RE(-)MEMBERING WOMEN IN EDGAR ALLAN POE’S (PRE)RATIONATIVE FICTION
RE(-)MEMBERING WOMEN IN EDGAR ALLAN POE’S (PRE)RATIONATIVE FICTION

Summary/Abstract: The present study proceeds in completion of a distinctive Poesque representation of womanhood, expanding the critical concern for the languish dark ladies of the Gothic stories, already departing from the diaphanous muses of the poems, towards the feminine victims, exposed in their posthumous decaying physicality, in the tales of ratiocination. In an attempt to explore the detective triad as illustrative of Poe’s ambivalence towards women and as addressing with rational means what is considered by the American author to be the most poetical topic in the world (Poe, 1846: 165), the mystique of the feminine characters will be subsumed to the controlled formulation of “the mystery with a repeatable solution” (Irwin, 1994: 2). Throughout these detective accounts, Poe’s fictional ways of re(-)membering women become strategies of coping with telling absences under – and despite of – requirements of privacy that condition the domestic space, forensic lenses applied to a grotesquely fragmented physicality lending itself to psychoanalytical interpretations, narratives blurring the lines of a feminine profile, unfolded between the private and the public, between journalistic factuality and crime fiction.

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