The Face in the Pool:

Reflections on the Doppelgnger Motif

in The Fall of the House of Usher
G. R. Thompson
Washington State University
In Heart of Darkness (1898-99), Joseph Conrads first narrator comments on the
conception of the meaning of a narrative held by Marlow, who is himself the narrator
of the basic tale of his pursuit of his psychological double, Kurtz, and to whom
Conrads first narrator listens as one sitting in darkness waiting for light. The first
narrator comments that Marlow, unlike other tale-spinning sailors, saw the
significance of a narrative not as a core meaning of some kind but as a system of
structures: The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which
lies within the shell of a cracked nut. [But to Marlow] the meaning of an episode was
not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a
glow brings out a haze in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are
made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine. So it is with Poes The Fall
of the House of Usher (1839), a tale that bears a number of similarities in theme,
imagery, and structure to Heart of Darkness (1). Poes tale is a structure of
interpenetrating structures that shifts its aspect with a slight shift of perspective by the
reader. Given the initial focus of a reader, the primary answer to any question
presented by the story varies, though the relationships among the various structures of
the story do not.
This can be partially illustrated by reference to the recurrent concerns of critics of the
tale; most of the critical commentary returns obsessively to a few central points,
compulsively repeating with slightly altered angles of vision the same set of haunting
questions. What is the significance of the close resemblance of Roderick Usher and
his sister, and are the two the products of and, simultaneously, guilty of incest? Did
Roderick intentionally try to murder Madeline, and did Madeline actually return from
her tomb, vampire-like, to claim her brothers life? Is the physical House actually
alive and by some preternatural force of will controlling the destinies of the Ushers?
Or is the story not a tale of the supernatural at all, but rather a work of psychological
realism? What then is the precise role of the narrator? And can the work be read in
Freudian or Jungian terms? If the tale is a psychological or symbolic work, what is the
meaning of the interpolated story of The Mad Trist of Sir Launcelot Canning? What

significance have the titles of the books in Ushers library, and what significance are
we to attach to Ushers strange, neurasthenic art works? The very fact that these
questions persist year after year suggests that at the dark heart of the story lies an
essential ambiguity, carefully insinuated and carefully wrought. [page 17:]
The present essay (and the present symposium) is no exception to this eternal return to
the same questions. But it is misleading to conceive of the meaning of the tale as
developing solely upon, say, the supernatural character of the House, or of Madeline
Usher, as opposed to a Gothic homily on the neurasthenia of the ultimate in
narcissistic artist-heroes, or as opposed to the incestuous guilt and hereditary curse of
the family. The tale is a concatenation of all these, and not an either/or question.
Nevertheless, there is, I submit, a basic structure that integrates all the others, a set or
system of relationships that remains constant and primary, enveloping the rest with a
further meaning without disturbing each as a coherent system within itself. This
primary structure is the product of the objective synthesis generated by our perceiving
as readers the double aspects of the tale as simultaneously supernaturalistic (symbolic
of deep structures in the human mind or not) and yet also realistic in a conventional
sense. This multiple perception of the simultaneous or parallel levels of the tale
derives primarily from our perception of the subjectivity of the narrator. That is, we
experience a series of supernatural events (which have Freudian and Jungian
resonances) through the mind of the narrator whom we recognize as disturbed so
that we simultaneously are subjectively involved in and detached from these
experiences.
Poes method in his Gothic tales, I have argued elsewhere (2), is in the American
tradition of the ambiguously explained supernatural, in which clues to the basic
psychological action of the tale are carefully insinuated into the Gothic atmosphere of
supernaturalism. Thus, underlying or enveloping a typical supernatural tale by Poe,
there is, on one level, a rational explanation of the seemingly supernatural events, on a
second level, a psychological explanation, and on a third level, an insinuated
burlesque (under or around the whole structure of explanations) of both the content
and the mode of the tale. That is, the whole system of interpenetrating levels or
structures of the tale leads ultimately to Poes mockery of the ability of the human
mind ever to know anything with certainty, whether about the external reality of the
world or about the internal reality of the mind.
Much of the present discussion of Usher derives from the brilliant analysis of the
tale as a psychodrama of the mutual hysteria of the narrator and Roderick Usher by
Darrel Abel (3). What I offer as progressive to our understanding of the tale is
principally addenda to such evidence in terms of a reconsideration of the principal
symbols of the tale within the primary structural context proposed that is, the
structure wherein the subjectivity of the narrator provides the basic system of

