The Perverse Strategy in 'The Fall of the House of Usher'
[Kaplan is an American psychoanalyst. In the following essay, she presents a psychoanalytic interpretation of "The Fall of the House of Usher."]
Edgar Allan Poe was a dissembler, a hoaxter, a liar, an impostor, and plagiarizer. He was secretive about his true identity and frequently masqueraded under one of several aliases. Deception and mystification were Poe's stock-intrade. Nevertheless, about some things we take him at his word. He truly was, as he boasted, a master of perversion, that most deceptive of mental strategies. We have only to recall his persistent and active pursuit of mental and physical self-destruction—the drinking, his habits of provocative and violent argumentation, the alienation of his guardian and other authority figures who might otherwise have given him support, the pedophilic-incestuous undercurrents of his marriage. Then there is the miasma surrounding his death—was it the outcome of one of his provocations, or disease, alcoholism, suicide, dementia? In living his life and even in his manner of negotiating death, Poe was a captive of the imp of perversity. But with Art as his shield, the realms of perversity became a haven for his troubled soul. He left to posterity a documentation of the spirit of the imp who held him enthralled.
In "The Imp of the Perverse," Poe explained the logic beneath the apparent unreasonableness of this "innate and primitive principle of human action" which prompts us to act solely "for the reason that we should not" Whereas all other faculties and impulses of the human soul could be seen as expressions of the human need for self-preservation, in the instance of perversity "the desire to be well is not only not aroused, but a strongly antagonistical sentiment exists."
With that cagey "not only not," Poe renders precisely the double negative duplicity of the perverse strategy. From a psychoanalytic perspective, perversion is not only not simply (or necessarily) an aberration of the sexual life, or merely some irresistible impulse to perform an act insidious to the moral order. Perversion is a complex strategy of mind, with its unique principles for regulating the negotiations between Desire and Authority. To achieve its aims, the perverse strategy employs mechanisms of mystification, concealment, and illusion, devices characteristic of the tales of Edgar Allan Poe. The perverse strategy is, as Poe might have put it, a faculty of the human soul.
Among the elements of the perverse strategy that we will encounter in "The Fall of the House of Usher" are certain literary devices aimed at revealing truth by way of concealment. Poe believed that truly imaginative literature locates its deepest meaning in an undercurrent. The surfaces of his tales are always deceptions. Initiated readers of Poe relish the deceptions and anticipate having to pore diligently over his texts to detect the embedded secrets. The tale of Usher is shrouded in mystifying atmospheres, references to obscure texts, and hints of enigmatic events. Poe's impish invitation to detect hidden meanings in one place distracts the reader from other crucial events going on behind the scenes. Whatever enigmas Poe brings into focus in "The Fall of the House of Usher" there are always the shadows of the unseen, the uncanny, the unknowable, implications of some darker secret that is being kept from us.
Indeed, to apprehend the ambiguities in "The Fall of the House of Usher" a reader must possess the analytical skills of a good detective. A few years after his account of the fall of Usher, Poe invented the detective story and created the prototypical detective, Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin. Dupin is "found of enigmas, of conundrums, of hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension praeternatural." Poe cautions, a person of mere ingenuity may be incapable of analysis. Despite his lavish (and duplicitous) displays of scientific reasoning. Dupin arrives at his solutions by way of imaginative leaps and an uncanny attunement with the mind of the criminal. Roderick Usher is at once an imaginative artist and a criminal. Although a certain fondness for enigmas is necessary to appreciate "The Fall of the House of Usher," it is our grasp of the perverse strategy that provides an attunement with Usher's troubled soul.
Poe was not above employing puzzles and enigmas as seductions into the mere ingenuity he disdained. In the history of Poe criticism, these seductions have been all too successful. For example, those not wise to the diversionary tactics of the imp have attributed Poe's facility with the logic of perversity to the primal traumas of his infancy and early childhood. When Poe was about eighteen months old, his alcoholic father abandoned the family. Shortly thereafter, Edgar witnessed the sickness, decay, and death of his mother. He became an orphan and his sister and brother disappeared. Poe's tales are convincing depictions of the castrations, separations, abandonments, and annihilations that constitute the typical anxieties of childhood, anxieties that in Poe's case must have reached overwhelming and therefore traumatic proportions. Poe's portrayals of body mutilations, smotherings, drownings, entombments of the living, the wasting away and rotting away of bodies, situations emptied of human dialogue, are calculated to re-evoke in the reader the archaic fears of childhood. It would not be farfetched to conjecture that Peo embraced these themes as a way of mastering the passively suffered traumas of his childhood.
