Poe and the apocalyptic sublime: "the fall of the house of usher". (2024)

Among the many interpretations of the idea of the"sublime" during the eighteenth and early nineteenthcenturies, the concept of an "apocalyptic sublime" was notformally recognized; indeed, it had to wait until the late twentiethcentury to emerge as a distinct aesthetic category. The term waspioneered by Morton Paley, whose study The Apocalyptic Sublime (1986)examined this concept in British art from the late eighteenth to the midnineteenth century in works by Benjamin West, Philip James deLoutherbourg, William Blake, J.M.W. Turner, John Martin, Samuel Colman,and Francis Danby. Created during the violence and unrest of the FrenchRevolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the Age of Reform, some of the mostdistinctive paintings, drawings, and engravings by these artistsdepicted a variety of apocalyptic events largely taken from the books ofDaniel and Revelation (along with a few other popular catastrophicbiblical scenes) while simultaneously drawing on the pervasivecontemporary influence of Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiryinto the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). (1)

Despite Paley's pioneering work, the notion of an"apocalyptic sublime" that we find in English Romantic art hasnot been extended to the work of contemporaneous English and AmericanRomantic writers, for some of whom it would seem particularly apt--forexample, Edgar Allan Poe. It has long been recognized that Poe wassteeped in contemporary aesthetic theory; indeed, Poe's poetry,tales, and critical writings demonstrate a familiarity with Burkean andother eighteenth-century theories of the sublime and beautiful as wellas more recent writings on the picturesque. (2) Yet one aspect ofPoe's aesthetic practice that has gone largely unnoticed is thesynthesis, in a small body of his fiction and poetry, of contemporarynotions of the sublime combined with a number of well-known motifs ofbiblical apocalyptic.

"The Fall of the House of Usher" provides arepresentative example of the author's use of the apocalypticsublime. "Usher" is notable for its iconographic depiction ofthe terrors of death. The main character of the story, Roderick Usher,attempts to transcend mortality in an idealized realm given over to thecreation and enjoyment of art; yet death reappears in the form ofUsher's prematurely buried "twin" sister, whose adventcatalyzes the collapse of the Usher mansion and line. Poe seems to havecarefully designed "Usher" around its final moments of sublimeapocalyptic terror. In "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846),Poe would argue that a writer should begin a narrative with thedenouement already in mind, creating a plot in which both action andtone are ineluctably related to a final dramatic effect (13-16). Inkeeping with this aesthetic credo, Poe designed "Usher" with aview to depicting the ineluctable onset of what the book of Job called"the king of terrors" (18:14), creating a supreme unity ofeffect of apocalyptic sublimity.

First published in September 1839 in Burton's Gentleman'sMagazine, "The Fall of the House of Usher" has since assumedits place as perhaps Poe's best-known story and in the processattracted a wide range of critical commentary. (3) The tale is a tour deforce of Gothic fiction, extensively borrowing from the basic componentsof the form as found in some of its classic productions by Walpole,Radcliffe, Lewis, Hoffman, and others. "Usher" thus features ahaunted castle, medieval decor, a family curse, symbolic doubling, amorally challenged hero-villain, a physically entrapped maiden, aself-consciously naive narrator, and a deeply buried secret exposed atthe climax to the story. (4) To this list of representative Gothicfeatures in Poe's tale we may add the influence of the discourse ofthe sublime. It has long been recognized that Burkean ideas of sublimeterror provided an important aesthetic rationale for the efflorescenceof Gothic fiction in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century.Yet the pervasive role of the sublime in Poe's "Usher"has not been adequately appreciated in the roster of critical approachesto the story.

The presence of the sublime in "Usher" has been mostfully examined by Craig Howes, Jack K. Voller, and Sean Moreland. Allthree writers variously argue that Poe critiques, undercuts, and rejectsaspects of the Burkean sublime in the tale. Howes asserts that "Poeembodies a Burkean understanding in the narrator, whose anticipations,desires, and ponderings are the vehicle for a devastating analysis ofBurke's sublime." Moreover, "the tale as a wholeultimately fails to incorporate the wider understanding of the sublimeit has pointed toward, because Poe cannot reconcile this knowledge withhis vision of the female" (173). "Usher" accordinglyreveals Poe's own failure to transcend Burke's limitations ofvision on the subject of gender and beauty. Voller, on the other hand,argues for the presence of both Burkean and Kantian concepts of thesublime in Poe's tale, only to claim Poe's rejection of bothwriters for a proper appreciation of terror in "Usher":"Poe's hostile interrogation of sublimity has as its motiveimpulse not merely the shortcomings of Burkean and Kantian theory, butPoe's recognition of the fundamental inability of the sublime toaddress what critics now identify as a Dark Romantic understanding ofthe human condition" (27). Finally, Moreland argues that Poe'stale "performs a dramatic negation of the architecture of sublimetheorizations Poe inherited from European intellectuals including EdmundBurke, James Ussher, and Immanuel Kant ...." While Howes, Voller,and Moreland all provide suggestive commentary on Poe's story,their discussions are all premised on the idea that "Usher"constitutes an implicit critique of the discourse of the sublime thatinforms the aesthetic universe of the story. Poe was thus allegedlyinvoking the Burkean and Kantean sublime only to reveal their aestheticand psychological inadequacies. A close reading of "Usher,"however, reveals that multiple aspects of Burke's theory of thesublime pervade Poe's tale to a greater degree than these or othercritics have indicated, and with a more valid artistic and psychologicalfunction. There is no evidence that Poe, who was largely ignorant of theGerman language, had any direct familiarity with Kant's"Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime"(1764) or the Critique of Judgment (1790) (Hansen 88-91). On the otherhand, there is overwhelming proof of Poe's detailed knowledge ofBurke's Enquiry throughout his writing career (Ljungquist, Grandand Fair ch. 2). Poe thus strategically mined Burke's influentialtreatise in "Usher," drawing on a number of its basicprinciples in order to create a final effect of sublime terror ofbiblical proportions. Burke's ideas of the sublime accordinglyprovide a basis for the sensibility of Poe's narrator, thesymbolism of the house, Roderick Usher's appearance and artistictemperament, his prematurely buried sister, and the series of uncannyevents that lead to his demise--and the demise of his"house"--through unmediated terror.

If Burke's ideas of the sublime provide "Usher" witha gallery of affects and events that crescendo at the conclusion to thestory, its plot and symbolism also rely on a number of traditionalapocalyptic motifs. Thus, the final extermination of both house andgenealogical line of Ushers evokes the Day of Wrath imagined by the OldTestament prophets and enacted in the book of Revelation, while RoderickUsher and his sister ironically invert the traditional apocalypticmarriage of Christ and his church at the end of Revelation; for it isthe final "marriage" of Roderick and Madeline following hermock "resurrection" that precipitates the collapse of thedoomed house, as we will see, in a crescendo of biblical specialeffects. (5)

We should begin by noting that Poe's use in "Usher"of Burke's Enquiry draws on the latter's basic distinctionbetween the painful and pleasurable aspects of the terrible; for whilethe source of the sublime is the emotion of overwhelming fear, it isonly when we are aware that this fear is not a lethal threat that we canexperience the true aesthetic enjoyment, or what Burke calls the"delight" of the sublime. As Burke writes in his Enquiry,"Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, anddanger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or isconversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous toterror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of thestrongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling" (39). Onthe other hand, "When danger or pain press too nearly, they areincapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certaindistances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they aredelightful, as we every day experience" (40). Physical or aestheticdistance is thus the key to experiencing the sublime as pleasure, asopposed to succumbing to its unmediated terrors in the form of traumaticpain. Hence the basis for Poe's use of the sublime in"Usher" is the fact that Roderick Usher is a fatal victim ofterror in its unmediated condition, while the reader is the beneficiaryof the vicarious "delight" arising from the narrator'sintermediary position as participant-observer and survivor of thehouse's collapse.

At the very beginning of Poe's story, the narrator immediatelyinvokes Burke's famous treatise when he remarks that, after a longride during "the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in theautumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in theheavens" (317), he arrived at the House of Usher. If thenarrator's description here hints at Burke's remarks on thesublime effects of "Privation," including "Vacuity,Darkness, Solitude and Silence" (71), it is only in thenarrator's ensuing description of the House of Usher that we findovert reference to Burke's sublime, as the narrator's view ofhis friend's house creates a sense of "insufferablegloom" that anticipates his coming experience of his friendRoderick Usher's pathological fears and neurotic despair:

I know not how it was--but, with the first glimpse of the building,a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable;for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, becausepoetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even thesternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon thescene before me--upon the mere house, and the simple landscape featuresof the domain--upon the bleak walls--upon the vacant eye-likewindows--upon a few rank sedges--and upon a few white trunks of decayedtrees--with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to noearthly sensation more properly than to the afterdream of the revelerupon opium--the bitter lapse into everyday life--the hideous droppingoff of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of theheart--an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goadings of theimagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it--Ipaused to think--what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation ofthe House of Usher? (317)

As an apparent connoisseur of aesthetic effects in landscape andarchitecture, the narrator evokes the aura of vacancy and decay thatcharacterizes the house and its surroundings, thereby creating apathologically depressive mood reminiscent of the well-known experiencesof De Quincey and Coleridge--or Poe himself--on the after-effects ofopium (laudanum) use. (6) The narrator thus experiences thesuperstitious dread that affects an innocent outsider facing themysteries of a Gothic castle, but he remarks that no"goadings" of his imagination could "torture" theimage of the House of Usher "into aught of the sublime." Wemay understand the narrator's expectation of sublime sensationafter his experience of vacuity, darkness, solitude, and silence intraveling to the Usher mansion, and in viewing its bleak andvacant-looking exterior. But at this point in the story, the narratorcannot feel that Burkean pleasure ("delight") with which"the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of thedesolate or terrible" largely because "the simple landscapefeatures of the domain" before him do not have the ominousintensity to reach the full Burkean sublime--even as the "ranksedges" and "white trunks of decayed trees" suggest thetypically bleak and blasted look of contemporary sublime landscapepainting. As we will see later in our discussion, however, it is a keyfeature of the ensuing narrative that the narrator eventually doesmanage to experience a cumulative sublime effect by the end of thestory, when his visit to Usher's mansion achieves a terrifyingenactment of the apocalyptic sublime in the events of the final evening.

