The answers to all these questions have been points of contention among many critics, though I will not attempt to answer all of them here. The question of what happens literally at the end of the story may be one impossible to answer definitely, but perhaps that is because there are so many possible answers. Or rather, there are multiple scenarios that lend themselves to answering this question. Because of the complexity of each scenario, an outline of each will facilitate a systematic discussion of the climax of the story that will reveal how the uncanny and doubling function as constants in each, thus illuminating the best ways to answer these interpretive questions. The first three scenarios outlined are all predicated upon the narrator’s sanity, while the last three posit that he is mad. The list below outlines the six scenarios:
Scenario One: Madeline’s return is a hallucination, Narrator is sane
Scenario Two: Madeline’s return is physically real and naturally explainable, Narrator is sane
Scenario Three: Madeline’s return is physically real and supernatural, Narrator is sane
Scenario Four: Madeline’s return is a hallucination, Narrator is insane
Scenario Five: Madeline’s return is physically real and naturally explainable, Narrator is insane
Scenario Six: Madeline’s return is physically real and supernatural, Narrator is insane
These scenarios, of course, are greatly simplified. Questions of Roderick’s sanity/insanity or whether or not he causes Madeline’s death, for example, could be brought into question, but such questions cannot be answered based on the testimony of the narrator. Even though each scenario only differs from the others on one or two possible points, the implications of these differences greatly impact the probability of each scenario. There are a number of interpretive possibilities within each. I will leave a discussion of the problems found within each scenario until after I explain each objectively.
There are two more important points to recognize before a discussion of the scenarios. First, even though these scenarios differ on points of causality and the literal physics of the climax, the experience of the narrator is always constant because it is the only element given to the reader as testament to the events, unreliable or not. Regardless of what actually happens, the narrator’s experience is uncanny. Through the use of the uncanny as a constant, one can reach a closer and better-reasoned approximation of the mental condition of the narrator and the literality, reality or un-reality, of Madeline’s return. Second, the existence of doppelgangers and the doubling of the plot are also constants. In this paper, I will argue that reading the narrator’s final experiences as uncanny and recognizing the power of doubling within the tale reveals that he is indeed not just mad, but on the same mental plane as Roderick Usher. This also allows for a reading of Madeline’s return as a supernatural event as the best possible explanation for what happens at the end of the tale. The double vision of the tale produces a single, uncanny effect that is best served by this explanation.
The uncanny can be defined in relatively simple terms. Freud recognizes that the term is related to “what is frightening—to what arouses dread and horror,” but that the core of this “feeling” requires this special term (930). The uncanny is distinguishable from the frightening in some ways, but in others, the uncanny lies within the realm of the frightening. Freud also points out that the uncanny can seem difficult to pin down in terms of definition because different people experience it in different ways. However, Freud also argues that there is one constant among all such experiences: “the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar” (930). The uncanny is the familiar made unfamiliar; therefore, the term must be applied to each individual case of fright to determine if it is indeed an uncanny experience. What is uncanny for one person, may not be for someone else.
The uncanny nature of the narrator’s experience can be found in his description of it. As the narrator reads The Mad Trist to Roderick, he thinks he hears “the very same cracking and ripping sound which Sir Lancelot had so particularly described” (181). This sound, amid the raging of the storm outside catches his attention and greatly disturbs him. What should have been familiar to him is made unfamiliar because it seems as though the sound matches the exact description found in the book he is reading. The narrator continues to hear these sounds and experience the uncanny until it reaches its climax. Susan Bernstein asserts that, “the doubling between text and reality, the move from one narrative level to another, brings the uncanny home. It walks and opens the door” (1131). This experience for the narrator remains constant in every scenario because it is reported in the text by the narrator. Regardless of what really happens to him, this is how he perceives it. Freud’s definition of the uncanny justifies this because the experience of the uncanny is not predicated upon what “really” happens, only what is perceived to have happened—what is familiar made unfamiliar to the perceiver.