We miss the point of all this, however, if we reduce "The Fall of the House of Usher" to Poe's personal traumas or his inclinations to sexual aberration and violence. Instead, as I said, I will take Poe at his word. I will use the tale of Usher as a demonstration of Poe's mastery of the perverse strategy, with its mystifications and concealments, its ambiguous relationship to the moral order, its pretense of a fundamental antagonism to representational reality. As I assess the currents and undercurrents of "The Fall of the House of Usher," my interpretations of the moral and aesthetic plights of the artist protagonist, Roderick Usher, will be guided by the principles of the perverse strategy. Nevertheless, in this tale, where specters of incest and necrophilia hover in the background, perversion in its narrower and customary sense—as sexual aberration—will inform my concluding interpretations.
First printed in 1839 in Burton's Magazine, "The Fall of the House of Usher" was six years later included in Poe's Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. The very terms Poe chose to describe his tales are expressive of the confusions between the real and the imaginary, the animate and the inanimate that characterize the perverse strategy. Arabesque is derived from Arabian and Moorish art and refers to an elaborate design in which highly stylized human and animal figures are embedded among intertwined branches, foliage, and fanciful scrollwork. Crucial to the complexity of the artistic design of "The Fall of the House of Usher," is the way in which Usher's person and fate are intertwined with the decaying foliage and crumbling ornate architectural scrollwork of his House. We are repeatedly reminded of the sentience of nonliving matter and the decay of living matter back into nonbeing. Grotesque is an ornamental style of antiquity, which one of Poe's lesser known critics [Wolfgong Kayser] has described as "something playfully gay and carelessly fantastic but also something ominous and sinister, in the face of a world in which the realm of inanimate things are no longer separated from those of plants, animals and human beings and where the laws of statics, symmetry, and proportion are no longer valid."The Fall of the House of Usher" depends for its emotional effects on the dissolving of the boundaries between the inanimate and animate realms and the breaking down of the laws of everyday reality. Though this tale could hardly be recommended for its playful gaiety, the reader is playfully engaged in solving mysteries, protected until the very end from the full knowledge of the ominous and sinister events going on behind the scenes.
The tale's epigraph from De Béranger warns of a potential dissolution of the borders between illusion and reality. We learn at once that the heart of the artist, Roderick Usher, is like a lute that resonates to all that touches it:
Son coeur est un luth suspendu: Sitôt qu'on le touche il résonne.
Poe, the creator of Roderick Usher, does not lose his boundaries. Through the trickery, call it technique, of mystification and enigma, Poe achieves the deceptions, call them illusions, that comprise his artistic strategy. In "The Fall of the House of Usher" various illusory devices are employed to preserve the borders of the moral order, even as they mischievously render a picture of moral disintegration.
The House of Usher decays, crumbles, and falls into oblivion but it does so in a manner eminently lawful and orderly. The tale is partitioned, one could say precisely measured, into three equal and distinct acts. The events take place within a month, beginning with the desolation and gloom surrounding the narrator's approach to the House and ending with the abrupt, noisy, and violent circumstances of his departure.
Act One introduces the characters, depicts the eerie effect the House of Usher has on its viewers and inhabitants, and apprises us of Roderick's family background and the general nature of his illness. The first character we meet is the narrator, who, in response to an agitated letter from his childhood companion Roderick Usher, has set off on a journey to his House. He has certain misgivings and the closer he comes to the House the more these misgivings increase. Nevertheless he hopes that his presence will help alleviate his old friend's maladies—a mysterious bodily illness accompanied by an oppressive mental disorder. We learn that Roderick and his sister, Lady Madeline, are the last of the Ushers, a family known for its inbreeding and deficiency "of collateral issue" as well as for its unassuming deeds of charity and devotion to the intricacies of musical science. As the narrator moves through numerous, winding passageways to the studio of his friend, he encounters a valet with a stealthy step and the Usher family physician, whose expression of "low cunning and perplexity" further enhances the mood of suspicion, gloom, and FEAR that envelops the Usher mansion. Save for the peculiar dialogues between the narrator and Rodrick, the universe of ordinary human dialogue is notable for its absence. Aside from the brief appearances of the valet and physician the staff of the mansion is invisible and uncannily silent. Madeline utters not one word. But the canny dialogue of detection between Poe and his reader is vibrant.
