SOURCE: “The Power of Terror: Burke and Kant in the House of Usher,” in Poe Studies, Vol. 21, No. 3, December, 1988, pp. 27-35.

[In the following essay, Voller contends that “The Fall of the House of Usher” represents a rejection of the theories of sublimity offered by Burke and Kant, and instead focuses on terrors and emotions that could not be easily explained in the context of the optimistic aesthetic proffered by Burke and Kant.]

It has been established that Poe's “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) is in part a commentary upon the Burkean sublime,¹ but the full extent of Poe's critique of sublimity remains to be determined. The tale certainly articulates, as Craig Howes has shown, Poe's dissatisfaction with Burke's silence on certain abstract sources of terror,² but “Usher” does not rest here in its unsympathetic examination of the sublime. Writing a tale directed against established theories of sublimity, Poe is not likely to have overlooked Kant's “Analytic of the Sublime,” and indeed “Usher” is, I would like to suggest, as much concerned with Kant's aesthetic as with that offered by Burke and his inheritors.³

We may go further: “Usher” finally records not merely Poe's rejection of two particular theories of sublimity, but of the possibility that the sublime can provide a meaningful or even competent accounting of terror. Poe's hostile interrogation of sublimity has as its motive impulse not merely the shortcomings of Burkean and Kantian theory, but Poe's recognition of the fundamental inability of the sublime to address what critics now identify as a Dark Romantic understanding of the human condition.

Since its reintroduction by Boileau into Western cultural debate, and particularly since the publication of John Dennis' The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704), the sublime had been an aesthetic which transmuted overwhelming sensory or intellectual experiences into positive, often transcendent, emotional or cognitive espisodes.⁴ For Poe, this apparently ineluctable character of the sublime—a character which had, by Poe's time, marked the value of sublimity for generations of critics—was its essential flaw, for such an optimistic aesthetic could not meaningfully account for the terrors that deeply fascinated Poe: those terrors that know no redemption.

“Usher” confronts the theories of both Burke and Kant with just such a terror, and it is emotion, not theory, that triumphs. When we understand this aspect of the tale, we not only recognize another dimension of Poe's Dark Romanticism, but may reevaluate Howes' finding that “Usher” is flawed, its conclusion an example of failed artistic and theoretical nerve on Poe's part, because of the tale's “unsettling” return to the sublimity that most of the tale has questioned.⁵ Seen as a refutation not only of Kantian and Burkean theory but of sublimity's affirmational character, the tale's conclusion becomes an emphatic recognition not only of the power of terror and of its ability to evade even the most rigorous intellectual attempts at containment, amelioration, or understanding, but also of the insufficiency and limitations of the sublime.

I

The very structure of sublime experience (as it was conventionally understood) articulates an aesthetics of optimism. In virtually every formulation it received, sublimity was understood as a linear, four-part experience that terminates benignly if not affirmatively. The normal or resting state of “the soul,” the mental faculties, is disrupted by a moment of trauma which, in the words of Alexander Gerard (himself echoing Burke), “occupies the whole soul, and suspends all its motions.”⁶ This moment of encounter is succeeded by a third state, that of elevation, in which the mind's prostration before the natural object is transformed into what Thomas Weiskel identified as “a symbol of the mind's relation to a transcendent order.”⁷ The final stage is that of recovery, of return to normal modes of cognition and feeling. Regardless of the significance of the experience—whether it is understood by aesthetic theorists as validating religious rapture or the triumph of reason or simply as a physiological experience—the sublime is a movement through disquiet to tranquility.

This underlying structure of sublimity is inscribed into the very plot of “Usher”: the narrator comes from the outside world (the pre-sublime, the normal); he encounters the house, its inhabitants, and its environs (the moment of trauma); he dwells briefly in the house (which, as an objectification of Roderick's disordered mind, embodies the sublime moment itself); then returns to the outside world (the recovery). What Poe has altered in his rendition of the experience is not the form or structure of sublime experience but its character, reversing anticipated movements and frustrating our expectations. The narrator encounters an external object that, as Howes notes, he expects will excite his faculties; instead, he experiences precisely the opposite:

I know not how it was—but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable, for the feeling was unrelieved by any of the half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me … with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium—the bitter lapse into everday life—the hideous dropping of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart—an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime.⁸

