illustration of a dark, menacing cracked house with large, red eyes looking through the windows

The Fall of the House of Usher

by Edgar Allan Poe

Start Free Trial

The Haunted Palace of Art

Download PDF PDF Page Citation Cite Share Link Share

SOURCE: "The Haunted Palace of Art," in The Romance in America: Studies in Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and James, Wesleyan University Press, 1969, pp. 60-9.

[Porte is an American educator and critic. In the following essay, he observes a conflict between Romantic and Realist attitudes in "The Fall of the House of Usher. "]

Beginning with Poe and continuing as a strong current in the works of Hawthorne, Melville, and James, the desire to test and evaluate the opposing claims of novelistic "good sense" and romance "wildness" finds expression in the very fabric of American fiction. "Art" as an implied or explicit theme and the frequent use of "artist" figures become characteristic of the American romance—indeed, are among the criteria that define it—as our authors argue out for themselves the question of daylight versus night.

It might seem odd to mention "The Fall of the House of Usher" in connection with such a formulation, but this familiar tale is an especially interesting illustration of the foregoing thesis. The reader first must be asked to shift his attention slightly from the gothic horrors depicted in the story to the subtle opposition set up between the character of Roderick Usher and that of the narrator. Usher is a portrait, somewhat caricatured, of the artistic temperament in its most decadent—that is, romantic—state. He has a "remarkable" face, with large and liquid eyes, lips "of a surpassingly beautiful curve," and a fine nose "of a delicate Hebrew model." Phrenologically considered, his "finely moulded" chin shows "a want of moral energy" (clearly suggestive of his capacity to indulge in forbidden practices), and the "inordinate expansion above the regions of the temple" bespeaks great intellectual powers.. He is morbidly sensitive:

The most insipid food was alone endurable; he could wear only garments of certain texture; the odors of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a faint light; and there were but peculiar sounds, and these from stringed instruments, which did not inspire him with horror.

His emotional life is characterized by a preponderance of the darkest of all human states, absolute Angst. "I dread the events of the future," he explains lucidly, "not in themselves, but in their results." This "intolerable agitation of soul" makes every incident and experience pregnant with unnameable terror for him. "I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive," he confesses, "when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR."

Usher is thus admirably suited by nature to exploring and giving expression to the direst aspects of human life, and his beliefs and training are what we should expect. He holds an opinion, we are told, concerning the "sentience of all vegetable things": nature for him is not only a force, animated and alive, but a source and reflection of hidden powers at work in the world. And the titles of his favorite books—of which Poe supplies a carefully constructed (and partially invented) list—read like a card catalog of subjects and materials for the most lurid of romancers, apt illustrations of the notion that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of by the most sagacious of novelists. Usher reads "the Heaven and Hell of Swedenborg; the Subterranean Voyage of Nicholas Klimm of Holberg"; several volumes of "Chiromancy"; the "Journey into the Blue Distance of Tieck; and the City of the Sun of Campanella," as well as a volume on the Inquisition by a Dominican friar. Most suggestive of all, perhaps, "there were passages in Pomponius Mela, about the old African Satyrs and Œgipans, over which Usher would sit dreaming for hours," while "his chief delight" was in perusing the "rare and curious . . . Vigiliae Mortuorum secundum Chorum Ecclesiae Maguntinae" Usher's favorite fantasy material—undoubtedly connected, any psychoanalytically inclined reader would say, with his excruciatingly intense anxieties—is a combination of sexuality and death.

As an artist—he is at once poet, painter, and musician—Usher adheres strictly to the school of the fantastic and the extreme. His guitar impromptus are either perverse variations on familiar tunes or "wild improvisations." And his paintings and poems, at least judged by the two detailed examples that Poe supplies, are the very type of the romancer's art: lurid symbolism verging on hideous allegory, or ominous allegory heightened by weird symbolism. Roderick's creations hint at the terrible secret about the House of Usher, presenting an intolerably dark view of human nature.

