My Burning Glances : The Male and queer gaze in three short stories by Edgar Allan Poe

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this essay is to show the narrator’s use of the male and the queer gaze in three short stories by Edgar Allan Poe: “Berenice: A Tale” (1835), “The Man that was Used Up: A Tale of the Late Bugaboo and Kickapoo Campaign” (1839) and ”The Man of the Crowd” (1845). Through close reading of the stories, I show how the different gazes work, how they are used in the stories and what they lead to. I relate how the visual perspectives function to how narrative development in the stories depend on the gaze, suggesting that whereas the male gaze in the stories by Poe aids in creating violence and misogyny; the queer gaze on the other hand helps in creating alternative worlds, governed by curiosity, empathy and possibility.