There are many thematic similarities in the works of Edgar Allen Poe. These themes are of mostly darkness and sickness and death. This is not so surprising considering his life experiences had many of the same themes. He was born in 1809 to actors. Two years later his father disappears and soon after his mother dies leaving him orphaned. He is never legally adopted but lives with the Allen family where he starts attending many different schools. First he is sent to a boarding school, then Manor House School, then enters the school of William Burke, then attends the University of Virginia where he incurs gambling debts. He asks his foster father for help, but receives none; this isn’t the first time this happens. After joining the army he asks for his foster fathers consent to withdraw but the request remains unanswered. When Poe is court-martialled and dismissed from a military academy he moves in with his aunt and his cousin Virginia. As he struggles with poverty he marries his younger cousin and has moderate success as a writer and editor. When Virginia dies Poe falls ill. He dies in 1849, after suffering hallucinations from excessive alcoholism, destitute and suffering from a brain legion. The experiences of his tragic life is the reason his stories are all so dark and foreboding with themes of eerie doublings, obsession with heads and the mind, sickly female characters, death and entombment. The story that shows of all of these themes together is Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. This one story embodies all of the common Poe themes (that can be found in his other popular works such as William Wilson, Ligeia, The Purloined Letter, Berenice, Ulalume and Annabel Lee) and gives the best representation of Poe’s unique literary world.
In the first paragraph of The Fall of the House of Usher the narrator rides up to the house of Roderick Usher. “But with a shudder even more thrilling than before” (Poe, 91) he is unnerved by the sight of the reflection of the house in the “black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled luster by the dwelling” (Poe, 91). This brings to light one of Poe’s most prominent themes in his stories and in this one in particular. Reflections, mirrors and doublings are important in analyzing any of Poe’s stories. In The Fall of the House of Usher this theme is seen in the beginning with reflection in the lake and the ending where the house crumbles down into the reflection in the lake as if it’s falling into itself; “-and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the ‘House of Usher’” (Poe, 109). Roderick Usher himself is a twin. Poe writes that “A striking similitude between the brother and sister now first arrested my attention… I learned that the deceased and himself had been twins, and that sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature had always existed between them” (Poe, 102). And, to the experienced Poe reader, there is the possibility that the narrator is Usher himself. Perhaps the best example of Poe’s eerie twinning themes in the other stories we read in class is in his story William Wilson. Throughout the whole story it seems that this narrator is being trailed by a person who very closely resembles him.
“The feeling of vexation thus engendered grew stronger with every circumstance tending to show resemblance, moral or physical, between my rival and myself. I had not then discovered the remarkable fact that we were of the same age; but I saw that we were of the same height, and I perceived that we were even singularly alike in general contour of persona and outline of feature” (Poe, 117).
At the end of the story it becomes apparent that William Wilson the narrator was also William Wilson the tormentor the whole time. To drive this twinning theme even deeper William Wilson is confronted with the truth when he looks into a mirror; “as I stepped up to it in extremity of terror, mine own image, but with features all pale and dabbled in blood, advanced to meet me with a feeble and tottering gait” (Poe, 130). Poe uses this theme of conversing with ones self in his poem Ulalume. The narrator writes about the experience he had one night while he was walking with his soul. “Here once, through an alley Titanic/ Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul-/Of cypress, with Psych, my Soul” (Poe, 34). Another example of the twinning or mirroring theme is in the story The Purloined Letter where there are several doublings. But the best example is when the detective says that in order to get into the mind of someone else he “fashion[s] the expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or hear, as if to match or correspond with the expression” (Poe, 291). Thereby becoming the mirror image, or twin, of the person he is looking at.
Along with his obsession of doublings is his obsession with people’s heads. It often seems that Poe’s characters exist only in their heads because of the attention he pays to describing this part of the body more than any other parts. In The Fall of the House of Usher Poe goes into a detailed description of Ushers head. He describes his skin, his eyes, his lips, his nose, his chin, his hair, his brow and the expressions they all portrayed (Poe 94-95). He does all this to show how much Usher has changed from the boy he once knew. This is very reminiscent of Poe’s description of the female character Ligeia in Ligeia. He describes just her head for over a page in length. He again describes her skin, her lips, her nose, her nostrils, her chin, her hair, her forehead, her dimples, her teeth and most importantly the paragraph devoted to describing her eyes (Poe, 63-65). In his story Berenice Poe takes his head obsession to new levels. The narrator seems to be living in his imagination; he locks himself up in his library like he locks himself up in his mind. “In that chamber was I born. …-into a place of imagination- …that I loitered away my boyhood in books, and dissipated my youth in reverie…” (Poe, 141). And like in Poe’s real life, his narrator falls in love with his cousin and becomes obsessed with her head, more specifically her teeth. He describes her head in detail as well, the same way as before; her forehead, her pale skin, her hair, her eyes, her lips and more importantly her teeth.
