painting – Nicki Chaput

“The Fall of the House of Usher” is one of my favorite Edgar Allan Poe stories, so I wanted to share an essay about it I wrote in college. You can watch the YouTube video essay adaptation here:

The Nebulous Role of the Narrator in the House of Usher

In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” doubling and reflection foreshadow the fate of Roderick Usher, Madeline Usher, and the titular house itself. Doubling of several major aspects of the story occurs: the two halves of the Usher house split by a zigzagged fissure, Roderick and Madeline, and the Usher estate’s paradoxically dilapidated yet intact infrastructure. But the unnamed narrator breaks from this pairing off of elements—he is an outsider, not a part of either concept of the House of Usher, and he is the only one who manages to escape the crumbling mansion and live to tell the tale. Thematically, he seems to disrupt the doubling found throughout the rest of the story. However, the story integrates the narrator gradually into the mirrors of the narrative by splitting his personality into halves vying for control, drawing parallels between him and Roderick through his character development, and reflecting his body and disposition in the physical house of Usher.

At first, the narrator seems completely separate from the phantasmagoria of the estate, beginning the story skeptical of the supposed supernatural elements of the estate and maintaining that skepticism until he hears Madeline break out of the vault. When the narrator first approaches the estate, “a sense of insufferable gloom pervade[s his] spirit” (49) for reasons he cannot identify. He explains this gloom away, surmising that the estate is only unnerving due to its arrangement, and “that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene… would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression” (49). Later, when Roderick tells him that he believes his family’s destiny is tied to “the method of collocation of [the] stones” (58) of the Usher mansion, the narrator doesn’t believe him and sardonically writes, “Such opinions need no comment, and I will make none” (58). He continues to try to convince himself that everything frightening or supernatural about the estate is coincidental, even in the highly unlikely scenario when he reads “Mad Trist” to Roderick and believes not once, but twice that the house mimicking the sounds he imagined for both the cracking of the door to the hermit’s hut and the screech of the dragon was a “coincidence” (63). However, this logical personality is not the only one residing in the narrator by the end of the story.

The story splits the narrator’s personality in two, a split which mirrors the fissure running down the middle of the House of Usher, and the second half of his personality, based on emotion, emerges throughout his sojourn at the House of Usher and erodes the logical part of him. After failing to shake off the “depression of soul” (49) he feels looking at the reflection of the house in an attempt to rearrange its ghastly features, the narrator writes,

I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while… 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. (49)

He can logically determine that combinations of objects can elicit strong emotions, but he cannot shake off those emotions. He later makes a similar observation specifically about fear: “the consciousness of the rapid increase of my superstition… served mainly to accelerate the increase itself. Such, I have long known, is the paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as a basis” (51). Over the course of the story, that paradoxical law starts to affect the narrator more and more as he observes the dreary interior decoration of the house, such as “the sombre tapestries of the walls” (52), the “cadaverousness” (52) of Roderick, and other frightening details. About a week after Madeline’s death, fear overcomes the narrator as he attempts to sleep, “overpowered by an intense sentiment of horror, unaccountable yet unendurable” (61). After letting Roderick into his apartment on that stormy night, the narrator notices “the unnatural light of a faintly luminous and distinctly visible gaseous exhalation which hung about and enshrouded the mansion” (62) through the window. Attempting to convince Roderick that the lights are due to “merely electrical phenomena” or “the rank miasma of the tarn” (62), the narrator echoes the prior times he described a strange phenomenon and accounted for its origin to himself, and thus this assurance comes across more as him trying to convince himself than Roderick. And despite his attribution of the first two odd noises during his reading of “Mad Trist” to coincidence, by the third “coincidence” the narrator’s logical mind can’t take it anymore, and “completely unnerved, [he leaps] to [his] feet” (64). The story ends with the narrator fleeing the mansion “aghast” (65), unable to account logically for Madeline raising herself from the dead, the splitting of the mansion in two, or the sudden sinking of the entirety of the House of Usher into the tarn.

