The first part of this paper will deal with the depiction of the women’s eyes and their symbolism. For my discussion of this thesis I will consider Poe’s short stories “The Oval Portrait,” “Morella”, “Berenice” and especially “Ligeia”. In this paper, I will argue that this emphasis on visual sensations is directly related to the violence against women as it exposes the murderers’ motives and drives, their course of action as well as their attempt to then distort the reader’s view of the truth in order to cover their involvement. Detailed accounts of eyes, glances, gazes and vision keep reappearing in the selected stories, so that sight becomes one of the key elements of the tales. Interestingly, the characters and the circumstances surrounding those deaths are described with an emphasis on the “lexical field of sight” (Marín-Ruiz 58) so that already “a cursory exposure to Poe’s fiction leaves a strong impression of his recurrent emphasis on the eye” (Scheick 80). The death of those women is often violent as they are murdered by a male character as a result of an “emotional estrangement between the male protagonist and a fated female” (Kennedy 118). Many of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories deal with a fixation on dying women as he famously states in “The Philosophy of Composition: “death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world” (1621).
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