Before Jacques Lacan has proposed psychoanalytical literary criticism on Poe’s well known story Purloined Letter, already established classical-Freudian psychoanalytical approach was practiced on the story; not by Freud himself but by French psychoanalyst Marie Bonaparte. Bonaparte was Poe expert, she evaluated his works and life on the basis of Freudian psychoanalysis. Freud did never write on Poe himself, but he wrote a preface as an introduction for Bonaparte’s book on Poe, in which he praised and approved Bonaparte’s work. Briefly, Bonaparte stresses that “purloined letter” in the story symbolizes regret for missing maternal penis and reproach for its loss. Maternal penis in Freudian understanding refers to the perspective of child, in which he considers the mother as castrated. This creates the castration anxiety. Lacan as well, takes maternal penis not as an anatomical object, but as an apparatus which enables the first encounter with otherness and lack when the child senses that s/he is not the mother’s entire world and that the mother wants something more than and apart from the child. The child, according to Lacan, wishes to be the phallus for the mother.

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Let’s continue to focus on the story with psychoanalytical perspectives. In the story, the letter is stolen and then it goes to the Minister. Dupin then takes it and brings it back to Queen. With the logic he developed, he finds the place of the letter hidden in Minister’s apartment, in full-view hanging over the fire-place. For Bonaparte, the fireplace symbolizes female genitals. The letter is hanged over female genitals, surely it is in fantasy. Letter would have been hung there if it existed. The detective is victorious at the end, and Bonaparte describes the relationship between him and the minister as son & father relationship, which comes out of Oedipal struggle. Here Bonaparte suggests that detective is the son, and to prove this she points at the past relationship between detective and Minister, which the story reveals in some passages. Bonaparte suggests that at the end of the story, Dupin restores missing penis; additionally gold which he gained for finding the letter is equivalent and symbolic to the penis.
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On the other hand, Jacques Lacan in his seminar on The Purloined Letter in 1954, to say the truth, makes fun of Bonaparte’s procedure. Although the whole seminar (1954-1955) was kind of a commentary on Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he criticizes Freudian psychoanalysis for taking the Freudian concepts, ideas and finding them in the text by any means whatsoever. Jacques Lacan is in fact against the main premises of Freudian conception. In one aspect, his reading fits in Freudian understanding: The idea that regards mother as phallus, as maternal penis. At this point the two thinkers seem to be in agreement. However Lacan does not take this point as an end to his analysis; on the contrary he takes this as the beginning of tracing temporal structure of story. Phallus for Lacan is important; it is a sign of absence. Maternal penis in fact never existed. It is a constituted lack. It is a starting point of everything that happens afterwards. Phallus is the sign of constitutive lack which prevents us from being whole egos. So phallus is the signifier of all signifiers and it is the keystone of symbolic order. Lacan claims that it is the sign of our being condemned to symbolic order; in order to exist in linguistic networks, in other words; to be ourselves in the realm of language. Thus it is always traversed, permeated by signifiers of absence. Lacan also proposes the idea that phallus is signifier of impossibility to find a final meaning, unity, presence; which he names as annulment of signified.
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Actually, Bonaparte’s analysis stopped where Lacan’s started. Lacan while analysing Purloined Letter intends to explore through text what “for the letter to be the phallus” means for characters in the story. What are the effects of the letter in the story? Why Lacan is so interested in a story in which a letter that he associates the phallus with signifier that changes hands? Lacan emphasises that the letter returns where it was before. He states that “letter always reaches at its destination”. On the contrary, Derrida opposed Lacan at this point; Derrida’s ideas were built upon the possibility of letter for not reaching its destination. I’ll talk about Derrida and his critical opposition to Lacan later. But for Lacan, there is a return, which is absolute. Lacan underlines that, in the story this movement of letter as phallus indicates that nobody can actually possess the phallus. Here, the basic idea which Lacan proposes is that the letter does its job without content; or independently from its content. Structuralist way of thinking suggests that the function of signifier stands for the signified; it absolutely stands for something in reality. In Purloined Letter we don’t know the content of the letter, whether it is something on love, politics, etc… or not. Nonetheless the letter is doing something; it is functioning in the way that it enables narrative, without even suggesting any relevance of its signified. Its function is not to stand for, make present some definite meaning, so content never comes on the agenda. The letter is not a communication vehicle. Its only function is narrative construction. The Queen in the story loses the letter, and she is in a possible trouble with the King. Maybe it was a letter from a lover, or a secret intrigue or something. For Lacan, whether she agrees or not, intends or not, simply by holding the letter in her hands, she becomes part of the pact; already a relation independent of her intention or what she believes. It happens to be like the intrusion of structure. It is like she is caught in the structure. Additionally, when letter gets stolen, it is a real loss of power for her. And when minister steals it, he gains power in a way. However, there is a further complexity for Lacan. Power that he receives from the letter is a power for which not using it. If he ever uses it, he will lose this power. Its power is a kind that depends on not being used. It’s hidden in letter’s invisibility. Besides, when Dupin recovers the letter, he gains two kinds of power here: 1) For Dupin, this is revenge; he has some kind of hostility against Minister. He took his revenge and thus triumphant. 2) He gets money for finding the letter. The letter, as signifier empowers who has it.
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So far, may this one be an accurate Lacanian reading? I guess so. I will go on to this Lacanian psychoanalytical criticism on Poe’s Purloined Letter in Poe’s “Purloined Letter” and Lacanian Psychoanalytical Criticism-2 in which I will talk about two scenes which Lacan emphasises in order to draw the scheme of relations between characters and their relation with Lacan’s concepts of psychoanalysis.
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