This study is primarily concerned with the diverse processes of constitution
and deconstitution of subjectivity at work in the writing
of Edgar Allan Poe. The analysis is largely confined to the short
fiction, although some reference is made to Poe's other work; twentyone
tales are examined, in greater or lesser detail, with the aid of
various theoretical perspectives - sociological, structuralist and,
above all, psychoanalytic.
The aim is to present a new reading of Poe's texts which rejects
traditional "unity"-based interpretations. The thesis privileges the
psychological dimension, but in textual, not biographical terms; it
stresses the tales' often undervalued element of modernity as well as
their receptiveness to emergent processes and discourses.
The psychological dimensions analysed include: the explicit presentation
of mental splitting ('William Wilson') and institutionalised
madness ('The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether'); the signification
of alienation ('The Man of the Crowd') and self-destruction
('The Imp of the Perverse', 'The Black Cat', 'The Tell-Tale Heart')
as constitutive of the subject at a determinate historical moment;
the simultaneous construction and subversion of mythical signifiers
of an illusory "full" subject, both metonyms (the detective, the
mesmerist) and metaphors (the artwork, the interior); the symbolic
emergence from repression of active female desire, perceived as
threatening in the male unconscious ('The Oval Portrait', 'Ligeia');
and the disintegration of the subject under the pressure of its own
repressions ('The Fall of the House of Usher').
Particular stress is laid throughout on the textual undermining of
the dividing-lines between "normal" and "abnormal", "sane" and "insane",
"respectable" and "criminal". It is concluded that Poe's work constitutes
a map of the vicissitudes and contradictions of subjectivity
in patriarchal culture; from the study of these texts, the "I" emerges
as formed out of a massive repression, and as therefore constantly
liable to fragmentation and rupture
