SOURCE: “‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ and Elegiac Romance,” in Southern Literary Journal, Vol. 19, No. 1, Fall, 1986, pp. 68-78.

[In the following essay, Howes presents an interpretation of “The Fall of the House of Usher” as an elegiac romance, a form of storytelling that blends romance and elegy to present the tale of a heroic figure through the eyes of a narrator embarked on a quest.]

One of the central concerns in “Usher” criticism has been the relationship between Roderick and the narrator. At the poles lie treatments that deal primarily with one character or the other. Thus we find essays on Roderick as vampire, practitioner of incest or necrophile, heroic artist moving into the intense inane, or object lesson in fatalism.¹ Essays on the narrator present him as a successful or defeated representative of reason, a portrait of mental collapse, or even a heroic figure.² “Usher” criticism's middle ground concerns itself with how the two characters interact: Roderick draws the narrator into madness; Roderick initiates him into “modern” metaphysics and aesthetics; Roderick is the narrator's double.³ This range of approaches has a kaleidoscopic effect: many bright fragments refract the light of Poe's story, forming an apparently arbitrary, expanding mass.

In 1971, Kenneth A. Bruffee published “Elegiac Romance,” an important, but apparently overlooked essay; more recently, his book Elegiac Romance: Cultural Change and the Loss of the Hero in Modern Fiction goes over this suggested genre in greater detail.⁴ I would like to draw on Bruffee's genre to point out first its usefulness when reading and teaching “Usher,” and second, its ability to draw the various critical approaches taken toward Poe's tale into a mosaic that integrates character, narrative, and a series of themes into a pattern governing some of American and European literature's most important and most taught works.

Bruffee doesn't mention Poe in his article, and “Usher” appears only for a moment in his book, but his account of elegiac romance could be a precis for the story. Bruffee observes that in certain 19th and 20th century stories and novels, the manner of telling welds romance and elegy together in an original, productive manner. This fusion results in part from the differences between two protagonists:

Works of Elegiac Romance are romances because a heroic figure in each is embarked on some kind of quest. They are elegiac because the narrator in each tells us the story after the heroic figure is dead.

(465)

Bruffee distinguishes elegiac romance from other literary kinds by referring to certain key characteristics of his new genre. Although there seem to be affinities with pastoral elegy, elegiac romance lacks the insistence on true friendship between hero and mourner. Puzzled and unsettled by the dead figure, the narrator tells a tale emphasizing the peculiar, unequal nature of their friendship. Nor does elegiac romance mirror fictional autobiography, because the centrality of the hero-narrator relationship prevents us from reading the text as exclusively about the teller. Even in those fictional autobiographies which emphasize the death of characters—Wuthering Heights, for example—the narrative does not owe its existence solely to the hero's death, and its effect on the narrator. Bruffee's list of elegiac romances is an impressive one. Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, The Good Soldier, and All the King's Men are just a few of the titles he mentions. But no story or novel I've encountered fits his paradigm more exactly than “Usher.”

Bruffee's discussion begins with “the questing hero,” since the narrator's response to this figure produces the tale. This hero's character makes him seem at first the story's main figure. He is a product of the 19th century; Byronic in nature, a character “isolated from society by his obsessive quest” (466). This quest can be internal or external; thus a physically passive figure can be “questing” through the landscape of his own psyche. Active, and even hyperactive in pursuing his obsession, he is sometimes an artist, and often a victim of some degenerating and inexplicable disease. Alive he is both fascinating and mysterious, with more than a hint of occult knowledge, but for all his talents, his death seems fated.

This portrait bears a strong likeness to Roderick Usher. Driven by his sense of impending doom, Roderick sees clearly the course ahead: “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.”⁵ His obsessive, futile quest after the mysterious cause of his destiny isolates him from society in an extreme fashion. Though subject at times to almost catatonic melancholy, Roderick is also prone to “excessive nervous agitation,” and “an excited and highly distempered ideality.” His aesthetic sensibility and artistic productions figure prominently. His knowledge of the occult manifests itself in his studies of musical theory, his reading material, and his metaphysics—the obsession with the doubling of history, landscape, and psychological states that the narrator describes. And although Madeline suffers the mysterious disease, Roderick certainly exhibits the symptoms as well.