structures holding in tension all the others. I shall attempt to demonstrate the
pervasiveness of this primary structure principally by reference to the pattern of the
double and its redoubled manifestations (Roderick and Madeline, Roderick and the
House, Roderick and the narrator, Madeline and the narrator, the narrator and the
House). This pattern is further redoubled by the imagery of the face or skull, which
ultimately inverts back on the self as a symbol of the reality seen from the inward
perspective of characters caught in a labyrinth of mental surmise.
On its most obvious level, the tale is concerned with the traditional Gothic subjects of
death and madness [column 2:] and fear. The matters of madness (especially
Rodericks) and fear have been frequently (though not definitively) commented on,
but the other pervading subject of death (physical, familial, spiritual, and mental) has
not been closely enough linked to the themes of fear and madness. It is curious, for
example, that no one has ever seen fit to remark that when the narrator rides up to the
House of Usher, he is immediately confronted with a deaths-head looming up out of
the dead landscape. The image of the skull-like face of the House Poe obviously
intended to dominate as the central image of the tale, for he returns to it again and
again, placing the most extended descriptions of it at symmetrically located places in
the narrative. Eventually, the pervasive image of the psychically split face reflects the
internal landscape of the narrator himself (rather than just Usher), so that the primary
structure of the tale merges with its central image. Even when the House sinks into the
pool at the end, the motifs of the skull and face (Ushers, the Houses, that of the mind
gone mad in The Haunted Palace, and the narrators) represent the internal spiraling
of the complete subjectivity of consciousness. That is, the sinking of the House into
the reflective pool dramatizes the sinking of that rational part of the mind, which has
unsuccessfully attempted to maintain some contact with a stable structure of reality
outside the self, into the Nothingness that is without and within.
Ushers weird painting of what might be a tomb for the burial of the body of
Madeline, imaging nothing but rays of light rolling throughout a passage without
outlet, is also reflective of the death and burial of consciousness and rationality
themselves; thus it is a painting of Ushers internal void, which is objectified by the
final collapse of the House into the image of itself in the pool. The spiraling further
and further inward leads us to the mocking irony of the ultimate theme of
Nothingness, which is all the mind can ever truly know, if it can know anything. The
Nothingness without (in the landscape) and the Nothingness within (in the minds of
Usher and the narrator) are nothing less than mirror images or doubles reflecting the
theme of Nothingness in the tale. And the collapse of the universe of Roderick Usher
includes the double collapse of his mind along with the narrators productive of an
overall structure of collapse mirroring the pattern of the universe itself, as expressed
in Eureka (4).

That Ushers mind disintegrates as the tale progresses is obvious. Both Usher and the
narrator comment variously on the matter. The inciting event, in fact, is Ushers
written appeal to the narrator to preserve him from the final collapse of his mind.
Moreover, as mentioned, a major concern in the tale is the mechanism of fear itself,
which has perversely operated on Roderick Usher before the narrator arrives, and
which operates on the narrator through Usher afterwards, so that we apprehend the
basic dramatic action of the tale as psychological the presentation of the
progressive hallucination of the two protagonists. In the supernaturally charged
atmosphere of the first level of the story, the narrator seems to serve as a corroborating
witness to the actual return of Madeline, and to the strange, simultaneous deaths of
the Ushers and of their House. But Poe meticulously, from the opening paragraph
through to the last, details the development [page 18:] of the narrators initial
uneasiness into a frenzy of terror, engendered by and parallel to Ushers terrors. The
tale opens with the narrators account of his lonely autumn journey through a
singularly dreary tract of country in response to a wildly importunate summons
from Usher. At nightfall, as the melancholy House of Usher comes into view, the
narrator feels a sense of insufferable gloom pervading his spirit. He pauses to look
at the mere house, trying to account rationally for its total weird effect. But the
scene still produces in him an utter depression of soul, which I can compare to no
earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium . . .
an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart an unredeemed dreariness of
thought . . . it was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy
fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered (Works, III, 273-274). The primary
effect of the opening paragraphs, of course, is to suggest something horrible and
supernatural about the House of Usher. But, as in Poes other tales, there is no
overstepping of the real (6); the strange impression of the scene is relegated to the
fancies of the narrator. Because the narrator tries to account for the effect rationally
however, we are led, for the time being, to attribute the weirdness of the scene not to
his subjective impressions but to the scene itself.
Yet Poe uses this apparent rationality to heighten the irrational. The narrator reflects
on the possibility that there are combinations of very simple natural objects that
have the power to affect the mind, but the analysis of this power lies among
considerations beyond our depth; and at this moment, he looks down into a black
and lurid tarn, to see the reflected, remodelled, and inverted images of the gray
sedge, and the ghostly tree stems, and the vacant and eyelike windows (Works, III,
274). The effect of this vision in the pool is to produce in him a shudder even more
thrilling than before and to deepen the first singular impression. He comments to
himself that There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase of my
Superstition for why should I not so term it? served mainly to accelerate the
increase itself. Such, I have long known, is the paradoxical law of all sentiments

