Several recent critics of Gothic fiction—notably David Morris and David Saliba—have connected this genre to such features of the sublime as obscurity and terror. For example, Morris has written that “in its excessive violations of excess sense, Gothic sublimity demonstrates the possibilities of terror in opening the mind to its hidden and irrational powers” (306). In the case of Poe's gothic short story “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the sublime's obscurity and terror not only account for Poe's choice of an ambiguous prose style; these features also help express the disintegration of Roderick Usher's mind—his psychotic condition and weakening grasp of the boundaries of reality, both internal and external. Furthermore—what has been noted with less frequency and emphasis—Roderick's painting both corresponds visually to Poe's obscure, sublime prose and embodies through its abstract-expressionism Usher's own inner, irrational world of nightmarish experience.

By drawing on both the Romantic tradition of the sublime, in particular its links to Edmund Burke's The Sublime and the Beautiful, and Ernest Hartmann's recent psychological theory about nightmare sufferers, I want to argue two points concerning the relations of Usher's painting to actual pictures executed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. First, Usher's painting parallels the abstract-expressionist work of Mark Rothko—not the geometrical abstractions of Mondrian and Picasso, as H. Wells Phillips and Paul Ramsey have suggested; and second, Usher's painting most closely parallels the expressionistic sublime paintings of the English Romantic painter J. M. W. Turner. Whether Poe knew Turner's work is unimportant; what matters is that in exploring the aesthetic problem of how best to express the mental experience of the Gothic sublime, Poe and Turner contemporaneously create similar stylistic effects, though in differing media.

I

Unlike the prose of such realist writers as Twain, Dickens, and George Eliot who aim to represent human experience through clarity and precision of detail, Poe's prose fits the style of romances—it is vague, obscure, mysterious, and redundant. These qualities, along with other ideas and images that Burke listed such as darkness, blinding light, and uncertainty (58-80), were all well known by Poe's time to be sublime; and, as Morris (300-01) and Saliba (31) explain, they form links between the Gothic and the sublime, whose “ruling principle,” according to Burke, is “terror” (58). So, to create a sublime mood conducive to terror, Poe skilfully uses an obscure, pictorially vague style.

Repeatedly, Poe describes the environment and interior of the House of Usher ambiguously. For example, after arriving on a dark, cloudy day, and getting his first glimpse of the place, Poe's narrator depicts its indeterminate atmosphere:

… about the whole mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their immediate vicinity—an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall and the silent tarn—a pestilent and mystic vapor, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued.

(399-400)

Though the narrator says that this exterior “dreariness” precludes his experiencing it as “sublime” (397), the reason is not, as Saliba suggests, that the exterior “setting is the interior of a mind” (163); rather, what actually stands for the interior of his mind are the interior of the house and the views from inside it, So, the narrator fails to experience the exterior atmosphere as sublime because his ego—while on the outside—remains reasonable, not yet influenced by the unconscious, which will threaten to swallow and destroy his ego, as it does Roderick's, once he enters the interior of the house.

Appropriately, then, on the night of Madeline's resurrection Poe uses sublime images of obscurity and formlessness to describe the view through the window inside the narrator's room. The narrator notes that he and Roderick

had no glimpse of the moon or stars—nor was there any flashing forth of the lightning. But the under surfaces of the blue masses of agitated vapor, as well as all terrestrial objects immediately around us, were glowing in an unnatural light of a faintly luminous and distinctly visible gaseous exhalation which hung about and enshrouded the mansion.

(412)

Both these views of the exterior atmosphere stress sublime obscurity and formlessness through images of faintly seen gases or vapors.

Moreover, the narrator's descriptions of the castle's interior are ambiguous, similarly lacking clear vivid details that distinguish between formal boundaries of external objects. Nothing is clearly defined: the hallways and draperies are dark, the floors black, the tapestries solemn, the trophies phantasmagoric. Likewise, in Roderick's studio the narrator's “eye … struggled in vain to reach the remoter angles of the chamber,” because the long, pointed windows let in only feeble, crimson light that illumined just the “more prominent objects.” Finally, the narrator sums up the room's effect by saying, “I felt I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all” (400-01). Stylistically, this passage like the other two illustrates how Poe's gothic fiction differs from realism. On one hand, realism strives to depict external reality as objectively as possible, and thus often seeks imagery and language as literal, logical, and precise as possible. On the other hand, as Patrick Brantlinger observes, the Gothic or romance from—through a sublime style—often approximates dreams of inner reality, and so needs vagueness and obscurity (31).