Of course, this portrait is hardly distinctive; the Romantic and Victorian woods are thick with such figures. It is this character's relationship with the second protagonist that moves the tale from self-destructive quest to elegiac romance. This second figure's role is crucial, because we see the questing hero through his eyes. Even when the hero speaks, his utterance “is edited, selected, and arranged by the narrator” (466). Furthermore, the narrator's own uncertainty colors every sentence. His self-consciousness is so pervasive that many critics see the narrator as the true central character. We generally know little about this figure's life before he encounters the questing hero, largely because this event radically transforms the narrator's vision of the world. In elegiac romance, the narrator strongly identifies with his hero, but this intense feeling is not returned. The hero remains aloof: “However friendly the narrator and his hero may have been according to the narrator's account, it is clear that they never were on terms of real mutual intimacy.” The narrator identifies with his hero because of a lack of self-possession. The language betrays the narrator's “extraordinary propensity to turn himself inside out at a moment's notice, with a feeling such as Ishmael's ‘certain wild vagueness of painfulness concerning’ Ahab.” At story's end he is isolated from society, but not by committing himself to the hero's quest. Rather, “an odd state of mind which seems to be a result of the nature of his relationship with the hero” isolates the narrator (465). We thus confront a highly impressionable, insecure initiate, brooding on his situation after the hero's death.

Poe's narrator fits this description precisely. He is nothing if not an editor, for he brackets Roderick's ideas within a welter of references to “disordered fancy,” “phantasmagoric conceptions,” and “hypochondria.” He is so self-conscious that he qualifies even the barest passages of exposition. Few works make so much use of “perhaps,” “I fancied,” and “I thought” to undercut narrative in the act of its presentation. The narrator tells us nothing about himself, and we also find that unequal relationship between hero and narrator Bruffee notes. The narrator rushes to Roderick's side after receiving a “summons,” though many years have passed since their last meeting. Upon arriving, he finds Roderick's behavior hardly congenial, but his childhood experiences prepare him for this, since “Although, as boys, we had been even intimate associates, yet I really knew little of my friend. His reserve had always been excessive and habitual” (275). Throughout his account, the narrator suggests that only by an act of will can Roderick stir up any personal warmth. And yet this hero influences his friend profoundly, certainly leaving him in “an old state of mind.” The story itself seems half narrative and half self-analysis; few narrators in literature express more “wild vagueness of painfulness” about their hero. Even before the apocalyptic events of the last few pages, then, we see the narrator occupying a troubled, interior position, yet remaining true to his self-imposed responsibility as the questing hero's companion.

Given the natures of these two characters, the narrative of elegiac romance is fairly predictable. After bringing the protagonists together and establishing their unequal relationship, the story quickly moves to a crisis—the moment when the questing hero violates the narrator's confidence. But this moment is not the story's climax, since only the hero's death will shock the narrator into finally regaining his self-possession. The hero himself never takes advantage of the narrator's fidelity. The relationship is too one-sided, and the hero is too preoccupied to bother with manipulating or maiming his friend. As a result, the narrator must take full responsibility for the state of his own mind after the hero's death. This death seems to take with it the narrator's self-possession, “But since the narrator's hero never literally took anything from the narrator, the crucial event in the experience was entirely imaginary” (467). Telling the story is therefore the narrator's attempt to regain himself after his prop has fallen away:

What occurred within the narrator's mind was what we might call malfeasance of the imagination. Imagination took over as a governing faculty when it should not have, or in a way it should not have. One way to rectify this situation would seem to be to make the imagination act correctly, to cause it to govern when it should and as it should. The way the narrator must set things right, therefore, is to undergo another, similar imaginative experience. This is what he does in telling the story. He sets out consciously to lay a trap for himself like the one in which he had at one time unconsciously let himself be caught, and from which he does not yet, as he begins to tell his story, feel free. His freedom can come only with understanding. The narrator understands and thus recovers himself by imaginatively recovering his past—by “writing” his “autobiography”.