The significance of this passage and the failure it documents becomes fully apparent when we understand that the sublime is, in essence, an ironic trope, converting impressions of vacuity and insignificance into suggestions of plenitude and potency.⁹ Denying this irony, Poe orchestrates an aesthetic experience that, by leading his narrator to interiorize directly the chaos and gloomy presence of the object—here, the house and its environs—amounts to an anti-sublime. The soul is not expanded into a sense of its own greatness, but is oppressed by forebodings of loss, decay, and ineffable unease. The narrator experiences “motions of the soul,” to use Burke's language, but the movement is downward and in, not upward and out: the narrator speaks of lapse, dropping, sinking. What should have been an experience of liberation and exaltation proves instead a denial of transcendence, a “bitter” and “hideous” repudiation of sublimity's power of apotheosis.

Poe repeatedly foreshadows the impending failure of the Burkean sublime, suggesting its inadequacy not only in the miscarriage of the narrator's “childish” and ill-fated attempt to dispel his sense of oppression by peering into the tarn (II, 399), but more importantly in Roderick's own understanding of the consequences of that “anomalous species of terror” of which he is victim:

I dread the events of the future, not in themselves, but in their results. I shudder at the thought of any, even the most trivial, incident, which may operate upon this intolerable agitation of soul. I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect—in terror. In this unnerved—in this pitiable condition—I feel that the period will soon arrive when I must abandon life, and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, Fear.

(II, 403)

Far from being an agent for the liberation or expansion of the soul, terror in “Usher” is itself crippling and life-denying, the greatest and gravest threat to Roderick's very being, leading not to affirmation or sensationist pleasure but to death and destruction of the house/mind.

For Poe, sublimity's very dependence upon terror proves its undoing, its deconstructive key. Burke, as Howes points out, traces the roots of sublime experience to a human desire for self-preservation, but Roderick's case is one for which Burkean theory cannot account. Insisting that terror is necessary for the sublime, Burke also insists (as will Kant) that the sublime cannot exist when the agent of terror threatens the life of the observer. Howes has shown that the source of Roderick's terror lies in the historical and socio-sexual background of Roderick and his “house,” yet these are not among the sources of terror which, both Kant and Burke agree, threaten us so directly as to obviate the sublime.¹⁰ Clearly, there is a dimension of terror beyond the pale of both Burkean and Kantian theory, and it this dimension with which Poe is most concerned.¹¹ “Usher” sets forth an experience of terror which is neither excluded by extant theories of the sublime nor accounted for by them, and in so doing, the story challenges the utility of these theories. When an aesthetics cannot cope with the experience of terror which has such consequences for Usher, what is its value?

II

Poe's rejection of the Kantian sublime goes beyond the fact that this aesthetic is, like Burke's, undermined by its own emotional foundation. The Kantian sublime, we recall, has two components: the mathematical sublime, associated with conceptual magnitude, and the dynamical, concerned with the processes and forces of nature. In the former, the imaginative or intuitive faculties fail in their attempts to apprehend the totality of objects or ideas connoting great extent or power, in which case reason must intervene to rescue the experience from lack of closure, from continued intellectual suspension and trauma. In the dynamical sublime, objects conveying a sense of nature's power “raise the energies of the soul above their accustomed height and discover in us a faculty of resistance … which gives us courage to measure ourselves against the apparent almightiness of nature.”¹²

In “Usher,” both modes of the Kantian sublime fail. Rationality is betrayed by the unsuspected power and tenacity of the imaginative: G. R. Thompson has pointed out how in the tale “every rational effort … serves merely to heighten superstitious fancies—both of Usher and the narrator.”¹³ When the exercise of reason subverts reason, no evasion of the consuming power of terror is possible. The mind's ability to resist the power of sublime objects, to regard them as “without any dominion over us and our personality” (Kant, p. 110) is shown by Poe to be an illusion: Roderick's dread of falling victim to fear is horribly realized. “Usher” flatly rejects Kant's easy confidence in the mind's superiority over nature, for “Usher” is the heavily symbolic account of the conflict between the rational and the imaginative in the ‘sublimed mind’¹⁴—a conflict in which the rational fails and the inscrutable dynamic powers of nature, represented by the chaotic yet localized storm, overwhelm and vanquish.

The lines of battle in “Usher” are clearly drawn. The narrator is associated with the rescuing force of reason; he is, David Ketterer has written, “a projection of the force that Usher half hopes will keep him in the everyday world.”¹⁵ Roderick has called upon him, the narrator explains, “with a view of attempting, by the cheerfulness of my society, some alleviation of his malady” (II, 398). Although he strikes few readers as particularly cheerful, the narrator is suited to his task: upon his arrival he shakes off the disturbing effect of the house's dreamlike “atmosphere” by turning to examine “the real aspect of the building” (II, 400; emphasis added); he will later attempt “to reason off the nervousness which had dominion over him” during the storm (II, 411; emphasis added). When Roderick advances his theory of “the sentience of all vegetable things” (II, 408) and claims that the house and grounds have their own atmosphere that has contributed to his present state, the narrator, who has sensed this atmosphere earlier, tersely dismisses these beliefs: “Such opinions need no comment, and I will make none” (II, 408). Such facile dismissal is invoked again later in the story when, at the height of the climactic storm, the narrator explains the unearthly glow surrounding the house as “merely electrical phenomena not uncommon” (II, 413; emphasis added). At such moments the narrator is behaving precisely as Roderick had hoped he would, but having himself been beset by the terrors of the house of Usher, the narrator can offer only a superficial rationality that cannot dissipate the literal clouds of gloom gathering about his friend.

The allure of the imaginative, the nonrational, is embodied (not surprisingly for Poe) in the story's only female character.¹⁶ It is no accident that Madeline should prove to be, to the narrator, an unknown quantity, a shadowy and mysterious figure whom he cannot know. Poe has taken evident pains to delineate the antithesis between the narrator and Madeline. On the day he arrives, the narrator has his only sight of Madeline before her entombment; instructively, this brief glimpse is provided not by direct meeting (Roderick never introduces his sister to his friend), but by the narrator's almost accidental notice of her passing through a “remote portion” of the chamber where he sits with Roderick.

The narrator's reaction merits scrutiny. “I regarded her with an utter astonishment not unmingled with dread—and yet I found it impossible to account for such feelings. A sensation of stupor oppressed me, as my eyes followed her retreating steps” (II, 404). There is no explanation for this response—none, that is, unless we recall the words with which Burke begins Part Two of his Enquiry: “The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, or by consequence reason on that object which employs it.”¹⁷ The association of Madeline with the nonrational dimension of the sublime could be no clearer.

Nor could the affinity between Roderick and Madeline. It is implicit in Roderick's attribution of his melancholy to his concern for Madeline's health that his well-being is in some way linked with that of his sister, and the internment scene affirms this. Noticing the “striking similitude” between the Ushers, the narrator learns from Roderick that the two are twins “and that sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature had always existed between them” (II, 410). The mistaken entombment of Madeline only intensifies these sympathies, drawing Roderick so strongly toward the nonrational or “arabesque” that even the direct intervention of the rationalist narrator is unable to prevent Roderick from becoming, in accord with his fears, the victim of terror.

It is a critical commonplace that the house of Usher is an objectification of Roderick's mind; this mind becomes, in the tale, the disputed territory in the conflict between reason and imagination, intellection and intuition.¹⁸ Poe is careful to present a house/mind vacillating between these faculties, uncertain in its allegiance. The sublimed mind is generally understood to be traumatized or suspended, and this is emphatically true for Roderick Usher. Alone in the remote countryside, the house of Usher itself is in a sense suspended, surrounded as it is by “an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven” (II, 399). Even the fissure in the front wall is emblematic of the divided mind, poised in the sublime moment between the rational and the imaginative.

The narrator's journey through the house, from the causeway at the level of the tarn up multiple staircases to Roderick's chamber, is a journey into this suspect mind, a progress “through many dark and intricate passages” (II, 400) which takes the narrator past “phantasmagoric” decorations and chambers that are both known and alien, accustomed sights somehow defamiliarized: “While the objects around me … were but matters to which, or to such as which, I had been accustomed from my infancy—while I hesitated not to acknowledge how familiar was all this—I still wondered to find how unfamiliar were the fancies which ordinary images were stirring up” (II, 400-401). Even the family physician wears “a mingled expression of low cunning and perlexity.” Associated with Madeline, the tale's avatar of the nonrational, the physician has every reason to confront the rationalist narrator “with trepidation,” for the narrator is, in a very important sense, his antagonist.

Roderick's chamber, like the rest of the house, is oppressively dark, the light of rationality excluded in the sublime moment. What is for Kant the necessary antithesis between reason and imagination is expressed by Poe in the narrator's troubled reaction to the sight of Roderick. Even before meeting his old friend, the narrator has found Roderick's behavior inscrutable: “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” (II, 398). Significantly, this reserve is attributed to “a peculiar sensibility of temperament”—further indication of the sway held over Roderick's mind by the nonrational.