In the meantime we find the narrator continuing in his attempt toderive more pleasure than pain from the scene of the house before him,for he speculates that "a mere different arrangement of theparticulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would besufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity forsorrowful impression" (317-18). In other words, the narrator is nowseemingly attempting to transform the view of the House of Usher into anexample of the "picturesque," which, like Burke'ssublime, was a ubiquitous critical category at this time. As developedby William Gilpin, Uvedale Price, Richard Payne Knight, and others inthe late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the theory of thepicturesque assimilated notions of both the sublime and beautiful whileemphasizing qualities of roughness, irregularity, intricacy,chiaroscuro, age, and decay in pictorial representation--some of whichare present in the initial image of the House of Usher. (7) When thenarrator of Poe's tale, however, subsequently goes to the"precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffledlustre by the dwelling," and gazes down into it in order to see aninverted image of the dreary scene before him, instead of picturesquepleasure he experiences "a shudder even more thrilling thanbefore" (318). While inadvertently foreshadowing the final collapseof the house into the tarn here, the narrator by his ensuing reaction isclearly unable to appreciate the initial scene as an example of thepicturesque even as he realizes its potential for the sublime in thereflected image. The narrator would thus seem to be on the brink ofactually gaining sublime pleasure from the scene, for his shudder is nowfearfully "thrilling" to him. By inverting the image of theHouse of Usher at the "precipitous brink" of the "blackand lurid tarn," the narrator has effectively provided therequisite danger and accompanying aesthetic distance that Burke claimedwas necessary to transform the potentially lethal threat of the sublimeinto the delight of the secure spectator.

Following the first paragraph, which sets the stage for all thathappens in the ensuing tale, the narrator tells us the reason for hiscurrent visit to his childhood friend: Roderick Usher's letterrequesting the narrator, his only remaining friend, to help alleviateUsher's "nervous agitation" and "mentaldisorder" (318). The scion of a "very ancient family"noted for its cultivation of "exalted art," "unobtrusivecharity," and "musical science," Roderick Usher isliterally the last man in the family, which has "put forth, at noperiod, any enduring branch," for "the entire family lay inthe direct line of descent, and had always, with very trifling and verytemporary variation, so lain" (318). The Usher family is thus arace of distinguished, if infertile, artists and philanthropists livingwithin its ancestral "house"; but it is now on the brink ofextinction because of the physical and psychological decline of its twocurrent occupants, Roderick and Madeline Usher. In keeping with thetraditions of Gothic fiction, the House of Usher is apparently under thesway of a mysterious curse manifested in both its genealogical sterilityand the physical decay of its ancestral residence.

After discussing the reason for his visit and the history of theUsher family, Poe's narrator returns to his initial experience offirst seeing the House of Usher and his attempt to alter its depressiveand fearsome effect by looking at its reflection in the tarn--an actionthat ironically only deepens his initial feeling of superstitious dread.The narrator again confirms the fact that the Burkean sublime frames thestory when, seeking to explain the "rapid increase" of hissuperstitious dread about the House of Usher, he adduces the"paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as a basis"(319), arguing that the individual's consciousness of terroraugments this emotion in a kind of negative feedback loop. As Burke hadnoted of the individual's experience of terror, "the mind isso entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other,nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it" (57).The narrator uses himself as an example of this phenomenon when he goeson to detail his "strange fancy" that there hung about theHouse of Usher "an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air ofheaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the graywall, and the silent tarn--a pestilent and mystic vapor, dull, sluggish,faintly discernible, and leaden-hued" (319). A seeming product ofhis incipient fears, the narrator's fanciful idea of apestilential, hellish vapor surrounding the House of Usher and itsblasted environs again suggests the conventions of sublime landscapepainting as well as the vagaries of the literary imagination thatafflict some protagonists approaching the Gothic manse in which theywill be sojourning, notably Emily St. Aubert in The Mysteries of Udolpho(Zimmerman, "Sensibility" 48-50); but in Poe's story, thenarrator's apocalyptic imagination proves to be justified by futureevents.

In keeping with the tangible aura of decay that resembles thevapors of hell, the narrator notes that the House of Usher is composedof decaying stonework and covered with minute fungi; but perhaps themost ominous physical sign of the imminent end to the House is the"barely perceptible fissure" that threads its way "in azigzag direction" (320) from the roof of the building down to thetarn. Extending through the whole outward structure, this distinctive"fissure" is what might be called a "crack of doom"portending the apocalyptic collapse of the Usher line and its familyseat. The familiar phrase, as found in the pageant of Scottish kings inAct 4, scene 1, of Macbeth, refers to the trumpet blasts that will markthe onset of the Apocalypse; but "crack" in its more modernusage connotes a physical break or imperfection, the symbolism evidentin Poe's story. The "crack of doom" in the masonry of thewalls of the House of Usher is thus an iconic sign of physical and moralweakness that will eventually destroy the building and its occupants. Bythe same token, the dark "tarn" above which the house islocated connotes a naturalized image of the abyss that will open up atthe end of the story, consuming all in its lustrous dark depths. (8)

Viewed within the larger literary and cultural context ofPoe's story, Roderick Usher's very name is eminentlyappropriate for a character in a Gothic tale depicting an enactment ofthe apocalyptic sublime. "Roderick" is the name of the moodynobleman Baron Roderick von Rolandsitten in E.T.A. Hoffman's DasMajorat, translated as Rolandsitten, Or The Deed of Entail--a partialsource for "Usher" based on Sir Walter Scott's discussionof it in his essay "On the Supernatural in FictitiousComposition" (Foreign Quarterly Review, July 1827), and a workbearing strategic resemblances to another major source for Poe'sstory, John Hardman's "The Robber's Tower"(Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, December 1828).9 The name Roderickalso pays implicit homage to Robert Southey's narrative poemRoderick, The Last of the Goths (1814); the name of Southey's herois additionally relevant in this connection because of his identity as a"last man" of his race and his association with the"Gothic" past that Horace Walpole had earlier used to coin anew genre of fiction. The surname "Usher" in Poe'sprotagonist, on the other hand, evokes the name of the influential IrishBishop of Armagh, James Ussher (1581-1656), whose chronological recordof biblical history, the Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti (1650- 54),fixed 23 October 4004 BCE as the date of the creation, establishing ahistorical time frame for events from Genesis to the Apocalypse that wasstill authoritative in the mid nineteenth century. Finally, Poe'sprotagonist also shared his last name with the Irish writer onaesthetics James Usher (1720-1772), whose Clio: Or an Essay on Taste(1769) enlarged on Burke's ideas of the sublime by claiming that onencountering the sublime the solitary soul was not only terrified butalso uplifted in religious awe--an anticipation of later Romantic ideasof natural and supernatural sublimity. (10)

Following the narrator's initial arrival at the House ofUsher, evidence of the Burkean sublime begins to emerge as soon as thenarrator enters the premises and is shown into Roderick's presence.The narrator thus proceeds "through many dark and intricatepassages" to Usher's studio, while observing "the sombretapestries of the walls, the ebon blackness of the floors, and thephantasmagoric armorial trophies" (320)--all of which have beenaccustomed to him from his "infancy" but which now stir up"fancies" that are "unfamiliar." In Usher'sstudio, the "long, narrow, and pointed" Gothic-looking windowsare at so vast a distance from the black oaken floor as to be altogetherinaccessible from within. Feeble gleams of encrimsoned light made theirway through the trellised panes, and served to render sufficientlydistinct the more prominent objects around; the eye, however, struggledin vain to reach the remoter angles of the chamber, or the recesses ofthe vaulted and fretted ceiling. Dark draperies hung upon the walls.(320)

The narrator's initial experience of the House of Usher is ofa virtual gallery of sublime effects, notably the "Obscurity,""Vastness," "Succession" and "Light inBuilding" that all form subheadings in Burke's treatise. In"Obscurity," for example, Burke wrote, "To make any thingvery terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary. When we knowthe full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, agreat deal of the apprehension vanishes" (58-59). And in"Light in Building," Burke similarly wrote, "I thinkthen, that all edifices calculated to produce an idea of the sublime,ought rather to be dark and gloomy, and this for two reasons; the firstis, that darkness itself on other occasions is known by experience tohave a greater effect on the passions than light" (81). Thenarrator in Poe's story accordingly "struggled in vain"to see into the "remoter angles" of Usher's studio. So,too, the "long, narrow, and pointed" windows, which admit"[f]eeble gleams of encrimsoned light," conform to the sameBurkean aesthetic while reinforcing the self-consciously"Gothic" ambiance of the story.

