A Period of Progress

I agree with Lainey and Sarah that one of the primary difficulties in understanding this period (or any for that matter) is hurdling our pre-conceived notions of the period. Certainly stereotypes set up by the era’s own authors and popular culture, particularly the Disney version of Alice in Wonderland in my mind, play a critical part in our contemporary understanding of the period. However, we should look not just to our misunderstanding in terms of how these authors or popular culture has affected it but also, as Lainey began to point out, to the aspects of the culture that we really cannot comprehend.

As I read the introduction to the period, what stood out to me the most was the incredible progress that took place throughout the entirety of the period and the effect it had on the people. The Norton tells us that the people “suffered from an anxious sense of something lost, a sense [. . .] of being displaced persons in a world made alien by technological changes that had been exploited too quickly for the adaptive powers of the human psyche” (980). What is at stake here is not whether or not we have lived through technological progress that matches or exceeds, perhaps proportionally, what was accomplished during the Victorian era. I think a case could be made for either side. However, I do not believe those of us alive today, who have lived at the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, can comprehend the mental strain that the majority of people during the Victorian era had to bear as a result of massive technological advancement.

The reasons for us not being able to understand such a thing stem from phenomena different from what Lainey and Sarah referred to: our pop culture and the ways the Victorian authors themselves presented the period. The advent of the railroad was monumental. We have not experienced such an incredible advancement in transportation. Even the invention of the car and airplane, I don’t think, can compare to the difference between traveling by horse and carriage and traveling by steam engine. Remember, before the steam engine, there had been no other practical way to travel except by horse or foot. I suppose the best analogy I can draw is if we suddenly discovered a way to teleport instantly—or, dare I say, apparate? As far as I can tell, that is the sort of monumental advancement in technology that the Victorian mind had to cope with.

We also do not know what it is like to live in a completely unfettered, free market economy. Yes, we’re a capitalist country, but I’m sure we’re all familiar with the ways in which our government regulates our economy, for better or worse. As contemporary Americans, we’ve grown accustom to a certain level of entitlement when it comes to employment. A minimum wage and an eight hour or less work day were simply a given when we were all holding down jobs to get through college. To think an employer could pay us less and work us more was laughable. We need to keep in mind the implications of a free market economy—both good and bad. Yes, child labor, extreme poverty, and few rights for the working class are horrible, but Britain also experienced unbridled progress that lead to inventions such as the photograph and photographic paper, the sewing machine, reinforced concrete, the list goes on and on (Victorian Web). Many of these things are completely taken for granted today, yet they are part of the foundation of our society. Now imagine what sorts of things cropped up all at once during this time. The sewing machine allowed for the mass production of clothing and linens. Reinforced concrete allowed buildings to be constructed quicker and stronger. As I said, I could continue the list of inventions and the ways in which they affected society, but the point is that all of these cropping up within just years of each other effected the common Victorian immensely. We’ve lived with concrete buildings—with skyscrapers, which were not around during this era. We’ve lived with department stores full of clothing, bed sheets, towels, anything imaginable made with a sewing machine. The mass production of goods of this nature did not exist before this time.

One final area that will escape our understanding is the imperialism of this age. We may be able to relate to it partially based on the Americanization of many countries around the world, i.e. a McDonald’s in just about every developed nation, but to understand what it would be like for those nations to actually belong to the United States would be impossible for us to understand. Never has a nation controlled such a large portion of the globe. To control so much of the world is a detestable notion today. Think about one of the major reasons most Americans believe we invaded Iraq: Oil. To gain wealth. Such a thing was completely standard just over a hundred years ago. Of course, that does not mean it was right, but I’m curious to see just how many of the authors we read address British imperialism and to what degree.

Many of us have written about our perception of the Victorians as affected by what we have in front of us: the novels of the age and the barrage of pop culture representations. While those are important, I would also stress the elements affecting our perception that are not in front of us, that we cannot fully comprehend: the lost British empire, the impact of a transportation development such as the steam engine, the effects of an unfettered, free market economy. I think it is easier for us to look at the images of the Victorians that have been planted in our head by popular culture and say, no, those are wrong because we can read the history of the period. However, reading the history of the period does not suffice when trying to comprehend the monumental progress that took place during this era. It is something that we’ll have to wrestle with and discuss if we want to understand.

She’s Alive! (Or is She?): Resurrection, Madness, and Phantasmagoria as Uncanny in “The Fall of the House of Usher”

Poe’s arabesque “The Fall of the House of Usher” is arguably his most successful for a very good reason: Complexity. The term “arabesque,” used to classify tales such as “Usher,” “Ligiea,” and “The Pit and the Pendulum,” conjures up images of complex geometric tapestries. In such tapestries, looking at the smallest component of the pattern does not best represent the whole picture. It contributes to the effect of the larger pattern, but it is merely one part connected to the other repeated images. These tales in particular exhibit a fluidity similar to that of a complexly fluid arabesque tapestry. The surface of the tale is convoluted just as the tapestry is. David Ketterer explains that, “the distinction between the literal narrative surface and the symbolic meaning disappears. Thus, [these tales] exhibit not only a concern with mind-expanding arabesque décor but also a fluidity of form, technique, or structure that seeks to approximate the arabesque condition” (181-2). G.R. Thompson also points out that the arabesque pattern found within the tales is “a constant element a tension between opposites that somehow gives one insight [. . .] resulting from the paradoxical fusion of opposing forces” (106). To see this pattern at work in “Usher” requires some serious digging. But uncovering the pattern is not an end in itself, as Thompson explains. The extent to which “Usher” achieves this great intricacy raises questions about the interpretation of events, character, and narrator—what happens literally, how do these elements work in concert, and how does this contribute to the unity of effect?

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.
New Jersey: Castle Books, 2002.

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,
1973.

