Text: G. R. Thompson, “Chapter 04,” Poe's Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales (1973), pp. 68-104 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 68:]

4

Explained Gothic

 

ROUGHLY PARALLEL in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries were seemingly separate developments of the Gothic, the grotesque, and the arabesque — each involving to a degree the psychology of fear. The development of theories of irony, I submit, served in part as a defense against such fear, metaphysical and otherwise. These were related literary extremes of generalized literary experimentation among writers suspicious of neoclassic regularity and stimulated by the subjective philosophies of Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. The terms have an intertwined history of connotation and reference that puts Poe's odd literary techniques into yet another context, related to those we have just examined, and further illuminates what Poe was up to. When seen in his proper Romantic context, Poe turns out to be not “merely” a Gothic showman (which, however, he assuredly is) nor “only” a clever satirist (which, again, he is). By focusing on the Gothic aspect of Romantic literature, I hope to demonstrate that Poe is as well a stunningly complex psychological and philosophical writer in the dark tradition. To accomplish this, it is requisite to trace the development of “terrible,” “explained,” and “ambiguous” modes of Gothic fiction from Germany to England to America. Then we shall examine Poe's two most famous Gothic tales, “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” as additional touchstones for his Gothic technique. Finally, we shall look at a [page 69:] number of important statements in Poe's letters, essays, and reviews which suggest that his Gothic mode is that of the ambiguously explained supernatural, in which clues to the real psychological action are patterned much like those of a detective story. Moreover, we shall see that the vision of the human mind that emerges from this complex of literary technique and philosophy is one of despair over the ability of the mind to know anything, and that the arabesque patterns of the tales parallel for the reader the labyrinth of surmise that the protagonists go through. Only by an objective reconstruction of the total pattern can we come near the overall meaning Poe built into these works. Simultaneously, he gives us a “supernatural” thrill within the weird subjective “reality” of the psychological state of the narrator's mind, all the while slyly insinuating a burlesque, a grotesquerie of both the content of the fictional structure and its mode.

 

I

In literature, the word Gothic normally refers to the kind of work that seeks to create an atmosphere of mystery and terror through pronounced mental horror. Applied to fiction in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the primary and constant element of the term is terror or horror — terror suggesting frenzy and horror suggesting perception of something incredibly evil or repellent.(1) The secondary element of the Gothic is the supernatural, whether real or fearfully imagined. Actual use of the term Gothic in English to describe an artistic effect or structure dates at least from the early seventeenth century; and by the beginning of the eighteenth century, it had already come to have at least two distinct meanings, each associated with a different kind of disapproval.(2) One meaning had to do with any architectural structure not in the classical style. A second meaning had to do with a historical hypothesis regarding Goths or other northern barbarian invaders of the Roman empire. As Arthur Lovejoy points out, John Evelyn in his Account of Architects and Architecture (1697) wrote that “Goths, Vandals and other barbarous Nations” destroyed Roman works and introduced in their stead “a certain fantastical ... Manner of Building ... full of fret and lamentable Imagery ... [so that] a judicious Spectator is distracted and quite confounded. ...” But, Evelyn continued, after the Goths “from the North” came the “Moors and Arabs from the South and East, over-running the Civilized World” and destroying true art while replacing it with “busy Work and other Incongruities,” with unreasonably thick walls, clumsy buttresses, towers, sharp-pointed [page 70:] arches, doors and apertures without proportion, marbles “impertinently placed,” and “turrets and Pinnacles thick set with Monkies and Chymaeras.” All of this, he continued, “rather gluts the Eye than gratifies and pleases it with any reasonable Satisfaction” and so confounds the sight “that one cannot consider it with any Steadiness, where to begin or end.”(3) This element of deception or confusion we shall see, later in this chapter, to be of great significance.

The architectural and historical hypothesis was widely accepted, and in 1713 Christopher Wren wrote that what “we now call the Gothick manner of architecture ... should with more reason be called the Saracen style.”(4) At other times the terms Arabic or arabesque were used as synonyms for Gothic, though by the middle eighteenth century “regular” Gothic and arabesque Gothic were distinguished. The later arabesque style was supposed to have been a reaction to the earlier style of Gothic, both, of course, being periods within the Middle Ages. The earlier Gothic was thought of as ponderous, somber, and depressing. “Gothic gloom,” writes Lovejoy, was one of the conventional descriptive phrases for characterizing its effect upon the mind. The later arabesque Gothic was condemned as “light” and “soaring,” “frivolous” and “fanciful,” “overrefined” and “overladen with ornament,” and “confusing the eye with an excessive multiplicity of separate parts and obtrusive details.”

The indictments against the modern arabesque Gothic of the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries, made by such men as Berkeley, Montesquieu, and Addison, listed its want of simplicity (in its use of nonstructural ornament), its failure to conform to nature (because not simple), its lack of symmetry (unnaturally militating against “unity of effect”), and its irregularity (lack of exact mathematical proportion). Thus the earliest literary usages of the term Gothic seem to have involved disapproval of what was considered unrestrained “fancy” and “confusing” design. One would like immediately to apply the terms Gothic and arabesque to Poe; but their meanings were to undergo some radical shifts between 1750 and 1830, and the apparent antithesis between the two styles was to blur into a paradoxical fusion. This paradox of meaning is underscored by the usual twentieth-century application of arabesque to Poe's serious Gothic tales, as if it could not with equal justice describe the frivolous, light, soaring, fanciful, wittily ornamented comic and satiric tales.(5)

Between 1750 and 1800, Gothic interiors, with their profuse scrollwork, sometimes called grotesque work, around windows and on ceilings, suggesting branches and groves and animals, began to symbolize to imaginative minds a “natural” landscape. Moreover, the impact of [page 71:] certain pre-Romantic elements in German literature and of the new “Nature Philosophy” began to be felt in England and elsewhere. By the turn of the century, Schelling in his Philosophy of Art (1802-1803) had rejected the idea that Arabs or Saracens brought the Gothic style from the Orient and had claimed (or reasserted) a Germanic origin. The “Gothic imagination,” he said, was primitive and natural, closer to the spirit of God than was the classical imagination. A Gothic building, Schelling remarked, was essentially a metaphor (or symbol or hieroglyph) for a huge row of trees, or the natural, primitive habitat of man. Poe commented similarly on the qualities of Gothic imagination: “In omitting to envelop our Gothic architecture in foliage, we omit, in fact, an essential point in the Gothic architecture itself. Of a Gothic church, especially [[,]] trees are as much a portion as the pointed arch. ‘Ubi tres, ecclesia,’ says Tertullian; — but no doubt he meant that ‘Ubi ecclesia, tres’ ” (H 16:169)

But for our purposes, it is more important to note in the concept of Gothic the intrusion of an aesthetic principle of irregularity or deceptiveness into what was considered natural. Edmund Burke, for example, in The Sublime and Beautiful (1756-57) had remarked that the idea of exact proportion had not been drawn from a study of nature, but was an artificial intrusion of man into nature. Subsequently, the characteristic “deformities” of Gothic art became virtues in garden design; the effect sought was beauty without perfect regularity and without immediately apparent design, as in Oriental gardens, which were yet intricately designed.(6) This deceptiveness of design in certain Gothic literary productions became, as we shall see, an integral part of Poe's concept of the Gothic, and allied it with Romantic theories of ironic composition.

These feelings regarding what was presumed to be truly natural shifted to a preference for wildness, seen in the taste for landscapes that suggested the “sublime” through their evocation of a sense of the mystery of the supernatural, hinting at grand secrets of another world that stretches away beyond the range of human intelligence. In the middle of the eighteenth century, Horace Walpole, whose novel The Castle of Otranto, a Gothic Story (1765) seems to have given real currency to the term Gothic in English literature, emphasized the vaults, tombs, stained windows, gloom, and perspective of medieval buildings; in the Gothic cathedral such ornamentation was supposed to generate sensations of Romantic devotion, though of a superstitious kind. Gothic churches and old castles thus became, after Walpole, inextricably associated with the “thrill of mystery and wonder.”(7)

The Castle of Otranto is generally regarded as the prototype of the [page 72:] Gothic romance in English, though the tale of terror has been traced rather directly to Renaissance drama.(8) In the Preface to Otranto, Walpole (as the “translator” William Marshall, Gent.) pretended that his “work was found in the library of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England” and that he had translated the manuscript from the Italian of a monk living at the time of the Crusades (1095 to 1253). He apologized for the “miracles, visions, necromancy, dreams, and other preternatural events” no longer believed in by an enlightened age. But when “our author wrote,” said Walpole, “belief in every kind of prodigy was so established ... that an author would not be faithful to the manners of the times” if he did not represent supernatural occurrences.(9) Moreover, he seems to have been concerned with the possibility of censure on the grounds of irregularity, lack of simple design, excessive multiplicity of parts, and distraction (caused by fret and lamentable imagery) that had been associated with the Gothic in the first half of the century. He wrote:

Thus, surprisingly, the term Gothic was at this time associated with multiple innuendoes, wit, and even with ironic contrasts. In both the first and second prefaces to Otranto, Walpole exhibited concern for the overly simple behavior of the domestics in the tale, but justified it on the basis of overall unity, pointing out that such contrast of character set into stronger relief the qualities of the sublime and the pathetic in the protagonists, and citing (pp. 10-11) the example of Shakespeare's “irony.” The potential parallels with A. W. Schlegel are obvious.

Thus, while giving literary currency to the term Gothic, Walpole shifted its meaning somewhat from unnatural confusion of details to a legitimately medieval and mysterious composition, artfully put together. Then Walpole, in a second preface for the second edition, said that he had tried to “blend the two kinds of Romance, the ancient and the modern. In the former, all was imagination and improbability; in the latter, nature is always intended to be, and sometimes has been, copied [page 73:] with success” (p. 9). He intended to give the “fancy” free play and yet write of real people, though in extraordinary situations (p. 10). Thus, unity of effect, a principle of contrast, and some psychological verisimilitude are among the qualities, theoretically at any rate, of the earliest English Gothic novel.

