INCOMMENSURATE MODELS: POE'S FICTION AND THE INEVITABILITY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
Abstract
Certain of Edgar Allan Poe's Gothic tales are richly psychological in implication, and a Jungian-informed interpretation is a most helpful means of elucidation. Using Carl Jung's analytical psychology as a lens makes it possible to regard Poe as experimenting with different models of relation between individual consciousness and the unconscious, something implicitly acknowledged in the epigraph to "A Descent into the Maelstrom," from which this study takes its title. In "MS. Found in a Bottle," The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and "A Descent into the Maelstrom," Poe presents male egos confronted by a vast and surging ocean that can be seen as symbolizing the unconscious, not least because it affects the characters as much psychologically as physically, completely changing their personalities. There is no real interrelationship possible between the characters and a phenomenon so overwhelming. In "Berenice," "Ligeia," and "The Fall of the House of Usher," the unconscious, that which three male characters seek to deny and to reject from their conscious personalities, is mediated and symbolized by mysterious, strangely significant female figures whose mystery and significance increase the more their male consorts perceive them as threats and persist in rejecting them. At the conclusion of their stories, all three male characters are stricken and transfixed, gazing in horror at that which symbolizes their undoing, their consciously chosen personalities overturned and destroyed. Thus Poe's models are "incommensurate" in that none of them depict a successful interrelationship between individual consciousness and the unconscious. Further, the general model of failed psychic relationship presented through many of Poe's Gothic tales receives paradoxical confirmation in Eureka, where the issue of the reconciliation of individual consciousness with the unconscious is raised by omission and made conspicuous by its absence. Eureka, despite its sweeping surface vision of cosmic integration, implicitly affirms the bleakness and irresolution of the Gothic tales.
Degree
Ph.D.
Subject Area
American literature
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