Objects of Satire and Severity in Pope’s Dunciad

Pope’s mock-epic The Dunciad is one of his most difficult poems to understand, primarily because it was altered three times over fifteen years, with major alterations and the addition of a fourth book in the final publication. Many critics have often had trouble deciding just how much of Pope’s biography should be taken into account when reading the poem because of the nature of his relationship to Colley Cibber and the fact that the poem is clearly an attack on Cibber. Aubrey Williams points out at the very beginning of the introduction to his pivotal book on The Dunciad that the poem “has impinged upon not only the artistic sensibilities of readers and critics, but upon their moral sensibilities as well” yet “the objections of the moralistic critic to the poem gain what relevance they have possessed principally from historical and biographical information about Pope and his contemporaries” (Pope’s Dunciad 1). The poem is scathing and bitter in its attacks, and calls into question whether or not Pope is simply committing the same crimes that he accuses other writers of within the poem. Fredric V. Bogel points out that in the course of this critical discussion, “some have asserted that Pope suffers a kind of satiric contamination in the course of the poem, [. . .] and begins to display a touch of what he attacks; or that he simply enjoys the dunces, taking pleasure in the low liveliness and sheer fecal fun of the games in book 2” (844). Satire by its very nature is based on the circumstances of the time in which it is produced. The majority of critics have shunned any type of New Critical approach to the poem simply because satire does not lend itself well to that. History must be taken into account. With The Dunciad, however, many critics have found the seriousness of tone that pervades the poem and the utterly hopeless apocalyptic ending to be paradoxical on primarily two levels.

One paradox stems from this question of the imitative fallacy raised by Williams, Bogel, and so many other critics. An examination of the third version of The Dunciad will prove most useful primarily because it calls into question, more so than the original three-book versions, Pope’s encounter with the imitative fallacy. The problem is that neither of the options summed up by Bogel sufficiently address the problem of fallacy—they merely cave in to it. The final version of The Dunciad, with the fourth book whose darkness and serious tone has been argued as bordering on outright hateful, demonstrates the concern of these critics most clearly. The solution to this paradox is in the focus of the attacks and the actual object of satire. Colley Cibber is the Dunce in the third version, yet the poem, at some point in every book, moves beyond Cibber, and folds him into something much larger, making an entire social movement of what Pope perceived as not only terrible poetry, but the general degradation of culture the object of satire. A close reading of the text will demonstrate that the dunces themselves seem harmless, but it is precisely their blithe ignorance of what is arising from their actions that becomes catastrophic. It is the result of their actions (the production of a new social movement), not the dunces themselves that is the object of satire.

The second paradox is in regard to Cibber and his reputation. Some critics, such as Donald T. Siebert, Jr., refuse to simply “take Pope at his word” (206). The idea that “the dunces themselves may often appear more like dangerous enemies of civilization than garden-variety fools” is problematic (203). How can simple fools bring about the end of history and the end of existence? Siebert sees two points that the majority of Pope critics agree upon with regard to The Dunciad: “(1) that Pope himself considered the dunces as a manifestation of some theological or metaphysical evil, as a real threat to the goodness and order of God’s universe, and (2) that the way in which Pope presented his victims was in fact the way they were; history vindicates Pope” (206). Siebert goes on to disagree with these critics. I, however, cannot completely disagree. It is evident that Pope considers something in the poem evil and threatening. His depiction of the dunces, their actions and statements, however, is not what is evil. The dunces themselves are not what is wholly evil because they have no recognition of the consequences of their actions. They are blithely unaware. They have no malicious intent. Reading the poem this way gives Pope more latitude in his depiction of the dunces and allows for a more generous moral reading in terms of Pope’s possible motives and the imitative fallacy. As far as the second point is concerned, in some ways history has vindicated Pope simply by virtue of the fact that his work has outlived the vast majority of those who are targeted in the poem. Following my explanation of the first point, if the dunces themselves are not evil, then Pope is fair in calling them out as simple fools. Especially with regard to Cibber, Pope presents a more or less accurate picture. Furthermore, why couldn’t Pope see all the dunces as not just simple fools but as an actual threat to goodness and order for the purposes of the satire? It is, of course, the satirist’s duty to be a good and moral man, who exposes the vices of others and replaces them with virtue. Whether or not Pope replaces vice with any virtue, of course, presents another interpretive problem, but one of the major vices Pope exposes is the sheer ignorance of the dunces.

The term “social movement” as mentioned above refers to a number of things. It is a phenomenon that began before Pope was born. The Dunciad addresses the movement in four parts: education, religion, science, and the arts. These parts are not necessarily addressed individually throughout the poem; rather, they are intertwined and are both causes and effects of the degradation of the other parts. Dryden confronts the problem with the arts, specifically satire, in his “A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire.” He undertakes what was called in England the lampoon, saying that it “is a dangerous sort of Weapon” and that authors “have no Moral right on the Reputation of other Men” (Dryden). Dryden continues to write, apparently in defense of his own work, that:

There are only two Reasons, for which we may be permitted to write Lampoons; and I will not promise that they can always justifie us: The first is Revenge, when we have been affronted in the same Nature, or have been any ways notoriously abus'd and can make our selves no other Reparation. [. . .] [T]he second Reason, which may justifie a Poet, when he writes against a particular Person [. . .] is, when he is become a Publick Nuisance. (Dryden)

Dryden claims in his explanation of the first reason that he very rarely sought revenge on anyone. Pope, having admired Dryden very much, agreed with Dryden’s view of lampooners and hack writers, as evidenced in the opening of his Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot: “What walls can guard me, or what Shades can hide? [. . .] Is there a Parson, much be-mus’d in Beer / A maudlin Poetess, a ryming Peer” (7, 15-6). Pope, famous at this time, is referring to being overrun by writers who want him to read their awful work—the types of lampooners Dryden is referring to. The drunk Parson, according to Williams, “suggest[s] the Rev. Laurence Eusden [. . .]; he was named poet laureate in 1718” (Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope 199). Pope’s frustration with the laureateship seems to be at the center of his frustration with the writing “profession” and publishing industry at the time. Eusden preceded Colley Cibber as poet laureate.

