When Life/Love is Over:Trauma and Melancholia in Poe’s Works

• Main Authors: Yeh, Chia-Hsin, 葉家馨
• Other Authors: Chao, Shun-Liang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2014
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/cp7vf7

碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 外國語文學系外國文學與語言學碩士班 === 102 === The thesis aims to proffer a psychological way of reading Edgar Allan Poe’s prominent four works—“Ligeia” (1838), “Morella” (1835), “Berenice” (1835), and “The Raven” (1845). Since the four works all share the common characteristics of “the death of a beautiful woman,” the topic Poe delineates the most in “The Philosophy of Composition,” I aim to explore in these four works Poe’s writing principles with Freud’s and Kristeva’s uncanny abjection and Nasio’s theory about mourning—rupture, trauma, disinvestment and overinvestment. I argue that the four works all reveal the narrators’ psychical pain in their own mourning process. Due to this, the narrators constantly hallucinate the fantasized presence of the lost beloved. Also, hallucination/overinvestment leads the narrator to endless torment of melancholia. The main body of the thesis consists of three chapters. The first chapter focuses on the construction of a psychoanalytical approach—from the theory of love, loss to hate—with the theories of Freud’s object-cathexis, Melanie Klein’s depressive position and Nasio’s three stages of mourning. The second chapter mainly draws on the love and loss in “Ligeia” and “Morella”; the third chapter in “Berenice” and “The Raven.” The thesis discovers that the four works indeed surround the topic of “the death of a beautiful woman”; based on such topic, the four works can be read as the four narrators’ mourning process—from rupture, psychical pain to overinvestment. The narrators in the four works all end up with overinvestment; this situation can be linked to their melancholia. Thus, the thesis aims to correlate the four narrators’ melancholia to uncanny abjection and trauma to discuss how Poe applies the most poetical topic—the death of beautiful women—to his composition.