![]() ![]() ![]() My reading of this text is that Usher comes home to find that his girlfriend is seeing another man and sits in his car going through the various options he can take. The narrative for this video is quite vague, either on purpose, or more likely, from a failing of the director. The song and video are centred around one consistent and clear concept, which is something that the director did very well, Climax. The house (the body which houses the mind?) cannot function without the mind, so it must also be destroyed.So, this song was just named Time magazine’s number one song of 2012, so it has to have a great music video, right? Perhaps that is what happens at the end of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’: Roderick comes face-to-face with his darkest unconscious, and it destroys him.Īnd this explains why both Madeline and Roderick are destroyed: the mind, both conscious and unconscious, is killed at once. If the unconscious did communicate with us clearly and openly, it would overwhelm and destroy us. (As the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan once quipped, ‘a neurosis is a secret that you don’t know you are keeping’.)ĭreams, for instance, are the way our unconscious mind communicates with our conscious mind, but in such a way which shrouds or veils their message in ambiguous symbolism and messages. Note that such an analysis of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ complements the uncanny elements in the story: the secret which ought to have remain hidden but has come to light is something deep within the unconscious which has broken out.īut when our unconscious breaks out and communicates with us, it usually does so in ways which are coded: ways which reveal, without revealing, the precise nature of our desires and fears. However, Roderick cannot keep her hidden for long, and she bursts out again in a frenzy – much as Freud would later argue our unconscious drives and desires cannot be wholly repressed and will find some way of making themselves known to us (such as through dreams). Might we then interpret Roderick as a symbol of the conscious mind – struggling to conceal some dark ‘secret’ and make himself presentable to his friend, the narrator – and Madeline as a symbol of the unconscious? Note how Madeline is barely seen for much of the story, and the second time she appears she is literally buried (repressed?) within the vault. The notion that we might have both a ‘conscious’ and an ‘unconscious’ mind, then, was already in circulation when Poe was writing ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’. The term ‘unconscious’ was then introduced into English by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). Indeed, it was the German Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854) who distinguished between the conscious and unconscious mind in his early work System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), labelling the latter Unbewusste (i.e. ![]() Sigmund Freud would, over half a century after Poe was writing, do more than anyone else to delineate the structure of the conscious and unconscious mind, but he was not the first to suggest that our conscious minds might hide, or even repress, unconscious feelings, fears, neuroses, and desires. Many things in the story are, to use a term later popularised by Sigmund Freud, ‘ uncanny’: simultaneously familiar yet unfamiliar another key element of the uncanny is the secret which ‘out to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light’.Īn interpretation which has more potential, then, is the idea that the ‘house of Usher’ is a symbol of the mind, and it is this analysis which has probably found the most favour with critics. Indeed, there are no overtly supernatural elements in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’: just a general sense of something not being quite right. How does he play around with them? First, Poe renders them ambiguous rather than clear-cut. Poe condenses these into a short story and plays around with them, locating new psychological depths within these features. We have a mysterious secret afflicting the house and eating away at its owner, the Gothic ‘castle’ (here, refigured as a mansion), premature burial (about which Poe wrote a whole other story), the mad owner of the house, and numerous other trappings of the Gothic novel. ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ is probably Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous story, and in many ways it is a quintessential Gothic horror story. ![]()
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