Pope’s absolute disgust with these men, as exemplified in his poetry, must come from his high respect for the position they held. The laureateship, during Pope’s time, was not so old a tradition as far as English traditions go. Beginning around the time of Chaucer, it appears to have been a volunteer position at first. It was not until Dryden that the laureateship became the official position that is today. Pope may have seen Dryden as the father of the contemporary laureateship, but it is more likely that the position held its esteem with Pope based on its association with Chaucer, Spenser, and Jonson. For Pope to see the laureateship pass from the greatness of these men, including Dryden, to the likes of Colley Cibber was clearly infuriating, but the position’s esteem was not the only thing that was problematic for Pope; the Laureateship is an absolute fusion of arts and politics. For Cibber to be deemed worthy of such an influential position was ridiculous to Pope and brings Cibber the furthest into public light that he could possibly be.

Based on Dryden’s theory of lampooning, The Dunciad should be justified. Whether Pope sought revenge against Cibber for a specific trespass would be difficult to answer; however, that Pope deemed Cibber as a public nuisance is obvious. But if The Dunciad were simply Pope calling Cibber out as a public nuisance, then the poem would not be much different than Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe in which Dryden does the same to Thomas Shadwell, the Poet Laureate of his time. This would not sufficiently address the way in which Pope makes a “social movement” the object of satire. Cibber is only partly responsible for the arts—one part of the movement out of four. This leaves the reader with the problem set forth in the beginning. Pope is attacking not only the reputation of an individual, but of a multitude of people from a variety of disciplines. Did he see everyone and everything he attacks in The Dunciad as a public nuisance? The simple answer would be yes, though Pope falls victim to the imitative fallacy regardless of his attempt to make that type of attack the object of his satire and appears to be horribly bitter, some would say immoral. However, even though those named in The Dunciad were seen as public nuisances, it is the aftermath of their actions as a result of their ignorance that Pope attacks the strongest.

What in the world made Colley Cibber such an utterly detestable writer in Pope’s eyes? Charles Peavy, in his study of the reason why Pope replaced Lewis Theobald with Colley Cibber as Dunce, points out that, “Pope and Cibber had been at odds for at least a decade preceding the first Dunciad of 1728” (17). The feud had been alive for some twenty-five years before the publication of the final Dunciad. Cibber’s position as poet laureate could not have been the sole reason for Pope’s decision to make him dunce, but it certainly could be seen as the proverbial straw. Cibber was more commercially than critically successful. He was also notorious as the manager of Drury Lane and despised by playwrights—especially those whose work Cibber rejected, seemingly without reason. Pope was a great supporter of the theater and was an editor and part-collaborator on a few famous plays of the time. But beyond these surface level distastes lies something more. Peavy declares that these two men were simply diametrically opposed to one another: “Politically, socially, and psychologically they were antipodal: their family backgrounds were quite different; Pope was a Roman Catholic, Cibber was vehemently anti-Catholic. In addition, the lives of the two men were strangely intertwined, and a conflict arising from the meeting of these two divergent personalities was inevitable” (17). One possible explanation for Cibber’s placement as Dunce is that Pope had simply had enough of Cibber. This seems juvenial, but then Pope’s attacks on Cibber in The Dunciad can be interpreted as such: “Nonsense precipitate, like running Lead/That slip’d thro’ Cracks and Zig-zags of the Head” (1.123-4). Pope also accuses Cibber of stealing work: “Next, o’er his Books his eyes began to roll/In pleasing memory of all he stole” (1.127-8). The resemblance of Cibber’s plays to other famous plays of his time is still being debated today. Regardless of whether or not he actually did, Pope clearly thought so.

This is the type of attack, however, that Siebert and others take issue with. This sort of “low blow” appears throughout the poem and brings up a very important question: How much of a fool was Colley Cibber really? As a theater manager he was very successful; however, he constantly rejected plays, including The Beggar’s Opera, which Pope saw as “the disregard of merit and the rewarding of mediocrity” (Peavy 19). Cibber’s career and public persona as a writer is summed up in his infamous Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber: Comedian. The title alone evokes notions of self-indulgence. Brian Glover points out that “On the one hand, Cibber [saw] his project as a record of his famous folly and vanity, dealing in self-indulgent ‘Impressions of my Mind’; on the other hand, [. . .] he claim[ed] objective authority as a historian. How can a man who describes himself as a self-centered fool, motivated by vanity, hope to be taken seriously as a judge of men and art” (524)? No doubt a question Pope likely asked, and no doubt the primary reason for Pope’s utter repulsion to the notion of Cibber as a talented writer, let alone deserving of the title Poet Laureate. Cibber viewed himself as the “fanciful object of his own history” (Glover 524). Pope makes Cibber the fool he always claimed to be. Cibber as King of the Dunces is an obvious choice.

However, Cibber’s historical persona does not seem to completely match what Pope has described in the poem. Cibber is a blundering fool in the poem, but he is also seemingly the source of all evil; he is “the Anti-Christ of wit” (The Dunciad 2.15). The use of Biblical images and parallels to Paradise Lost heightens the seriousness of what is being said in the poem. Pope is not simply expressing disgust with Cibber and the social movement that he satirically presides over; there is a genuine, grave concern for what is happening as evidenced in the Biblical images and parallels to Paradise Lost. Williams points out that “From Pope’s parodying of Milton results a tacit suggestion that the Dunciad, like Paradise Lost, is about a war between good and evil” (131). Book II begins with such a parody of Milton. Cibber parallels Milton’s Satan. Book III begins with Cibber’s head in the goddess’ lap, an allusion to the Madonna with child. Cibber, however, is an inversion of the Christ figure. This inversion of the divine is manifested completely in Cibber, even down to his thoughts. The goddess tells Cibber “Each Monster meets his likeness in thy mind” (Pope 3.252) indicating that since Cibber is the Antichrist of wit, everything he imagines is monstrous and distorted: An inverted representation of reality. This is easily read as an exaggeration of Cibber’s historical persona; however, it is the ramifications of Cibber’s actions that bring about the most catastrophic moment in the poem. Pope is serious about the events in the poem, but only in regard to what they produce: the end of history and existence.

