“The Fall of the House of Usher”

In America, we’re trained from a young age to equate Edgar Allan Poe with both terror and Halloween.  In my experience, reading Poe in an English class was something of a yearly ritual, even if the rationale for the exercise was rather forced.  Poe clearly enjoys a better literary reputation than our other horror master, Lovecraft — but only a marginally better one.  Despite the ubiquity with which Poe dominated my education while growing up, once I entered college and began reading “Literature”, Poe was ignored almost as thoroughly by my profs as he had been taught by my gradeschool teachers.  If we did read him, we did so only to devote the briefest of discussions to his work, and always in the context of establishing some other writer’s superiority with one literary element or another.

Of course, Poe has entered into the mainstream of American culture in a way that few writers have experienced.  Almost all of his major stories have been adapted in some form or another to television or film, from several silent films of the 1920s and 30s to the (in)famous Roger Corman adaptation of “The Fall of the House of Usher” with Vincent Price in 1960, and the fantastic Simpson’s adaptation of “The Raven” for the first “Treehouse of Horror” episode.  Even the Baltimore Ravens have three mascots, named Edgar, Allan, and Poe. 

Poe’s reliance on Gothic traditions that establish very singular settings, atmosphere, and characters is by no means unique in the American tradition.  Many other American authors steeped themselves as much in Gothic trappings as Poe.  But, Poe is the one that stands out for some reason or another — we “always remember” because we are “unable to forget!”, to borrow the phrase from Roger Corman’s trailer — and perhaps we might better understand why during our tribute to Halloween.

Most American students are forced to read at least “Usher” and “The Raven” at some point in school, while “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Mask of the Red Death” often follow.  And then we’re all treated to the intrigue and scandal of Poe’s death (seemingly drunk in a gutter).  Stories of the “Poe Toaster“, someone (maybe several people) who leaves three roses and raises a toast over Poe’s grave every year, help heighten the mystery.  And mystery certainly suits the author.

“The Fall of the House of Usher” is one of Poe’s most famous short stories and it levies the tale of Roderick Usher and his sister Madeline.  Veterans of Lovecraft will recognize the style, one quite common to Gothic-tinged writing.  The narrative is a first-person account peppered with a sometimes exhausting attention to detail.  Dialogue is often kept to a precious minimum, deepening both the sense of isolation and the sense of urgency the narrator hopes imbue in the reader.  And much like Lovecraft, our narrator here is never named, layering another haze of mystery over the story.  Yes, there is a prurient nature attached to this kind of writing.  It is meant to be shocking, if somewhat formulaic.

“Usher” (I’ll use the shortened title from this point on) focuses on the decay of both the famous house and its inhabitants, as if the two are interminably linked.  Indeed, by the end of the story, that link is clearly confirmed.  As the narrator rides up to the house, “a barely perceptible fissure” is noticed running down the entire height of the house “until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn.”  Upon entering into the room where Roderick sits, the narrator is confronted with “an atmosphere of sorrow” reflected in his description of his boyhood friend:

It was with difficulty that I could bring myself to admit the identity of the wan being before me with the companion of my early boyhood. Yet the character of his face had been at all times remarkable. A cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid, but of a surpassingly beautiful curve; a nose of a delicate Hebrew model, but with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar formations; a finely moulded chin, speaking, in its want of prominence, of a want of moral energy; hair of a more than web-like softness and tenuity; these features, with an inordinate expansion above the regions of the temple, made up altogether a countenance not easily to be forgotten. And now in the mere exaggeration of the prevailing character of these features, and of the expression they were wont to convey, lay so much of change that I doubted to whom I spoke. The now ghastly pallor of the skin, and the now miraculous lustre of the eye, above all things startled and even awed me. The silken hair, too, had been suffered to grow all unheeded, and as, in its wild gossamer texture, it floated rather than fell about the face, I could not, even with effort, connect its Arabesque expression with any idea of simple humanity.

Poe writes a very detailed description of Roderick in wonderfully beautiful imagery, only to subvert the description and remove from it (or at least some element of it) “any idea of simple humanity.”  This brand of contradiction, of the inability of language to capture the true nature of the unsettling details, is not new to us.  Lovecraft does the same thing, though he often couches the language in mathematical terms.  The sense is of the inability of the human imagination to comprehend horrors that are clearly beyond natural reason.  For both Lovecraft and Poe, contradiction is a mark of impurity, even an expression of evil clearly at odds with the “totality” and “unity” of “Beauty” (Poe, “Philosophy of Composition“), a philosophy clearly stemming from the popular understanding of Platonic metaphysics combined with western Christian thought.

The effect is a foreshadowing because the contradiction is a slight one, mirroring the “fissure” cracking the axis of the House of Usher.  This story is often used as a tool for teaching foreshadowing to students because it is so full of examples.  The nearly ghost-like entrance of Madeline into the story is another, as she “passed slowly through a remote portion of the apartment, and, without having noticed my presence, disappeared.”  Roderick “had buried his face in his hands”, an action replayed to extreme heights in the story’s end.  Roderick, sometime afterward, declares “abruptly” that “lady Madeline” is “no more,” and he resolves to entomb her within the vaults of the house for two weeks.  It doesn’t take long for the narrator to begin hearing sounds seemingly coming from the walls.

Of course, Roderick wails in astonishment during the wildly climactic scene that “We have put her living in the tomb!“  Very soon, noises that reverberate through the house as the narrator reads a story to calm Roderick prove this deplorable truth:  Madeline emerges, again, this time ghoulishly with “blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame.”  Interestingly enough, the contradiction is heightened here because while the language is certainly terrifying, Madeline’s description is much more human and material.  Notice that the narrator does not give space to any detail other than those most associated with humanity: blood and body.

As she falls through the door, into the arms of her brother, both die in the moment (or so we’re to believe), doomed as only “Echoes” of each other.  The narrator flees in terror and turns to watch the House of Usher crack fully and crumble into the swamp.

Broadly speaking, the story can be read in many ways, considering the House of Usher as a seat of family identity shattered and lost.  Thus, a problem appears.  Roderick and Madeline suffer from some ailment that is never named, and it’s questionable whether or not the narrator would tell us if he knew.  Roderick attributes his own physical decay to the “dissoultion” of his sister, as they are “twins,” and his attachment to her is often read as a hint at some potentially incestuous relationship between the two.  That their decay seems symbolic of some brand of guilt tied to the family name and the mansion as an expression of that name only fuels the interpretive fire on that end.  But nothing is ever made explicit in the story, yet there clearly is some unnamed guilt on Roderick Usher’s part.

Roderick Usher ties all of it to one end, though:  “I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR.”  Notice that “FEAR” is not “Death.”  If anything, a reader can see Roderick perhaps wishing for death, and that perhaps that is why he buried Madeline prematurely.  Of course, “FEAR” is in fact Madeline in the story’s end.  Yet, what about her embodies “FEAR”?  We’ve reasoned in a circle:  the narrator never touches on this.  Madeline never progresses beyond anything more than an image, or a symbol.  She’s certainly not a character except in the sense that she is a mirror for Roderick.  In effect, Roderick is facing down himself as something of a defeatist and a coward — and he loses, literally dragging the remnants of his family with him.  Thus, the whole House of Usher collapses as “the the deep and dank tarn [...] closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the ‘House of Usher‘.”

Tagged as: American Literature, Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Philosophy of Composition, The Fall of the House of Usher