Ultimately, then, Poe uses an obscure, vague style to express Roderick's psychotic, nightmarish condition and its gradual terrifying effect on the narrator. Like the typical nightmare sufferer described by Ernest Hartmann in The Nightmare: The Psychology and Biology of Terrifying Dreams. Roderick exhibits thought disorders related to schizophrenia (130). Anticipating Hartmann, David Saliba defines the operation of fear and nightmares in terms of the ego's fear of disintegration, which subsumes the inability to distinguish between reality and fantasy (41); however, Saliba does not discuss the concept of mental boundaries and its relations to sublime style. Hartmann's more recent work on nightmares, though, helps identify Roderick as schizophrenic, for he lacks well-developed mental boundaries and shows extreme openness or defenselessness—that is, he has failed to develop the normal defenses and protections—the boundaries—that form part of the child's development of mental structures, beginning with distinctions between the self and others, and fantasy and reality (Hartmann 139). For instance, the letter Roderick sends to the narrator inviting him to visit evokes, we are told, “nervous agitation,” and in it Roderick writes about “a mental disorder which oppressed him” (398). Indeed, the narrator finds Usher incoherent, unable to overcome “an excessive nervous agitation,” and he concludes that Usher is “a slave to terror” (402). Roderick himself admits, “in this pitiable condition—I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason altogether” (403). In fact, we realize, that period has come.

Poe represents Roderick's loss of rational mental boundaries by making the sublime atmosphere of the house an expression of Roderick's spirit and morale. As the narrator tries vainly to cheer his friend, he discovers that Usher possesses “a mind from which darkness … poured forth upon all objects … in one unceasing radiation of gloom.” Furthermore, his highly distempered ideality,” we are told, “threw a sulphureous lustre over all” (405). Roderick's lack of same boundaries is yet further evoked by his belief that all vegetable things—including the fungus that encases the House of Usher—are conscious of perception and feeling (408). And just as the castle itself violates the boundaries of the organic and inorganic, so too the other House of Usher, the family, violates a significant social boundary: the sexual one between its individual members. In fact, the family is so inbred it has bred itself out of existence. And of course Roderick and Madeline are twins further stressing the lack of boundaries and distinctions between Roderick and other living beings.

II

Consequently, to manifest Roderick's lack of contact with reality and his disintegrating psyche, Poe describes one of Roderick's paintings; not surprisingly, the prose style Poe uses to describe the murky atmosphere of the house—an atmosphere that on one level represents Usher's mind—also parallels the style of Roderick's picture: like Poe's sublime prose, Usher's painting is ambiguous, and it lacks linear boundaries. In general, Poe characterizes his paintings like this:

From the paintings over which his elaborate fancy brooded, and which grew, touch by touch, into vaguenesses at which I shuddered the more thrillingly, because I shuddered knowing not why;—from these paintings … I would in vain endeavor to educe more than a small portion which should lie within the compass of merely written words.

(405)

Therefore, after stating that Roderick's paintings defy logical expression of discursive language—one touchstone of the sublime—Poe's narrator then elaborates on one painting “not so rigidly” executed in “the spirit of abstraction”:

A small picture presented the interior of an immensely long and rectangular vault or tunnel, with low walls, smooth, white, and without interruption or device. Certain accessory points of design served well to convey the idea that this excavation lay at an exceeding depth below the surface of the earth. No outlet was observed in any portion of its vast extent, no torch, or other artificial source of light was discernible; yet a flood of intense rays rolled throughout, and bathed the whole in a ghastly and inappropriate splendor.

(405-06)

Indeed, to a psychologist this painting could serve as Roderick's interpretation of a Rorschach ink blot, revealing his especially thin or open sense of boundaries—boundaries of the ego, of fantasy and reality, of sleeping and waking, and of overly close, merging relationships. Like a nightmare sufferer who fails to keep a sense of annihilation and disintegration out of his painting.