(465)

We are dealing with a narrator glancing back at an “often seemingly harmless but in truth fundamentally corrupt relationship” (468). At story's end, however, the relationship fractures, partially due to the hero's death, but also partially due to the narrator's personal reasons for telling the story: “He is interested only in saving himself” (468).

This explanation of the narrative's course forces us to look more closely at the mental journey the narrator of “Usher” takes us on. The “crisis” moment comes at the story's center, when the narrator, confronted with “The Haunted Palace,” places before us what he claims was an important insight: “I fancied that I perceived, and for the first time, a full consciousness on the part of Usher, of the tottering of his lofty reason upon her throne” (284). The narrator has seen signs of madness earlier, but this moment is the violating one, because here he realizes that Roderick is aware of his own mental instability. Identifying with Roderick now becomes truly problematic for the narrator, since the hero not only recognizes his obsession, but also refuses to consider the narrator's involvement with his fate. Roderick is supremely indifferent. And yet the narrator continues his fidelity, despite the fact that his belief in Roderick is severely undermind. Even though the narrator now realizes “the futility of all attempt” to save Roderick (282), he carries on in what is obviously “a fundamentally corrupt relationship.”

Roderick's death is the breaking point, creating the emotional mess we find the narrator in. For both elegiac romance and “Usher,” this is the moment the storytelling begins. “Usher” is a circle, returning at its end to that opening image of the narrator before the tarn: “the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the ‘House of Usher’” (297). The word “fragments” points to the reconstructing of event and house that the narrator's tale, composed after the experience, attempts. This is the “similar imaginative experience” Bruffee notes in elegiac romance. Few works call more attention to the fact that the narrator is not only reconstructing events, but also reshaping his personal responses, which constitute the trap “in which he had at one time unconsciously let himself be caught, and from which he does not yet, as he begins to tell his story, feel free” (467).

This reshaping explains the undercutting we find in the narrator's account. Since the crucial moment is “entirely imaginary,” we find the narrator editing his account to provide an after-the-fact justification. He emphasizes his awareness that Roderick has improperly engaged his imagination: “I felt creeping upon me, by slow yet certain degrees, the wild influences of his own fantastic yet impressive superstitions” (290). Roderick did not deliberately attack the narrator's sanity, but the narrator insists that identifying with Roderick's pain led his imagination into a “malfeasance.” The retelling thus attempts to divorce the narrator from Roderick imaginatively, but in a retroactive manner, made necessary by the hero's death. In the telling, the narrator tries to prove his own intellectual participation in the events, and thus claims an active role for himself after the fact. At story's end, we find him again an outsider, standing before the tarn, but with one crucial difference: “The House of Usher” no longer stands before him. Through the telling he has psychologically saved himself, just as in the narrative he physically saves himself from that “fundamentally corrupt relationship” he now puts to rest.

The similarities between “Usher” and elegiac romance are not limited, however, to matters of character, plot, and narrative perspective. In fact, the thematic affinities are perhaps the most intriguing. Of these, the handling of time is one of the most interesting. In elegiac romance, “the past holds the present in a vice-like grip” (468). Difficulties do not disappear when the questing hero dies; in fact, the narrator's retelling becomes a form of therapy, a reshaping that allows him to exorcise a horrifying or traumatic experience. Bruffee claims the gap between past events and the present retelling allows for a sense of completion in the story that the bald narrative might not seem to bear out. Speaking of his own test case, a fragmentary horror story by Byron, Bruffee points out that despite the incompleteness of the plot, the narrator's emotional struggle is over: “only superficial gothic details are left to be worked out, whereas the youth's emotional state in response to his companion's death seems conclusive” (469).