The connotation in Gothic of the supernatural and the fantastic, however, was heightened into the principal meaning of the term by the extraordinary success of Otranto and especially of Walpole's immediate imitators. The medieval atmosphere was a major element, but it served primarily as the backdrop for weird and terrifying events. The usage of arabesque meanwhile began to be more clearly associated with the term grotesque, metaphorically applied to literature from ancient scrollwork styles that conjoined animal, human, and plant figures in a bizarre manner which was sometimes playful and sometimes ominous. The three terms, then, were likely in the third quarter of the eighteenth century (and lingering well into the nineteenth century) to mean about the same thing. Arabesque was a term used to suggest “later Gothic” styles, and grotesque was a term associated with the intricate designs ornamenting Gothic buildings or other artworks, early and late.(10)

The Gothic novel became so stereotyped, however, that it fostered a large catalog of often ludicrous conventions, which Poe burlesqued, and also a large subgenre of Gothic satire popular even before Poe's time.(11) Moreover, writers of Gothic tales developed the tale of terror into the psychological tale of sensation, in which the protagonists got themselves into fantastic predicaments (such as being baked in an oven) and then proceeded to analyze their sensations. These sensation tales, as noted earlier, were the mainstay of the fiction of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in the early nineteenth century, which Poe lampoons in “The Premature Burial,” “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” “A Predicament,” “Loss of Breath,” and “Metzengerstein.” The Gothic writers rapidly developed a number of stock-in-trade devices, such as the lonely manor house, the winding staircase, the heavily curtained bedchambers, underground passages, creaking hinges, misty graveyards, forked lightning, howling wind, eerie animal cries, awful darkness, curses and prophetic dreams, animated portraits, mad heroes and sickly heroines, and the presence of giaours, ghosts, and other forms seemingly the product of metempsychosis. These elements, with a little exaggeration, could be made the devices of clever parody; and, if the exaggerations were subtle enough and combined with any effective scenes of horror at all, they could easily become, as in Poe, satiric hoaxes of the genre.

Besides developing such conventions, the Gothic tale itself also developed [page 74:] into subtypes, as Nathan Drake observed at least as early as 1804. Drake distinguished between the “regular Gothic” (the mythology of Scandinavian origin) and the “vulgar Gothic,” which, he said, had in turn two types: “the terrible” (which involves the awful ministrations of the specter) and “the sportive” (which involves fancy, humor, and the innocent gambols of the fairy). Terrible or supernatural Gothic developed along two lines especially important for the understanding of Poe's treatment of Gothic materials: the truly supernatural and the apparently supernatural, or preternatural, which is finally explained away in realistic terms.(12)

Discussing the development of the “terrible” mode of Gothic fiction, J. M. S. Tompkins writes that there were two stages which resulted in the two basic types of the English Gothic romance.(13) In the first stage, the characteristic writer was Mrs. Radcliffe, who worked from English models and produced a type of romance in which the heroines never get their feet dusty, in which there is little or no real violence, and in which supernatural phenomena are rationally and scientifically explained. In the second stage, the Gothic novel was greatly affected by the translation of German Gothic stories, and the characteristic English figure was Matthew Gregory Lewis with The Monk (1795). Whereas Radcliffe displayed dignity, delicacy, and moral scrupulousness, the Germanic kind of Gothic terror was “frequently hideous,” detailing shocking and “protracted butcheries” (p. 245). The English or Rad-cliffean method was to darken the scene slowly, but the early German method, Tompkins claims, had no twilight and insinuated mystery. (She apparently does not include the later grotesque works of the German Romantic Ironists as part of the German Gothic tradition„) Radcliffe's elements were beautiful and awesome landscapes, Gothic buildings, and “the sensitive mind of a girl, attuned to all the intimations, sublime or dreadful, that she can receive from her surroundings” (p. 253). Her books were “full of the half-revealed”; “deliberate recourse to suggestive obscurity” was her most noticeable technique. “Her theme is not the dreadful happening ... but the interval during which the menace takes shape and the mind of the victim is reluctantly shaken ...” (pp. 257-58). The essence of her fiction, then, was human psychology.

The Gothic terror of the Germans, however, worked by sudden shocks and usually with the “real” supernatural, wrenching the mind suddenly from skepticism to “horror-struck belief” (p. 245). Tompkins writes that the taste of the readers was for “the colossal, the impassioned, the dark, the sublime. They wanted to see great forces let loose and the stature of man once more distended to its full height. ... They [page 75:] wanted to see him ablaze with destructive fire or tempered by his will to an icy ruthlessness; they wanted vehemence and tumult, and measureless audacity and measureless egoism” (p. 287). But the whole sense of the Enlightenment was against such unchecked force and against the propagation of superstition. Thus, not only did the English Gothic novel become moral and doctrinal, but also the supernatural became a matter of misperception on the part of the characters. The eerie events were perfectly explicable in realistic terms. Mrs. Radcliffe secured a weird effect by the lighting of blue flames on the points of the soldiers’ lances before the Castle of Udolpho, but she was careful to add in a footnote: “See the Abbé Berthelon on Electricity.” Eager “to serve two gods,” writes Arthur Ransome, she “gave us our thrill and our electricity together” and her fiction is thus “a little laughable on that account,” whereas Poe later, with a clearer understanding of the effect of the weird, avoided such absurdity.(14)

Ransome's assessment of Poe's method is not quite accurate. The technique of explaining the supernatural, according to Tompkins, though unpopular with later generations of readers, was one of the most popular features of the Gothic tale at the end of the eighteenth century, since the explanations preserved “probability.” Even Coleridge wrote in a review of The Mysteries of Udolpho in 1794 that the “reader experiences in perfection the strange luxury of artificial terror” and yet is not “obliged for a moment to hoodwink his reason, or to yield to the weakness of superstitious credulity.”(15) Moreover, the most successful Gothicist in America before Poe, Charles Brockden Brown, was a proponent of the explained rather than the supernatural Gothic, and the interest of his novels resides in both a spooky thrill and a reasonable psychological or scientific accounting.

It is hard to overestimate the importance of this characteristic, for it comprises an essential difference between American Gothic and British Gothic. In a useful essay on “The Gothic Element in American Literature before 1835,” Oral Sumner Coad writes that American poets treated their Gothic mysteries as beyond human ken, but he adds that the dramatists and fiction writers usually “explained” everything: “the preponderance of these rationalized phenomena is proof that the dominant influence on the whole body of American Gothic literature was Mrs. Radcliffe.”(16) Accurate though this may be as a general description, it is only a half-truth with regard to the major American Gothicists, as William B. Cairns long ago noticed. In a monograph on American literature from 1815 to 1833 (which was, of course, the formative period for the young Poe), Cairns considers the effect of Brown's Gothic fiction (despite explanations involving madness, ventriloquism, [page 76:] and spontaneous combustion) to be “purely horrible.” While discussing the effects of writers like Brown, Hawthorne, and Richard Henry Dana, Sr., Cairns writes that the horrors in Dana's novel Paul Felton (1821) are “real no matter how they are accounted for.” The reader is presented with the observable facts of the dramatic situation and then is left to choose between demonic possession and insanity. But the impact is double: if the reader wishes to get the “strongest effect,” Cairns suggests, he intellectually apprehends the weird events as the products of the diseased imagination of a madman, but he feels them as supernatural phenomena.(17)

There is, in other words, a genuine American character, other than mere locale, to the best Gothic tales written on this continent during the last century. Except for the obvious explanations of Mrs. Radcliffe and the ambiguities of a handful of German writers, the ghosts, apparitions, demons, witches, succubi, giaours, fiery orbs, bleeding portraits, animated corpses, invisible tormentors, and grotesque monsters of European fiction of the nineteenth century are usually conceived of (in the dramatic structures of the tales) as actually supernatural. That is, except for certain works by the German ironists, the European writer's handling of the supernatural treats it as a reality that can be explained only by recourse to the occult. But the American mode is markedly different. The very ideology of American fiction is different from the European, whatever other debts the American writer may owe to European literary traditions. Despite the “explained” mode of Mrs. Radcliffe's Gothic romances, we find in examples of the Faust legend that Mephistopheles is a devil in the flesh, not an inhabitant of Faust's imagination. The supernatural is also an actuality in M. G. Lewis's The Monk, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, and Bram Stoker's Dracula.

But what comparable American work so insists on the supernatural as an actual realm of phenomena? The American writer's characteristic attitude toward the supernatural and toward the genre of the Gothic is instead ambiguous. This is clearly seen in those American writers who made the European Gothic tradition truly American — Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and James. The persistent question of Brown's Wieland, for example, is whether the younger Wieland acts under the influence of a demonic agent when he murdered his family or whether his was merely the act of a madman influenced by environmental forces. In Irving's “Adventure of the German Student,” we are never sure whether the young man has made love to a demonic spirit or the incident is totally the product of his crazed imagination — or, for that matter, [page 77:] a more ambiguous twist, whether his “madness” is not the sign of a demonic pact. And did Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown really see Faith participate in a Witch's Sabbat, or was the event a product of his lack of faith in human goodness? Did Melville's Ahab pursue the demonic agent of a satanic God, or was the significance of the eerie white whale totally the product of his monomania? Did James's young governess wage heroic battle against the demonic spirits of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, or did she conjure them up out of an abyss of repressed sexuality? Such questions make it clear that the American development of the Gothic tale inclined toward explained Gothic in psychological terms, a mode that preserved some ambiguity as to the real nature of events.