In the amorphous sense of form—in his emphasis of color and light rather than line and form—Roderick's art suggests modern abstract painting. In the passage describing Usher's pictures, Poe mentions the early Romantic painter Henry Fuseli, but says even Fuseli's “reveries” were “too concrete” (405). This is true. Fuseli introduces nonrational non-neo-classical subject matter into art, as his painting The Nightmare (1782) shows, but he still followed Sir Joshua Reynolds' rule that in painting “everything shall be carefully and distinctly expressed” (138). Fuseli's painting is too linear; his forms have boundaries too distinct and clear and realistic to suggest Roderick's chaotic, obscure creations.

Two critics, Paul Ramsey and H. Wells Phillips, discuss Usher's painting in relation to modern abstract art. Neither, however, mentions the two painters who I think make the best analogues—Mark Rothko (d. 1970) and J. M. W. Turner (d. 1851). Without ever specifying particular works, both critics mention Mondrian (Phillips 15; Ramsey 211)—ostensibly because Poe says Roderick's paintings are “pure abstractions” that have an “utter simplicity” and “nakedness of design” (405). It is true that the early Mondrian painted Gothic churches and boundless vistas of oceans and dunes; but Modrian's later paintings like Composition with Red, Yellow, Blue, and Black are too linear, too geometrical, to parallel Roderick's art, even though they are abstract. In fact, to quote Robert Rosenblum, Rothko's close friend Barnett Newman—who published an essay on the sublime in 1948—felt that Mondrian's “tidy pictorial structures of rectangles” constituted “a pretty abstract art that stood in opposition to … sublimity” (210).

Therefore, I think the best parallel for Usher among modern artists is Rothko, a painter neither critic refers to. Stylistically, several of Rothko's paintings closely parallel Roderick's expressionistic painting and seem to mirror the mental state of Rothko himself, a painter who increasingly suffered from depression, heavy drinking, and family problems, and who eventually committed suicide in 1970. In Rothko's paintings of the fifties and sixties, he strived to use color not to stress the physical abstraction of paint, but rather to convey both emotion and mood, the sensuous and the spiritual. By organizing his colors in asymmetrical bands, he stripped his paintings of unessential details and, unlike Mondrian, avoided enclosing them with firm linear boundaries. As Diane Waldman says, he made “the concrete sublime” (59). Clearly, Rothko was right to insist that he is “not an abstractionist” (quoted in Waldman 58); like the painting by Roderick Usher, Rothko's works depict a real subject, the contents of the psyche, or in his words, “basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom …” (quoted in Waldman 58).

Three of Rothko's paintings that especially suggest Usher's work present “a flood of intense rays” that bathes “the whole [of Roderick's painting] in a ghastly splendor.” Untitled (1955), for example, consists of three luminous rectangles—red, orange, and white—that shimmers like flooding light. In particular, the square of white that fills the bottom half of the canvas seems to evoke Usher's rectangular tunnel with “smooth, white” walls. Similarly, another painting called Untitled (1957) contains three bands—yellowish-orange on top, reddish-orange on bottom, and white in the middle—and the frayed borders of these forms help privilege their luminous color and diminish their geometrical shape. And while the bands of color do not extend to the edge of the surface, Rothko escapes bounding his pictures by surrounding the bands with red, which does appear to extend indefinitely in every direction and in which the forms seem to float. Finally, Red, Orange, Orange on Red (1962) exemplifies why Waldman says that red “fascinates Rothko above all colors as a carrier of emotion” (58). The intense colors of these indeterminate rectangles suggest the blood-red radiance that shines, at the end of Poe's story, through the simultaneously disintegrating boundaries of both Usher's house and his mind.

