CRITICAL EXCERPTS
FOR PAPER #2
A: “The Fall of the House of Usher”
1.
[C]ritics of “The Fall of the House of Usher” have almost universally failed to recognize
that it is a Gothic tale, like “Ligeia,” and that a completely satisfactory and internally directed
interpretation depends on vampirism, the hereditary Usher curse. Madeline is a vampire—a
succubus—as the family physician well knows and as her physical appearance and effect upon
the narrator sufficiently demonstrate. The terrified and ineffectual Roderick, ostensibly suffering
from pernicious anemia, is her final victim. . . .
Roderick, neither consumed by love nor acquiescent, faces a classic dilemma. He must
put an end to Madeline—the lore dictates that he must drive a stake through her body in the
grave—or suffer the eventuality of wasting away, dying, and becoming a vampire himself. As an
intellectual he regards either course with growing horror and at length summons an old school
friend, the narrator, whom Usher tentatively plans to confide in. From the outset the evidences of
vampirism are calculated to overwhelm the narrator. Even before entering the house he feels the
presence of supernatural evil. Reining in his horse to contemplate the “black and lurid tarn,” he
recalls Roderick's “wildly importunate” letter, speaking of bodily as well as mental disorder. . . .
Once within, the narrator wonders “to find how unfamiliar were the fancies which
ordinary images were stirring up.” On the staircase he meets the family physician, whose
countenance wears a “mingled expression of low cunning [denoting knowledge of the Usher
curse] and perplexity.” He finds Roderick “terribly altered, in so brief a period,” (an
inconsistency: earlier the narrator says, “many years had elapsed since our last meeting”) with
lips “thin and very pallid,” a skin of “ghastly pallor,” oddly contrasting with the “Miraculous
lustre of the eye”; his manner is characterized by “incoherence—an inconsistency” and nervous
agitation. He has, in fact, all the symptoms of pernicious anemia—extreme pallor, weakness,
nervous and muscular affliction, alternating periods of activity and torpor—but it is an anemia,
as Usher now makes perfectly clear, beyond the reach of mere medical treatment. He explains
“what he conceived to be the nature of his malady ... a constitutional and a family evil and one
for which he despaired to find a remedy.” He confesses that he is a “bounden slave” to an
“anomalous species” of terror. Roderick discloses, further, that he is enchained by superstition in
regard to the Usher house, and that “much of the peculiar gloom which thus afflicted him could
be traced to a more natural and far more palpable origin—to the severe and long-continued
illness—indeed to the evidently approaching dissolution—of a tenderly beloved sister.” And the
invalid reveals immediately that tenderly beloved is ironically intended by speaking with a
“bitterness which I can never forget” of Madeline's impending death.
--This excerpt is from an article called “The Vampire Motif in ‘The Fall of the House of
Usher.’” It appeared in the journal College English (volume 24, issue 4) in March of
1963 on pages 450-453.
2.
Surprisingly, most critics manage to discuss “Usher” without mentioning the fact that
Roderick and Madeline are children of incest and quite possibly practice it themselves. Mabbott
rejects the idea because “conscious use of such a theme is contrary to Poe’s general practice”
(CW, 2:395). Still, in this case the “theme” of incest is hard to deny: “I had learned, too, the
very remarkable fact, that the stem of the Usher race, all time-honored as it was, had put forth, at
no period, any enduring branch; in other words, that the entire family lay in the direct line of
descent, and had always, with very trifling and very temporary variation, so lain” (CW, 2:399).
In the next sentence the narrator refers to this circumstance as a “deficiency,” and Roderick later
explains that his sickness is “a constitutional and a family evil” (CW, 2:402). Roderick’s
sickness could well be a blood disease brought on by inbreeding. But incest is not the great
“hidden meaning” that readers are supposed to discover; it can hardly be said to be hidden at all.
