Two Critical Interpretations of Edgar Allan Poe's, The Fall of the House of Usher

Two Interpretations of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher"

Everyone has read "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe. It is probably Edgar Allan Poe's most popular short story and has elicited much criticism. It has had many interpretations under the traditional headings of supernatural, natural, and psychological, but many critics have chosen to take even more offbeat approaches.

The main character in the story is Roderick Usher. He has invited the narrator, a boyhood companion, to visit him in hopes that the narrator can cheer him up and attempt to alleviate his problems to some degree. Roderick suffers from what Poe calls "overacuteness of the senses" and Roderick is fearful and deteriorating rapidly. He and his sister Madeline are the last of the Usher line and Madeline has an illness in which she is gradually wasting away. While the narrator is there with Roderick, Madeline dies and they put the corpse in a vault. Roderick's condition worsens and one stormy night the whole story reaches its climax. While the narrator is reading to Roderick from a romance called "Mad Trist" to try to calm him down during the storm, the events of the book begin to parallel what is happening inside the house. Finally, Madeline appears, covered with blood, at the door and falls into Roderick's embrace. This causes Roderick's death and moments after, the whole house cracks on the fissure and falls into the tarn. The narrator flees from the house in terror and tells us this story.

"The Fall of the House of Usher," although it has a relatively simple plot has evoked much criticism and there are multitudes of opposing judgments as to the interpretation of the meaning of the story. Some critics suggest a vampire motif under the heading of Gothic; others offer a more elementary Gothic theme. Some propose a story of environmental determinism. Beverly Voloshin's "Explanation of The Fall of the House of Usher," Studies in Short Fiction (1986), pp. 419-429, and David Butler's "Usher's Hypochondriasis: Mental Alienation and Romantic Idealism in Poe's Gothic Tales, Studies in American Literature (1977), pp. 1-12, display the interpretive discord concerning this story that still exists among its many critics.

The only similarity that these two articles have is that they both ignore the more traditional interpretations of the story and take very unusual yet interesting approaches to arrive at their opposing conclusions, if Voloshin arrives at a conclusion at all. Voloshin's interpretation embodies three elements: the supernatural, the psychological, and the natural. Within these three categories she offers many possibilities. Butler's theory, on the other hand, centers on mental disorder and he suggests that "only when we discover the rich parallels which Poe's tale develops between medical theories about the progressive derangement of the mind and the romantic theories about the growth of the mind's perceptive powers can we understand one of the most important themes in Poe's story" (Butler 1). Both of these articles offer interesting interpretations and support their claims, but Voloshin makes too many claims and appears to be unsure of her own interpretation. Mr. Butler's hypochondriasis theory, which seems to account for all events in the story, is a well-written, integrated theory which appears to have some valid connections.

Voloshin's interpretation begins by relating the story to the theories of John Locke. In both, "the perception, the vehicle of appearances, is the only link between mind and the external world-that is nature, and possibly the supernatural (Voloshin 420). Voloshin contends that "Poe subtly shades the categories of the supernatural, the natural, and the psychological into each other," (Voloshin 420 but although she gives evidence for each theory, she never explains how the three aspects that she proposes come together at the end to merge into one.

Voloshin continues with a discussion of the story as supernatural. "The unusual and unnatural in the story-an utterly strange atmosphere; a mysterious, decaying castle; an undead corpse; the blasting of the Usher line-strongly suggest the supernatural" (Voloshin 421). She then states that Poe hints that the house has been placed under the curse of vampirism, and she refers to J.O. Bailey's persuasive article. She refers specifically to Bailey's striking thesis that rather than Madeline being the vampire, the House itself is the vampire.

The next explanation offered is psychological. The reader can see the terrors of Roderick Usher and those of the narrator as imaginary or subjectively produced rather than actual. She states that, "Roderick Usher seems to be falling into a self-enclosed dream state, which could be taken as the catatonic's blocking of external reality or as the dreamer's production of his own nightmare" (Voloshin 423). Perhaps Usher is overcome not by Madeline, but by his own imaginings, as he prophesied in his earlier statement, "I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason together in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR." The narrator comments that Usher died "a victim to the terrors he had anticipated," but the reader does not know whether these terrors were objective or subjective. Voloshin disputes this. "Underscoring the psychological explanation for strange impressions and appearances is the fact that the House of Usher is an image of Roderick's mind as indicated by the narrator's similar descriptions of the House and Roderick's head and by Roderick's allegorical and self-referential lyric, "The Haunted Palace" (Voloshin 423).

Lastly she touches on the natural interpretation. Both the narrator and Roderick attempt to account for these frightening and unusual appearances with natural explanations. "The appearances, which bewilder you, are merely electrical phenomena not uncommon-or it may be that they have their ghastly origin in the rank of the miasma of the tarn." Even Voloshin doesn't believe this theory. She ends this article with the conclusion that "Just as all parts of the Usher world mirror each other, so all the explanations-psychological, natural and supernatural-which Poe subtly intimates for the puzzle of what happens at the House of Usher merge into a radical resolution to the puzzle of appearances," and "the final solution to the puzzle of appearances is to destroy the appearances (Voloshin 428). Voloshin's conclusion is completely unsatisfactory. The largest problem with her theory is that she doesn't seem to know what it is, and this fact is obvious to the reader. She "covers all that bases" but fails to arrive at anything.

