[Kendall is an American educator and critic. In the following essay, he views Madeline Usher as a vampire.]

The often expressed conventional interpretation of ["The Fall of the House of Usher"] is summarized and expatiated upon in Arthur Robinson's "Order and Sentience in The Fall of the House of Usher.'" My own view of the story, although admittedly whimsical, is that in concentrating upon symbolism, upon psychological aberration, upon its connection with Eureka (first published some years after the story) and with certain aspects of nineteenth-century culture, critics of "The Fall of the House of Usher" have almost universally failed to recognize that it is a Gothic tale, like "Ligeia," and that a completely satisfactory and internally directed interpretation depends on vampirism, the hereditary Usher curse. Madeline is a vampire—a succubus—as the family physician well knows and as her physical appearance and effect upon the narrator sufficiently demonstrate. The terrified and ineffectual Roderick, ostensibly suffering from pernicious anemia, is her final victim.

It is not my purpose here to trace sources and analogues, for example, the body of a murdered person hidden in a makeshift coffin in the haunted wing of a castle (Clara Reeve, The Old English Baron, 1777), or the climactic and cataclysmic description of eerie, horrible sounds (the final chapter of Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, 1820). Poe was sufficiently familiar with Gothic materials and techniques (effectively summarized in chapter seven of James R. Foster's History of the Pre-Romantic Novel in England, 1949), and both male and female vampires abounded in literature by the time he published his contribution to the genre in 1839. The bibliography of poetry, fiction, and drama appended to Montague Summers' The Vampire (1929) lists at least twenty-five separate works that Poe could have read, or known about, by the time he came to invent Roderick and Madeline. Among these are Southey's Thalaba the Destroyer (1801), Byron's The Giaour (1813), Polidori's The Vampyre: A Tale by Lord Byron (1819), Scribe's Le Vampire (1820), Keats's Lamia (1820), Hugo's Han d'Islande (1823), Merimee's La Guzla (1827), Liddell's The Vampire Bride (1833), Gautier's La Morte Amoreuse (1836), and a host of German works—mostly bearing the title Der Vampyr, or something close to it—published in the 1820's. And although it was not published until 1847, I cannot forbear mentioning Thomas Prest's enormously popular Varney the Vampire.

Roderick is the central figure of the narrative, Poe seeming at first glance to devote less than passing attention to Madeline as a character. Her personality seems unrealized, for she appears only three times: toward the middle of the story she passes "through a remote portion of the apartment"; some days after her supposed death she is seen in her coffin, with "the mockery of a faint blush upon the bosom and the face, and that suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so terrible in death"; in the final paragraph but one she reappears to die again, falling "heavily inward upon the person of her brother." These brief appearances are nevertheless fraught with darkly suggestive significance, enough to inspire D. H. Lawrence's impressionistic diagnosis, although he takes a wrong turn: "The exquisitely sensitive Roger, vibrating without resistance with his sister Madeline, more and more exquisitely, and gradually devouring her, sucking her life like a vampire in his anguish of extreme love. And she was asking to be sucked."

Roderick, neither consumed by love nor acquiescent, faces a classic dilemma. He must put an end to Madeline—the lore dictates that he must drive a stake through her body in the grave—or suffer the eventuality of wasting away, dying, and becoming a vampire himself. As an intellectual he regards either course with growing horror and at length summons an old school friend, the narrator, whom Usher tentatively plans to confide in. From the outset the evidences of vampirism are calculated to overwhelm the narrator. Even before entering the house he feels the presence of supernatural evil. Reining in his horse to contemplate the "black and lurid tarn," he recalls Roderick's "wildly importunate" letter, speaking of bodily as well as mental disorder. He remembers that the Usher family has "been noted, time out of mind, for a peculiar sensibility of temperament, displaying itself, through long ages, in many works of exalted art, and manifested, of late, in repeated deeds of munificent yet unobtrusive charity" (a typically ironical Poe commentary upon charity as expiation). Before he rides over the causeway to the house, the visitor reflects further upon "the very remarkable fact, that the stem of the Usher race .. . had put forth, at no period, any enduring branch; in other words, that the entire family lay in the direct line of descent, and had always, with very trifling and very temporary variations [accounting for the twins], so lain."

Once within, the narrator wonders "to find how unfamiliar were the fancies which ordinary images were stirring up." On the staircase he meets the family physician, whose countenance wears a "mingled expression of low cunning [denoting knowledge of the Usher curse] and perplexity." He finds Roderick "terribly altered, in so brief a period," (an inconsistency: earlier the narrator says, "many years had elapsed since our last meeting") with lips "thin and very pallid," a skin of "ghastly pallor," oddly contrasting with the "miraculous lustre of the eye"; his manner is characterized by "incoherence—an inconsistency" and nervous agitation. He has, in fact, all the symptoms of pernicious anemia—extreme pallor, weakness, nervous and muscular affliction, alternating periods of activity and torpor—but it is an anemia, as Usher now makes perfectly clear, beyond the reach of mere medical treatment. He explains "what he conceived to be the nature of his malady .. . a constitutional and a family evil and one for which he despaired to find a remedy." He confesses that he is a "bounden slave" to an "anomalous species" of terror. Roderick discloses, further, that he is enchained by superstition in regard to the Usher house, and that "much of the peculiar gloom which thus afflicted him could be traced to a more natural and far more palpable origin—to the severe and long-continued illness—indeed to the evidently approaching dissolution—of a tenderly beloved sister." And the invalid reveals immediately that tenderly beloved is ironically intended by speaking with a "bitterness which I can never forget" of Madeline's impending death.

