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The Fall of the House of Usher

by Edgar Allan Poe

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‘The Fall of the House of Usher’: An Apocalyptic Vision

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SOURCE: “‘The Fall of the House of Usher’: An Apocalyptic Vision,” in University of Mississippi Studies in English, Vol. 3, 1982, pp. 53-63.

[In the following essay, Gargano theorizes that the inability of the characters in Poe's “The Fall of the House of Usher” to explain their ordeal is a result of the apocalyptic vision of the narrator, who views events in the Usher house as symbolic representations of the destruction of the world.]

Any new discussion of “The Fall of the House Usher,” no matter how adventurous, must be a sort of outgrowth of the accumulated wisdom of George Woodberry, Arthur Hobson Quinn, Edward Davidson, Maurice Beebe, Richard Wilbur, and many other interpreters of Poe's fictional masterpiece.1 The variety of critical response elicited by the tale has an almost infinite suggestiveness: Poe emerges, among other things, as an expert in creating gratuitous terror, as a parodist, a depth-psychologist, a student of vampires, and a master of pure artistic form. Fortunately or unfortunately, criticism multiplies routes into and out of Poe's story, and new interpretations, for better or for worse, seem to discourage critical consensus and to invite fresh explorations. Poe's multi-faceted work, it appears, will continue to resist definitive “solution” about the significance of the narrator's journey into a “singularly dreary tract of land” that he regards as both portentous and utterly confounding.

My essay takes its departure, in a general and perhaps idiosyncratic way, from those critics who have emphasize the relationship between the theme of “Usher” and Poe's philosophical-cosmological views. I also share Herbert F. Smith's opinion that Poe's theory of sentience—a theory whose source Smith traces to Richard Watson's Chemical Essays—pervades the story, but I can not accept Smith's contention that Usher goes mad because his belief in sentience is “too peculiarly self-oriented.”2 I propose that the action of Poe's narrative takes place in a unique context that accounts for the major characters' unique emotions and their inability to explain their ordeal. The narrator, I maintain, sees an apocalyptic vision of the destruction of the world in the extraordinary events enacted in Usher's domain. The predetermined collapse of separateness and identity into unity, the apparently purposeful fury of whirlwind and clouds, and the final, appointed submergence of Usher's mansion into the waiting tarn suggest Poe's concern with eschatalogical issues. Indeed, the almost concurrent publication of “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion,” a visionary work in which a comet destroys the earth, and “Usher” indicates Poe's imaginative preoccupation in 1839 with the idea of the world's end. Although I do not wish to attribute to T. O. Mabbott notions which he may not have held, his notes to “Usher” imply that he saw a connection not only between that tale and “Eiros” but also between it and the biblical prophecy of universal catastrophe in Revelation.3 The abnormalities and singularities that oppress Poe's narrator are, I am convinced, much more adequately explained by the gradual build-up of an imminent cataclysm than by his exposure to ghoulish vampirism or incest.

A corollary to my interpretation of “Usher” is that Poe intended his narrator to have a limited understanding of his experience. In a sense, the narrator's bewilderment makes him an ideal reporter because he must recount what happens to him in affective and connotative terms full of wonder and alarm; he feels himself an explorer in a region in which cause-and-effect relationships have broken down. I cannot regard him, as Darrel Abel does, as a “mere point of view for the reader to occupy.”4 His tale is the ironic drama of a tormented soul adrift in a universe no longer stable or comprehensible. In his futile shifts to cope with the derangement of his world, he has a remarkable affinity to other Poe narrators who encounter the incalculable and end up uttering passionate outcries about the mysterious process in which they are trapped. His situation, however, is more elemental in that it represents mankind's cosmic plight.