This, then, is also Poe's Gothic genre. The weird events of such stories as “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “Ligeia” are psychological delusions on the part of the narrators, delusions so subtly insinuated that the reader tends to see only from the narrator's point of view even though he announces his madness, or nervousness, or terror, or some oddity or another that should cause the reader to pause for a moment to consider his distorted or eccentric view of the events he narrates. In their intricacy of design, Poe's Gothic tales contain telltale evidences for rational psychological explanation, yet rarely so obtrusive as to destroy the uncanny supernatural effect, though often the events are so bizarre and incongruous that we cannot fully enjoy the “luxury” of the Gothic terror. It is as if Poe sought to blend two kinds of Gothic romance: the shocking, supernatural, Teutonic tale; and the insinuated, explained, English tale. Poe's technique, as I have suggested before, is one of deceptive tripleness: his tales are supernatural on one level, psychological on another, satiric and ironic on another. If the unwary reader is deceived by the apparent verisimilitude of an apparently supernatural tale (a verisimilitude which in Defoe, Poe said, often half-concealed a “banter”), so much the better.(18) If the unwary reader is deceived by a satiric and mocking Gothic tale, he is properly served.

 

II

Direct statement from Poe that his mode is psychologically explained Gothic is scanty. But there are a half-dozen documents that are highly suggestive. One of the most important of these is an ambiguous correspondence with Philip P. Cooke regarding what Poe at one time considered his masterpiece, “Ligeia.” In a letter to Cooke on September [page 78:] 21, 1839, Poe wrote that Cooke was “right” about the “flawed” technique of “Ligeia”:

Critics disposed to see Poe as a supernaturalist have used this letter and Cooke's original to disprove the psychological reading of “Ligeia,” first given detailed expression by Roy P. Basler.(19) James Schroeter, for example, notes that Cooke in his letter of September 16, 1839, identified the narrator with Poe; Cooke wrote that the story would have been improved if “you had only become aware gradually that the blue Saxon eye of the ‘Lady Rowena of Tremaine’ grew daily darker ... if you had brooded and meditated upon the change. ...”(20) “Surely,” writes Schroeter, “if Poe had intended his narrator to be regarded as a madman, a murderer, and a psychopath ... he could scarcely have failed to be deeply offended by Cooke's letter ...” (p. 406). But Schroeter omits the part of Poe's letter in which Poe wrote, with emphatic pauses, that he was forced to be content with “a sudden half-consciousness, on the part of the narrator, that Ligeia stood before him.”

The possibility that Poe was offended by such identification of himself with the mad murderer of the tale, however, provides a fine motive for irony even in his reply to Cooke. In this connection, a second major point made by Schroeter for the nonpsychological reading reveals a startling double revision by Poe. Schroeter calls attention to Cooke's criticism that Ligeia as a “wandering essence” too suddenly takes over Rowena and becomes the “visible, bodily Ligeia,” and that this violates “the ghostly proprieties.” Schroeter then reports that Poe “did make a change after his correspondence with Cooke,” which is “detailed clearly in [A. H.] Quinn's book,” the standard biography of Poe. This change, Schroeter adds, the psychological critic Basler “did [page 79:] not bother to check.” Schroeter, however, misquotes Quinn and writes that Poe inserted a long passage in which Rowena's now gradual struggles with death are characterized by relapses into “sterner” and “more irredeemable death,” accompanied by “agony” that “wore the aspect of struggle with some invisible foe,” and “succeeded” by “wild change in the personal appearance of the corpse.” Actually, only the last phrase about the changes in the appearance of the corpse was added, and that was in 1845 (usually considered the standard reading, from the Broadway Journal).

Even this much of an addition, however, would suggest that Poe took seriously Cooke's judgment about the abruptness of the conclusion; and Quinn writes in his biography that “this clause prepares the way for the final assumption by Ligeia of the body of her rival, without appearing to do so” (p. 749). The problem with this “corroboration” of Poe's supernaturalist intentions is that the original version in the American Museum in 1838 includes all of the paragraph about the “hideous drama of revivification” taking place in Rowena down to and including the “struggle with some invisible foe” — so that Poe had already laid a foundation for the gradual possession of Rowena by Ligeia before Cooke, a year later, wrote his unperceptive letter.(21)

The next publication of “Ligeia” was in the Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, dated 1840. On September 29, 1839, eight days after Poe's reply to Cooke, the publishers Lea and Blanchard wrote Poe that they would print his Tales (without paying him). Quinn guesses November 1839 to be the month of publication. Thus, Poe had a month or two to make minor revisions. He did: he took out the passage about Rowena's seeming to struggle with an invisible foe, so that Ligeia's final appearance was made more abrupt than in the version Cooke read! Given this context, the undertone of Poe's letter to Cooke is clearly recognizable as ironic and sarcastic:

Poe then went on to list a few others, who, like Cooke, had fully “appreciated” him — indeed, had “read my inmost spirit, ‘like a book.” These other readers included Benjamin Disraeli and N. P. Willis, two of Poe's favorite satiric targets in his early tales.(22) Poe also cited Washington [page 80:] Irving's praise of “Usher,” but said to Cooke: “... I assure you, I regard his best word as but dust in the balance when weighed with those discriminating opinions of your own. ... Touching ‘Ligeia’ you are right — all right — throughout.”

Poe then wrote that Cooke's way of doing it would have rendered the story “sublime,” and he slyly assured Cooke that the ghost of Ligeia did not live but was “entombed as Rowena.” The innuendo regarding the veracity of the opium-bound narrator as a reporter of empirical data is clear. Ligeia exists in the narrator's mind. “But,” Poe writes Cooke, “your word that it is ‘intelligible’ suffices — and your commentary sustains your word. As for the mob — let them talk on. I should be grieved if I thought they comprehended me here.” This last statement surely not only clearly illustrates Poe's attitude toward the majority of his readers but also displays his fine and subtle irony, with P. P. Cooke, in this case, its unsuspecting victim.

If “Ligeia” is not a Gothic tale of the supernatural, then what is it? The concept of the arabesque, to which we had reference earlier as a deceptive pattern, provides an initial clue; for the usage of arabesque, which as we have seen was early connected with the true Gothic, in “Ligeia” seems almost an allegorical explanation of Poe's deceptively psychological Gothicism. Poe's narrator describes his second wife's bridal chamber in a way that clearly shows the close association in Poe's mind of the terms Gothic and arabesque: the “ceiling, of gloomy-looking oak, was excessively lofty, vaulted, and elaborately fretted with the wildest and most grotesque specimens of a semi-Gothic, semi-Druidical device.” From the “most central recess” of the ceiling there is a huge gold censer “depended, by a single chain of gold ... Saracenic in pattern, and with many perforations so contrived that there writhed in and out of them [[,]] as if endued with a serpent vitality, a continual succession of parti-colored fires” (H 2:259-60). In the first publication of “Ligeia” (1838) and in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), the word Saracenic was Arabesque (cf. H 2:387, 390).

The rest of the bridal chamber exhibits those overdone qualities that critics have either called tawdry or taken as simply part of the Romantic mode of the supernatural. The bridal bed is “of an Indian model ... sculptured of solid ebony, with a pall-like canopy above.” In each of the “angles of the chamber” stands “on end a gigantic sarcophagus of black granite” (H 2:260). But in “the draping of the apartment lay, alas! the chief phantasy of all.” The “unproportionably” high walls are covered with “vast folds” of “heavy and massive-looking tapestry” of rich gold cloth. This cloth also is used for the carpet, for the upholstery, for the canopy of the bed, and for the “gorgeous volutes” [page 81:] of the curtains around the window. The material, however, has a peculiar black design. The cloth is:

This passage suggests that the arabesque decor as Poe uses it is not merely the monstrousness of supernatural things but is a matter of appearance, of deceptiveness, of perspective and point of view in an overall design. As a kind of allegorical statement about “tales of the grotesque and arabesque,” as well as about the single tale itself, the passage suggests that the real subject of such tales is subconscious and obsessive delusion. In “Ligeia,” as in Poe's other Gothic tales, what seems simply monstrous or Gothic on the surface becomes “realistically” psychological, a matter of dream and delusion, as one shifts his perspective. For the attentive, Poe develops an ironic distance between the reader and narrator as it becomes clear that the narrator is closely involved in the eerie events of the story. The “bridal” chamber that the narrator prepares for his second wife, Rowena, should surely alert the reader. For the Gothic and arabesque decor of the room suggests not a bridal but a funeral chamber.

Poe plants the first clue to this kind of psychological dramatic irony in the first paragraph of the tale. The mind of the narrator is clouded. His memory is especially tricky; he cannot at the moment remember where or when he met Ligeia. Nor does he know if he ever knew her last name! On one “topic,” however, “memory fails me not. It is the person of Ligeia” (H 2:249). She was tall, slender, beautiful; her voice was low, sweet, and musical; her footstep light and elastic; her face had “the radiance of an opium-dream” (H 2:249). The opium dream is but a metaphor at this point in the tale, but halfway through, just before and just after the arabesque description of Rowena's bridal [page 82:] chamber, Poe emphasizes his narrator's drug addiction, even noting his “incipient madness.”

Poe also provides him with a motive for murder, if the alert reader will look for it. Having moved from Germany, where his first wife, Ligeia, has died, the narrator purchases a ruined abbey — with the money left him by Ligeia (H 2:258). His next move is to take as his wife a titled Englishwoman. Sneering at her parents, who have accepted a large sum of money from him in return for their daughter's hand in marriage, he begins to indulge his taste for the Gothic in the decoration of his new wife's bridal chamber. He explains that he has always been drawn to the Gothic and the bizarre in architecture and interior design, and he attributes his now wilder Gothic fancies to the influence of the opium he is taking in large quantity. But the reader used to Poe's “ratiocinative” method and to Poe's focus on the disintegrating mind knows what to expect from this death-decorated chamber, especially when the narrator mentions his memories of the ideal Ligeia and his growing “hatred” and “loathing” of Rowena (H 2:261): “Now, then, did my spirit fully and freely burn with more than all the fires of her [Ligeia's] own. In the excitement of my opium dreams (for I was habitually fettered in the shackles of the drug) I would call [[aloud]] upon her name, during the silence of the night ...”(H 2:261; my italics).