Roderick tells the narrator that his sufferings stem from a disorder of the senses: He is oppressed by every odor, even of flowers. His tastebuds can endure only the most insipid food; his skin can tolerate only garments of the slightest texture; his eyes are tortured by the faintest of lights, and save for the tones from his own stringed instruments, every sound inspires Roderick with horror. Existence itself is a torment for Rodrick. He lives with the dread that this pitiable condition of his senses will eventually lead him to "abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR." He is possessed by a superstition that the form and substance of the House itself, the very sentience of the stones and foliage, have obtained a power over his spirit. Finally Rodrick hints that his gloom could be attributable to the severe and lengthy illness of his beloved sister, "his sole companion for long years—his last and only relative on earth". As Rodrick utters these words, Lady Madeline passes through a remote corner of his large studio and vanishes.
In Act Two the narrator quickly discovers the futility of "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." Nevertheless he does not give up on his mission of salvation. He spends several days alone with Roderick, reading from the esoteric texts in his library, watching him paint, listening to the wild improvised dirges his friend plucks from his speaking guitar. Most of this act is given over to detailed descriptions of Roderick's paintings, music, and poetry. It concludes with the "death" of Madeline and her entombment in a vault at the bottommost reaches of the House of Usher. As the narrator and Roderick go about the preparations for Madeline's burial, the reader learns that she is Roderick's twin sister, and also the disquieting fact that her features still glow from the blush of life. Immediately following Madeline's entombment, Roderick's mental condition deteriorates and the narrator becomes infected with his friend's fantastic imaginings and superstitions.
Act Three takes place on a stormy night about a week after the entombment of Lady Madeline. Usher comes to the narrator's room in a state of "mad hilarity" and hysteria. In an attempt to calm him, the narrator reads aloud from the tale of the "Mad Trist." The sounds described in this tale are soon echoed by the sounds of Madeline escaping from her tomb. Roderick exclaims, "We have put her living in the tomb!" Madeline appears in the doorway, and in her final death agonies, falls inward on her brother, bearing him "to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated." The narrator flees in terror from the chamber and from the mansion. He looks back to see the mighty walls of the House of Usher burst asunder and fall into a dank tarn that closes over its fragments.
With sin and violence so much in the foreground of Poe's tales, we are apt to forget that they are as much about the structures of reason and moral order as they are about the forces that undermine those structures, causing them to totter and collapse in on themselves as they do in "The Fall of the House of Usher." The protagonist, Roderick Usher, is an artist and the central conflicts concern the artist's ambiguous relation to the moral order. In a tale of an artist, matters of Art cannot be incidental. The decay and eventual fall of the House of Usher are inextricably linked to the crumbling away of the borders between reality and illusion in Roderick's art. The lengthy descriptions of his paintings, musical performances, and poetry are crucial to the undercurrents of "The Fall of the House of Usher," and to the affinities between creativity and perversion. Poe's tale of the life and death of the artist, Roderick Usher, depicts the creative processes that enabled Usher's art along with the moral nihilism his art was striving to regulate and contain.
In his essay "The Poetic Principle" Poe stated that the highest art is to be "found in an elevating excitement of the Soul—quite independent of that passion which is the intoxication of the Heart—or that Truth which is the satisfaction of the Reason." Richard Wilbur, in "The House of Poe," distinguished between Poe's proclaimed aesthetic of repudiating the human and earthly in favor of poésie pure—the visionary uncontaminated by passion, the imaginative unconstrained by logic or reason—and his more down-to-earth literary method of posing moral riddles in the form of prose allegories. Wilbur deplored the aesthetic expressed by the visionary Poe in his essays on music and poetry, but honored the method employed by the logical Poe in allegories such as "William Wilson," "Ligeia," "MS. Found in a Bottle," and "The Fall of the House of Usher.".. . .
Whereas Poe's aesthetic entails a conscious undermining of reality and authority in order to attain the rhythms of a pure visionary art, his prose allegories derive their effects from the vibrancy of the negotiations between Desire and Authority. In other words, "the civil war" in the palace of the mind acts as a resistance to the wish for pure gratification. In the absence of such resistance, without moral conflict, the aesthetic of poésie pure is the equivalent of a moral nihilism.
Analogously, we might say that sexual aberration with its conscious claim for unrestrained gratification is the aesthetic of perversion, whereas the perverse strategy is an unconscious method that regulates the life of Desire. In contrast to the sexual aberrations which have, as a conscious aim, an undermining of Authority, the strategy of perversion is an attempt to preserve the moral order. Paradoxically then, the interests of the moral order—what some psychoanalysts call "ego and superego" and others "the symbolic order" and still others "the structures of language"—are served by the perverse strategy. In a canny duplicity, the perverse strategy achieves its moral aims by permitting a token expression to Sin and even to the torments, anxieties, melancholia, and violence that accompany moral disorder. As in all Poe's allegories, in the tale of Usher these frightful states of mind are given a due measure of expression—but all regulated and contained within the boundaries of art.
