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Suffering from a mysterious "acuteness of the senses" (Poe 38), Roderick Usher is a miserable man teetering on the twin precipice of death and insanity; it is only a matter of time before he topples over the edge. In presenting this ultimate demise of Roderick in "The Fall of the House of Usher," Edgar Allan Poe plays out his own internal conflicts on the public stage of a short story. Upon examination of the text against an image of the author, it is clear that Poe unconsciously uses the character of Roderick as his avatar. Poe's tale conforms to Freud's id/ego/superego model of the human mind, with the ego as the aspect that should act as the arbiter between the id's pull to pursue the pleasure principle and the superego's demands to follow the reality principle (Vesterman 53). The other characters in the story represent Poe's own tripart mind: the House as the superego, Madelaine as the id, and the Narrator as the ego. In this story, Poe not only plays out the conflict between these forces but also accurately predicts his own failure to reconcile his internal struggles.
One need only compare an image of the author to his description of the ailing Roderick to recognize Roderick as Poe's avatar in the story. Poe's is a much caricatured face, distinctive and memorable to anyone who has seen his portrait. This is why the passage describing Roderick Usher is strikingly accurate as a description of Poe's own face. Consciously chosen by the author or not, a great many of the features that Poe ascribes to Roderick are his own. Compare the descriptive passage to the photograph of the author:
A reader might well describe Poe's pale and somewhat sickly complexion as "cadaverous," and though his moustache makes it somewhat hard to confirm, one suspects that his "pallid" lips are also "somewhat thin." The two features of Poe's face that linger longest in the memory--his large, deep-set eyes and broad, intelligent forehead--are also found in Roderick's description: "an eye large, liquid, and luminous" and "an inordinate expansion above the regions of the temple." In ascribing to Roderick a chin much like his own, Poe gives the reader a hint of the judgment he has already passed on himself, for he says that "in its want of prominence" it speaks of his "want of moral energy." It is very clear to a reader familiar with the author that it is Poe himself that Roderick Usher would see in a mirror. As physical evidence shows that Roderick Usher represents Poe himself, further analysis using psychoanalytical criticism will show that the other characters represent Poe's conflicting inner forces of his psyche.
The first of these forces that is apparent in the story is the superego, in the form of the mysterious "House of Usher." One of the primary influences in the development of a person's superego is the family (Vesterman 53). Representing the family of Usher itself, the House is far more than simply a mansion and its grounds, a fact demonstrated both explicitly and implicitly within the text. The narrator reveals that the "House of Usher" was "an appellation which seemed to include, in the minds of the peasantry, both the family and the family mansion." The manor has been passed down from father to son for generations of Ushers until family and property have become synonymous (Poe 36).
And Roderick, after composing a spontaneous poem chronicling the descent of the once glorious house into its present state, reveals to the narrator his theory that the home and its lands had an intelligence and life all their own, with an acute effect on the family. "The result was discoverable, he added, in that silent, yet importunate and terrible influence which for centuries had molded the destinies of his family, and which made him what I now saw him--what he was" (Poe 42). If, in the world of Poe's gothic tale, the family and the home were inextricably linked, then the degeneration of each were also linked.
Symbolic similarities between the House of Usher and Poe's own family make even more clear how the House represents Poe's superego. Poe was orphaned at an early age, separated from his brother and sister, and taken in by the Allans, a family strange to him (Woodson 5). With no true family or estate it might seem to Edgar that his father's family "had put forth, at no period, any enduring branch" (Poe 35). As a child Edgar was considered popular and promising by many and accepted by his foster father (Sinclair 42), yet he was lonely and unhappy, and as he grew older his relations with family grew as dilapidated as the mansion of the Ushers. This deterioration of family relations centered in great part around Edgar's relationship with John Allan, who had grown dissatisfied with Poe over time and never let Poe forget that he was living off of charity (Sinclair 50). Allan, other family members, Poe's colleagues, friends and others that he admired held a dim view of Edgar's lifestyle (Sinclair 53), so it is no surprise that these influences which composed his superego would be represented as a once stately, but now crumbling, manor.
Within that crumbling manor is Roderick--symbolizing Poe confined by the demands of his superego. Imprisoned with Roderick, Madelaine represents Poe's unconscious desires, his id. This use of a twin sister as the symbol of his id is appropriate and expected. Throughout Poe's life he was consistently frustrated by a lack of strong, close relationships with females. His mother died when he was three years old and he was separated from his brother and sister (Sinclair 28). Fanny Allan, the matriarch of his foster family, was a very sickly woman whose illness prevented her from being a "mother" to Edgar. Jane Stanard, the mother of a schoolmate and the one woman that he was able to attach such emotions to, suffered a period of insanity and died only a year after he had met her (Sinclair 55). This left Poe without any significant mother figure in his life.
In addition, at the time that he wrote "The Fall of the House of Usher," Poe had not been able to establish an intimate love relationship with a female. His attempts at marriage to his first love were thwarted by her father; Poe wrote her letters of affection which her father intercepted. When he returned home from school he went to a party at her home only to find out that the party was to celebrate her engagement to someone else (Sinclair 72). Such tragedies were a common theme in Poe's life, and having been deprived of a meaningful relationship with any woman, it is not surprising that Poe grants Roderick (who is an extension of himself) the close sibling relationship that he himself desired. "I learned that the deceased and himself had been twins, and that sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature had always existed between them" (Poe 43).
In Madelaine, this closest of siblings, are found all of the confused desires and urges that stem from the id's insistent pleasure principle: the desires for love both maternal and erotic, and the need for a companion who would comfort, understand, and identify with Roderick/Poe.
It was those same elements of the pleasure principle that circumstance and John Allan, and others who helped to form Edgar's superego, kept always out of Poe's reach. Edgar suffered from this deprivation, just as Roderick suffered under the oppression of the mysterious intelligence that permeated the House of Usher. And this situation of gradual mental degradation is what a friend from happier days, the Narrator, enters into. The Narrator represents the ego, the sense of "I," trying to keep Roderick from going over the edge, to help him survive the struggle between the two pulling forces of the id and superego. But the Narrator was simply not strong enough. The House/superego, wins out and Madelaine, the id, must be buried because of it.
But she (and the urges she represents) won't stay buried, and Roderick knows it. He senses that she's still alive, sees the "faint blush on the bosom and the face," (Poe 43) but attributes the signs of life to her illness and screws on the lid of the coffin anyway, in an effort to appease the superego. This initial burst of self-denial isn't isolated, Roderick feels the pull of his id repeatedly after that, but ignores it, favoring the stronger force of the superego. He tells the Narrator, "I heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin. I heard them--many, many days ago--yet I dared not-- I dared not speak! " (Poe 47) Roderick is not surprised by his sister's, the id's, "resurrection;" he foresaw it long before hand, and most likely the consequences of her rising as well. One way or another the conflict would finally be resolved.
By entombing his sister before she is fully dead, Roderick shows the attempted repression of Edgar's desires by his superego before he had come to terms with them. And raising Madelaine to slay Roderick, the author unconsciously makes a rather dire (and accurate) prediction of his own failure to adequately resolve his internal id/superego conflict.
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