Soon after, Rowena is taken with a “sudden illness,” which the narrator describes most vaguely, punctuated by weird dreamlike memories of the lost Ligeia. Near the end of October, he administers a glass of wine to Rowena, and fancies that “three or four large drops of a brilliant and ruby colored fluid,” forming invisibly in the air, fall into the goblet, after which Rowena takes “a rapid change for the worse” (H 2:263-64) “Wild visions, opium-engendered, flitted, shadow-like, before me. I gazed with unquiet eye upon the sarcophagi in the angles of the room, upon the varying figures of the drapery, and upon the writhing of the parti-colored fires in the [arabesque] censer overhead” (H 2:264; my italics). Next there follows his watch over the changes in the appearance of Rowena's corpse, a deathwatch that the narrator describes as “an agony of superstitious terror” (H 2:264). The clues undercutting the ostensible supernaturalism could hardly be clearer. Poe's real subject is the delusive madness of his narrator, the subconscious welling up of the extremities of emotion — of extreme love, hate, and fearful superstition — in a spirit writhing in fire.

On a second level of irony, “Ligeia” contains some specific satiric mockery. Clark Griffith has suggested that Poe's underlying satiric point in “Ligeia” is similar to that of “Silence” and “How to Write a [page 83:] Blackwood Article,” a double-edged comment about transcendentalism and Gothicism. Griffith suggests that the overdone style and the symbolic contrasts of light and shadow, of gold and black in the furnishings of the settings, and of the fair and dark women are carefully patterned to make an almost allegorical point. Griffith points out that Ligeia's unearthly transcendentalism contrasts with Rowena's dull worldliness; the dark German lady is infinitely more intriguing than the Englishwoman. Moreover, Griffith notes a series of similarities between Poe's Rowena and Scott's Rowena in Ivanhoe, as well as some parallels of setting, such as the disproportionately high walls and the odd draperies. Griffith further notes some startling parallels with Confessions of an Opium-Eater, which Poe then thought to be a brilliant hoax by Coleridge, and which Poe parodies among other works in “Silence.” Griffith's conclusion, given such parallels and echoes, seems quite plausible: Poe's satiric innuendo suggests the triumph of German idealism and Gothicism over its pale imitations in the English-speaking world.(23)

But even if we assume, for the sake of argument, the traditional reading of “Ligeia” as an occultist tale of the power of the will to effect its reincarnation, what are we to make of the then almost inexplicable self-parody presented in “The Man That Was Used Up. A Tale of the Late Bugaboo and Kickapoo Campaign”? This tale, a political satire on Andrew Johnson, appeared less than a year after “Ligeia,” and its first few paragraphs burlesque almost phrase by phrase the opening paragraphs of “Ligeia,” a perplexing phenomenon noticed recently by Richard Wilbur.(24) “The Man That Was Used Up” presents as its hero a completely artificial man, Brevet Brigadier General John A. B. C. Smith, severely (indeed, almost totally) wounded in the Indian Wars, but fully reconstructed by American technological know-how: he is fitted up with artificial limbs, artificial shoulders, an artificial chest, and artificial hair, eyes, teeth, and palate. When put all together, the General is a handsome figure of a man, six feet tall, and altogether admirable. Of him, the narrator remarks (in the first version of the story) that his appearance gives “force to the pregnant observation of Francis Bacon — that ‘there is no exquisite beauty existing in the world without a certain degree of strangeness in the expression’ ” (H 3:336). This is just what the narrator of “Ligeia,” also alluding to Francis Bacon, says of her beautifully strange face:

The implications for Poe's detached, ironic attitude toward his materials, toward such details in Ligeia's “strange” and somehow “irregular” beauty of face, are obvious and suggest a further ironic context for Poe's conception of the Gothic quality of such a tale as “Ligeia.”

“Ligeia” opens with the narrator's statement: “I cannot, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where, I first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia” (H 2:248). “The Man That Was Used Up” begins: “I cannot just now remember when or where I first made [[the]] acquaintance of that truly fine-looking fellow, Brevet Brigadier General John A. B. C. Smith” (H 3:259). In “Ligeia,” Poe's strategy in the dreamlike opening is to have his narrator “bring before mine eyes in fancy the image of her who is no more” (H 2:249). She was tall and slender, she had a low musical voice, and there was something “strange” about her appearance (H 2:250). The narrator then carefully details her features, noting the “lofty and pale forehead,” the whiteness of her complexion, the “gentle prominence of the regions above the temples,” the luxuriant, glossy, raven-black hair, the delicate nose, the shape of her lips and chin, and especially the white teeth which send the light “glancing back, with a brilliancy almost startling.” Finally, he describes her extraordinary eyes, large, dark, yet luminous, and especially the mysterious “expression” that lies “far within the pupils” (H 2:251). “What was it?” the narrator repeatedly asks himself, that was so remarkable about the strange mystery of her expression (H 2:251-52). He connects this strangeness with the mysteries of the cosmos, the invisible force of the stars in the heavens, emphasizing the sense of “intensity [[intensity]] in thought, action, or speech” that seemed to result from her “gigantic volition” (H 2:253). The tale then moves along in this Gothic direction, with the slow but steady accumulation of psychological clues to the nervous and agitated condition of the narrator.

In “The Man That Was Used Up,” Poe's narrator comments on his lack of “definite impressions” of his first meeting with the General, mentions that he is “constitutionally nervous” and inclined to become most agitated in the face of “the slightest appearance of a mystery [[of mystery]]” (H 3:259). He then repeatedly observes that there is something “remarkable” about the General, and details his appearance. The General [page 85:] is tall, with glossy, jetty-black hair and equally black whiskers surrounding his “utterly unequalled” mouth, and has the “most brilliantly white of all conceivable teeth.” His voice is clear and melodious, and his extraordinary eyes are especially remarkable, large, deep hazel, yet lustrous — “and there was perceptible about them ... just that amount of interesting obliquity which gives pregnancy to expression” (H 3:260). The tale then moves along in its comic direction, ludicrously repeating the mysterious “je ne sais quoi,” that “remarkable something” about him. Thus, we see here a salient feature of Poe's habitual mode of composition, the shift to opposites — first a Gothic tale about a mysterious woman, then a comic tale about a “mysterious” man — using the same opening strategy in both, as though in self-parody the second time. The narrator of “The Man That Was Used Up” is almost the comic Doppelgänger of the narrator of “Ligeia.” This radical about-face burlesque of one's own compositional technique, characteristic of the Romantic Ironists, at the very least shows Poe's preoccupation at this juncture with artificial constructs in both a Gothic and a comic vein. Not only may Ligeia be the construct of the narrator's agitated Gothic mind, but she is also quite clearly his “demon,” a device of his own “self-torture” — as Poe says of the student's conception of the raven — and thus is an absurdist, if serious, parody of the ideal woman as much as the artificial General is a comic parody of the ideal man.

But the narrator of the Gothic tale digresses with such singular intensity about this strangeness of the face of Ligeia that we need to give it further attention. He speaks especially of her eyes and of a “gentle prominence above the region of the temples.” Poe's emphasis on these features of Ligeia's face is so pronounced that Edward Hun-gerford suggests that Poe was trying to emphasize for his readers a proper “phrenological” basis for Ligeia's character.(25) One of the first things we learn about Ligeia, Hungerford says, is the “eloquence of her low musical language”; language, Hungerford notes, is one of the “organs” of phrenology, externally indicated by the eyes. “We have not very long to wait. The description leaves us peering into the large eyes of Ligeia. And very large eyes they were” (p. 228). Soon after, we learn of Ligeia's great learning in various tongues. Hungerford, however, can find in Poe's “phrenological” emphasis on Ligeia's ability with languages no direct relevance to the themes of the tale; he suggests instead that Poe is trying to show his readers that Ligeia is “scientifically true according to phrenology,” that Poe is setting up through phrenological details a subtle clue to Ligeia's major trait — “love of life.” But there is an obvious satiric point to this emphasis on language if we accept Griffith's suggestion that Poe's innuendo in the [page 86:] tale has to do with the relationship of German and English literatures.

Ligeia's major trait, however, is to be discovered in that “gentle prominence above the regions of the temples,” a significant point for the reader of Poe's time, says Hungerford, for “anyone who knew phrenology” would guess that this prominence above the temples suggested one or more of the following traits: “constructiveness,” “acquisitiveness,” “secretiveness,” “destructiveness,” “alimentiveness” (a taste for heavy feeding), or one other, “love of life.” Only the last, Hunger-ford says, could possibly apply to Ligeia. Actually, all of them apply in some way.

It is hard not to see “constructiveness” as double-edged, suggesting her ingenuity and her ambiguous existence in the delirious mind of the narrator. But Ligeia is without doubt “destructive,” “secretive,” and “acquisitive.” In the supernatural interpretation of the tale, she kills Rowena, secretly, and acquires her body. At one point, the narrator remarks on her “gigantic intellectual acquisitions,” especially of secret, occult knowledge; moreover, she had acquired a fortune large enough to allow her husband to buy an abbey and a titled bride. As to “alimentiveness,” Ligeia's relationship with her husband and her “acquisition” of Rowena's body have something of a vampirelike quality; she feeds on other life to preserve her own. Poe, I suggest, is purposefully ambiguous and ironic about that prominent region “above the temples.”

