Research Proposal on "Poe's the Fall of the House"

Research Proposal 8 pages (2202 words) Sources: 5 Style: MLA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

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

While Edgar Allan Poe is known as a writer of horror, it should be noted that his tales reflect life and the pain associated with it.

Death, psychology, blood, sanity, oppression, and mutability echo throughout "The Fall of the House of Usher" making it a tale of mystery, imagination, and reality.

Poe's tales begin with the imagination.

Romanticism captured positive and negative aspects of the human experience

Poe incorporated his Romantic yearnings with the pain he felt as a boy

Poe's tales seem out of this world but they are actually very much within it

Poe utilizes mental states to create mood in "The Fall of the House of Usher"

The narrator become pivotal in the progression of the tale

Alchemy serves as an influence in the story

The destruction of the body and the house echo the belief of alchemy

Issues of slavery and tainted blood lurk within the poem "the Haunted Palace"

Blood diseases were feared in Poe's day

Conclusion: "The Fall of the House of Usher" is a tale about the delicate psyche of man woven into a tale of mystery and suspense.

There may be no other American writer whose life is proof of the adage that art imitates life. When we look at Poe's life, we see that many aspects of his day emerge in his tales.

A society on the verge of medical breakthroughs became enamored with thoughts and ideas of death and dying. Dying was a mystery and it was prevalent in the nineteenth century with tuberculosis and other diseases taking life quickly. Poe's mother died of consumption and his wife Virginia, died of tuberculosis. Loss and the pain of it are constant shadows in Poe's life. Coping with despair and sadness become powerful issues that force Poe to examine man's delicate psyche. Other aspects of his time emerge in Poe's work as well. For example, science and the notion of alchemy make an appearance in this tale as the house and it inhabitants seem to be on a path of destruction. Embedded within the story is a poem that sheds light on the social concerns of slavery. All things move to death eventually, whether the move is obvious or not. Poe understood death as simply a fact of life but this did not make it any easier for him. Death, psychology, blood, sanity, oppression, and mutability echo throughout "The Fall of the House of Usher" making it a complete tale of mystery, imagination, and reality.

Poe's influences begin with the human mind. Tony Magistrale notes that Romanticism was "attracted to subjectivity and the unconscious, mystery and the imagination, the romantic sensibility tended to embrace the contradictions and complications of human nature" (Magistrale 261). Romanticism, then can embody tranquil characteristics as well as "elements of restless distortion and the macabre, a plaintive yearning for the sublime in spite of the suspicion that perhaps the quest for tranquility and beauty is forever beyond the human ability to grasp" (261). These dual worlds are significant when attempting to understand Poe and his influences because they represent real life. Life can be beautiful but it can also be very painful, as Poe learned very early. His mother dies when he was a baby and he was placed in a foster home shortly thereafter. Poe did not have the happiest of childhoods in that it is reported that he did not get along with his foster father very well. As Poe became older and the animosity between the two increased, Poe was sent to board at Manor House School in Newington. This timing was very untimely in that his foster mother had been ill for some time. The distance bothered him and he wrote of the situation that he felt a "refreshing chilliness" (Mankowitz 27) of the ancient village in which he lived and attended school. Mankowitz maintains that Poe was expressing "Romantic, medieval and gothic qualities" (27) before he was 10 years old. When Poe was 20, his foster mother died. Poe later married his cousin, Virginia, whom Poe loved dearly. Just two years later, she died of tuberculosis.

Poe seemed to be a magnet for death and sorrow at a very young age. This pain no doubt left an impression on him and one way in which Poe channeled his emotion was through writing. Mankowitz contends that Poe suffered from a "preoccupation with the dying mother-sister, the red phantom of tuberculosis, the tomb, suffocation, premature burial, womb-like tunnels of darkness and light" (Mankowitz 208). We can see echoes of this in the mysterious Madeline and her diseases that "long baffled the skill of her physicians" (Poe 42). The most powerful influences in Poe's life start within his own mind as he learns to cope with death.

While many may view Poe's tales as otherworldly, we can study them and realize that they are actually too much of this world at times. "The Fall of the House of Usher," may seem like a tale that could only be made up but, in reality, it is constructed using the basic characteristics of man's personality. We have one character that seems normal and one that appears to be slightly abnormal. One of the first things we become aware of is the mood of the story and Poe establishes it with the delicacy of these characters mental states. The narrator notices something peculiar about Roderick and, as the story progresses, he realizes that Roderick is unstable. The narrator notices him to be incoherent and inconsistent. He suffered from an "excessive nervous agitation" (Poe 41). Early in the story, Poe wishes to contrast the narrator with Roderick just so we can see how mad the narrator becomes at the end of the story. Daniel Hoffman contends that they story, is a "testament to the autonomy of the unconscious, by whose inexorable powers are revealed the deepest truths of the soul" (Hoffman 175). This process must begin and end with our narrator, who narrowly escapes the madness thrust upon him by Roderick. The madness manifests itself after the two men entomb Madeline and intensifies with time. The narrator starts to undergo the "full power of such feelings" (Poe 46), has difficulty sleeping, and struggles "to reason off the nervousness which had dominion over me" (46). The power of Roderick's madness encroaches upon the narrator before he realizes it. Poe's message her is that madness moves stealthily.

Barton Levi St. Armand has an interesting take on what other influences that might have inspired Poe's writings. When observing "The Fall of the House of Usher," he agrees that the notion of alchemy plays an important part in the tale with the "house and Usher himself" (St. Armand) at the "bottom of the alchemal ladder" (St. Armand). Since the mood that Poe conveys with this tale is melancholy and dark from the onset, St. Armand believes that the house and Usher represent the planet Saturn, whose corresponding metal is lead. Here Poe symbolizes the "beginning darkness" (St. Armand) in which the "soul must remain buried until it is resurrected by purification" (St. Armand). St. Armand asserts that Roderick is on a quest for perfection while he conducts an "experiment in transmutation which risks the life of his mind as well as the state of his soul"(St. Armand). When Usher exclaims that he must perish in "this deplorable folly" (III, 280), he is referring to the folly of alchemy. St. Armand notes that these words are "prophetic" (St. Armand) because one life must end for the experiment to succeed. The tomb and the body are the same, explains St. Armand and the "brother, in fact, does eat up the sister who returns and eats up the brother" (St. Armand). St. Armand believes that the tale "can be seen as prime evidence of Poe's own heretical attempt to throw off not only the old manacles of Time and Space, but the chains of that newest and most threatening of the Archons, Science itself" (St. Armand). This perspective is interesting because the story is about destruction. Clearly two types of destruction are taking place - physical and mental. The destruction gains momentum when the narrator begins to suffer from the same type of mental anguish as does Roderick. The narrator begin to hear Madeline's "feeble movement's in the hollow coffin" (Poe 49) and he asks, "Do I not distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of her heart?" (49). In adition, his physical appearance begins to suffer and he has a "morbid acuteness of the senses, the most insipid food was alone endurable; he could wear only garments of certain texture; the odors of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a faint light" (41). All of these cue alert us to the fact that if he does do something quickly, he will, too, become part of this path of destruction.

Stephen Dougherty has a slightly different take on death and its meaning in the… READ MORE

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