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"The Fall of the House of Usher" is among those few stories that seem to elicit nearly as many critical interpretations as it has readers. More recent critical appraisals of the story have largely followed two directions: a reappraisal of the genre of the story as a Gothic romance1 and a close attention to Madeline Usher as a type of Poe's other female characters.2 But the tale presents the reader a multiplicity of problems that set it aside from Poe's other stories. Madeline is as enigmatic as a new language and as difficult to construe. While debates about Lady Ligeia have filled the pages of many journals, it is not hard to understand why.3 Her contrarian social role, her purely gothic resurrection, and her defiant antithesis in character to Rowena sharpen her person from the start. But Madeline? This sylph-like creature, so attenuated and frail, seems to slip through the story like vapor, all the more mysterious for that and for her incredible power displayed in the conclusion.
Similarly, while the story is certainly Gothic in nature, here, too, we find exceptions and qualifications. In the majority of Poe's Gothic tales the narrative point of view is first person, and, significantly, the reader is also placed inside the mind of this leading character-narrator who is only a step away from insanity. In "Usher" we also have a creeping horror and the mental disintegration of the principal persona, but the story is in fact narrated by an outside visitor (also representing the reader) who wants to find away out of the horror. The only problem with this narrator is that, even having been given ample signs and warnings (as happens to Fortunato in "The Cask of Amontillado"), he is too inept to put the clues together. Poe has designed this deliberately, of course, for the reader is far more deductive than the narrator but has to wait for him to reach the extreme limit of safety before fleeing. However dull the narrator's mental processing, it is altogether better than being trapped in insanity.
One of the more penetrating of these studies of Gothic traits is G. R. Thompson's analysis of "The Fall of the House of Usher" in his Poe's Fiction. Thompson addresses the variations Poe...