Poe & Pop Culture, Week Two

This week the Poe short story is The Fall of the House of Usher. You can listen to a reading of it here and the second part here.

A two minute, some seconds recap in dramatic Lego form can be found here.

This story is a classic example of Gothic literature (this link has the worst background music ever- apologies).The primary intent of a Gothic writer was to produce terror in the heart of the reader, whether dreadful anticipation of an event or the climactic event itself. It's the battle between sanity and irrationality, appearance and reality. Gothic literature in its simplest form is an examination of the dark side of human nature.

Every work of Gothic fiction draws on the setting; a crumbling castle or ancient house, mists and gloomy weather, lightning and thunder, dungeons, caves, labyrinths and long hallways, church bells in the distance... Setting is everything. You can't have the build up terror without the creeptacular location and the building to go with it. Gothic fiction, with its motifs of the supernatural and oft times sublime (and originating with Horace Walpole and his work The Castle of Otranto), is just as much about the setting as it is the plot or characters. 

Poe never gave much time to specifics, letting his silence extend the drama in the reader's mind. In many cases, he leaves the town name or character name blank, as it's not as important as what is taking place. The universes he created were often non-descript in the sense that nothing would be recognizable-- like the cities of Baltimore or Paris, or the architecture, or layout of rooms-- or familiar to the reader. He went on for pages in developing the setting but it was never done in a way to express anything a reader would feel at ease with. By removing the familiar, he created a place already uncomfortable at the beginning of the work. The unexpected and strange from the get-go started the reader off with the sense of wrong footedness.

The opening lines of The Fall of the House of Usher:

• During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.
• I know not how it was-- but, with he first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I saw insufferable, for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest of natural images of the desolate or terrible.
• I looked upon the scene before me-- upon a mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain-- upon the bleak walls-- upon the vacant eye-like windows-- upon a few rank sedges-- and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees-- with utter  depression of soul which I can compare to no other earthly sensation more properly than to the after dream of the reveler upon opium-- the bitter lapse into every day life-- the hideous dropping off of the veil.

Here is the short, animated film of this story, narrated by Christopher Lee.

Think of other Gothic settings in literature: 

• Landscape is incredibly important to the Bronte sisters.
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, screenshots from the 1939 movie
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, Thornfield Hall (shot at Haddon Hall)
• and not to leave out the other Bronte sister, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte
• Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier and Manderly (Alfred Hitchcock's first American film, 1940)

A couple of years ago, Guillermo del Toro made a Gothic Romantic film, Crimson Peak. In the interviews, much time is spent in expounding on the use of the set, the house-- this building that is so ancient it has become sentient. The name of the house is Crimson Peak, and in many respects, the story mirrors that of the Usher family. 

The Fall of the House of Usher is just as much about the house as it is the characters. The overall feeling is there is something darker, and more wrong with the house itself and it is reflected in its inhabitants. Another element of Gothic literature is the sense of claustrophobia or confinement/ entrapment, something being locked away and help captive). As with other Gothic elements, this is both literal and figurative, being physically locked away (or buried alive in the case of Madeline Usher) or locked away in the mind. There is something terribly off in Roderick and even his friend, the narrator (because who seriously goes to someone's house to offer comfort when they don't really know the guy and while the two men languish in melancholy, Madeline dies-- or doesn't). 

Another aspect of Gothic fiction is its moral ambiguity. While the plot details highly questionable relationships and scenarios, there is always a reckoning. Gothic literature deals heavily in the concept of "sins of the father visited on the sons." There is the idea that no matter what the story is about, if it dabbles in the immoral, justice will prevail and there will be consequences for the sin. The narrator in The Fall of the House of Usher describes the family "... the stem of the Usher race, all time-honored as it was, had put forth, at no period, any enduring branch; in other words, that the entire family lay in the direct line of descent, and had always, with very trifling and very temporary variation, so lain." Several essays on this piece suggest that the family tree did not, in fact, branch out. *cough* They kept family in the family. *cough* This was not a completely removed facet of society, considering the royals and their bloodlines (Queen Victoria and her lineage and offspring, any one?) of that time period and their ignorance of the rules of consanguinity. Even Poe married his young cousin, so who's to question the details of this fiction. That being said, it is clear that in the case of Roderick and Madeline Usher, the sins catch up to them literally (they both die and the biological line dies with them) and figuratively (the family estate crumbles to ruin). The anticipation of terror is urged on by the characters themselves because they know intrinsically there will be a judgment.

Poe and Gothic Fiction continues next week with the works The Cask of Amontillado and The Masque of the Red Death.

There's also been some conversation about the influence of Poe on Lemony Snicket. This link shows a load of literary references that include Poe. The bigger question being what literary work is not referenced?