The Fall of the House of Usher: Disintegration of the Artistic Mind

Introduction: The Tragedy of Thought and the Disintegration of the Artistic Mind. If Shakespeare’s Hamlet can be categorized as “the tragedy of thought,” Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” can be regarded as “the disintegration of the artistic mind.” The tale is ambitious, even for Poe, as it embraces several gothic and romantic conventions—such as premature burial—along with any number of biblical and classical allusions. The very shape of the Usher castle, juxtaposed with the phrenological details of Roderick Usher’s features, suggests that we have entered into the labyrinth of the mind, in this case, the psyche of an artist cut off from the source of his creativity. On another plane, Poe’s narrative persona offers a rare glimpse into the horrific intricacies of the pagan birth process, an incestuous relationship that precedes moral civilization, as the Egyptian gods Isis and Osiris are said to have copulated in the womb. The intensity of the epiphany afforded our narrator is a blinding truth, and he will force his visions, these “considerations beyond our depth,” down, downward, into the dark abyss of the triumphant tarn, the muddy world of the libidinous subconscious.

The Social Call and Usher’s Pathological Malady. The tale proceeds as a social call: A nameless narrator answers the request of an old boyhood friend, Roderick Usher, to provide social solace from some nameless, debilitating malady that has rendered Usher neurasthenic to a pathological degree. Usher has become morbidly acute in all his senses, literally too sensitive to endure life. Both the House of Usher and its environs have no specific locale other than “a singularly dreary tract of country,” a wasteland, and the melancholy atmosphere of the House of Usher, its aura of moral oppressiveness and self-containment, has another revealing trait: the “barely perceptible fissure” that proceeds down the length of the structure of the building, a suggestion of bifurcated consciousness or schizophrenia. The narrator finds the state of Usher’s health shocking; Usher reveals that part of his moral gloom is traceable to the imminent death of his cataleptic twin sister, Madeline, “his last and only relative on earth.”

The narrator indicates that the Usher family suffers hereditary psychological degeneration as a result of inbreeding, of what Poe tactfully calls “collateral issue . . . undeviating transmission, from sire to son, of the patrimony of the name.” Madeline dies and is buried in the family crypt, after which a fearful tempest arises.

The Tempest, the Mad Trist, and the Resurrected Madeline. As the narrator and Usher spend the night reading the “Mad Trist” of Sir Launcelot Canning, life imitates art as the literary knight Ethelred shatters the hermit’s door, and we hear the death cry of the dragon; so, too, the resurrected Lady Madeline enters in full fury through the portals of the library. She falls upon her brother and kills him. As the narrator flees the scene, the “full, setting, and blood-red moon” expands the fissure of the House of Usher, and the edifice sinks below “the deep and dark tarn at my feet.”

Interpretation: The Inner Sanctum and the Archetypal Creative Neurotic. We cannot interpret the tale realistically, as weird commentary on mismanaged real estate. Clearly the narrator has penetrated into some inner sanctum, which may well be some form of Egyptian pyramid. In Roderick Usher, the aging and withered “pharaoh,” Poe has created an archetypal creative neurotic, the model for further studies by Joris-Karl Huysmans and Oscar Wilde. The narrator notes Usher’s “passionate devotion to the intricacies, perhaps even more than to the orthodox and easily recognizable beauties, of musical science.”

As the narrator proceeds to Roderick’s studio, he notes “the Gothic archway,” and then, led by a silent valet “through many dark and intricate passages,” he encounters the physician of the family, who wears “a mingled expression of low cunning and perplexity.” When we add to these descriptions Roderick’s “ghastly pallor” of skin, the “miraculous lustre of the eye,” and the “silken hair . . . with its wild, gossamer texture” that “floated rather than fell about the face,” we have indeed met the living incarnation of Coleridge’s fearful visionary in “Kubla Khan”: “Beware! Beware! / His flashing eyes, his floating hair!” (ll. 49–50).

