Santiago Beuzón Rodríguez

“Some languages in use today can only render the German expression ‘an unheimlich house’ by ‘a haunted house’”1

The gothic haunted house can be regarded as the literary embodiment of uncanniness, for its nature is linked to the very etymological origin of the source german word heimlich. In his essay ‘The Uncanny’, Freud explores this etymology revealing the double meaning of this word, linked to its opposite unheimlich, and conveying both the opposite meanings of ‘homely’ and ‘secret’: in his quote of Grimm’s dictionary we read:

“4. From the idea of ‘homelike’, ‘belonging to the house’, the further idea is developed of something withdrawn from the eyes of the strangers, something concealed, secret; and this idea is expanded in many ways…”2

And it is ultimately expanded in the figure of the haunted house, which contains both the ‘homelike’ features (as it is a house) and the secrecy (the supernatural). Freud analyzes the work of Hoffman as a means to explore the uncanny; Poe, as it has been pointed out by some critics3, was also heavily influenced by him, especially in the case of “The Fall of the House of Usher”.

In this tale, Poe uses the haunted house as the epitome of the “terror... not of Germany but of the soul”4, the fear that arouses not from the explicit but from the slight suggestion. And his main tool to accomplish this is by providing his tale of a doppelgänger nature. This term, invented by the German Romantic Jean Paul in his novel “Siebenkäs”, embodies the double nature present in every human being: the conflict between good and evil, the body-soul dychotomy; but it is with the advent of Freud’s psychoanalysis that the doppelgänger comes to refer also to the double nature of the human mind, entering in the realm of horror narrative: "[...] the division of the psychical into what is conscious and what is unconscious is the fundamental premise of psychoanalysis.”5 The doppelgänger of Poe’s tale parallels that of the human mind. The story runs in two levels: the conscious, which is the story of the twins whose hereditary illness which confines them into the house; and the unconscious, the ‘hesitating shadow’ text which contains the real source of horror. The craft of Poe is to suggest this underlying ‘shadow text’ by allowing the reader brief glimpses of it while avoiding being explicit; both concealing and showing at the same time.

As Von Der Lippe suggests6, Poe draws from the biography of Hoffman in order to construct the character of Roderick Usher, as well as from his literary creation for the other major element in the tale: the house. In Hoffman’s The Cremona Violin, Krespel builds the house according to his whims, as a reflection of his mind, “a house that was, in a special sense, a mirror of his soul”7. This concept of the house reflecting, or linked to, the soul of the character is precisely what Poe uses in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’. To this core of characters he adds the figure of the narrator, which is the reflection of the reader and the embodiment of the ‘conscious’ text , refusing any supernatural fact by maintaining a rational attitude towards Usher’s ravings: “He was

enchained by certain superstitious impressions in regard to the dwelling which he tenanted” (p.142). The skeptical position of the narrator helps the reader to identify with him, giving thus more verosimilitude to the adjective-filled descriptions and startled reactions that set the atmosphere of the tale. From this rational point of view we are presented with a chain of elements that subtly suggest the supernatural, to finally reach the surprising and revealing end.

The numerous references to the vampiric nature of the house are listed by J.O. Bailey in his essay ‘What Happens in the House of Usher?”8. Bailey sustains the theory that the house is in fact a spiritual vampire that feeds on the vitality of the twins. It was originated by a curse bestowed on the family by some martyr while being tortured in the donjon of the house. Many references in the tale to other gothic literature or accounts of vampiric myths support Bailey’s theory, such as the resemblance of the twins to victims of vampirism as described in John Polidori’s introduction to The Vampyre, or the content of the books in the house; it gives an account of the spiritual relationship between the house and the twins and why the house crumbles at the end, when the curse has been finally fulfilled. The question of whether Bailey’s ‘spiritual vampire’ theory is exact or not is not the purpose of this essay; as it manages to provide a more than plausible supernatural framework of the text, it serves as example (if not the perfect one) of the “shadow” or underlying supernatural story which is hinted at the reader, which would be of little interest if explained thoroughly and explicitly in the tale.