When the narrator actually meets his childhood friend in Poe'stale, he discovers someone who has undergone a physical andpsychological breakdown but who still exhibits the distinguishingfeatures of the artist and intellectual. Critics have noted theinfluence of phrenology in the representation of Roderick Usher'sappearance; for example, Usher's "large, liquid, andluminous" eyes, "ghastly pallor of the skin," and"hair of more than web-like softness and tenuity" all indicatea phrenologically "nervous" personality type. Moreover,Usher's "inordinate expansion above the regions of thetemple" (321) demonstrates the fact that he possesses a conspicuousphrenological bump of "Ideality," denoting taste, love ofbeauty, and poetry. Although such a cranial formation is a key featureof Usher's character type, the bump of "Ideality" was infact contiguous to the adjacent region of "Sublimity,"denoting love of grandeur and vastness. Roderick Usher'sphrenologically prominent temples thus identify him as a devotee of theclosely related aesthetic ideals that help shape his creative vision andthat eventually kill him through an excess of imaginative sensibility.(11)

If parts of Usher's appearance are phrenologically suitablefor the artistic and intellectual pursuits in which he is subsequentlyengaged, still other traits convey physiognomic signs of decadence andmoral decline. Morbidly pale with his "cadaverousness ofcomplexion," he has a chin "speaking, in its want ofprominence, of a want of moral energy"; while his"silken" hair "had been suffered to grow allunheeded" in its "wild gossamer texture" so that "itfloated rather than fell about the face" (321) in a kind of haloeddishevelment. The prevailing image of Usher's appearance, then, isof an unkempt, ethereal refinement that is paradoxically both morbid andexalted--a combination we find graphically presented in thejuxtaposition of "the now ghastly pallor of the skin, and the nowmiraculous lustre of the eye" (321).

The narrator's ensuing conversation with Usher about "thenature of his malady" provides an ostensibly clinical basis forunderstanding Usher's character and anticipating the ensuing eventsof the story. Usher suffers from an intractable inherited melancholyconjoined with an overly acute artistic sensibility that has led him tothe brink of madness. A Romantic artist in his dedication to the idealand the ineffable, he ultimately falls victim to his ideal of thesublime which, in theory, the artist seeks to represent. The victim of"a constitutional and a family evil," Usher has developed"a morbid acuteness of the senses" so that each sense--taste,touch, smell, sight, and hearing--reacts with pain to excessivestimulation: "the most insipid food was alone endurable; he couldwear only garments of certain texture; the odors of all flowers wereoppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a faint light; and there werebut peculiar sounds, and these from stringed instruments, which did notinspire him with horror" (322). In modern psychological terms,Usher suffers from an aggravated case of hyperesthesia, a conditiondivisible into gustatory, tactile, olfactory, optic, and auditory forms.Hyperesthesia has long been recognized as a symptom of opium addiction,a diagnosis the narrator would seem to be evoking when, with a nod to DeQuincey, he notes that Usher's voice

varied rapidly from a tremulous indecision (when the animal spiritsseemed utterly in abeyance) to that species of energetic concision [...]which may be observed in the lost drunkard, or the irreclaimable eaterof opium, during the periods of his most intense excitement. (322)

Significantly, Usher's evocation of his peculiar psychologicaland physiological condition also tallies with Burke's descriptionof the various sensations conducive to the sublime that may create painif they are insufficiently mediated. Thus, "bodies which are roughand angular, rouse and vellicate the organs of feeling, causing a senseof pain" (151); while the "affections of the smell and taste,when they are in their full force, and lean directly upon the sensory,are simply painful, and accompanied with no sort of delight" (85).With regard to sight, when the eye is overwhelmed with excessive visualstimulation "the whole capacity of the eye, vibrating in all of itsparts must approach near to the nature of what causes pain, andconsequently must produce an idea of the sublime" (137). Finally,with the sense of hearing, "[w]hen the ear receives any simplesound, it is struck by a single pulse of the air, which makes theear-drum and the other membranous parts vibrate according to the natureand species of the stroke. If the stroke be strong, the organ of hearingsuffers a considerable degree of tension" (140). RoderickUsher's answer to his painful sensory overload is to experiencevarious forms of sensory "smoothness," which according toBurke "is a principal cause of pleasure to the touch, taste, smell,and hearing" (151). The hypersensitivity of Usher's auditorynerves will play a key role later in the story; but for now we can wellunderstand his preference for the music of "stringedinstruments" which alone create a tolerable auditory environment;for as Burke notes, "the beautiful in music will not bear thatloudness and strength of sounds, which may be used to raise otherpassions; nor notes, which are shrill, or harsh, or deep; it agrees bestwith such as are clear, even, smooth, and weak" (122).

Given Roderick's psychological condition as a kind of testcase of Burkean aesthetics, it is not surprising that he concludes hisself-diagnosis by announcing his "dread" of future events, notin themselves, but in their effect on his hypersensitive mind andnerves, leading to an overwhelming and life-threatening terror:

I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absoluteeffect--in terror. In this unnerved--in this pitiable condition--I feelthat the period will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life andreason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR. (322)

Foreshadowing the last scene of the story, Usher's words hereanticipate the onset of sublime terror in its unmediated form associatedwith the dramatic return of Madeline Usher from the grave. As Burkenotes after describing a man under the influence of extreme physicalpain, "Fear or terror, which is an apprehension of pain or death,exhibits exactly the same effects, approaching in violence to those justmentioned in proportion to the nearness of the cause, and the weaknessof the subject" (131). Usher is just such a weakened subject whosesummoning of his childhood friend, the narrator, is a last attempt tofight against his mental and physical disintegration.

This disintegration is illustrated, as he goes on to state, by hisbelief that the "peculiarities in the mere form and substance ofhis family mansion" (323), from which he has not ventured forth"for many years," have contributed to his precarious mentalcondition. We have already seen that both the outside and inside of theHouse of Usher create a gallery of sublime effects based on obscurity,privation, and infinity. Yet chief among the reasons for Usher'sdecline is the anticipated death of his "tenderly belovedsister" (323), a fact that causes Usher the greatest grief andmelancholy and contributes to the sense of helplessness thatcharacterizes his condition. According to Burke, in a With suchintellectual and physical labor, the subject can potentially transmutethe lethal effects of fear into more secure "delight." It isthus the narrator's job to provide a potentially recuperativecompanionship to Usher so that he can try to overcome his cripplingmelancholy or "hypochondriasis" verging on madness. (12)

languid inactive state, the nerves are more liable to the mosthorrible convulsions, than when they are sufficiently braced andstrengthened. Melancholy, dejection, despair, and often self-murder, isthe consequence of the gloomy view we take of things in this relaxedstate of body. The best remedy for all these evils is exercise orlabour. (135)

In the days following the narrator's arrival, he and RoderickUsher engage in various artistic and intellectual activities--painting,music-making, reading--during which time the narrator learns that hisattempts at "cheering" his friend from his melancholy mood arean exercise in futility; for Usher's mind emits "one unceasingradiation of gloom" (324). It is during these sessions that Usherintroduces the narrator to his private artistic world of Romanticidealism.13 The narrator thus finds it impossible to provide "anidea of the exact character of the studies, or of the occupations, inwhich he [Usher] involved me, or led me the way. An excited and highlydistempered ideality threw a sulphureous lustre over all" (324). IfUsher's studies and occupations sound like they are infused withthe fantastic dreams of the opium eater, they are more verifiablyBurkean in their sublime obscurity; for "[i]t is our ignorance ofthings that causes all our admiration, and chiefly excites ourpassions" (61). The narrator thus vaguely remembers an example ofUsher's music-making as a "perversion and amplification of thewild air of the last waltz of Von Weber" and evokes the obscurityof his paintings, "which grew, touch by touch, into vaguenesses atwhich I shuddered the more thrillingly, because I shuddered knowing notwhy" (324). As Burke notes, "a judicious obscurity in somethings contributes to the effect of the picture" (62). Usher thusinfuses his canvases with "an intensity of intolerable awe,"to which the "too concrete reveries of Fuseli" (325) pale bycomparison; Usher outdoes even the famous creator of The Nightmare inthe fearsomely ineffable quality of his paintings.

The narrator's description of the two specific examples ofUsher's creativity in painting and poetry combines elements ofRomantic sublimity with archetypal biblical symbolism. Usher'sstrange and prophetic painting, which anticipates the abstract andsurrealistic art of the twentieth century (Wright), is described asfollows:

A small picture presented the interior of an immensely long andrectangular vault or tunnel, with low walls, smooth, white, and withoutinterruption or device. Certain accessory points of the design servedwell to convey the idea that this excavation lay at an exceeding depthbelow the surface of the earth. No outlet was observed in any portion ofits vast extent, and no torch, or other artificial source of light wasdiscernible; yet a flood of intense rays rolled throughout, and bathedthe whole in a ghastly and inappropriate splendor. (325)

Commentators have pointed out that Usher's painting of anunderground "vault" anticipates the living entombment of hissister later in the story (despite the fact that there is no source oflight in the vault holding Madeline Usher). But Usher's paintinghas other symbolic characteristics, for we should view the painting ascreating an anticipatory image of the apocalyptic sublime that willdistinguish the end of the narrative. In keeping with Burke'streatise, which designated the "Artificial Infinite" as acomponent of the sublime, Usher's painting represents an"immensely long and rectangular vault or tunnel," its"low walls" being "smooth, white, and withoutinterruption or device." As Burke had written, "To producetherefore a perfect grandeur [...] there should be a perfect simplicity,an absolute uniformity in disposition, shape and colouring" (142).While "darkness" and "obscurity" are also familiarcomponents of Burke's sublime, the "flood of intenserays" evident in Usher's painting also qualifies for thiseffect; for "such a light as that of the sun, immediately exertedon the eye, as it overpowers the sense, is a very great [i.e., sublime]idea" (80).