The narrator's entrance into his host's chambers confirms their estrangement. Studying the dark dwelling-chamber, the narrator records his impression that “An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all” (II, 401). As a token of the sublimed mind, the chambers indicate not only the opacity of imaginative experience to rational inquiry, but also the negative tenor of Poe's anti-sublimity. The literal darkness which obscures the interior of the house of Usher is the objective correlative of that lack of redemptive possibility in an aesthetic and philosophic situation so imbued with an abstract yet threatening terror that both Burkean and Kantian sublimity fail as aesthetic, emotive, and cognitive guides.

Confronting Roderick, the narrator confronts a virtual stranger, “an incoherence—an inconsistency” (II, 402). This lack of recognition should be expected, however, and not only because of years of separation. Roderick's peculiar sensibility of temperament has been aggravated by the imminent loss of Madeline, his psychic twin and intuitive kindred-spirit. Threatened by abstract terrors and a sense of impending tragedy, Roderick would indeed be on the verge of losing himself, both literally, in the withering of the family tree, and figuratively, in the growing and ineluctable fear that seems to him a part of the very “physique” of the familial estate. Constitutionally disposed to a great, even profound, intuitive and imaginative sensibility, Roderick can only be further estranged from the rationally-apprehended world of empirical reality by the terrors that beset him. No wonder, then, that he summons to rescue him a rational friend from happier years—a friend who barely recognizes him; no wonder the narrator, driven to metaphor to describe Roderick's condition, invokes images of drunkenness and opium reverie. At the moment of the narrator's arrival, Roderick is perhaps already beyond the possibility of rationalist redemption.

The narrator's earliest reports confirm his inability to effect any change in Roderick's condition. “I should fail,” he says, “in any attempt to convey an idea of the exact character of the studies, or of the occupations, in which he involved me, or led me the way” (II, 403). For a rescuer, the narrator is remarkably passive, and the activities that the two men pursue—painting, literature, music—affirm that Roderick is very much the dominant aesthetic force in the house of Usher. The best the narrator can do, apparently, is endeavor to distract his friend, but the chosen distractions (if indeed they are not chosen by Roderick, as seems to be the case,) serve only to reinforce those aspects of Roderick's character which dispose him to be a victim of terror. Far from rescuing his friend, the narrator is abetting his eventual destruction, as though the narrator himself has been subsumed by the house and its atmosphere of terror.

The narrator's lack of vigilance against the effects of terror is evident in his responses to the activities in which Roderick engages. The sublime was regarded by most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aestheticians as ineffable, and frequently was associated with pain, vagueness, and awe; all of these characteristics are present in the narrator's experience and impressions of his time in the house/mind of Usher:

… I hold painfully in mind a certain singular perversion and amplification of the wild air of the last waltz of Von Weber. From the paintings over which [Roderick's] elaborate fancy brooded, and which grew … into vagueness at which I shuddered the more thrillingly, because I shuddered knowing not why;—from these paintings … I would endeavor to educe more than a small portion which should lie within the compass of merely written words. … For me at least—in the circumstances surrounding me—there arose out of the pure abstractions which the hypochondriac contrived to throw upon his canvass, an intensity of intolerable awe. …

(II, 405)

Such obscure and emotionally-freighted responses to Usher's art prepare us for the eventual capitulation of reason during the terrors of the storm; for the moment, Poe has made the point that the artistic, the imaginative, is, if not superior to the rational, at least its equal, capable of summoning powers that challenge the control and understanding of that narrow rationality embodied in the narrator.

Given these circumstances and discoveries, the failure of the narrator's attempts “to alleviate the melancholy of [his] friend” is inevitable:

as a closer and still closer intimacy admitted me more unreservedly into the recesses of his spirit, the more bitterly did I perceive the futility of all attempt at cheering a mind from which darkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe in one unceasing radiation of gloom.

(II, 404-405)

Rather than asserting control and bringing his friend within the compass of reason, the rationalist narrator is able to register only an increasing helplessness and frustration.

III

Reason may totter on its lofty throne in “Usher,” but there is at least one moment in which its triumph over terror and the imagination seems secure. We have seen how in Poe's symbolist staging of the drama of the sublime, Roderick's mysterious kindred spirit and psychic correspondent is placed in stark antithesis to the rationalist narrator, vanquished by him after a brief and wordless encounter. The narrator's mere presence, Poe implies, is sufficient to drive Madeline from the stage of the mind, to exclude her from Roderick's life and render her ineffective until she dies.

