Freudian Economies and Constructions of Love in Poe's Tales

Abstract

A clean, Freudian-inspired reading of Poe's texts is hard to come by. A major reason for writing this paper is the very basic claim that Poe's literary constructs are perfectly intelligible to the modern reader without needing what most critics regardless of theoretical persuasion have offered for decades: a psycho-biographical apparatus as introduction. In fact, this paper argues that donning allegorical glasses in order to find correspondences between Poe's life and Poe's work is at best a futile exercise and at worst a blinding of the reader/analyst to the signification of Poe's tales. Paradoxically, the exercise is not futile because correspondences cannot be found, but on the contrary because so many and so comprehensive correspondences can be construed that one should immediately suspect that this is not entirely without auctorial design in itself.