Mirror Images in The Fall of the House of Usher PDF

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Essay on the Mirror Images in Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher...

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Mirror images in the Fall of the House of Usher

Introduction: The Gothic genre was very popular during the nineteenth century, as the numerous publications of Edgar Allan Poe’s writings show. “The Fall of the House of Usher” is one of his short stories and it was first published in 1839, in Burton's Gentlemen Magazine. This first person narrative is about the reunion of the narrator and his childhood friend Roderick Usher, who suffers from a strange mental illness and whose sister is dying slowly because of an unknown disease in the mansion of Usher’s family. The story takes place in a gloomy and morbid atmosphere, which is a typical characteristic of Gothic stories. Within the story, as Poe often used to create, one can find multiple mirror images which can be seen in the most obvious aspects of the story to the least obvious ones. It becomes thus very interesting to look into these images and to analyze them.

Preparation work: “The Fall of the House of Usher” is literally filled with mirror images, but that fact alone is not the most interesting thing about this short story. One of the most interesting things is that one can find mirror images in the sentences themselves in the words they contain or in their structure, but one can also find mirror images in elements of the setting and in the characters. In other words, mirror images are to be found in both the form of the short story and its content, the story itself. And one can add that almost everything in the story acts as a mirror of the character of Roderick Usher, which opens a reflection on the question of self in the story. As I previously said, the structure of the short story is mirror-like. It starts with two lines quoted from a French author, and the same kind of structure appears again when Roderick’s guest (or the narrator) nearly ends the reading of “Mad Trist” (“Who entereth herein, a conqueror hath bin;/ Who slayeth the dragon, the shield he shall win”). Moreover, these two lines start in an anaphoric way (“Who” is repeated twice) and ‘bin’ rimes with “win”. While describing Usher’s house, Poe also plays with the expression “eye-like windows”, which appears twice in the novel and obviously reminds the reader of a pair of eyes. The tarn reflects the house itself (“when I again uplifted my eyes to the house itself, from its image in the pool”), and the fall of this house at the end reflects also the fall of Usher himself (his death, or the climax of his madness) (“this fissure rapidly widened—there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind —the entire orb of the satellite burst at once upon my sight—my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder—there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters—and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the

“House of Usher.””). And again, everything happens in front of the tarn, which serves as a mirror during the whole story. The palace in Usher’s poem “The Haunted Palace” is a kind of allegory of Usher’s life (“And, round about his home, the glory/That blushed and bloomed/Is but a dim-remembered story/ Of the old time entombed”). The poem is made by multiple enjambments, a technique which contributes to the idea of a mirror-like poem. There is obviously a mirror image between Roderick Usher and his sister Lady Madeline, as they are twins (“A striking similitude between the brother and sister […] I learned that the deceased and himself had been twins”). It seems that everything surrounding Usher in this isolated mansion serves as a reflection of himself, including his own sister. What exactly is the idea of “self” and whom Roderick Usher really is remains ambiguous; even after the end of the story, we don’t get a clear answer. But what is interesting is that even bringing a character from outside the mansion (the narrator) did not prevent the latter from becoming a reflection of Usher (“It was no wonder that his condition terrified—that it infected me. I felt creeping upon me, by slow yet certain degrees, the wild influences of his own fantastic yet impressive superstitions.”; “Oppressed, as I certainly was, upon the occurrence of this second and most extraordinary coincidence, by a thousand conflicting sensations, in which wonder and extreme terror were predominant”). If Lady Madeline is more a physical reflection of Usher, the narrator is more a reflection of Usher’s moral state. If we go further in our analysis and think about the functioning of a mirror, we realize that a mirror reflects something similar to the reflected object and yet opposite. We can thus oppose Lady Madeline to Usher regarding the themes of life and death (she dies and he lives, at least until the end of the story), or the themes of masculinity and femininity (and we could link that to the idea of incest as well in a further analysis) and oppose the narrator’s sanity of mind to Usher’s folly. To finish and to open up another field for further reflection, we can add that the mirror images in “The Fall of the House of Usher” and the short story itself are a reflection of reality, a reflection made possible through a mirror called “art”. Of course these images do not portrait our day-to-day life, but the descriptions of the setting and of the psychological dimension of the story are near to reality thanks to art. Poe liked to write things in such a way that every little part of the writing contributed to the whole in order to create a sense of harmony, as we have seen in this short story. One can thus assume that Poe tried to create a microcosm (and this idea is reinforced by the presence of a poem within a work of art) in this short story, and a microcosm is a world in miniature, and to create microcosms was (and still is) one of the purposes of art....