It would be difficult to believe that Pope saw Colley Cibber as the solitary source from whence all destruction and darkness is emitted. With regard to the arts, Pope takes on the entire publishing industry. In Book II, Pope further establishes the object of his satire as not just Cibber, but a whole host of other poets and booksellers. Pope uses Epic Games to satirize not just the people but the degradation of the society that they are involved in. Here, Pope focuses on people other than Cibber as satiric objects, which read collectively, produce the social movement as the single object of satire. The goddess of Dulness creates a phantom poet, whom booksellers chase. Pope names many of them; these names are part of the object of satire just as Cibber is. They chase the phantom, sliding through human waste, have a contest to see “who can tickle best” followed by a yelling contest, and finally a contest to see who can come up the brownest after diving into Fleet Ditch (2.196). The focus on so many different people as objects of satire forms the social movement they participate in as the true object of satire in the poem. The games themselves are meaningless and harmless. Yet the participants do not see that. They take them very seriously—they are ignorant of their own stupidity, a notion that Pope takes very seriously.

With regard to the other aspects of the social movement, Cibber cannot be seen as the sole object of satire either. Rather, Pope uses Cibber as a sort of litmus test to demonstrate just how far other social institutions have fallen and thus produced the Cibbers of the world. Education is one of the primary examples. Pope points to it explicitly as a reason for the existence and praise of poets such as Cibber:

Now leave all memory of sense behind:
How Prologues into Prefaces decay,
And these to Notes are fritter’d quite away:
How Index-learning turns no student pale,
Yet holds the eel of science by the tail:
How, with less reading than makes felons scape,
Less human genius than God gives an ape,
[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .]
‘Twixt Plautus, Fletcher, Shakespear, and Corneille,
Can make a Cibber, Tibbald, or Ozell. (1.276-82, 284-6)

The lack of rigor in learning is a major contributor to the degradation of his society. Students look to the indexes of books for the answers rather than actually reading. Pope blames the creation of bad poets like Cibber and Lewis Theobald (Tibbald) on this kind of degenerate learning. The arts and education are thus intertwined. Science is also tangled into this passage, and its part in the social movement seems to be brought on by this shift in education. It is “Index-learning” that has control over science. Thus, poor education contributes to both the degradation of the arts and science.

In Book III, Pope attacks science and religion together using another historical figure: J. Henley the Orator. Pope writes of Henley in his note that he “preached on the Sundays upon Theological matters, and on the Wednesdays upon all other sciences. Each auditor paid one shilling. He declaimed some years against the greatest persons, and occasionally did our Author that honour” (347) meaning that Henley railed against Pope at some point. The lines of the poem give a sharp picture of what Williams is referring to:

But, where each Science lifts its modern type,
Hist’ry her Pot, Divinity his Pipe,
While proud Philosophy repines to show,
Dishonest sight! his breeches rent below (3.195-8)

Pope begins this short portrait of Henley with a definition of science that is a mixture of history, theology, and philosophy. They are “friends,” so to speak, raising their glasses and tipping their pipes to one another. Henley is standing bent over, exposing his behind, “Tuning his voice” (200). Pope continues to describe him: “Oh great Restorer of the good old Stage / Preacher at once, and Zany of thy age” (3.205-6). Pope’s contempt for Henley is obvious, but it is how Henley speaks about the great scientific minds of the age that demonstrate how Pope is using this portrait of Henley to satirize the turn downward that science has taken as part of the social movement:

‘Tis yours, a Bacon or a Locke to blame,
A Newton’s genius, or a Milton’s flame.
But oh! with One, immortal one dispense,
The source of Newton’s Light, of Bacon’s Sense! (3.215-8)

Henley’s sermon ends with a call to the dunces: “Persist, by all divine in Man unaw’d / But, ‘Learn, ye Dunces! not to scorn your God” (223-4) referring to Cibber as their God. They do not need Bacon, Newton, Locke, Milton, or any of the greatest minds of the last hundred years because they have Colley Cibber’s example to follow. The irony is that Cibber is not actually their “god”—Dulness is.

This portrait of Henley provides a clearer picture of the combination of severity and satire, but in order to reconcile the two, the focus of the satire must be read as the effects of Henley’s speech, not the speech itself. The speech is one of many things that contributes to the cataclysmic ending of the piece. The speech blinds the dunces to what is really going on; they see Cibber as their leader rather than Dulness, so they are unable to see the apocalypse that is coming as a result of their actions. Pope’s depiction of Richard Busby, a “famous headmaster of Westminster School” (Williams Poetry and Prose 360), further establishes education as part of the social movement and intertwines art and education yet again. Busby declares proudly, “Since Man from beast by Words is known / Words are Man’s province, Words we teach alone” (Pope 4.149-50). The meanings of words are not important to Busby. What is more important is that students know what the words are so that they can sound smart when they speak. But it is empty. Busby continues:

To ask, to guess, to know, as they commence,
As fancy opens the quick springs of Sense,
We ply the Memory, we load the brain,
Bind rebel Wit, and double chain on chain,
Confine the thought, to exercise of breath;
And keep them in the pale of Words till death. (4.155-60)

The students do not learn what is important; they learn what is fashionable. Their heads are filled not only empty words, but empty knowledge of classic poets so that they may have “endless matter for Conversation, and Verbal amusement their whole lives” (Pope 360). With this empty information, Busby is confident that the students will still make excellent poets and that his method is surely the best:

We hang one jingling padlock on the mind:
A Poet the first day, he dips his quill;
And what the last? a very Poet still.
Pity! the charm works only in our wall,
Lost, lost too soon in yonder House or Hall. (4.162-6).

Busby’s padlock is the prison that this kind of education has put the students in. It is jingling because the students’ “instructors contrive to make the Words jingle in rhyme or metre” (Pope 360). The students are being taught to use the meaningless words to write poetry. Ironically, Busby acknowledges that this is only effective inside the walls of his institution. As soon as the students leave, their poetry is no longer brilliant. He names a few famous students:

There truant Wyndham ev’ry Muse gave o’er,
There Talbot sunk, and was a Wit no more!
How sweet an Ovid, Murray was our boast!
How many Martials were in Pult’ney lost! (4.167-70)

All of these men became dukes, members of parliament, or gained other such titles. The effects of this kind of education now become clear. These men are partly in charge of running the country, yet they have had a completely empty education. Their words and heads are completely empty.

