Watermarks Double Take: The Mirror Images in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Heather Glover

A person usually stands before a mirror in order to "see" himself or herself and just how he or she looks. Yet the image that a mirror-gazer receives is not that of oneself. The image perceived, rather, is only a faithful representation, or, as the Random House Webster's Dictionary states, "an object having a spatial arrangement corresponding to another object, except that the right-to-left sense on one object corresponds to the left-to-right sense on the other." Thus, one's reflection is actually a backward imitation of oneself.

Edgar Allan Poe uses the illusory technique of the mirror in several of his short stories, including "The Fall of the House of Usher." Poe doubles characters as well as art and inanimate objects in the "House of Usher" in an effort to convey images that are only superficial likenesses of real elements. The story in itself resembles a mirror in that a surface reading of the tale presents a horror story detailing the demise of an unfortunate Roderick Usher and his noble family. On a subject level, however, the story relates the narrator's struggle to deal simultaneously with the "real" and the surreal. Poe provides his readers with doubles of the house and with writings and artwork within the story that mimic its events; additionally, he demonstrates an eerie similarity between Roderick and Madeline and develops Roderick as a foil both within himself and unto the narrator. With the technique of doubling images and characters, Poe not only blurs the defining lines between the natural world and the surreal but also creates for his narrator a parallel existence that the narrator cannot accept because of an attachment to the logic and reason of the natural world.

The first instance of doubling in the "House of Usher" occurs as the narrator approaches the Usher estate. He states, "With the first glimpse of the building a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit" (1508). The windows of the house are "vacant and eye-like," the walls are "bleak," the landscape is "simple" and "decayed." As if this sight is not unsettling enough, the narrator then goes into a tarn and and suffers "a shudder even more thrilling than before--upon the remodelled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows" (1509). Functioning like a tain, the tarn "inverts" the image of the house, thus creating an imitation that suggests that something is terribly amiss in the Usher home. The narrator, however, cannot acknowledge the symbolism of the reflection due to his fears of what he cannot understand and of what cannot be defined by reason. Confined within the limits of logic, he describes his experience as "an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller of opium… the reason, and the analysis, of this power, lie among considerations beyond our depth" (1508-1509). Mere intellect, then, cannot serve to explain what the narrator sees; rather, the influence of an outside impetus such as the potent drug opium is needed to comprehend the scene. Habit-forming drugs create for their users a sort of fantasyland that has no earthly or natural basis; consequently, by comparing his view of the house to an opium high, the narrator defines the sight as one which cannot be related in a logical manner. In other words, the house and its deteriorative state exist on a level not of the real world, a world of reason and scientific explanation.

The destruction of the house is mirrored not only in the tarn; just as the house crumbles into the water, the Usher family falls to ruin. The narrator suggests that the "House of Usher" was a name "which seemed to include, in the minds of the peasantry that used it, both the family and the family mansion" (1510). The ailing Roderick Usher bears a striking resemblance to the delapidated grounds--his skin is of a "ghastly pallor" akin to the landscape that is gray instead of lush green; his eyes, "large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison," look like the vacant windows; the hair that "had been suffered to grow all unheeded" and that "floated rather than fell about the face" all mirror the ravenous fungi that cling to the building (1511). Roderick tells the narrator that his illness is a constitutional and a family evil (1512), thus alluding to a fact that the narrator already knows; "the entire family lay in the direct line of descent, and had always, with very trifling and very important variation, so lain" (1509). Both Roderick and the narrator admit to intermarriage within the Usher family, a practice known to result in mentally and physically handicapped progeny. Roderick and his twin, Madeline, suffer from illnesses that will claim them as the last of the Usher clan. The fall of the house, then, is synonymous with the fall of Roderick and the Ushers.

Another example of doubling in the story involves the resemblance between the text and other literary works. The narrator reveals that Roderick "not unfrequently accompanied himself with rhymed verbal improvisations," including a poem entitled "The Haunted Palace" (1514). A poem composed and published by Poe before the "House of Usher," "The Haunted Palace" vividly represents the rotting of Roderick's house; "once a fair and stately palace," it succumbs to "evil things," just as the Usher estate falls victim to the pervasive actions of a morally depraved family (1514-1515). Likewise, the family that lives in the palace is "porphyrogene," meaning that they are of royal birth, prior to their troubles; the Ushers, too, are an ancient family of lost greatness. Even the image of the decayed palace in the "greenest" of the valleys corresponds with the narrator's first glimpse of the house of Usher:

The "red-litten windows," the "pale door," and the absence of happiness portrayed in the poem are obvious parallels to the Usher estate, yet again the narrator fails to recognize this symbolism. He does, however, recognize the allegorical value of the poem's aristocratic family to that of Roderick. He says that, after he heard of "The Haunted Palace," he perceived "a full consciousness, on the part of Usher, of the tottering of lofty reason upon her throne" and that Roderick "trespassed, under certain conditions, upon the kingdom of inorganization" (1514-1515). Yet, despite his references to the similarities between the poem and Roderick's state, the narrator, seeking an answer to all of life's perplexities, shuns what is not methodical and scientific. He deems reason superior by equating it to royalty and suggests that the reading of literature, the "passionate devotion to the intricacies… of musical science" (1509), and the visual arts--things enjoyed by Roderick and his family before him--are endeavors found useful only to persons with diseased minds. The narrator frequently labels Roderick a hypochondriac; hence, the references to Roderick's "tottering reason" and his ability to access "inorganization" seem valid to the narrator.