In “Usher,” Poe deals on the simplest level with three interlocking themes: the physical and psychic breakdown of one man, Roderick; the end of a once-eminent historic dynasty; and the seemingly sinister power of nature in effecting the destruction of both the individual and the ancient family he represents.5 Of course, Poe complicates his fiction by telling it through a narrator who confesses himself confused, horrified, and awed by what he sees and reports. The narrator's intellectual and emotional responses clearly establish Usher's domain as an eerie outpost where the laws of the normal, quotidian world no longer operate. Thus, Poe locates his action in a “singular” land where the collapse of ordinary logic and easy rationality compels not only mystification and wonder but a search for new logic and explanation. The narrator's bewilderment obviously results from an understandable habit of seeing with conventionalized vision, thinking with inapplicable thought processes, and confronting the unexpected with customary expectations. Poe requires his reader, however, to profit from, rather than imitate, the narrator's intellectual helplessness. The artistic strategy of “Usher,” then, incites the reader to enter unexplored territory as an observer of the observer, as a third consciousness probing the meaning of the narrator's sensations while he effectually analyzes Usher's beliefs and dreads.

It may be profitable to begin my analysis with preliminary observations on Poe's narrator and on the histrionic context in which Poe places his major actions. For all his similarity to them, the narrator in “Usher” is unlike the narrators in “Ligeia,” “William Wilson,” “Morella,” “Berenice,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Cask of Amontillado”; he does not commit a murder or relate the story of his life with women he either loved or hated. Critics often label him a rationalist, but in the first paragraph he writes he exhibits a panicky distrust of reason: he “explains” the depression caused in him by the sight of the house of Usher as a “mystery all insoluble”; when he employs reason in an attempt to overcome his depression, he acts on what he calls an “unsatisfactory” premise; and he constantly surrenders himself to extreme emotional states in a manner remarkable for a rational man. Throughout his psychological adventure in a world that defies intellectualization, he may give the impression of rationality by belittling as folly and superstition the enigmas he encounters; in truth, he is a man who would like to believe in reason, who spins theories in order to keep his courage up. Not so surprisingly, he can talk as if from first-hand knowledge, about “the after-dream of the reveller upon opium,” and he is all-too-ready to be impressed by reflections in a tarn, “eye-like windows,” “bleak walls,” “rank sedges,” poems, and paintings. His very language, with its intensities and metaphoric radiations, characterizes him as someone who extracts emotional value from objects, colors, and sounds. Although some of his hypersensitivity may be ascribed to his unique situation, he seems at least as impressionable as he is “reasonable.”

Poe, then, has created an ambivalent narrator who energetically tries to suppress the authority of his acute feelings. His intellectual posturings take the preposterous form of protecting him from his valid insights and apprehensions and preventing him from examining the consequences of what he really experiences; for example, he rejects as a “fancy” too “ridiculous” to be entertained the discovery that the house of Usher and its environs are enclosed in “an atmosphere peculiar to themselves,” an otherwordly “atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of Heaven.” The mind will not legitimize what the eyes see and the feelings vividly apprehend. Throughout “Usher,” the narrator's so-called rationality functions as a refuge from the “facts”; far from helping him to get to the meaning of anything, it offers trivial “reasons” for dismissing almost everything that will prove “real.” Obviously, a major motif of Poe's story resides in the sharp irony that the intelligence evades what the emotions take in. The narrator, thus, can be described as bringing a closed mind and an open sensibility to his journey into the unknown.

The context in which the narrator finds himself is a symbolic world to which he must make an imaginative rather than a purely cerebral adjustment. Assuredly, Poe, whose settings can often be disparaged as aggressively functional, carefully designed Usher's estate out of spiritualized Gothic material: it is an emblematic, fantasy region where the real world comes to meet its destiny, and the house may be seen as a sort of perilous chapel where man can be shown the relation of his own life to cosmic necessity. In the microcosm that the narrator enters, unity inevitably prevails, everything is interrelated, accident is not tolerated, and “unnatural” phenomena are part of a universal scheme. House and occupants fuse into one identity; brother and sister cannot be separated; Usher obsessionally paints a picture objectifying an idea that translates into a fatal and fated action; a poem describes its author's mental condition, which, in turn, corresponds to the condition of the mansion; and even a fissure, which might be a sign of division, promotes the triumph of unity. When the narrator desperately chooses to divert Usher by reading from the “Mad Trist” of Sir Launcelot Canning, the action of the absurd romance coincides with Madeline's escape from her tomb. The casual is transformed into the causal, human sounds blend into natural ones, fungi suggest human hair, and trees, walls, and tarn combine to produce an atmosphere that is both natural and supernatural. Interrelation binds everything from clouds, books, and people into a vast living web of irresistible and undiscerned purpose.