Into this house of horror enters Poe's narrator, the sort of man who in happier days and more cheerful circumstances might have written the novels of Anthony Trollope. Although by no means unemotional or unfeeling, he is an eminently, even doggedly, reasonable person with a great need to make sense of his experiences, or at least to believe that everything ultimately is capable of some rational explanation. Strange occurrences fascinate him—he is the kind of man who is frequently tempted to peer over the brink of an oddity—but he is finally disturbed enough by the inexplicable to want only to avoid it. His speech is formal, complicated, and intricately logical, as if to express a hope that the coherences of grammar might make up for the incoherencies of life. He is intelligent, but his intelligence is more often used to protect himself from knowledge than to explore the unknown.

Numerous concrete instances of all these characteristics are provided by Poe throughout the tale. When the narrator first sees the House of Usher, its melancholy aspect depresses and unnerves him, and that he should be so affected strikes him as "a mystery all insoluble." He is assailed by "shadowy fancies," and to escape them resorts to what we learn is his usual expedient, an attempt at rational explanation: "I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth." The explanation, admittedly "unsatisfactory," offers the appearance rather than the substance of intellectual acuteness, but it at least temporarily allays the narrator's fears and protects him from a darker conclusion—that the capacity for Angst, seemingly groundless and unreasoning fear, is part of everyone's human makeup. Later, when the narrator finds Usher in just such a state, he can only term it "anomalous"—that is, abnormal and unwarranted. And toward the end of the tale, when he himself is finally infected with the "incubus of utterly causeless alarm," his only resource is to attempt to shake it off "with a gasp and a struggle," since the sentiment is "unaccountable yet unendurable." Our narrator has no power against the "unaccountable," and his "yet" is beautifully characteristic; that a horror without an apparent cause should be unendurable (indeed, worse than an explainable horror) makes no sense to him. He has not learned to accept the awful truth—Usher's truth—that the world's worst horrors are unendurable because they are unaccountable.

The narrator perpetually shies away from the suggestion of inexplicability and ultimate mystery in human affairs. Disturbed by his first vision of the house, he attempts to calm himself by resorting to the "somewhat childish experiment" of observing, instead of the house itself, its reduplicated image in the tarn. The experiment fails, his nervousness is only increased, and he feels compelled to explain: "There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase of my superstition—for why should I not so term it?—served mainly to accelerate the increase itself. Such, as I have long known, is the paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as a basis." He is content to rest in a general "law," no matter how paradoxical, and to account himself a victim of "superstition," rather than confront a profound personal puzzle. But his solicitude extends beyond himself to the reader. His explanations are clearly meant to reassure us, and he avoids exploring the ambiguous, we may understand, mainly for the sake of our peace of mind. The "equivocal hints" he receives from Usher concerning the latter's mental state which relate to "certain superstitious impressions" about the house are, we are told, "conveyed in terms too shadowy here to be re-stated." Usher's strange theory of vegetable "sentience," especially in regard to the malign influence exercised over him by the very stones of the house, is brushed aside: "Such opinions need no comment, and I will make none." And whatever the narrator may have learned from Usher's "few words" about the "sympathies" existing between himself and his sister, he is not eager to go beyond reporting that they were "of a scarcely intelligible nature." Poe's main purpose in all of these instances is, of course, to heighten the sense of implied horror by being suggestive rather than explicit. And the narrator serves this purpose splendidly, in spite of himself, since his attempt to allay our fears by overlooking the "anomalous" only increases the air of the sinister. As with his first vaguely disquieting impression of the house, the narrator prefers consistently to shake off the inexplicable intimations that he believes "must have been a dream" and turn his attention to the "real aspect" of things, hopefully to dispel the atmosphere of unreality.

