The Gold-Bug and Other Tales (на англ.яз.)

If Poe's narrators in the tales about women, in "Ligeia" (1838), "Berenice" (1835), or "Morella" (1835), for example, become as vain, abstract, and diseased as the objects of their desire (the women the madmen had idolized), Poe's letters and his love poems also trade on a sexual exchange. If women in nineteenth-century America must bear the trappings of style, must inhabit most fully the external as essence, Poe shows how such a spectacle both exploits and consumes its participants, both men and women. -95- What happened to the tough, sometimes delirious skepticism of the critic of a society "sunk in feeling," when he turned to an institution that sustained itself by the most incredible mystifications? What were the effects of Poe's characterization of Jupiter in "The Gold Bug" (1843) or the fiendish "brute" whose shrill "jabberings" are unidentifiable — the terribly marked deeds of the "OurangOutang" driven wild by "the dreaded whip" in The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) — on readers for and against human ownership? When Poe was an editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, Virginia (1835-38), he corresponded with Thomas R ...»