House of Mirrors Edgar Allan Poes The Fall of the House of….pdfVIP

House of Mirrors PLL 227 House of Mirrors: Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” J OHN H. TIMMERMAN “The Fall of the House of Usher” is among those few stories that seem to elicit nearly as many critical interpretations as it has readers. More recent critical appraisals of the story have largely followed two directions: a reappraisal of the genre of the story as 1 a Gothic romance and a close attention to Madeline Usher as a 2 type of Poe’s other female characters. But the tale presents the reader a multiplicity of problems that set it aside from Poe’s other stories. Madeline is as enigmatic as a new language and as 1Perhaps the most helpful study of this sort is Gary E. Tombleson’s “Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ as Archetypal Gothic: Literary and Architectural Analogs of Cosmic Unity” (Nineteenth-Century Contexts 12.2 [1988]: 83-106). Tombleson locates the place of the story—both its traditional and innovative elements—within the tradition dating to Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, A Gothic Story (1764). Also helpful is Stephen Dougherty’s “Dreaming the Races: Biology and National Fantasy in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’” (Henry Street 7.1 [Spring 1988]: 17-39). Of particular interest, and with a revealing twist on interpreting the story, is Mark Kinkead-Weekes’ “Reflections On, and In, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’” Kinkead-Weekes argues that the story is “not merely Gothick, but rather a ‘Gothick’ which at every turn signals a consciousness of its own operation” (17). This pattern includes, furthermore, an awareness of the writer of the Gothic. 2See, for example, Cynthia S. Jordan’s “Poe’s Re-Vision: The Recovery of the Second Story” (American Literature 59.1 [Mar. 1987]: 1-19). Jordan sets