Dante’s Gate, Orpheus, and the Haunted Palace. The archway may well suggest Dante’s gate of hell, and the troubling physician whom we meet after passing by way of “meandering with a mazy motion” (l. 25) through Usher’s castle provides a “mingled measure” (l. 33) of anxiety as to the mental and moral health of the protagonists. The narrator later describes the “wild improvisations” of Usher’s “speaking guitar,” a parody of the legendary Orpheus, whose “floating hair” signifies his decapitation by the maenads. Long hours with Usher leave in the narrator no clear recollection of their character, since an “excited and highly distempered ideality threw a sulphureous lustre over all.”

The two are dedicated to hellish rites, and the litany of words Poe invokes, such as “a want of moral energy,” “a constitutional and family evil,” a “darkness” that “poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe, in one unceasing radiation of gloom,” all point to some original sin, since, as James Joyce points out in his “Fire sermon” in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “the fires of Hell give forth no light.” The culmination of this “evil music” is Usher’s original poem “The Haunted Palace,” whose theme appears to be the fall of thought. Critics of Poe’s short story consistently point out that “transcendence” in this tale is downward, and that the grim, unnatural union of Roderick and his sister, Madeline, at the end has its source in the father-daughter incestuous bonding in Medea, and in Coleridge’s equally chilling line describing “woman wailing for her demon lover” (“Kubla Khan” 1. 16).

Madeline Usher and the Androgynous Figure. Madeline Usher is, of necessity, a more elusive figure. The narrator glimpses her but once, and he remarks of his “utter astonishment not unmingled with dread,” another pass at “Kubla Khan,” whose other female figure is of “a damsel with a dulcimer” (l. 37), an image more fitting for Roderick himself. That Roderick and Madeline remain androgynous figures is typical of Poe, who always wrestles with issues of sexual identity. Madeline provides Roderick’s female perspective, and he has both isolated her and violated her.

His painting that most captivates the narrator is of an underground vault or tomb, illuminated by “a flood of intense rays” that “bathed the whole in a ghastly and inappropriate splendour.” Roderick depicts Madeline’s burial chamber, and its moral degeneracy is implied, so much so that the narrator compares its effect to that of the “reveries of Fuseli,” noted for his study The Nightmare. When he and Roderick place Madeline within the “donjon” of the castle as her resting place, the narrator complains that “there sat upon my very heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm,” a depiction of Fuseli’s vision exactly!

Roderick’s Dissolution and the Apocalyptic Finale. With the apparent death of Madeline, Roderick enters the last phase of his own dissolution, “a species of mad hilarity in his eyes.” A whirlwind combines with “the rank miasma of the tarn,” and we recall Hamlet’s disgust with things “rank and gross in nature” (Hamlet 1.2.138) after learning of the unnatural circumstances of his father’s death. As the infuriated Madeline approaches and penetrates the library, Roderick assumes his final, feminine guise by asking, “Whither shall I fly?” a direct echo of hapless Lady Macduff in Shakespeare’s Scottish tragedy (Macbeth 4.2.81). Like a Fury out of Erebus, Madeline appears out of “the ponderous and ebony jaws” of the house.

“There was blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle,” which captures both her breaking of the vault and her brother’s violation of her virginity. That he supposed her dead at the time only adds to the apocalyptic horror of the vision, confirmed by the “fierce breath of the whirlwind” and the final music of destruction, “the voice of a thousand waters” (see Ezekiel 43:2) that marks the Ushers’ ghastly marriage as Persephone delivers the coup de grâce to her misbegotten Hades.

For Discussion or Writing.
1.Consider Hawthorne’s “The Artist of the Beautiful” as a companion piece to “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Discuss their relative views on the power and limitations of art. In what ways do these authors suggest a tension between aesthetics and morality?

2. Trace the way that Poe communicates Usher’s interior, psychological state through descriptions of architecture and landscape. With this as background, explain how the sinking of the House of Usher into the tarn makes sense as the logical counterpart to Roderick’s dissolution.