Frequently Asked Questions
What is the significance of the close resemblance of Roderick Usher and his sister? Are the two the product of, and guilty of, incest? Did Roderick Usher intentionally try to murder Madeline, and did Madeline actually return from her tomb vampire-like, to claim her brother's life? Is the physical house actually "alive" and by some preternatural force of will controlling the destinies of the Ushers? Or is the story not a tale of the supernatural at all, but rather, a work of psychological realism? What then is the precise role of the narrator? And can the work be read in Freudian or Jungian terms? If the tale is a psychological or symbolic work what is the meaning of the interpolated story of the "Mad Tryst of Lancelot Canning"? What significance have the titles of the books in Usher's library, and what significance are we to attach to Usher's strange, neurasthenic art works? (Thompson p. 88).
Mad Tryst Central Theme
The situation of the narrator and the characters in this medieval tale are parallel. They are psychologically fused. What happens there happens to him; both are victims of anticipated terrors. The tale, this Mad Tryst, is an absurd parody of a medieval romance about the delusive meeting of the knight Ethelred with a hermit who disappears and changes his form into that of a fearful dragon.
Collapse and Nothingness
- Collapse of the mind, the reason, the house, the narrator, Madeline, Roderick etc. Roderick appeals to his friend to help prevent his mental collapse by coming and cheering him up. - The nothingness without (in the landscape) and the nothingness within (in the minds of Usher and narrator) are mirror images or doubles reflecting the theme of nothingness in the tale. And the collapse of Roderick Usher included the double collapse of his mind along with that of the narrator's - productive of an overall structure of collapse mirroring the pattern of Eureka (Thompson p. 90). - He, too, has lost his self, his living soul, and become a sensitized instrument of the external influences; his nerves are verily like an Aeolian harp which must vibrate (DH Lawrence p. 39). - The absence of real central or impulsive being in himself leaves him inordinately mechanically sensitive to sounds and effects, associations of sounds, associations of rhyme, for example - mechanical facile having no root in any passion (Lawrence p. 40). - People only become subject to stones after having lost their integral souls (Lawrence p. 40).
Dethroning of Reason
- "Haunted Palace" written by Usher speaks of reason being dethroned and replaced by ghouls - very parallel to the book. This is the first of literary parallels in the tale. Wilbur's interpretation of the poem involves the dethroning of rationality. The face of a man is hidden within the first few stanzas and the subjective state before and after the fall of rationality are alluded to. Wilbur : "I expect you observe that the two luminous windows of the palace are the eyes of a man, and the yellow banners on the roof are his luxuriant blond hair. The "pearl and ruby" door is the man's mouth - ruby representing red lips, the pearl representing pearly teeth. The beautiful Echoes which issue from the pearl and ruby door are the poetic utterances of man's harmonious imagination, here symbolized as an orderly dance. The angel-guarded valley in which the palace stands, and which Poe describes as the "monarch Thought's dominion" is a symbol of the man's exclusive awareness of exalted and spiritual things" (Wilbur p. 57). - The eye-like windows of the palace are no longer "luminous", but have become red-litten - they are like the bloodshot eyes of a madman or a drunkard. As for the mouth of the allegorized man, it is now "pale" rather than "pearl and ruby" and through it come no sweet Echoes, as before, but the wild laughter of a jangling and discordant mind (Wilbur p. 58).
Psychological Doubles
In meeting Usher, the narrator is symbolically staring into the face of his psychological double, and when he steps through the "gothic" archway of Usher's into the dark, black-floored hall with its carved, niched, fretted architectural features, lit by "feeble gleams" of "encrimsoned" light that barely makes its way through elaborately "trellised panes", it is clear that the narrator has stepped into the confused subjective world of Gothic terror and horror (Thompson p. 96).
Incest theme: D. H. Lawrence
- Moralists have always wondered helplessly why Poe's morbid tales need have been written. They are ghastly stories of the human soul in its disruptive throes. They need to be written because old things need to die and disintegrate, because old white psyche has to be gradually broken down before anything else can come to pass. For the human soul must suffer its own disintegration, consciously, if ever it is to survive (Lawrence p. 35). - Love is the mysterious vital attraction which draws all things together, closer, closer together. For this reason sex is the actual crisis of love. For in sex the two blood streams, in the male and female, concentrate and come into contact, the merest film intervening. Yet if the intervening film breaks down, it is death (Lawrence p. 36). - Men live by food, but die if they eat too much. Men live by love, but die, if they love too much (Lawrence p. 36). - But as a matter of fact this glowing unison is only a temporary thing, because the first law of life is that each organism is isolated in itself, it must return to its own isolation (Lawrence p. 37). - Poe had experienced the ecstasies of extreme spiritual love. And he wanted those ecstasies and nothing but those ecstasies. He wanted that great gratification, the sense of flowing, the sense of union, the sense of heightening of life. He had experienced this gratification. He set up his will against the whole of the limitations of nature. This was a brave man, acting on his own belief, and his own experience. But this is also an arrogant man, and a fool (Lawrence p. 38). - Poe was going to get the ecstasy and the heightening, cost what it might. He went into a frenzy, as characteristic American women nowadays go on in a frenzy, after the same thing: the heightening, the flow, the ecstasy. Poe tried alcohol, and any drug he could lay his hands on. He also tried any human being he could lay his hands on (Lawrence p. 38). - And it is this longing for identification, utter merging, which is at the base of the incest problem... Incest desire is only one of the modes by which men strive to get their gratification of intensest vibration of the spiritual nerves, without any resistance (Lawrence p. 39). - It is a ghastly psychological truth of what happens in the last stages of this beloved love, which can not be separate, cannot be isolate, cannot live in isolation to the isolate Holy Ghost. For it is by the Holy Ghost we must live by. And the Holy Ghost speaks individually inside each individual: always ever a ghost. The Ushers, brother and sister, betrayed the Holy Ghost in themselves. They would love, love, love, without resistance. They would love, they would merge, they would be as one thing. So they dragged each other down into death. For the Holy Ghost says you must not be as one thing with another being. Each must abide by itself, and correspond only within certain limits (Lawrence p. 43).
Dreams & Hallucinations
- The gaseous cloud surrounding the house could have been marsh gas, which has hallucinatory effects. - Not altogether insignificant that Madeline's burial chamber is located beneath what the narrator describes as, "my own sleeping compartment". The narrator mentions dream earlier concerning his perceptions of the house. Could the whole experience have been a dream?
Apocalyptic Theme
- The physical collapse of the decayed mansion into the lake beneath has universal archetypal appeal--the apocalypse, the ending of things, the collapse of all constructions at the moment of final atomic explosion.