Rather, the incestuousness of the Ushers is itself a symptom of a malady similar to William
Wilson’s: they want to live in their own world on their own terms. Although Poe does not
specify the story’s setting, the Ushers, in their resistance to change and foreign intrusion,
prefigure the families of modern Southern Gothic literature from G.W. Cable to Tennessee
Williams. Poe would address the consequences of trying to lock out some perceived evil in “The
Masque of the Red Death” as well, with a similar conclusion: whether it be a plague or the
impurity of non-Ushers or the material world in general, the “enemy” either finds a way inside or
is already there. Thinking their “race” could be brought down only by outsiders, the Ushers
become victims of their isolation, their hermetically sealed environment.”
--From a book called Edgar Allan Poe Revisited by Scott Peeples, p. 85. The book was
published by Twayne in New York City in 1998.
3.
What is it that [the n]arrator has failed to perceive? He has set down without comment
some rather strange goings-on. For instance, while Madeline is sick, but not yet thought to be
dead, Roderick is already busily composing dirges. The beloved sister is still on her sickbed
while Roderick finds solace in one of his favorite books, a Latin office of the dead. His
visionary painting is of a vault exactly like the vault in which he will inter her, a vault
illuminated by that eerie light cast by the energy of the dead which we have seen to shine
upwards from the ruins of the City in the Sea [the title of an early poem by Poe]. No wonder,
then, that Usher’s aborted poem foretold the dissolution of his “lofty intellect.” He could not
become an artist until he had wished his sister dead. All along, having laid her in the vault, he
knew her to be yet alive. But he had not rescued her. The Roderick we see in [the n]arrator’s
story has not enough will, enough strength, enough resolution, to do this, or to do anything, save
to create those ideational and visionary strains, images, and rhymes evoked from his soul by the
thought of his sister’s dying. What his helpless irresolution reveals is that he wanted to bury
Madeline even as he knew her not yet to be dead. He has repressed this self-incriminating [end
of p. 309] information but it will out, with the tell-tale beating of her heart. . . .
Madeline is Usher’s twin, his sister, his lover, and – but this is true only when he can
think of her as dying – his muse. It is as though her dying is a precondition for the exercise of
his creative impulse. The notion that the artwork outlives its subject is indeed an old one, but
Poe makes the artist a [end of p. 310] cannibal or vampire whose subject must die so that there
may be art.
--From Daniel Hoffman’s book Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe, originally published in 1972
and reprinted by Louisiana State University Press (located in Baton Rouge) in 1998.
B: “Bartleby, the Scrivener”
1.
Bartleby insists upon revealing that everything the world believes in, especially its fake
concept of freedom, is vanity. In blatant opposition to what is “normal,” he prefers to exist not
in the largest circle, but always in the smallest. Just as he has worked his way from larger circles
of freedom to smaller ones of confinement, ending at the “heart of the eternal pyramids,” so he
seems determined to reverse the process of normal growth. He is willfully moving from the
circle of youth to the smaller circles of boyhood and infancy and then to prebirth. He comes
more and more to resemble first a child who inexplicably will not mind and do what the adult
world expects of him and then a fully dependent infant who is helplessly acted upon. He does
not save his money in a bank account, as an adult would ordinarily do, but in a child’s savings
bank. He does not eat like an adult, but like a child, preferring apples and cakes to more
substantial food. He eats less and less, and finally will not eat at all the solid food which the
grub-man prepares for him. When he is found dead he is in a fetal position, “strangely huddled
at the base of a wall, his knees drawn up, and lying on his side.” To the grub-man’s question as
to whether Bartleby is asleep, the [end of p. 47] lawyer answers, “with kings and counselors.”
He means, of course, that Bartleby is dead, but the words carry an additional significance
probably lost on the speaker. The lawyer’s words are from the third chapter of the book of Job,
in which Job wishes not for death that comes at the termination of life, but for the death that
precedes life. He laments the night he was conceived and curses the day that he was born, and
he wishes that he had died in the womb. . . (48)
..............................
Bartleby’s willful regression seems to be a personal defiance of things as they are. He
proclaims his independence in the most difficult and trying of all situations, namely that state
where he is by necessity most dependent physically. Before his death he has moved to the
smallest circle of dependency and thus exercised the highest degree of independence possible.