Doubling refers to two things in this tale: doppelgangers and the doubling of the plot. The term “doppelganger” is difficult to pin an exact definition to. A doppelganger is a twin, either exactly opposite or exactly the same. It is usually associated with an evil twin, one that means to kill its double and take over the double’s life. In any of these cases, there is a supernatural connection between the pair because they are so closely related—like two parts of the same whole. In this paper, I will not be using the term in the sense of an evil twin, but rather a twin who is either a mirror image or an exact image of another character.
The other “doubling” of the plot is best described by Gillian Brown, who terms it, “a style of proliferation: the story repeats the event it describes through the anticipation Poe creates of that event” (331). This type of doubling exists throughout the tale beginning with the image of house reflected in the tarn. The narrator states that he “gazed down—but with 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” (171). This image is repeated at the very end of the tale when the house crumbles into the tarn. Many other events, such as Roderick’s composition of “The Haunted Palace,” his painting of the tomb, his assertion that he will die, are all brought to fruition by the end of the tale.
Scenario One
The narrator is not mad. Since the beginning he has maintained that Roderick’s condition has not affected him, and he remains in the House of Usher because he is a loyal friend. The sounds he hears as he reads The Mad Trist to Roderick are merely coincidences—the sounds of an immense, empty, and very old house. However, with the storm howling outside, and Roderick calling him a madman, the narrator hallucinates the return of Lady Madeline. The sounds he hears become an uncanny experience for reasons explained previously. This prepares him mentally to accept Roderick’s suggestion that Madeline is actually alive and at the door, another fiction become reality. The door then opens on its own, and the narrator claims that he sees Madeline and runs outside. The collapse of the house is another illusion, possibly caused by the violent storm.
Roderick’s hallucination is explained not only by his madness, but also by his duplicitous relationship to Madeline. They are doppelgangers. Her death causes grief so strong that he hallucinates her return and dies, bringing him back to her state so he can match her again. The narrator is also a double of Roderick; however, he is Roderick’s mirror image. But because of this relationship, what Roderick sees is projected to the narrator, even though the narrator is sane.
The scenario is predicated upon two points. First, it would not be physically possible for a person to be entombed alive and remain in the tomb for what the narrator says is seven or eight days only to emerge alive and well enough to walk up to the room where the narrator and Roderick are. It would also be difficult to believe that such a person could open the giant copper door to the tomb. Second, this scenario denies the possibility of a supernatural event. Madeline’s return does not really happen—nothing supernatural takes place.
Scenario Two
The narrator still is not mad for the same reasons in scenario one. However, he is not mad only in relation to the reader. This time what he hears as he reads The Mad Trist to Roderick is actually Madeline escaping from the tomb and stumbling her way up to the bedroom. As Brown argues, “Madeline suffers from catalepsy. The loss of consciousness and rigidification of the muscles caused by this disease make its sufferers likely candidates for premature burial” (341). Madeline’s return is given a logical, scientific explanation. When Roderick explains to the narrator what has happened, he is actually telling the truth. They did bury Madeline alive, and now she has escaped to “upbraid” them for it (Poe 182). Therefore, when Roderick calls the narrator a madman, he is right in the sense that the narrator is not perceiving reality and Roderick is.
The narrator’s reaction is completely acceptable because what he experiences in this scenario is still uncanny. Unlike Roderick, he does not believe that Madeline is behind the door until he sees her. Even though the explanation for her presence is completely rational in this scenario, it is outside the realm of the narrator’s perception. He can no longer rationalize what he sees before him, so he runs out of the house. In keeping in line with the “realistic” explanations for what the narrator perceives to be supernatural phenomena, the house collapses simply by coincidence. It was old and crumbling at the beginning; perhaps the violence of the storm caused it to collapse. The fact that it happens once the narrator is a safe distance away is purely coincidental.
The status of the characters as doppelgangers in this scenario is also little more than coincidental. Even though the characters are recognized as doubles of each other, this has no bearing on logical explanation of Madeline’s return.
