“The Fall of the House of Usher” Blog Post

by Anthony M.

                  Edgar Allan Poe originally published “The Fall of the House of Usher” within the Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine in 1839 (eapoe.org). A year later Poe republished the short story within his two volume anthology entitled The Grotesque and Arabesque. Normally the term Arabesque describes the complexity of Islamic architecture and art. However, the association of the words grotesque and arabesque within the title implies Poe’s association of Islamic art to disturbance and fear. Within his article, UCSB PhD alumni, Jacob Rama Berman claims, “Poe’s own adoption of the arabesque illuminates his aesthetic fascination with decadence and decay” (Berman 132).  At the same time, other American writers also contributed these same qualities to the arabesque. Popular with writers of the nineteenth century, authors like Melville and Twain also wrote about the desolation of the Holy Land with their works Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage to the Holy Land (1876) and The Innocents Abroad: or, The New Pilgrims’ Progress (1869). Modern scholars claim that Poe’s anthology and particularly “The Fall of the House of Usher” was “part of a larger nineteenth-century European Romantic fascination with the arabesque” (Berman 132). Scholars at the time coined this attraction with the arabesque within the century as “Holy Land mania” (Obenzinger). This “mania” emerged from the idea that America was the New Israel; a nation chosen by God as the new promised land (Obenzinger). Disappointingly when scholars like Herman Melville and John Lloyd Stephen returned they often described the land as desolate, therefore, raising apprehension about America’s potential future. As an editor during this “Holy Land mania,” Poe reviewed many works in regards to this topic.  After examining the work of John Stephen’s travel narratives, Poe himself described the contemporary Palestine as “the visible effects of the divine displeasure” (Poe 152). Poe himself could not resist the mania and used its association with decay within his anthology and short stories.

Modern scholars like Jacob Rama Berman, and Molly K. Robey, have recently taken Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” into a historical context in regards to the “Holy Land mania.” In her paper “Poe and Prophecy: Degeneration in the Holy Land and the House of Usher” Molly K. Robey claims that the description of Roderick Usher’s deterioration as a transformation from Hebrew to Arab comments on the fear and anxiety that America may become the contemporary Palestine.

 

Sources:

Berman , Jacob Rama. ‘Domestic Terror and Poe’s Arabesque Interior’, ESC, 31/1 (March 2005): 128-150.

Obenzinger, Hilton. American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1999. Print.

Poe, Edgar Allan. ‘Palæstine’, Southern Literary Messenger, February 1836, p. 152

Robey, Molly K. “Poe And Prophecy: Degeneration In The Holy Land And The House Of Usher.” Gothic Studies 12.2 (2010): 61-69. Academic Search Complete. Web. 14 Aug. 2013.