But that “love of life” is the dominant idea of the phrenological description of Ligeia's head is quite clear. Poe specifically underscores this characteristic in the narrator's account of her struggle with death: “It is this wild longing — it is this eager vehemence of desire for life — but for life — that I have no power to portray ...” (H 2:256). This idea, too, has its ironies. Ligeia seems to love life itself without any concern for the ultimate principles of philosophy and ethics which her studies of transcendentalism would suggest were prominent traits in her. Poe is again quite clear: “I would have soothed,” the narrator says, “I would have reasoned; but, in the intensity of her wild desire for life, — for life — but for life — solace and reason were alike the uttermost of folly” (H 2:255). We have seen before Poe's ironic attitude toward American transcendentalism and toward phrenology, the pseudoscientific, and the occult (even Hungerford admits some difficulty in accounting for Poe's satiric remarks about and satiric use of phrenology elsewhere). Poe's mockery here becomes clearer when we note that the concepts of phrenology were closely related to Coleridge's metaphysics, Swedenborg's mysticism, and New England transcendentalism, all of which Poe satirizes in other works. In fact, so closely related [page 87:] were these four mystic-metaphysical-psychological “theories” that F. H. Hedge, late in the nineteenth century, claimed to have been the real founder of the Transcendental Club, for he had published a series of articles on Coleridge, Swedenborg, and phrenology in 1833 and 1834.(26) This relationship further strengthens Clark Griffith's claims for Poe's insinuated mockery of transcendentalism and mysticism in “Ligeia” by linking the tale quite clearly to the satiric subjects of such tales as “How to Write a Blackwood Article” in just the way he suggests.

A further ironic twist can be seen in the description of Ligeia's head. The front-view picture of her face — looming out of the darkness of her hair, with that gentle prominence above the temples, with an ivory complexion in which are set the large, staring, black, almost pupilless eyes, and with a broad chin above which are “the teeth glancing back with a brilliancy almost startling” — is that of a death's-head (H 2:250). Ligeia, the narrator's obsession, is thus first described in a way that, ambiguously, suggests a grinning skull; her head is for the narrator the symbol of death itself. Later, in decorating Rowena's death chamber with pall-like canopies and Egyptian sarcophagi, the narrator reveals his half-conscious love of death, an ironic inversion of Ligeia's apparent love of life. Moreover, the narrator's memory of the strange face of Ligeia, coupled with his blurred memory of her as a real person and his calling upon her name as he wakes from opium dreams in the dead of night, again suggests a demonic and delusive construct in his mind. But real or not, Ligeia is certainly his vampire, his succubus. His blurred memory of her skull-like head is at the very least a symbol of his obsession with death, just as the zigzag fissure and general decay of the arabesque “face” (H 3:279) of Roderick Usher's house are symbolic of his crumbling and decaying mind.(27)

 

IV [[III]]

The structural configuration of ambiguously explained Gothic informing “Ligeia” and “Usher” may be clarified by reference to another nineteenth-century tale. In Heart of Darkness (first published in Blackwood's, 1898-99), Joseph Conrad's first narrator comments on the conception of the meaning of a narrative held by Marlow, who is himself the narrator of the basic tale of his pursuit of his psychological double, Kurtz, and to whom Conrad's first narrator listens as one sitting in darkness waiting for light. This first narrator comments that Marlow, unlike other tale-spinning sailors, saw the significance of a narrative not as a core-meaning of some kind but as a system of structures: [page 88:] “The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. [But to Marlow] the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.” So it is with “The Fall of the House of Usher,” which bears a number of surprising similarities in theme, imagery, and structure to Heart of Darkness.(28) Like “Ligeia,” “Usher” is a structure of interpenetrating structures that shifts its aspect with a slight shift of perspective by the reader. Given the initial focus of a reader, the primary answer to any question presented by the story varies, though the relationships among the various structures of the story do not.

This can be partially illustrated by reference to the recurrent concerns of critics of the tale; most of the critical commentary returns obsessively to a few central points, compulsively repeating with slightly altered angles of vision the same set of haunting questions. What is the significance of the close resemblance of Roderick Usher and his sister, and are the two the product of, and guilty of incest? Did Roderick intentionally try to murder Madeline, and did Madeline actually return from her tomb, vampirelike, to claim her brother's life? Is the physical house actually “alive” and by some preternatural force of will controlling the destinies of the Ushers? Or is the story not a tale of the supernatural at all, but rather a work of psychological realism? What then is the precise role of the narrator? And can the work be read in Freudian or Jungian terms? If the tale is a psychological or symbolic work, what is the meaning of the interpolated story of the “Mad Trist of Sir Launcelot Canning”? What significance have the titles of the books in Usher's library, and what significance are we to attach to Usher's strange, neurasthenic art works? The very fact that these questions persist year after year suggests that at the dark heart of the story lies an essential ambiguity, carefully insinuated and carefully wrought.

Thus, just as with “Ligeia,” it is misleading to conceive of the meaning of the tale as devolving solely upon any single and fixed subject, such as the supernatural character of the house, or of Madeline Usher, as opposed to a Gothic homily on the neurasthenia of the ultimate in narcissistic artist heroes, or as opposed to the incestuous guilt and hereditary curse of the family. The tale is a concatenation of all these, and not an either/or question. Nevertheless, there is, as with “Ligeia,” a basic structure that integrates all the others, a set or system of relationships that remains constant and primary, enveloping the rest with [page 89:] a further meaning without disturbing each as a coherent system within itself. This primary structure is the product of the objective synthesis generated by our perceiving as readers the double aspects of the tale as simultaneously supernaturalistic (symbolic of deep structures in the human mind or not) and yet also realistic in a conventional sense. This multiple perception of the simultaneous or parallel levels of the tale derives principally from our perception of the subjectivity of the narrator. As in “Ligeia,” we experience a series of “supernatural” events (which have Freudian and Jungian resonances) through the mind of a narrator whom we recognize as disturbed — so that we simultaneously are subjectively involved in and detached from these experiences. The whole system of interpenetrating levels or structures of both tales leads ultimately to Poe's ironic mockery of the ability of the human mind ever to know anything with certainty, whether about the external reality of the world or about the internal reality of the mind.

Much of the discussion of “Usher” to follow derives from Darrel Abel's brilliant analysis of the tale as a psychodrama of the mutual hysteria of the narrator and Roderick Usher.(29) What I offer as progressive to our understanding of the tale is principally addenda to such evidence in terms of a reconsideration of the principal symbols of the tale within the primary structural context proposed — that is, the structure wherein the subjectivity of the narrator provides the basic system of structures holding in tension all the others. I shall attempt to demonstrate the pervasiveness of this primary structure principally by reference to the pattern of the double and its redoubled manifestations (Roderick and Madeline, Roderick and the house, Roderick and the narrator, Madeline and the narrator, the narrator and the house). This pattern is again redoubled by the imagery of the face or skull, which ultimately inverts back on the self as a symbol of the “reality” seen from the inward perspective of characters caught in a labyrinth of mental surmise.

On its most obvious level, the tale is concerned with the traditional Gothic subjects of death and madness and fear. The matters of madness (especially Roderick's) and fear have been frequently commented on, but the other pervading subject of death (physical, familial, spiritual, and mental) has not been closely enough linked to the themes of fear and madness. It is curious, for example, that no one has ever seen fit to remark that when the narrator rides up to the house of Usher, he is immediately confronted with a death's-head looming up out of the dead landscape. Poe obviously intended the image of the skull-like face of the house to dominate as the central image of the tale, for he returns to it again and again, placing the most [page 90:] extended descriptions of it at symmetrically located places in the narrative. Eventually, the pervasive image of the psychically split face reflects the internal landscape of the narrator himself (rather than just Usher), so that the primary structure of the tale merges with its central image. Even when the house sinks into the pool at the end, the motifs of the skull and face (Usher's, the house's, that of the mind gone mad in “The Haunted Palace,” and the narrator's) represent the internal spiralling of the complete subjectivity of consciousness. That is, the sinking of the house into the reflecting pool dramatizes the sinking of the rational part of the mind, which has unsuccessfully attempted to maintain some contact with a stable structure of reality outside the self, into the nothingness that is without and within.

Usher's weird painting of what might be a tomb for the burial of the body of Madeline, imaging nothing but rays of light rolling throughout a passage without outlet, is also reflective of the death and burial of consciousness and rationality themselves; thus, it is a painting of Usher's internal void, which is objectified by the final collapse of the house into the image of itself in the pool. The spiralling further and further inward leads us to the mocking irony of the ultimate theme of nothingness, which is all the mind can ever truly know, if it can know anything. The nothingness without (in the landscape) and the nothingness within (in the minds of Usher and the narrator) are mirror images or doubles reflecting the theme of nothingness in the tale. And the collapse of the universe of Roderick Usher includes the double collapse of his mind along with the narrator's — productive of an overall structure of collapse mirroring the pattern of the universe itself, as expressed in Eureka.

