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In Heart of Darkness (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. The 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: “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 Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), a tale that bears a number of similarities in theme, imagery, and structure to Heart of Darkness (1). Poe’s tale 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 products of and, simultaneously, guilty of incest? Did Roderick intentionally try to murder Madeline, and did Madeline actually return from her tomb, vampire-like, 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. [page 17:]
The present essay (and the present symposium) is no exception to this eternal return to the same questions. But it is misleading to conceive of the meaning of the tale as developing solely upon, say, 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, I submit, a basic structure that integrates all the others, a set or system of relationships that remains constant and primary, enveloping the rest with 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 primarily from our perception of the subjectivity of the narrator. That is, we experience a series of “supernatural” events (which have Freudian and Jungian resonances) through the mind of the narrator whom we recognize as disturbed — so that we simultaneously are subjectively involved in and detached from these experiences.
Poe’s method in his Gothic tales, I have argued elsewhere (2), is in the American tradition of the “ambiguously explained supernatural,” in which clues to the basic psychological action of the tale are carefully insinuated into the Gothic atmosphere of supernaturalism. Thus, underlying or enveloping a typical “supernatural” tale by Poe, there is, on one level, a rational explanation of the seemingly supernatural events, on a second level, a psychological explanation, and on a third level, an insinuated burlesque (under or around the whole structure of explanations) of both the content and the mode of the tale. That is, the whole system of interpenetrating levels or structures of the tale leads ultimately to Poe’s 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 present discussion of “Usher” derives from the brilliant analysis of the tale as a psychodrama of the mutual hysteria of the narrator and Roderick Usher by Darrel Abel (3). 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 further 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 [column 2:] and fear. The matters of madness (especially Roderick’s) and fear have been frequently (though not definitively) 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. The image of the skull-like face of the House Poe obviously intended to dominate as the central image of the tale, for he returns to it again and again, placing the most 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 spiraling of the complete subjectivity of consciousness. That is, the sinking of the House into the reflective pool dramatizes the sinking of that 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 spiraling 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 nothing less than 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 (4).
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 [page 18:] of the narrator’s initial uneasiness into a frenzy of terror, engendered by and parallel 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.° 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” (Works, III, 273-274). 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 (6); 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, remodelled, and inverted images of “the gray sedge, and the ghostly tree stems, and the vacant and eyelike windows” (Works, III, 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.” He comments to himself that “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 “ (Works, III, 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 vapor, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued” (Works, III, 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 the real aspect of the building” (Works, III, 276). The paragraph that follows 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” (Works, III, 277), by now clearly emblematic of [column 2:] 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. . . .” He continues: “To an anomalous species of terror I found him a bounder slave. ‘I shall perish,’ said he, ‘. . . in this deplorable folly. . . . I have, indeed no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect — in terror. In this unnerved — in this pitiable condition — I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR’” (Works, III, 280). 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. Then Usher reads his weird poem about the decay of reason (Works, III, 284-286), 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 (Works, III, 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 vagaries of madness,” the narrator feels growing in himself a vague fear that Usher has some horrible “oppressive secret” to divulge (Works, III, 289). “Rationally,” however, the narrator acknowledges that Usher’s “condition terrified . . . it infected me. I felt creeping upon me, by slow yet uncertain degrees, the wild influences of his own fantastic yet impressive superstitions” (Works, III, 289-290).
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 tremor gradually pervaded my frame; and, at length, there sat upon my very heart an incubus” of “utterly causeless alarm” (Works, III, 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 [page 19:] 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 (7). Usher is about to keep a mad trist with Madeline, even as the narrator has kept his mad trist 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” and bearing Usher “to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated “ (Works, III, 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 tarn in a lurid blaze, for the narrator has by now been revealed to be totally 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” (Works, III, 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 (8).
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 they screwed down tightly? 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 Works, III, 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 compartment” (Works, III, 288). The images of sleep, mist, water, and descent, reNrring 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 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 “Ligeia,” Poe intrudes an ironic distance clearly and rather suddenly between the narrator and the reader, here calling attention to the real psychological situation of the two protagonists engaged in their own mad trist.