There is some suggestion that Roderick believes the death of his sister might resolve the reason/imagination conflict, for the narrator reports that Roderick has chosen a vault (“entirely without means of admission for light”) which, tellingly, lies “at great depth, immediately beneath that portion of the building in which was my own sleeping apartment” (II, 410). Yet while Roderick's desire to “bury” Madeline beneath the chamber of his rationalist friend might betoken a desire to terminate the sublime, to subordinate the imaginative to the rational, it simultaneously testifies, in his unwillingness to remove his sister from the house, to the inescapable influence of the imagination.

Madeline's exclusion is illusory, of course, and resolves nothing. Roderick's distressed condition is only exacerbated by the death of his sister:

His ordinary manner had vanished. His ordinary occupations were neglected or forgotton. … The once occasional huskiness of his tone was heard no more; and a tremulous quaver, as if of extreme terror, habitually characterized his utterance. There were times, indeed, when I thought his unceasingly agitated mind was laboring with some oppressive secret. … At times, again, I was obliged to resolve all into the mere inexplicable vagaries of madness.

(II, 410-411)

The narrator's recourse to madness as an explanation for Roderick's behavior indicates, as do the earlier references to drug use, how far beyond reason's purview are the dynamics of terror. Insensitive to the “sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature” which existed—and exist—between Roderick and his sister, the narrator also fails to appreciate the extremity of Roderick's terror-anxiety. This proves especially ironic, or perhaps especially appropriate, for now that Madeline has to all appearances been suppressed, the narrator falls more completely under the spell of terror: “It was no wonder,” he says of Roderick's increasingly bizarre behavior, “that his condition terrified—that it infected me. I felt creeping upon me, by slow yet certain degrees, the wild influences of his own fantastic yet impressive superstitions” (II, 411).

It is evident by the time of the storm's outset that the narrator has no power to rescue his friend from the terrors that are fast closing upon him. So thoroughly, in fact, has the narrator succumbed to the house's ambience of vague terror that he will be hard put to save himself. During the “rising tempest,” the narrator finds he has been driven sleepless from his bed by “the full power of such feelings” as possess his host:

I struggled to reason off the nervousness which had dominion over me. I endeavored to believe that much, if not all of what I felt, was due to the bewildering [“phantasmagoric” in early texts] influence of the gloomy furniture of the room. … But my efforts were fruitless. An irrepressible tremor gradually pervaded my frame, and, at length, there sat upon my heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm.

(II, 411)

This is a passage crucial for its presentation of a dual failure. The narrator has sought vainly to alleviate his terror by a stratagem identical to that employed during his initial scrutiny of the house: just as he attempted to dispel his gloom by peering into a tarn that, in its inverted reflection of the house, only intensified his depression, the narrator here tries to dismiss his “alarm” by analyzing it as a mere effect of the “gloomy” decor, although in a limited sense the furniture, as part of the house, might also be considered a partial source of his terror. Roderick has explained the near-sentience of the house and its environs; given Madeline's horrific struggle in the vault below, and the general morale of the house, the narrator's terror cannot be explained away as a mere Halloween illusion caused by tapestries and shadows. By acknowledging that “[his] efforts were fruitless,” the narrator grants not only the reality of his terror, but also its power over and resistance to his reason. He has invoked the rational in his attempt to suppress the “nervousness” that has infected him; when the effort fails, the narrator appears momentarily to abandon the sanctuary of self-deception, to acknowledge the reality of an “alarm” that rationality finds “utterly causeless,” and to turn his attention more generally to the house and storm, there to find himself “Overpowered by an intense sentiment of horror …” (II, 411).

Reason's helplessness in the face of the engulfing and chaotic forces of terror is evident in the narrator's reading of “The Mad Trist,” a story whose elements of magic and chivalry are markedly inimical to rational authority. The fact such a text is the only one at hand, when neither Roderick nor the narrator care for maudlin romance, is strong evidence of the decay of reason's assuredness and of the ascendancy of the imaginative and nonrational.¹⁹ This “ascendance” proves quite literal, for by his reading the narrator liberates Madeline even as he seeks, with his reading, to deny her, to repudiate her vitality and influence. He cannot; she ascends to the upper level of the house, and there, surrounded by an atmosphere in disorder and in the presence of the powerless narrator, she helps Roderick consummate his fear. In terms of the story's symbolist drama, Madeline returns only to legitimate her brother's profound dread and then “bear him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated” (II, 417). In the very face of rationality, terror has leagued with the intuitive/imaginative to exercise a power beyond reason's purview.

