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Poe's THE FALL OF THE HOUSEOF USHERRaymond Benoit aa Saint Louis UniversityPublished online: 30 Mar 2010.

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Poe’s THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER

In Death of the Soul: From Descartes to the Computer, William Barrett imagines the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume as someone looking into the window of his own house to see whether he is at home: “It is the error noted earlier: the philosopher’s temptation to take a purely spectator view of the mind, forgetting that he himself is a participant. He stands outside the self and looks for it as some kind of sensory datum, forgetting that he himself has launched the search and is involved in it throughout” (46). Referring to Hume’s philosophy in the context of Poe’s “Sonnet-To Science,” Edward Davidson stresses Poe’s attack on the resulting “delusion of modem man that he can reduce the phenomenal universe to his own convenient, measurable detail” (14).

This is precisely the delusion that the narrator exhibits in his “contempla- tion” of the House of Usher. “What was it,” asks the narrator in Poe’s story, “that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher?’ (273). In the long first paragraph of the story, the narrator cannot let go of sensory data as he tries to answer that question; he looks beyond himself to contemplate and catalogue the house and its surroundings in repeatedly frustrated and notably ironic efforts to find the locus of his “utter depression of soul’’ (273). That it might be something inward does not occur to him, and cannot occur to him, because Poe stresses, and thereby lets the reader critically observe, the narrator’s certainty that “the self [. . .] is only a heap of perceptions” (Barrett 46)-in his case, of walls, windows, sedges, and trees. Tellingly, in Poe’s account, they are “bleak,” “vacant,” “rank,” and “decayed” if that is all it is, if there is no vitalizing spirit, no soul. And for the narrator there clearly is not; mind or soul to him is but the tabula rasa of eighteenth-century philosophy. Continued insistence on external details in the scene before him as the reason for his depression only underscores for the reader just how internal the narra- tor’s melancholy is, just how much it is a matter of something within rather than from without. Indeed it is this one-sidedly rationalistic and scientific ori- entation to man as mirror (and not lamp) that buries half the personality alive.’

We do seem to be listening to a stymied but stubborn geologist as much as to a hurting human being as he concludes: “It was a mystery all insoluble [. . .I. 1 was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considera- tions beyond our depth” (274)? Nevertheless, the narrator rides up to the tam and makes a last-ditch rearrangement of the external detail before him to try to change his mood and thus establish a taxonomy of depressions and get to the bottom of his own: “It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrange- ment of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be suffi-

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cient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression [. . .]” (274). The inversion of the images in the tam, however, only leaves him more “unnerved” than before-a scarecrow in the wasteland of his own making.

With such emphasis on the externalization of the self, Poe has established for the reader what the narrator must do to unearth what haunts him: look inward. Once “over a short causeway” (277), literally and as the first para- graph, that turning inward is where the story as such begins and where the nar- rator-an outsider physically and psychologically at first-becomes an insid- er and a participant in a drama clearly his own-and the age’s-with Roderick and Madeline as the players. Certainly Roderick‘s “excessive nervous agita- tion” (279) reflects the narrator’s. And it is no surprise, given the narrator’s “utter depression of soul” (273) and its apparent death, that the two entomb Madeline in the vault “immediately beneath that portion of the building in which was my own sleeping apartment” (288). (That this vault in the more recent past was also “a place of deposit for powder” [288] only underscores the imminence of psychological upheaval.) But the narrator’s rationalistic and scientific explanations seem only to balloon as he seeks to calm Roderick (that is, himself) by attempting to suppress any spiritual significance: “‘These appearances, which bewilder you, are merely electrical phenomena not uncommon-or it may be that they have their ghastly origin in the rank mias- ma of the tam”’ (292).3

In the midst of that analytic account, however, another imaginative account supervenes to embody, as does Poe’s story itself, the reaction of romanticism to such one-sidedness-the tale of the “Mad Trist”: a story (“one of your favourite romances” [292] the narrator tells Roderick) that parallels what is occurring in the house and reflects and even enables the awakening of the feminine side (the complementary or twin aspect-that is, “mystery all insol- uble”) thought to have been laid to rest in the philosophy and literature of the Enlightenment and by Roderick/narrato~~ As Davidson writes of Poe’s “Son- net-To Science,” here, too, Poe’s short story “is reaffirming, like Emerson’s Nature and like Moby-Dick, that nature has wonders and comprehensible sys- tems far beyond the trivially limiting perspective of ‘science’ or man” (14). But the narrator himself hunts no whale and only condescends to read the wondrous tale of the “Mad Trist” about the hero Ethelred, a fiery and scaly dragon, and a shield of shining brass to be won: “I indulged a vague hope that the excitement which now agitated the hypochondriac, might find relief (for the history of mental disorders is full of similar anomalies) even in the extremeness of the folly which I should read” (292). Although this tale seems to encode the narrator’s own journey, there is no apparent resolution of his melancholy as “The Fall of the House of Usher” concludes-xcept that the reader (all along ironically ushered into the new romantic view by a narrator who rejects it) comes to understand what the narrator should do to find relief

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forsake the scaly perspectives of reason alone and the self as virtually other, and begin to live with body and soul. As formulated in Coleridge’s notion of the imaginative life and its art, the narrator should “make the external inter- nal, the internal external [. . .] make nature thought, and thought nature” (2.258).

-RAYMOND BENOIT, Saint Louis University

NOTES

1. In his book The Flight from Womun, Karl Stern notes how “non-scientific” thinking is often similarly stylistically “entombed” by brackets: “Many contemporary rationalist philosophies (of the positivist, empiricist, naturalistic variety) imply that non-scientific thinking is archaic, and is being outstripped by evolution which will lead to an ultimate triumph of discursive thought. Indeed, we are inclined to bracket different phenomena such as ‘poetic insight’, ‘intuition’ etc.. because these forms of thinking have one thing in common: they are supposed to be close to the world of the child and the primitive while scientific thinking belongs to the world of the adult and of advanced civilization” (53).

2. Cf. Hume’s concluding words to his treatise (1757) The Natural History of Religion: “The whole is a riddle, an aenigma, an inexplicable mystery. Doubt, uncertainty, suspense of judgment appear the only result of our most accurate scrutiny, concerning this subject” (363).

3. Cf. Ernest Becker’s description of modern man. in his book The Denial of Death, i n relation to the narrator here and throughout Poe’s short story, modern man as rooted in the Age of Rea- son: “modern man is the victim of his own disillusionment: he has been disinherited by his own analytic strength. The characteristic of the modern mind is the banishment of mystery, of naive belief, of simple-minded hope. We put the accent on the visible, the clear, the cause-and-effect relation, the logical-always the logical. We know the difference between dreams and reality, between facts and fictions. between symbols and bodies. But right away we can see that these characteristics of the modern mind are exactly those of neurosis” (200-01).

4. Cf. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

WORKS CITED

Barrett, William. Death of the Soul: Fmm Descurtes to the Computer. Garden City: Anchor, 1986. Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Dearh. New York: Free Press, 1973. Coleridge, S. T. Biogruphia Literaria. Ed. J. Shawcross. Vol. 2. London: Oxford UP. 1958. Davidson, Edward H. Poe: A Critical Study. Cambridge: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1969. Hume, David. The Philosophical Works. Ed. T. H. Green and Thomas H. Grose. Vol. 4. Darm-

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Complete Works. Ed. James A. Harrison. Vol. 3. New York: AMS. 1965. Stern, Karl. The Flight from Woman. New York: Farrar, 1965.

stadt, Germany: Scientia Verlag Aalen, 1964.

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