Dark Romanticism and "The Fall of the House of Usher"
In what ways is this story an example of dark romanticism? What passages relate to the ideas of dark romanticism?
posted by Jared at 12/04/2006 10:00:00 AM
Monday, December 04, 2006
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3 Comments:
This story is an example of Dark Romanticism right from the start when Poe explains his ride to the House of Usher, He says,"During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher." Everything Poe describes is dark and dreary. He even says the aspects in nature are dark and he then makes his story start as Dark Romanticism and carries it throughout the piece.
When Poe describes the feeling he gets when he sees the building, "a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit," it gives a dark romantic description. Also, the lives of the Usher and the sister in the house come off corrupt pathetic lives, stooped in a house dwelling in their own sadness. The narrator makes the Usher out to be a person "suffering from an acuteness of the senses" with "excessive nervous agitation." Dark Romanticists believe society is the only way to overcome our badness, and the usher was far from society for years and was made out to be a pathetic person. The overall view of the story was pessimistic. Lastly, the dead sister even managed to come back from the dead as a ghost.
Dark Romantics acknowledged the evil of man and the horror of evil. The evil of man is shown in “The Fall of the House of Usher” when Roderick Usher’s sister comes back from the dead to kill him. "For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon the threshold, then, with a low moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated." The horror of evil is also shown throughout this story. Roderick lives in constant fear of the evils in his house. “I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect --in terror. In this unnerved-in this pitiable condition --I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR."
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