An uncanny resemblance, then, exists between Poe's verbal representation of Usher's painting in 1839 and Rothko's modern abstract-expressionism. However, Rothko's stated kinship with Turner (Waldman 52) implies that Poe's own historical period—the Romantic age—produced visual analogues to Roderick's painting. And in fact Turner, through a masterfully indistinct sublime style, does with paint what Poe—in depicting Usher's painting—does with words. Typically, to represent sublime consciousness Turner dissolves external subject matter through light and color. For instance, like the interior light-flooded rectangle of Usher's picture, Turner's Interior at Petworth (1835-40) is not “rigidly” executed in “the spirit of abstraction,” for the traces of a real interior space, named by the title, remain. However, as in Poe's description, “a flood of intense rays” from an unseen source rolls “throughout” the space and bathes the picture in a “splendor” that blurs the traces of line and form. Significantly, just as both Usher's and Rothko's vague rectangles contain white, so too at the focal point of Turner's interior “flood” is white, a color he called “the substitute of light” (quoted in Gage 207) and often used in landscapes to create a sublime intractability to perspective. Furthermore, because Turner's luminous interior space completely lacks linear boundaries, like Usher's painting it figures “the depth below the surface”: that is, it represents the formlessness of the unconscious, a mind exhibiting Hartmann's notion of thin boundaries.

Because the light of the setting sun dissolves the literal, physical boundary between earth and sky, Turner painted sunsets again and again for fifty years. His works illustrate the belief of Dugold Stewart, a contemporary philosopher, that the literal image of sunset evokes the mind's experience of the sublime. One of Turner's most sublime sunsets appears in Sun Setting over a Lake (1840-45). This time even the title is generalized, as if blurring the distinction between the external prospect and the prospect of the mind. In fact, without the title the subject of this abstract oil would seem to be nothing more than the lurid pigments themselves. In effect, Turner conveys the dissolving of the external image of the sun into a luminous emanation by representing it as merely an ambiguous yellow smudge, off-center and surrounded by the orange and brown that suggest the awesome radiance. Consequently, in Sun Setting there seems to be no perspective at all, which is, of course, the perspective of sublime infinity.

Ultimately, in Turner's great seascapes it is lack of perspective, lack of boundaries, that evokes their terrifying, powerful sublimity. Like Mark Rothko after him, Turner recreates, for his viewers, through formless color and light, the mind's experience of obliterated perspective, of completely open boundaries. Similarly, in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Poe uses an ambiguous prose style, loaded with atmospheric imagery, to express the interpenetrating disintegrations of Roderick's painting, his house, and his psyche. Not surprisingly, as Clark Griffith reminds us in “Poe and the Gothic,” Poe maintained “that the terror of which he wrote came not from Germany but from the soul” (127).

Works Cited

Brantlinger, Patrick: “Romances, Novels, and Psychoanalysis.” The Practice of Psychoanalytic Criticism. Ed. Leonard Tennenhouse, Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1976. 18-45.

Burke, Edmund: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. Ed. J. T. Boulton. 1958. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1968.

Gage, John: Colour in Turner: Poetry and Truth. New York: Praeger, 1969.

Griffith, Clark: “Poe and the Gothic.” Critical Essays on Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Eric W. Carlson. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987. 127-32.

Hartmann, Ernest: The Nightmare: The Psychology and Biology of Terrifying Dreams. New York: Basic Books, 1984.

Morris, David B.: “Gothic Sublimity.” New Literary History 16.2 (1985): 299-319.

Newman, Barnett: “The Sublime is Now.” The Tiger's Eye 1.6 (1948): 51-53.

Phillips, H. Wells: “Poe's Usher: Precursor of Abstract Art.” Poe Studies 5.1 (1972): 14-16.

Poe, Edgar Allan: Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott. 3 vols. Cambridge and London: Belknap, 1978. Vol. 2.

Ramsey, Paul: “Poe and Modern Art.” College Art Journal 18 (1959): 210-15.

Reynolds, Joshua: Discourses on Art. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merril, 1965.

Rosenblum, Robert: Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.

Saliba, David: A Psychology of Fear: The Nightmare Formula of Edgar Allan Poe. Lanham, MD: Univ. Press of America, 1980.

Stewart, Dugold: “On the Sublime.” Philosophical Essays. Edinburgh, 1819.

Waldman, Diane: Mark Rothko, 1903-1970: A Retrospective. New York: Abrams, 1978.