With the ‘conscious’ and the ‘unconscious’ layers of the story arranged, we are presented, as the tale evolves, with various ‘peepholes’ in which the ‘shadow text’ can be perceived: the mirror image on the tarn, the parallelism between Usher’s “web-like” hair and the “tangled webwork” of fungi in the roof, the eyes of both Usher and the house, the painting of the illuminated vault as an attempt to remove the “curse”, the simultaneity of the reading of the Mad Trist and Madeline’s escape from the vault, the final fall of the house at the exact moment of the death of the twins... all of them are explainable by means of science or chance. That is Poe’s purpose: to push the events against the barrier of reality without breaking it; so the sense of familiarity is never lost although we sense there is something going in the shadow. As Bailey states, “Poe here invents a technique of Gothic fiction. [...] Mrs Radcliffe’s apparently supernatural phenomena turn out to be natural; what Poe’s narrator seeks to be natural can be explained only as supernatural”9 Poe is constructing a supernatural story to conceal it aftwerwards until the point of being barely explainable in an equilibrated balance.

1 Sigmund Freud, "Das Unheimliche" (The Uncanny), (Penguin Books: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1985)2 Ibid. pp. 3463 George B. Von Der Lippe, “Beyond the House of Usher: The Figure of E.T.A. Hoffmann in the Works of Poe” Modern Language Studies, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Winter, 1978-1979), pp. 33-41 4 Arthur Hobson Quinn, “Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography” (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) p. 2495 Sigmund Freud, “The Ego and the Id” (W. W. Norton & Company, 1990)6 George B. Von Der Lippe, “The Figure of E. T. A. Hoffmann as Doppelgänger to Poe's Roderick Usher” Modern Language Studies,, Vol. 92, No. 3, German Issue (Apr., 1977), pp. 525-5347 Anthony Vidler, “The Architecture of the Uncanny: The Unhomely Houses of the Romantic Sublime” (The MIT Press) Assemblage, No. 3 (Jul., 1987), pp. 6-298 J.O. Bailey, “What Happens in “The Fall of the House of Usher””, American Literature, Vol. 35, No. 4 (Jan., 1964), pp. 445-466

But the origin of this supernatural story can have its roots in reality as well, being in this case a threefold operation in which the author would transform a real-life story symbolically into a supernatural tale, in order to disguise it afterwards as a natural story to achieve the balance of ‘uncanniness’. The references to opium in the story may contribute to this last hypothesis:

“an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium - the bitter lapse into everyday life - the hideous dropping off of the veil”

(p. 137)

“that leaden, self-balanced and perfectly modulated guttural utterance, which may be observed in the lost drunkard, or the irreclaimable eater of opium, during the periods of his most intense excitement”

(p. 142)

There is more than a hint in the tale to the relationship between Roderick Usher’s state (or the hideous aura of the house in the case of the first quote) and opium. We have already mentioned Von Der Lippe’s essay in which he points out that Poe based, at least partially, the character of Roderick Usher on Hoffman. In this same essay he mentions the suggestion by Scott and Carlyle that “the inspirations of Hoffmann [...] resemble the ideas produced by the immoderate use of opium” and that Poe was probably familiar with Scott and Carlyle’s texts. On this assumption, Poe’s reference to opium may hint to the fact that the psychic vampire, the house, is a symbolic representation of opium addiction; the features attributed to the vampire victim are as well applicable to the drug addict: isolation, acuteness of the senses, manic-depressive behaviour and lastly, the fact that the curse of drug addiction ends destroying his family as well as himself. In Poe’s short story “Ligeia”, the narrator, after taking “immoderate doses of opium” becomes a “bounden slave in the trammels of opium”. The exactly same compound, bounden slave, is used by the narrator when referring to Roderick Usher: “To an anomalous species of terror I found him a bounden slave.” (pp. 142)

In this interpretation of the text we found yet another narrative layer underneath the already concealed supernatural one; the ‘real’ dimension, that of the narrator, the ‘supernatural’ which contains the vampiric elements, and the ‘symbolic’ that speaks of opium addiction. The first and the last embrace the central supernatural tale in a tangle of conscious and unconscious elements, where the familiar (the boyhood friend, the house, even known musical pieces) has been changed into something else by a vaguely hinted supernatural force, linked to the terror of real madness.

9 Ibid. (footnote 8)