Welcome back to Dissecting The Dark Descent, where we lovingly delve into the guts of David Hartwell’s seminal 1987 anthology story by story, and in the process, explore the underpinnings of a genre we all love. For a more in-depth introduction, here’s the intro post.
There aren’t many names in American gothic literature that carry the weight of Edgar Allan Poe. A journalist and writer by trade, Poe melded an early form of pulp fiction and the preoccupations of (for his time) modern American with a deconstructive eye of his literary counterparts across the Atlantic. From this fertile imagination grew classic horror stories like “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Feather,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” works that incorporated (in a rudimentary way) both the focus on his characters’ psychology that characterized Poe’s own unique approach to gothic fiction, and issues like insufficient mental healthcare, class violence, and other social concerns.
“The Fall of the House of Usher,” a gothic work published in Grotesques and Arabesques, is a terrifying portrait of a nobleman driven insane by inbreeding, generational trauma, and his own refusal to leave his ancestral home. Within the traditional gothic framework of the story, Poe also takes jabs at aristocracy, the idea of families as institution, and various conventions of gothic literature itself.
On a gloomy fall day, the unnamed narrator rides to the House of Usher, the ancestral manor of his former best friend Roderick Usher and his family. The house is in disarray, a ruin afflicted by fungal rot and disrepair only matched by the mental and physical decay of its sole surviving inhabitants, Madeleine and Roderick Usher. While the narrator helps Roderick in every way possible to shake off his gloom and find his way back to health, it’s clear that the rot goes much deeper than the House itself. As the House of Usher’s darkness threatens to envelop the three of them, the narrator must escape before both the family and the house drag him down with them.
The sickly environment of the Usher siblings’ home provides a feedback loop for Roderick. By the time the narrator arrives at the titular house, it’s in disturbing disarray, with the narrator even mentioning multiple times that there’s a horrifying malaise to the air. Gothic fiction relies heavily on visual cues to help cultivate its atmosphere of unease, and the environment feeding off Roderick’s advancing mental illness (and clear environmental illness, given that his sensitivities are signs of an advancing case of mold toxicity from all the fungus) exemplifies this. It’s clear that between the loss of his family, his clinging to the moldering ruin as the last vestige of his family’s memory, and the deeply toxic relationship between himself and his sister, he’s not doing well either mentally or physically. The longer he stays in that depressive loop without any kind of change, the worse things get. Eventually, it leads to him accidentally burying his sister alive, and the two of them dying as the house crumbles and falls apart around them.
Within that gothic tragedy, Poe finds an unusual note of grim and deadpan humor about the situation. While there’s a supernatural air about the House and the Ushers within, everything in “The Fall of the House of Usher” has a reasonable explanation. The unnatural glow at night is swamp gas, Madeleine’s ghostly appearance is due to the fact that she’s been locked in a vault underneath the house, and the constant descriptions of the House (itself a sideswipe at the need to detail every inch of the architecture frequently found in older gothic works) foreshadow it eventually falling apart completely. The story isn’t sympathetic to Roderick, with the narrator consistently more unnerved and terrified by his former friend than anything else. The Usher family line, fallen far from whatever nobility they held in the past, is portrayed as so inbred their family tree is basically a trunk. Roderick even becomes one of the earliest depictions of the dreaded Guy Breaking Out an Acoustic Guitar as he holds the narrator hostage in order to perform his original compositions, which the narrator describes as “unnerving.”
The combined effect of the empathic environment, Roderick’s numerous failings, and the deadpan way Poe pokes fun at the traditional conventions of gothic literature center the blame mainly on Roderick for being idle, privileged, and doing nothing to change his situation. He’s intellectual and clearly has a great taste for art, music, and literature but lives isolated and alienated from everyone in a moldering gothic ruin infested by fungi. In the end, it’s that stubborn refusal to change, and the narrator’s own realization that Roderick has destroyed not only himself but his sister Madeleine (and is possibly on the way to destroying the narrator), that proves to be the undoing for two-thirds of the cast, as the vengeful Madeleine dies strangling Roderick to death only for the house to collapse upon them, ending the line of Usher.
Roderick, in perfect adherence to the genre conventions, ends the story in a state of terror as he realizes that Madeleine’s clawed her way out of the vault and is probably not particularly happy that her brother and sole companion buried her alive. There’s not much nobility and romance to the story, just a grotesque man forcing the narrator to paint horrid landscapes with him, listen to his bad poetry, and read depictions of historical atrocity, none of which seems to help improve his mental or physical health.
“The Fall of the House of Usher” functions as a send-up of both gothic tradition and the more right-leaning conventions of genre—the doomed family cannot be saved, the dead woman who haunts the estate isn’t dead, the misogynist subtext of gothic literature is made distinctly text as Roderick would rather lock his sister away (much like the classic tropes of the madwoman in the attic and the mysteriously ill waif) than deal with her problems, the stately manor is a crumbling wreck that collapses in on itself, and the noble yet doomed scion of the cursed family is the maniac result of centuries of incest who holds his good friend emotionally hostage in a damp moldy ruin. In the end, there’s no cruel whims of fate or supernatural curses, just the narcissistic and literally toxic influence of a self-destructive noble unable to (literally) see beyond his own front door.
Institution in “Fall of the House of Usher” is not upheld. It is a poisonous and ultimately fatal thing, clung to by someone for whom family name and generational property are all they have left.
And now to turn it over to you. Did “The Fall of the House of Usher” successfully criticize the decadence of the upper classes through the medium of gothic literature? What story first got you started reading Poe? What’s your favorite depiction of an annoying guy forcing everybody to listen to him jam on an acoustic guitar in all of literature?
Also, please join us next time for an exploration of Stephen King’s own dalliances with gothic fiction.