having terror as a basis (Works, III, 276; my italics). After this objective recognition
of an inward self-division that results in yet further subjectivity, he again lifts his eyes
to the house itself, from its image in the pool and he becomes aware of a strange
fancy growing in his mind: I had so worked upon my imagination as really to
believe that about the whole mansion and domain there hung . . . a pestilent and
mystic vapor, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued (Works, III, 276; my
italics) . But Poe then reasserts the narrators rationality: Shaking off from my spirit
what must have been a dream, I scanned more narrowly the real aspect of the
building (Works, III, 276). The paragraph that follows is organized, however, so as to
bring the real description back again to the impression the scene makes upon the
narrators fancy. Although the narrator begins his analysis of the House at the
(rational) roof, with its fine tangled web-work of fungi, his eye travels down along a
zigzag fissure to become again lost in the sullen waters of the tarn (Works, III, 277),
by now clearly emblematic of [column 2:] the subconscious mind.
The apprehensive, fanciful, superstitious, but rational narrator then goes into the
House to meet Usher, where, during the course of the next several days, he comes
increasingly under the influence of Ushers own wild superstitions. In the manner of
my friend, the narrator says, I was at once struck with an incoherence an
inconsistency. . . . He continues: To an anomalous species of terror I found him a
bounder slave. I shall perish, said he, . . . in this deplorable folly. . . . I have, indeed
no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect in terror. In this unnerved
in this pitiable condition I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive when I
must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm,
FEAR (Works, III, 280). Ushers statement of his own condition applies also to the
narrator, who struggles with the same phantasm, heightened by Ushers own
phantasms. It is Usher, for example, who remarks to the suggestible narrator that the
House is alive and has exerted a malignant influence on his mind. Later the narrator,
looking for something to read, finds that the only books in Ushers library are
accounts of strange journeys, eerie meetings, and deathwatches. Then Usher reads his
weird poem about the decay of reason (Works, III, 284-286), the single extended
metaphor of which suggests the face of the House of Usher itself, and extends the
pattern of descent from roof to basement, of rationality to irrationality, and the inverse
ascent of irrationality welling up to overwhelm the rational. Soon after the reading,
Madeline dies, and Usher and the narrator bury her in a crypt in the cellar. She has the
mockery of a faint blush of life upon her skin and a terrible lingering smile upon
her lips, phenomena that the rational narrator attributes to the peculiar ravages of
her cataleptic disorder but which Usher intimates is something less natural (Works, III,
289). Then, as Ushers behavior becomes even more distracted (a continual
tremulous quaver, as if of extreme terror, habitually characterized his utterance), the
narrator confesses to himself his own increasing apprehensiveness. Slowly, although