In addition to visual suggestions of the sublime, moreover, thereare also notable apocalyptic elements in the narrator's evocationof Usher's painting. Although it is physically situated in anunderground realm normally associated with hell, the scene has theluminous characteristics of the New Jerusalem, in which there is nonatural source of light according to the book of Revelation: "Andthe city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it:for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the lightthereof" (Rev. 21:23). Yet in Usher's painting, the glaringlybright light is not divine but hellish-looking: for "a flood ofintense rays rolled throughout, and bathed the whole in a ghastly andinappropriate splendor." The image of a "flood" of lightthat "rolled throughout" the picture suggests the"flood" that emerges from beneath the earth as divinepunishment in Genesis 7, as well as the image of final divine punishmentin the prophet Isaiah, when "all the host of heaven shall bedissolved, and the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll"(Isa. 34:4). The same image is repeated in Revelation on the opening ofthe Sixth Seal, at which time "the heaven departed as a scroll whenit is rolled together" (Rev. 6:14). Usher's strange painting,then, is a potential visual reminder of the sublime qualities of hisimagination, which is a mirror of the dominant aesthetic paradigm foundthroughout the narrative.

Roderick Usher's main example of the poetic art is, of course,his poem on "The Haunted Palace," which Poe had himselfpublished five months prior to the publication of "Usher."Situated at the center of the story, "The Haunted Palace"provides a poetic abstract of the collapse of Usher's mental andphysical worlds. Thomas O. Mabbott has demonstrated that Poe'simmediate source for the poem was the "Ballade" by JohnWolcot, better known as Peter Pindar (1738-1819), a three-stanzapseudo-Elizabethan lament for rejected love comparing the speaker'sheart to a "mansion drear" (Collected Works 1:312-13). Yet itis also evident that both the situation and imagery presented in"Ballade" do not fit the more general symbolic message andtechnique of Poe's poem. With its allegorical parallels of houseand head, "The Haunted Palace" draws on a long tradition ofviewing the human body as a microcosmic form of the universe, beginningwith Plato's Timaeus.14 The general model for Poe'sinterpolated poem, however, is almost certainly Spenser'srepresentation of the House of Alma in Book II of The Faerie Queene, acombined castle/human body in which Sir Guyon and Arthur are given anillustrative moral/anatomical tour, and against which the enemies oftemperance lay siege:

 What warre so cruell, or what siege so sore, As that, which strong affections do apply Against the fort of reason euermore To bring the soule into captiuitie: Their force is fiercer through infirmitie Of the fraile flesh, relenting to their rage, And exercise most bitter tyranny Upon the parts, brought into their bondage: No wretchednesse is like to sinfull vellenage. (Canto XI, stanza 1)

As in Spenser's depiction of the House of Alma, RoderickUsher's poem relies on the traditional anthropomorphic concept ofthe human body as a microcosmic house or temple. "The HauntedPalace" in Poe's story provides a paradigmatic linkage betweenthe primordial Fall of humanity consequent on the discovery of evil andthe derangement of the human mind through the experience of sorrow andsuffering--a mythic paradigm that also suits the characterization ofRoderick Usher as representative Romantic artist.

If at the beginning of the poem we find the cerebral"palace" a beautifully ordered, sacred domain of the self, atthe end it has been desecrated by an invasion of evil and thustransformed into a grotesque ruin. So we find that in the first stanzaof the poem, "the monarch Thought's dominion" is a palacein the Edenic "greenest of our valleys" and is guarded by"good angels." The scene, as the second stanza goes on tonote, takes place "in the olden / Time long ago." Drawing onthe traditional Platonic concept of the human soul as a musical harmony,the poet in the third stanza also follows the Spenserian tradition ofdepicting the head as architectural structure, with eyes as figurativewindows on the soul:

 Wanderers in that happy valley Through two luminous windows saw Spirits moving musically To a lute's well-tuned law,

In the fourth stanza, the mouth is likewise a conduit forharmonious sound:

 And all with pearl and ruby glowing Was the fair palace door, Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing, And sparkling evermore, A troop of Echoes whose sweet duty Was but to sing, In voices of surpassing beauty, The wit and wisdom of their king.

Yet eventually "evil things, in robes of sorrow, / Assailedthe monarch's high estate" in the fifth stanza--a sufficientlyvague allusion to merit Burke's equation of obscurity and thesublime. So, too, in the last stanza of the poem, travelers in theformerly Edenic valley now see through the "red-litten"windows of the soul "Vast forms that move fantastically / To adiscordant melody" (327). "Vastness," or "Greatnessof dimension," is another key feature of the sublime, according toBurke (72-73). The orderly, divinely blessed palatial head of the poemhas become a hellish realm occupied by grotesque monsters, while alaughing "hideous throng" of creatures rush out of the"pale door," or mouth, "like a rapid ghastly river"(327). Like Usher's painting, then, his quasi-Spenserianallegorical poem combines implicit indications of a fearful Burkeansublimity along with a general biblical frame of reference, in this casethe Fall instead of the Apocalypse.

Following the recital of Usher's autobiographical poem, thenarrator notes that his friend's "disordered fancy" ismanifested in the belief in "the sentience of all vegetablethings" as well as in the "kingdom of inorganization"(327), the mineral world. In other words, for Usher the whole physicalworld, both animate and inanimate, is mysteriously alive. ConfirmingUsher's belief here is his paranoid notion that the specialarrangement of the stones of his house and its surrounding dead treesare all manifestations of this "sentience" that has created apeculiar "atmosphere" around the house and "moulded thedestinies of his family" with a "silent, yet importunate andterrible influence" (328).15 As the ultimate expression of hispoetic endowment of Ideality gone awry (and foreshadowing his intuitiveperception of his sister's bodily resurrection), Usher'sbelief in a universal "sentience" evokes the concept ofanimism, the ascription of life to all forms of nature--a belief thatunder the rubric of Pantheism could be found throughout the writings ofthe English Romantics.16 In his "Eolian Harp," for example,Coleridge posed the question:

 And what if all of animated nature Be but organic Harps diversely fram'd, That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze At once the Soul of each, and God of all? (11. 44-48; qtd. in Piper 43)

The Wanderer in Wordsworth's The Excursion, similarlyasserted:

 "To every form ofbeing is assigned," Thus calmly spake the venerable Sage, "An active Principle: --howe'er removed From sense and observation, it subsists In all things, in all natures; in the stars Of azure heaven, the unending clouds, In flower and tree, in every pebbly stone That paves the brooks, the stationary rocks, The moving waters, and the invisible air. (IX, 1-9; qtd. in Piper 160)

Using an adjectival form of the word "sentience," Shelleywrote in Queen Mab:

 Throughout this varied and eternal world Soul is the only element: the block That for uncounted ages has remained The moveless pillar of a mountain's weight Is active, living spirit. Every grain Is sentient both in unityand part, And the minutest atom comprehends Aworld ofloves and hatreds[.] (IV, 139-46; qtd. in Piper 44)

Roderick Usher's ascription of "sentience" to thevegetable and mineral worlds is yet another symptom of his Romanticsensibility.

On the other hand, Usher's belief that the particular"collocation" of stones, fungi, and trees have exerted abaleful influence on his family undercuts the traditionally benign auraof Romantic Pantheism by suggesting a malign spirit of apocalyptic doomand the contemporary theory of the miasmatic spread of disease. For inUsher's allegedly "disordered fancy," the family mansion,like the sterile family itself, is under a kind of entropic curse--abelief that confirms the narrator's original view of the house, butthat he now dismisses as unworthy of further consideration since heattempts to embrace a more commonsensical view of the world, havingassumed the role of Usher's spiritual physician.

The final activity the narrator describes in his attempt to helphis childhood friend overcome his debilitating psychological conditionis in sharing his intellectual interests through reading. The titles inUsher's library all constitute esoteric accounts of imaginaryphysical or metaphysical realms, a continuation of the representation ofidealized libraries in other Poe writings such as "Berenice"and the "Marginalia" (Mabbott, Collected Works 2:419-22;Hayes, Printed Word). Roderick Usher's arcane private libraryprovides a representative sampling of his abstruse beliefs on thesentience of nature and the unity of spirit and matter, in keeping withhis twin bumps of Ideality and Sublimity. Yet it is significant that thelast-mentioned title in the narrator's list of examples, theVigiliae Morturorum Secundum Chorum Ecclesiae Magutinae--a vigil for thedead for the Church of Mainz, Germany, dating to 1500--is immediatelysucceeded by the announcement of Madeline Usher's death, as lifeand art begin to coalesce in the final dramatic sequence of the story.The narrator's experience of Usher's creative and intellectualworlds demonstrates that the desire to escape into the realm of theideal is bounded by the ineluctable fact of death. But we must now turnto the presence of Usher's mysterious sister in Poe's tale.

