The male characters in Edgar Allan Poe’s stories are either artists or poets. The ideal towards which they strive is imaginative self-reliance of a kind that is removed from the material and materialistic to exclude them from consciousness. A suppressed form of violence operates as an undercurrent and originates from the aggression that the male characters resort to in order to ward off their own fears. In The Oval Portrait, the painter’s desire to portray his wife is the manifestation of his voyeuristic and fetishizing tendencies and killing the woman into art manifests the highest form of creativity. The artist tries to create through his gaze a new woman-an attempt at causing a kind of metempsychosis. In The Oblong Box the dead Mrs. Wyatt is the real object of desire and remains 'a thing of beauty' even in death. Wyatt wishes to hold on to his object of desire and literally gazes upon it every night by on fling the coffin wherein lies Mrs. Wyatt. The arrangement made by Wyatt and Captain Hardy to transport Mrs. Wyatt's body in secret shows that death is a taboo and no one is comfortable thinking about death, or staying close to a dead body for a long period of time. The male protagonists in Poe try to usurp the share earmarked for women in the domestic space. In 'The Black Cat, the household which is considered to be domain of women, becomes the site for the destruction of the male ego. Even from his death cell, the narrator tries to assert his ego. The narrator's acts of destroying the beauty of the beast in order to bring it closest to the 'bestial' ushers in the element of the involvement with the erotic in the story. Scheherazade in The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade lays open the possibility of creating an alternative mode of experience, in which even the king gets interested and initiates the process of employing gynocritics from within patriarchy. Scheherazade's death is closely related to the erotic. She is aware of the potential of bodily death resulting out of the condition of being married to the king. Scheherazade denies the tyranny of closure by accepting death not merely as an end to her physical existence but also as a means of depriving the king of possibilities of the knowledge of the worlds yet unknown to him. Death holds no horror for her. The Colloquy of Monos and Una depicts death as a pause or a caesura; a period of sleep or dormancy, as irrational and erotic; as beautiful; and fraught with sentimentality as it separates individuals from their loved ones. The position of woman in a man-woman relationship as the dominated is further enhanced in Hop-Frog because the king is not only the receptacle of power drawn from his gender but also by virtue of the power of the state. In the androcentric world, this embodies supreme power. Aggression is a part of any state machinery. Hop-Frog and Trippetta, are also capable of being aggressive. Death then is seen as a means to an end-of closure and finality. The agents of death here transgress the taboo of death in the backdrop of an extravaganza and create an occasion for the death of the king, subvert the establishment and the power related with it, and earn for themselves their freedom.

Edgar Allan Poe - subjecting the subject -the subject-object equation - voyeurism - fetishism - eroticism - macabre - metempsychosis - aggression - metempsychosis - necrophilia - taboo - Gothic - annihilation - gratification - misogynistic - heterosexual