The Tell-Tale Heart and the Fall of the House of Usher by Poe - Book Report/Review Example

Both The Fall of the House of Usher and The Tell-Tale Heart are manifestations of Edgar Allen Poe’s Gothic genius. Both tales are Gothic in that they represent the embodiment of fear characterized by darkness, contrast and the sublime. Melancholic gloom, a prominent feature of all Gothic literature is prominent throughout both short stories. (Thomson, 6) Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher was first published in 1839 in Burton’s Gentlemen’s Magazine. (Baym/Poe, 1553) The Tell-Tale Heart was first published in The Pioneer in 1943. (Baym/Poe, 1589) The Gothic element of fear is set early on in Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. The narrator describes the house that he is about to enter in the following terms: “…found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was - but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. …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 rank sedges - and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees…” (Baym/Poe, 1553) Against this gloomy background we are introduced to the narrator who remains nameless as is the narrator in The Tell-Tale Heart. In typical Gothic fashion The Fall of the House of Usher’s narrator introduces a striking contrast. He is about to enter the gloomy house with a view to bringing some cheer to his friend, Roderick Usher’s melancholic mood. (Byam/Poe, 1553) True to Gothic form Poe has succeeded in introducing us to a subliminal element. This is a subliminal element in that the reader will not hesitate to latch onto as a false sense of security, expecting brightness and a cure to the malady afflicting Roderick Usher. This is a typical technique of Gothic writers. (Punter, 116) The Gothic element of fear is set up in a different way in The Tell-Tale Heart. The narrator first introduces us to fear that has been instilled in him as a result of the physical condition of an old man’s eye which he described as: “One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture -- a pale blue eye with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me my blood ran cold, and so by degrees, very gradually, I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye for ever.”(Baym/Poe, 1589) Both tales describe madness in a similar nature. Although in The Fall of the House of Usher, madness is viewed as a malady to be cured while in The Tell-Tale Heart madness is viewed with optimism. Usher who is a hypochondriac complains of having an over sensitivity to sight and sound to such an extent that he barely sleeps and eats. (Baym/Poe, 1556) Clearly he is not pleased with his mental ailment. On the other hand The Tell-Tale Heart’s narrator appears to be content with his mental condition and says: “The disease has sharpened my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell.” (Byam/Poe, 1589) The difference between the two characters is obvious. While Usher is willing to assign madness to his condition it becomes clear that he only expects to be mad since it appears to be an Usher legacy. Whereas the narrator of The Tell-Tale Heart adamantly denies being mad when it is very obvious that he is. He reasons that the manner in which he commits murder and covers it up is not the work of a mad man, but the work of a healthy man of logical thought and reasoning. (Baym/Poe, 1589) A striking contrast between both tales, although similarly Gothic is the plot direction. Most of the fear in The Tell-Heart is created by the narrator whereas in The Fall of the House of Usher, the fear is created by a force of nature and a string of supernatural events on the final night. There is a storm brewing outside and Usher enters the room in which the narrator is occupying and opens the windows permitting the strong winds to enter the room. The bog that encircles the house appears to glow in the dark in the same manner as it did in one of Usher’s paintings. In an effort to calm Usher the narrator reads to him a story entitled The Mad Trist. The sounds that are described in The Mad Trist are similarly heard as the story unfolds. Awed and frightened by the similarities, the narrator is shocked when Usher reveals that the sounds are coming from his twin sister’s temporary burial place. A week earlier she was believed to have died and Usher insisted on a temporary burial in the house for fourteen days. (Baym/Poe, 1553) To the narrator’s surprise Usher reveals that his sister was alive at the time of the interment. Simultaneously the door is forced open by the storm and Usher’s sister emerges, she falls dead upon her brother who subsequently dies. Usher flees the house and looks back to see it crack in half. The house is used by Poe as symbolic of the Usher family structure in much the same way as the lyrics of a song The Haunted Palace sang by Usher. Both the song and the house itself foreshadow the doom that accompanies the fall of the Usher family. While buildings are often used in Gothic literature to highlight fear and doom, Poe humanizes the house by recurring references to its “eye-like windows”. (Baym/Poe, 1553) The dark of night depicted in Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, unlike The Fall of the House of Usher does not involve supernatural elements in furtherance of Gothic fear. Yet the former is no less terrifying than the latter. In The Tell-Tale Heart the dark of night is symbolic of the darkness that exemplifies the narrator. He personifies darkness and light. It is apparent that he has good human qualities in that he cares for an old man whom he is fond of. There is a dark side to him however, and it is that dark side that he succumbs to in his plotting and execution of the old man’s murder. He is driven to this extreme because he finds it is the only solution for him if he wants to avoid seeing the old man’s repulsive eye. The subliminal element in The Tell-Tale Heart is obvious in the narrator’s reasoning. He very clearly understands that it is not the man that he hates. In fact he loves the old man. It is only the “evil eye” that he despises. (Baym/Poe, 1589) In that love and the narrator’s ability to be logical, the reader is drawn into a false sense of security hoping that love might prevail in the end. Darkness prevails however, and the narrator coolly and collectively carries out his plan to mercilessly murder the old man and dispose of his body under the wood planks of the floor. (Baym/Poe, 1589) The narrator tells of his nightly visits to the old man’s chambers. In each telling he describes how he carefully manipulated the lantern so as to shed light only on the old man’s “evil eye”. (Byam/Poe, 1589) In these descriptions of the narrator’s painstaking manipulation of the lantern’s light the reader arrives at the inescapable conclusion that Poe is clearly conveying in The Tell-Tale Heart a message that there is a delicate balancing of light and darkness in human nature. In both The Tell-Tale Heart and The Fall of the House of Usher Poe draws on inward and outward appearances. In The Tell-Tale Heart the reader is led to believe that while the old man’s outward appearance is thwarted by a repulsive eye, he is inwardly a well-meaning and basically a good human being. The narrator, on the other hand is inwardly repulsive. His soul is dark and ugly. On the contrary in The Fall of the House of Usher there is no disparity between outward and inward appearances. Just as the house is decaying and looks old and worn, so are its inhabitants. Roderick Usher is falling apart in as much a dramatic fashion as the house he lives in. In both tales, Poe takes pains to shift from peace to despair. In the end, the reader is left with the inescapable feeling that Usher in the Fall of the House of Usher and the narrator in The Tell-Tale Heart were both at peace prior to the tale’s beginning and had arrived at the point of madness once the tale begun. In either case, the tales have all the classic elements of Gothicism. The melancholy protagonist set against the background of varying degrees of darkness and fear. The contrasting scenery and the subliminal undertones are manifestations of Poe’s ability to weave together a gothic tale with underlying symbols of political and social themes. Elements of social and political unrest prevalent in mid 1800s come together in haunting gothic style in Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart and The Fall of the House of Usher. They represent an exercise in consciousness in the tormented likeness of both the narrators and Roderick Usher. Works Cited Baym, Nina. (ed) The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Vol B. W.W. Norton & Company, 2002 Meyers, Jeffrey. Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy. New York City: Cooper Square Press, 1992 Punter, David. The Literature of Terror. London: Longman, 1980 Thompson, G.R. The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism. Pullman: Washington UP, 1974 Read More