IV

Concentrating on its most evident features, Howes finds the conclusion of “Usher” merely a “pyrotechnic display of sublime effects” that, in its implicit endorsement of conventional sublimity, “undercuts any tidy allegorical reading” of the tale.²⁰ But Poe's concern, we must recall, is not exclusively or even primarily with the sources of terror. He is, rather, concerned with its consequences, with what we might call terror's final metaphysical import, for Poe is seeking to test, through his fiction, the received claims that through the aesthetics of sublimity terror leads either to a sense of human grandeur and elevation or to a recognition of reason as the only human faculty capable of rescuing meaning from otherwise-overwhelming cognitive experience. There are indeed present at the tale's conclusion many of the conventional markers of sublimity—they may be found throughout “Usher,” and throughout much of Poe's serious fiction—but they are not the point. Poe has kept these components because it is the sublime with which he is concerned, albeit not with its form but with its character. Poe seeks not to deny the emotional power of darkness, obscurity, noise, or immensity; if anything, he claims in “Usher” that these sources of the sublime have unrecognized power. Terror, from these and from abstract sources, may plunge the human “soul” into an abyss from which reason cannot extricate it, an abyss much deeper and darker than ever Burke or his followers suspected.

For generations of writers and thinkers in Europe and America, Burke's Inquiry and Kant's “Analytic” articulated the transcendental and rationalist promise of terror. For Poe, this canonical optimism was a profoundly inadequate response to the implications of terror. “Usher” is Poe's revision of this dominant aesthetics of terror, a revision that demonstrates the inability of theories of the sublime to account for those vague and abstract terrors that come unmingled with delight—those terrors central to the Dark Romantic vision given voice in so much of Poe's fiction.

Notes

1. Craig Howes, “Burke, Poe, and ‘Usher’: The Sublime and Rising Woman,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, 31 (1985), 173-189.

2. Howes' basic claim, with which I concur, is that “Usher” uncovers “historically and sexually determined sources of terror” (p. 173) which escape the notice of Burkean inquiry and thereby compromise the value of Burke's terror-based aesthetic.

3. Poe's familiarity with the Burkean sublime is well-established; it is unlikely that most investigators would need to look further than Howes' essay (both notes and text) and Kent Ljungquist's The Grand and the Fair: Poe's Landscape Aesthetics and Pictorial Techniques (Potomac, Maryland: Scripta Humanistica, 1984). The first chapter of Ljungquist's study is a useful introduction to the sublime and its reception by American writers. In an article that takes issue with Howes by arguing for the primary importance of theories of the picturesque in “Usher,” Ljungquist further documents the degree to which “Usher” depends upon aesthetic theory in “Howitt's ‘Byronic Rambles’ and the Picturesque Setting of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, 33 (1987), 224-236.

   The precise extent of Poe's knowledge of Kant may perhaps never be known, but a convincing case that Poe had direct acquaintance with some of Kant's work is made by Glen A. Omans, “‘Intellect, Taste, and the Moral Sense’: Poe's Debt to Immanuel Kant,” Studies in the American Renaissance 1980, ed. Joel Myerson (Boston: Twayne, 1980), pp. 123-168. Ljungquist also discusses this question on pp. 22-23 of The Grand and the Fair.

   We cannot discount the likelihood of Poe's indirect knowledge of Kant. Poe had some acquaintance with the writings of Fichte and Schelling (Works, II, 237, fn. 4), and would there have encountered some of Kant's ideas. Perhaps most likely as an indirect source is Coleridge, who knew Kant's “Analytic of the Sublime” well enough to consider translating it, and who much preferred the German idealist's formulation of sublimity, with its subjectivism and implicit moral dimension, to Burke's sensationist theory. For Coleridge's familiarity with Kant, see Clarence DeWitt Thorpe, “Coleridge on the Sublime,” Wordsworth and Coleridge: Studies in Honor of George MacLean Harper, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (1939; New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), pp. 192-219. For the general influence of German thought on Poe, see G. R. Thompson, Poe's Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1973), pp. 24-38, 210, and Henry A. Pochmann, German Culture in America: Philosophical and Literary Influences 1600-1900 (1957; Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978), pp. 388-408.