Like Usher, who evinces a fundamental antagonism to earthly reality in favor of imaginative purity, Poe spurned realistic descriptions and representational devices in favor of setting tones and creating moods that would engender abnormal states of mind. He wanted to shake readers loose from the moorings of everyday earthly life so their imaginations might be freed; so they might suspend disbelief and accept as true something patently untrue. In "The Fall of the House of Usher" Poe engenders illusion and yet preserves a sense of reality; he replaces what otherwise might be a feeling of overwhelming dread with playful shudders, thrills, excitements. Literary devices that confound what is true by masking it with the untrue, or substitute pleasurable emotions for painful ones, are analogous to fetishism, the paradigmatic instance of the perverse strategy.
Imposturing, petty lies, plagiarism, in fact, any act, object, thought, or artistic device that wards off the perception of an unwelcome or unbearable reality and substitutes instead perceptions that facilitate ambiguity and illusion can be thought of as the equivalent of a fetish.
In sexual fetishism, for example, a fetish—a garter belt, boot, slipper, whip, corset, negligee—is employed to counteract the unwelcome and frightening reality of a woman's actual body and to engender the illusion of a phallic woman, a person who is female but whose genitals nevertheless are identical to those of a male. This act of fetishizing a woman's body protects the fetishist from the anxious reality of the differences between the sexes. However, this shield against the "real" reality, though it enhances an illusion that rescues the capacity for sexual intercourse, can only be accomplished through a dehumanization and deanimation of the sexual partner. Thus in fetishism an experiencing, breathing body is deadened, entombed as it were, like the still blushing, earthly body of Madeline Usher, in the realm of the living dead. My concluding interpretations will stress how Roderick Usher's break with the moral order is connected with his need to repudiate the reality of Madeline's sexuality. For now I am using the model of fetishism to show how Roderick Usher's artistic devices contrasted with those of his creator, Edgar Allan Poe. In his quest for a pure aesthetic, Usher eventually loses his connection with the moral order. Poe never does.
The fetishist's apparent antagonism to reality is not so absolute and fundamental as it first appears. Nor is Poe so wholeheartedly committed to the aesthetic of pure Supernal Beauty he promulgates in "The Poetic Principle." Poe demonstrates his divided loyalties by always acknowledging the principles of reason and logic even as he creates an atmosphere of illusion and mystification. With his fetishistic devices, the fetishist is disavowing the reality of differences between the sexes, while simultaneously avowing that reality. His fears engender an illusion of identity between the sexes. The passions of his heart, his earthly sexual desires, are an acknowledgment of the sexual difference. With one part of his mind working to conceal differences, another part is still aware of reality. There is what is called in psychoanalysis "a split in the ego," a fissure or rupture in the mind, but not a full departure from the world of reality. The fetishist is not a madman who simply denies or repudiates reality, as Roderick Usher eventually does. Nor is he one of your standard neurotics, like perhaps the narrator of Poe's tale, who represses any knowledge that frightens or humiliates him.
In the life of Edgar Allan Poe, artistic creation served as a version of disavowal, a kind of fetishistic device that enabled him to conceal and yet still reveal the unbearable secrets and phantoms that haunted his mind. Moreover, the lies, tricks, conundrums, enigmas, and mystifications characteristic of Poe's tales function like a fetish. In "The Fall of the House of Usher," various artistic media and art objects are employed in a fashion analogous to a fetish. Like translucent veils placed between the reader and what would otherwise be a full knowledge of some dark, unwelcome reality, the ambiguity and illusory quality of Roderick's works of art serve to distract and conceal. Yet, and this is the heart of Poe's artistic strategy, these same art objects simultaneously reveal in a symbolic form what would be too unbearable to acknowledge directly. While readers are kept busy detecting the enigmas suggested by Roderick's art (and the esoteric books in his library), Lady Madeline is being de-animated, buried alive, entombed in the land of the living dead. Yet, just as an analysis of the symbolic structure of a sexual fetish would tell us about the unconscious mental life of the fetishist, so the symbolic structure of Roderick's art reveals his unconscious forbidden wishes.