This scenario is also predicated upon two major points: (1) Nothing supernatural takes place in the story, and (2) everything described by the narrator does happen and has a logical explanation behind it. The effect of terror and the uncanny that is produced in the reader is a result of unreliable narration. The reader is put into the shoes of the narrator; the reader thinks, just as the narrator does, that he is outside of any “madness” that may be running rampant throughout the House of Usher. However, both narrator and reader feel themselves being pulled into madness because the notion of someone returning from the dead seems insane to a logical mind—especially when it is suggested by someone whom both narrator and reader think is mad. This scenario is dedicated to exposing the “reliable” plot behind the unreliable narration.
Scenario Three
The narrator, still, is not mad. This scenario is similar to the previous two, and again only differs in what “literally” happens in the end. Here, Madeline’s return is supernatural. This scenario rejects any explanation that would explain her resurrection scientifically. However, this opens the door for a host of other questions, primarily: What reason is the for Madeline’s return? In the first two scenarios, Madeline’s return needs very little explanation. The first is an illusion, so the reason for her return is irrelevant. In the second, she obviously “returns” to life because she was never dead to begin with. One could argue that she first goes to the bedroom because she is angry for being buried alive—silly, but why else would she, after awakening from paralysis, go there first?
If the explanation for her return is supernatural, then the reason why she returns and specifically why she goes to the bedroom first needs further explanation. If she was dead when buried, the explanation in the second scenario does not work—why would Madeline rise from the dead, from supposed eternal rest, to confront those who buried her? The reason must lie in the nature of Roderick’s relationship with Madeline—the doppelganger gains importance. The narrator explains to the reader that much of Roderick’s suffering, the affliction of his apparent madness, “could be traced to [. . .] the severe and long-continued illness—indeed to the evidently approaching dissolution—of a tenderly beloved sister, his sole companion for long years, his last and only relative on earth” (Poe 175). In this scenario, it is not that Roderick did anything to provoke Madeline’s return, but rather, his very being precipitates her return because of their duplicitous relationship. They are two parts of the same whole. He suffers because she does—or vice versa. In either case, once Madeline is laid to rest, Roderick becomes increasingly depressed to the point where the narrator can no longer describe the exact nature of his actions. He tells the reader that, “an excited and highly distempered ideality threw a sulphureous lustre over all” (175). Roderick, who was certainly strange before Madeline’s death, has now slipped beyond any reasoning the narrator can think of.
Roderick knows from the very beginning that he must die. Before Madeline dies, he tells the narrator, “I must perish in this deplorable folly. Thus, thus, and not otherwise, shall I be lost. I dread the events of the future, not in themselves, but in their results” (174). This speech projects the events at the end of the story; he knows that he will die. In this scenario one may even argue that somehow he also knows how it will happen, since he does not dread the events themselves, but their results. Madeline returns supernaturally to fulfill this prophecy. Because of the nature of their relationship, Roderick must die as well. The house, as a double of both Madeline and Roderick, also crumbles under the supernatural weight of Roderick’s prophecy. The House metaphorically and literally ceases to exist.
What the narrator experiences is also uncanny in this instance but for a slightly different reason. He is literally seeing a ghost or Madeline as undead. Ghosts and the undead are uncanny because they take the familiar shape of a human, but the beholder knows that they are not human—the familiar is made unfamiliar. His duplicity with Roderick is inconsequential in terms of his uncanny experience because it is the sight of the ghost that causes the uncanny.
Scenario Four
The narrator is suffering from a madness, which has grown gradually throughout the story and is marked by a transition in the narrative. In the beginning, the narrator tries to remove himself from the events of the story. His narration of the events is scientific, emotionless. Of Roderick’s condition he says, “I had indeed been prepared, no less by his letter, than by reminiscences of certain boyish traits, and by conclusions deduced from his peculiar physical confirmation and temperament” (174). He is outside of Roderick’s condition and will not be affected by it. By the end of the tale, however, the narrator has succumbed to Roderick’s insanity. He has descended to it. This transformation begins once Madeline is buried. He tells the reader, “I felt creeping upon me, by slow yet certain degrees, the wild influences of [Roderick’s] own fantastic yet impressive superstitions” (179), overtly admitting to losing his mind. Daniel Hoffman writes that the narrator’s “inner and spiritual self is Roderick Usher” and supports this assertion based on the fact that “Narrator and Usher are brought together in the tale” (305). The narrator and Roderick were boyhood friends. The narrator describes himself as Roderick’s “best and indeed his only personal friend” (172). This descent into madness is thus a function of the doubling pattern developed in the tale. In the first three scenarios, the narrator is Roderick’s opposite. The narrator’s logical, scientific thinking mirrors Roderick’s twisted and maddened yet artistically inspired mind. Because the narrator does not descend into madness in the first three scenarios, he remains Roderick’s opposite throughout the tale. Even in the second scenario where the narrator is technically the one who is “mad” and Roderick “sane,” they still remain mirror images, just on opposite sides of the mirror.
