“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.

“The Fall of the House of Usher” Blog Post

by Meggie T.

Edgar Allan Poe’s short narrative, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” was first published in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine in September 1839. It was later revised and republished in the Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in 1840. However, the poem “The Haunted Palace” within the short story was separately published earlier in an issue of Baltimore Museum magazine. Voloshin suggested that the poem was incorporated into the narrative to give the poem more context as well as “a representation of the fall of thought” in the story as well as the turning point (Voloshin 22).

Thomas Dunn English, Poe’s physician and alienated friend, claimed that he tried to sell his poem “The Haunted Palace” to John L. O’Sullivan, editor of The Democratic Review (Winwar 355). However, English believed O’Sullivan rejected the offer because he had trouble comprehending the poem. Instead, Poe’s poem was published in the April 1839 issue of Baltimore Museum. Voloshin’s suggestion is consistent with Poe’s later incorporation of his poem into “The Fall of the House of Usher.” 

After the poem was published, Poe’s rival, Rufus Wilmot Griswold raised suspicion that the poem was plagiarized from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Beleaguered City.” Longfellow’s “’Beleaguered City’ is designed to imply a mind beset with lunatic fancies; and this is, identically, the intention of ‘The Haunted Palace’” (Longfellow). Even the title of Longfellow’s poem is a paraphrased version of Poe’s. In 1841, Poe wrote a letter to Griswold addressing the plagiarism suspicion and claimed that it was actually Longfellow who plagiarized him. Poe stated in his letter that although both poem shared many similarities, the “allegorical conduct, the style of its versification & expression” were all his own. He also notese c that Longfellow’s poem was published six weeks after his appeared in Baltimore’s Museum (Poe).

Even with Griswold’s suspicion, “The Haunted Palace” was one of the poems featured in the first American poetry anthology, The Poets and Poetry of America published in 1842. Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and poem, “The Haunted Mansion,” has become the classic works of American Gothic literature.

 

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. Letter to Rufus Wilmot Griswold. Autographed
          letter. 28 September 1850.

Poe, Edgar Allan. Letter to Rufus Wilmot Griswold. 29 May 1841.
          <www.eapoe.org/works/letters/p4105290>

Voloshin, Beverly. “Explanation in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’” in Studies in
          Short Fiction, Vol. 23, No. 4, Fall, 1986, pp. 419-28. 

Winwar, Frances. “The Haunted Palace. A Life of Edgar Allan Poe.” The Pennsylvania
          Magazine of History and Biography. (1959): 355-337. Web.
          <www.jstor.org/stable/20089220?seq=2>

Wohlpart, Jim. “Edgar Allan Poe ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’” Florida Gulf Coast
          University.
          <itech.fgcu.edu/faculty/wohlpart/alra/PoeFall.htm>