Poe tells us that Usher's heart is like a lute that can only quiver helplessly and passively to the throbs of nature. Usher himself laments that his body, his very soul is being pervaded by the atmosphere of his house, but this complaint to the narrator may very well be a vast deception, a clever subterfuge. In Usher's ascetic avoidance of sensuous earthly pleasures is he not, in fact, inviting a merger with spirits, phantoms, foliage, stones, atmospheres? Would our earthbound narrator ever dare such risky excitements of the soul?
When the House of Usher first comes into sight, the narrator finds it impossible to erect any cover of illusion between the decaying images before his eyes and his soul. In fact the very opposite occurs. There is "a hideous dropping off of the veil." The narrator experiences "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."
Though the narrator strives to impress us with his altruism and therapeutic zeal, one suspects that he has responded to Roderick's summons in order to gratify his personal quest for the sublime. With a mental contrivance that merely impersonates Art, the narrator turns his eyes away from the awe inspiring spectacle of the House and interposes an illusory arrangement of its features. He stops before a tarn that reflects the inverted image of the house with its grey and ghastly foliage and "vacant and eyelike windows." His gaze into the tarn does not, however, entirely dispel his anxiety; it transforms anxiety into a more tolerable fear. Indeed, the new visual arrangement brings "a shudder even more thrilling than before," but thrilling is a distance from the overwhelming melancholy and sinister import of the actual images. Poe's "thrilling" is all the seduction his readers require. We will not be disappointed. We are in for a bit of excitement. Our playful quivering apprehension will capture the essence of some terrible anxiety and shield us from the displeasure and terror we might otherwise experience. A roller coaster ride may scare us to death, but we gladly defy death for the elation of the thrills it promises. We enter the illusion willingly, even daringly, assured that we are not actually going to be smashed to pieces and die. In the tale of Usher, elated feelings of risk and excitement replace the mental sufferings—anxiety, depression, madness—we might otherwise experience if we were to actually feel as Roderick feels.
Poe invites us to resonate with Roderick's "FEAR." The thrilling tale the narrator relates will be the artifice that shields the reader from Roderick's unbearable moral plights. Poe, the artist, renders a tale that both reveals and conceals the torments of a soul that loses the boundaries of the symbolic order.
The logical Poe sides with truth and reason, but from the point of view of the visionary Poe, Roderick's release from reason and descent into madness is an act of artistic courage. The narrator who tells Usher's tale in his earnest, measured, reasonable way, is a coward who flirts with the dangerous process of Art and then furtively shrinks into the shadows of normality.
At each step of the way, from the moment the narrator has the inspiration to rearrange the particulars of the scene by inverting them, Art is evoked to conceal yet reveal the gradual but inexorable dissolution of Roderick's tie to the world of ordinary mortals. The art forms, poetry, painting, music, and even the obscure scholarly texts on the sentience of the inanimate world, books which "had formed no small portion of the mental existence of the invalid," express and reflect Roderick's plight, while by their continued connection to the symbolic order, they veil the horrors they express. As the last of his futile efforts to protect Roderick from the terrors encroaching on his mind and consuming his soul, the narrator reads aloud from the "Mad Trist," a vulgar grotesque by Sir Launcelot Canning. In this choice, the narrator confesses to an ingenuous duplicity: "I had called it a favorite of Usher's more in sad jest than in earnest; 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." The subtly "thrilling" shudders of Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" rouse the imagination and we accept as real and actual the ghastly sounds of Madeline Usher clawing her way out of her tomb. However, the blatant clangings and rattlings of the merely fanciful "Mad Trist" are so cheaply obtained as to be laughable.
Roderick's art, his music, his paintings, his poetry strive for aesthetic purity. Roderick is willing to risk his soul for Art. His bodily asceticism serves as a protection against earthly human desires. With his art, Roderick seems to be deliberately negating the palpable representational world. This negation of tangible reality is Roderick's effort to achieve a more intimate attunement with nature and even go so far as to dissolve his being in the sentience of nonliving matter. Only with this painful and frightening dissolution of the boundaries of the self can Roderick free his imagination and create new art forms. As D. H. Lawrence said in his essay on Poe, "old things need to die and disintegrate . . . before anything else can come to pass. . . Man must be stripped even of himself. And it is a painful, sometimes a ghastly, process."
A contemporary reader might well wonder if Roderick did not invent abstract expressionism. The sounds and images created by Roderick overpower the ordinary, definitive, and concrete realities, replacing them with perceptions that facilitate ambiguity and illusion. "An excited and highly distempered ideality threw a sulphureous lustre over all." Even when his images lean on reality, Roderick distorts that reality beyond any ordinary recognition. An example is his "singular perversion and amplification of the wild air of the last waltz of Von Weber."
