Gothic Literature | Poe, Edgar Allan (1809 - 1849) - Maurice LéVy (Essay Date 1968)

MAURICE LÉVY (ESSAY DATE 1968)

SOURCE: Lévy, Maurice. "Poe and the Gothic Tradition." ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 18, no. 66 (1972): 19-29.

In the following essay, translated by Richard Henry Haswell and first published in French in Caliban in 1968, Lévy assesses Poe's works within the context of the Gothic tradition.

Since the appearance of Marie Bonaparte's study, only the daring speak of Poe without evoking his dipsomania, opiomania, cyclothymia, paraphrenia, and sado-necrophilia, all so obviously characterizing the major part of his work. Today how does one dare to see in Poe's architectural structures anything but mother-figures, or in the inextricable maze of the island of Tsalal where Pym got lost, anything but a fantasy of the maternal body from an intestinal point of view? The "shadows" and "doubles" and the Devil must be symbols of the castrating father-figure and...

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