Poes Fall of The House of Usher Essay: Gloomy Images :: Fall House Usher Essays

Gloomy Images from The Fall of the House of ostiarius In Poes The Fall of the House of Usher the narrator first views the house of Usher and perceives a mystery incapable of being solved. Foreboding imaginings keep feeler into his mind in spite of rational thinking and reasoning. As he says, there are things beyond our ability to rationalize. He rationalizes that if he could numerate at things differently or in a brighter light, he efficacy be able to change it, but when he looks into the lake he sees, with until now more fear before, a mirror image of the house in all its darkness. The eye-like windows of the house reflect back at him. This paragraph is the look-alike of the Romantic movement and the story itself makes many direct and indirect references to Romanticism. Poes references to train Weber and Fuseli are direct references to European Romanticists. Poe wrote this story when Romanticism was at its height in Europe. The neoclassic world view had given authority to t he realm of the emotion. No longer was art or life looked upon as a set of rules that if one followed one could rationalize and make a sense of order out of things. Now, one looked at the emotion on a lower floor the rational. And if that emotion was dark and even evil, it was still beautiful because it expressed a truth. Whereas Hawthorne, in Young Goodman Brown, viewed good and evil as something outside of ourselves, such(prenominal) as a witch or a devil, Poe seems to look deep down the very soul of man. The first element of Romanticism which Poe seems to incorporate into our paragraph and into the story is the moving away from neoclassic rationality when he says that when he looked upon the house he was forced to fall back on the unsatisfying conclusion that . . . the reason, and the analysis, of this power lay among considerations beyond our depth. In the story, he as well as speaks of abandoning reason in his struggles with fear. case does not seem to help here. Reason ha s gone the way of the neoclassicists. In another part of the story, Poe speaks of the sentience, or ken of feeling, of vegetable which seems to grow out of the ordered placement or concord of the stones. But the consciousness of feeling does not come until the element of putrefy and fungi is added to the ordered structure.