The narrator is enthralled as he watches Roderick's paintings grow "touch by touch into vaguenesses." The more abstract and ambiguous they become "the more thrillingly" the narrator shudders. Of these "phantasmagoric conceptions" the narrator recalls one painting that was "not so rigidly of the spirit of abstraction." The imagery was just sufficiently representational to allow the narrator to "shadow forth, although feebly, in words," a description. The image the narrator recalls is the interior of an immensely long and rectangular vault that lay at an exceeding depth below the surface of the earth. Though no source of light is discernible, "a flood of intense rays rolled throughout, and bathed the whole in a ghastly and inappropriate splendor." We later learn that this chiaroscuro image is a harbinger of Madeline's tomb.
Another of Roderick's productions is far less abstract and more obviously premonitory. With the advantage of hindsight, the narrator, now comfortably distant from the frightening events he relates, recollects the words of one of the ballads Roderick sang as he strummed his singing guitar. In its conventional phrasing and structure "The Haunted Palace" evidences a mind capable of the "collectedness and concentration" the narrator admires. When he wrote the ballad Roderick was still in command of the formal properties of poetry. His madness was still only incipient. Yet the words imply, at least to the conventional and cautious narrator, that Roderick is aware of the fate that awaits him. "In the under or mystic current of its meaning, I fancied that I perceived, and for the first time, a full consciousness on the part of Usher, of the tottering of his lofty reason upon her throne."
Whereupon the narrator recites the verses of Usher's ballad, an abbreviated version of a poem written by Poe for another occasion and self-plagiarized to express the plight of Roderick Usher. Inevitably, the avid detectives who delight in fathoming Poe's deeper meanings note that all his mansions and buildings are structured like the human body, parts of the human body, or as layers or aspects of the mind. Often as not, the Usher mansion or the haunted palace of the mind in Roderick's ballad are cited as epitome and proof of this interpretation. The first four stanzas are said to represent a head, moreover a head with a lawful and orderly mind still capable of uttering words of authority; the flowing, glorious, golden banners are likened to hair, the windows through which wanderers might see "Spirits moving musically / To a lute's welltunéd law" are linked to luminous eyes, the pearly and ruby doorway giving forth the wit and wisdom of the king is, of course, a mouth. The two concluding stanzas, which depict "red-litten windows" and "forms that move fantastically / To a discordant melody," are said to represent a sick and disordered mind. Like the narrator who is himself a missionary from the land of law and order, many of Poe's critics interpret "The Haunted Palace" as Poe's lament to the tottering of Roderick's mind, his loss of connection to the life of reason. Surely, however, there must be an undercurrent beneath the current so easily and ingeniously detected by our reasonable narrator.
Let us consider "The Haunted Palace" from the point of view of the artist, Roderick Usher, rather than from the perspective of the frightened traveler who turned aghast from the revelations of Usher's Art, running as fast as he could back to civilization with its clear boundaries between real and not real, animate and non-animate, to tell an orderly tale. For Usher, as for any imaginative artist, the lyrics of his ballad might be less a lament to lost reason and more a tribute to innocence and free imagination. In this light, the "glory that blushed and bloomed" and now will "smile no more" could be interpreted as the innocent soul of the child. The child is the king who utters wisely, whereas the adult, the moral authority who enforces the life of reason, depriving the child of his contact with the world of sensate flux, is the corrupt one. The "evil things, in robes of sorrow" that "assailed the monarch's high estate" are the forces of civilization.
Poe, like the poets he idealized to the point of plagiarism, envisioned childhood as a time of glorious innocence, an innocence betrayed by the laws of reason and morality. Childhood was discovered (some say invented) in the eighteenth century in response to the dehumanizing trends of the industrial revolution. By the nineteenth century, when artists began to see themselves as alienated beings trapped in a dehumanizing social world, the child became the symbol of free imagination and goodness. Blacke and Wordsworth, and soon Dickens and Twain, were preoccupied with themes of childhood innocence. The image of the child was set in opposition to the prison of civilization. By peering into the soul of the child, the artist hoped to rediscover some divine state of selfhood. The artist looked to the child as the representation of that original True Self that was lost when man became a social being. Whatever is noble and pure and good about the human being could be found in the child, who, living freely in the world of sensate flux, a world uncorrupted by language and reason, is closest to the natural world, the realm of existence where soul and imagination flourish.
