| Summary: | 碩士 === 靜宜大學 === 英國語文學系 === 103 === This thesis aims to explore the scapegoating death and resurrection theme in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia,” “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Poe in “The Philosophy of Composition” proclaims that “the death of a beautiful woman” is the “most poetical topic in the world.” The process of the death of a beautiful woman as a scapegoat and her subsequent resurrection as repeated in the narratives of Poe’s works reveal his narratives to be based on primitive death rituals as studied by James George Frazer in The Golden Bough and René Girard in Violence and the Sacred. Moreover, Poe’s stories descriptively elaborate affective dimension of such rituals.
In the three short stories, details about “the deaths of the females” and the effects of “fear” are the main foci of the narration. The characters suffer from unknown things which are shaped by the forces of Nature and cause the deaths of women. However, while depicting the deaths of women in a violent and direct manner, Poe exposes his killers as performing sacrifices. Using the concept of "the scapegoat" derived from James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion and "the stereotypes of persecution" in René Girard’s The Scapegoat, this thesis analyses the narratives as ritualistic mechanisms in Poe’s stories. The introductory chapter introduces Poe’s theory and the motivation of the thesis. In the first chapter, the concepts of James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough and the ideas of René Girard’s The Scapegoat are investigated and taken as the theories to the thesis. In the second chapter, the research explores the unknowns, including the unknown objects, the unknown houses and the unknown killers. Also, the chapter probes the relationship between the unknowns and Nature. The unknowns from Nature shape the oppressions and arouse the fear of the characters. In the third chapter, the interpretation centers on the dead or dying females as the scapegoats and their dying processes as a ritualistic process. In the fourth chapter, the research explores the similarity between Poe’s three short stories and Frazer’s “movement of the higher thought” as it restates and summarizes the ritual scapegoating in Poe’s three short stories.
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