Viewed within its temporal sequence, Poe's story is divisibleinto three parts of approximately equal length, each of which ends withthe anticipated or actual death of Madeline Usher. Thus, at the end ofthe first part, set on the day of the narrator's arrival, we seeMadeline pass "slowly through a remote portion of theapartment" like a ghost and then discover that her "unusualdiagnosis" is a "settled apathy, a gradual wasting away of theperson, and frequent although transient affections of a partiallycataleptical character" (323). A potential consequence of extremefright, depression, or other nervous disorder, catalepsy producesmuscular rigidity, suspension of feeling, and a slowing of bodilyfunctions, including breathing, for varying lengths of time.Madeline's death-mimicking catalepsy is thus an appropriatecounterpart to her brother's morbid afflictions of melancholy andpathological fear. The very evening of the narrator's arrival,Madeline mysteriously takes to her bed for the last time, succumbing to"the prostrating power of the destroyer" (324), the latterbeing a term for death borrowed from St. Paul (1 Cor. 10:10).

While Craig Howes views her as an illustration of the implicitsexism of Burke's idea of feminine beauty, we have no realindication of Madeline Usher's physical exemplification of theseideas; we do, however, have evidence in her shadowy and indistinct formof her association with the Burkean sublime. As Burke notes in hisdiscussion of obscurity, "in nature dark, confused, uncertainimages have a greater power on the fancy to form the grander passionsthan those have which are more clear and determinate" (62); and hegoes on to cite a passage from the book of Job describing an uncannynocturnal theophany as an illustration of "the terrible uncertaintyof the thing described." The passage includes the lines:"'Then a spirit passed before my face. The hair of my fleshstood up. It stood still, but I could not discern the form thereof; animage was before mine eyes; there was silence'" (63; emphasisoriginal). In Poe's story, we are given no distinct impression ofMadeline and so are left to imagine her as a source of haunting fear. Asthe narrator notes following Madeline's one phantom-likeappearance, "I regarded her with an utter astonishment notunmingled with dread--and yet I found it impossible to account for suchfeelings. A sensation of stupor oppressed me, as my eyes followed herretreating steps" (323). Even the exact illness of Madeline issublimely obscure, having "long baffled the skill of herphysicians" (323).

If Madeline is virtually dead on the day of the narrator'sarrival, after he has spent "several days" in Roderick'scompany we learn from the latter that she has finally expired and willbe temporarily entombed in a subterranean vault, due to the impliedthreat of greedy medical resurrectionists. We subsequently witness thenarrator and Roderick depositing the body of Madeline in the vault,secured by a "massive iron" door--a protective precautionsymbolically related (as we will see) to the "great stone"blocking Christ's sepulcher (Matt. 27:60)--along with thenarrator's uncanny discovery that Madeline and Roderick, who bear a"striking similitude," are in fact twins. Given the"sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature" that haveexisted between them, Madeline's death is a displaced suicide forher brother; for neither sibling is apparently capable of fullyfunctioning without the other--an example of spiritual, if not literal,vampirism found elsewhere in Poe's fiction.17 Roderick and Madelineare also seemingly involved in a quasi-incestuous relationship, but thepsychological illnesses of both are almost certainly due to theirrepression of sexual desires, not their fulfillment. In keeping with theearlier mention of her susceptibility to catalepsy, Madeline exhibitstell-tale signs in the tomb that she is not truly dead, for she has"the mockery of a faint blush upon the bosom and the face" anda "suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so terriblein death" (329). Having long expected his sister's demise,Usher is now apparently too grief-stricken to notice her apparentlycataleptic condition and has presumably been assured of hissister's death by the family physician, who had earlier shown whatthe narrator imagines to be "low cunning and perplexity" (320)on the day of his arrival.

The final temporal sequence of the story begins after "somedays of bitter grief"(329) and increasing derangement onUsher's part due to his obsession with the idea of his twinsister's premature burial. As the medical historian Jan Bondesonnotes, "In the 1830s and 1840s, it was neither uncommon norabnormal to be concerned about the risk of being buried alive; indeedsome of the leading European medical authorities on the subject were ofthe opinion that live burials were common" (208; see also Kennedy).In Poe's story, "in the night of the seventh or eighthday" (330) after her entombment, we witness Madeline'sterrifying "resurrection" during the reading of "The MadTrist." Brief as it is, we can see throughout Madeline'scharacterization an essentially ambiguous identity poised between lifeand death in accordance with the Burkean sublime, even as she isultimately a symbolic agent of apocalyptic annihilation.

For adding to Madeline's terrifying significance is a clusterof implicit biblical associations. Burton R. Pollin has noted that thescene of Madeline's return from the grave is partially drawn from acomparable scene in La Motte-Fouque's Undine (69-71); and while shebears the name of Keats's heroine in "The Eve of St.Agnes," who is rescued from family captivity by her lover Porphyroin a daring nocturnal deliverance, the ultimate source ofMadeline's name and symbolic identity in Poe's tale is MaryMagdalene. It is significant in this context that the latter's rolein the gospels is that of chief witness to Christ's resurrection.18In the gospel of Mark, for example, Mary Magdalene, accompanied byJesus's mother and Salome, comes to Christ's tomb to retrievethe body only to discover that the stone has been rolled away and a"young man" is sitting in the tomb, "clothed in a longwhite garment, and they were affrighted" (16:5). The angelicmessenger tells them that Jesus is not there but would appear to thedisciples in Galilee. "And they went out quickly, and fled from thesepulchre; for they trembled and were amazed: neither said they anything to any man; for they were afraid" (16:8). In the gospel ofMatthew, an earthquake accompanies the resurrection (Matt. 27:2), whilein John, a weeping Mary Magdalene looks into the sepulcher and sees twoangels in white and then Jesus, who famously tells her: "touch menot; for I am not yet ascended to my Father" (20:17).

In Poe's adaptation of the biblical story, the temporary"resurrection" of Madeline Usher inverts the New Testamentscene at Christ's tomb; for we now witness Madeline-Magdalene as afigure inspiring paralyzing fear (in Usher) and flight (in thenarrator). When Roderick Usher screams to the narrator that his sisterstands behind the door, "the huge antique panels to which thespeaker pointed, threw slowly back, upon the instant, their ponderousand ebony jaws" (335). The "jaws" of death and hell haveopened, and out comes "the lofty and enshrouded figure of the ladyMadeline of Usher. There was blood upon her white robes, and theevidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciatedframe" (335). The white-robed Madeline is now poised to complete anapocalyptic "marriage" with her brother, but there is a hintof vengeance in her actions here as well, as though punishing him forher premature burial, or refusing to truly "die" without hiscompany. According to the book of Revelation, after the opening of thefifth seal, the Christian martyrs cry out, "How long, O Lord, holyand true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell onthe earth? / And white robes were given unto every one of them"(Rev. 6:10-11). Madeline wears the white robes of the Christian martyrsand her "blood" is symbolically avenged on her brother.Furthermore, the only plausible reason that Madeline can rise up fromher heavily fortified crypt is that she is taking part in a dressrehearsal of the general resurrection at the Last Judgment.

Madeline's temporary return from the monstrous"jaws" of death also relies on a well-known image patternfound in both the Old and the New Testament. In the so-called Apocalypseof Isaiah (chs. 24-27), in a description of God's redemptiveactions in the future kingdom-age, the prophet notes: "He willswallow up death in victory." Moreover, "Thy dead men shalllive, together with my dead body shall they arise. Awake and sing, yethat dwell in dust" (Isa. 25:8, 26:19). St. Paul famously cited thefirst of these assertions when he wrote, in the midst of his descriptionof the Christian resurrection "when corruption shall have put onincorruption," then "Death is swallowed up in victory" (1Cor. 15:54). In Poe's story, which reverses the biblical imagery ofdeath being "swallowed" up in the victory of spiritualresurrection, Madeline emerges from the "ponderous jaws" ofthe narrator's door, but her "victory" over death is onlytemporary. She accordingly causes the immediate demise of her terrifiedbrother, whose vigil for his sister is now consummated in a climacticRomantic Liebestod. "For a moment she remained trembling andreeling to and fro upon the threshold--then, with a low moaning cry,fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her violentand now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and avictim to the terrors he had anticipated" (335). Unlike the dead inthe Apocalypse of Isaiah, Madeline's "low moaning cry" ishardly the joyful singing that should accompany the resurrected body.The unholy "marriage" of brother and sister in"Usher" also implicitly parodies the well-known apocalypticmarriage of Christ and his church at the climax to Revelation, when theNew Jerusalem will appear "coming down from God out of heaven,prepared as a bride adorned for her husband" (Rev. 21:2). This"husband" is, of course, Christ, who appears as the"bridegroom" in two parables in the gospel of Matthew (9:15;25:1-23).

