The Features of Gothic Narrative in The Fall of The House of Usher

In his comprehensive introduction to Gothic Tales Baldick outlines the vital role that Edgar Alan Poe, and in particular his first Gothic tale 'The Fall of the House of Usher', played in redefining the genre: 'Poe ensured that whereas before him the keynote of Gothic fiction had been cruelty, after him it could be decadence'. Although Poe altered some conventions of the Gothic, he still maintained in his tales the important function that this genre had in literature: to subvert the dominant ideologies of a contemporary society, a function which it still performs today. The principle technique the Gothic employs to subvert the dominant is to displace the narrative to a past setting. This makes it less threatening to the dominant since it appears to be a description of ideologies that no longer exist. In 'The Fall of the House of Usher', the house of the title performs the task of displacing the reader to a past time because of its heritage, despite the fact that the narrative actually appears to take place at the time that the text was written. It is through the house, what it represents, and the domains of possible worlds constructed within its narrative that Poe has managed to formulate a critique not solely targeted at the bourgeoisie but also at the aristocracy and at gender roles in society. Equally important in the construction of Poe's critique are the roles the protagonists of the text (Roderick, Madeline and the narrator) enact within the different domains and textual worlds in the text.

Secrets play a crucial part in the construction of the Gothic narrative and thus have become a convention of the textual Gothic world. The concealment of secrets creates an atmosphere of fear and approaching horror, which has become a characteristic of the genre. A distinguishingly Gothic world is one of anxiety, apprehension and terror of impending but unidentifiable doom or disaster. When the narrator in 'The Fall of the House of Usher' first approaches the mansion he is immediately struck by this all-pervading Gothic atmosphere: 'with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable, for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment with which the mind usually received even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible' (p. 85). Hence, within the first paragraph of the story Poe has already constructed in the reader a sense of apprehension and knowledge that something sinister or unnatural is surely to happen. Poe is providing the reader with a gateway into the Gothic world of the text; a world which is dominated not only by a desolate landscape but also populated by persecuted characters (usually female) situated within the claustrophobic boundaries of a historical castle or home. Although the Gothic home is somehow endless because of its tunnels and secret passages, it also offers no escape and therefore no sense of closure; the hero or heroine must find a way to escape its confines in order for the narrative to have closure.

The house of the Ushers forms an integral part of the text, not just as the conventional site of the supernatural activity found in Gothic narratives but also as a symbolic version of the family which has inhabited that house for generations but is now coming to an end. To be able to demonstrate the power of the house and those who reside in it, the author has divided the house into two interlocking domains: the outside of the house, which represents the natural and rational world, and the inside of the house, where madness, irrationality and the supernatural rule. The narrator forms the threshold (for the readers) between the two domains. The narrator moves from the outside world to the world inside the house that is dying and is encroaching on the natural world surrounding it: 'I looked upon the scene before me upon the mere house and the simple landscape features of the domain upon the bleak walls upon the vacant eye-like windows...upon a few white trunks of decayed trees.' (p.85). The 'decayed trees' depict how the corruption and calamity within the house is affecting the world around it. Moving closer to the house, the narrator is further struck by the deterioration of the building, ' I scanned the scene more narrowly the real aspect of the building...minute fungi had overspread the whole exterior, hanging in a fine tangled web-work from the eaves...yet...no portion of the masonry had fallen; and there appeared to be...the crumbling condition of individual stones'. In this example one could argue the individual decayed stones of the building represent the degeneration of the entire house. However, there also appears to be some inexplicable force that keeps the house erect when it presumably should have collapsed a long time ago. Inside the house is a perfect example of the dark, claustrophobic but somehow endless spaces celebrated in Gothic fictions: 'the windows were long, narrow, and pointed...the general furniture was profuse, comfortless...I felt I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow' (p.88). Still permeating within the recesses of the house is the feeling of impending doom which now must surely be linked to the house and therefore to the Usher family which resides in it. The creation of the house as a symbol for the corruption and decay that lives in the Ushers is a critique of the traditional system of inheritance of title and property by aristocratic families, usually left to the first-born son.