he tries to see in Ushers behavior the mere vagaries of madness, the narrator feels
growing in himself a vague fear that Usher has some horrible oppressive secret to
divulge (Works, III, 289). Rationally, however, the narrator acknowledges that
Ushers condition terrified . . . it infected me. I felt creeping upon me, by slow yet
uncertain degrees, the wild influences of his own fantastic yet impressive
superstitions (Works, III, 289-290).
Symmetrically, the psychological themes of the first part of the tale are exactly
repeated in the second, but with the fears of both Usher and the narrator at a higher
pitch. Shortly after Madelines burial, the narrator is unable to sleep, especially since,
as with the reflected image of the House in the tarn, he is aware of his increased
terror: an irrepressible tremor gradually pervaded my frame; and, at length, there sat
upon my very heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm (Works, III, 290).
Overpowered by an intense sentiment of horror, the narrator begins pacing
nervously; suddenly he is startled by a light footstep outside his door. But it is only
Usher. Ushers intensely agitated condition, however, is the more unnerving,
especially when he suggests that a supernatural[page 19:] and luminous vapor has
surrounded the House in spite of the rising wind without.
What is perhaps the clearest of clues to the theme of doubled and redoubled fear
comes next. The narrator in an attempt to calm Usher, reads from a volume called
The Mad Trist. The title calls attention to the basic situation in which the narrator
finds himself (7). Usher is about to keep a mad trist with Madeline, even as the
narrator has kept his mad trist with Usher. The tale, this Mad Trist, is an absurd
parody of a Medieval romance about the delusive meeting of the knight Ethelred with
a hermit who disappears and changes his form into that of a fearful dragon. The
narrators reading of The Mad Trist to Usher is interrupted by strange sounds of
creaking wood, of shrieking, and of grating metal. These sounds, beginning at the
bottom of the House and moving upward toward them, eerily (and ludicrously)
correspond with the sounds evoked in the chivalric romance. The sounds, of course,
are supposed to be the results of the cataleptic Madelines efforts to free herself from
her tomb. Usher, at least, tells the narrator that this is so and that she is, in fact, now
standing outside the door. And, in the end, the narrator sees her too: bloody, frail,
emaciated, trembling, and reeling to and fro, falling upon Usher in her now final
death agonies and bearing Usher to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he
had anticipated (Works, III, 296; my italics) . As a last emphatic psychological
detail, Poe has the narrator tell us that from that chamber and from that mansion, I
fled aghast. Thus we do not know for sure that the House splits apart and sinks into
the tarn in a lurid blaze, for the narrator has by now been revealed to be totally
untrustworthy.

Yet, even here, Poe provides one more turn of the screw: for, buried in the details
about the House, is the information that the oxygenless dungeon has been a storage
place for gunpowder or some other highly combustible substance (Works, III, 288).
Thus if the House cracks open and crumbles, rather than a necessarily supernatural
occurrence, as it seems to the hysterical narrator, it is explainable as the combustion
generated when the lightning of the storm crackles near the previously airless crypt
the inrushing electricity being conducted along the copper floor and igniting the
remnants of powder. Yet these mocking clues are not all. The miasma enshrouding the
House provides yet another, for marsh gas was then thought to
have hallucinatory effects, and Poe elsewhere mentions this very effect (8).
If the stated terrors of the narrator are not convincing enough for a complete
psychological interpretation of the supernaturally charged events, the recurrent dream
imagery and the very order of the opening paragraphs regarding the images of the
House in the pool should confirm such a reading. The dream images culminate in the
return of Madeline and in the Mad Trist. Madeline, supposedly the victim of a
cataleptic fit, is presumably not a ghost or other supernatural manifestation, even
though her appearance at Ushers door produces a ghostlike effect in the best tradition
of supernatural Gothic. We do get our Gothic thrill, even though she is not a
supernatural being. Yet, if she is not, then how, in her frail and emaciated condition,
would she be capable of breaking open the coffin, the lid of which the narrator
specifically tells us they screwed down tightly? Or of pushing open the door, of
massive iron and of such immense weight that its movement caused an unusually
sharp, grating sound, as it moved upon its hinges? (See Works, III, 288.) These
details of Madelines entombment, given us at the midpoint of the tale, underscore the
dream motif and link her dreamlike manifestation directly to the psyche of the
narrator; for Poe also makes a point of having the narrator tell us that Madelines tomb
is at great depth, immediately beneath that portion of the building in which was my
own sleeping compartment (Works, III, 288). The images of sleep, mist, water, and
descent, reNrring throughout the tale, forcibly suggest Poes focus on the
subconscious mind. The night of Madelines return, just before the reading of the
Mad Trist, the narrator cannot sleep, and a detailed description of his troubled
drowsiness is given. Neither can Usher sleep, for he is troubled by the dreamy mist
enshrouding the House. Finally, the events, the disappearances, the transformations,
and the correspondences of sounds in the tale of the Mad Trist which follows, all
have the order of a dream, and, moreover, move from the depths of the House upward
toward Usher and the narrator.
Yet the Mad Trist is made purposefully ludicrous; it reads like a parody, and even
the narrator comments on its absurdity. The correspondence of sounds, especially,
heightens the ludicrous effect. But the intruded tale of the Mad Trist also has a clear

