[In the following essay, Thompson analyses “The Fall of the House of Usher” as a tale of Gothic fiction.]

In her article “Explanation in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’”¹ Beverly R. Voloshin offers a “Lockean” perspective on the idea of “merging” objective and subjective in “gothic fiction” and in Poe's story in particular. Her observations about the multiplicity of merged interpretations of gothic events parallel my own in several studies she does not cite,² and in two studies she does cite.³ Therefore I was a little surprised to read that “though in the past several decades much important criticism of Romantic poetry has analyzed it as a response to the crisis in epistemology, gothic fiction is less often seen as having a similar philosophical substratum” (420, n. 2). I was even more surprised to read that while she agrees with my general claim for multiple interpretation of events in “Usher,” her “premise about gothic fiction,” her “account of multiple interpretations in ‘Usher,’” and her “conclusion about the conclusion of ‘Usher’” differ “in almost all points” from my own analysis (420, n. 4). I should have thought her claims for a gothic transmutation of what she calls the Lockean idea of “appearances” in relation to “objects” quite compatible with my own observations on the gothic and “Usher” from a more Kantian perspective. In fact, the major “difference” may be a matter of degree and the philosophical point of entry—Locke vs. Kant.

Insofar as I can determine it from her article, her premise about gothic fiction is that much of the best of it is epistemologically indeterminate. Her multiple interpretations of “Usher” depend, like mine, on an interpenetrating structure of “natural,” “psychological,” and “supernatural” (or preternatural) “explanations” of the events of “Usher.” My analysis privileges the psychological somewhat but denies that any one explanation can be adopted exclusively. Her analysis “depends” on the pattern of competing explanations because she seeks to deny the three conventional choices, suggesting that there is a category of perception (the ontological status of “appearances” according to Locke and modified by Poe) that precludes, substitutes for, or transcends the natural-psychological-supernatural structure. This “other” effect blurs ordinary discriminations. Her conclusion about the conclusion is that the tale conjoins or merges “ordinarily distinct entities” (427) in an elaborate pattern of “doubling.” None of this is incompatible with what I have written. What is different is her claim for a gothic conversion of the “empirical notion of discrete cause and effect” into the “monistic” universe of Eureka (the logic of which is a little hard to follow). Of Poe's “Usher,” she says that all of the “explanations” (psychological, natural, supernatural) “merge into a radical resolution to the [gothic] puzzle of appearances …” (428).

I naturally do not wish to argue with her notion that “the cause of unusual impressions and appearances cannot be definitively located in consciousness, nature, or the supernatural” (428); nor with the idea that the gothic transforms the Lockean idea of “appearances” as the connecting link between subject and object into “representations” that “do not necessarily correspond to objects” so that in Poe they may be “seen as the boundary or wall between subject and object” (428). These points are quite pertinent to philosophical gothic in general, though, as mentioned, I propose instead a Kantian context and influence. Nor do I wish here to debate the influence of Scottish Common Sense philosophy in America—though I would suggest in passing that Robert C. McLean's study of Poe's teacher at the University of Virginia, George Tucker: Moral Philosopher and Man of Letters (1961), Terence Martin's The Instructed Vision: Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and the Origins of American Fiction (1961), and the sections on Poe, Locke, and Thomas Upham in Allan Gardiner Smith's The Analysis of Motives: Early American Psychology and Fiction (1980) make a better basis for judgment than the unpublished essay she cites. But I would like to clarify my premises about gothic fiction and my reading of Poe's story—premises which Voloshin seems to have radically misconstrued.

First, regarding the conclusion of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” I have several times observed that the tale is epistemologically and ontologically indeterminate, deliberately so, and that the insistent pattern of doubling that merges toward unity is a structural and imagistic reinforcement of the theme of indeterminism. Voloshin's point seems to be that there is an epistemological puzzle not merely in the human mind but also in the very structure of things. My analysis of the tale emphasizes the psychological while maintaining that the possibilities of illusoriness—or hallucination—are paralleled in the universe Poe's characters inhabit. I emphasize the importance of the narrator's conscious and unconscious responses to events, the realistic and psychological aspects of the apparent supernaturalism of the tale, and the requisite of simultaneous multiple explanations. For the full weight of Voloshin's paradigm of “appearances” to be felt, one must be sensitive to the contrastive pull of the natural-psychological-supernatural tension.

Although in the indeterminate gothic tale (as distinguished from “supernatural” or “explained”), the occult element is undercut by insinuated natural and psychological explanations, the dramatic events often cannot be taken as either actual or mental but suggest instead some ambiguous (or ambivalent) combination of both. In “Usher,” the sinking of the house into its own image in the pool symbolizes the final collapse into that void which is the self and the universe simultaneously. This point in the story—where ambiguous mystery engulfs the reader's response in perception of epistemological uncertainty dramatically embedded in the fictive world of the work—parallels Tzvetan Todorov's formulation of the “fantastic” as the moment of reader hesitation between the “marvellous” and the “uncanny” that precipitates the reader into a terrible limbo. The gradually intensified hysteria of the narrator, by means of which he merges with Usher, parallels the subjective phase of the experience of the reader, who sees through the eyes of the narrator, who sees through the eyes of Usher. When Voloshin writes that “the dissolving consciousness of Roderick and the decaying world of Usher are brought into complete union … [so that] the final solution to the puzzle of appearances is to destroy appearances, if only temporarily … in the consciousness of the narrator, and through him, in the consciousness of the reader” (428), there is hardly any difference at all between her reading and mine.

