Hello, Goths and Scholars!

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Welcome to Recorded Gothic’s first ever summary video!

 

These videos aim to go through the plot of the chosen story, clearing up any misunderstandings for first time Gothic readers, picking out the most relevant quotes, and discussing where the story fits in the literary arena. This week’s summary is Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. I will be using the Penguin Classics Edition of The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings. There are PDFs available so you don’t need to purchase a copy, and YouTube has many audio book of it.

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Original Publication

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As this is the first summary video, I thought I should just say that it is at this point that I like to go through where the story was originally published, and some quick  anecdotes about that.

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The Fall of the House of Usher was originally offered to, and rejected by, Jame E. Heath, because he doubted “whether the readers of The Messenger have much relish for tales of the German School” (by this he meant stories of legend, of the fantastic).[1] He continued, “I doubt very much whether tales of the wild, improbable and terrible class, can ever been permanently popular in this country. Charles Dickens it appears to me has given the final death blow to writings of that description.” (p. 110). I mean we can’t be too upset. He is right, there are almost no books, films, or even songs that talk about the improbable or the terrible now… I guess it all died out.

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“Poe eventually sold the story to Burton’s Gentleman's Magazine for ten $10” (about $190 dollars today’s money), which is not much at all.[2]

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Where does it sit in Poe’s canon?

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When I talk about where a text fits in Poe’s individual canon, I am going to be talking about how critics generally think about it now. This is a great thing to know when starting an essay on a text, because you can put in the introduction “Poe’s [title of text] is viewed by the literary community as [insert quote].”

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When it comes to where The Fall of the House of Usher sits in Poe’s portfolio, it is described as “one of Poe’s finest tales […] one of the short-fiction masterpieces of all time [...] founded solidly on Gothic tradition,” (Galloway, 1986, p. xvii), and “The Fall of The House of Usher probably measures as one of Poe’s greatest achievements in the short story”. [3]

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The Plot

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The story opens with the narrator arriving at the melancholy House of Usher. The description of the house is so stunning, and you could choose any line to quote, but my personal favourite is “I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression” – eerie, sublime, not quite right. Poe offers a perfect description of what the feeling of eeriness is.[4] For those of you who don't know, something is eery when you are confronted with something you know, but it is mutated in some way that alters it creepily. The best way I can show it is by putting up a picture of Achraf Baznani’s Surreal Hands.[5] In this image we are seeing something we are used to (an empty suit on a coat-hanger), but then we see the hand, and the picture adopts an eerie tone.

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The narrator informs the reader that he is at this house, to see “one of my [his] boon companions in boyhood” (p. 91), Roderick Usher, who had sent him a letter asking for companionship while he suffers from “nervous agitation,” “acute bodily illness” and “mental disorder” (p. 91). These three things are very Gothic. The narrator follows this by stating that something he found interesting about the Ushers was that “the entire family lay in the direct line of descent, and had always” (p. 91  ). The is basically translated as “a hell of a lot of incest.” These Ushers are pedigree.

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As the narrator stands outside the Usher house, he notices a thin crack from the roof, down the front of the building: “A barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn” (p. 91).

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He is shown to where Roderick is, and he is shocked at the decay his friend has endured. “I gazed upon him with a feeling half of pity, half of awe. Surely, man had never before so terribly altered, in so brief a period, as had Roderick Usher!” (p. 94).

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Roderick's sister then walks through the room: “while he spoke, the lady Madeline (for so was she called) passed through a remote portion of the apartment, and, without having noticed my presence, disappeared” (p. 97). This description is very ghost-like. She is passing through a remote portion of the room, so she is walking through the shadows. This is a great quote to know, because Madeline is not described as much as you would think throughout this story.

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The narrator then spends the next week trying to cheer his old friend up. The narrator states “for several days ensuing, her name was unmentioned” (p. 97). Roderick’s illness meant that he could not listen to music, except when he was playing guitar. He plays for the narrator and improvises ballads. He then is told of the death of Lady Madeline. As Roderick is nailing down the coffin, the narrator states that he sees the “blush upon the bosom and the face, and that suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so terrible in death” (p. 102). The narrator sees this as creepy, but normal. Usher believed this to indicate she is alive, but says nothing and they seal up her tomb.

