Writing, as Mysterious as a Cat: a Critical Evaluation of Poe’s the fall of the House of Usher

Abstract

Edger Allan Poe occupies a unique place in American Literature. A master of the horror tale and the patron saint of the detective story, Poe, in his supernatural fiction, usually deals with paranoia rooted in personal psychology, physical or mental enfeeblement, obsessions, the damnation of death, feverish fantasies and the cosmos as source of horror and inspiration, without bothering himself explicitly with such supernatural beings as ghosts, werewolves or vampires. The terror infused in his works is not fantastic or ‘German' but it is realistic and based on true principles of human nature and conduct. J.J. Ingram writes of Poe – “His readers are well aware how clearly Poe's idiosyncrasies, both in his prose and in his verse, show through the transparent mask behind which his heroes are supposed to be hidden and in the ‘Narrative', it is rarely that the imaginary hero is thought of otherwise than as identical with Poe himself.” Like his poems Poe's tales are notably unequal. The best of his narrative work is to be found in his analytical tales, in certain stories in which he combines his analytical gift with the imaginative sensibility as in The Fall of the House of Ushers. In all of his short stories, he displays a skill of concentration and of construction and shows himself as a master of English style and approaches the eloquence and splendor of De Quincy