This description certainly fits “Usher.” Although we don't have the “morning after” information that might nail down a theory about the narrator—say, another paragraph about his time in a mental institution—the story itself does seem to reach an emotional equilibrium in the last few sentences. This supports what many critics have pointed out: the actual fall of the house is secondary to the narrator's state of mind after his experience. We have already noted that in elegiac romance, the narrator loses confidence in his hero, but stays by his side up to the moment of actual physical separation. Why does the narrator do this? One possible explanation is his lack of self-possession: rather than assume a self-determining lifestyle, he chooses, out of fear and anxiety, to stay with what he formerly admired, even if what seemed certain and strong is at bottom obsessive. Roderick's death, however anticipated, thus results in a “metaphysical abandonment” and can account for the “despair or aimlessness in the character of the narrator as he begins telling us his story.” The retelling is crucial, since by speaking, the narrator “may break the grip of the past by defying it.” This defiance is both rebellious and therapeutic, since the narrator determines “to relieve the past imaginatively by telling the story—to employ the imagination freely and creatively, rather than be a slave to its improper governance” (475).⁶

This state of mind, present in both elegiac romance and “Usher,” helps us place them within literary history. Elegiac romance is neither elegy or romance in the conventional sense. The shift of focus away from the questing hero toward the more prosaic narrator is a move away from traditional romance toward the realistic, psychological narratives so much a part of modern tradition. “Usher” stands with other examples of elegiac romance Bruffee offers as a kind of text that mirrors in some way a modern predicament: a view of the past as a Romantic, yet strangling, deadening force we return to imaginatively in order to remake it or lift it off our shoulders entirely. Although this synopsis is one of the truisms of studies in 19th and 20th century literature, the genre of elegiac romance provides some interesting insights into how this movement can be embodied powerfully in a literary text.⁷

The advantages Bruffee's paradigm offers us for reading “The Fall of the House of Usher” are substantial. His emphasis on the importance of the two protagonists' relationship acts as a healthy check on seeing one figure as the true center, and thus relegating the other to a supporting role. The distinctive qualities of the hero and narrator also take on a new significance when we see that these traits lead not only to a particular kind of narrative, but also to a specific kind of psychological exploration. Furthermore, stressing the gap between narrative events and the retelling helps us understand the hesitant, heavily-edited text the narrator produces. And finally, the idea that the telling is a kind of therapy or rebellion gives the story an energy arising from more than narrative.

All these gains lead to a further benefit: the elegiac romance paradigm helps us set “Usher” within both literary tradition and the history of ideas. The narrator's painful break from the past's constricting force helps us place “Usher” within the history of Romanticism, and those visions of personal self-determination and psychological revolution we find so prominent in the literature of this time. The lesson is almost too clear: the terms dictated by the past finally kill Roderick, but the strategies of creative individualism save the narrator. Bruffee's paradigm also sets up a series of productive correspondences between “Usher” and other major works of the past two centuries. Traditional generic approaches tend to separate Poe's tales from many major works, or lead to comparisons based on superficial details—for example, the Gothic machinery. What Bruffee's elegiac romance suggests is that the “structural and thematic characteristics,” the most striking aspects of “Usher,” actually forge much stronger links to other works exploring the same artistic and psychological problems. Thus, elegiac romance not only helps us recognize the work's place within a continuing narrative so central to Romantic and post-Romantic literature: the struggle of the individual to remain self-determining in the face of the combined forces that make up society and history.

To return to my own beginning, elegiac romance is an excellent tool for organizing and understanding much of the important “Usher” criticism, and a strong stimulus for new work on Poe as well. The genre's cohesion of character, plot, narrative technique, and literary history draws the many fine studies of “Usher” together into a mosaic: each piece crafted and shaped, but still part of a larger whole. Studies of Roderick not only help us define more precisely the questing hero's role, but also add to our knowledge of this dying figure within literary tradition. Studies of the narrator give us greater insight into what precisely constitutes this anxious, uncertain, yet finally decisive figure so central to Romantic and post-Romantic poetry and fiction. The many studies of the narrative technique help us identify the idiosyncratic, baroque turns Poe makes in his exploration not only of psychological truth, but of the passage from one age, with all its preoccupations, to another. And those studies that work through the traditional notions of genre shed important light on the connections between these other literary kinds and the central psychological narrative of the alienated yet creative imagination. The list could go on, but the pattern is clear: each of the major studies helps us fill in with rich detail the central narrative and psychology of a story that participates strongly in central concerns of the past two hundred years.

