Edgar Allan Poe: The Fall of theHouse of Usher

The making of Southern myth However much they differ, though, writers like Cooper and Sedgwick do have common interests and ideas, derived from the basic currency of Western myth: a belief in mobility, a concern with the future, a conviction that, whatever problems it may have, America is still a land of possibility. The counter myth to this is the myth of the South: preoccupied with place and confinement rather than space and movement, obsessed with the guilt and burden of the past, riddled with doubt, unease, and the sense that, at their best, human beings are radically limited and, at their worst, tortured, grotesque, or evil. And if Cooper was the founding father of the Western myth in literature, even though he never actually saw the prairie, then, even more queerly, Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) was the founding father of Southern myth, although he was actually born in Boston and hardly ever used Southern settings in his fiction or his poetry. What makes Poe a founder of Southern myth, typically of him, is not so much a matter of the literal as of the imaginative. “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) is set in an anonymous landscape, or rather dreamscape, but it has all the elements that were later to characterize Southern Gothic: a great house and family falling into decay and ruin, a feverish, introspective hero half in love with death, a pale, ethereal heroine who seems and then is more dead than alive, rumors of incest and guilt – and, above all, the sense that the past haunts the present and that there is evil in the world and it is strong. Figure 2.1 Portrait of Edgar Allan Poe. Photo: akg-images. 54 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 Publisher's Note: Image not available in the electronic edition Poe began his literary career with a volume of poetry, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827). Published anonymously and at his own expense, it went unnoticed. But it clearly announced his poetic intentions: aims and ambitions that were later to be articulated in such seminal essays as “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846) and “The Poetic Principle” (1850) and further put into practice in the later volumes, Poems by E A Poe (1831) and The Raven and Other Poems (1845). The poet, Poe wrote in his essays, should be concerned, first and last, with the “circumscribed Eden” of his own dreams. “It is the desire of the moth for the star,” Poe says of the poetic impulse in “The Poetic Principle.” According to his prescription, the poet’s task is to weave a tapestry of talismanic signs and sounds in order to draw, or rather subdue, the reader into sharing the world beyond phenomenal experience. Poems make nothing happen in any practical, immediate sense, Poe suggests. On the contrary, the ideal poem becomes one in which the words efface themselves, disappear as they are read, leaving only a feeling of significant absence, of no-thing. Just how Poe turned these poetic ideas into practice is briefly suggested in one of his poems, “Dreamland,” where the narrator tells us that he has reached a strange new land “out of SPACE – out of TIME.” That is the land all Poe’s art occupies or longs for: a fundamentally elusive reality, the reverse of all that our senses can receive or our reason can encompass – something that lies beyond life that we can discover only in sleep, madness or trance, in death especially, and, if we are lucky, in a poem or story. Certain poetic scenes and subjects are favorites with Poe precisely because they reinforce his ultimately visionary aims. Unsurprisingly, life after death is a favorite topic, in poems like “Annabel Lee” and “The Sleeper.” So, too, is the theme of a strange, shadowy region beyond the borders of normal consciousness: places such as those described in “The City in the Sea” or “Eldorado” which are, in effect, elaborate figures for death. Whatever the apparent subject, the movement is always away from the ordinary, phenomenal world in and down to some other, subterranean level of consciousness and experience. The sights and sounds of a realizable reality may be there in a poem like “To Helen,” but their presence is only fleeting, ephemeral. Poe’s scenes are always shadowy and insubstantial, the colors dim, the lighting dusky. In the final instance, the things of the real world are there only to be discarded Disengagement was not, however, something that Poe could pursue as a practical measure. He had to earn his living. He worked as an editor for various journals, including Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine and Graham’s Magazine; he was associated with other journals, and he was an indefatigable essayist and reviewer. What the magazines wanted, in particular, were stories; and in 1835 Poe attracted attention with one of his first short stories, “MS Found in a Bottle,” which won first prize in a contest judged by John Pendleton Kennedy (1795–1870) – himself a writer and author of one of the first idyllic fictional accounts of life on the old plantation, Swallow Barn; or, A Sojourn in the Old Dominion (1832). This short story was followed by more and more tales appealing to the contemporary taste for violent humor and macabre incident. His first collection of stories, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, was published in 1840; it included “Ligeia,” “Berenice,” and “The Assignation.” In 