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 mast 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 eye-like 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 (Works, III, 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 House and the family as the [page 20:] House of Usher and immediately returns to the image of the “face” in the pool (Works, III, 275-276). 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 webwork from the eaves” (Works, III, 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 weird appearance of Usher’s face. Usher’s face has a generally decayed aspect 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, “weblike,” “silken hair,” of a “wild gossamer texture,” thus imagistically merges the face-like structure of the House with Usher’s face, the “Arabesque expression” of which the narrator cannot “connect with any idea of simple humanity” (Works, III, 279). 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 (Works, III, 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, nor 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.(9) 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 as so often in Poe the subtly ironic paralleling of the narrative structure of the tale to its visual focal point. And by having the face-like 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 it is clear that we do not know that anything the narrator has told us is “real,” the whole tale and its structures may be the fabrication of the [column 2:] 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 this further perception of the structures of Nothingness becomes our ultimate perception of the tale as simultaneously involved and detached observers.
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NOTES
(1) Such as the psychological journey, the double, the motif of the skulls, and the theme of mental and moral collapse. Quotation is from the Signet edition (New York: New American Library, 1950), p. 68.
(2) See “ ‘Proper Evidences of Madness’: American Gothic and the Interpretation of ‘Ligeia,’” ESQ, 18 (1972), No. 66 n.s., 30-49.
(3) “A Key to the House of Usher,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 18 (1949), 176-185.
(4) See my article “Unity, Death, and Nothingness — Poe’s ‘Romantic Skepticism,’” PMLA, 85 (1970), 297-300; Richard Wilbur, “Introduction” to the Laurel edition of Poe’s poems (New York: Dell, 1959); Patrick F. Quinn, “Poe’s Eureka and Emerson’s Nature,” ESQ, No. 31 (1963), pp. 4-7.
(5) References to Poe’s works are to James A. Harrison, ea., The Complete Works of Edger Allan Poe, 17 vols. (1st pub., 1902; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1965), hereafter cited as Works. Here see III, 273-274.
(6) See “‘Proper Evidences of Madness,’” pp. 42-47.
(7) See Jean Ricardou, “L’Hisroire dans l’histoire; La Mise en abyme . . . “ in Problemes du Nouveau Roman (Paris: Le Seuil 1968), pp. 171-176, for a slightly different discussion of the “Mad Trist” as a synecdoche of the story itself (much as is “The Haunted Palace”), and as representing a kind of pre-knowledge for the narrator of the inevitable outcome of the main narrative. The phrase “la mise en abyme” comes from heraldry and suggests “the inclusion of one blazon into another.” See Claude Richard, “Poe Studies in Europe: France,” PN, 2 (1969), 22.
(8) See Works, XIV, 167, for Poe’s comment on miasmata, although he says that “injury” to the public from miasmata is questionable, his comment shows his awareness of the supposed properties of such gas, thus making it a proper device for a fictional narrative (cf. Works, XIV, 168). See I. M. Walker “The ‘Legitimate Sources’ of Terror in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’” Modern Lang~age Review, 61 (1966), 585-592, for a discussion of this and for a lucid “psychological” analysis of the dramatic action.
(9) See in particular, Maurice Beebe, “The Fall of the House of Pyncheon,” Nineteenth Century Fiction, 11 (1956) 1-17, and “The Universe of Roderick Usher,” Personalist, 37 (1956), 146160; Joseph Gold, “Reconstrucring the ‘House of Usher,’” ESQ, No. 38 (1964), 74-76; John S. Hill, “The Dual Hallucination in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’” Southwest Review 47 (1963), 396-402; Lyle Kendall, “The Vampire Motif in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’” College English, 24 (1963), 450-453; D. H. Lawrence, Chapter VI of Studies in Classic American Literature (1st pub. 1923, rpt. New York: Viking 1964); Bruce Olson, “Poe’s Strategy in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’” Modern Language Notes, 75 (1960), 556-559; Patrick F. Quinn, “That Spectre in My Path,” Chapter VII of The French Face of Edgar Poe (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957); Paul Ramsey, Jr., “Poe and Modern Art: An Essay on Correspondence,” College Art Journal, 18 (1959); 210-215; E. Arthur Robinson, “Order and Sentience in ‘The [page 21:] Fall of the House of Usher,’” PMLA, 76 (1961), 68-81; William B. Stein, “The Twin Motif in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’” Modern Language Notes, 75 (1960), 109-111; Allen Tate, “Our Cousin Mr. Poe” in Collected Essays (Denver: Alan Swallow, 1959); Richard Wilbur, “The House of Poe,” Anniversary Lectures (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1959).
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Associated Article(s) and Related Material:
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[S:0 - PSDR, 1972]