The Gothic Mood of Edgar Allan Poe's
"The Fall of the House of Usher"
by Kristina Hartung - April 15, 2008
Among the many different genres of short stories, those that heighten the senses have captivated and stretched the imagination of all ages. One of today's more recognizable short story authors, Edgar Allan Poe, is well-known for his use of Gothic mood to increase the mentality of his readers. Gothic is a term used to express dark novels that are filled with an atmosphere of fear ("Gothic Novel" 1). Poe is notorious for pushing the envelope and creating pieces of work that shake the nerves. A short story that does just that, Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," uses a number of different methods to influence the overall Gothic mood. The unmistakable setting, the symbolic illusion of the House of Usher, and the internal affect that events have on the characters greatly contributes to the Gothic mood of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher."
Perhaps influencing his style of writing, Poe was thrown into tragedy at an early age. Born in Boston, Massachusetts on January 19, 1809, Edgar Allan Poe was only three years old when his father, David Poe, left (Kopacz 861). Edgar Allan Poe's mother, Elizabeth Arnold, was a talented actress who sadly soon died after Poe's father left. Following his mother's death, Poe was taken in by John Allan, a thriving merchant living in Richmond, and his wife, Frances Allan. Allan was known as a stern and detached man, and his wife was known as slightly "overindulgent" (Carlson 304). Despite the fact the Allan's were Poe's new family, he was never legally adopted by the Allans; however, Poe did take their last name as his middle name. Due to the growing success of Allan's business, Poe went with John and Frances to England. The family did not return to Richmond again for five years. Increasing the Allan's status, a large sum of money was obtained in 1825 after Allan's uncle died; nonetheless, Poe was still considered as an outside by Richmond's privileged because his parents were actors (Carlson 304). Perhaps Poe's way of rebelling, he got engaged to Ms. Sarah Elmira Royster. Unfortunately, no parental approval was given and Sarah and Poe never got married.
Poe's middle years ended up being fairly unstable. According Eric Carlson's article "Edgar Allan Poe," Poe was admitted into the University of Virginia in February of 1826. However, Allan's allowance did not cover Poe's needs, so Poe started gambling to make up for the money he wasn't getting. Poe made a two-thousand dollar debt and when Allan denied paying for the debt, Poe was withdrawn from the University. This feud caused bad feelings between Edgar and John Allan (304). After leaving the University, Poe went to Boston and singed up for the United States Army under a different name. Poe may have stayed in the army longer, however, he quit after Mrs. Allan died. From there, Poe entered West Point, but he was dismissed shortly after for ignoring orders. In May of 1836, Poe married his thirteen year old cousin, Virginia Clemms, whom he had been living with for some time ("Poe" 891). A couple years after his marriage to Virginia, Poe became the coeditor for Burton's Gentleman's Magazine in Philadelphia. During this time, Edgar Allan did reviews and published features monthly.
Poe's life ended with almost as much tragedy as his earlier childhood contained. Poe's unstable employment caught up with him as his family hit its lowest point both financially and physically. In January of 1847, Virginia died of Tuberculosis, and Poe then turned to alcohol for comfort (Peeples xvi, 76). Following his wife's death, Poe engaged in a number of romantic affairs with a number of different women. One woman, the married Mrs. Elmira Shelton, was his former childhood fiancée. Eric Carlson suggests in his article "Edgar Allan Poe" that these relationships "echoed" throughout his writing (319). During the last year of his life, Poe proposed marriage to the now widowed Mrs. Shelton. Mrs. Shelton accepted his offer. Things seemed to be looking up for Poe, but then tragedy hit one final time. On his way to retrieve his aunt for the wedding, Edgar Allan Poe mysteriously died on October, 7 1849 after being found half conscious and delirious outside a polling stand (Kopacz 861). The full details are still unknown to this day.
