Text: Wendy Stallard Flory, “Usher’s Fear and the Flaw in Poe’s Theories of the

Metamorphosis of the Senses,” Poe Studies, June 1974, Vol. VII, No. 1, 7:17-19

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[page 17:]

Usher’s Fear and the Flaw in Poe’s Theories of the Metamorphosis of the Senses

Wendy Stallard FloryRutgers University, Douglass College

As a consoling alternative to the prospect of total annihilation at death, Poe conceives a theory of metamorphosis according to which the senses persist after the death of the physical body. The main weakness of this “consolation” is that the senses must then experience the process of decomposition of the flesh. Poe never deals with this problem in his theoretical writings, but it surfaces in a dramatic way in his stories — and particularly in “The Fall of the House of Usher” — as the theme of premature burial. In Usher’s dilemma Poe attempts to confront this problem by dramatizing it, but by making Usher a weak and evasive character Poe leaves himself free to blame Usher’s final terror on failure of nerve; thus Poe sidesteps the crucial flaw in his own theories.

The analogies with Roderick Usher’s temperament are striking. The extreme acuteness of his senses seems to suggest a straining of his being toward that “ultimate” state in which the whole body becomes one undifferentiated sense-organ. The painfulness of all but the most restrained sensations makes it appear as though the “circuits” of his “rudimentary” sense organs are overloaded. This painfulness is to be

expected, since Poe considers the pain which man experiences to be integral to human experience on earth, and believes that “The pain of the primitive life of Earth, is the sole basis of the bliss of the ultimate life in Heaven” (V, 253).

The narrator’s comparison of Roderick’s state to that of “the irreclaimable eater of opium, during the periods of his most intense excitement” (III, 279) is, in fact, a positive indication according to Poe’s ideas about the “ultimate” existence. Usher’s state resembles the mesmeric trance which Poe describes in “Mesmeric Revelation,” and which, he says, “. . . resembles the ultimate life; for when I am entranced the senses of my rudimental life are in abeyance, and I perceive external things directly, without organs. . .” (V, 250). Roderick’s heightened sensitivity seems to suggest how closely he is approaching his metamorphosis.

That Usher’s hypersensitivity is a hereditary condition suggests that Poe feels the “poetic intellect” is at least partly something one is born with. Usher, like Poe, is committed by his particular temperament to an intense preoccupation with the mysteries of death. While Poe examines these mysteries methodically and programmatically through his philosophic writings and more indirectly in his tales, Usher approaches them only tentatively and hesitantly in his paintings, music, and random reading. Usher lacks Poe’s dedication and single-mindedness and is

[page 18:] dangerously passive. His undoing seems to lie in his lack of courage. Usher’s belief in the sentience of vegetable things, which the narrator dismisses as too bizarre to deserve comment, is one which is central to Poe’s belief in ultimate unity as he expounds it in Eureka (2).

It is not Usher’s “mind” which disintegrates in the course of the tale but his “reason”C understood with all the limiting connotations of Poe’s use of the word. If Usher is mad, then it is an enlightened and mind-expanding kind of madness. Although Usher’s hypersensitivity is a positive sign of imminent metamorphosis to a higher state rather than a sign of insanity, his intense fear is negative. It indicates his ambivalence toward the approaching metamorphosis and leads to his attempts to evade or postpone it. We see his evasiveness when he dismisses his malady as “. . . a mere nervous affection . . . which would undoubtedly soon pass off” (III, 280). Also, he had invited the narrator to stay with him in the hope that his friend’s cheerfulness would cure his own nervousness, but this is a vain hope, since, as soon as the narrator is in the vicinity of the house, he himself is overwhelmed with gloom. In many respects the narrator really plays the part of man’s own “reason” or “understanding” which he hopes can resolve the dilemma of his imminent mortality, but which Poe believes is ineffectual because the reason is completely abandoned in the experience of death, and the senses are self-sufficient.

The narrator does not present Poe’s view of the situation at all, because he sees only the negative aspects of Roderick’s state. Poe himself would not describe the reason as “lofty.” The narrator’s viewpoint is an unenlightened and “rational” one. He can only react to Roderick’s purely abstract paintings with an “intensity of intolerable awe” and feels that they are the product of an “excited and highly distempered ideality.” (Normally abstraction is frowned upon by Poe, but these paintings probably only seem abstract to the narrator because they have reference to a higher plane of perception than he can rise to.)

The imminence of death is strikingly frequent in many of Poe’s tales, and it is usually death as inevitable, rather than as voluntarily sought out. By setting several tales in a time of plague, he has found a simple way of dramatically intensifying all the threatening aspects of the prospect of death. The plague setting is very important in “The Sphinx” which resembles “The Fall of the House of Usher” in all but its trick ending. In “The Sphinx” Poe has reversed the roles taken by host and guest in “Usher,” making the narrator here the Usher-figure, and reinforcing the idea of Poe’s closeness to and sympathy with Roderick. As the two friends wait together daily hearing news of the death of friends from cholera, the narrator says: