Symbolism in Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher"

Introduction: Poe's Psychological Gothic

One characteristic of Edgar Allan Poe's writing is his penchant for generating psychological terror in very few words. King of the gothic short story, Poe knew how to get into the minds of his readers, and one of his techniques was working on them from the inside out. Poe understood fear, and he knew that the best fear does not lurk outside but rather in the mind. With this understanding, Poe constructed psychological thrillers that chip away at sanity one fragment at a time. His characters are disturbed — and sometimes downright unstable — and it is within this framework that he develops stories that frighten readers from the inside out. One story in which we see Poe's talent at work is "The Fall of the House of Usher," where decay takes place on both a mental and physical level, heightening the suspense for which Poe is so well known. In the story, the crumbling house symbolizes Roderick's decaying mind.

From the beginning of this tale, all things work from a psychological perspective. The narrator, upon seeing the house, feels a "sense of insufferable gloom" (Poe 38) and a "sorrowful impression" (38). The house sits along "a singularly dreary tract of country" (38), and when the narrator finally arrives at the front of the home, he feels an "utter depression of soul" and an "iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart — an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime" (38). The inside of the house produces no better reaction. The windows are "long, narrow, and pointed, and at so vast a distance from the black oaken floor as to be altogether inaccessible from within" (39). The light that filters in is barely enough to illuminate the chambers, and compounding the situation, dark draperies hang from them. The narrator notices that the objects in the chamber fail to "give any vitality to the scene" (39).

The House as a Character

Poe paints a portrait of something sinister and fearsome with every word he uses to describe the house. Similarly, Roderick garners the same response from the narrator. He is wan and pallid, with hair like gossamer. While one is living and the other dead, Poe constructs a likeness between these two characters that will persist for the rest of the tale. Roderick strikes within the narrator an incoherence and inconsistency, which the narrator at first attributes to Roderick's nervous nature.

This nervous nature becomes the foundation for the psychological terror of the tale. The madness is a mystery at the beginning, and this elevates the sense of unease we feel in the atmosphere of the house. Poe uses mood and atmosphere to heighten this mystery and prepare readers for things more dreary and icy than what the narrator initially beholds. The additional element at work is the character of the house itself. Francesca Cangeri maintains there is a correlation between the house and its owner. The house is eerily human in that it has "vacant and eye-like windows" (Poe 38), a detail mentioned twice. The house is covered with ivy, and there is "tension between the progress of decay and the perfect arrangement of the single stones" (Cangeri 6). This image, Cangeri asserts, is reminiscent of Poe's cosmological theory, in which he describes a "continual struggle of all things between attraction and repulsion" (6).

Psychological Terror and the Unconscious

Dawn B. Sova asserts that while this story is gothic — dark, romantic, and supernatural — it "departs from the usual gothic fare in its emphasis upon retrospection rather than action and incident" (Sova 69). The focus of the story is not a crumbling building but the very mind of Roderick. This brings us to one of Poe's specialties: inciting psychological fear in readers. That fear includes stepping into Roderick's mind to experience the "onslaught of insanity" (69). The end of the story raises questions it can never answer, "because the characters who may possess vital knowledge perish" (69). The story ends in the same dreary way it begins — no questions are answered, and readers are left to ponder the frailty of the human mind.