Usher's theory of sentience—his belief that even inanimate things have life—informs every incident of Poe's story. Still, the theory must be interpreted in larger terms than the narrator and Usher interpret it. What Poe suggests, and what his characters do not grasp, is that all things contain life in the special sense that they play a vital part in an implacable cosmic pattern. As many critics, notably Maurice Beebe, have shown, the laws that hold sway in the domain of Usher are the same laws that, according to Poe's Eureka, control expansion and contraction in the actual universe. Usher, in short, inhabits a dying world whose “fall” will be effected by natural means directed by mysterious higher forces; not surprisingly, then, vacancy, decay, and disorder have spread through Usher's realm, annihilating difference, discreteness, and human separateness from the rest of nature. The very stones of the chateau, as Mabbot noted, preach that one soul is diffused throughout Usher's crumbling mansion, its sick occupants, and its blighted premises.6 Poe's microcosm is, paradoxically, alive with the power of death because the active energies that will encompass destruction obey fate or providential law.

A universal return of Oneness prescribed by an incomprehensible destiny and brought about by dissolution of heterogeneous life may be, for some philosophic spirits, a soothing abstraction. Indeed, in Eureka, Poe hopefully contemplates the re-organization of fragmentary and divided particles into homogeneity as their reunion with God. It must be acknowledged, however, that no divinity or beneficent authority seems to preside over the disintegration portrayed in “Usher,” where the action is unrelievedly tense or terrifying. Except for the “good angels” in the beginning of Roderick's poetic allegory of his mental breakdown, Poe does not allow his readers a glimpse of transcendent goodness at work in the universe. Destruction proceeds relentlessly and without promise of ultimate salvation; indeed, Poe presents it, from the point of view of his characters, as a derangement in nature and in man's vision of nature. If “Eiros” did not furnish evidence to the contrary, one might speculate that when Poe wrote “The Fall of the House of Usher” he had arrived at all the elements of the philosophy contained in Eureka except the comforting teleology. In “Eiros,” however, a more personal heaven than any posited in Eureka awaits doomed humanity, who will learn, at long last, the reason for their earthly suffering. In fact, if one were to ignore both Eureka and “Eiros,” one might pessimistically conclude with Leo Spitzer that “Usher” is a “poetic expression of sociological deterministic ideas which were in the air in 1839.”7

The reason for the absence of hope from Poe's narrative is, after all, aesthetic. He wishes to tell his truth “slant,” through the intuitions and enigmatic auguries misunderstood by the narrator and not through didactic philosophising. The seemingly conscious universe operates according to its own supreme and inexplicable laws, but its mystery takes on importance in the incomplete perceptions, the evasive rationalizations, and the dreads of man. The central irony of “Usher” is nothing less than the narrator's failure to understand that he is witnessing a revelation or preenactment of the end of the world and time. Unlike John in the biblical Revelation, however, Poe's confused and intimidated character has no access to celestial enlightment. He records what he sees with fear and trembling, but in lacking divine clues, the heavenly knowledge of Eiros and Charmion or the wisdom of Poe's Eureka, he has no key to the shocking dislocation in the earthly order. He therefore translates his vision into a mystery that eludes reason and into the psychological responses aroused by the wonders he beholds. Isolated in their personal compulsions and sensations, he and Usher register horrors rather than meanings.