The new directions for criticism are first those that Bruffee suggests: studies of the dynamic relationship between various works in the new genre. Poe and Conrad, Poe and Melville, even Poe and Fitzgerald could all be productive areas for exploration, and elegiac romance would guide us away from ephemeral similarities, and toward centers of correspondence. Another possible direction is in some ways a revolution against the Romantic Rebellion, one that would place us strongly within the range of contemporary theory. For example, elegiac romance suggests that one possible interpretation sees the narrator's tale as an imaginative act central to Romantic and post-Romantic literature. But does this creative act finally carry out all that is required of it? Even if “Usher” enacts the Romantic move toward imaginative freedom, the critic might still call into question this assurance, and suggest that this whole idea of imaginative rebellion has within itself major problems. This kind of study would lead us not only to probing further Poe's aesthetics and philosophy, but also to confronting one of the central characteristics of an important literary movement.

In short, Bruffee's elegiac romance can help us understand “Usher” itself, its critical reception, and the forces at work in many of our most important and frequently taught texts.

Notes

1. For Roderick as a vampire or victim of vampirism, see J. O. Bailey, “What Happens in ‘The House of Usher’?” American Literature, 35 (1964), 445-466; Lyle H. Kendall, Jr., “The Vampire Motif in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’,” College English, 24 (1963), 450-453; and of course D. H. Lawrence, “Edgar Allan Poe,” Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Viking, 1964), 65-81. The incest and necrophilia motifs appear in John L. Marsh, “The Psycho-Sexual Reading of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’,” Poe Studies, 5 (1972), 23-24; and Renata R. Mautner Wasserman, “The Self, the Mirror, the Other: ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’,” Poe Studies, 10 (1977), 33-35. Roderick-as-artist appears throughout Poe criticism; a representative sample would include Maurice Beebe, “The Universe of Roderick Usher,” The Personalist, 37 (1956), 147-160; Richard Wilbur, “The House of Poe,” Anniversary Lectures 1959 (Washington, D.C.: Reference Department of the Library of Congress, 1959), 21-38; Nathalia Wright, “Roderick Usher: Poe's Turn-of-the-Century Artist,” in Artful Thunder: Versions of the Romantic Tradition in American Literature, in Honor of Howard P. Vincent, ed. Robert J. DeMott and Sanford E. Marovitz (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1975), 55-67; and Frederick S. Frank, “Poe's House of the Seven Gothics: The Fall of the Narrator in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, Orbis Literarum: International Review of Literary Studies, 34 (1979), 331-351. Roderick appears as a fatalist in Terence J. Matheson, “Fatalism in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’,” English Studies in Canada, 6 (1980), 421-429.