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Roderick’s mental state worsens. Roderick comes to the narrator's bedroom, which is situated directly above the vault, and throws open his window to a storm. He notices that the tarn surrounding the house seems to glow in the dark. The narrator attempts to calm Roderick by reading aloud The Mad Trist, a novel involving a knight named Ethelred who breaks into a dwelling in an attempt to escape an approaching storm, only to find a palace of gold guarded by a dragon.

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As the narrator reads of the knight's forcible entry into the dwelling, cracking and ripping sounds are heard somewhere in the house. When the dragon is described as shrieking as it dies, a shriek is heard, again within the house. Roderick becomes increasingly hysterical, and eventually exclaims that these sounds are being made by his sister, who was in fact alive when she was entombed: “Madman! I tell you that she now stands without the door!” (p. 108).

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The bedroom door swings open to reveal Madeline standing there,  “there was blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame. For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and fro 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” (p. 108).

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With Roderick and his sister both dead on the floor the narrator flees the house in fear. As he leaves he turns back and sees the yet another “fall of usher” as the house collapses in on itself. The story ends with the narrators saying, “I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder—there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters—and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the “House of Usher” (p. 108). We see the Fall of the Ushers twice, with the siblings and the house. 

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Critical opinions

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So normally in these videos, this would be where I would talk about the popular opinions about the origins of the story (i.e., where Poe took “inspiration” from), and then talk about interpretations of the text. I came across an essay by Agnieszka Monnet who does a fantastic job at running through the compelling critical overviews of Poe’s work, and that serves as a great resource jumping off point. So for Recorded Gothic, I followed up on some of Monnet’s suggested avenues of interpretations and included quotes from some of  the suggested critics to best help your writing.

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The first one she highlighted was a psychoanalytical approach by Princess Marie Bonaparte (Princess George of Greece and Denmark), “a member of Freud’s inner circle in the 1920s,” and author of The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation.[6] Bonaparte was of the thought that “Poe’s work emanated largely from his unresolved sense of loss of his mother, and that Usher was a projection of this loss” (Monnet, p. 322).  

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Bonaparte states, in true Freudian fashion, that “Poe was a potential sado-necrophilist all his work shows and only his most purely literary devotees would deny it.”[7] I, personally, do disagree. I think it's highly unfair to assess Poe in this way. She suggests that that The Fall of the House of Usher is "Poe's phantasy of the mother who will return from the grave to find her son and claim him in death” (p. 202). I have read Bonepart’s text, and I feel that she doesn’t evidence this at all.

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Bonaparte suggests that this was Poe expressing his deep guilt. He married his cousin in some psychosomatic attempt to fill the void of his mother’s love, he feels guilt for both the act of incest and the strain of a motherless existence, and writes the story in which he is both punished with mental illness, and dragged to the grave by his very mistakes.

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It is vital to remember that neither Monnet, nor I, are suggesting that the princess is to be believed in anyway. In fact, Julian Symons states that “the insights given into Poe’s work by her study are rarely of direct literary value,” so Bonaparte is often ignored.[8] But, that being said, it is good to know the ideas surrounding Poe and The Fall of the House of Usher.

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Monnet also talks about D.H Lawrence’s interpretation of the text. Lawrence’s view is that The Fall of the House of Usher is about the mutual destruction of love. He states, “Madeline and Roderick exemplify the mutual destruction and loss of soul that can occur when two people love each other too much” (Monnet, p. 322). In other words, it is Roderick’s intense love for his sister (in a romantic way) that causes him to go insane, causes her body to decay, and ultimately results in both their death.

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There are many other critics with original and very interesting interpretations of The Fall of the House of Usher, and I suggest avoiding the ones who only talk about the incest in the story, because I see it ultimately as a tragic love story, and I feel all of the incest points have been made. Other critics include G. R Thomson (who suggests that the Usher house is a metaphor for one descent into madness due to simply biological mental illness), and J. R Hammond (who suggests that Usher is a metaphor for Poe himself, but in a different way to Bonepart's reading). With these interpretations it is vital to keep in mind that Poe stated that “there is scarcely one respectable word to be said” about allegory.[9] Therefore one is compelled to ignore any deeper readings into The Fall of the House of Usher – but as scholars, we just can’t help ourselves. Please do keep this in mind though!