ironic effect, it destroys the Gothic illusion. As in Ligeia, Poe intrudes an ironic
distance clearly and rather suddenly between the narrator and the reader, here calling
attention to the real psychological situation of the two protagonists engaged in their
own mad trist.
Connected with the dream images and reinforcing the suggestion of subconscious
action is the dreamlike reflection of the House of Usher in the pool and its parallel in
Ushers Arabesque face. In fact, Ushers famous face (supposedly a pen portrait of
Poes own according to biographically oriented critics), with its parallels in the
appearance of The Haunted Palace of Ushers wild poem and in the appearance of
the House itself, provides a major clue to the irony insinuated into, under, and around
the apparent Gothic surface of the story. Ushers face in a sense is the image of the
narrators own, whose mind, if not disintegrating also, is capable of slipping in an
instant into the same kind of madness or hysterical fear to which Usher is subject. The
narrator as he becomes absorbed in his superstitious reflections says that he had to
shake off from his fancy what mast have been a dream. The narrators first
impression of the House is that it is like a human face, especially with its two vacant
eye-like windows. Then he looks down into the pool, but sees only the reflection of
the face of the House. What is equally likely, of course, is that he should see imaged
there his own reflected features, since Poe is careful to point out that the narrator
wheels his horse up to the precipitous brink of the tarn and thus gazes straight down
(Works, III, 274). Then he remembers Ushers hysterical letter and mentions, along
with Ushers mental disorder, that he had been Ushers close and only friend. Next
he remembers that the peasants refer to both the House and the family as
the [page 20:] House of Usher and immediately returns to the image of the face in
the pool (Works, III, 275-276). When he looks up at the House again, he tries to
analyze its weird effect, and describes once more its prominent details, especially
the overspreading fungi hanging in a fine tangled webwork from the eaves (Works,
III, 276). The nervous narrator, conscious of his own vague terror and therefore the
more apprehensive, goes into the House to meet Usher, and his attention is focused on
the weird appearance of Ushers face. Ushers face has a generally decayed aspect like
the House itself, but especially noticeable are his large and luminous eyes and his hair
of more than web-like softness and tenuity. This tangled, weblike, silken hair,
of a wild gossamer texture, thus imagistically merges the face-like structure of the
House with Ushers face, the Arabesque expression of which the narrator cannot
connect with any idea of simple humanity (Works, III, 279). As we have seen, the
narrator grows terrified and infected with Ushers hysteria. He becomes like
Usher. In meeting Usher, he is symbolically staring into the face of his psychological
double, and when he steps through the Gothic archway of Ushers house into the
dark black-floored hall with its carved, niched, fretted architectural features, lit by
feeble gleams of encrimsoned light that barely makes its way through elaborately

trellised panes, it is clear that the narrator has stepped into the confused, subjective
world of Gothic terror and horror. Once inside, in another absurdist touch, he is taken
by a servant who ushers him into Ushers presence (Works, III, 277) . Thus, Ushers
Arabesque face and the face of the House are the same, and when the narrator gazes
into the pool, the reflected Arabesque face is merged with his own symbolically
is his own. The image of the face is then reemphasized in Ushers poem about the
attack of madness on the haunted castle.
The ghosts in the tale of Usher, then, are those of the mind. Such an analysis does not
deny the supernaturalistic surface level of the tale, nor other significant patterns such
as the incest motif, the eerie hint of vampirism, the use of abstract art to suggest
sexuality, entombment, or Nothingness, or the carefully balanced themes of order and
sentience that other critics have noted.(9) Rather, such a reading incorporates them
into its overall pattern, while wrapping a layer of dramatic irony about the whole. As
in other of Poes Gothic tales, the delusiveness of the experience is rendered in and
through the consciousness of the narrator so that we participate in his Gothic horror
while we are at the same time detached observers of it. In the image of the House as
skull or deaths-head, and the merging of the narrators face with the face of the
House which is also Ushers face in the pool, we see as so often in Poe the subtly
ironic paralleling of the narrative structure of the tale to its visual focal point. And by
having the face-like House of Usher sink into its own image, the final collapse into
that void which is both the self and the universe simultaneously is complete. This,
then, is the larger pattern of meaning generated by the overall narrative system
enveloping the other levels of narrative. And yet there is, by implication, a further
enlargement. Since it is clear that we do not know that anything the narrator has told
us is real, the whole tale and its structures may be the fabrication of the [column
2:] completely deranged mind of the narrator. Nothing at all may have happened in a
conventional sense in the outside world only in the inner world of the narrators
mind. Of this redoubled Nothingness, then, also comes Nothing. And this further
perception of the structures of Nothingness becomes our ultimate perception of the
tale as simultaneously involved and detached observers.