That Usher's mind disintegrates as the tale progresses is obvious. Both Usher and the narrator comment variously on the matter. The inciting event, in fact, is Usher's written appeal to the narrator to preserve him from the final collapse of his mind. Moreover, as mentioned, a major concern in the tale is the mechanism of fear itself, which has perversely operated on Roderick Usher before the narrator arrives, and which operates on the narrator through Usher afterwards, so that we apprehend the basic dramatic action of the tale as psychological — the presentation of the progressive hallucination of the two protagonists. In the supernaturally charged atmosphere of the first level of the story, the narrator seems to serve as a corroborating witness to the actual return of Madeline, and to the strange, simultaneous “deaths” of the Ushers and of their house. But Poe meticulously, from the opening paragraph through to the last, details the development of the narrator's initial uneasiness into a frenzy of terror, engendered by and parallel [page 91:] to Usher's terrors. The tale opens with the narrator's account of his lonely autumn journey through a “singularly dreary tract of country” in response to a “wildly importunate” summons from Usher (H 3:273-74). At nightfall, as the “melancholy” house of Usher comes into view, the narrator feels a sense of “insufferable gloom” pervading his spirit. He pauses to look at the “mere house,” trying to account rationally for its total weird effect. But the scene still produces in him “an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium ... an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart — an unredeemed dreariness of thought. ... it was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered” (H 3:273-74). The primary effect of the opening paragraphs, of course, is to suggest something horrible and supernatural about the house of Usher. But, as in Poe's other tales, there is no overstepping of the real; the strange impression of the scene is relegated to the “fancies” of the narrator. Because the narrator tries to account for the effect rationally, however, we are led, for the time being, to attribute the weirdness of the scene not to his subjective impressions but to the scene itself.

Yet Poe uses this apparent rationality to heighten the irrational. The narrator reflects on the possibility that “there are combinations of very simple natural objects” that have the power to affect the mind, but “the analysis of this power lies among considerations” beyond our “depth”; and at this moment, he looks down into a “black and lurid tarn,” to see the reflected, remodeled, and inverted images of the “gray sedge, and the ghostly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows” (H 3:274). The effect of this vision in the pool is to produce in him a “shudder even more thrilling than before” and to “deepen the first singular impression”: “There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase of my superstition — for why should I not so term it? — served mainly to accelerate the increase itself. Such, I have long known, is the paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as a basis” (H 3:276; my italics). After this objective recognition of an inward self-division that results in yet further subjectivity, he again lifts his eyes “to the house itself, from its image in the pool” and he becomes aware of a “strange fancy” growing in his mind: “I had so worked upon my imagination as really to believe that about the whole mansion and domain there hung ... a pestilent and mystic vapour, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued” (H 3:276; my italics). But Poe then reasserts the narrator's rationality: “Shaking off from my spirit what must have been a dream, I scanned more narrowly [page 92:] the real aspect of the building” (H 3:276). The paragraph is organized, however, so as to bring the “real” description back again to the “impression” the scene makes upon the narrator's “fancy.” Although the narrator begins his “analysis” of the house at the (rational) roof, with its fine tangled web-work of fungi, his eye travels down along a zigzag fissure to become again “lost in the sullen waters of the tarn” (H 3:277), by now clearly emblematic of the subconscious mind.

The apprehensive, fanciful, superstitious, but “rational” narrator then goes into the house to meet Usher, where, during the course of the next several days, he comes increasingly under the influence of Usher's own wild superstitions. “In the manner of my friend,” the narrator says, “I was at once struck with an incoherence — an inconsistency. ...”

Usher's statement of his own condition applies also to the narrator, who struggles with the same phantasm, heightened by Usher's own phantasms. It is Usher, for example, who remarks to the suggestible narrator that the house is alive and has exerted a malignant influence on his mind. Later the narrator, looking for something to read, finds that the only books in Usher's library are accounts of strange journeys, eerie meetings, and deathwatches (some of which, like Tieck's Blue Distance are partially satiric). Then Usher reads his strange poem about the decay of reason (H 3:284-86), the single extended metaphor of which suggests the “face” of the house of Usher itself, and extends the pattern of descent from roof to basement, of rationality to irrationality, and the inverse ascent of irrationality welling up to overwhelm the rational. Soon after the reading, Madeline dies, and Usher and the narrator bury her in a crypt in the cellar. She has the “mockery of a faint blush of life” upon her skin and a terrible “lingering smile” upon her lips, phenomena that the “rational” narrator attributes to the peculiar ravages of her cataleptic disorder but which Usher intimates is something less natural (H 3:289). Then, as Usher's behavior becomes even more distracted (a continual “tremulous quaver, as if of extreme terror, habitually characterized his utterance”), the narrator confesses to himself his own increasing apprehensiveness. Slowly, although he tries to see in Usher's behavior the “mere inexplicable vagaries of madness,” [page 93:] the narrator feels growing in himself a vague fear that Usher has some horrible “oppressive secret” to divulge (H 3:289). “Rationally,” however, the narrator acknowledges that Usher's “condition terrified ... it infected me. I felt creeping upon me, by slow yet uncertain [[certain]] degrees, the wild influences of his own fantastic yet impressive superstitions” (H 2:289-90; my italics).

Symmetrically, the psychological themes of the first part of the tale are exactly repeated in the second, but with the fears of both Usher and the narrator at a higher pitch. Shortly after Madeline's burial, the narrator is unable to sleep, especially since, as with the reflected image of the house in the tarn, he is aware of his increased terror: “an irrepressible tremour gradually pervaded my frame; and, at length, there sat upon my very heart an incubus” of “utterly causeless alarm (H 3:290). “Overpowered by an intense sentiment of horror,” the narrator begins pacing nervously; suddenly he is startled by a light footstep outside his door. But it is only Usher. Usher's intensely agitated condition, however, is the more unnerving, especially when he suggests that a supernatural and luminous vapor has surrounded the house in spite of the rising wind without.

What is perhaps the clearest of clues to the theme of doubled and redoubled fear comes next. The narrator, in an attempt to calm Usher, reads from a volume called the “Mad Trist.” The title calls attention to the basic situation in which the narrator finds himself.(30) Usher is about to keep a mad tryst with Madeline, even as the narrator has kept his mad tryst with Usher. The tale, this “Mad Trist,” is an absurd parody of a medieval romance about the delusive meeting of the knight Ethelred with a hermit who disappears and changes his form into that of a fearful dragon. The narrator's reading of the “Mad Trist” to Usher is interrupted by strange sounds of creaking wood, of shrieking, and of grating metal. These sounds, beginning at the bottom of the house and moving upward toward them, eerily (and ludicrously) correspond with the sounds evoked in the chivalric romance. The sounds, of course, are supposed to be the results of the cataleptic Madeline's efforts to free herself from her tomb. Usher, at least, tells the narrator that this is so and that she is, in fact, now standing outside the door. And, in the end, the narrator sees her too: bloody, frail, emaciated, trembling, and reeling to and fro, falling upon Usher in her “now final death agonies [[death-agonies]]” and bearing Usher “to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated” (H 3:296; my italics). As a last emphatic psychological detail, Poe has the narrator tell us that “from that chamber [[,]] and from that mansion, I fled aghast.” Thus we do not know for sure that the house splits apart and sinks into the [page 94:] tarn in a lurid blaze, for the narrator has by now been revealed to be completely untrustworthy.

Yet, even here, Poe provides one more turn of the screw, for, buried in the details about the house, is the information that the oxygenless dungeon has been a storage place for gunpowder or “some other highly combustible substance” (H 3:288). Thus if the house cracks open and crumbles, rather than a necessarily supernatural occurrence, as it seems to the hysterical narrator, it is explainable as the combustion generated when the lightning of the storm crackles near the previously airless crypt — the inrushing electricity being conducted along the copper floor and igniting the remnants of powder. Yet these mocking clues are not all. The miasma enshrouding the house provides yet another, for marsh gas was then thought to have hallucinatory effects, and Poe elsewhere mentions this very effect.(31)

If the stated terrors of the narrator are not convincing enough for a complete psychological interpretation of the supernaturally charged events, the recurrent dream imagery and the very order of the opening paragraphs regarding the images of the house in the pool should confirm such a reading. The dream images culminate in the return of Madeline and in the “Mad Trist.” Madeline, supposedly the victim of a cataleptic fit, is presumably not a ghost or other supernatural manifestation, even though her appearance at Usher's door produces a ghostlike effect in the best tradition of supernatural Gothic. We do get our Gothic thrill, even though she is not a supernatural being. Yet, if she is not, then how, in her frail and emaciated condition, would she be capable of breaking open the coffin, the lid of which, the narrator specifically tells us, had been screwed down tight? Or of pushing open the door, “of massive iron” and of such “immense weight” that its movement “caused an unusually sharp grating sound, as it moved upon its hinges”? (See H 3:288.) These details of Madeline's entombment, given us at the midpoint of the tale, underscore the dream motif and link her dreamlike manifestation directly to the psyche of the narrator; for Poe also makes a point of having the narrator tell us that Madeline's tomb is at great depth, immediately beneath that portion of the building in which was “my own sleeping apartment” (H 3:288). The images of sleep, mist, water, and descent, recurring throughout the tale, forcibly suggest Poe's focus on the subconscious mind. The night of Madeline's return, just before the reading of the “Mad Trist,” the narrator cannot sleep, and a detailed description of his troubled drowsiness is given. Neither can Usher sleep, for he is troubled by the dreamy mist enshrouding the house. Finally, the events, the disappearances, the transformations, and the correspondences of sounds in [page 95:] the tale of the “Mad Trist” which follows, all have the order of a dream, and, moreover, move from the depths of the house upward toward Usher and the narrator.

Yet the “Mad Trist” is made purposefully ludicrous; it reads like a parody, and even the narrator comments on its absurdity. The correspondence of sounds, especially, heightens the ludicrous effect. But the intruded tale of the “Mad Trist” also has a clear ironic effect; it destroys the Gothic illusion. As in “Metzengerstein” and “Ligeia,” Poe intrudes an ironic distance clearly and suddenly between the narrator and the reader, here calling attention to the real psychological situation of the two protagonists engaged in their own mad tryst.

