Folkloric and Psychological Implications of Animal Characters in the Works of Edgar Allan Poe

Abstract

While humanity has eternally been foregrounded as the primary subject of fiction, the place of non-human characters has not necessarily dwindled into oblivion. Time and again they have resurfaced, have made their presence felt in an assortment of ways, and have waged a war to exert their dominion over the intricate workings of the reader’s consciousness. Their purpose in certain narratives, as this paper will attempt to elucidate, is two-fold. In that, while on the one hand, authors often employ these entities whose existence is rooted in the annals of folktales and legends, on the other their actual repercussions on any given text borders heavily on the domain of the psychological. In the course of such narratives these two strands---folkloric and psychological, merge inextricably as the non-human entity comes alive on the pages of literature with an almost preternatural vitality. In order to explicate this aspect of such characters, this paper will attempt to analyze certain works of Edgar Allan Poe from a folkloric and psychological perspective, works which bear testimony to the enduring lure of the supernatural that still remains in this modern world.