Decay, disgust and indifferentiation in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’
‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ begins as the unnamed narrator comes to visit one of his old ‘intimate associates’, Roderick Usher, responding to a letter in which Roderick, complaining of ‘acute bodily illness’ and ‘mental disorder’ requests his old friend’s presence.57 Upon arriving, the narrator finds Roderick ‘terribly altered’ (p. 82) and also catches a glimpse of his twin sister, Madeline, who also suffers from a disease that has ‘long baffled the skill of her physicians’ (p. 83). The narrator passes some time with Roderick, viewing his paintings and listening to his ‘fervid’ musical compositions with suggestions of ‘mystic’ inner meaning, including the strange, horrible ballad ‘The Haunted Palace’ (p. 84), which gives rise to thoughts of ‘the kingdom of inorganization’ and the sentience of stones and ‘of all vegetable things’ (p. 85). The latter parts of the tale consist of Madeline’s seeming death, possibly premature entombment and revivification or return. After her burial, Madeline seems to stir from the grave – or, perhaps, to simply wake from her cataleptic state. She rushes forth from her tomb and clasps her brother in a monstrous embrace, till both fall to the floor, dead. The narrator rushes from the house only to witness its collapse into the black waters of the tarn that already seemed to contain the house, holding the gloomy mansion in its reflection.
Along with several other of Poe’s stories, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ has cemented the idea of Poe as an author of psychological horror, and, indeed, the story is full of uncanny doubles, Freudian suggestions, the possibility of incest and homoeroticism, and a dream-like atmosphere rich with possible symbols for the unconscious or the fractured psyche. Without denying or discarding such interpretations, I read the story in ontological terms rather than purely psychological ones. Like ‘Ligeia’ and ‘Morella’, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ presents us with a kind of possession narrative, but here it is unclear who (or what) is possessing whom – is the house reflecting and exteriorising the madness of Roderick and his sister, or is it actually causing their decline, as the story sometimes hints? The tale continuously blurs the boundaries between characters and setting, troubling conceptions of selfhood, agency and humanness. The omnipresent imagery of decomposition in the story not only suggests the mental breakdown of Roderick and possibly the narrator, it foreshadows the breakdown of all distinctions and the subsumption of everything into ‘the deep and dank tarn’ (p. 89), both Ushers and their house dissolving back into a putrescent totality in which all distinctions are lost.
‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ is saturated with the imagery of decay. The house and surrounding landscape inspire in the narrator a nauseous ‘sickening of the heart’ (p. 81). When the narrator approaches the decrepit Usher mansion, whose grotesquery is compounded by architectural variegation and the depredations of organic growths, an excess of life, we are told that:
Its principal feature seemed to be that of an excessive antiquity. The discoloration of ages had been great. Minute fungi overspread the whole exterior, hanging in a fine, tangled web-work from the eaves. Yet all this was apart from any extraordinary dilapidation. No portion of the masonry had fallen; and there appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of parts, and the crumbling condition of the individual stones. In this there was much that reminded me of the specious totality of old woodwork which has rotted for years in some neglected vault, with no disturbance from the breath of the external air. (p. 82)
Poe’s language here stresses the house’s incoherence, its contradictoriness. It is both incredibly old and yet without extreme dilapidation; its individual stones are crumbling and its woodwork rotting, but none of it has fallen. Even the fungi – already a categorically confused and confusing force of decay, caught between animal and plant, parasitically infesting host organisms – also resemble arachnid cobwebs, blurring the line between seemingly passive, non-sentient matter and vermin. The fungi, in their rhizomatic profusion and penetration of the house, suggest a series of connections and couplings between the house and its grounds, blurring the boundaries between natural and artificial as they hasten the house’s decomposition. It is not that the house, in its contradictoriness and defiance of schema and category, is an ‘anomaly’ per se. Rather, the house suggests that multiplicity and difference always form part of a greater totality beneath the surface, that our distinctions themselves are flawed or superficial. While the ‘barely perceptible fissure’ that runs along the wall of the house until it becomes ‘lost in the sullen waters of the tarn’ (p. 82) foreshadows the mansion’s collapse, I also want to read it as a physical representation of the Kantian split between subject and object which the collapse undoes.
The house is a kind of loathsome amalgam. H. P. Lovecraft wrote that ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ ‘hints shudderingly of obscure life in inorganic things’, most prominently through ‘an abnormally linked trinity of entities at the end of a long and isolated family history – a brother, his twin sister, and their incredibly ancient house all sharing a single soul and meeting one common dissolution at the same moment’.58 It is this abnormal and revolting linkage between organic and inorganic components that leads us towards indifferentiation, a monist ontology in which the line between living beings and non-living things is smudged, breathing body and wasting corpse and decaying house melding in a cadaverous Absolute. The house’s mismatched inorganic components are host to organic ones, the actors of decay and the house itself seems horribly like a decomposing body, with ‘vacant eye-like windows’ suggesting the empty sockets of a skull (p. 81). It seems of a piece with the ‘ghastly tree-stems’ and ‘few white trunks of decayed trees’ which protrude from the grounds like the bony fragments of a half-exhumed skeleton and conspire alongside the decaying house to produce ‘an utter depression of soul’ most comparable to ‘the hideous dropping off of the veil’ (p. 81), the liminal, disgust-inducing moment between life and death inviting metaphysical awareness of the fragility of consciousness, its rootedness in the physical world. Catalysed by the onset of decomposition, house, trees, landscape, fungi and water run into one another to form an affective assemblage exerting power over the narrator.
The Ushers themselves form part of this decaying assemblage as well. In their own diseased decline, the Ushers mirror the decomposition of their hereditary mansion, house reflecting family and vice versa: the Ushers bear the same monstrous decrepitude as their estate, while the house resembles their emaciated features. As the narrator states, the original title of the estate has merged with the Usher family name, such that ‘the quaint and equivocal appellation of the “House of Usher”… seemed to include, in the minds of the peasantry who used it, both the family and the family mansion’ (p. 82). This slippage of language between house and family is reiterated in the description of the Ushers. The narrator notes Roderick Usher’s ‘cadaverousness of complexion’, his ‘thin and very pallid’ lips and his hair’s ‘weblike softness’ (p. 82) – a softness with a texture like ‘wild gossamer’ recalling the ‘web-work’ of fungi hanging over the house’s eaves – as well as a ‘ghastly pallor of the skin’ and ‘emaciated fingers’