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Poe at this point

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So, the context of Poe has been rather thrashed out at this point, but I think it is important to give you some solid facts about Poe’s life while he was writing this story. So this text was published in September, 1939. By this point Poe was 30 years old, and had been married to his wife, Virginia Clemm for three years. In those three years he had moved to Richmond, New York, and Philadelphia in hope of employment. Though he sells a few stories, his only real employment comes in the year of this story's publication, when he becomes the editor of Burton’s Gentleman’s magazine, to which he submits quite a few stories and reviews.[1]

 

That’s The Fall of the House of Usher! In this video we covered the publication history, the context, the plot, and some critical opinions. I really think all of this information is great to have if you are beginning to write an essay on the text (obviously read the text if you were writing on it, do not rely solely on my summary).

If you having any questions please email me, comment on the videos, or tweet me. I am here to help your educational development, and I would love to clear up any confusion if I haven't been clear in some areas. Subscribe, like, and hit that notification button!

 

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Remember to read more Gothic and make your nightmares fear you!

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Sadie B, signing off.

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Footnotes

 

[1] James Heath, ‘James Heath Condemns Poe’s Germanism', in Edgar Allen Poe, ed. by Ian Walker (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), pp. 109-111 (p. 109). (All further references will be indicated within the text).

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[2] David Galloway, ‘Introduction’, in The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings, ed. by David Galloway, (London: Penguin Books, 1986), pp. xvii-lv (p. xvii). (All further references will be indicated within the text).

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[3] Benjamin Franklin Fisher, ‘Poe and the Gothic tradition’, in The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe, ed. by Kevin J. Hayes, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 72-92 (p. 84).

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[4] Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ in The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings, ed. by. David Galloway, (London: Penguin Books, 1986), pp. 90-109 (p. 91). (All further references will be indicated within the text).

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[5] Achraf Baznani (2015) Surreal Hands. Available at: https://www.baznani.com/artwork/ (Accessed: 14 May 2019).

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[6] Agnieska Monnet, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, in The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. by Scott Peeples, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 320-337 (p. 322).

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[7] Marie Bonaparte, The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-analytic Interpretation, (Albury: Imago Publishing Company, 1949), p. 202.

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[8] Julian Symons, The Life And Works Of Edgar Allan Poe, (London: House of Stratus, 2014), p. 249. (All further references will be indicated within the text).

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[9] Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Tale-Writing: N. Hawthorne’, in The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. XIII, ed. by J. A. Harrison, (Virginia: University of Virginia, 1902), pp. 141-155 (p. 143).

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[10] Tatiani Rapatzikou, ‘Chronology’, in The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings, (London: Penguin Books, 1986), pp. xi-xv (p. xiii).

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Word count: 2293

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Bibliography

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Baznani, Achraf (2015) Surreal Hands. Available at: https://www.baznani.com/artwork/ (Accessed: 14 May 2019).

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Bonaparte, Marie , The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-analytic Interpretation, (Albury: Imago Publishing Company, 1949)

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Fisher, Benjamin Franklin , ‘Poe and the Gothic tradition’, in The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe, ed. by Kevin J. Hayes, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 72-92

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Galloway, David , ‘Introduction’, in The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings, ed. by David Galloway, (London: Penguin Books, 1986), pp. xvii-lv 

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Heath, James , ‘James Heath Condemns Poe’s Germanism', in Edgar Allen Poe, ed. by Ian Walker (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), pp. 109-111

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Monnet, Agnieska , ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, in The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. by Scott Peeples, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 320-337

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Poe, Edgar Allan , ‘Tale-Writing: N. Hawthorne’, in The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. XIII, ed. by J. A. Harrison, (Virginia: University of Virginia, 1902), pp. 141-155

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Poe, Edgar Allan , ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ in The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings, ed. by. David Galloway, (London: Penguin Books, 1986), pp. 90-109

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Rapatzikou, Tatiani , ‘Chronology’, in The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings, (London: Penguin Books, 1986), pp. xi-xv

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Symons, Julian , The Life And Works Of Edgar Allan Poe, (London: House of Stratus, 2014), p. 249

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