Clearly the narrator and Usher are at odds, not only in their attitudes to art but also in their moral values. The narrator is a conventional moralist, who even as he follows Usher into vaults and cellars and underground passages and thrills to the shudders they evoke, still clings desperately to the world of reality. Usher, on the other hand, has deliberately isolated himself from the world of earthly delights and from the moral order itself, in order to create visionary abstractions. The narrator, who has entered this heart of darkness on a mission of rescue, is frustrated by Usher's passive surrender to his illness. He suspects that Usher is nourishing the dark melancholy that he projected "upon all objects of the moral and physical universe" as if it were a positive force. With a mind still fettered by the temporal, physical world that Usher has shaken off, the narrator cannot apprehend "The Haunted Palace" as anything other than a sign of Usher's descent into madness. Finally it is Usher who turns to the narrator, crying out "Madman." But who is the madman?
Recall that the perverse strategy encourages an illusory excitement that approximates madness in order to shield the mind against a more profound madness. To appreciate the nature of this other madness, let us return to the narrower meaning of perversion, perversion as sexual aberration.
Fetishism, in its literal, narrow sense enables sexual intercourse through a displacement of sexual desire away from the whole identity of a woman to some accessory or garment, some object ancillary to her being—a shoe or a garter belt. Why should a man be unable to experience sexual desire for a woman without the protection of a fetishistic device?
Until quite recently when psychoanalysts began to scrutinize the symbolic structure of the sexual fetish, the need to create a fetish was taken as presumable evidence of the castration anxiety evoked by the frightening vision of the absent and therefore castrated female genitals. It was assumed that there is something innately horrifying about the female body, something about her life-giving passages of sexuality and procreation that would inevitably bring to men's minds the stigmata of humiliation, degradation, multilation, and death. However, this perennial theme of the female stigmata is now appreciated as a disguise, a cover-up we might say, for a man's secret and forbidden unconscious wishes—to merge with woman, to be her, to never leave the Garden of Eden of Childhood where sacred mother and innocent child are united for eternity. In Eden the mother is pure and asexual. To acknowledge the mother's sexuality and her earthly desire is equivalent to a banishment from Eden. The fetish object conceals and disguises the sexual difference, thereby granting simultaneously an earthly passion of the Heart and the exalted spiritual wish to be reunited with the mother.
These currents of Poe's tale surface in the relation between Madeline and Roderick. Although much intervenes to intrigue and distract the reader of "The Fall of the House of Usher," the specter of incest is omnipresent from the beginning. We are told at once that the barely perceptible fissure down the center of the mansion and the decay of its stones are expressions of the deficiency "of collateral issue, and the consequent undeviating transmission from sire to son, of the patrimony with the name." In a tale heavy with ambiguities, Poe's words to describe the incestuous family background of Madeline and Roderick are ominously ambiguous:
[T]he stem of the Usher race, all time-honored as it was, had put forth, at no period, any enduring branch; in other words, .. . the entire family lay in the direct line of descent, and had always, with very trifling and very temporary variation, so lain.
Unless the twins, Madeline and Roderick, surrender to their earthly passions and commit incest, they are doomed to be the last of the Usher line. Was Roderick's asceticism, his avoidance of all bodily temptations, aimed at avoiding incest? Or did he endure the ghastly process of self-disintegration in order to create new forms of art? D. H. Lawrence introduces his essay on Poe by saluting the forces of dissolution, disintegration, and death, declaring them vital to the life of free imagination. However, Lawrence recognized that as much as "The Fall of the House of Usher" is about the risky ecstasies of a genuine artistic sensibility, it is also a tale of love. This is where the moral ambiguities lie. The spiritual ecstasy that is essential to Roderick's creativity becomes a force of evil in his love for Madeline. To put these issues another way: The tale of love in "The Fall of the House of Usher" reveals the terrible consequences of an aesthetic of pure gratification, when that aesthetic no longer engages the resistance of the moral order.
Lawrence warned, "There is a limit to love." He grasped precisely the force of evil in the spiritual bond between the two last survivors of the House of Usher. In sensual love, there is never a complete fusion or merger. The boundaries between self and other never completely dissolve. In spiritual love, however, the lovers vibrate in unison and their beings merge. [As Lawrence writes], in the vibrating, spiritual love between Madeline and Roderick:
the mystery of the recognition of otherness fails, [and] the longing for identification with the beloved becomes a lust. And it is this longing for identification, utter merging, which is at the base of the incest problem. .. . In the family, the natural vibration is most nearly in unison. With a stranger, there is greater resistance. Incest is the getting of gratification and the avoiding of resistance.