"The naked Senses," Poe wrote in Marginalia, as if he were thinking of his narrator, "sometimes see too little—but then always they see too much." The narrator of "The Fall of the House of Usher" has a "noticing" eye which, clearly in defiance of his conscious intention to enlighten and demystify, weaves a pattern of surrealistic detail that contradicts any common-sense view of reality. What he sees, without apparently being fully aware of it, is a barely definable similarity between the house and its master. The "minute fungi" which cover the exterior of the house (and which play a part in Usher's theory of sentience) overspread the building, "hanging in a fine tangled web-work from the eaves," while Roderick's hair, "of a more than web-like softness and tenuity," had been "suffered to grow all unheeded" and floated wildly about his face. The house gives the impression of a "wild inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of parts and the crumbling condition of the individual stones"; likewise, in Roderick's behavior, the narrator is "at once struck with an incoherence—an inconsistency." The atmosphere reeking from the mansion is that of a "pestilent and mystic vapor, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued"; Roderick's voice is "leaden," and from his mind "darkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe in one unceasing radiation of gloom." ("A sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit," reports the narrator as he first approaches the house.) And, worst of all, "perhaps the eye of a scrutinizing observer might have discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn." That "scrutinizing observer" is of course our narrator, sharp enough to perceive, and willing to report, this obscure sign of inherent instability in the house, but not eager to divine for himself, or convey to us, that "oppressive secret" which is the parallel cause and sign of instability in the decaying Roderick. "The eye," says the narrator entering Usher's room, "struggled in vain to reach the remoter angles of the chamber." Some things are too dark even for his scrutinizing eye.

The nightmarish view of reality suggested by the resemblance of house and master defies the narrator's explanations and discourages him from attempting to draw any conclusions, but we are not ultimately left to rest contentedly in his limited point of view. Instead, we are offered Roderick Usher's own artistic productions as oblique elucidations of the mysteries everywhere adumbrated in the tale. Usher's poem, "The Haunted Palace," seems to be a flat allegory, with an "under or mystic current" of meaning, as the narrator suggests, insinuating "the tottering of his [Usher's] lofty reason upon her throne." The verses do equate a reasonable head that has gone bad with a "Radiant palace... In the monarch Thought's dominion" which has been assailed and captured by "evil things, in robes of sorrow." (The palace once had "banners yellow" for fair hair, "two luminous windows" for eyes, a "pearl and ruby" door for teeth and lips, and a king full of "wit and wisdom" for sanity.) But it is worth noting that the loss of reason is signalled by a shift from "Spirits moving musically / To a lute's well-tuned law" to "Vast forms that move fantastically / To a discordant melody"—the shift from "lawful" music to the "wild fantasias" of Usher's improvisation. The poem thus represents Usher's fate as a romantic artist: he may begin in joy and gladness, but he inevitably moves to despondency and madness as his vision darkens and he becomes aware of the "evil things" in himself and others—truths that cannot be overlooked by the artist who descends into the human depths. The narrator's visit to the House of Usher is not only a visit to the soul of Roderick Usher but a glimpse into the "Haunted Palace" of the romancer's art itself.

As an example of the kind of experience necessarily encountered in the realm of romance, we are offered one of the "phantasmagoric conceptions" painted by Roderick Usher:

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 the 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, and 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.

Looking ahead to Hawthorne's Marble Faun, we might wish to name this painting "Subterranean Reminiscences." But by itself it sufficiently suggests that realm of the submerged—the underside of human consciousness—which is the peculiar province of romance. Ordinarily dark and inaccessible, it is now exposed and illuminated by the "ghastly" light of the romancer's imagination.

In the tale the picture adumbrates the dungeon-tomb reserved for Roderick's sister, Madeline, and thus suggests that the particular kind of underground experience which lies at the heart of this (and, as it turns out, most other) romance art involves the darkest aspects of sexuality. Roderick Usher's secret subject, with an obvious but unacknowledged borrowing from Byron, concerns what can be called the Manfred Syndrome: the artist-brother's illicit and finally murderous passion for his twin-sister, usually identified—as in Byron's poem—with Astarte, the eastern Venus. (Ultimately, as in Melville's Pierre, the underlying suggestion is drawn out that the artist's narcissistic love for his female mirror image symbolizes his infatuation with his own psyche—a destructive involvement with his own unconscious which is at once the romancer's inspiration and his undoing.)