Science and religion become tangled again toward the end of Book IV as Dulness prepares for her apocalypse unbeknownst to the dunces. In lines 459-93, an anonymous clergyman gives a speech about the privilege science has over religion. It is important that the clerk is anonymous and not someone taken from history as the other speakers have been. This speech is completely different than the others; the speaker’s anonymity furthers this distinction. The speech in this case is against the pursuits of Dulness; however, the clerk is still unknowingly helping to enact the apocalypse because he promotes a deism that still puts God second to science. Prior to his speech, The Goddess has just finished speaking to two naturalists:

‘O! would the Sons of Men once think their Eyes
And Reason giv’n them but to study Flies!
See Nature in some partial narrow shape,
And let the Author of the Whole escape:
Learn but to trifle; or who most observe,
To wonder at their Maker, not to serve.’ (4.453-8)

She is calling scientists and naturalists to abandon their deism and belief in God completely without thinking about it at all. She wants them not to serve their maker, but to wonder how or if he exists. She wants them to conceptualize nature as something other than Creator-made, thus letting God escape from science. Science, for the Goddess, has no need for religion, not even a religious belief that holds God as apart from humanity and the universe. The clerk disagrees, and replies:

Let others creep by timid steps, and slow,
On plain Experience lay foundations low,
By common sense to common knowledge bred,
And last, to Nature’s Cause thro’ Nature led.
All-seeing in they mists, we want no guide,
Mother of Arrogance, and Source of Pride!
We nobly take the high Priori Road,
And reason downward, till we doubt of God. (4.465-72)

The clerk criticizes this notion abandoning God completely calling it arrogant and prideful. He believes that the foundation of plain experience is not good enough. The road he speaks of is described in Pope’s footnote: “[T]hey who take this high Priori [. . .] Road (such as Hobbs, Spinoza, Des Cartes, and some better Reasoners) for one that goes right, ten lose themselves in Mists, or ramble after Visions which deprive them of all sight of their End, and mislead them in the choice of the wrong means” (4.471). The clerk is angry with the Goddess for suggesting scientists abandon God without reason. However, his “high Priori Road” is not much different. It still calls for an eventual dismissal of God, just through reasoned means. He describes what he and his group of scientists do:

Make Nature still incroach upon his plan;
And shove him off as far as e’er we can:
Thrust some Mechanic Cause into his place;
Or bind in Matter, or diffuse in Space.
Or, at one bound o’er-leaping all his laws,
Make God Man’s Image, Man the final Cause. (4.473-8)

The clerk asserts that as long as God is dismissed through scientific means, then that is okay. The clerk is “one of deistical bent” meaning he believes in a God that created the universe, but since then is completely apart from it (Williams 371). The final line describes what his type of science accomplishes: God is whatever Man decides he is through science, and Man is the ultimate purpose of creation. This is ironic on two levels. First, he has unwittingly aligned himself with Dulness. He thinks he has differentiated himself from her by claiming he has reached his conclusion through scientific means, but it is the same conclusion. Second, in the context of the poem, Man is the final cause in the sense that the men of this social movement Pope has outlined throughout the poem are the final cause of the apocalypse.

The example of the anonymous clerk perfectly describes the ignorance of the dunces. It is so overwhelming that even the clerk who thought he was set against the Goddess is unwittingly aiding her. These speeches and portraits, along with the many others, unintentionally result in the apocalypse. The speakers and trespassers themselves have no idea that it is coming. Even the speaker is unable to remain outside of its power as he has throughout the rest of the poem. The final stanza is testament to that:

In vain, in vain, — the all-composing Hour
Resistless falls: The Muse obeys the Pow’r.
She comes! she comes! the sable Throne behold
Of Night Primœval, and of Chaos old! (4.627-30)

The blithe ignorance of the dunces is so pervasive that not even the speaker can resist or escape its consequences. The final four lines describe an evil and a darkness that is completely absolute:

Lo! thy dread Empire, Chaos! is restor’d;
Light dies before they uncreating word;
They hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And Universal Darkness buries All. (4.653-6)

This absolute and cataclysmic ending would seem inappropriate if the dunces knew they were bringing it about. If this had been their plan all along, then many critics, the moralists described by Williams, and those who refuse to take Pope at his word, would have ample ground to stand on in criticizing Pope. However, this was not the design of the dunces. One could argue that the Goddess Dulness had this apocalypse in mind from the beginning—that would make perfect sense. The progenitor of this kind of evil could never convince the simple dunces to agree to go along with such a plan. She had to disguise it and make her minions blind to it. Colley Cibber becomes a foolish and simple-looking front for a more dastardly and severe purpose. His disguise is the social movement, summed up in the lines just prior to the finale:

Physic of Metaphysic calls for aid on Sense!
See Mystery to Mathematics fly!
In vain! they gaze, turn giddy, rave, and die.
Religion blushing veils her sacred fires,
And unawares Morality expires. (4.645-50)

Just as these are tangled up throughout the poem as both causes and effects of the degradation of the other parts, here they grasp at each other to try and save themselves from the darkness and chaos they see coming. In vain. They collapse under the weight of their entanglement.

The two paradoxes discussed at the beginning are remedied through reading Dulness as the cause of all evil and the social movement as the object of satire rather than Cibber and his dunces as both. The poem makes it clear that Pope felt Cibber had not one original thought in his body. Pope would have never given Colley Cibber, or any other dunce for that matter, credit for coming up with so cunning and complex a plan. Rather, it makes much more sense in light of Pope’s history with Cibber to read his role in this as simply foolish and ignorant—part of the disguise Dulness uses to bring the apocalypse. Cibber’s desire to be seen as a fool and the object of his own history finally catches up with him. And when it does, history ends.

Works Cited

Bogel, Fredric V. “Dulness Unbound: Rhetoric and Pope’s Dunciad.” PMLA. 97 (Oct 1982): 844-55.

Dryden, John. “A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire.” 1693. Ed. Jack Lynch. 28 Apr 2008. .

Glover, Brian. “Nobility, Visibility, and Publicity in Colley Cibber’s ‘Apology.’” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900. 42 (Summer 2002): 523-39.

Peavy, Charles D. “Pope, Cibber, and the Crown of Dulness.” The South Central Bulletin. 26.4 (Winter 1966): 17-27.

Pope, Alexander. The Dunciad. 1743. Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope. Ed. Aubrey Williams. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1969. 295-378.

