"Roderick Usher: Portrait of a Madman as an Artist"

            Gerald Garmon’s article “Roderick Usher: Portrait of a Madman as an Artist,”  (http://www.eapoe.org/pstudies/ps1970/p1972104.htm.) argues that despite the many attempts to explain Roderick’s behavior and the story “Fall of the House of Usher,” the most important aspect of Poe’s story is that Poe actually believed that all of the events within the story were plausible.  They were within his realm of understanding and Poe really believed that these events could have happened under the right circumstances.  Garmon goes on to discuss the importance of Roderick’s art in the understanding of the story.  He says “it contributes greatly to the definition of his character, pointing directly to the paradox that Usher's heredity and environment endow him with a hypersensitivity that enables him to be an artist seeking freedom and individuality but at the same time doom such endeavors to failure. The narrator describes Usher as a man intensely involved in his art.” 

Roderick’s artwork generally involves sensual themes thus exacerbating the idea that incest is a major part of the Usher twins’ lives.  Since incest has been practiced by their ancestors, it has culminated to Roderick and Madeline – the former twin experiencing extreme acuteness of the senses and the latter twin experiencing greatly reduced sentience.    Garmon explains that in an incestuous relationship, the male generally, with great gusto and lust takes the lead role, and the female takes on a passive, consenting position.  Roderick and Madeline both play into these roles.  By not producing offspring, Madeline does not take on the role of continuing the destruction of the family and by doing so falls out of her passive, consenting role.  Garmon says “deterioration of the ability to act the roles of the male and the female become nearer and nearer to each other. When at last the male is no longer able to exert his will, he has lost his most consistent male characteristic. Now, in a stunning Gothic twist, the House takes on that role.”  Poe uses the house to take on the role of the Usher family’s destructor.   The male generally propagates his own personality in and name.  Roderick is unable to properly do this and knowing this, the crack the narrator views in the house upon his arrival was probably established upon Roderick’s birth – symbolizing the ultimate end of the Usher line.  “The House has taken on the dominant, aggressive, male role and wills its own destruction with that of the last of the Ushers.”

Why Roderick Usher calls for the narrator to come is another very interesting question that remains unanswered.  Garmon suggests that his invitation to the narrator was simply a stretch out for individuality.  Since he was essentially imprisoned in the house, Roderick strives for individuality and freedom in any way he can reach it.  Roderick uses art as a means of expression.  Frankly, it comes across that art is his ONLY way of expressing himself.  “. Those paintings which the narrator describes as "pure abstractions" seem intended to paint the horror of annihilation which the House poses, but which Roderick cognitively understands only vaguely. The one painting the narrator is capable of recalling in sufficient detail to describe in words has a grim and rather pointed meaning.”  Roderick’s paintings portray his sadness and emotion – his feelings of imprisonment and ultimate horror. 

One of the paintings, which the narrator describes in great detail, ultimately portrays the tomb of Madeline.  Though the narrator sees it beforehand, he does not recognize the tomb when he sees it.  Garmon says, “This painting, seen as an attempt to communicate with the narrator, suggests that Roderick very likely doubts his own sanity and is trying to use the narrator for a standard of rational thinking.”  Roderick’s second attempt at expressing his fears to the narrator was in “The Haunted Palace.”  This attempt proves more fruitful than the previous attempt, yet, as Garmon says, the narrator misses the main gist.  He “misses the point that the song describes Roderick's fears of going insane rather than a present reality.”  Just after this, Roderick expresses the idea that the House is a sentient being to the narrator yet again, the narrator just regards these ideas as those of a madman.

Roderick’s only hope in achieving his own individuality is by breaking free of both Madeline and the House.  Garmon says “The House, Madeline and his ancestry have fixed the limits of his individuality. Only in breaking these limiting factors can Roderick hope to gain his freedom as a man and an artist.”  His first step towards becoming his own man involves a separation from his sister.  He attempts to accomplish this by inviting in an outsider (the narrator) and by avoiding his sister.  Throughout the story, the narrator says he does not see very much of Madeline Usher.  Roderick fears he is set to die alongside Madeline yet Garmon supposes that with her death prior to his own, Roderick saw a gleam of hope that he had in fact achieved his own freedom.  There is much speculation over whether or not Roderick “willed” Madeline’s death or whether or not he truly believed her dead when she fell into her cataleptic state.  Nevertheless, she is entombed where nobody can examine her body.  The reader soon learns, that Madeline is not dead.  “The House, in one tremendous display of will, tears open the coffin--perhaps in the shifting of the foundations which a few minutes later will cause the House to fall… Thus is Roderick destroyed by his fatal flaw: the very quality of his nature that makes him an artist: his extreme sensitivity, which simultaneously makes him long for freedom and yet makes him incapable of ever achieving it. The House of his heredity claims him for its own.” 


Roderick Usher is essentially destroyed by his yearning for freedom.  Garmon shows this throughout “Roderick Usher: Portrait of a Madman as an Artist.”  Both Madeline, and the House in which they are imprisoned hinder Roderick’s individuality and freedom and consequently lead to his ultimate demise.