Connected with the dream images and reinforcing the suggestion of subconscious action is the dreamlike reflection of the house of Usher in the pool and its parallel in Usher's arabesque face. In fact, Usher's famous face (supposedly a pen portrait of Poe's own according to biographically oriented critics), with its parallels in the appearance of “The Haunted Palace” of Usher's wild poem and in the appearance of the house itself, provides a major clue to the irony insinuated into, under, and around the apparent Gothic surface of the story. Usher's face in a sense is the image of the narrator's own, whose mind, if not disintegrating also, is capable of slipping in an instant into the same kind of madness or hysterical fear to which Usher is subject. The narrator, as he becomes absorbed in his “superstitious” reflections, says that he had to shake off from his fancy “what must have been a dream.” The narrator's first impression of the house is that it is like a human face, especially with its two vacant eyelike windows. Then he looks down into the pool, but sees only the reflection of the “face” of the house. What is equally likely, of course, is that he should see imaged there his own reflected features, since Poe is careful to point out that the narrator wheels his horse up to “the precipitous brink” of the tarn and thus gazes straight down (H 3:274). Then he remembers Usher's hysterical letter and mentions, along with Usher's “mental disorder,” that he had been Usher's close and only friend. Next he remembers that the peasants refer to both the building and the family as the House of Usher and immediately returns to the image of the “face” in the pool (H 3:275-76). When he looks up at the house again, he tries to “analyze” its weird effect, and describes once more its prominent details, especially the overspreading fungi “hanging in a fine tangled web-work from the eaves” (H 3:276). The nervous narrator, conscious of his own vague terror and therefore the more apprehensive, goes into the house to meet Usher, and his attention is focused on the odd appearance of Usher's face. Usher's face has a generally decayed aspect, [page 96:] like the house itself, but especially noticeable are his large and luminous eyes and his hair “of more than web-like softness and tenuity.” This tangled, “web-like,” “silken hair,” of a “wild gossamer texture,” thus imagistically merges the facelike structure of the house with Usher's face, the “arabesque expression” of which the narrator cannot “connect with any idea of simple humanity” (H 3:278-79). As we have seen, the narrator grows “terrified” and “infected” with Usher's hysteria. He becomes like Usher. In meeting Usher, he is symbolically staring into the face of his psychological double, and when he steps through the “Gothic” archway of Usher's house into the dark, black-floored hall with its carved, niched, fretted architectural features, lit by “feeble gleams” of “encrimsoned” light that barely makes its way through elaborately “trellised panes,” it is clear that the narrator has stepped into the confused, subjective world of Gothic terror and horror. Once inside, in another absurdist touch, he is taken by a servant who “ushers” him into Usher's presence (H 3:277). Thus, Usher's “arabesque” face and the face of the house are the same, and when the narrator gazes into the pool, the reflected “arabesque” face is merged with his own — symbolically is his own. The image of the face is then reemphasized in Usher's poem about the attack of “madness” on the “haunted” castle.

The ghosts in the tale of Usher, then, are those of the mind. Such an analysis does not deny the supernaturalistic surface level of the tale, or other significant patterns such as the incest motif, the eerie hint of vampirism, the use of abstract art to suggest sexuality, entombment, or nothingness, or the carefully balanced themes of order and sentience that other critics have noted.(32) Rather, such a reading incorporates them into its overall pattern, while wrapping a layer of dramatic irony about the whole. As in other of Poe's Gothic tales, the delusiveness of the experience is rendered in and through the consciousness of the narrator so that we participate in his Gothic horror while we are at the same time detached observers of it. In the image of the house as skull or death's-head and the merging of the narrator's face with the face of the house which is also Usher's face in the pool, we see once again in Poe the subtly ironic paralleling of the narrative structure of the tale to its visual focal point. And by having the facelike house of Usher sink into its own image, the final collapse into that void which is both the self and the universe simultaneously is complete. This, then, is the larger pattern of meaning generated by the overall narrative system enveloping the other levels of narrative. And yet there is, by implication, a further enlargement. Since, just as in “Ligeia,” it is clear that we do not know that anything the narrator has told us is [page 97:] “real,” the whole tale and its structures may be the fabrication of the completely deranged mind of the narrator. Nothing at all may have happened in a conventional sense in the outside world — only in the inner world of the narrator's mind. Of this redoubled nothingness, then, also comes nothing. And as with “Ligeia,” this further perception of the structures of nothingness becomes our ultimate perception of the tale as simultaneously involved and detached observers.

 

V [[IV]]

Poe's attitude toward the ghostly and monstrous “constructions” of the human mind and the mind's susceptibility to the force of suggestion finds succinct statement in his review of William Newnham's Human Magnetism. That “the belief in ghosts, or in a Deity, or in a future state, or in anything else credible or incredible ... is universal,” Poe observes, “demonstrates nothing more than ... the identity of construction in the human brain ...” (H 16:115). A man can “feign [to] himself a sphynx or a griffin, but it would never do to regard as thus demonstrated the actual existence of either griffins or sphynxes” (H 16:114). In an earlier review in the Southern Literary Messenger (December 1835), Poe complained that William Godwin in the Lives of the Necromancers had dealt with “the great range and wild extravagancy of the imagination of man” rather than with what is more important — “the manner in which delusion acts upon mankind” (H 8:93-94). Later, in 1842, Poe began his “Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” a murder story based on a real murder in New York, with a comment on the “supernatural” impact of sheer coincidence: “There are few persons, even among the calmest thinkers, who have not occasionally been startled into a vague yet thrilling half-credence in the supernatural, by coincidences of so seemingly marvellous a character that, as mere coincidences, the intellect has been unable to receive them” (H 5:2). Although Poe went on to suggest that by reference to a “doctrine of chance,” a “Calculus of Probabilities,” we can apply mathematics, “the most rigidly exact in science,” to “the shadow and spirituality of the most intangible in speculation” (H 5:2), it is important to note Poe's precise phrasing: “mere coincidences” take on a “seemingly marvellous character.” Poe's ironic attitude here is clarified in his letters (O 1:199-202) to George Roberts and Joseph Evans Snodgrass (both June 4, 1842). He intimates that he is aware of the “manner” in which his readers will receive the correspondence between the case of Marie Rogêt in Paris and that of Mary Rogers in New York: at the [page 98:] same time that he is applying a calculus of probabilities, his readers will be taken with the seeming supernatural coincidences. The effect then is clearly related to the double impact of ambiguously explained Gothicism. This is heightened by the contrast of the rational and the supernatural in the tale. Poe prefaces the story with a motto from Novalis about the divine and earthly correspondences we call coincidence. But the point of the tale is rational analysis of cause and effect, connection and probability.(33)

A few years later, Poe wrote another letter to P. P. Cooke expressing his appreciation of Cooke's recent praise for his latest work, even though “others have praised me more lavishly.” Poe suggested that Cooke reread an “improved” version of “Ligeia,” and Poe sarcastically commented on the general response to his ratiocinative tales: “You are right about the hair-splitting of my French friend: — that is all done for effect. These tales of ratiocination owe most of their popularity to being something in a new key. I do not mean to say that they are not ingenious — but people think them more ingenious than they are — on account of their method and air of method.” Poe then patiently explained to Cooke some of the intentional hoaxing involved in the Dupin tales: “In the ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’, for instance, where is the ingenuity of unravelling a web which you yourself (the author) have woven for the [[express]] purpose of unravelling? The reader is made to confound the ingenuity of the supposititious Dupin with that of the writer of the story” (O 2:328).

This half-mocking detachment is found also in Poe's comments on his apparent use of the supernatural in “The Raven” (1845). Four months after his letter about Dupin, Poe wrote in a letter to George W. Eveleth (December 15, 1846) that he had taken great care both with his words and with the studied effect of a sense of the supernatural in “The Raven.”

Poe here defended himself from the same kind of charge of stylistic flaw that T. S. Eliot a hundred years later claimed resulted from Poe's never paying attention to the “actual meanings” of words, though Poe [page 99:] admitted that, although he had carefully considered and planned the effect, he may have failed to make the momentary supernatural effect “felt.” In this same letter, Poe also mentioned other general improbabilities in the poem, especially the position of the lamp that throws the shadow of the raven on the floor, which had been objected to by a “blundering” critic in the Hartford Review. Poe wrote Eveleth that he had indeed conceived a clear position for the candelabrum, “affixed against the wall, high up above the door and bust — as is often seen in the English palaces, and even in some of the better houses in New York.” But to object to the unusualness of this arrangement, Poe wrote, was to miss the point: “For the purposes of poetry it is quite sufficient that a thing is possible — or at least that the improbability be not offensively glaring” (O 2:331). Poe wanted the supernatural effect generated by his Gothic decor to be felt by a reader vicariously experiencing the protagonist's situation. But Poe made it abundantly clear in “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846) that the supernatural effect was not to be taken by the perceptive reader as the true dramatic action of his Gothic works.

In this essay, Poe described the action of “The Raven” as psychological, and repeatedly suggested that there is in the poem a clear separation between the narrator's vision and the reader's. Poe points out that the dramatic center of “The Raven” is the emotional state of the bereaved lover. But this center was arrived at only after his having considered the problem of overall intention, length, specific effect desired (melancholy loss of a spiritualized beauty being most universal), and the unifying devices appropriate. Having decided to give the poem a surface stylistic and emotional unity through the device of a one-word refrain, Poe said, he then considered the difficulties of monotony and decided further upon a nonreasoned response from a nonhuman creature (a parrot or a raven) that should have, above all, “variation of application.” The one-word nonreasoned refrain would be subject to different interpretations by a distraught human being. The “replies” at first would seem commonplace, but less so with each repetition, as the bereaved lover begins to apply personal and sinister’ meanings to the raven and his one meaningless word. Poe wrote that:

One of the major stratagems of the poem would be to deepen the “ultimate impression” by “force of contrast” through the creation of “an air of the fantastic” which should approach “as nearly to the ludicrous as was admissible” (H 14:205), such as when the raven enters the window flirting and fluttering.

