Introduction: The “Usher” Formula

Abstract

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” is widely recognized as a literary masterwork and has been regularly included in short story, Gothic, horror, and American literature anthologies. Why Poe’s dark story of madness, premature burial, and a sentient house is so important may be partially answered in the aggregate of the hundreds of critical articles and chapters that seek to explore its seemingly endless ambiguities. As Clive Bloom summarizes the problem, Poe’s tale “is probably the most interpreted short story ever written, its ambiguities endlessly fascinating” (3). To summarize the body of such criticism would be an impossible task, even for an introduction to a book about its significance. Even to account with any comprehensiveness for the various theoretical and interpretive “camps” that have grown around the tale is beyond our scope and purpose. However, we hope to provide briefly something of the flavor of various key approaches to “Usher” in order to contextualize what we attempt in this study. ¹

There isn’t anywhere you can go in this overcast, weedgrown, blood-fertilized field of ours that [Poe] hasn’t been first: the chilly blue-litcorners, the arena of onstage violence, Poet’s Corner, the comedy sideshow, the Vale of Things Man Was Not Meant to Know. In the perfumed mouldy halls of horror, he is the doorkeeper, the cartographer, and the resident ghost.

—John M. Ford

Real art is news that stays news.

—Ezra Pound