An examination of the three main themes of “Usher” may appropriately begin with the narrator's version of Usher's psychic and physical deterioration. Although he does not meet Roderick until the story's eighth paragraph, the narrator has by this time documented his own amazement; he cannot get to the source of his “insufferable gloom” as he nears Usher's house; in seeking to dispel this gloom, he acts according to an “unsatisfactory conclusion” that produces a “shudder even more thrilling than [any he felt] before”; he confesses himself afflicted with mounting superstition and his mind is warped by a “ridiculous fancy”; he feels himself emerging from “what must have been a dream”; and he wonders why familiar objects stimulate “unfamiliar fancies” in his mind. Even before he encounters Usher, the narrator has already been deprived of the comfort of customary and routine associations and explanations. The sight of his old friend startles him, fills him with “awe,” and heightens his sense of lost connections with the known world; the cadaverous Roderick has almost changed his identity, and his “Arabesque expression” seems to dissociate him from “any idea of simple humanity.” Yet, ironically enough, although the narrator can explain nothing else in his new world, he immediately accepts the view that Usher suffers from a strange malady and from an “anomalous species of terror” that Usher himself tries to rationalize as a “deplorable folly.”

There is, of course, no doubt about Roderick's hysteria and the imminence of his death. The narrator goes wrong, however, in relying on explanations appropriate to the world he has left behind. That world, used to standards appropriate to it, may consider Roderick's beliefs as outrageous and hallucinatory, but events prove them to be valid; after all, the physical condition of the exterior of Usher's house does affect the “morale,” to use Poe's words, of its inmates' “existence.” The environment of the mansion does have a vitality and a will of its own that act in concert with occurrences within the house; and, as her brother exclaims before her appearance, the entombed Madeline does actually stand outside his door. Roderick's perpetual agonies, then, do not result from his superstitions, which turn out to be “realities,” but from his inability to assign a cause to what he knows will happen.

Usher represents Man in the last stage of his existence, in what “The Conqueror Worm” was to describe as “the lonesome latter years.” Hypersensitive and aware of his doom, he sees his own death foreshadowed in that of his only relative, a twin sister. He consciously or unconsciously acknowledges his intellectual collapse in “The Haunted Palace”; he paints a “phantasmagoric” picture of a burial vault, probably Madeline's; and he plays with “singular perversion and amplification” a waltz by Von Weber, which Mabbott takes to be Roderick's “dirge for himself.”8 Clearly, all signs point to Usher's consciousness of impending personal annihilation, but the source of his terror can be traced to his ignorance about the connection between his death and the imminent death of his sister, the disintegration of his house, and the sinister menace of nature. Roderick feels that his destiny is part of a larger, perhaps cosmic process; still, although the evidence to support his feeling is omnipresent, he cannot convert emotion into meaning. He may resemble those people in “Eiros,” who responded in strange ways to the approaching end of the world: “wonders and wild fancies had been, of late days, rife among mankind.” Roderick has the emotional sensitivity to register the shocks of the coming destruction, but he lacks the prophet's second sight. The excruciating refinement of his senses, which the narrator clinically notes, remains a “morbidity” because it compels him to “thrill” with horror and to seek relief in tears without enabling him to interpret the signs and wonders around him.

“Eiros” was published in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine in December 1839, only three months after “Usher” appeared there in September. If, as Mabbott surmises, “Eiros” could have been written as early as October 1839, Poe must have been preoccupied with the idea of universal catastrophe at the time he wrote “Usher.” Indeed, verbal similarities between the stories suggest more than a little resemblance in theme: in addition to the “wild fancies” in both tales, the narrator in “Usher” declares that there “sat upon my very heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm” and Eiros explains that the inhabitants of earth view the comet that threatens them as an “incubus upon our hearts”; the famous conclusion of “Usher” echoes Revelation in its reference to the “shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters,” and Eiros remembers one of the final terrors of earthly existence as the “horrible sound like the ‘voice of many waters’.” Moreover, “the gaseous exhalations which hung about and enshrouded” Roderick's mansion have an affinity to the “gaseous character” of the world-destroying comet feared by Eiros. Certainly, too, the “wild lurid light” that heralds the termination of all things in “Eiros and Charmion” recalls the “wild light” that “shot along the path” of the fleeing narrator in “Usher.” Another correspondence between the two stories can be found in Eiros's reminiscence about “the learned men” who consoled the populace that the comet, at worst, might produce “magnetic and electrical influences” and the narrator's assurance to Usher that the devastating storm is merely due to “electrical phenomena.” Finally, Eiros's admission that men could not account for the comet in accepted intellectual terms may explain the narrator's and Usher's almost complete mystification: “We could no longer apply to the strange orb any accustomed thought. Its historical attributes had disappeared. It oppressed us with a hideous novelty of emotion. We saw it not as an astronomical phenomenon in the heavens, but as an incubus upon our hearts, and a shadow upon our brain.” Only in the afterlife of an Edenic Aidenn will Eiros become acquainted with “the majesty of all things—of the unknown now known—of the speculative Future merged in the august and certain Present.”

