Jean-Yves le Fourn : Poe’s “The Spectacles”

The tale “The Spectacles,” one of Edgar Allan Poe’s Extraordinary Tales, is a story of the “grotesque” showing us that if in adolescence one looks without seeing or sees without looking, the resolution of the enigmas of the sexual, of identity, of social development will be difficult because, like the hero at the outset, one will remain entangled in the net of Oedipal and incest issues. The adolescent gaze is above all “a language and it develops the proof.” (Jean Cocteau).