The aristocracy had for generations maintained power and wealth through inheritance down family lines but the bourgeoisie overthrew that line of power by emerging as a 'self-made' class. Even if past generations had squandered all the family's money, most aristocratic families still maintained their ancestral house or mansion, which therefore become a metonym for the power they still sustained over the public. It is possible that the current desolate state of the Usher family is a result of their attempts to maintain their title and wealth within family members and thereby committing the taboo of incest, 'I had learned, too, the very remarkable fact, that the stem of the Usher race, all time-honoured as it was, had put forth at no period, any enduring branch; in other words, that the entire family lay in direct line of decent, and had always...'(p.86). It is well documented in historical texts that inbreeding was prevalent within European aristocracy in an attempt to retain power. Hence, Poe is subverting the preservation of titles within aristocratic families rather than the usurpation of titles. However, by the period that 'The Fall of the House of Usher' was published (1839), the bourgeoisie had established itself as the ruling class. Hence, Poe's critique must have also been directed towards them and not solely the aristocracy.

With the rise of the bourgeoisie, and the economic structure which it formed, it become imperative that women remain in the private (that is, domestic) sphere in order to sustain that structure. This created both a binary between the private and the public spheres, and also gendered domains within the textual worlds. Although I will later argue that Roderick and his sister Madeline are essentially different versions of the same character, it is through their genders that they occupy different textual domains, the female and the male. Roderick immediately inhabits the male domain and hence the behaviours that are associated with being male in a patriarchal society, such as control of others. Although the text does not contain many instances in which Roderick asserts his patriarchal power, we know that ultimately he controls Madeline. The clearest example of this is when the narrator and Roderick place Madeline, whom they believe to be dead but who is in fact still alive, in a vault underneath the house. The vault itself signifies the underworld, since it is situated below the house and therefore beneath the ground level, like a grave. This scene is suggestive of how patriarchy imprisons women within the domestic realm because they pose a threat to its power; both Roderick and the male narrator entomb the unconscious female not only in the vault but also within the coffin: 'We replaced and screwed down the lid, and, having secured the door of iron, made our way' (p.95). The full horror of Madeline's imprisonment is not realised until the reader is made aware that she has been, in fact, buried alive and that Roderick has been aware of that fact for some time but has done nothing to ratify their mistake: 'We have put her living in the tomb! Said I not that my senses were acute? I now tell you that I heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin. I heard them many, many nights ago...yet...I dared not speak' (p. 100). Also, even while still 'living', Madeline was little more than a passing presence in the house, which, in some ways, represented the small amount of power that women held in those times and their submissiveness to male authority: 'the lady Madeline (for so was she called) passed through a remote portion of the apartment, and without having noticed my presence, disappeared' (p.90) and 'the glimpse I had obtained of her person would probably be the last I should obtain that the lady, at least while living, would be seen by me no more' (p.90-91). Although I do not dispute that Roderick controls Madeline in the same way that patriarchy controls women, I propose now to explore how these two characters are linked within the text.

Apart from the fact they are twins, the main link between the two siblings is that they both occupy the threshold between the life and death domains. Neither is dead, but both are stricken with a mysterious illness and are anticipating death; their morbidity is almost fatalistic, in that they have both resigned themselves to the certainty of a premature death. Both characters are described in almost ghastly and unnatural terms: 'A cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison' (p. 88). Both characters suffer from madness: Roderick's madness is a certainty 'his countenance, was, as usual, cadaverously wan but, moreover, there was a species of mad hilarity in his eyes an evident restrained hysteria in his whole demeanour' (p.96). The reader has also made the assumption that Madeline is equally mad, the result of generations of inbreeding: 'that silence yet importunate and terrible influence which for centuries had moulded the destinies of his family' (p.94). Ultimately, even though they occupy the same threshold between life and death, it is Roderick's presence in a different gender domain which brings about the eventual downfall of the Ushers. The burial alive of his sister and her return triggers the collapse of the house, thereby destroying not only them but the legacy of the Ushers: '[she] fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated.' And 'my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushed asunder...and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the 'House of Usher'' (p.100-101). What Roderick did in imprisoning Madeline may be seen as the physical manifestation of what he was doing to himself in his psyche, the coffin in which he entombed Madeline being symbolic of the house in which he had become entombed. By imprisoning Madeline he was forcing the end on both of them. The narrator's presence inside the house, and the destruction of it, as well as his ability to flee that destruction, symbolises how the natural world around the house in some way caused its collapsed.

Despite 'The Fall of the House of Usher' being scarcely 15 pages long, it has managed to occupy three different domains: the house, the gender domain and the living dead domain. It is through the characters' movement between these worlds and domains, and the relationships with each other, that Poe has been able to create a subversive text. By creating two characters, who are essentially the same, Roderick and Madeline, but who occupy different gender domains, Poe has also been able to defamiliarise gender relations. When you have a house that conceals rather than reveals knowledge and is riddled with madness and unexplainable illnesses, and a doctor who is untrustworthy, you have formed a very powerful adversary to that privileged by the dominant.