The Burkean sublime is also pervasively present in thisrefiguration of biblical apocalyptic. One of the functions of thenarrator's reading of the pseudo-medieval "Mad Trist,"which coincides with the return of Madeline Usher from the tomb, is toillustrate the disjunction between life and art in the experience of thesublime. If to the narrator "The Mad Trist" is an inferiorspecies of antiquarian literature, to Usher it is an increasinglyterrifying fulfillment of the anticipated return of his dead sister.Roderick's problem is that he has no aesthetic distance from theevents of the story; and he succumbs to a sublime terror in which,according to Burke, "the mind is so entirely filled with itsobject, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason onthat object which employs it" (57). The unexpected and unsettlingnoises of Madeline's emergence from the tomb, which assume the formof an amplified echo of the events narrated in "The MadTrist," create a steadily increasing crescendo of terror. In hisEnquiry, Burke characterized "excessive loudness,""suddenness," and "intermitting" sound as productiveof sublime terror: "A low, tremulous, intermitting sound [...] isproductive of the sublime." Hence "some low, confused,uncertain sounds, leave us in the same fearful anxiety concerning theircauses, that no light, or an uncertain light does concerning the objectsthat surround us" (83-84). It is just this type of sound that thenarrator hears below him as Madeline rips open her subterranean tomb andmakes her way up to the narrator's room. The first sign ofMadeline's arrival occurs following the description of SirEthelred's breaking down of the hermit's door with his mace,at which point the narrator pauses; for

it appeared to me that, from some very remote portion of themansion, there came, indistinctly, to my ears, what might have been, inits exact similarity of character, the echo (but a stifled and dull onecertainly) of the very cracking and ripping sound which Sir Launcelothad so particularly described. (332-33) (19)

The next indication of Madeline's impending arrival comes justafter the narrator has described Ethelred's killing of the dragonwith his mace, resulting in the creature's emitting "'ashriek so horrid and harsh, and withal so piercing'" thatEthelred holds his hands to his ears. Here the narrator pauses withgrowing alarm, for he now heard from some unknown direction "a lowand apparently distant, but harsh, protracted, and most unusualscreaming or grating sound--the exact counterpart of what my fancy hadalready conjured up for the dragon's unnatural shriek as describedby the romancer" (333). The terrorinducing "screaming orgrating sound" continues to mimic the prescriptions of Burke:"In every thing sudden and unexpected, we are apt to start; thatis, we have a perception of danger, and our nature rouses us to guardagainst it. It may be observed, that a single sound of some strength,though but of short duration, if repeated at intervals, has a grandeffect" (83).

Finally, the narrator's description, within the confines ofthe story, of the unexpected falling down of the brazen shield from thewall, "'with a mighty great and terrible ringingsound,'" eventuates in the same sound from below thenarrator's room in the House of Usher: "No sooner had thesesyllables passed my lip, than--as if a shield of brass had indeed, atthe moment, fallen heavily upon a floor of silver--I became aware of adistinct, hollow, metallic, and clangorous, yet apparently muffledreverberation" (334). Such a "distinct, hollow, metallic andclamorous" sound recalls Burke's description of a sudden andunexpected loud noise: "Few things are more aweful than thestriking of a great clock, when the silence of the night prevents theattention from being too much dissipated. The same may be said of asingle stroke on a drum, repeated with pauses; and of the successivefiring of a cannon at a distance" (83).

Needless to say, such a crescendo of sublime sounds, along withtheir implicit message of Madeline's return from the realm of thedead, has transformed Roderick Usher into a state of terrifiedprostration. For Usher now exhibits a fixed gaze and "stony"countenance, only to be succeeded by a "sickly smile" and afinal speech delivered "in a low, hurried, and gibberingmurmur" (334). As Burke noted in the Enquiry, "The passionswhich concern self-preservation, turn mostly on pain and danger. Theideas of pain, sickness, and death, fill the mind with strong emotionsof horror" (38). Usher is clearly unhinged by the noise of hisreturning sister, for the narrator has to actually bend over to hear hiswords, which until his final outburst are spoken more to himself than toany auditor like the narrator. Usher's final speech articulates theterrifying recognition that his own acute sensations were correct intheir perception of the reanimation of his sister's body in thetomb and her likely impending retribution; but he dared not speak,presumably because of the horror that this idea would force him toacknowledge: "'Oh whither shall I fly? Will she not be hereanon? Is she not hurrying to upbraid me for my haste? Have I not heardher footsteps on the stair? Do I not distinguish that heavy and horriblebeating of her heart?'" (335). Significantly, with his firstquestion, Usher echoes the Hebrew psalmist fearing the ubiquity of God:"Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee fromthy presence" (Ps. 139:7). Springing to his feet as Madelineadvances to the threshold, Usher then "shrieked out his syllables,as if in the effort he were giving up his soul--'Madman! I tell youthat she now stands without the door!'" (335). FollowingBurke's precepts, Usher is in the end a victim of life-threatening,unmediated terror stemming from his primordial fear of death,precipitated by his own horrified recognition of having prematurelyburied his sister.

With the appearance of Madeline through the "ponderous andebony jaws" of the room's "huge antique pannels"(335), the stage is set for whole house to sink like the damned into the"lake of fire" (Rev. 20:10, 15) at the end times--but notbefore the narrator is able to flee from the premises before their finalcollapse:

From that chamber, and from that mansion, I fled aghast. The stormwas still abroad in all its wrath as I found myself crossing the oldcauseway. Suddenly there shot along the path a wild light, and I turnedto see whence a gleam so unusual could have issued; for the vast houseand its shadows were alone behind me. The radiance was that of the full,setting, blood-red moon, which now shone vividly through that oncebarely-discernible fissure, of which I have before spoken as extendingfrom the roof of the building, in a zigzag direction, to the base. WhileI gazed, this fissure rapidly widened--there came a fierce breath of thewhirlwind--the entire orb of the satellite [i.e., the moon] burst atonce upon my sight--my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushingasunder--there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of athousand waters--and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenlyand silently over the fragments of the "House of Usher."(335-36)

The memorable conclusion of Poe's story depends for its effecton a collocation of sublime and apocalyptic elements.20 As an enactmentof the sublime, the scene described here exhibits a number of featuresthat accord with Burke's analysis. We may first note that the imageof "the vast house and its shadows" that appears behind thenarrator again evokes the discussions of "Obscurity,""Vastness," and "Magnitude in Building" inBurke's treatise. The violent play of light that characterizes theend of Poe's story evokes Burke's theories as well. The factthat the moonlight suddenly shoots a "wild light" along thenarrator's path, which penetrates through the zigzag,lightning-shaped "fissure" of the building, is in conformitywith Burke's analysis of the sublime qualities of light:

Mere light is too common a thing to make a strong impression on themind, and without a strong impression nothing can be sublime. But such alight as that of the sun, immediately exerted on the eye, as itoverpowers the sense, is a very great idea. Light of an inferiorstrength to this, if it moves with great celerity, has the same power;for lightning is certainly productive of grandeur, which it owes chieflyto the extreme velocity of its motion. (80)

In the climax to Poe's story, the sudden burst of moonlightthat breaks through the disintegrating house conforms to Burke'sevocation of "[l]ight of an inferior strength" to the sun that"moves with great celerity" akin to lightning. We shouldremind ourselves that the narrator is able to evoke the sublimities ofthe scene of the House of Usher's collapse because he has exertedhis instinct for self-preservation and thus experiences the scene ofBurkean terror at a safe distance; "for terror is a passion whichalways produces delight when it does not press too close" (46).

In addition to Burke's notions of the sublime that pervade thefinal scene in Poe's story, we may add the scene's reliance onvarious elements of biblical apocalyptic. If the "wrath" ofthe storm evokes the traditional notion of an impending Day of the Lordof Old Testament prophecy, the ultimate collapse of the House of Usherhas brought about the "fierce breath of the whirlwind." The"whirlwind" is a recurrent Old Testament sign of divine wrathbest known from the book of Job but also found throughout the Hebrewprophets. In Jeremiah, for example, we read, "Behold, a whirlwindof the Lord is gone forth in fury, even a grievous whirlwind; it shallfall grievously upon the head of the wicked" (23:19). So, too,Ezekiel speaks of those false prophets guilty of "lyingdivination" who have thereby built a wall weakened with"untempered morter":

Therefore thus said the Lord God; I will even rend it [the wall]with a stormy wind in my fury; and there shall be an overflowing showerin mine anger, and great hailstones in my fury to consume it. So will Ibreak down the wall that ye have daubed with untempered morter, andbring it down to the ground, so that the foundation thereof shall bediscovered, and it shall fall, and ye shall be consumed in the midstthereof; and ye shall known that I am the Lord. (Eze. 13:13-14)

The fissure in the House of Usher thus mimics the weakened"mortar" of the targets of the prophet's denunciationsfollowing the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians.

The scene of the final demise of the House of Usher also relies ona few key allusions to the book of Revelation. We recall that it is theimage of the "blood-red moon" that ultimately seems to bringdown the house; for as the narrator notes of the "wild light"that shot across his path upon emergence from the collapsing mansion:"The radiance was that of the full, setting, blood-red moon, whichnow shone vividly through that once barely-discernible fissure." Ablood-colored moon is symptomatic of the end times, for after theopening of the sixth seal in Revelation, "there was a greatearthquake; and the sun become black as sackcloth of hair, and the moonbecame as blood" (Rev. 6:12). (The image was borrowed from theprophet Joel: "The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the mooninto blood, before the great and the terrible day of the Lord come"[2:31]; see also Acts 2:20.) The ultimate collapse of the House of Ushertakes place with "a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voiceof a thousand waters," just as in Revelation immediately prior tothe final theophany of Christ as divine warrior, we hear "the voiceof a great multitude, and as the voice of many waters, and as the voiceof mighty thunderings, saying, Alleluia, for the Lord God omnipotentreigneth" (Rev. 19:6; see also Ezek. 1:24; 43:2). The overpoweringnoise of the collapse of the house also conforms to Burke'sassertion in the Enquiry that "sound and loudness" areintegral elements of the sublime: "Excessive loudness alone issufficient to overpower the soul, to suspend its action, and to fill itwith terror. The noise of vast cataracts, raging storms, thunder, orartillery, awakes a great and aweful sensation in the mind."Moreover, "The shouting of a multitude has a similar effect"(82).

