Story of Consciousness

- As in other of Poe's gothic tales, the delusiveness of the experience is rendered in and through the consciousness of the narrator, so that we participate in his Gothic horror while we are, at the same time, detached observers of it. In the image of the house as skull or death's head and the merging of the narrator's face with the face of the house, which is also Usher's face in the pool, we see once again in Poe the subtly ironic paralleling of narrative construction of the tale to its visual focal point and by having the face-like house of Usher sink into its own image, the final collapse into that void which is both the self and the universe simultaneously is complete. Nothing at all may have happened in the conventional sense in the outside world - only in the inner world of the narrator's mind (Thompson p. 97).

Primary Structure: Doubles

Much of the discussion of "Usher" to follow derives from Darrel Abel's brilliant analysis of the tale as a psychodrama of mutual hysteria between the narrator and Roderick Usher. The pattern of double and redoubled manifestations: Roderick and Madeline, Roderick and the House, Roderick and the narrator, Madeline and the narrator, the narrator and the house (Thompson p. 89).

Use of Analogy

According to Poe's definition, an analogy is a similarity of structure perceived by intuition, a similarity that helps us to get at the truth about the physical universe, or at the beauty of the artistic universe. Poe used the principle of analogy very effectively in The Fall of the House of Usher when he compares the mansion and the family, finding an identical pattern in each, and when he makes the events in the book being read correspond to those going on in the house (Buranelli p. 60).

Unity of Effect

"There is no greater mistake than the supposition that a true originality is a mere matter of impulse or inspiration. To originate, is to carefully, patiently, and understandingly to combine" (Buranelli p. 68). According to Poe, the guiding principle in tale writing should be the intended effect. "A skillful artist has constructed a tale. He has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents, but having deliberately conceived a certain single effect to be wrought, he then invents such incidents, he then combines such events, and discusses them in such a tone as may best serve him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very first sentence tends not to the out- bringing of this effect, then in his very first step has he committed a blunder. In the whole composition there should be no word written of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale, its theses, has been presented unblemished, because undisturbed - an end demanded, yet, in the novel, altogether unattainable."

- The Usher family and the Usher mansion are analogous, - stained with time, used up. crumbling from within, awaiting collapse. Roderick Usher and his sister Madeline, identical twins, are almost two faculties of the same soul, and they can be interpreted together as the soul of which their mansion is the body. All three decline together, and the inference is that the disappearance of one means the disappearance of the others, which in fact is what comes to pass. The Fall of the House of Usher is a mosaic of incidents, psychological attitudes, symbols, all cemented into place in a unified structure according to the prescription of an exacting and skillful art. Poe's theory of the short story demands unity of effect, and here he achieves it as nowhere else (Buranelli p. 78,79).

Supernatural Naturalism

When the house cracks open and crumbles, rather than a necessarily supernatural occurrence, as it seems to the hysterical narrator, it is explainable as the combustion generated when the lightning of the storm crackles near the previously airless crypt - the inrushing electricity being conducted along the copper floor and igniting the remnants of powder. Yet these mocking clues are not all. The miasma enshrouding the house provides yet another, for marsh gas was then thought to have hallucinatory effects, and Poe elsewhere mentions this effect (Buranelli p. 94).

Symbols

It is curious that no one has ever seen fit to remark that when the narrator rides up to the house of Usher, he is immediately confronted with death's head looming out of the dead landscape. Poe obviously intended the image of the skull-like face of the house to dominate as the central image of the tale, for he returns to it again and again, placing the most extended descriptions of it symmetrically in the narrative.

House of Usher