“Usher” deals, then, with the bewildered narrator's prevision of the end of the world, but because he does not know what Eiros presumably learns in Aidenn, he must narrate what he sees and feels from an unenlightened, tremulous human perspective. His account necessarily strains to express “a hideous novelty of emotion” and to trespass beyond “accustomed thoughts.” His hysterical rhetoric effectively conveys his own fear that something significant lies outside his vision, that Roderick's malady cannot be wholly referred to physical and psychological causes. Surely, the narrator stops short of apocalyptic clairvoyance, but the story's narrative development shows him to be “progressing” to Usher's more heightened state of awareness and terror. As reason no longer sustains him, he admits that he felt “creeping upon me, by slow yet certain degrees, the wild influences of Roderick's own fantastic yet impressive superstitions.” Worried about being infected by his friend's outlook, he begins to hear voices in the night and to suspect mysterious energies gathering in the weirdly inexplicable storm. Indeed, when his friend enters his room to prove, with “mad hilarity,” that his so-called superstitions are being verified, the narrator might well be appalled at the prospects of abandoning his own individuality and “becoming” Usher. In an effort to preserve his identity, he seeks refuge in the innocuous romance, the “Mad Trist,” only to find Roderick's insane prophecies symbolically anticipated in it. Within the mansion, he is subject to its influence. Even in flight from it, he discovers, from a backward glance, that the nightmarish fears he had unwillingly shared with Usher have been confirmed as actuality.

Poe reinforces the destruction-of-the-world theme in “The Fall of the House of Usher” by making one man's death represent the end of a long family history. Roderick's death coincides with Madeline's, and their extinction is inevitably linked to the collapse of their hereditary house. Moreover, the Usher dynasty not only dies out, but it sinks with all its human appurtenances—its books, its art, and its furniture—into a deep tarn that is disturbed by a “sound like the voice of a thousand waters.” “The Haunted Palace,” too, goes beyond its relevance to Roderick's mental condition; it deals with a beginning and an end, probably describing a long process starting from a paradise-like state presided over by “good angels.” Looking back to a radiant past (in an “olden / Time long ago”) that cannot survive in the feverish present, the poem seems, like its sister poem in “Ligeia,” to make a general statement about the human predicament rather than one specifically pertinent to Usher. Indeed, “The Haunted Palace” had appeared in print as a self-contained work a number of months before Poe included it as a suggestive detail in his short story. Finally, even the melodramatic “Mad Trist” juxtaposes an action from the past upon the present by contrasting the doughty, wine-drinking Ethelred to the impotent and reclusive Usher; the medieval hero harks back to an “olden time” of crude physical prowess when dragons could still be slain while Roderick is almost without physical existence and cowers before fearful intimations from a realm he cannot know. With his boldness and valor, Ethelred represents the founder and father of lines; with his superfine nerves, Roderick can only symbolize a distraught visionary foreseeing the end of his race.

The depleted energies of man in “Usher” contrast with the increasing vigor of nature. Quiescent at the outset of Poe's story, nature still has the power to provoke man's awareness of his incapacity to discover its subtle secrets: even while it prepares its overwhelming storm, it renders explanations of its “intentions” futile. In contemplating his natural surroundings upon entering Usher's world, the narrator seeks a way “to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impressions”; all he can conclude, however, is that the decayed trees, the fungi-covered walls of the house, and the lurid tarn create an atmosphere which has “no affinity with the air of heaven.” Of course, the narrator cannot explain nature because it has changed its laws of operation and because it is bringing about an end rather than promoting continuance; its new laws no longer permit man to live under the old dispensation of predictability and order. What Usher and the narrator cannot fathom is that the coming destruction must be preceded by unique conditions never before experienced by men at home in historic continuities. All unknowingly, they are present at the climactic unraveling of the “lonesome later years” or days; in short, they are witnessing vivid portents of the final hours.