In addition to echoing Burke's criteria of sublime sound, the"long tumultuous shouting sound" in Poe's story similarlymimics two biblical scenes in which shouting and divine judgmentsimultaneously occur. In the book of Joshua, the city of Jericho istaken with the noise of shouting and trumpets: "the people shoutedwhen the priests blew with the trumpets: and it came to pass, when thepeople heard the sound of the trumpet, and the people shouted with agreat shout, that the wall fell down flat" (6:20). Climacticshouting will also occur at the Second Coming, according to St. Paul inhis First Letter to the Thessalonians: "For the Lord himself shalldescend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, andwith the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first"(4:16). The conclusion to "The Fall of the House of Usher"thus evokes the sublime "shouting" that accompanied the fallof Jericho in the Old Testament and that will characterize the SecondComing according to the scenario outlined in the New Testament.

In addition to these biblical images of collapse, thenarrator's flight from the House of Usher recreates theself-preserving action of the Christian "saving remnant"described in the "little apocalypse" of the three synopticgospels (Matt. 24-25; Mark 13; Luke 21) and the repeated call to"come out" of Babylon before its collapse as described in thebook of Revelation. In the last days, as described in Christ'sOlivet discourse, those who are in Judea are told to "flee into themountains" before the arrival of the great tribulation (Matt.24:16). In Revelation, just before the fall of Babylon the prophet hears"another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people,that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of herplagues" (Rev. 18:4). Although not a member of any Christian"remnant," the narrator of "The Fall of the House ofUsher" nevertheless flees the collapsing house of his friend asfrom a realm of spiritual pollution, and he witnesses the disappearanceof the fragmented house into the dark tarn at his feet, like the damnedsinking into hell at the end times.

It is by now evident, then, that the final collapse of the House ofUsher consummates the story's enactment of apocalyptic sublimity.At the beginning of the story, we find the narrator unsuccessfullyattempting to transform the initial scene of the House of Usher into anexperience of the Burkean sublime. By the end of the story, however, thenarrator's wish for a sublime experience of the house has beenamply fulfilled, including his obscure understanding of the eventstranspiring at the Usher mansion, his uneasy interactions with theRomantic artist figure Roderick Usher, and the raw terror ofMadeline's apparent return from the dead, leading to the finalannihilation of the Usher family line and mansion. The emotion of terrorinforming the Burkean sublime has been forcibly evoked, and we asreaders enjoy the vicarious delight--"the sensation whichaccompanies the removal of pain or danger" (37)--of watching thehouse and Usher line collapse and disappear into the tarn.

Yet the question remains to be asked whether Poe'sdramatization of the apocalyptic sublime in "The Fall of the Houseof Usher" is comparable to any of those Romantic-era artistsmentioned at the start of this essay. In fact, the contemporaneouspaintings and engravings of John Martin (1789-1854) provide suggestiveanalogues to Poe's use of the apocalyptic sublime in"Usher." Now largely overshadowed by his greatercontemporaries, Martin was nevertheless one of the best-known Britishartists of the 1820s and 30s and the friend of many leading artists andwriters of the day. (21) Poe casually alludes to Martin's Fall ofNinevah in an October 1836 review of Henry F. Chorley's Memorialsof Mrs. Hemans; thus we can safely assume his acquaintance with theartist's principal works in the 1830s and 40s. Combining skills asa painter, printmaker, and civil engineer, Martin was famous forcataclysmic and visionary landscapes that often had a biblical source,from his first famous painting, Belshazzar's Feast in 1820, to thefinal trilogy of The Great Day of His Wrath (1852), The Last Judgement(1853), and The Plains of Heaven (1853). As an illustrator, Martincreated a series of widely distributed engravings for Paradise Lost in1825, for the Bible in 1831, and again for the New Testament in 1836.One of Martin's preferred subjects was the fall of a city,civilization, or humanity in general; thus in his career he createdpaintings of The Fall of Babylon, The Fall of Man, The Fall of Nineveh,The Fall of the Rebel Angels, and the Fall of the Walls of Jericho.

In 1833 the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton described Martin inEngland and the English as

the greatest, the most lofty, the most permanent, the most originalgenius of his age. I see in him, as I have before said, the presence ofa spirit which is not of the world--the divine intoxication of a greatsoul lapped in majesty and unearthly dreams.[...] Vastness is hissphere, yet he has not lost nor circumfused his genius in its space; hehas chained, and wielded, and measured it, at his will; he hastransfused its character into narrow limits; he has compassed theInfinite itself with mathematical precision. (qtd. in Feaver 141-42)

In the various descriptive phrases here, with their grounding insublime aesthetics, we might almost imagine that Bulwer-Lytton wasdescribing the sublime genius of Roderick Usher, or his creator Poe.While Martin's work probably didn't play a direct role inshaping the catastrophic pictorialism of "The Fall of the House ofUsher," both artists were clearly working within the same earlynineteenth-century tradition of apocalyptic sublimity, combiningbiblical images of the end times with Burkean ideas of terror.

(1.) On the sublime, see Samuel H. Monk's The Sublime: A Studyof Critical Theories in XVIII Century England (New York: Modern LanguageAssociation, 1935); Walter John Hipple, Jr.'s The Beautiful, theSublime, and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century British AestheticTheory (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1957); James Kirwan'sSublimity: The Non-Rational and the Irrational in the History ofAesthetics (New York: Routledge, 2005); and Philip Shaw's TheSublime (New York: Routledge, 2006). On the history of apocalyptic art,see Frances Carey's The Apocalypse and the Shape of Things to Come(Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1999).

(2.) See George Kelly's "Poe's Theory ofBeauty" (American Literature 27 [1956]: 21-36); Nina Baym's"The Function of Poe's Pictorialism" (South AtlanticQuarterly 65 [1966]: 47-54); Jeffrey Hess's "The Sources andAesthetics of Poe's Landscape Fiction" (American Quarterly 22[1970]: 177-89); Sharon Furrow's "Psyche and Setting:Poe's Picturesque Landscapes" (Criticism 15 [1973]: 16-27);Kent Ljungquist's The Grand and the Fair; John Conron'sAmerican Picturesque (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2000);Rachel Polonsky's "Poe's Aesthetic Theory"(Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Kevin J. Hayes. New York:Cambridge UP, 2002. 42-56); and Dennis Pahl's "Poe'sSublimity: The Role of Burkean Aesthetics" (The Edgar Allan PoeReview 7 [Fall 2006]: 30-49) and "Sounding the Sublime.'"

(3.) See Thomas Woodson's Twentieth-Century Interpretations of"The Fall of the House of Usher" (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:Prentice-Hall, 1969; Eric W. Carlson's The Fall of the House ofUsher: A Literary Casebook (Columbus, OH: Charles E. Merrill, 1971) andA Companion to Poe Studies (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996.) 190-208; PoeStudies (5 [June 1972]); G. R. Thompson and Virgil L. Lokke'sRuined Eden of the Present: Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe (WestLafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 1981) 303-74; Terry Haller's The Delightsof Terror: The Aesthetics of the Tale of Terror (Urbana: U of IllinoisP, 1987) ch. 8; and Scott Peeples's "Poe'sConstructiveness and 'The Fall of the House of Usher'"(Ed. Kevin J. Hayes. Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe. New York:Cambridge UP, 2002) 178-90.

(4.) On "Usher" as Gothic fiction, see G. R.Thompson's Poe's Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales(Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1973) 87-97; Benjamin Franklin FisherIV's "Playful 'Germanism' in 'The Fall of theHouse of Usher': The Storyteller's Art" (Ruined Eden. Ed.G. R. Thompson and Virgil L. Lokke. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 1981.355-74) and "Poe and the Gothic Tradition" (CambridgeCompanion to Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Kevin J. Hayes. New York: CambridgeUP, 2002. 72-91); Gary Tombleson's "Poe's 'The Fallof the House of Usher' as Archetypal Gothic: Literary andArchitectural Analogs of Cosmic Unity" (Nineteenth-Century Contexts12 [1988]: 83-106); and Beverley R. Voloshin's "Explanation in'The Fall of the House of Usher'" (Studies in ShortFiction 23 [1986]: 419-28).

(5.) The only study of "Usher" as an apocalyptic fictionis Gargano, who argues that the narrator of Poe's tale "seesan apocalyptic vision of the destruction of the world in theextraordinary events enacted in Usher's domain. The predeterminedcollapse of separateness and identity into unity, the apparentlypurposeful fury of whirlwind and clouds, and the final, appointedsubmergence of Usher's mansion into the waiting tarn suggestPoe's concern with eschatological issues" (53). Garganousefully notes that Poe published his post-apocalyptic fable "TheConversation of Eiros and Charmion" in Burton'sGentleman's Magazine in December 1839, three months after"Usher" appeared in the same magazine, revealing Poe'spreoccupation with apocalyptic themes at this time. Gargano does not,however, explore the biblical sources of the story's apocalypticmotifs or their interrelation with elements of the Burkean sublime. OnPoe's extensive familiarity with the Bible, see two early studies:William Mentzel Forrest's Biblical Allusions in Poe (New York:Macmillan, 1928) and Killis Campbell's "Poe's Knowledgeof the Bible" (Studies in Philology 27 [1930]: 546-51).

