Reason and Nature Vs. “Madness” and the Supernatural
The Fall of the House of Usher is obviously the work of a masterful ironist. Although the narrative’s manifest content bespeaks an affinity with themes encountered in the Surrealists, and did, to a greater or lesser degree, manage to reveal a primordial, instinctively incestuous and aggressive nature that perhaps had been ignored or denied by the more overtly moralistic American literary figures that preceded him, the latent content openly valorizes reason and reads more like a moral driven detective story than it does a horror story. Poe’s criticism seems to be aimed at the suspension of reason as exhibited in belief in an antiquated ideological framework (Medievalism), drug abuse (in spite of Poe’s personal addiction to drugs and alcohol), and the Romantic subordination of reason to pure experience.
Poe, from the onset of the text, sets nature and reason (symbolized by the rational, self-composed, and painfully honest narrator) in opposition to “madness” and the supernatural (symbolized by the fully sensory, disheveled, and skillfully deceptive recluse); and in the end, it is reason and nature that survive. The apparently chaotic sequence of events following Madeline’s inexplicable “death” is revealed to be a meticulously organized mirroring of the texts that “had formed no small portion of the mental existence of the invalid” (803), concluding with the collapse of an antiquated social structure that drowns in “the deep dank tarn” whose sound is like “the voice of a thousand waters.” The description of the tarn’s sound, strikingly similar to the biblical description of the voice of God, places Nature and divinity, if only by implication, in an intimate, reflective relationship in which Nature, like God, punishes those that do not behave in accordance with her decrees and grants salvation to individuals sola ratio. Seemingly supernatural events are revealed to be natural events, the causation of which is determinable through a process of deduction.
A Note about the Texts
The role that literature plays in The Fall of the House of Usher cannot be overlooked. Roderick Usher is a man of letters, well versed in literature ranging from politics (Machiavelli), to religion (Swedenborg), to medieval torture practices (Eymeric de Gironne), and, finally, poetry (Tieck). He is a man who, interestingly, finds coherent expression only through the arts, particularly, writing. Usher’s writing, in contradistinction to his speech, is remarkably cogent, beautiful, and reminiscent of Romantic poetry, drawing upon a host of stock images, including seraphs, flutes, spirits, and royalty (801-802). The narrator’s admission that Usher’s “phantasmagoric conceptions” did not “partake so rigidly of the spirit of abstraction,” moreover, only adds to the critical overtones of the story; Usher wrote well, but what he wrote about, excluding his letter to the narrator, was nonsensical, lacking any connection to external reality (i.e. Nature).
Considering the importance of literature as a vehicle for expression, therefore, it is no wonder that Usher’s actions mirror the texts that he and the narrator “pored together over” and that, according to the narrator, “had formed no small portion of the mental existence of the invalid” (803). Each text, including the fictitious Mad Trist of Sir Launcelot Canning (yet another reference, albeit a mocking reference, to medievalism), coincides with narrator’s recounting of the events that occurred, suggesting that what took place was carefully crafted. Machiavelli’s Belphegor, for example, is a satirical novel about marriage, in which a female demon marries a man who, thereafter, suffers immensely. What makes this listing of literary works even more striking is the narrator’s declaration that the Directorium Inquistiorum, a book delineating specific methods of torturing Catholic heretics, was one of Usher’s “favourite volumes[s].” And, finally, completing the heroic tragedy that Usher has conducted is the narrator’s reading of “that well known portion of the [Mad Trist].”
Usher’s Forced Heroism: The Death of Romanticism and the Triumph of Reason
Usher, it can be argued, is not mad; instead, he is playing multiple roles that, in an Enlightenment society, are no longer practically functional: he is the tortured, saintly aesthete, the villain, the dungeon keeper, and the chivalric hero all at once. If there is any form of madness that Poe wishes to convey to the reader, therefore, it is the madness that belief in the type of irrational and fictitious literature (via their incommensurability with natural events) that lines Usher’s library shelves. There are no dragons, dungeons, heroes, villains, angels, or demons; there is no heaven or hell; there is Nature and individuals who either have or lack Reason. Roderick Usher, a man marked by an acuteness of the senses, is also an incontinent man (in the Aristotelian usage of the term) who has no control over his desires and stands in opposition to the narrator, who, in spite of admitting his occasional susceptibility to the sensations, beliefs, and actions that plagued the mind of Roderick Usher, manages to keep himself controlled, acting rationally all throughout the narrative.
Poe’s story warns the reader of the dangers of belief in the supernatural and “phantasmagoric,” with Roderick Usher serving a twofold symbolic purpose: he is a symbol of the antiquated, unnecessary, and, in essence, harmful superstitions of medievalism, and a symbol of the writers who have indulged in those superstitions. Despite the superficial eccentricities of Poe’s writing, what is being presented is a fairly conservative ideology that condemns irrationality, drug abuse[1], and the supernatural (unnatural?). The innumerable references to “the arrangement of objects” (i.e. objects if thought, spiritual objects, physical objects, et cetera) provide a clue as to how the narrative should be read, clearly indicating that the cause of Roderick Usher’s madness can be found through a careful deductive assessment of the narrative (unlike Madeline’s illness, to which there was no known cause). In the end, the House of Usher destroys itself and is consumed by Nature, while Reason, the unnamed narrator, stands beside the event to record it.
The Fall of the House of Usher, moreover, is not the only work in the Poe canon that, through irony, gives support to the Enlightenment. The Tell Tale Heart, for example, is another implicit attack on the medievalism that The Fall of the House of Usher smugly mocks. The “mad” narrator is a man who holds superstitious beliefs and stands in striking contrast to the “profound old man,” who “suspected that every night, just at twelve, [the narrator] looked upon him while he slept” (810). The scrutinizing gaze of reason, symbolized by the old man’s eye, although it is blinded momentarily, is resurrected by the narrator’s irrepressible moral sensibility, giving law, the epitome of rationality (indeed, what urged Aristotle to call man a political animal), the upper hand.
Lastly, and perhaps most striking about both narratives, is the painful honesty with which the events in both stories are relayed to the reader. There are no suspicions as to the veracity of each narrator’s account. Ironically, however, the same cannot be said about their author.
[1] As suggested by the parallels that the narrator frequently draws between drug induced states and the feelings that came over him (e.g., 794).
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