Romanticism in The Fall Of The House Of Usher Essay

In Poes The Fall of the House of Usher the narrator first views the house of Usher and perceives a mystery incapable of being solved. Foreboding imaginings keep coming into his mind in spite of rational thinking and reasoning. As he says, there are things beyond our ability to rationalize. He rationalizes that if he could look at things differently or in a brighter light, he might be able to change it, but when he looks into the lake he sees, with even more fear before, a mirror image of the house in all its darkness. The eye-like windows of the house reflect back at him.

This paragraph is the epitome of the Romantic movement and the story itself makes many direct and indirect references to Romanticism. Poe's references to Van Weber and Fuseli are direct references to European Romanticists. Poe wrote this story when Romanticism was at its height in Europe. The neoclassic world view had given way to the realm of the emotion. No longer was art or life looked upon as a set of rules that if one followed one could rationalize and make a sense of order out of things. Now, one looked at the emotion beneath the rational. And if that emotion was dark and even evil, it was still beautiful because it expressed a truth. Whereas Hawthorne, in Young Goodman Brown, viewed good and evil as something outside of ourselves, such as a witch or a devil, Poe seems to look within the very soul of man.

The first element of Romanticism which Poe seems to incorporate into our paragraph and into the story is the moving away from neoclassic rationality when he says that when he looked upon the house he was "forced to fall back on the unsatisfactory conclusion that . . . the reason, and the analysis, of this power lay among considerations beyond our depth." In the story, he also speaks of abandoning reason in his struggles with fear. Reason does not seem to help here. Reason has gone the way of the neoclassicists. In another part of the story, Poe speaks of the sentience, or consciousness of feeling, of vegetable which seems to grow out of the ordered placement or arrangement of the stones. But the consciousness of feeling does not come until the element of decay and fungi is added to the ordered structure. And not until its "reduplication in the still waters of the tarn." We must look clearly in the mirror at the eye-like windows of the dark side of the soul before we can add the element of emotion to the stone-like structure of neoclassicism?

Poe appears to speak of truth, another element of Romanticism, when he talks about looking into the lake which one could compare to a mirror because it is clear and "unruffled." He also seems to talk about truth and seeing clearly when he talks about "the hideous dropping off of the veil" or "shaking off what must have been a dream, I scanned more narrowly the real aspect of the building." In our paragraph, Poe also talks of trying to look at things in a brighter light in order to change or get rid of the gloomy impression of the house. But it doesn't work. More than once he speaks of music, books and art as ways of cheering us up (could it be to divert attention from the truth of the darkness of the soul?) but, none of these things seem to help. Ultimately, one must look into the eye-like windows of the soul. The metaphor of windows as eyes is seen again in the poem Poe recites when he says that "Wanderers in that happy valley Through two luminous windows saw . . ." (emphasis added)

The Romantic view that ugly can be beautiful as long as it reflects honest emotion, can be seen if we look at Poe's description of the storm wherein he says "It was indeed a tempestuous yet sternly beautiful night, and one wildly singular in its terror and its beauty." Poe describes Madelaine as being identical to Usher. "Her figure, her air, her features -- all in their very minutest development were those -- were identically . . . those of Roderick Usher who sat beside me." Could she be the dark side of Usher that he tries to bury alive rather than face and that, in the end, rises up to kill him? If so, that might tell us the importance of looking clearly into the mirror and facing head on those dark eye-like windows of the soul looking back at us. We cannot bury the dark side of our natures, no matter how deep the vault. And might not that dark side be beautiful if it is honest emotion?

Poe himself is the quintessential Romantic. His life was "the most melodramatic of any of the major American writers of his generation." The child of actors, disreputable people in those days, he was abandoned by his alcoholic father at an early age and orphaned by his mother a few years later. His personal life "was unstable" and he was unlucky in love. He "sipped the juice" on and off most of his life and eventually died of "congestion of the brain." What better example of a life lived in the emotions without much rationality or sense of order. A life of shadows and, out of the dark shadows comes the beauty of his work.

Given our knowledge of Poe's dark nature, our knowledge of the world view of the Romanticist who looks upon the emotions as the replacement for the rational and orderly, and given the rest of the haunting story of The Fall of the House of Usher, one can easily see in our paragraph a man who comes to look upon the dark, foreboding house, and in an effort to rationalize in order to see things in a brighter light, looks into a mirror, but looking back at him are the eye-like windows of that dark and gloomy house.