   Indirect knowledge of Kant's theory of sublimity is, of course, all that Poe would have required; “Usher” is not a detailed assault upon the particulars or mechanisms of Kantian (or Burkean) sublimity but upon the general means by which such theories function as aesthetics of a facile optimism.

4. Space does not permit a detailed consideration of the sublime or its history. For the theories of sublimity examined in “Usher,” see Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. J. T. Boulton (2nd ed., 1759; New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1958); and Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (1790; New York: Hafner, 1951). Howes' essay provides a useful brief introduction to the sublime; a longer introduction is to be found in J. T. Boulton's introduction to Burke's Enquiry, pp. xv-cxxvii. Among the full-length studies, the best general introduction is still Samuel Holt Monk's The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England (New York: MLA, 1935). Also useful are Walter J. Hipple's The Beautiful, The Sublime, and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1957); and Marjorie Hope Nicholson's Mountain Gloom and Morning Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Ithaca, New York: Cornell Univ. Press, 1959). The most impressive recent study of the sublime is Thomas Weiskel's The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976).

5. Howes, p. 184. Howes finds that “when ending ‘Usher,’ Poe tries to evoke terror in his narrator through a rather hackneyed return to physical causes, thus dropping back into an understanding of sublimity he has shown to be inadequate. The last few pages slavishly and predictably turn upon the outer trappings of terror” (p. 183).

6. Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Taste, ed. Walter J. Hipple, Jr. (3rd ed., 1790; Gainesville, Fla.: Scholar's Facsimiles and Reprints, 1963), p. 16.

7. Weiskel, p. 23.

8. Works, II, 399; subsequent references to this edition are supplied in parentheses in my text.

9. Since the late seventeenth century, the sublime has depended upon an inverse signifier/signified relationship, exploiting symbols of absence (infinity, silence, emptiness) as indications of divine presence and human possibility. This is, as David Laurence has remarked, an “ironic gesture … [,] philosophically dubious if poetically interesting,” in which “failure, defeat, and inadequacy in the world of experience indirectly and ironically vouch for the reality of a realm of supersensible ideas” (“William Bradford's American Sublime,” PMLA, 102 [1987], 55-65; 58). Weiskel makes much the same point (p. 23). The Dark Romantic tradition, from Gothic fiction to Poe and beyond, subverts this irony. Infinity, chaos, and silence become not emblems of a power beyond human understanding but direct indicators of void, disorder, and absence. The opening scene of “Usher” asserts just such an equivalence.

10. Burke writes, in passing, that “When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible” (p. 40), and therefore such cases do not proceed to sublimity. Kant explains that the natural object of power “is more attractive, the more fearful it is, provided only that we are in security” (p. 100). Finding that “it is impossible to find satisfaction in a terror that is seriously felt,” Kant, like Burke, strictly circumscribes the utility of his aesthetics. The tenor of discussion in both works makes it clear that what Howes identifies as “internal and personal” sources of terror (p. 178) are not among those considered life-threatening by either theorist. Roderick's mortal fear of “Fear” constitutes Poe's throwing the gauntlet of Dark Romantic despair in the face of these theories of metaphysical optimism.

11. Poe's interest in the extremes of terror is not confined to “Usher.” Other tales, such as “Descent into the Maelström,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and even, in his satiric vein, “The Premature Burial” and “The Scythe of Time,” are concerned with emotions in extremis. Although offered in “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” the admonition “Should you ever be drowned or hung, be sure and make a note of your sensations” (II, 340) points to a serious concern repeatedly addressed in Poe's fiction.

12. Kant, pp. 100-101.

13. G. R. Thompson, “Poe and the Paradox of Terror: Structures of Heightened Consciousness in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’” Ruined Eden of the Present: Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe: Critical Essays in Honor of Darrel Abel, ed. G. R. Thompson and Virgil L. Locke (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue Univ. Press, 1981), pp. 313-340, 333.

