Edgar Allan Poe: A Short-Story Master - Essay Example

Critical Essay – Edgar Allen Poe The short story is an art form that was first mastered by the 19th century writer Edgar Allen Poe. Poe had been left an orphan at a very young age and grew up in the house of adoptive parents, the Allens, who did not understand his more passionate temperament. After struggling to find his niche, Poe’s first book of poems was published when he was only 19 and he began writing short stories at the age of 23 (Conklin, 1989). In perfecting this form, Poe said “If any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression” (Mowery, 1997). As he tells the tale of the twin brother and sister, Roderick and Madeline, in the final days of their gloomy, mad-haunted world as they are witnessed by an unnamed narrator, Poe presents his readers with in-depth imagery and descriptions based on binary oppositions to help build the suspense and horror of his tale. As Mowery explains, binary oppositions are things such as hot and cold, male and female, dark and light. “It is in the subtle shifts in our expectations of the character that tension and conflict are developed” (Mowery, 1997). In Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”, the author contrasts the brother and sister of the story in an unsettling way that significantly contributes to the horror of the story. In discussing the relationship between the brother and sister, Poe presents a very Freudian perspective on the way they relate to each other. Roderick is presented first as a poet and artist, living in this house of woe. The effect of the house is made clear as the narrator notes the tremendous changes that have occurred in the man in what he describes as a brief period, although the duration of this period is left unspecified. Roderick is described as having “a cadaverousness of complexion” that shocks his visitor. “The now ghastly pallor of the skin, and the now miraculous luster of the eye, above all things startled and even awed me” (Poe, 1997). Madeline, the sister, appears only as a ghostly, wraithlike figure as she passes through the house almost as a ghost. “’Her decease,’ he said, with a bitterness which I can never forget, ‘would leave him (him the hopeless and the frail) the last of the ancient race of the Ushers.’ While he spoke, the lady Madeline (for so she was called) passed slowly through a remote portion of the apartment, and, without having noticed my presence, disappeared” (Poe, 1997). The two siblings are thus seen as having some sort of symbiotic relationship between the two of them in that with Madeline’s illness, Roderick himself has also lost stamina and strength. “Roderick is the ego or consciousness which attempts to bury the primitive impulses of the id, Madeline. The narrator in this reading functions as the superego, an awareness of standards and conventions that mediates between the twins” (Heim, 1994). However, there are several other readings possible on this family relationship. This relationship between the brother and sister is further examined in terms of the dominant sibling holding sway over the weaker brother. The night of the storm, Roderick is seen in the narrator’s room. “His head had dropped upon his breast … he rocked from side to side with a gentle yet constant and uniform sway” (Poe, 1997) while he seems aware that Madeline, buried alive in the crypt below, has been struggling for many days to escape her tomb. “Long – long – long – many minutes, many hours, many days, have I heard it – yet I dared not – oh, pity me, miserable wretch that I am! – I dared not – I dared not speak! We have put her living in the tomb!” (Poe, 1997). While Roderick is incapable of facing his ghastly mistake in order to rectify it, Madeline appears in the doorway with “blood upon her white robes and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame” (Poe, 1997). The terror of her appearance is made all the more ghastly as one considers how the two men struggled over the casements that had enclosed her body, the heavy iron door that had blocked her tomb and the completely sealed quality of the dungeon in which she was placed. More than requiring superhuman strength to overcome the several days’ worth of airlessness that she had endured since being buried, Madeline required additional superhuman strength to throw off the heavy, bolted lid of her coffin and tear open the locked door of her cell in order to appear in the narrator’s room that evening. “Mistakenly we ask these creatures, ‘What do you want?’ But their demand is unconditional and unnegotiable; they have evolved beyond desiring subjects, for Poe’s undead heroines embody nothing other than the death drive – the real terror of the undead” (Pike, 1998). In accomplishing this feat, Madeline is instantly recognized as a creature of the undead, which, through the imagery Poe has provided to this point, seems to suggest the very real possibility of a vampire. This idea of the undead female exacting revenge has led to some critics interpreting the work as a vampire story with Madeline in the pivotal role. Lyle Kendall points to several examples in the story that indicate Madeline’s role as a vampire, including her brother’s wan, anemic appearance, her ability to stupefy their guest with little more than a passing glance, the “mockery of a faint blush upon the bosom and the face, and that suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip” (Poe, 1997) and her superhuman ability to escape a sealed coffin and bolted door (Kendall, 1963). In this view, Madeline has been feeding off of her brother ever since his return home, continuing to weaken him and losing her own strength in the process, but prevented from leaving by the knowledgeable doctors and her own brother’s ability to keep her locked away. It is due to the weak state of Madeline herself that many have argued against the possibility of her being a vampire, as well as the popular conception that the head vampire must always be male. However, other analyses of the story have led to the suspicion that perhaps Poe was attempting to present the house itself as a sort of vegetative vampire. In discovering the clues Poe provides in keeping with vampire lore, Bailey (1964) reveals that the vampiric presence suggested by Poe is all in connection to the vitality of the house itself, thus making the house the vampire rather than any of the people within it as first Madeline and then Roderick begin to fail under its continuous feeding from their spirits. Thus, an investigation into the relationship between Roderick and Madeline in Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” continues to reveal an ever-darkening aspect to the opposition between the siblings, increasing the reader’s sense of horror and fear while keeping the story short enough to be experienced at one time. Poe concentrates on bringing out the emotional elements of the tale, focusing on those details that will encourage readers to actually feel the creeping of fingers up their spine as they learn more about the house and its occupants and constantly guessing regarding the true nature of their shared malady. This sense is strangely brought to an even greater awareness as the narrator continues to ignore or attempt to explain away his feelings of foreboding and ‘superstitious’ suspicion. This sense of the horrifically doomed is brought to a conclusion with the dramatic collapse of the house into the ground upon which it had stood following the dual death of the Usher twins in the narrator’s presence – “my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder – there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters – and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the ‘House of Usher’” (Poe, 1997). “Because of this multiplicity of meanings, ranging from high entertainment value to powerful psychological insight, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ can satisfy an unusually wide spectrum of reader responses” (Strandberg, 1994). Despite the many attempts to analyze the story, it remains tantalizingly just outside our ability to fully explain and explicate how it manages to pull so strongly upon reader emotions. Works Cited Bailey, J.O. “What Happens in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher?” American Literature. Vol. 35, N. 4, (January, 1964), pp. 445-466. Heim, William J. “The Fall of the House of Usher: Overview.” Reference Guide to American Literature, 3rd Ed. Jim Kamp (Ed.). St. James Press, 1994. Kendall, Lyle H. Jr. “The Vampire Motif in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’” College English. Vol. 24, N. 4, (March 1963), pp. 450-53. Mowery, Carl. “An Overview to ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’” Short Stories for Students. Gale Research, 1997. Pike, Judith. “Poe and the Revenge of the Exquisite Corpse.” Studies in American Fiction. Vol. 26, N. 2, (Autumn 1998), pp. 171-92. Poe, Edgar Allen. “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Project Gutenberg. (June 1997). March 15, 2010 Strandberg, Victor. “The Fall of the House of Usher: Overview.” Reference Guide to Short Fiction, 1st Ed. Noelle Watson (Ed.). St. James Press, 1994. Read More