2. Many writers are interested in the narrator's relationship to reason. Some draw out the implications of the connection: see Matheson and Bailey above, or Barton Levi St. Armand, “Poe's Landscape of the Soul: Association Theory and ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’,” Modern Language Studies, 7 (1977), 32-41. Others talk about the undermining of the narrator as a representative of reason: see Frank above, or Jacqueline Viswanathan, “The Innocent Bystander: The Narrator's Position in Poe's ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ James's ‘The Turn of the Screw’ and Butor's L'Emploi du temps.” Hebrew University Studies in Literature, 4 (1976), 27-47; and Charles Feidelson, Symbolism and American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 37-43. The madness of the narrator is of course a recurring question in Poe criticism: see Wilbur above, or Peter Obuchowski, “Unity of Effect in Poe's ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’,” Studies in Short Fiction, 12 (1975), 407-412. The longest sustained debate over the narrator's sanity appears in the exchange of essays between Patrick F. Quinn and G. R. Thompson in Ruined Eden of the Present: Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe: Critical Essays in Horror of Darrel Abel, ed. G. R. Thompson and Virgil L. Lokke (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1981). Quinn responds to Thompson's Poe's Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973) in the essay “A Misreading of Poe's ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’,” 303-312; Thompson responds in “Poe and the Paradox of Terror: Structures of Heightened Consciousness in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ 313-340; Quinn responds yet again in “‘Usher' Again’: Trust the Teller!” 341-353. Almost any essay on “Usher” deals with this question in some way. For the narrator as a hero, see Michael J. Hoffman, “The House of Usher and Negative Romanticism,” Studies in Romanticism, 4 (1965), 158-168.

3. The seductive quality of Roderick's mental state appears in Thomas J. Rountree, “Poe's Universe: The House of Usher and the Narrator,” Tulane Studies in English, 20 (1972), 123-134. Wilbur also discusses this topic, as does Darrel Abel, “A Key to the House of Usher,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 18 (1949) 176-185. G. R. Thompson above strongly insists on the doubling effect, as do I. M. Walker, “The ‘Legitimate Sources’ of Terror in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’,” Modern Language Review 61 (1966), 585-592; and John S. Hill, “The Dual Hallucination in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’,” Southwest Review, 48 (1963), 396-402. An interesting variation of the relationship appears in David Halliburton's discussion of the “guardian sleeper” relationship in Edgar Allan Poe: A Phenomenological View (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), 43-49, 199-228, and 292. Many other studies could be listed; the above are meant to be loosely representative, since full documentation would result in an “Usher” bibliography.

4. Kenneth A. Bruffee, “Elegiac Romance,” College English, 32 (1971), 465-476. All subsequent page references to this essay appear in the text. In the contributor's note, Bruffee calls this essay a “prospectus for a full, book-length treatment which is in the offing.” This book, Elegiac Romance: Cultural Change and the Loss of the Hero in Modern Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), appeared in 1983. I have chosen to follow the “prospectus” because it states more generally the issues involved in elegiac romance. Other essays by Bruffee that discuss specific works as elegiac romances are “The Synthetic Hero and the Narrative Structure of Childe Harold III,” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 6 (1966), 669-678; and “Form and Meaning in Nabokov's Real Life of Sebastian Knight: An Example of Elegiac Romance,” Modern Language Quarterly, 34 (1973), 180-190.

5. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” in The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison (New York: Crowell, 1902), III, p. 280. All subsequent page references to “Usher” appear in the text.

6. This particular characteristic of elegiac romance might also shed some light on “Usher's” problematic ending. Suppose for a moment that Roderick simply dies that final night—no Madeline arises, no house falls. I submit that the narrator's sense of confusion and terror would be no less intense. Although the narrative satisfies our desire for a sense of an ending, this is a formal requirement, and adheres to certain conventions about tying up loose ends—the reason for death, its effect on the scene, and so forth. But psychologically the death would still be apocalyptic for the narrator, since nothing in his preceding experience would explain this death. The narrator makes this clear to us in the retelling: at no point does he finally come to some kind of deeply-felt conclusion that might explain adequately Roderick's painful case. Could it be possible that the last two paragraphs are an “imaginative” conclusion, the shaping of the narrative by the teller, in an act of freedom that makes the story his own? As mentioned earlier, the act of retelling does offer a kind of psychic freedom: no house looms up before the narrator at the end. And the conclusion does have a sense of completion that only the narrator can appreciate or benefit from. This point is offered as speculation, but it does afford an alternative explanation for a passage generally read as either realistic exposition, or conclusive evidence that the narrator has slipped into madness.

7. In his book, Bruffee undertakes a number of the studies mentioned here and below. He is particularly interested in setting his genre within a historical, literary, and cultural context.