1845 Tales appeared, a book that reprinted previous work. This later collection contained “The Pit and the Pendulum” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” among other notable pieces. In the earlier, in turn, Poe made his attentions as a short story writer clear in a brief Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 55 preface. It was true, Poe admitted, that many of his stories were Gothic because they had terror as their “thesis.” But that terror, he went on, was not of the conventional kind, since it had little to do with the usual Gothic paraphernalia; it was, instead, a terror “of the soul.” Whatever else he might have been, Poe was an unusually perceptive (if often also malicious) critic. And he was especially perceptive about his own work. Poe did not invent the Gothic tale, any more than he invented the detective story, science fiction, or absurd humor. To each of these genres or approaches, however, he did – as he realized and, in some instances, boasted – make his own vital contribution. In a detective story like “TheMurders in the RueMorgue,” for example, Poe created the detective story as a tale of ratiocination, a mystery that is gradually unraveled and solved. He also created the character of the brilliant amateur who solves a crime that seems beyond the talents of the professionals. And in his Gothic stories, he first destabilizes the reader by using unreliable narrators: madmen and liars, initially rational men who have their rationalism thoroughly subverted, men who should by all commonsensical standards be dead. And he then locates the terror within, as something that springs from and bears down upon the inner life. In Poe’s stories, the source of mystery and anxiety is something that remains inexplicable. It is the urge to self-betrayal that haunts the narrator of “The TellTale Heart,” or the cruel and indomitable will of the narrator of “Ligeia” which finally transforms reality into fantasy, his living wife into a dead one. It is the impulse towards self-destruction, and the capacity for sinking into nightmare worlds of his own creation, that the protagonist and narrator of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) reveals at so many moments of his life. Poe tears the Gothic tale out of the rationalist framework it previously inhabited, and he makes it a medium for exploring the irrational, even flirting with the anti-rational. As such, he makes it as central and vital to the Romantic tradition as, say, the lyric poem or the dream play. “The Fall of the House of Usher” shows how Poe makes a fictional art out of inwardness and instability. The narrator, an initially commonsensical man, is confused by his feelings when he first arrives at the home of his childhood friend, Roderick Usher. But he is inclined to dismiss such feelings as “superstition,” and even when he is reunited with Usher, his response is “half of awe,” suggesting a suspicion that his host might know things hidden to him, and “half of pity,” suggesting the superiority of the rational man. Gradually, the narrator comes to speak only of “awe.” He even admits that he feels “the wild influences” of Usher’s “fantastic yet impressive superstitions” “creeping upon” him. The scene is set for the final moment, when Roderick’s sister Madeline arises from her grave to be reunited with him in death, and the House of Usher sinks into a “deep and dank tarn.” At this precise moment, Usher turns to the narrator and speaks to him, for the last time, addressing him as “Madman.” The reversal is now complete: either because the narrator has succumbed to the “superstition” of his host, or because his continued rationality argues for his essential insanity, his failure to comprehend a truth that lies beyond reason. Nothing is certain as the tale closes, except that what we have witnessed is an urgent, insistent movement inward: from daylight reality towards darker, ever more subterranean levels, in the house and in the mind of the hero. And as the narrator moves ever further inward, into “Usher” the house, we the readers move ever further inward into “Usher” the fiction. The structures of the two journeys correspond. So, for that matter, do the arts of the hero and author: Roderick 56 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 Usher uses his to transform his guests’ minds and expectations, so also does Poe with his imaginative guests. And at the moment of revelation at the end – when the full measure of the solipsistic vision is revealed – both “Usher” the house and “Usher” the tale disintegrate, disappear, leaving narrator and reader alone with their thoughts and surmises. In short, the house of Usher is a house of mirrors. Every feature of the story is at once destabilizing and self-reflexive, referring us back to the actual process of creative production, by its author, and re-production, by its readers. Like so many other tales by Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher” stands at the beginning of a long line of Southern narratives that incline toward narcissism and nostalgia, the movement inward and the movement back. And it stands at the beginning, also, of an even longer line of fiction, American and European, that disconcerts the reader by jettisoning the mundane in favor of the magical and turning the literal world into a kind of shadow play.

Preview questions:

1. Explain the term of gothic novel.

2. Why is The Fall of the House of Usher called a typical gothic story?