| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立中山大學 === 外國語文學系研究所 === 103 === From the perspective of psychoanalysis, this thesis explores the function and the influence of the nonhuman creatures’ gaze (including the animal gaze and the bird gaze) in Edgar Allan Poe’s four works—“The Murder in the Rue Morgue,” “The Black Cat,” “Metzengerstein,” and “The Raven.” Focusing on the function and influ-ence of the nonhuman creatures’ gaze, this book is concerned with how Poe and the male characters in these four works satisfy their desires for ideal maternal love and define their egos by daydreaming.
This thesis contains six chapters. Chapter One expounds thematic concerns cov-ered, introducing the thematic structure and methodology of this book. This chapter introduces psychoanalytic theories related to the Oedipus complex and the gaze. By connecting Poe’s aesthetic idea of “the death of the beauty” to Princess Marie Bona-parte’s concept of “murdered mother,” this chapter contends that the nonhuman crea-tures’ gaze is the imagination created by Poe’s and the male characters’ desire for the ideal mother. Chapter Two focuses on the gaze of the ourang-utan in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” analyzing how the ourang-utan, as an ideal father, castrates the Oe-dipus complex of the male characters in the story and discussing how the ourang-utan’s gaze strengthens Poe and the male characters’ desires for the ideal mother. Chapter Three explores the black cat’s gaze in Poe’s “The Black Cat”; it examines how the black cat’s gaze, as the gaze of an ideal mother, affects the behavior and mind of the adolescent protagonist. Focusing on Poe’s another mysterious story titled “Metzengerstein,” Chapter Four discusses how the horse’s gaze becomes the gaze of “the big Other” to help the Baron, the protagonist in Poe’s “Metzengerstein,” to achieve the ego ideal. Chapter Five centers on “The Raven” and the bird gaze, argu-ing that the self-image in the raven’s gaze is the reflection of the speaker’s ideal ego and that the speaker is able to repetitively obtain the ideal mother only by day-dreaming of his ideal ego in an imaginary world. Chapter Six, the closing chapter, is a brief summation of the entire book.
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