Dave Schaafsma's Reviews > The Fall of the House of Usher

“The Fall of the House of Usher” is a classic Poe story, and helps us define just what it means to be “gothic” in nineteenth-century literature. Continuous dark, stormy weather, a huge decaying gothic-architectural-style house, continuous pervasive gloom, humans infused with all this.

Roderick Usher, pale and wild-haired owner of the house. Sick, maybe from the waters seeping from the tarn into the house? The fungi on the building? Is Roderick an opium eater? Living with his also pale and wild-haired wraith twin sister Madeline. Mental disorder, nervous agitation, mysterious house. Lead poisoning? (imposing a contemporary theory. . .). House decayed, with a crack in the foundation, tall ceilings, dimly lit.

Sonorous, formal language on the verge of the ridiculous: “cadaverousness, “ “pertinacity,” “phantasmagoric.” Language that matches the house, a little formal and brooding and stuffy.

“An excited and highly distempered ideality.” A romantic vision filled with dread, fear.

[“I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.” –Barthes]

The pleasures of the text, satisfying or at least calling up desire: aching, seductive. Tacking between the laughter of desire and the tears of heartbreak, loss. Death and darkness as delicious pleasures.

[Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language.—Barthes]

Rhapsodic painting and music. Presaged by Romantics Coleridge, Wordsworth, Liszt. An imagination intensified by anxiety. Decay. (Presaged themselves by Romeo, Macbeth, Hamlet?) The mad stoned suicidally romantic artist. Looking ahead to Baudelaire, to theBeats, to beat daddy Kerouac! Wild rhapsodic self-destruction.

“We painted and read together, or I listened, as if in a dream, to the wild improvisations of his speaking guitar.”

“A small picture [made by Roderick] presented the interior of an immensely long and rectangular vault or tunnel, with low walls, smooth, white, and without interruption or device.”

“He not infrequently accompanied himself with rhymed verbal improvisations.” [Hey! Flash forward to rap! Spoken word?]

The narrator and Usher seem to speak little, and alternately Usher lapses into melancholy, or wild incoherent, rhapsodic talking.

“Manic depression. . . ”—Jimi Hendrix

“A mere nervous affection, he [Roderick] immediately added, which would undoubtedly soon pass off” (as Lady Macbeth claimed about Macbeth who freaks out at the sight of Banquo’s ghost).
The house is, as if it were, his very soul, weighing on him. In contemporary gothic tales, Sylvie and Ruth and Lucie in Housekeeping, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the gothic House is the Soul. And the House seen as a tomb.

Or the house is to the human/family constitution as the body is to the mind/soul. When the mind breaks down in gothic tales, so does the body. The house crumbles as does the body.

So Madeline dies, put in a vault in the musty room below our narrator.
In grief, agitation, driven to madness, Usher succumbs to “gazing upon vacancy for long hours.”

They write, they draw, they play music, but they also read books, too, to heal, or to further sink into the gloom: the literature of dread. Life echoes the story the narrator is reading.

A knocking. What? Who’s there?! But she’s dead! Buried? Buried Madeline alive?!

“Madman! I tell you that she now stands without the door!” [Shudder]

(As I teenager I saw a B Vincent Price movie, “Premature Burial,” at a drive-in, and I actually screamed from the Big Reveal: SHE'S ALIVE! SHE'S ALIVE! ALIVE!)

Wild storm, house cracks at the fissure we early learned about, collapses (no spoiler here, remember that title) into the tarn [a small mountain lake!]. Nature in all its voluptuousness takes the house back into itself.

So. I liked it. There’s too little dialogue in the story, which for me is a fault, but it has its moments. A classic gothic horror story, one of the classic gothic stories.

Other castles: The Castle of Otranto by Walpole. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. The Haunting of Hill Huse by Jackson. TheIce Palace. Oh, any number of places in nineteenth century lit: Jane Yre, Wutherring Heights. The Turn of the Screw. The Others (film((. But you can't talk about gothic castles without this one in the conversation.