Siebert, Donald T. “Cibber and Satan: The Dunciad and Civilization.” Eighteenth-Century Studies. 10 (Winter 1976-7): 203-21.

Williams, Aubrey. Pope’s Dunciad. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1955.

Williams, Aubrey, ed. The Dunciad. By Alexander Pope. 1743. The Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1969. 295-378.

All Out Beyond Horizons

I’ve finally decided to write about writing. Just like everyone else. There’s no need to wrap it up in any clever disguise. Disguises have been done to death. But the allure has finally drawn me. I have been raised up in a tradition that now requires me to conform. So I tried to not conform by not conforming to not conforming which was really conforming, so what the fuck is an artist supposed to do? Everyone wrote about the death of art sometime before I was even born for this very reason. Yet here I am. Here all of us are. I suppose none of it is important. None of it will ever be important. How cliché. How cliché to call anything cliché.

1.
Josiah Lemming focused so hard on the page in front of him.

No, wait.

Josiah Lemming thinks he knows everything, and the reality is he really does, but it is impossible for him to express any of it. Any time he does, it just comes out as screaming on a page. Sometimes rambling. He circles and circles the answers, the perfect and beautiful words which he knows are inside of him. He wishes he could inspire.

Josiah sighs and pushes his stringy, mouse hair out of his eyes so he can close them. He clenches his teeth and tenses his neck so that his whole head begins to shake. He keeps this going for a few minutes. When he physically can’t do it anymore, his head begins to beat with the rhythm of his heart.

Nothing.

Josiah Lemming pulls at his hair.

This is how I relate to my character, Josiah Lemming. In this way, we are the same person. But if Josiah Lemming is a writer whom I created, and I relate to him, then the two of us are just like Kilgore Trout and Kurt Vonnegut.

I don’t want to be like them. I would conjecture that Josiah wouldn’t want to either. Josiah Lemming is different. So am I.

2.
Josiah Lemming has a pure voice. He’s heart broken and dramatic.

He sings, “Why don’t you like me, why don’t you like me, why don’t you like me,” as he pounds on his keyboard.

He wants an answer.

He wrote the song to demand an answer.

Why don’t you like him?

Josiah jumps off the small stage at the Universal Bar and Grill. He is unplugging his keyboard and packing everything away in a small suitcase. His car sits out front. Everyone, the ten patrons, are sitting at the bar, drinking. Nothing new.

A lone, young woman sits at a booth in the back. Josiah didn’t notice her during his set. She gets up from her table and approaches. She taps Josiah on the shoulder as he is bent over the bag for his keyboard, trying to get everything put away.

“Maybe everyone assumes you want to be left alone,” she says to him.

“I’m sorry?”

“I said: Maybe everyone just assumes you want to be left alone. Maybe that’s why you think they don’t like you.”

“Oh.”

“Do you want to be left alone?”

“I—No. Not really.”

“Can I buy you a drink? I like you.”

“I—Sure.”

The two of them wander to the end of the bar where no one is.

“I’ll have a Sapphire and tonic,” the young woman says to the bartender. Both turn to Josiah.

“I’ll have a water. With lemon—“

“No, no, no. That isn’t what a star drinks,” she says, putting her hand, fingers spread, on his chest. “That isn’t you. You said you wanted people to like you.” She turns to the bartender. “He’ll have a scotch on the rocks. Any scotch will do, as long as it's not a blend, of course. Single malt. Glenlivet, Glenfiddich perhaps. Maybe a Glengow—Any Glen.”

The bartender chuckles.

The young woman winks at Josiah.

“To be honest with you—“

“Shhhhhhhh. You don’t have to say it. Just pretend you like what he puts in front of you.”

Josiah nods his head.

3.
I am a poor man. I haven’t wealth or fame.
I have my two hands, and a car to my name—

And all the stars were crashing ‘round,
As I laid eyes on what I’d found—

1.
I think I’ll come back to the story of Josiah and the young woman when I figure out how it ends. If I figure it out. I like where I was going the first time.

Josiah Lemming decided that the only way he could write and get his answers out was in the form of science fiction. He knew that he’d be pushing us both further into a box by doing that, but he couldn’t help it. That was all he knew.

He wrote a story once about scientists who invented a device that would speak anyone’s thoughts. It was a sort of helmet someone would wear, and the speakers on the side of it would blurt out thoughts into speech. The scientists, however, could not find anyone willing to participate in a public demonstration. They had already been booked for The Today Show, The Tonight Show, and Oprah.

They found a boy named Curtis Koch. His parents claimed he was the sweetest young man in the world. After lengthy trial runs, the scientists agreed he was the one. When the curtain was pulled on The Tonight Show, revealing Curtis wearing the helmet, the first thing that came out of those speakers was Everyone is going to hate me. The audience laughed and laughed and the band played and the host slapped Curtis Koch on the back. Oh God, they’re laughing—Ouch! The scientists stood behind the cameras taking notes on clipboards. The thoughts, however, continued to pour out, even after the audience moved from laughter to murmuring to silence to murmuring again. Little Curtis Koch could not stop his brain from spewing bad thoughts about himself.

Everyone hates me they all hate me I’ve failed I’ve failed humanity stop staring at me stop it stop it stop it stop it stop it stop it stop it stop it stop it stopitstopitstopitstopitstop itstopitohmyGodIcan’tbreatheI’mgoingtodieI’mgoingtodie—
It was at that moment the bandleader came running onto the stage and tore the helmet off Curtis Koch’s head. He smashed it on the floor. The scientists gasped. Everyone else was silent.

Many months later, the scientists came back with a new, smaller version to put on the heads of animals and babies. No one cared, and to no one’s surprise, every animal thought the same word over and over again.

Food.

Babies thought a variety of things, but none of it ever made any sense, so Josiah decided it wasn’t worth writing about. And that is where he ended the story.

2.
“What’s your name?” Josiah Lemming asks.

“Autumn Le.”

“Autumn Le.”

“It took you three weeks to ask me that question.”

“I know, but I was just—And technically, it was only three days. Three Mondays in a row.”

