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Order and Sentience in “The Fall of the House of Usher”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

E. Arthur Robinson
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Extract

Although traditionally “The Fall of the House of Usher” has been regarded as a “horror” tale, close examination reveals that it possesses many characteristics similar to those which Poe termed “ratiocinative” in other stories. In 1936 Arthur Hobson Quinn, after defining the tale as “arabesque,” pointed out briefly its systematic duplication of theme in the treatment of Usher, of his house, and of his relation to his sister. More recent scholarship has concentrated upon reclassifying the story and upon exploring the subconscious or even Freudian recesses of Roderick's nature, particularly as these concern his attitude toward his sister Madeline. In the present study I propose to continue Quinn's investigation of the structure and form of the story, including recurrent ideas and character relationships. My thesis is that behind the mood and the characterization of “The Fall of the House of Usher” exists a pattern of thought and of thematic development as rigorous in its way as the more sharply denned rationality of “The Purloined Letter” or “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and that a study of this pattern explain the significant themes of the story.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 76 , Issue 1 , March 1961 , pp. 68 - 81
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1961

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References

1 American Fiction, An Historical and Critical Survey (New York, 1936), pp. 83–84.

2 For “The Fall of the House of Usher” as a tale of horror and mood, see Edward Shanks, Edgar Allan Poe (New York, 1937), pp. 131–132; Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Fiction (New York, 1943), pp. 202205. For reclassification of the story, see Killis Campbell, ed. Poe's Short Stories (New York, 1927), p. xvii; W. H. Auden, ed. Poe's Selected Prose and Poetry (New York, 1950), pp. vi-viii. For able psychological and symbolic studies of Usher's personality see Maurice Beebe, “The Universe of Roderick Usher,” Person, xxxvn (Spring 1956), 147–160; Patrick F. Quinn, The French Face of Edgar Poe (Carbondale, 111., 1957), pp. 240–251; Edward H. Davidson, Poe: A Critical Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), pp. 196–198. For Freudian analysis of Roderick Usher, see Patrick F. Quinn above and particularly D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York, 1923), pp. 110–116. Darrel Abel, “A Key to the House of Usher,” UTQ, xvm (January 1949), 176–185, analyzes the tale as a whole, with emphasis upon the conflict between good and evil represented by symbols of Life-Reason in opposition to Death-Madness.

3 See Joseph Wood Krutch, Edgar Allan Poe (London, 1926), pp. 116–117.

4 Arthur Hobson Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe (New York, 1942), p. 271.

5 See the complete passage in Krutch, pp. 115–117, with Krutch's suggestion that Poe's “published statement concerning his mechanical methods of composition” was a rationalization of his neurotic visions. Critics often have found it necessary to choose between subconscious and conscious aspects of Poe's art; on the contrary, its fascination may lie precisely in the combination of the two.

6 Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Poe are from The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Edmund Clarence Sted-man and George Edward Woodberry, 10 vols. (New York, 1914). Parenthetical volume and page numbers otherwise uncredited are to this work and edition. For Poe's theory of the short story in his review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales see vu, 36–43. Quotations of “The Fall of the House of Usher” are from i, 11–41.

7 The Cycle of American Literature (New York, 1955), pp. 77–78.

8 Poe applies the term “arabesque” to Usher's wild, uncut hair that “floated . . . about the face,” with emphasis upon the visual pattern as well as upon the mood.

9 These italics do not appear in the 1914 Works (i, 21), but they are present in all other editions which I have examined.

10 The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. John Ward Ostrom (Cambridge, Mass., 1948), i, 160–161.

11 On Poe's belief in “sentience,” see Beebe, op. cit. (above, note 2), p. 154.

12 Patrick F. Quinn, The French Face of Edgar Poe, pp. 266–267, describes a similar relationship in Poe's story “Berenice”: “To see the organic in the inorganic—this is one of the typical modulations in our experience of the world which Poe makes possible. . . . Once the great barrier between living and non-living matter is broken down . . . fantastic correspondences are discovered to exist.”

13 Poe: A Critical Study, pp. 154, 196–198.

14 Studies in Classic American Literature, pp. 114–115. Lawrence states: “In psychoanalysis almost every trouble in the psyche is traced to an incest-desire” (p. 111). He disagrees with the inclusiveness of this statement, but finds it appropriate for the ills of Roderick and Madeline.

15 On evil and man's “perversity” in Poe's philosophy see Davidson, Poe, pp. 188, 192–193. On their place in Poe's fiction see N. Bryllion Fagin, The Histrionic Mr. Poe (Baltimore, 1949), p. 215. A valuable estimate of Freudian and other psychological interpretations of Poe may be found in Fagin, pp. 211–216.

16 “The Universe of Roderick Usher,” p. 157.

17 Patrick F. Quinn, The French Face of Edgar Poe, p. 246. Quinn accepts fully the reading that in willing Madeline's death Roderick is willing his own; in his interpretation Madeline symbolizes not specifically incestuous desire but the “dark, under side” or unconscious “evil” in Usher (pp. 244–245).

18 See Beebe, “The Universe of Roderick Usher,” p. 157: “while he lives, Madeline is not dead”; and see Abel, “A Key to the House of Usher,” p. 183: “Madeline's rising up from her coffin to claim her brother for death really suggests that he had mistakenly and perversely lingered among the living.”

19 Patrick F. Quinn, The French Face of Edgar Poe, p. 55.

20 Cf. Mary Devereaux's romantic description of Poe, stressing his “large and full eyes,” hair “fine as silk,” and the “beautiful” expression of his mouth; see Hervey Allen, Israfel (New York, 1926), i, 343, but also see A. H. Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe, p. 196, on “Mary Devereaux.” For further autobiographical implications of “The Fall of the House of Usher” see A. H. Quinn, p. 285, and Killis Campbell, ed. The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (Boston, 1917), p. 238.

21 See Allan Tate, “The Angelic Imagination: Poe and the Power of Words,” KR, xiv (Summer 1952), 461: “Poe . . . discovered our great subject, the disintegration of personality”; also Randall Stewart and Dorothy Bethurum, Classic American Fiction (New York, 1954), pp. 8–9, who see in Poe “one of the first to show the breakdown of the sensitive individual under the stresses of the modern world.” Tate declares that Poe is “transitional” because he “discovered our great subject . . . but kept it in a language that had developed in a tradition of unity and order.” Poe is transitional, but to the large degree to which he merged order and feeling in the theme of his stories, their ordered style is appropriate.

22 It is interesting to note that Ligeia, who also struggles against destruction, is likewise portrayed by Poe as descending from a “remotely ancient” family; as possessing a majestic forehead and brilliant eyes “far larger than the ordinary eyes of our own race”; and as having acquired esoteric learning which outshines Usher's but which cannot save her from death, though she succeeds in attaining a mortal resurrection.