The Male Gaze and Beyond: Edgar Allan Poe’s Female Characters

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to trace the motif of death in three short stories by Edgar Allan Poe: "Morella", "Berenice" and "The Oval Portrait". The portrayals of female characters are interpreted in relation to their male partners, who either narrate the stories (as in "Morella" and "Berenice") or seem to be more active in comparison with the female character (as in "The Oval Portrait"). Although the perspective of each of the male characters reveals much about the women (rendering the women silent), the question whether the reader can rely on their accounts persists. This is due to certain inconsistencies which are visible in the descriptions of female characters as they are provided by Poe’s narrators. As a results, the reader is inclined to investigate both the spoken and unspoken content, as the latter may offer a space in which the female voice is heard. The double layer of meaning (created by allusions and symbolic references) causes one to question the credibility of male characters and disturbs their integrity, thus exposing conflicting qualities which define Morella, Berenice and the painter’s wife in "The Oval Portrait". Morella’s husband, for instance, admires his wife’s virtues, but also describes her using words which have overtly negative connotations, rendering her increasingly dangerous. All of the three female characters eventually die, which in combination with the ambiguous male-constructed descriptions of their lives and deaths encourages readers to explore other possibilities in the understanding of Poe’s women and their relation to the male characters.