Playing on the old cliché, "art imitates life," Poe also uses painting to reflect the surreal of his text and to challenge the view of his narrator. The narrator "shuddered not knowing why" upon seeing Roderick's paintings; he states:

Roderick's art is intolerable because it is not the product of scientific methos; instead, it is fostered by Roderick's unexplainable emotion. By comparing Roderick's work to that of Henry Fuseli, a Swiss painter known for his interest in the supernatural, the narrator realizes that there exists an abnormal, mysterious state of being that he cannot even begin to contemplate but that Roderick is somehow connected to.

Besides creating mirror images of the house and of the story, doubling plays an active role in the presentation of characters in the "House of Usher." For instance, Roderick and Madeline are a classic example of doubles because they are twins. Despite the difference in gender, Madeline's features are "identically those of Roderick Usher" (1513), just as the occurrences in "The House of Usher" are identical to those of "The Haunted Palace." Brother and sister are both very ill, afflicted with maladies that continue to baffle their doctors who, like the narrator, are men of scientific reason. On staring down at the deceased Madeline, the narrator states, "The exact similitude between brother and sister even here again startled and confounded me" (1517), noting that, even as a corpse, Madeline still mirrors Roderick. Yet Madeline, in death, assumes characteristics of someone still alive--the body in its coffin has "the mockery of a faint blush upon the bosom and the face, and that suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so terrible in death." Roderick, in turn, worsens when is sister is locked in the tomb. He begins to act as she did before her death; he walks about the house, his usual activities "neglected or forgotten." Like Madeline, Roderick is relieved of his condition only in death, when his sister emerges from the grave and forces him to join her. While the narrator denies hearing the approach of the phantom Madeline and claims that Roderick becomes "a victim to the terrors he had dreaded" (1521), his own dread becomes apparent in the final scene. Unable to grasp the fact that Roderick and Madeline cannot live or die without one another, the narrator flees the scene without relating what takes place in the chamber once Madeline drags her brother to the floor. As a result, a view made narrow by the narrator's inhibition of reason is the only one given of the Usher's demise.

Doubling also serves to exhibit opposing entities in the story. Although Roderick appears to the narrator as only one person, he and Madeline are fractions of one individual; however, Roderick alone is also representative of the battle between the "real" and the surreal. Roderick's conflict is an internal one which the narrator views as "a series of feeble and futile struggles to overcome a habitual trepidancy, an excessive nervous agitation" (1511). Unable to reach a conclusion as to what ails Roderick, the narrator equates him with a "lost drunkard" and "the irreclaimable eater of opium" (1512), again denoting the influence of addictive substances. What the narrator notes as "an incoherence" within Roderick resulting from a weak mental state serves as yet another mirror in the story. The narrator's visit to the house of Usher, requested by Roderick, introduces to the last of the Ushers a sensibility that is not present in the home prior to the narrator's arrival. Roderick, then, is attempting to remove himself from the surreal state of the house and of his sister by summoning the narrator, s friend whom he knows is a believer in the scientific and not the supernatural. He tells the narrator:

Roderick wants to avoid a fate that he knows is inevitable, acknowledging that he must leave not only life but also reason, the very idea that the narrator represents. Like the narrator, he logically fears the unknown. Thus, in the narrator's presence, Roderick struggles to conform to the sentiments of reason and, as he fights to become the logical person that the narrator seems to be, Madeline and the forces within the house of Usher fight to keep hold of him. In the end, the illogical, the misunderstood, proves the victor.

Roderick's internal conflict, in turn, imitates the conflict between himself and the narrator. Try as he might to free himself of the evils that have pervaded his family, Roderick exemplifies a subscriber of the surreal, while the narrator remains firmly rooted in the soil of the natural world. Constantly referring to Roderick as a hypochondriac, the narrator also frequently asserts that he is unable to discern what goes on in the house of Usher with phrases such as "I could not, even with effort, connect [the] arabesque expression [of Roderick's face] with any idea of simple humanity" (1511) and "I at once concluded that my excited fancy had deceived me" (1519). Holding fast to his reason, the narrator actively refuses not to accept a logical explanation of what happens around him. Roderick, by contrast, pursues nonscientific interests such as music and poetry and easily determines that there are evil forces about him that have no place in the narrator's world. Roderick even challenges the narrator's reason; when Madeline comes to claim Roderick, he ironically calls the narrator a "madman" and screams, "I tell you that she now stands without the door!" (1521). Until this climactic scene, Roderick tries to join forces with the narrator; now, he accepts what will befall him and remains within the obscure borders of his own world. As a dead Roderick rumbles with his sister to the chamber floor, he and the narrator are forever separated, displaying the fissure between the "real" and the surreal. These two states, according to the narrator's account, cannot coexist.

"The Fall of the House of Usher" is a complex networking of mirror images in which "real" is simply a term; it is a tale of the intellectual versus the supernatural. The narrator witnesses things beyond his comprehension and cannot accept what befalls his childhood friend; thus, he and his reason are forced to take leave of Roderick's world before they are overcome by it. Perhaps an argument can be put forth which exposes the truly unfriendly relationship between the narrator and Roderick--if the two are "intimate associates" (1509), as the narrator claims, why, then, have they gone without contacting each other for so long, and why is it that the narrator cannot help Roderick? Their "intimacy" is nothing more than another likeness of something true, another one of the many reflections in the Usher's house of mirrors.

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