(6.) Alethea Hayter notes in Opium and the Romantic Imaginationthat it is unclear whether Poe was a regular user of opium (in the formof laudanum) or merely relied on the writings of De Quincey andColeridge for illustration of the effects of the drug. "Since thepublication of The Confessions of an English Opium Eater [in 1821],opium had become as much of a standard accessory of the Romantic hero asa ruined castle in the Apennines had been a generation earlier, and Poemight have included an opium trance among his heroes' experienceseven if he himself had never taken anything stronger than a dose ofcalomel" (135). On the opium use of De Quincey and Coleridge, seechapters 5, 9, and 10.

(7.) On the theory of the picturesque, see Hipple (note 1 above)chs. 12-18. On the likely influence of the picturesque at the beginningof Poe's story, see Ljungquist's Grand and Fair 100-01.Surprisingly, Ljungquist reads "Usher" in the context only ofthe picturesque, not the sublime (Grand and Fair 100-06). In asubsequent article, Ljungquist associates the features of Usher'shouse with William Howitt's picturesque descriptions of NewsteadAbbey and Annesley Hall, the ancestral homes of Byron and his earlysweetheart Mary Chaworth ("Howitt's 'ByronianRambles'"). On the possible influence of Associationistpsychology on the narrator's initial view of the House of Usher,see Barton Levi St. Armand's "Poe's Landscapes of theSoul: Association Theory and 'The Fall of the House ofUsher'" (Modern Language Studies 7 [1977]: 33-41).

(8.) Pahl notes of the zigzag crack in the Usher mansion:"Given the status of texts in Poe's story--their deviating,disfiguring nature--it is perhaps only fitting that such deviations beemblematized in that mad line, that 'zigzag' fissure that runsthrough the house ... " (Architects 12). Some critics haveattempted to contextualize the symbolism of collapse in"Usher" in a cultural milieu of cultural or biologicaldecline. Thus, in "Foucault in the House of Usher: Some HistoricalPermutations of Poe's Gothic" Stephen Dougherty argues thatthe story embodies cultural fears of racial extermination and extinction(Papers on Language and Literature 37 [Winter 2001]: 3-24); GillianBrown discusses "Usher" in the context of contemporarybiological ideas of extinction in "The Poetics of Extinction"(The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Shawn Rosenheim and StephenRachman. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. 330-47).

(9.) Hardman's story was actually an adaptation of the GermanGothic writer H. Clauren's "Das Raubschloss" (1812).Edward W. Pitcher, in "From Hoffman's 'Das Majorat'to Poe's 'Usher' via 'The Robber's Tower':Poe's Borrowings Reconsidered," first noted the closeresemblances between elements of Poe's story and Hardman's"The Robber's Tower" (American Transcendental Quarterly39 [Summer 1978]: 231-36) while Thomas Hansen (with Burton Pollin)provides in The German Face of Edgar Allan Poe: A Study of LiteraryReferences in His Works a precise account of the chain of literaryinfluences uniting Claurens, Hoffman, Hardman, and Poe (Columbia, SC:Camden House, 1995) 60-71.

(10.) See Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla's The Sublime: AReader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory (New York:Cambridge UP, 1996. 147-56). The name "Usher" also belonged tothe acting couple Noble Luke and Harriet L'Estrange Usher, withwhom Poe's parents shared the Boston stage in the two years beforehis birth in 1809. Mabbott notes that the couple's two children,James Campbell Usher and Agnes Pye Usher, were orphaned in 1814 and mayhave acted as models for Roderick and Madeline Usher (Collected Works2:393).

(11.) Poe's formal introduction to phrenology dates from hisreview of Mrs. L. Miles's book Phrenology in the March 1836Southern Literary Messenger. On Poe's interest in phrenology andits influence on "Usher" see Edward Hungerford's"Poe and Phrenology" (American Literature 2 [1930]: 209-31)and Brett Zimmerman's "Phrenological Allegory in Poe's'The Fall of the House of Usher'" (Mosaic 43 [2010]:57-72). On antebellum phrenology generally, see John D. Davis, whoprovides in Phrenology: Fad and Science: A 19th Century American Crusade(New Haven: Yale UP, 1955) a phrenological chart showing the contiguityof the organs of ideality and sublimity. Poe's Usher also bears asuggestive physical resemblance to the figure of James Gates Percival(1795-1856), a contemporary poet, lexicographer, and geologist whosepoem "The Suicide" also suggests the psychic desperation ofRoderick Usher. On this resemblance, see Herbert F. Smith's"Is Roderick Usher a Caricature?" (Poe Studies 6 [June 1973]:49-50). For Roderick Usher's possible resemblances to literaryportraits of the writer E.T.A. Hoffman, see George B. von derLippe's "The Figure of E. T. A. Hoffman as Doppelganger toPoe's Roderick Usher" (Modern Language Notes 92 [1977]:525-34).

(12.) For more on the medical and cultural history of"hypochondriasis," see David W. Butler's"Usher's Hypochondriasis: Mental Alienation and RomanticIdealism in Poe's Gothic Tales" (American Literature 48 [Mar.1976]: 1-12) and George R. Uba's "Malady and Motive: MedicalHistory and 'The Fall of the House of Usher'" (SouthAtlantic Quarterly 85 [1986]: 10-22).

(13.) See Richard Wilbur's "The House of Poe" (TheRecognition of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Eric W. Carlson. Ann Arbor: U ofMichigan P, 1966. 255-77); Maurice Beebe's Ivory Towers and SacredFounts: The Artist as Hero in Fiction from Goethe to Joyce (New York:New York UP, 1964) 118-28; Michael Hoffman's "The House ofUsher and Negative Romanticism" (Studies in Romanticism 4 [1965]:158-68); Joel Porte's The Romance in America: Studies in Cooper,Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and James (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1969)60-69; Daniel Hoffman's Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (New York:Doubleday, 1972) 295-316; E. Miller Budick's "The Fall of theHouse: A Reappraisal of Poe's Attitudes Towards Life andDeath" (Southern Literary Journal 9 [Spring 1977]: 30-50); andJoseph Patrick Roppolo's "Undercurrents in 'The Fall ofthe House of Usher'" (Tulane Studies in English 23 [1978]:1-16).

(14.) For an insightful study of the allegorical use of the body inclassical, medieval, and Renaissance literature, see LeonardBarkan's Nature's Work of Art: The Human Body as Image of theWorld (New Haven: Yale UP, 1975).

(15.) For earlier studies of Roderick Usher's notion ofuniversal "sentience," see Arthur Robinson's "Orderand Sentience in 'The Fall of the House of Usher'" (PMLA76 [1961]: 68-81) and Herbert F. Smith's "Usher's Madnessand Poe's Organicism: A Source" (American Literature 39[1967]: 379-89).

(16.) See Herbert Walter Piper's The Active Universe:Pantheism and the Concept of Imagination in the English Romantic Poets(London: Athlene P, 1962).

(17.) On Madeline as a literal vampire, see Lyle H. Kendall,Jr.'s "The Vampire Motif in 'The Fall of the House ofUsher'" (College English 24 [1963]: 450-53) and J.O.Bailey's "What Happens in 'The Fall of the House ofUsher'?" (American Literature 35 [1964]: 448-66).

(18.) Fisher relevantly asks, "Remembering that Mary Magdelenwas among those at the Crucifixion, should we conclude that Poe, everalert to scriptural themes, added another irony in namingRoderick's sister for one who was present at a colossalsacrifice?" ("Playful 'Germanism'" 368). Pahloffers a deconstructive reading of the name of Usher's sister:"Madeline is connected to a certain textuality or writing throughher name, a conflation of made-line or mad-line; that is, a kind ofwriting that would call attention to its fictive or artificial qualityor to its distortion or 'madness'" (Architects 10).

(19.) Dennis Pahl, in "Sounding the Sublime" (46-47),briefly notes the Burkean manner in which the narrator's wordswhile reading "The Mad Trist" seem to evoke the sounds ofMadeline breaking out of the tomb.

(20.) As Gargano observes,

 The central irony of "Usher" is nothing less than the narrator's failure to understand that he is witnessing a revelation or preenactment of the end of the world and time. Unlike John in the biblical Revelation, however, Poe's confused and intimidated character has no access to celestial enlightenment. He records what he sees with fear and trembling, but in lacking divine clues, the heavenly knowledge of Eiros and Charmion or the wisdom of Poe's Eureka, he has no key to the shocking dislocation in the earthly order. (57-58)

(21.) See Wiliam Feaver's The Art of John Martin.

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JONATHAN A. COOK is the author of Satirical Apocalypse: An Anatomyof Melville's "The Confidence-Man" (1996). He haspublished numerous articles and reviews on Melville, Hawthorne, Irving,Poe, and other nineteenth-century American writers. His study ofMoby-Dick and the Bible will be published by Northern Illinois UP in2012.