Psycho-Sexual Reading of The Fall of the House of Usher Essay -- Fall

Psycho-Sexual Reading of The Fall of the House of exhibit The idea that The Fall of the House of Usher is in part an investigation into informal motivation and sexual guilt complexes has often been hinted at but never critically pursued as the dominant theme in the tale. But such(prenominal) a reading is at least prepared for in important essays by D. H. Lawrence and Allen Tate which make the essential recognition that The Fall of the House of Usher is a love story (1). Lawrence and Tate, however, mistakenly attempt to purge the love concerned of all corporal meaning. What they see Usher wanting is possession not of Madelines carcass but her very being (Lawrence, p. 86). Theirs is essentially an anti-biological reading of the tale in which the Poe hero tries in self-love to turn the soul of the heroine into something like a physical object which can be known in direct cognition (fate, p. 115). But if The Fall of the House of Usher is a drama of cognition, its cognitive carry o n is not circumscribed by metaphysical speculation on the identity of matter and spirit (2). In this connection, Patrick F. Quinns suggestion that Usher is a criminal merits wariness (3). He is, in a biological reading of the story, a sexual criminal, and a critic like Richard Wilbur, who suggests that the poetic soul is out to shake false this temporal, rational, physical world and escape . . . to a realm of unfettered vision, lifts us out of rather than urges us into the depths which humanity in the person of Usher has touched(p) (4). Caroline Gordon and Allen Tate are closer to the truth when they call column 2 Usher a Gothic character taken seriously and when they view The Fall of the House of Usher as a serious story of moral perv... ...267. (5) Caroline Gordon and Allen Tate, The Ho?se of Fiction (New York Scribners, 1960), p. 53. (6) See Albert Mordells comment on the tale and Usher in The Erotic Motive in Literature, rev. ed. (New York Collier Books, 1962), p. 173 As we learn from psycho-analysis, morbid fear is inhibited sexual desire it is reaction against the libido. column 2 (7) The editors of The Literature of The coupled States (Chicago Scott-Foresman, 1949), p. 317, note 17, favor the more familiar explanation which links the doctor with a gang of body-snatchers. Thus Usher chooses to entomb his sister in the vaults of the dramatics rather than in the family graveyard. (8) Darrel Abel, A Key to The House of Usher, rpt. in Interpretations of American Literature, ed. Charles Feidelson, Jr. and Paul Brodtkorb, Jr. (New York Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 53.