At first, the lover banters with the bird. But gradually, as his emotions begin to well up and color his rational state, the lover, wrote Poe, “no longer sees any thing even of the fantastic in the Raven's demeanor.... This revolution of thought, or fancy, on the lover's part, is intended to induce a similar one on the part of the reader ...” (H 14:206). But so far, Poe continued, “every thing is within the limits of the accountable — of the real” (H 14:206).

So concerned was Poe about this point that he next paused to recapitulate the dramatic situation of the poem to show the perfectly real, though perhaps unlikely, quality of all the circumstances and how this reality is insinuated into the poem. The lover even “... guesses the state of the case, but is impelled, as I have before explained, by the human thirst for self-torture, and in part by superstition, to propound such queries to the bird as will bring him, the lover, the most of the luxury of sorrow, through the anticipated answer, ‘Nevermore — (H 14:207; my italics). Despite the irony of this psychological self-division, where the lover objectively sees, or guesses, his true situation yet enmires himself further in his own subjectivity, there is in all this, Poe repeated, “no overstepping of the limits of the real” (H 14:207), although in great literature there are suggestions of something beyond, behind, or under mere appearances. There may be an “under-current, however indefinite, of meaning” that may impart a “richness” to the writing. But richness, Poe wrote, “we are too fond of confounding with the ideal,” one of the glaring faults of the didactic writings of the American transcendentalists: “It is the excess of the suggested mean-ing — it is the rendering this the upper instead of the under current of the theme — which turns into prose (and that of the very flattest kind) the so called poetry of the so called transcendentalists” (H 14:207-8). Instead, suggested Poe, the writer should try, as he himself had done in the last two stanzas of “The Raven,” to convey a symbolic meaning, to “dispose the mind to seek a moral in all that has been previously narrated,” to cause “the reader ... now to regard the Raven as emblematical ...” (H 14:208), but emblematical not of a message from [page 101:] Beyond, but of the psychological state of the narrator. The raven, in other words, is the objective correlative of the student's emotional state, just as “The Haunted Palace” and the house of Usher are the objective correlatives of Usher's state of mind. Indeed, just as Usher is emblematical of the narrator's state of mind — and just as Ligeia is of her narrator's state of mind.

Another especially revealing document on this matter is Poe's first review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales. Here Poe remarked that the obvious, allegorical “moral” of “The Minister's Black Veil” will be taken by the “rabble” as its “true” meaning, whereas actually the story is a deceptive psychological tale:

Poe is wrong about Hawthorne's intent, as Hawthorne's later footnote denying any specific cause of Hooper's estrangement from the world bears out.(34) But the very difference between the two writers on this point, their very oppositeness, emphasizes Poe's “realistic” though deceptive technique, as well as his focus on psychological aberration. The reference to the “young lady” occurs early in Hawthorne's tale and is quite brief. Her funeral is the second occasion of Mr. Hooper's wearing the black veil. As Hooper leans over her body, the veil hangs forward so that, had she been awake, she might have gazed into his face; an old lady in Hooper's congregation is almost certain that at this moment the girl's body shuddered. Although the incident increases the uneasiness the villagers feel in the presence of the black veil, it is only a minor introductory event. That Poe took this one reference as the clue to the true meaning of the tale supports what I have said is his characteristic technique: deceptive, ironic, psychological realism, in which the reader must read the clues as a detective in a mystery story. And Poe's comment that such “insinuated” meaning will be “caviare” to the mob corroborates what I have said is central to his characteristic irony: his own hoaxlike mockery.

In this connection, let us conclude with one further item relevant to Poe's ironical use of the psychological mode of ambiguous Gothic. In a review in 1836 Poe commented on an anonymous book called The Doctor, which was currently making a great stir as “an imitation of [page 102:] Sterne — an august and most profound exemplication, under the garb of eccentricity, of some all-important moral law ...” (H 9:67). But Poe claimed, after a close reading, that the book was a hoax: “That any serious truth is meant to be inculcated by a tissue of bizarre and disjointed rhapsodies, whose general meaning no person can fathom, is a notion altogether untenable, unless we suppose the author a madman. But there are none of the proper evidences of madness in the book — while of mere banter there are instances innumerable” (H 9:67). Poe thus indicates that madness is a proper literary theme even for moral or philosophical books, and that such madness may be dramatically represented as the bizarre and disjointed rhapsody of a madman if the proper clues are given. Poe may, of course, have reference to some psychological manifestation of madness by the author (unconsciously), since he uses the word author; but the context suggests that he is thinking of a literary structure, similar to that of Tristram Shandy.

Particularly relevant to Poe's sense of irony, however, is the close association here of banter with madness, though of course he distinguishes between the two — or rather, between two kinds of banter, that of madness and that of pure humor. Disappointed in its lack of reason in madness, what he really likes about the book was that it is “a hoax.” He particularly relishes the mysteriousness of a monogram on the back cover of the book, the meaning of which he wordily and wittily solved.

By punning on the meaning of “plane faces” Poe has again connected the “mad” wit and humor of the book with the hoax.

In this connection, we should recall that the term arabesque was used in the first three quarters of the eighteenth century primarily to indicate the later Gothic style of ornament in which there was much fret, lamentable imagery, and busy work that so confounded the sight that one could not consider where to begin or end — but which was yet conjoined with congestions of heavy, dark, melancholy, and monkish piles. Moreover, we have seen that one of the earliest literary applications [page 103:] of Gothic indicated inordinate wit and complexity. The historical and psychological association of inordinately complex wit, distraction, and more sinister elements receives one more turn of the screw with the information that the eighteenth century also used the term arabesque to mean a madman's rhapsody (W 2:16). The ambivalence of this interlinking congeries is striking; yet a clear basis for the relationship is visible. It is human subjectivity: the extreme reaches of the mind in wit and madness, humor and fear, perception and confusion, the real and the unreal.

Thus, by Poe's own account of his method and intent in “The Raven,” and elsewhere, and by his practice in his most famous works, it is clear that his major concern was to make “real” circumstances seem strange or supernatural through unusual decor, through careful consideration of the connotations and dramatic suggestiveness of words, through ludicrous-grotesque contrasts, through careful psychological rendering of an emotionally self-indulgent, distraught, or mad protagonist. The effect of ambiguously real psychological supernaturalism that Poe said he sought in “The Raven” is the same kind of ambivalent effect noted by Cairns in the writings of Poe's immediate predecessors, Charles Brockden Brown and Richard Henry Dana, Sr. The reader is left to choose between the supernatural and the psychological, or for strongest effect, to think one theory and feel the other. Such double effect is, then, also that of “Usher,” “Ligeia,” and Poe's other “supernatural” tales. As Poe wrote of the “German” terror of the Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque: “If in many of my productions terror has been the thesis, I maintain that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul — that I have deduced this terror only from its legitimate sources, and urged it only to its legitimate results” (H 1:151). What source these “legitimate results” have, clearly, is human psychology. Poe's subject is the precariously logical human mind which is capable of gross misperception, unreal construction, and instant irrationality.

Poe's significance in this cannot be overemphasized. For not only are “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” touchstones for and high points of the technique of such early American Gothic works as Wieland, Edgar Huntly, Paul Felton, and tales like Irving's “Adventure of the German Student,” “The Spectre Bridegroom,” “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” and even “Rip Van Winkle,” but also Poe's two most famous tales are emblematic of the technique and world view of such masterworks, of the American Gothic as The Scarlet Letter, The Marble Faun, “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” “Roger Malvin's Burial,” “Young Goodman Brown,” “The Minister's Black Veil,” Moby-Dick, and “Benito .Cereno.” As suggested at the outset of this chapter, [page 104:] the vision of the human mind that emerges from these Gothic works is one of despair over the ability of the mind ever to know anything, either about the ultimate reality of the world or about the mind itself.

In “Ligeia,” we have a brilliant example of Poe's use of an involved first-person narrator. We are led, first, into the world of supernatural horror, and then out of that world into a world of mental horror, and then, out of that purely mental world into a limbo region of ambiguity where we cannot be sure what did or did not take place. Step by step, we are led to see, objectively, the involved narrator's abnormal condition, all the while subjectively participating in it. Yet, skillful as it is in achieving such ironic ambiguity through simultaneously operative interpenetrating structures, “Ligeia” is surpassed in narrative strategy by “The Fall of the House of Usher” a year later. Indeed, “Usher” represents the next logical step in the manipulation of narrative frames, for Poe gives the narrative one more ironic turn by providing a seemingly objective observer in the person of an initially peripheral narrator who “witnesses” the same preternatural events as does Usher. As we have seen, however, the steadily intensified dramatic irony works in the same way as in “Ligeia”: we are again led step by step to draw back, objectively, from both the narrator and Usher, even while participating subjectively in their mutual terror.

In tales like “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Assignation,” “The Oval Portrait,” “Eleonora,” “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” “Mesmeric Revelation,” and others, we shall examine, in the next two chapters, variations of Poe's ironic manipulation of point of view — a technique that began with “Metzengerstein.” Moreover, we shall see that coextensive with such narrative strategies is an interrelated image system of dreams, of dreamlike states, and of a limbo region between dreaming and waking. This is an especially significant point, for critics have traditionally seen opium dreams and “sleep-waking” states in Poe's fiction as representative of a Romantic mode of insight, rather than as the forms of delusion they are. This welling up of a subconscious nightside realm of hallucinatory dreamlife that overwhelms the rational daytime mind, however, is critically consistent with Poe's pervasive themes of the deceptive structures of nothingness in the universe and the correlative structures of delusion in the mind. Finally, a total pattern of ironic mockery of absurd self-delusion is all that remains — with reader and narrator left face to face, as it were, staring into each other's luminous eyes, wondering exactly what has happened in these subjective encounters with the dark well of the unconscious.