In this scenario, however, the narrator moves from mirror image to exact twin of Roderick. The narrator’s sudden ability to perceive sound that Roderick thought only he could hear prior to that moment puts him on the same mental plane as Roderick. This scenario is in line with the first in that it asserts that Madeline is a hallucination. However, the reason for the hallucination differs. The narrator hallucinates as a result of his connection to Roderick. He is seeing and hearing what Roderick is, and because both are insane, what they perceive is a hallucination of Madeline’s return. The experience is uncanny for the same reason it is in the first scenario. Nothing has changed because in both cases, the narrator perceives the same hallucination and believes it to be real, hence his reason for running out of the house. His madness has no bearing on whether or not the experience is uncanny.
The claim that Madeline is a hallucination in this scenario is made solely based on the assertion that the narrator is insane and suffering from the same madness as Roderick. Because the narrator is mad, the destruction of the house is easily explained in this way as well—it is completely in his mind. No physical reason, such as the violence of the storm, is needed.
Scenario Five
The narrator is insane, yet that insanity has no bearing on what he and Roderick witness. Madeline literally awakens and was never dead just as in the second scenario. The insanity of the narrator adds a level of irony here. He is mad, and therefore Madeline’s return is something the reader would expect to be a hallucination as a result of the narrator’s madness, but it is not. What the narrator is experiencing has a logical explanation behind it, but the narrator is too insane and terrified to be bothered with such things anymore. The physical demolition of the house is ironic in the same way because it is of natural causes, yet the narrator is too mad to realize it.
The experience is uncanny because the narrator cannot explain what he sees. His madness prohibits him from any rational explanation. Because the narrator is on the same mental plane as Roderick, he is just as terrified as Roderick is by the thought of burying Madeline alive. When he sees her, his worst fears are confirmed. This scenario contradicts the second not only because of the narrator’s admission of insanity as described in the previous scenario, but because this scenario posits that if the narrator were sane, he would have been able to rationalize the situation immediately—recognize that Madeline must have suffered from catalepsy. Therefore, he must be insane.
Scenario Six
In the final scenario, the narrator’s madness again has no bearing on what he is seeing. Madeline’s return is real, albeit supernatural; therefore, the narrator’s madness only serves to add to the complete disintegration of the logical world, which the narrator so desperately tries to cling to. His reaction and experience as uncanny is a constant because his madness has no bearing on the reality of what he perceives. Just as in the third scenario, the narrator is seeing a ghost, mad or not. The question that is raised is why Madeline comes back from the dead. This scenario also confirms the power of the doppelgangers, and even adds to the power found in the relationship of the narrator to Roderick not because of Madeline’s return, but simply because the narrator is unable to resist the true nature of their duplicity—they are twins not mirror images.
* * *
Each scenario offers insight into what is between the lines in the narration of the tale. The first scenario is seems acceptable but for two issues: (1) How does one maintain the narrator is not mad and rationalize the fact that the narrator admits to his depleting sanity, and (2) Are the causes of the hallucination (i.e. Roderick’s speech and the uncanny experience of reading The Mad Trist) good enough reasons to explain a sane narrator hallucinating something this real? It would be difficult to argue that the narrator only thinks he is succumbing to Roderick’s madness when he says outright to the reader that he is. While the narrator may be unreliable, to claim unreliability on every point would be difficult because then one could argue that the entire story is fabricated and none of it happened. One could argue that Roderick, the house, the tarn, everything is a hallucination. Such a notion does not stand. Secondly, a claim of sanity coupled with hallucination raises too many questions about the plausibility of such an effect brought about by mere words and sounds. Even if the sounds the narrator hears as he reads The Mad Trist produce an uncanny experience, that fear alone would not be enough to produce such a realistic hallucination. If the narrator is indeed rational, then when Roderick claims Madeline is outside, he would see nothing, further confirming Roderick’s insanity.