Another thematic similarity between Berenice and The Fall of the House of Usher is the introduction of a sickly female character. Poe has a common theme of creating a female character that is both sick and dying with a strange illness or is already dead and haunting the story. Usher’s twin sister Madeline is suffering from a disease that “had long baffled the skill of her physicians. A settled apathy, a gradual wasting away of the person, and frequent although transient affections of a partially cataleptical character, were the unusual diagnosis” (Poe, 97). Then she “succumbed… to the prostrating power of the destroyer…” (Poe, 97). In Berenice the object of the narrators desire also has a strange illness. “Disense- a fatal disease- fell like the simoom upon her frame… Alas! The destroyer came and went…” (Poe, 142). In Ligeia the narrator first wife “grew ill” (Poe, 67) and then finally dies of an undisclosed illness. Poe’s poem Annabel Lee is about a boy who is in love with a girl who has died. Ulalume is another poem about a man who has lost his love to death. Both of those poems do not mention the cause of death and if the cause of death to these young beautiful women is mentioned it is some strange and rare illness. But it is a very typical theme of Poe’s to include the deaths of young beautiful women in his stories.
It is not only the women that die in Poe’s stories but men as well. There is a major theme of death in most of his stories. In The Fall of the House of Usher not only does Ushers sister die but it is assumed that Usher dies as well when the house falls down. As I mentioned before the poems Ulalume and Annabel Lee both deal with the death of close loved ones. There is a theoretical death in William Wilson where the narrator kills the person he thinks is harassing him, which Poe describes as killing a part of himself. He ends the story with the talk of how the narrator himself is dead- “Yet, henceforward art thou also dead- dead to the World, to Heaven and to Hope! In me didst thou exist- and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself” (Poe, 130).
The death theme is often corroborated with his theme of entombment. Entombment plays a big roll in The Fall of the House of Usher. Usher’s sister Madeline dies and the narrator “personally aided him in the arrangements for the temporary entombment” (Poe, 102). The narrator goes on to describe in detail exactly how and where they entomb her- “The body having been encoffined, we two alone bore it to its rest. The vault in which we placed it… was small, damp, and entirely without means of admission for light…” (Poe, 102). This mention of the small confined space without any light highlights just how confined and enclosed this tomb is. Then the narrator goes on to explain how they not only enclosed the sister in a tomb, they “screwed down the lid,” and “secured the door of iron” (Poe, 103). Then at the end of the story Usher is entombed by his house as it crumbles and falls down on top of him and his sister. This theme is carried over in Berenice. In the beginning the narrator describes the library in which he spent most of his childhood. “The recollection of my earliest years are connected with that chamber… Here died my mother. Herein I was born” (Poe, 141). The chamber is like likened to a tomb not only because he is constantly enclosing himself in it but also because his mother died in it. Later in the story the narrator encounters more tomb-like rooms as in The Fall of the House of Usher. For example the bed-chamber in which his cousin’s body is laying. If you take the description of the room out of context- “The room was large, and very dark, and at every step within its gloomy precincts I encountered the paraphernalia of the grave” (Poe, 146) it sounds very much like a description of a tomb. Upon entering the bed-chamber the narrator goes even further into the depths of the “tomb” when he pulls back the drapes around the coffin and lets them fall around him enclosing him in with the coffin like a tomb.
“Gently I uplifted the sable draperies of the curtains. As I let them fall they descended upon my shoulders, and shutting me thus out from the living, enclosed me in the strictest communion with the deceased. There very atmosphere was redolent of death. The peculiar smell of the coffin sickened me… I would have given worlds to escape- to breath once again the pure air of the eternal heavens” (Poe, 146).
In his poem Annabel Lee the narrator explains that his love was entombed by her family; they “shut her up in a sepulcher” (Poe, 42). And then at the end of the poem he is constantly visiting her “In the sepulcher there by the sea/ In her tomb by the sounding sea” (Poe, 43). In the other poem Ulalume the narrator unknowingly comes upon the tomb of his love.
“But [we] were stopped by the door of a tomb-
By the door of a legended tomb;
And I said- ‘what is written, sweet sister,
On the door or this legended tomb?’
She replied- ‘Ulalume- Ulalume-
‘T is the vault of thy lost Ulalume!’” (Poe 16)
Poe was very true to his writing styles, motifs and themes, using the same themes in almost all his works. Doublings/mirrorings, detailing the importance of characters heads, sickly female characters, death and entombment are all important and inescapable themes of his and are all featured prominently inThe Fall of the House of Usher. Most of these themes were also important and inescapable themes of his life as well, thereby it is not a total coincidence that one can see these themes repeated through all of his writings.
Copyright Megan Tharpe 2004