The article titled "Edgar Allan Poe," written by Eric Carlson, says that there are three stages in Poe's writing profession. The first stage concentrates on a romantic dynamic and a poetic ideal; the second stage has a subject matter of death and darkness; the third stage returns to poetry, essays, and fiction (306). It is the stage that centers on the subject of death and darkness that one finds "The Fall of the House of Usher." This short story was first published in 1839 in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine while Poe was coeditor, and published again in 1840 in Tales of Grotesque and Arabesque (Peeples 74). "The Fall of the House of Usher" is considered to be Poe's best piece of work due to the fact it was, and to this day still is, well-liked by the public (Carlson 310).
The story begins when Roderick Usher contacts a childhood friend. The unnamed friend, the story's narrator, rides up to the house and finds a creepy old mansion reeking with horror. The narrator goes on to explain the details of the house as dark, crumbling, and just plain alarming. The narrator is led into Roderick's study to find a degenerating man in both body and soul. Within the house also lives Usher's twin sister, Madeline, who shares the same strange mental illness that Usher does. For several days, the friends occupied themselves with painting, reading, and listening to music. Then one night, Roderick informs his friend that Madeline had mysteriously died. Due to her illness, Usher wished her body to be entombed in a vault found under the castle. From there on Roderick's mental condition worsens. Seven or eight nights later a storm hits the castle and neither the narrator nor Usher could sleep. In an attempt to calm his friend's nerves, the narrator reads to Roderick. Weird, hair-raising occurrences start to happen as noises start coming from a remote area of the mansion. Before the narrator knows what is happening, the departed Madeline is standing at the door. Madeline stays at the door for a moment and then enters the room, killing her brother. The narrator runs from the house just before it collapses into the dark tarn.
The alarming setting of "The Fall of the House of Usher," that is so thoroughly described, adds to the Gothic mood that the reader observes. According to Darrel Abel's article "A Key to the House of Usher," reprinted in Short Story Criticism, the description of the setting gives a fitting and picture-like background that suggests a mood for Poe to build on throughout his story (380). Poe immediately demonstrated this idea when he describes the eerie House of Usher:
I looked upon the scene before me - upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain - upon the bleak walls - upon the vacant eye-like windows - upon a few rank sedges - and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees - with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveler upon opium - the bitter lapse into everyday life - the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was iciness, a sinking, a sickening of heart - an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. (Poe 83-84)
Poe allows the setting to include "bleak walls," "eye-like windows," "rank sedges," and "decayed trees" to give the mansion an unnerving affect. When one reads the description Poe has written for the primary setting, he or she can clearly picture a scary and haunted house. This description takes place in the beginning of the story and causes readers to remember this haunted description throughout the story.
Some features of the setting also cause the reader to perceive the house as dead and decaying. For example, "Minute fungi overspread the whole exterior, hanging in a fine tangled web-work from the eaves" and "specious totality of old wood-work which has rotted for long years in some neglected vault, with no disturbance from the breath of the external air" (Poe 87). There is nothing that can affect the mood of a story like death. The "remoteness, decadence, and horrible gloom" surrounding the House of Usher, heightens the readers' senses and causes them to picture creepy things during the action of the story (Abel 380), and consequently opens the reader's mind to dark and dangerous manifestations.
Poe also uses common everyday items within the setting to give the story a Gothic mood. When the narrator is entering Usher's study for the first time, Poe describes its simple items in a way that causes the mood to be gloomy and mysterious:
Dark draperies hung upon the walls. The general furniture was profuse, comfortless, antique, and tattered. Many books and musical instruments lay scattered about, but failed to give any vitality to the scene. I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all. (Poe 89)
Though in most cases, items such as draperies, furniture, and musical instruments would not have an impact on the story and possibly be overlooked, Poe uses these items to his advantage. Another example of Poe using common items to affect the mood is upon the narrator's last night in the House of Usher. The narrator states:
I endeavored to believe that much, if not all of what I felt, was due to the bewildering influences of the gloomy furniture of the room - of the dark and tattered draperies, which tortured into motion by the breath of rising tempest, swaying fitfully to and fro upon the walls, and rustled uneasily about the decorations of the bed. (Poe 102)
The listless items of the narrator's bedroom not only affect the mood of the scene, but they also increase the narrator's troubles.
