As I was trying to find meaning in “Ligeia,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “William Wilson. A Tale,” “A Man of the Crowd,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” I was confounded with the issue of an unreliable narrator. While this makes perfect sense with what we’ve discussed about Poe and his genre, it left me with a bit of a conundrum. His stories are fantastical, suspenseful and yet not suspenseful (he usually tells you what’s going to happen in the first paragraph), and yet always leave me wondering if any of it is “real.” Perfect for selling magazines. 

However, one of the stories that was the most clear to me and of which I was able to make some meaning was “William Wilson. A Tale.” It became clear to me fairly early on in the story what the other William Wilson is sort of a physical manifestation of conscience. However, it also seemed as if there was almost a sexual tension between William Wilson and the other William Wilson. This potential homoeroticism is also seen in “The Fall of the House of Usher” and perhaps in the violence of “The Tell-Tale Heart.” There is limited scholarship on these themes in Poe’s stories, because it seems that the prevailing belief is that he was straight, but I did find a master’s thesis exploring this (linked below).

https://fau.digital.flvc.org/islandora/object/fau%3A9933