    None of this is to suggest that Poe was an enemy of the rational. David Ketterer points out that although early theoretical writings by Poe—his example is the “Letter to B—” (1831)—posit “an opposition between the imaginative and reasoning faculties,” by 1835 Poe had effected a truce between the reason and the imagination, recognizing the necessity of each in the artistic process (The Rationale of Deception in Poe [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1979], p. 238). In the critique of the Kantian sublime in “Usher,” Poe reasserts this balance by refuting Kant's valorization of the rational at the expense of the imaginative and intuitive. G. R. Thompson notes that Jean Paul Friedrich Richter's theories of Romantic irony and comedy, influential for Poe, would have led the latter to find suspect the veneration of reason at the expense of the nonrational (Poe's Fiction, p. 162). If indeed, as Thompson claims, “comedy enters into Poe's ‘Gothic’ writings not so much by way of hysteria as by way of a controlled, and therefore skeptical, philosophical despair” (p. 164), Richter's understanding of comedy—a “sublime in reverse”—contributes markedly to our understanding of “Usher” as a critique and refutation of the Kantian sublime. Thompson points to “Usher” as one of the tales in which Poe most closely follows Richter—a tale at the center of which is the “confrontation of the mind with itself” (p. 163).

14. Poe's critique of the sublime is so heavily symbolist as to approach the allegorical, a type of writing which, it is widely believed, Poe rejected utterly. The basis of Poe's opposition to allegory is his famous dictum that “Under the best circumstances, [allegory] must always interfere with that unity of effect which, to the artist, is worth all the allegory in the world” (Complete Works, XII, 148). Yet we cannot dismiss the possibilities of extended symbolism in “Usher.” Even in his most well-known anti-allegorical statement—his full review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales and Mosses from an Old Manse in November 1847—Poe could write, “Where the suggested meaning runs through the obvious one in a very profound under-current, so as never to interfere with the upper one without our own volition, so as never to show itself unless called to the surface, there only, for the proper uses of fictitious narrative, is [allegory] available at all” (Complete Works, XIII, 148).

    That such balanced artistic achievement was possible Poe affirmed by praising (for the second time) De La Motte Fouqué's Undine for its ability to maintain unity of effect while still invoking the near-allegorical: “Of allegory properly handled, judiciously subdued, seen only as a shadow or by suggestive glimpses, and making its nearest approach to truth in a not obtrusive and therefore not unpleasant appositeness, the ‘Undine’ of De La Motte Fouqué is the best, and undoubtedly a very remarkable specimen” (Complete Works, XIII, 149). In his September 1839 review of Undine, which appeared in the same number of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine that carried “Usher,” Poe praised the work precisely on account of its unity as “a model of models, in regard to the high artistic talent which it evinces. … Its unity is absolute—its keeping unbroken” (X, 37). That Poe was thinking of Undine and allegory at the same moment he was working on “Usher” clearly suggests that we might profitably search for a “mystic or under-current of meaning, of the simplest and most easily intelligible, yet of the most richly philosophical character” (X, 35) in “Usher.” One submerged level of meaning becomes readily apparent when we follow Poe's own clues, provided in the opening paragraph of the tale, that aesthetics of terror are at the intellectual center of Roderick's story.

    Other critics have detected this kind of near-allegorical symbolism in “Usher” and other Poe works. See, for example, Benjamin F. Fisher IV, “Playful ‘Germanism’ in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’: The Storyteller's Art,” in Ruined Eden of the Present, pp. 355-374. Daniel Hoffman also argues for the presence of a “subliminal allegory” in this tale in which Roderick represents the narrator's unconscious; see Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1972), p. 306. Donald Ringe, in American Gothic: Imagination and Reason in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1982), pp. 139-141, finds that “William Wilson” operates on one level as an allegory. Richard Wilbur's “The House of Poe” argues that “we can make no sense about [Poe] until we consider his work—and in particular his prose fiction—as deliberate and often brilliant allegory; see The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Criticism since 1829 (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1966), pp. 255-277. The list of critics detecting near-allegorical intensities of symbolism in Poe could no doubt be extended.

15. Ketterer, p. 195.

16. Ketterer, p. 195; invoking one of Poe's favorite terms, Ketterer here also identifies Madeline as “that side of Usher which is pulling him toward arabesque reality.”

17. Burke, p. 57.

18. Speaking of the mathematical sublime, Kant describes the experience in terms of the antithesis between reason and the imagination: “The feeling of the sublime is therefore a feeling of pain arising from the want of accordance between the aesthetical estimation of magnitude formed by the imagination and the estimation of the same formed by reason” (p. 96).

19. In Ketterer's understatement, “The mere fact that the rationalist narrator is reading such an unrealistic story is an indication of Madeline's dominance at this point” (pp. 196-197).

20. Howes, p. 183.