Since Poe's tale is, at its deepest level, a kind of fictional debate which argues for the seriousness of romance as a way of exploring the secret soul of man (Roderick's point of view), it is altogether fitting that the awful truth about the House of Usher should be most fully revealed by a romance within the larger romance: "the 'Mad Trist' of Sir Launcelot Canning." Poe underlines the narrator's common-sensical obtuseness and his imperviousness to the serious implications of the romance form by having him choose to read to Usher, in order to calm him, a tale which exacerbates him to the point of madness and, ultimately, death. The narrator himself at first calls the tale one of Usher's "favorite romances," and then adds, characteristically, that he was joking, "for, in truth, there is little in its uncouth and unimaginative prolixity which could have had interest for the lofty and spiritual ideality of my friend." In fact, the "Mad Trist" is a highly imaginative symbolic representation of the sordid reality of Usher's psychosexual nature. And it is Usher himself who spells out its meaning for the bewildered narrator, as the incidents read out of Canning's tale coincide with the final events of Poe's tale in one final ghastly demonstration of the power and living truth of romance.

The "Mad Trist" relates an episode in which the hero Ethelred comes upon and slays a "scaly and prodigious" dragon, with "fiery tongue" and "pesty breath," which has been polluting the precincts of a golden and silver "palace." While the narrator reads, the details of this last horrible night in the house mingle with those of the "Trist" as the ravished and dying sister Madeline makes her way, with many a clinking and clanging, up to the chamber containing Usher and his friend. The tortured, terrified Roderick himself makes the connections: "Ethelred—ha! ha!... the death-cry of the dragon, and the clangor of the shield!—say, rather, the rending of her coffin, and the grating of the iron hinges of her prison, and her struggles within the coppered archway of the vault!" In Roderick's version of the "Mad Trist" (the wonderfully ambiguous title suggesting both insane sorrow and a mad love meeting)—and here we must gather up the repetitive elements of the fantasy woven throughout Poe's tale—the sexually tempting sister is the "dragon" that has infested and corrupted the "palace" of his soul. Roderick's own haunted palace can be restored to its pure use only by the slaying of this evil thing "in robes of sorrow" ("the lofty and enshrouded figure of the lady Madeline" appears at the end with "blood upon her white robes"). For Madeline, of course, the sexual dragon is her lustful and attacking brother.

But the assigning of blame is ultimately of no importance. Since Roderick and Madeline are twins—that is, one person—Ethelred / Roderick's confrontation with the dragon/sister represents a symbolic confrontation with his own sexuality. It is an awareness of his own secret and forbidden desires that has darkened the imagination of the artist, and the romancer can never return to the "pure" state when he was free of such knowledge. Roderick's determination to slay the dragon/sister coincides with his own death. Illicit sexuality, for Roderick Usher, is inseparable from life.

For Poe's narrator, however—the rational man of daylight sensibility, whose experience of the self is blissfully free of such dark knowledge—the revelation in the House of Usher is not a truth about human existence but a bad dream that can be shaken. He arrives there on a "dark" and "soundless" day, having traveled into the "shades of evening." His first ghastly impression of the House seems to him the "after-dream" of an opium eater. It "must have been a dream," he insists. He sees the lady Madeline for the first time with a "sensation of stupor" and listens to Roderick's wild guitar "as if in a dream." He can scarcely believe the strange world he has entered, and yet he finds it difficult not to be affected by and caught up in it: "I felt creeping upon me, by slow yet certain degrees, the wild influences of his [Usher's] own fantastic yet impressive superstitions."

The danger of being permanently infected by so dark a vision increases with time; long dreams are hardest to forget. And so he must rouse himself with a violent effort to escape the horrors he has viewed, fleeing "aghast" "from that chamber, and from that mansion," and thereby releasing himself cataclysmically from the grip of nightmare: "—my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder—there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters—and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the 'HOUSE OF USHER.'" For the narrator, the ghastly world of romance is dissolved as the dark waters of night close over the fragments of his shattered dream. But for the reader, and for Poe, this world continues to live.

Get Ahead with eNotes

Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.

Get 48 Hours Free Access
Previous

The Vampire Motif in 'The Fall of the House of Usher'

Next

The Face in the Pool: Reflections on the Doppelgänger Motif in 'The Fall of the House of Usher'