The use of the House of Usher as a symbol also increases the Gothic mood of Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher." Walter Evans' article "'The Fall of the House of Usher' and Poe's Theory of the Tale," reprinted in Short Story Criticism, suggests that the house and the surrounding scenery is in fact a representation of Roderick Usher. The landscape of the house, as it is described in "The Fall of the House of Usher," could symbolize the "'bleak' cheeks, huge eyes...'rank' and slightly bushy mustache, and perhaps even 'white trunks of decayed' teeth" (405) of Usher. Evans goes on to comment that this "projection, duplication, and inversion" is very important to the story's structure and subject matter (405). Why would Poe choose to describe the house and landscape in a manner that makes it comparable to Roderick Usher? Perhaps it is to act as a representation of sinister energy, which Darrel Abel's article "A Key to the House of Usher" suggests when talking about the fungi on the house and how it compares to Roderick's hair (382).
The bad condition of the house may also be Poe's way to represent Usher (Dougherty par. 17-22). For instance, Poe describes the house as fragile, deteriorating, spooky, and even not having the same value it once did. This description is comparable to Roderick Usher's condition for he is also sick, frail, deteriorating, spooky, and missing the mental stability he once had. It is even possible that the collapsing of the house at the end of the story may be meant to accent the death of Roderick Usher. G.R. Thompson's breakdown of "The Fall of the House of Usher," as stated in his Poe's Fiction, proposes:
The sinking of the house into the reflecting pool dramatizes the sinking of the rational part of the mind [of Roderick Usher], which has unsuccessfully attempted to maintain some contract with a stable structure of reality outside the self, into the nothingness within. (qtd. in Timmerman par. 3)
This theory is in fact possible because it is not long after Usher's sister, Madeline, brings Usher to the floor, and his death, that the house crashes down.
Another part of the setting that Poe may have purposely placed in his story is the crack found on the decaying mansion. Poe first introduces this crack in the beginning of the story. The narrator of the story declares, "Perhaps the eye of a scrutinizing observer might have discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which, extended from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn" (Poe 87-88). Darrel Abel advises in her article "A Key to the House of Usher" that the zigzag fissure in the house symbolizes the source of evil that is found throughout the house, which is fighting with heaven (Abel 382). This assumption is obtainable because Poe placed the crack "extending from the roof of the building" (Poe 87). When the evil overtakes the house, Poe mentions this crack again: "While [the narrator] gazed, this fissure rapidly widened…and the deep and dank tarn at [his] feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the 'House of Usher'" (Poe 110). Poe may have done this in order to represent the evil finally conquering the Usher's (Abel 382).
Another factor that contributes to the Gothic mood of "The Fall of the House of Usher" is how outward events influence the characters internally. Griffith Clark believes, as stated in "Poe and the Gothic," that internal influence causes there to be no "distance, or difference, between the terror and the terrified" (398). One instance where internal influence is shown is when the narrator allows the haunted features of Roderick Usher's home to explore his mind. Not only did the narrator "look upon the scene before [him]," but he "paused to think - what was it that so unnerved [him] in the contemplation of the House of Usher" (Poe 83-84). This fact is important because the narrator stopped to think about the setting and rationalized how the setting made him feel internally. The narrator could have easily pushed the haunted ideas off as mere images.