Autumn Le smiles and sips her drink. Josiah smiles back and suddenly notices her for the first time. She has short, thin hair. It looks red under the lights of the bar. He wonders what color it really is. Her skin is bright red as well. She looks warm. Her face is lovely. All of her features are fragile and small. Her nose is upturned slightly. When she smiles, little arrows form at the corners of her mouth. They point to her ears, also delicate, which lead Josiah’s eyes to her slender neck.

He doesn’t want to look beyond.

His eyes work back up Autumn’s neck, re-examining all the same features. He realizes she is looking at him. Looking at his eyes. Autumn Le kisses Josiah Lemming, innocently. Josiah closes his eyes.

“Why?” he manages to choke out once Autumn has pulled back.

“Would you like to see me in natural light?” she asks.

“Where?”

“I’ll show you where I live.”

“Okay.”

Josiah Lemming’s eyes are still closed.

Autumn Le grabs his wrist and leads him outside. Josiah can now see her for the first time. Her hair is dark, espresso. Her skin is pale under the streetlights. Josiah’s heart is making his whole body pulse. It’s in his throat, his stomach, and his feet.

“Are we walking?” Josiah calls out to Autumn who has run ahead.

“Of course we are.”

Universal City is glowing. The Studios, which sit atop the hills, can be seen from Lankershim Boulevard. Autumn Le turns the corner onto Valleyheart Drive and again onto Willow Crest Avenue. Her apartment overlooks South Weddington Park. Universal City is across the street.

Despite the glow of the Studios, Autumn Le’s apartment is completely black. The shades are drawn.

“Close your eyes,” she whispers in Josiah’s ear.

As soon as he does a flood of light tries to break through his lids.

“Okay, open them.”

3.
Oh well. You’ve got me under your spell,
And I don’t think that I’m kidding around.
I don’t think I can forget you now—

I will kick and beat my wrists together
And feel an ocean breathing waves,
Feel them licking at my face.
Ceilings don't exist, and there are no floors beneath me.
If I were king of this night, would you become my queen?

1.
Josiah Lemming tried to get his answers out in paint. He gave that up quickly. Most of the paintings ended in Josiah punching his fist through the canvas. He still liked them though. They were for him. His favorite was one where he had become so frustrated that he closed his eyes and threw everything he could at the canvas. Then he put his fist through it. As he removed his fist, the edges of the hole came back out with it. When he opened his eyes, it looked like a bomb had gone off inside the painting and somehow was strong enough to cross the line into reality.

2.
On every wall of Autumn Le’s apartment are paintings of the ocean. Some are hanging neatly in frames. Some are sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall. Josiah doesn’t say anything. He is jealous at first. He’s never created anything as beautiful as the worst of these.

He begins at the wall on his left, carefully studying each one like he is in a museum exhibit. Some are of bright days on some unknown beach, waves crashing and foaming on the shore. Others are of lighthouses on rocky cliffs or jetties, their light pouring out and instantly getting lost in the complete darkness of a storm. Josiah Lemming looks at every single one. The final painting is still on the easel. The ocean is open and fills most of the frame. It is moving on the canvas. Giant swells of sea, blue-green, move across it. One hundred foot faces of God’s good ocean gone wrong.

The sky is split between light and dark. Black storm clouds are chasing down the sun, which is setting in the opposite corner along the horizon. Its radiance is cartoonish in comparison to the rest of the canvas. Golds and oranges sparkle and are swallowed immediately by the black clouds.

Something catches Josiah Lemming’s eye that hadn’t the first time he studied the water. It is as if the swells had blocked it from his view momentarily, but now it is visible again. A tiny boat floats amidst the rising water. Its sails are billowing in the wind. A figure sits at the front. Her espresso hair is also windblown. She looks toward the sky.

“Is that—?”

Autumn Le wraps her arms around him from behind. She puts her hands on top of his and guides them to the palette and brush still resting on a short table. The brush meets the palette and Autumn guides Josiah Lemming’s hand to the canvas. Josiah’s eyes are closed again. He feels the slight pressure of the brush on the canvas. It comes and goes between canvas and palette for just a few minutes.

“There,” Autumn Le whispers in his ear.

Josiah Lemming opens his eyes and sees a second figure now in the boat, his mouse hair blown by the wind into the first’s. They are both tangled and twisted, tied up together.

Josiah smiles and turns to Autumn.

“Where are they going?” he asks.

“To the horizon.”

“And when they get there?”

“Who knows?”

Josiah looks back at the two tiny seafarers. He sighs.

“Is something wrong?” Autumn asks.

“No,” Josiah says, eyes on the canvas.

“What are you thinking about?”

“I—I could hold my breath until I blow up. To make this all seem real.”

“Don’t be dramatic,” she says

Autumn Le kisses Josiah Lemming again.

3.
Try and define the energy it takes to write these lines
That I find useless all the time—

Take your eyes out, you play the part so well:
Cut off, screened in, tracklessly dreaming—

Hey pretty, what's on your mind.
Nothing here, an endless night.
I'm fed up and sick, tired of me.
My thin boy voice ruins everything.

1.
Song writing is where Josiah Lemming thinks his talent really is. He has notebooks full of songs, parts of songs, choruses, versus, single lines. Whenever he thinks of something, he writes it down. He loves every one of them. He’s prepared to record a lifetime of albums if anyone will ever give him the chance. The incomplete ones are his favorite, though. If he comes across an incomplete song in his notebook, it means he can’t leave it alone. He’s allowed to change whatever he wants as many times as he wants if it’s incomplete. Once he’s finished, he doesn’t like to change anything. Once he’s put a melody to it, he just can’t. He knows it’ll never end otherwise. I’m the same way.

The problem with Josiah Lemming’s notebook is that it’s stolen. There is not one original thought inside his book. He doesn’t know it though. He writes what he does because it has some familiarity to it—that’s how he knows it’s good. He can hear the melody right away and the words just slide perfectly into place. Sad to say it has never crossed his mind that it’s familiar because he’s heard it before. Some a thousand times before. It’s okay. I’m no different.

2.
At eight in the morning, the sun is pouring through the street-side windows of Autumn Le’s apartment. Josiah has placed another canvas on the easel. His brush strokes are wide and clumsy, but they’re getting better. At his feet sit four or five other attempts. None have holes.

