How to Murder a Young and Beautiful Woman: Death in Edgar Allan Poe’s Gothic Tales

In Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories there is a morbid obsession with the death of women. It is easy to identify these narratives, since their title corresponds, invariably, to the names of the victims: “Berenice”, “Ligeia”, “Eleonora”, “Annabel Lee”, “Morella”, etc. Uncommon names for stories where the macabre and the improbable play a leading role, and the relationship between the living and the dead is frequently an incestuous one. In this paper, I analyse the aesthetic and biographical reasons behind this phenomenon, resorting to some celebrated stories from the Gothic writer, and to the work of several specialists in Poe’s literary production.