Butler, in contrast takes a "natural explanation" approach that connects well to the story and offers some interesting parallels between the medical theory of the rime and romantic thought. Doctors of Poe's time saw a connection between the imaginative power which characterizes romantics like Usher and actual madness. Benjamin Rush, a well-known American doctor, believed that people who were poets or painters were far more prone to madness than chemists or mathematicians. It is also commonly thought that insanity could increase artistic ability. It was believed that hallucination comes from an over-excited imagination and that over-excitement is a disease but is not madness until that hallucination is mistaken for reality. But "this attitude makes no allowance for that individual insight into the supernatural toward which the romantic idealist struggled, and which, like Usher, Poe often sought to express in artistic form (Butler 3). Butler goes on with his background information to explain that the physicians of the time "in no way distinguished between hallucination and the possibility that the romantic imagination could break through the bonds of ordinary perception to a higher order. The moment of romantic triumph in which the individual imagination succeeded in idealizing the real, was in medical terms, the moment at which a nervous disorder turned to complete delusion (Butler 3). Butler believes that Poe also saw a connection between creativity and madness, but he seems to believe in private experiences of the transcendent. In other words, Poe believes that a person can have experiences outside the realm of reality and NOT be crazy. "Indeed the continuing conflict between psychological and mystical explanations of Poe's Gothic tales suggests that in many of these stories the natural, and the supernatural, or the scientific and the romantically idealistic, are deliberately paralleled rather than cautiously distinguished (Butler 3).

Butler now examines the role that Roderick's hypochondria plays in the story. Roderick is a madman whose imaginative powers may actually increase as his mind sickens. the idealized capacities of those powers are confirmed by the supernatural elements reaching their climax at the end of the story. "Since hypochondriasis was thought to involve the interaction of mind and body, it offered a superb medical analogy to the romantics' concern with the bonds between the internal, subjective realm and the external world of physical objects" (Butler 5). Physicians of the time could not agree as to whether hypochondriasis originated in the mind or body, so by Poe suggesting both physical and mental causes for Roderick's hypochondria, he accurately reflects the medical conflict and the close relationship between mind and body. Usher calls his malady "a constitutional and family evil." This reflects the belief that tendency to nervous disorder was inherited.

The doctor's descriptions of the victims of the disease also offer parallels to the romantic qualities of Roderick Usher. His "excessive and habitual reserve" is not only appropriate to the romantic, who tends to scorn society as unsympathetic to anything but material quests, but is also the sign of a true hypochondriac who avoids people. Fletcher, a physician of Poe's time, lists things such as sensitivity of feeling and activeness of imagination-all of which are part of Usher's and the romantic's personality. Even the "morbid acuteness of the senses," of which Usher complains parallels the medical definition of hypochondriasis. "It is, however, through the associations which he establishes between Usher and his house-his dwelling, his ancestors, and his twin Madeline-that Poe most fully exploits the romantic implications of hypochondriasis" (Butler 7). Usher tells the narrator that he dreads the future when he must, "abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR." Rush describes "distress" as a mental symptom of hypochondriasis, the cause of which is an obsessive belief on the part of the sufferer that he is somehow threatened, either with regard to himself or external circumstances. This surely sounds like Usher. When Usher elaborates on his malady, it has much in common with the romantic and transcendental belief in the interrelationship of mind and matter. Butler stresses that the physical peculiarities of the house are, like the body peculiarities, related to his own disorder, inseparably linked to the house. As the anthropomorphic structure of Usher's poem "The Haunted Palace" implies, the derangement which affects the Ushers is finally indistinguishable from the strange condition which affects their home. "The doctors could not agree as to whether hypochondriasis was ultimately physical or mental in origin, and similarly it is impossible to say whether the Usher's family illness originated in their bodies and in the related structure of their dwelling or in their own minds and the related intelligence of their abode (Butler 10).

The physicians did believe that the hypochondriac's obsessive imagination played a powerful role in accelerating his physical deteriorations and one would suspect that the fearful minds of the generations of Ushers coupled with the debilitating atmosphere of their House have helped to speed the family's fall. Butler finally points out that "the medical pattern which brings the Ushers to physical annihilation may be in romantic terms, the process which brings them absolute unity with the realm of pure mind" (Butler 10). When the narrator first enters the house and passes the family physician on whose face he sees a "mingled expression of low cunning and perplexity," it could be a foreshadowing of the medical field's failure of knowledge about the illness. Butler ends his article with a strong statement that convinces the reader of the connection. "'The Fall of the House of Usher' brilliantly suggests that under certain circumstances there may be an exact correlation between the progress of melancholia through isolation and intellectualism, to monomaniacal obsession with a single fear, to self-destruction as a result of that obsession, and the progress of romantic idealism through reclusion and cultivation of the mind's powers, to the imaginative struggle to idealize the real, to the absolute dissolution of the real in order to achieve complete union with ideality (Butler 11).

Butler provides a theory with convincing evidence for it. He also offers an entirely new perspective for our story. While Voloshin makes too many claims and doesn't give enough evidence to support any of them, Butler makes his point and supports it well. Butler builds his case with strong evidence between the story and the medical views of the time. He convinces the reader of his theory.

WORKS CITED

Butler, David, W., "Usher's Hypochondriasis: Mental Alienation and Romantic Idealism

in Poe's Gothic Tales," Studies in American Literature (Spring 1977), pp. 1-12.

Voloshin, Beverly, "Explanation of The Fall of the House of Usher," Studies in Short

Fiction (Fall 1986), pp. 419-428.