Poe's narrator describes the disastrous storm as if it were seen in an apocalyptic vision. “Wildly singular in its terror and beauty,” it begins with a “furious whirlwind, with the life-like velocity” of dense clouds that move and yet hover over Usher's house, and with an “unnnatural light” that sets aglow the “under surface of the huge masses of agitated vapor” and all the surrounding “terrestrial objects.” Obviously not undirected or accidental in its fury, nature has a mission to perform; its elements act not only with “life-like” energy and volition but in grim concert. At last an illumination from “the full, setting and blood-red moon” invests the scene of the whirlwind's fatal work with a dying splendor, and man and his earthly mansion and possessions sink into nature's abyss in the oblitering term.

The nature of the “evil” presented in “Usher” remains to be considered. Certainly, the horrible plight of the narrator and Roderick turns them into pathetic figures: the former trembles, trusts and mistrusts an equivocating reason, and acts as if evil has undermined his sanity; the latter's agitating suspicions and final shriek show his life to be a tale of irrationality and terror. Viewed from a human perspective the universe of Roderick Usher reveals plenty of signs and portents, but it malignantly seems to produce them in order to baffle and terrify mankind. Yet, the narrator expresses his sense that the universal upheaval takes place during a “sternly beautiful night,” and he cannot help discovering “beauty” in the “terror” around him. Man's anguish does not detract from the majesty of the so-called “evil” forces that annihilate him, and his ignorance merely obscures the supernal order that manifests itself—however fearfully—in the doom of humanity. Even after entering into the bliss of Aidenn, Eiros remembers the days before the end of all life in terms of evil: freeing itself, for delusive moments, from the “apprehension of the great calamity foretold,” mankind debates what kind of “minor evils” it will have to endure; later, “the people now dismissing any lingering hope, experienced all the certanity of evil”, and immediately before destruction comes, everyone is briefly pleased that “the evil was not altogether upon us.” In short, nature or God seems committed to intensely violent means to effect transcendent ends, and man's self-directed vision and imperiled psyche conspire to see evil where only necessity or fatality reigns. The enigma, the horror, and the majesty last as long as life and misunderstanding do.

“The Fall of the House of Usher,” then, is Poe's ironic rendering of his narrator's apocalyptic vision. Not precisely the vision contained in “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion” or Eureka, it differs from these ultimately hopeful prophecies because man cannot see any infinite purpose beyond his misery and terror. Poe gives no hint of a future existence that may reduce the fatal storm to the proportions of a cosmic incident; instead, he dramatizes the full fury of the storm itself.

Notes

  1. George E. Woodberry, The Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 2 vols. (Boston and New York, 1909); AHQ [American Quarterly]: 284-285, 430, 466; Edward H. Davidson, Poe: A Critical Study (Cambridge, MA, 1957); Maurice Beebe, “The Universe of Roderick Usher,” Poe: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert Regan (Englewood Cliffs, 1967), pp. 121-133; Richard Wilbur, “The House of Poe,” Anniversary Lectures [The Library of Congress] (Washington, DC, 1959), pp. 24-31.

  2. Herbert F. Smith, “Usher's Madness and Poe's Organicism: A Source,” AL [American Literature], 39 (1967), 389.

  3. M, 2: fns. 29, 34 (pp. 421, 422).

  4. Darrel Abel, “A Key to ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’,” UTQ [University of Toronto Quarterly], 18 (1949), 177.

  5. I use Mabbott's authoritative text, cited above, for all quotations from “Usher” and “Eiros.”

  6. M, 2?394.

  7. Leo Spitzer, “A Reinterpretation of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’,” CL [Comparative Literature], 4 (1952), 360.

  8. M, 2:418.

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