If one is to read the events in the end as hallucination, it is much more plausible that the narrator be read as insane by the end of the tale. Such a reading is supported heavily by the text. The narrator essentially admits he has descended to Roderick’s level, though he tries desperately to hang on to his previous status as apart from the events of the house. Scenario four is much more feasible than one because everything that happens can be explained away by the narrators insanity. However, therein lies the problem with this scenario. To say that the narrator merely hallucinates everything he sees cleans up too easily and makes the end of the tale seem almost contrived.
Both the second and fifth scenarios, though claiming to be founded on logic, present a host of logical problems. To defend them first, however, unlike scenario one there is more plausibility in terms of the narrator’s reaction because these scenarios claim that there is a physical presence for the narrator to see whether he is sane or not. Therefore his literally seeing Madeline is much more feasible based on his reaction. The two primary logical questions these scenarios raise are: (1) How does Madeline survive for seven or eight days without food or water if she was indeed buried alive, and (2) How does a person who has suffered through such conditions break out of her coffin and then the vault she is buried in? The answers to these questions are found in the tomb itself. There are three descriptions of it. The first is of Roderick’s painting, which the narrator does not say explicitly is the tomb, but the reader can assume as much. It is described as
an immensely long and rectangular vault or tunnel, with low walls, smooth, white, and without interruption or device. Certain accessory points of the design served well to convey the idea that this excavation lay at an exceeding depth below the surface of the earth. No outlet was observed in any portion of its vast extent, and no torch or other artificial source of light was discernible; yet a flood of intense rays rolled throughout, and bathed the whole in a ghastly and inappropriate splendor. (Poe 176)
This description, though just a painting, holds a tremendous amount of weight in the proving the implausibility of these scenarios. As mentioned in the introduction, an important aspect of this tale that functions as part of the arabesque nature of the text is Brown’s “style of proliferation”—the doubling and anticipation of events in the tale. Brown is also a critic who adheres to scenario two. Yet a reading of this passage as literally anticipating the future event of Madeline’s resurrection contradicts the assertion that she physically appears in the door and was never dead to begin with. The second description of the tomb the narrator gives following Madeline’s burial confirms the painting as the tomb:
The vault in which we placed it [. . .] was small, damp, and entirely without means of admission for light; lying, at great depth, immediately beneath that portion of the building in which was my own sleeping apartment. [. . .] [A] portion of its floor, and the whole interior of a long archway through which we reached it, were carefully sheathed with copper. The door, of massive iron, had been, also, similarly protected. Its immense weight caused an unusually sharp, grating sound, as it moved upon its hinges. (178-9)
Roderick in the final, brief mention of the tomb, equates the sounds they are hearing to the description of the tomb. He tells the narrator that he hears, “the rending of her coffin, and the grating of the iron hinges of her prison, and her struggles within the coppered archway of the vault (182). For a person who has not had food or water for seven or eight days to escape from such a place is difficult to believe, but leaving the physicality of the event aside, such an explanation does not match the painting. There is no discernable exit in the painting because this anticipates the miraculous nature of the escape. It represents the impossibility of Madeline breaking open the coffin and getting through the iron door of the vault. The tomb in the real description is completely dark. The supernatural glow of the tomb in the painting does not suggest a logical explanation for Madeline’s return. It suggests one that either is supernatural or one that Roderick thinks is supernatural.