There is something about the way the narrator allows the background to persuade him inwardly that affects how the reader views the mood of the story. The reader finds the mood more frightening because the human mind can imagine much more than outward events can create. It is suggested that the terror that exists in "The Fall of the House of Usher" comes mainly from within its characters (Griffith 398-99). The narrator of Poe's short story even admits to letting his imagination determine the atmosphere of the house:
I had so worked upon my imagination as really to believe that about the whole mansion and domain there hung and atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their immediate vicinity - an atmosphere which had no affinity with air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, the gray walls, and the silent tarn - a pestilent and mystic vapor, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued. (Poe 87)
The atmosphere within the house is not just scary strictly because of its true landscape, but also scary because the narrator adds his own imagination to the mix. The narrator allows the landscape of the house to influence him internally and consequently creates more terror within the story itself. The mind can create more terror than any outward occurrence can begin to create. Isn't that why people are scared of the dark? People allow their imaginations to believe that there is something in the dark that will hurt them or devour them. When in fact, it is simply a persons own imagination that is creating the terror rather than solely the dark.
There is no happy ending for the characters of "The Fall of the House of Usher." At the conclusion of Poe's story, both Madeline and Roderick die, and the narrator runs from the house more psychologically troubled then when the story first began. "Poe and the Gothic" written by Clark Griffith suggests that there can not be a happy ending for the characters of "The Fall of the House of Usher" due to the fact that the terror comes from within (398-99). This proposal is conceivable because it is much harder to overcome terror that is the product of inward imagination than it is to overcome those that reside in physical fact. A person can adjust to the dark and realize it is a physical phenomenon, but a person cannot forget the images they have formulated in their mind and now connect with the dark.
"The Fall of the House of Usher" is debatably one of Poe's best pieces of work. Perhaps it is the Gothic mood that makes this story so unforgettable. This Gothic mood not only adds terror to "The Fall of the House of Usher" but also captivates reader's attention. A number of different features add to the Gothic mood including the setting, the symbolism of Roderick Usher's house, and the influence outer events have on the characters internally. Each of these characteristics gives "The Fall of the House of Usher" a unique flavor that grants this short story an unnerving appearance.
Works Cited
- Abel, Darrel. "A Key to the House of Usher." University of Toronto Quarterly. 18.2 (1949): 176-85. Rpt. in Short Story Criticism. Ed. Laurie Lanzen Harris and Sheila Fitzgerald. Vol. 1. Detroit: Gale, 1988. 380-84.
- Carlson, Eric W. "Edgar Allan Poe." Dictionary of Literary Biography: American Short Story Writers Before 1880. Ed. Bobby Ellen Kimbel. Vol. 74. Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1988. 303-22.
- Dougherty, Stephen. "Foucault in the House of Usher: Some Historical Permutations in Poe's
Gothic." Papers on Language and Literature 37.1 (2001): 3. InfoTrac OneFile. Thomson Gale. Ferris State University. 30 Jan. 2007 http://find.galegroup.com.
- Evans, Walter. "'The Fall of the House of Usher' and Poe's Theory of the Tale." Studies in Short Fiction. 14.2 (1977): 137-44. Rpt. in Short Story Criticism. Ed. Laurie Lanzen Harris an Sheila Fitzgerald. Vol. 1. Detroit: Gale, 1988. 403-5.
- "Gothic Novel." Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature. 1995 ed. Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature. Thomson Gale. Ferris State University. 22 March 2007 http://galenet.galegroup.com.
- Griffith, Clark. "Poe and the Gothic." Papers on Poe: Essays in Honor of John Ward Ostrom. 1972: 21-7. Rpt. in Short Story Criticism. Ed. Laurie Lanzen Harris and Sheila Fitzgerald. Vol. 1. Detroit: Gale, 1988. 397-99.
- Kopacz, Paula. "Edgar Allan Poe." Encyclopedia of Literary Critics and Criticism. Vol. 2. Chicago: Salem Press, 1999. 861-864.
- Peeples, Scott. Edgar Allan Poe Revisited. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1988.
- "Poe." Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, Inc., 1995.
- Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Fall of the House of Usher." The Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Tales - Horror and Death. Vol. 6. New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1904. 83-110.
- Timmerman, John H. "House of Mirrors: Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Fall of the House of Usher.'" Papers on Language and Literature 39.3 (Summer 2003): 227. Literature Resource Center. Thomson Gale. Ferris State University. 29 Jan. 2007 http://galenet.galegroup.com.
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