Both Madeline and Roderick are dying of asceticism, of their mutual need to banish every sign of sensuality or earthly desire. Madeline's physical presence is a reminder to Roderick of his earthly passions. She is slowly wasting away, but her skin still blushes with the blood of life. In light of Roderick's conflicted feelings toward his sister, I would interpret "The Haunted Palace" as an expression of his wish to restore the spiritually of his love for Madeline. The contrasting images in this ballad represent two images of Madeline: the Madeline of childhood in her days of glorious innocence, and the bloody, lewd Madeline, the Madeline of sexual desire and the wild intoxications of the Heart.
Childhood innocence is about the life of Desire before the knowledge of female sexuality and the male-female sexual difference. It is the oedipal child, the child who must leave the world of sensate flux and free imagination and enter the symbolic order with its rules of language, reason, and morality, who resurrects the earlier uncomplicated infantile wish to merge with the mother, now as a defense against the knowledge of the irrevocable and irreversible differences between the sexes. With a full acknowledgment of these differences would come the painful acknowledgment that the life of Desire can never be pure. Once the child enters the moral order, the elevating excitements of the Soul cannot exist independently of earthly passions and the intoxications of the Heart—or the Truth of Reason.
Asceticism, the total avoidance of sensual pleasure, is an avoidance of the complex negotiations between Desire and Authority. When the effort to banish passion through asceticism fails, as eventually it must, there is either a fulfillment of a forbidden sexual desire or something worse—the madness of total emotional surrender to the other and a loss of identity.
Emotional surrender entails a total dissolution of the boundaries between the real and the not real. Thus, in ridding himself of the intoxications of the Heart, the passions of incestuous desire, Roderick is attempting a more insidious violation of the moral order. For, as Lawrence detected, latent in the undercurrent of an apparent sexual incestuous wish is the wish for a spiritual merger with the other. Roderick's deepest and most frightening wish is to merge with Madeline, to be eternally united with her in some smooth womblike utopia where the rough realities of earthly existence would no longer disturb his peace. Our most profound fears are always a reflection of our unconscious forbidden wishes. Roderick's "FEAR" of total annihiliation resides in his wish to be one with Madeline, to dissolve his being in the sentience of non-living matter.
Alongside my own interpretive version of Madeline, I am ready to acknowledge a grain of truth in previous interpretations of her as double or doppelgänger, or as representation of Roderick's darker consciousness, or unconscious desires, or as witch or vampire. They all miss the essential point of the perverse strategy employed in "The Fall of the House of Usher." This prose allegory is about the regulation of Desire through the fetishistic devices of Art. Roderick's aspiration for a Supernal Beauty, the pure excitement of the soul expressed in his music and painting, is the counterpoint of his bodily asceticism. By ridding himself of all earthly passion he is attempting to repudiate his incestuous longing for Madeline. However, Roderick's sublime art only disguises and conceals his forbidden wishes and in the end the Truth is out—revealed. Roderick's effort to bury the life of Desire by deanimating his still living, breathing sister is doomed to fail. Madeline's return from her walled-off place beneath the House of Usher represents the return of Usher's repudiated desires and the granting of his forbidden wishes.
The nature of Madeline's dying gesture is ambiguous. When Madeline falls inward on Roderick is it a fulfillment of their sensual passions? Or is her apparently violent gesture an act of blanketing generosity, an affirmation of their spiritual bond, a granting of her beloved brother's wish to merge with her? Either way, Madeline's final enactment represents a destruction of the symbolic order and a violation of social morality. The civil war in the palace of the mind is over. The perverse strategy has failed.
The perverse strategy employs a symbolic structure. The perverse strategy enables illusion but also still retains a connection with the moral order and reality. The price is a split-in-the-ego, much like the barely perceptible fissure that extends down the walls of the House of Usher. On the other hand, a repudiation or total denial or earthly reality entails a breakdown of symbolic structures and always invites a return of the repudiated in its most archaic and awesome guises. Whether as witch or vampire or as the specter of incestuous desire, the terrifying, emaciated, white-shrouded, bloody Madeline returns from her tomb to grant her brother's forbidden wishes. The twins are reunited in death, merged as one for all eternity. With Madeline's substantiation of the aesthetic of pure Desire, her overthrow of moral Authority, Heaven cries out, venting its full wrath on the House of Usher, which cracks apart along its fissure, collapses like a house of cards—and is no more.
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