埃德加•爱伦•坡《黑猫》和《一桶白芒提多酒》心理恐怖分析(2)
Western scholars have paid great attention to Edgar Allan Poe and apply lots of theories to study his works. Mental horror is a popular topic of Poe study in England, the United States of America and France. Scholars have studied Poe’s horror short stories from different angles. Some of them interpret mental horror as gothic fancies. For instance, Bodkin observes that Poe sets suspense and leaves much room in his works, which leads readers to achieve relaxation after tension (Bodkin 801). It is clear that Bodkin’s reading focuses on the stimulation of horror in spirit. Mabbott, T. O.’s works about Edgar Allan Poe is the most comprehensive finding. She writes, “Poe's life and writing are fully intelligible only if it is supposed that they both originate their characters from an infantile oedipal experience of massive intensity” (12).
In comparison with foreign researches, Domestic study lags far behind them. Because Poe’s works is outside of mainstream, domestic scholars do not pay much attention to Poe study before the 1970s. In recent years, with more studies of Poe’s works, more achievements have being reached. In the article of “Judge of Edgar Allan Poe”, Cao Minglun makes a new analysis of Poe’s life, novels, poetry and artistic outlook. Xu Yan analyses Poe’s horror fictions by using Miller’s famous theory of repetition in the “Repetition Patterns in Allan Poe’s Horror Fictions”. Guo Lei reveals Poe’s hidden values and literary creation ideology under the effects of horror.
According to the analysis above, readers can better understand Allan Poe and his works. “Domestic researchers mainly do research on Poe’s poems and writing techniques, the combination of aesthetic and literature theory, or analyze his works from Gothic points of view” (Zhang 11). This article will analyze the mental horror in Edgar Allan Poe’s works from the aspects of image, scene and psychological reactions in order to produce some new views.
Although Edgar Allan Poe’s horror works were written more than one hundred years ago, readers are still interested in them. The main reason is that readers will fall into horror thoroughly. Readers experience the same situation with narrators and see their miserable struggles in horror.
“The Black Cat” and “The Cask of Amontillado” are Poe’s representative works. The mental horror transpires the whole process of stories. This article will firstly introduces the achievement, experience of Edgar Allan Poe, his writing style of mental horror, current research situation and the main idea of this article. Then it analyses the mental horror in “The Black Cat” and “The Cask of Amontillado” from the following perspectives: horrible images, horrible scenes and horrible psychological reactions. Readers witness the whole process of their murder directly and experience the evil and sick soul of humanity, which enhances the effects of mental horror.