This is his final affront to the normalcy of life. Besides illustrating Bartleby’s rebellion and his
preoccupation with independence, these images and references to birth suggest a paradox
involving the scrivener’s death. . . . Throughout the story Bartleby is described in imagery that
suggests that he is already dead. The lawyers says that there is nothing “ordinarily human about
him,” and when the scrivener appears at the door of the chambers on a Sunday morning, the
narrator calls him “the apparition of Bartleby.” He is constantly described as “pallid,” or “pale.”
His eyes are “dull and glazed,” his mouth “white.” He possesses a “cadaverously [end of 48]
gentlemanly nonchalance”: he makes a “mild cadaverous reply”’ and he achieves a “cadaverous
triumph” over the lawyer. At one time the narrator imagines Bartleby’s “pale form . . . laid out .
. . in its shivering winding sheet.” Bartleby “died” when he achieved that extraordinary power to
say “I prefer not to” to society and the universe. He ceased to be an ordinary man, which means
that he rose above that level where fear is man’s ruler but which also means that he no longer
feels what ordinary people experience—the joy, the petty worry, the hopes, the compassion, the
small pleasures, and the humility that make up life (49).
--From William Dillingham, Melville’s Short Fiction, 1863-1856, published by the
University of Georgia Press in Athens, GA (1977).
2.
Even though Melville must have been intrigued by his character Bartleby and admired
the self-sufficiency of the man, yet he shows us the implications of such an independent course
of action. Bartleby became less and less a man until there was nothing left of him. There can be
no such thing as an effective life of aloofness. When Thoreau wrote, “I simply wish to refuse
allegiance to the State, to withdraw and stand aloof from it effectually,” he was but expressing an
absurdity.
Thoreau could write, as he did in his journal for January 16, 1852: “Here was one [Bill
Wheeler] who went alone, did not work, and had no relatives that I knew of, was not ambitious
that I could see, did not depend on the good opinion of men.” If Melville had seen this sentence
he would have asked, with a raised eyebrow or a [end of p. 73] sly wink: “No relatives? Not
even a mother? Or a father? No work? On whose efforts does he depend, even if he does not
depend on opinions?”
In April of that year before Melville was to write “Bartleby,” Thoreau confided to his
journal: “Society, man, has no prize to offer me that can tempt me; not one. . . . When I am most
myself and see the clearest, men are least to be seen. . . .” “Bartleby” seems to be written in
answer to such thought as this. The pathos of “Bartleby” need not blind us to the implications of
the story. Try as you will, you cannot cut yourself off from society, and to persist in such a
direction can only destroy the individual.
--From Egbert Oliver, “A Second Look at ‘Bartleby,’” which was published in Bartleby
the Inscrutable, edited by Thomas Inge and published in Hamden, CT, by Archon Books
(1979). The essay appeared on pp. 66-74; the quoted material is from pp. 73-74.
3.
In all these readings [cited in McCall’s essay – he’s referring to readings in which the
lawyer/narrator is viewed as unreliable and blameworthy] we are asked to see that the Lawyer
represents “consumer capitalism”; we are asked to see, too, that the man refuses to recognize—or
is simply incapable of recognizing—the political and economic forces that have made him what
he is. Critic after critic tells us that the Lawyer cannot see his own complicity in the ruthless
capitalist system and that we should read his every word as deliberate deception or hopeless
failure. . . .
But what if he is not? On the opening pages of his narrative the Lawyer spends
considerable time and energy bragging about the very thing the critics say he cannot admit. And
then the “eminently safe man” goes on to tell us that the advent of Bartleby in his life has forced
him to question all his old rules. Modern socially conscious readers won’t hear of it; they have
their man. But they fail to reckon with the wonderfully dramatic quality of the story, the
Lawyer’s agonizing reappraisal of himself. He does not put it, back in 1853, in any of the
language we use so wantonly more than a century later, but we watch him go weak in the knees
with his prized “prudence” and “method” as he senses a rich and frightening world that his lifelong procedures have shut out. To see him as a representative of a class, an unwitting victim of a
social and economic system, is not so much creative interpretation as it is obtuse paraphrase.