NOTES
(1) Such as the psychological journey, the double, the motif of the skulls, and the
theme of mental and moral collapse. Quotation is from the Signet edition (New York:
New American Library, 1950), p. 68.

(2) See Proper Evidences of Madness: American Gothic and the Interpretation of
Ligeia, ESQ, 18 (1972), No. 66 n.s., 30-49.
(3) A Key to the House of Usher, University of Toronto Quarterly, 18 (1949), 176185.
(4) See my article Unity, Death, and Nothingness Poes Romantic
Skepticism, PMLA, 85 (1970), 297-300; Richard Wilbur, Introduction to the
Laurel edition of Poes poems (New York: Dell, 1959); Patrick F. Quinn,
Poes Eureka and Emersons Nature, ESQ, No. 31 (1963), pp. 4-7.
(5) References to Poes works are to James A. Harrison, ea., The Complete Works of
Edger Allan Poe, 17 vols. (1st pub., 1902; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1965), hereafter
cited as Works. Here see III, 273-274.
(6) See Proper Evidences of Madness, pp. 42-47.
(7) See Jean Ricardou, LHisroire dans lhistoire; La Mise en abyme . . .
in Problemes du Nouveau Roman (Paris: Le Seuil 1968), pp. 171-176, for a slightly
different discussion of the Mad Trist as a synecdoche of the story itself (much as is
The Haunted Palace), and as representing a kind of pre-knowledge for the narrator
of the inevitable outcome of the main narrative. The phrase la mise en abyme comes
from heraldry and suggests the inclusion of one blazon into another. See Claude
Richard, Poe Studies in Europe: France, PN, 2 (1969), 22.
(8) See Works, XIV, 167, for Poes comment on miasmata, although he says that
injury to the public from miasmata is questionable, his comment shows his
awareness of the supposed properties of such gas, thus making it a proper device for a
fictional narrative (cf. Works, XIV, 168). See I. M. Walker The Legitimate Sources
of Terror in The Fall of the House of Usher, Modern Lang~age Review, 61 (1966),
585-592, for a discussion of this and for a lucid psychological analysis of the
dramatic action.
(9) See in particular, Maurice Beebe, The Fall of the House of
Pyncheon, Nineteenth Century Fiction, 11 (1956) 1-17, and The Universe of
Roderick Usher, Personalist, 37 (1956), 146160; Joseph Gold, Reconstrucring the
House of Usher, ESQ, No. 38 (1964), 74-76; John S. Hill, The Dual Hallucination
in The Fall of the House of Usher, Southwest Review 47 (1963), 396-402; Lyle
Kendall, The Vampire Motif in The Fall of the House of Usher, College
English, 24 (1963), 450-453; D. H. Lawrence, Chapter VI of Studies in Classic
American Literature (1st pub. 1923, rpt. New York: Viking 1964); Bruce Olson,
Poes Strategy in The Fall of the House of Usher, Modern Language Notes, 75

(1960), 556-559; Patrick F. Quinn, That Spectre in My Path, Chapter VII of The
French Face of Edgar Poe (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957);
Paul Ramsey, Jr., Poe and Modern Art: An Essay on Correspondence, College Art
Journal, 18 (1959); 210-215; E. Arthur Robinson, Order and Sentience in The [page
21:] Fall of the House of Usher, PMLA, 76 (1961), 68-81; William B. Stein, The
Twin Motif in The Fall of the House of Usher, Modern Language Notes, 75 (1960),
109-111; Allen Tate, Our Cousin Mr. Poe in Collected Essays (Denver: Alan
Swallow, 1959); Richard Wilbur, The House of Poe,Anniversary
Lectures (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1959).