Depiction of Psychological through Supernatural: A Reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s Selected Short Stories

Abstract

This paper analyses the representation of psychology by the supernatural in Edgar Allan Poe’s fiction which exposes his tormented and sometimes neurotic obsession with death and violence and his preoccupation regarding the abandonment of women. The various literary devices and themes frequently used by Poe in representing thus are discussed as major subcategories. And for this case I make use of Poe’s three different short stories namely”The Fall of the House of Usher”, “The Black Cat”, and “Morella”. Poe had the aid of the pseudo-sciences of the time: mesmerism, phrenology, and other efforts to explore what we today call the subconscious. In the area between waking and sleeping, between life and death, he found the senses most alert, the emotions least inhibited. Insanity, telepathy, and other abnormal or unusual states of the mind became instruments of his deliberately overwrought mind. This paper is an analysis of how the psychological acuity of his stories and their impeccable concision and unity set a model and a standard that few have equaled and none have surpassed when it comes to the macabre fiction.