One of the most interesting dramas in the story is the Lawyer’s own helpless intuition that he is
not adequate to the challenge of Bartleby, and never has been. His initial boasting about his
virtues becomes his tortured exploring of them as weakness and failure. To read him out of his
own brave story is to lose what is most lovely and spiritually generous about him.
--From Dan McCall, “The Reliable Narrator,” pp. 266-286 of Melville’s Short Novels, the
Norton Critical Edition, edited by Dan McCall and published by W. W. Norton (New
York) in 2002. The quoted material is from pp. 271-72.
C: "The Soul selects her own Society"
1. No one seems to have tried the assumption that the poet condemns the behavior [of the soul],
but this assumption fits the poem equally well and also explains it. The shut door symbolizes the
closed mind. The term "divine majority" is ironic . . . the soul is seen as a parliamentary body,
casting votes over the candidates for membership in her society. But we should note this is a
majority of one over nothing, and where is the victory when there is no opposition? "Divine" is
the soul's arrogant estimate of herself: like God, she knows all in advance and can safely reject
without examining. In the second stanza, the soul, in her modest circumstances (another version
has "rush mat," one made of the cheapest material), could benefit from the acquaintance of her
callers, people of wealth and power. Here the length of the lines is symbolic, the long lines
mentioning the opulent visitors, the short lines the soul's lowly dwelling. It is now probable that
the "society" is one of ideas rather than people, the rejected postulants, then, being rich and
powerful ideas. The last stanza presents the extreme case where the soul, with "an ample nation"
available, limits herself to only one. That such behavior could be subject to disapproval is
readily apparent. . . One can imagine that, after trying to present an idea to someone who rejected
it out of hand, Miss Dickinson, muttering "You might as well talk to a stone, or a statue," sat
down and in exasperation wrote this poem, a portrait of bigotry.
--This excerpt is from an essay by Elizabeth Bowman called "An Interpretation of 'The
Soul selects her own Society'" from an issue of the journal Explicator published in
October 1970 (volume number 29, issue number 2). The article appeared on pp. 83-84.
This excerpt comes from page number 83.
2. Elizabeth Bowman's able explication of Emily Dickinson's "The Soul selects her own
Society" as a poem which implicitly castigates people with closed minds invites rebuttal on the
basis of the overall tone of the poem . . . [and] one can point to some fairly objective evidence in
support of this view. For one thing, the poet speaks, not of some souls only, but of "The Soul" in
general. It is difficult to believe that she is attempting to slander the entire human race-including, presumably, herself--by accusing everyone of having closed minds. . . . What the poet
seems to be doing in "The Soul selects her own Society," then, is simply to be asserting the right
and privilege of an individual sensitive enough to be said to have a soul, to retreat, retire,
withdraw from the mass of mankind into the exclusive company of a single congenial soulmate
(or the memory of such a person), and this despite whatever exalted rank, by the materialistic
standards of the world, others who seek that individual's company or want to share her privacy
might possess. Thus, even emperors are kept outside the door.
--This excerpt is from an article by Larry Rubin called "Response to Elizabeth
Bowman's Interpretation of 'The Soul selects her own Society.'" It appeared in the
journal Explicator in April of 1972 (volume 30, issue 8). The pages it appeared on
were 63-64. The quote is from page 63.
3. "The Soul selects her own Society" has always been understood as a covert declaration of
love. And it might be that. I suspect myself that it is not. It has to do, certainly, with the
affinities one has with a very few people and how the soul, or anybody, makes exclusions and
inclusions that are quite arbitrary; but I think this is meant to parallel the question of the Elect of
God. So the soul in choosing its friends does very much what the deity does in discriminating
between the saved and the damned. There is something very frightening about that; when we
think of how ruthless we are about who our friends and enemies might be, at least inwardly, we
are performing. . . the same act that God performs when he cuts us from all hope of salvation.
--This excerpt quotes a critic named Anthony Hecht. It appears in a book called
Voices and Visions by Helen Vendler. The book was published in New York by
Random House in 1987. This excerpt appeared on p. 62.