When Madeline herself now appears, at some little distance, the guest regards her with "an utter astonishment not unmingled with dread; .. . A sensation of stupor oppressed me [a characteristic reaction to the succubus] as my eyes followed her retreating steps." Roderick himself is quite evidently terror-sticken. Reluctant to grasp the import of the plain evidence with which he has so far been presented—not to mention the supernatural assault upon his own psyche—the narrator learns that Madeline's illness has been diagnosed as "of a partially cataleptical character," which is to say, to even the most casual student of necromancy, that she has the common ability of witches to enter at will upon a trance-like, death-like state of suspended animation. Her "settled apathy" and "gradual wasting away of the person" are to be accounted for by the corresponding condition in her victim.

Following Madeline's presumed death the friends occupy themselves with poring over old books that have a curiously significant connection with Usher's dilemma. Among them are the "Chiromancy" of Robert Flud, Jean D'Indagine, and De la Chambre (dealing with palmistry). Even more significantly, "One favorite volume was a small octavo edition of the 'Directorium Inquisitorium,' by the Dominican Eymeric de Gironne" (on exorcising witches and ferreting out other sorts of heretics). But Usher's "chief delight, however, was found in the perusal of an exceedingly rare and curious book in quarto Gothic—the manual of a forgotten church—the Vigiliae Mortuorum secundum Chorum Ecclesiae Maguntinae." The "wild ritual of this work"—the Watches of the Dead according to the Choir of the Church of Mainz—is, of course, the "Black Mass."

These books fail to provide a text for Roderick, who decides to imprison Madeline, as he says, by "preserving her corpse for a fortnight (previously to its final interment,) in one of the numerous vaults within the walls of the building." Here the plodding narrator at last scents the truth: "The brother had been led to his resolution .. . by consideration of the unusual character of the malady of the deceased, of certain obtrusive and eager inquiries on the part of her medical men, and of the remote and exposed situation of the burial-ground of the family. I will not deny that when I called to mind the sinister countenance of the person whom I met upon the staircase on the day of my arrival at the house, I had no desire to oppose what I regarded as at best but a harmless, and by no means an unnatural precaution" (italics mine).

Alone the two friends encoffin the body and bear it to the vault. One last look at the mocking features of Madeline, and then the lid to the coffin is screwed down, the massive iron door secured. "Some days of bitter grief ensue, but soon, sensing danger from a wonted quarter, Roderick Usher spends his restless hours consumed by the old horror, which he verges on confiding to the narrator: "There were times, indeed, when I thought his unceasingly agitated mind was laboring with some oppressive secret, to divulge which he struggled for the necessary courage." As he confesses later—"I now tell you that I heard her first feeble movement in the hollow coffin"( hollow in the sense that its vampiric occupant is scarcely physical in nature)—Usher is perfectly aware of Madeline's impending escape. And on the final night the guest himself suffers an experience which suggests that her evil spirit is already abroad. Endeavoring to sleep, he cannot "reason off the nervousness which had dominion over me." The room, he feels, is exerting a bewildering influence: "An irrepressible tremor gradually pervaded my frame; and, at length, there sat upon my very heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm. Shaking this off with a gasp and a struggle, I uplifted myself upon the pillows" (italics mine), and now he hears "low and indefinite sounds." Shortly he is joined by Usher, radiating "mad hilarity" and restrained hysteria, who rushes to a casement window and throws it "freely open to the storm." It is not difficult to imagine that all the old fiendish Ushers in the distant cemetery are, disembodied, somehow present. A whirlwind (traditionally signalizing a spiritual presence) "had apparently collected its force in our vicinity; for there were frequent and violent alterations in the direction of the wind; and the exceeding density of the clouds .. . did not prevent our perceiving the life-like velocity with which they flew careering from all points against each other."

The last of the Ushers is persuaded to leave the window, which is closed against electrical phenomena of "ghastly origin," and the guest begins to read aloud from the "Mad Trist," whose descriptions of sound are horribly reproduced by Madeline as she leaves her prison and approaches the listeners. Roderick's final words are "a low, hurried, and gibbering murmur" punctuated by extraordinarily meaningful phrases: "'I dared not speak!... Oh! whither shall I fly? . . . Do I not distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of her heart?'" (Again, the slow and heavy pulse is traditionally characteristic of preternatural creatures.) Poe's accentuation of the miraculous aspects of the tale continues to the end. The sister reels upon the threshold, "then, with a low moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated." She is a vampire to the finish, and there is no escaping the shock of absolute recognition in "From that chamber, and from that mansion, I fled aghast."

In this view "The Fall of the House of Usher"—typical of Poe in its exploration of abysmal degradation—creates an experience that possesses, within itself, credibility and unity of technique once the basic situation is granted. And from the artist's treatment of the theme, the active existence of malignant evil in our world, emerges his partly optimistic and partly ironic commentary: Evil in the long run feeds incestuously upon itself, and it is self-defeating, self-consuming, self-annihilating; the short run is another matter.