Further out from the easel lie sheets of paper covered in writing. They are stories and songs. The songs still aren’t different, but the lyrics just poured out of Josiah. He is filled with music.

Josiah Lemming is painting the ocean, trying to mimic the perfect beauty that Autumn Le has created. His favorite part is painting the horizon. He tries to imagine what is on the other side of it. That’s what he has to do. He has to paint what exists on the other side of the horizon.

He takes the canvas down, half completed, and puts another on the easel. Autumn Le, sleepy still, wanders into the room.

“How long have you been awake?” she asks.

“Almost all night.”

“Oh. What are you doing?”

“I’m trying to paint what is beyond the horizon.”

Autumn Le looks mournfully at Josiah. He is fixed on the blank canvas.

“Having trouble thinking of something?” she asks.

“It’s just really hard to picture.”

“That’s because it’s not possible,” Autumn Le says very seriously.

“Yes it is. I just have to envision—“

“No, Josiah. It isn’t.” She looks at him quietly. Josiah notices that this is unlike any other time she has looked at him. “Maybe you should go now. I’ll see you next Monday. At the Universal.”

“But—I don’t understand. I mean, look—my painting is getting so much better—I’ve—I mean—I’ve never painted like—and my song writing, my story writing, everything is getting so much better—because—Look around—All the songs I’ve written—All the stories—All because—“

“Last night felt like the only time that we made sense. Every moment after which, chalk it up to coincidence.”

“But—I—“

“Goodbye for now, Josiah. I’ll see you on Monday.”

3.
Your tongue is a rudder.
It steers the whole ship.
Sends your words past your lips
Or keeps them safe behind your teeth.
But the wrong words will strand you,
Come off course while you sleep,
Sweep your boat out to sea,
Or dashed to bits on the reef.

Whatever you need to make you feel
Like you've been the one behind the wheel.
The sunrise is just over that hill,
The worst is over.
Whatever I said to make you think
That love is the religion of the weak.
This morning we love like weaklings,
The worst is over.

Always a combination of one or the other:
Girl keeps screaming.
Boy keeps feeling
far away.

It's easier to say it's over.
It's easier, but I might still be pretending.
Not a single one will believe,
And I can't say I wouldn't agree,
I don't know if I know myself anymore.
I gave up what I couldn't give in.


I'm waiting to give you whatever the world may bring
I'd give you my life,
Because I don't own anything.
It seemed like the bottom was all that I had until now.
I'd give you my life,
If you'd give me yours somehow.

Every attempt to ________ is filled with holes.
It reads like a polygraph I'm told.
I'm not bitter anyway.
Let it go.
I never sleep still, lest I forget.
Tied down by handicaps instead.
I'm not bitter anyway,
But I didn't want it to turn out this way.
Sing a long goodnight, forfeit any fight.
Refuse to rest assured.
It comes with no reply, hold on too tight.
Hang on every word.

The vessel groans,
The ocean pressures its frame.
To the port I see the lighthouse
Through the sleet and the rain.
And I wish for one more day to give
My love and repay debts.
But the morning finds our bodies
Washed up thirty miles West.

1.
Josiah Lemming wrote a story once that was not science fiction. It was something and nothing at the same time. A trace. He didn’t know what to call it. But it just poured out of him like projectile vomit. It wasn’t perfect. And it wasn’t brilliant. But it spoke. It lived and breathed. It deserved to live.

There can be no such thing as brilliance anymore. Josiah and I both agree that they won’t allow it. It died long ago. And God damn them for killing it.

2.
Josiah Lemming sits at the bar alone. He drinks water with lemon. He feels pretty good about his set tonight. He thinks it went as well as it could have.

The Universal is crowded. Josiah has no idea why he never played Friday nights before. Neither do I. He earned ten times more in tips than he ever had playing a Monday. Women sitting at the bar wink at him. But Josiah doesn’t blush. He doesn’t care.

“Another lemon, Hotshot?” the bartender asks. He calls Josiah’s regular drink a lemon.

“Sure.”

“By the way, someone left this for you on Monday.”

“How do you know?”

“Your name’s Josiah Lemming, isn’t it?”

The bartender hands Josiah a cream colored envelope. It is bright red under the lights, but I know that it’s really cream. Josiah’s name is written very neatly in block lettering on the front. He carefully and meticulously tears open the top, using his fingernail as a letter opener. He pulls out a piece of cardstock the same color as the envelope; another piece of paper comes out with it, unexpectedly, and falls on the floor. Josiah looks at the card first. It reads:

Sorrow drips into your heart through a pinhole,
Just like a faucet that leaks and there is comfort in the sound.

Take the pain out of love and then love won’t exist.

See, I can do it too.
I’m sorry.

Josiah sets the note on the bar and reaches down to pick up the piece of paper on the floor. It is the size of a photograph, but isn’t one. The colors of the ocean are immediately reminiscent. He puts it face down on the bar. After a second, he looks again just to make sure. A speck of a sailboat with two microscopic figures carefully dotted in is lost in the vast ocean. Josiah is fixing his eyes on them, trying not to look directly at the horizon. But he can’t help it. As soon as he does, his hand automatically crumples the paper.

“Want me to toss that for you?” the bartender asks, bringing Josiah’s lemon.

“Yes, thank you.”

“Those damn, crazy fans,” the bartender chuckles.

“Something like that. I’ll see you next week.”

“Sure thing, Hotshot.”

Josiah Lemming walks out the door of the Universal to his car. He will never come back. I don’t want him to go back. I can’t stand to see either of us like this. It’s our own fault, but it’s just not fair somehow. Neither of us should have to change, and neither of us will. We are timeless now.

3.
This is the end.
This story is old, but it goes on and on
Until we disappear.
This is the calm.
Calm me and let me taste the salt you breathed
While you were underneath.
We are the risen.
I am the one who haunts your dreams of mountains
Sunk below the sea.
After the storm,
I spoke the words but never gave a thought of
What they all could mean.
Rest in the sea.
I know that this is what you want,
A funeral keeps both of us apart.
You know that you are not alone,
I need you like water in my lungs.
This is the end.