Secondly, regarding gothic fiction in general, I have argued that the genre reflects the epistemological and ontological uncertainties of the romantic age to the extent that it may be called a philosophical literature. In part, gothic themes represent a quest for a theory adequate to world perceived as mind. But once epistemological doubt is established in the “dark romantic” mind, it does not matter whether one assumes the world to be objective or subjective. If romanticism is largely a philosophy of consciousness, dark romanticism is the drama of the mind engaged in the quest for metaphysical and moral absolutes in a world that offers semblances of an occult order but withholds final revelation. In romantic gothic, man is confronted with an ambiguous world structure, and his instruments for perceiving this structure are limited and flawed. The tendency of the indeterminate mode is toward obsessive epistemological doubt in which not only the ontology of beings and events but also the very medium of the narrative is called into question, especially by unreliable narrators or interpreters. Central to the indeterminate mode is heightened psychological and philosophical perplexity—so much so that such works may be considered not only as uncertain metaphysical texts, but fundamentally as epistemological texts.

And finally, it was Immanuel Kant's three “Critiques” of Pure Reason (1781), Practical Reason (1788), and Judgment (1790) that most profoundly influenced early nineteenth-century popular and literary conceptions of human perception. According to Kant, all human knowledge is subjective, and objects are known only by qualities not inherent in the things themselves but given us by our sensory “intuition.” This approximates Voloshin's formulation of the gothic transformation of Lockean concepts of “appearances.” Gothic fiction takes the Kantian proposition one step farther—and in the opposite direction. For Kant, the function of the human mind is to organize sense impressions into meaningful patterns; thus, to an extent, man's mind imposes order on the universe. But Kant postulated another human faculty, the will, which perceives spiritual and moral truths, unrelated to sense experience and unknowable by the intellect. The will, reaching out toward an external reality of universal moral law, operates within an individual as the categorical imperative in a realm of free moral choice. This realm of choice determines rightness and directs action without reference to mere reason and understanding. Gothic fiction undercuts reason, understanding, and the will and repeatedly enmires itself in the epistemological swamp of “appearances,” which are not necessarily connected to things, and which may simply be subjective impositions.

The curiously tangled metaphysical-epistemological issue is especially evident in the American ghost story, a subgenre of the gothic focused on the illusion of ghostly experience as an icon for the apparitional nature of all existence. The American ghost story embodies ontological, epistemological, and axiological concerns central to the romantic dilemma of subject and object. The relative lack of unambiguous ghosts and other supernatural phenomena in American romantic fiction reflects the philosophical uncertainties of the dominant intellectual movement of transcendentalism. The transcendentalist paradox is the necessity of valuing and believing in the external material world while seeing it simultaneously as the apparitional symbol of a higher (and “better”) world. The world view of American romantic writers—both the gothicists and the transcendentalists—is marked by a recurrent apprehension that all matter may be a mental construct, just as all dreams of the spiritual world may be a delusion. The greatest paradox of the American romantic movement is that the emphasis in the Emerson-Whitman world on a benign cosmos, in which all distinctions between material and spiritual are ultimately dissolved, proceeds not by denial of the material world, but by a reinterpretation of the spiritual that suggests that a supernatural realm of the wholly “other” does not finally exist but is a fiction in a world that is ultimately monist. If the only ontologic reality is a mysterious dynamic interaction between two fictional constructs—the physical phenomenal world of sensations and the spiritual noumenal world of ideas—what then is the ontological status of the indeterminate monism? What happens to the duality of the real and the apparitional, and which is the apparition? In such a dialogic, the natural and the supernatural fuse or “merge” one into the other; the uncertain result is a world of appearances, which are representational of the essential apparitional nature of nature. It is this gothic transformation of the world of Kantian “appearances” that Poe's “The Fall of the House of Usher” encodes. Far from being at odds on “all points” on Poe's story, Voloshin's observations are rather close to mine. Despite her observation that Berkeley and Hume collapsed Locke's distinction between primary and secondary qualities and that Hume's Treatise of Human Nature clearly worked out the skeptical implications of Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Voloshin's “Lockean” approach is too narrow; and any claim for its exclusivity or priority of “explanation” just grazes the tip of the philosophical iceberg.

Notes

1. Studies in Short Fiction, 23 (Fall 1986), 419-28; further references are in the text.

2. “Romanticism and the Gothic Tradition,” Introduction to The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism (1974); “Gothic Fiction of the Romantic Age: Context and Mode,” Introduction to Romantic Gothic Tales 1790-1840 (1979); “The Apparition of This World: Transcendentalism and the American ‘Ghost’ Story,” in Bridges to Fantasy (1982).

3. “Explained Gothic,” in Poe's Fiction (1973), and “Poe and the Paradox of Terror,” in Ruined Eden of the Present (1981).