Scenario three is moving in the right direction because it gives a better account for the doubling in the tale. The characters as doppelgangers do not carry much weight in terms of effect in the scenarios discussed so far. The power of these relationships is somewhat truncated by the explanation of the climax. In scenarios two and five, Roderick and Madeline’s duplicitous nature with each other and the house has no real power because Madeline’s return and the destruction of the house both have logical explanations. The narrator’s connection to Roderick is amplified in scenario five because he becomes Roderick’s twin; however, this is trumped by the lack of power found in the other doppelgangers. In scenarios one and four, the link between Roderick and Madeline is stronger because Madeline’s death drives Roderick to hallucinate, but what takes place still is not real. Madeline is still dead in the tomb. In scenario one, the connection between narrator and Roderick as mirror images does not hold as much weight at the end of the story as it did at the beginning. It is most effective in the beginning because the reader gets a strong sense of Roderick’s insanity from the scientific narration—it is very clear they are opposites. However, at the end, a sane narrator who hallucinates paradoxically loses his doppelganger status with Roderick. He is not insane, yet he sees what Roderick does. Scenario four remedies this by making the narrator Roderick’s twin, thus confirming the power of their duplicitous status because the narrator is able to experience what Roderick does. However, the simplicity of the explanation that this affords the events takes away from the doubling power a bit because the hallucinations continue after Roderick is already dead.
If the nature of Roderick’s doubling with Madeline brings her back from the dead, this is clearly the strongest connection and perhaps the best reason for their doubling in the tale. Madeline has returned to bring her double to the grave so they may once again be perfect twins. The error in the third scenario is the denial of the narrator’s madness. The mental state of the narrator has no bearing on the supernaturalism of the events, but based on the narrator’s testimony, as discussed in scenario four, the reader must assume that he is mad.
This leaves scenario six. The explanation is easily the most complex because it accounts for the complexity of the other elements in the story. First, the madness of the narrator fits with the narrator’s own description of his descent and fear that he Roderick’s disease has overtaken him. The narrator’s own words confirm his insanity. However, the reasons supporting his insanity do not end there.
The duplicity of all the characters and the Ushers with the house adds to the complexity and arabesque nature of the tale. The narrator best characterizes complexity as a doppelganger of Roderick if he moves from being a mirror image of Roderick to being his twin. This transition also compounds the terror that builds within the reader. The narrator attempts to be so far removed from the events of his story that he seems as if he is in the reader’s position. The reader identifies the madness of the Ushers along with the narrator. However, once the reader recognizes that the narrator too is slipping, suddenly the familiarity the reader had with the narrator at the beginning is no longer familiar. The experience becomes uncanny. The narrator has become one of “them.” A sane narrator would not evoke the same feeling of unfamiliarity even when he lapses into terror.
Madeline’s return read as supernatural also contributes more complexity than the other scenarios because as described earlier, it gives full power to the relationship between Roderick and Madeline. It is so strong that Madeline rises from the dead to bring her brother back to death with her. Her return is not predicated upon the narrator’s mental state as it is in scenario four, thus giving more power to the relationship of the doppelgangers than a hallucination does. This explanation of the narrator’s uncanny experience and the characters as doppelgangers opens the function of these elements to their full depth and breadth. The moment that Roderick screams, “Madman! I tell you that she now stands without the door!” the door opens, and Madeline is seen (Poe 182), every one of these complex elements coalesces to form a single, uncanny effect. Everything that was familiar to the reader is made completely unfamiliar. The narrator, whom the reader thought was the opposite of madness, is the twin of madness, and Madeline who was once human now stands at the door in familiar human figure made unfamiliar because she is an apparition.
The arabesque nature of the tale is what is at stake in this discussion of scenarios. The question in deciding which scenario is most plausible must take into account the degree of effect that is achieved through the function of the arabesque elements in the tale. If a reading of one of the other scenarios is accepted, then some of the strength of effect that exists within these elements is sacrificed. The uncanny experience demands the full strength of double vision.
Works Cited
Allan Poe, Edgar. “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Tales & Poems.
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Bernstein, Sandra. “It Walks: The Ambulatory Uncanny.” MLN. 118. (December 2003): 1111-39.
Brown, Gillian. “The Poetics of Extinction.” The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Shawn
Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995.
Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2001.
Hoffman, Daniel. Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe. Garden City: Double Day & Co., Inc., 1972.
Ketterer, David. The Rationale of Deception in Poe. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1979.
Thompson, G.R. Poe’s Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales. Madison: U of Wisconsin P,
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