In addition to splitting his personality in two, the fear that consumes the narrator, overriding his ability to think logically about his circumstances, makes him a mirror to Roderick Usher. The pair start off as foils: Roderick is a recluse interested in occult practices such as “chiromancy” (59), while the narrator is an embodiment of the “society” (50) from which Roderick secludes himself who is unwilling to believe in Roderick’s “superstitious impressions in regard to the dwelling which he tenanted” (54). The pair also view each other quite differently: to Roderick, the narrator is “his best, and indeed his only personal friend,” while the narrator admits that he “really knew little of [his] friend” (50) despite their childhood spent together. Likewise, the two begin the story with opposite dispositions. While Roderick is happy to see his friend, he is pessimistic about his prospects, telling the narrator, “I must perish in this deplorable folly” (54); still, the narrator does his best to comfort his friend. As the narrator gets to know Roderick better, however, his optimism towards raising the man’s spirits wanes, and his attitude becomes more defeatist like Roderick’s:

And thus, as a closer and still intimacy admitted me more unreservedly into the recesses of his spirit, the more bitterly did I perceive the futility of all attempt at 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. (55)

He also starts to believe, or at least understand, Roderick’s convictions about the house as the story progresses, like when Roderick performs “The Haunted Palace” for him: “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” (56). After Madeline’s apparent death, despite criticizing Roderick’s reasoning (or lack thereof) on various matters previously, the narrator begins to think like him, agreeing to help Roderick entomb Madeline in a vault underneath his apartment. After Madeline’s entombment, even the narrator notices his growing resemblance to Roderick, bitterly acknowledging: “It was no wonder that his condition terrified—that it infected me. I felt creeping upon me, by slow yet certain degrees, the wild influences of his own fantastic yet impressive superstitions” (60). He even uses the exact same words as Roderick to describe his condition: when Roderick explains his illness to the narrator, he describes it as a “pitiable condition” (54); during the tempest, the narrator calls his illness “the pitiable condition into which [he] had fallen” (61).

While the narrator mimics Roderick, his mind and body also mirror the Usher mansion. The narrator immediately anthropomorphizes the Usher mansion, emphasizing its “vacant eye-like windows” (49) twice, making it a suitable projection for his personality. As mentioned previously, the “barely perceptible fissure… extending from the roof of the building in front, [making] its way down the wall in a zigzag direction” (51) mirrors the narrator’s two temperaments, logic and emotion. The atmosphere surrounding the house also illustrates the narrator’s mental state. When the narrator first sees the house in the distance, the narrator feels a depression “which [he] can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium” (49). The otherworldly depression that plagues the narrator manifests in “an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn—a pestilent and mystic vapour, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued” (51) that hangs about the Usher estate. The interior of the mansion, where the narrator spends the majority of his visit, also reflects his growing malaise: “I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all” (52). In addition to depicting the narrator’s mind, the Usher house also represents his body’s deterioration.While the physical effects of the illness the narrator experiences are nowhere near as debilitating as the ones Roderick suffers from, the “wild inconsistency between [the Usher mansion’s] still perfect adaptation of parts, and the crumbling condition of the individualstones” (51) still parallels the tenuous maintenance of the narrator’s logical brain within his fear-ridden body as “an irrepressible tremour gradually pervade[s his] frame; and, at length, there [sits] upon [his] very heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm” (61).

If the narrator is just as susceptible as everything else to the doubling in the story, then it makes sense to question why he alone survives. If the narrator becomes a mirror for Roderick, apparently replacing Madeline’s role, why does Roderick die while the narrator lives? While the narrator mirrors Roderick, he does not entirely take over Madeline’s function in the story; he does not possess the physical “similitude” or “sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature” (60) that Madeline andRoderick possess as twins that bind them together. Madeline and Roderick are two parts of a whole, Roderick’s “morbid acuteness of the senses” (53) complementing Madeline’s catalepsy. Also, unlike the narrator, who becomes a victim of fear like Roderick, Madeline becomes Roderick’s fear incarnate. Roderick believes that he will die “in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR” (54), and in the penultimate paragraph of the story, his prediction becomes true: “[Madeline] fell heavily inward upon the personof her brother, and… bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated” (65). Moreover, while the house reflects the narrator both physically and mentally, he is still not a part of the House of Usher, neither “the family [nor] the family mansion” (50-51). Because of his lack of family ties, the narrator is able to escape, and the power the house wields over him ceases as soon as he crosses “the old causeway,” watching the “fissure [splitting the house in two] rapidly widen… and the deep and dank tarn at [the narrator’s] feet close… sullenly and silently over the fragments of the ‘House of Usher’” (65).

Though the narrator at first seems to escape the doubling present throughout the narrative, he is actually a major part of it, as it is through his perspective that readers feel the gloom that permeates the House of Usher in both senses of the appellation. However, the narrator survives the fall of the House because he is a copy of Roderick and the mansion, not a part of either of them. The extent of duplication in this story is astounding; there are many more examples of mirroring, doubling, and twinning throughout it that are not directly pertinent to the narrator’s story arc, such as the significance of the reflection of the mansion in the tarn upon which both the narrator and Roderick remark. The careful braiding of this imagery illustrates Poe’s approach to writing. In his essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” Poe writes about the drafting of “The Raven,” stating, “no one point in its composition is referrible either to accident or intuition—that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem” (545).