The Psycho-Sexual Reading Of “The Fall Of The Hou

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The idea that “The Fall of the House of Usher” is in part an investigation into sexual motivation and sexual guilt complexes has often been hinted at but never critically pursued as the dominant theme in the tale. But such a reading is at least prepared for in important essays by D. H. Lawrence and Allen Tate which make the essential recognition that “The Fall of the House of Usher” is a “love” story.(1) Lawrence and Tate, however, mistakenly attempt to purge the love concerned of all physical meaning. What they see Usher wanting is possession not of Madeline’s body but her very being (Lawrence, p. 86). Theirs is essentially an anti-biological reading of the tale in which the Poe hero tries in self-love “to turn the soul of the heroine into something like a physical object which can be known in direct cognition” (fate, p. 115). But if “The Fall of the House of Usher” is a drama of cognition, its cognitive impact is not circumscribed by “metaphysical speculation on the identity of matter and spirit”.(2) In this connection, Patrick F. Quinn’s suggestion that Usher is a criminal merits attention.(3) He is, in a biological reading of the story, a sexual criminal, and a critic like Richard Wilbur, who suggests that the poetic soul is out to “shake off this temporal, rational, physical world and escape . . . to a realm of unfettered vision,” lifts us out of rather than urges us into the depths which humanity in the person of Usher has touched.(4) Caroline Gordon and Allen Tate are closer to the truth when they call [column 2:] Usher “a ‘Gothic’ character taken seriously” and when they view “The Fall of the House of Usher” as “a serious story of moral perversion.”(5) Certainly perversity and maladjustment are central to a reading of Usher’s character; and if this is a story of moral (sexual) perversion, its locus, Usher’s morbid fears, express themselves overtly and

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