An essay by Alyssa Lamberti

For Prof. K. Woofter’s course entitled American Gothic

          The repression of disturbing secrets or truths, as well as the complete collapse of the self due to the resurfacing of repressed material, are common elements found in gothic literature. Stories such as Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls” incorporate both figurative and literal ruins to represent secrets and fears that have been purposely buried, which ultimately lead to the complete collapse of the characters’ sense of self. In the case of both “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Rats in the Walls,” the literal ruins are both family homes that hold a repressed truth about the protagonists’ families. These have been hidden in an attempt to destroy a vicious family cycle and stop traumatic or reprehensible events of these families’ pasts from resurfacing and happening once again. However, ruins represent the past, and the past always has a way of repeating itself. With the added pressure of having a family secret attached to that repressed past, in the case of Poe’s and Lovecraft’s works, the discovery of such a truth can lead to the ruin of the characters who are forced to face the usually traumatic and morally collapsing discoveries. 

            In both Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls,” there is both a figurative and literal use of ruins. In the end, it appears that both the figurative and literal ruins are actually connected, and seemed to work together to repress a certain hidden truth. Both stories take place in an environment that is ultimately in ruins. Since Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls” is a clear homage to Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” there are evident similarities, such as the fact that both stories take place in family mansions, within which terrible family secrets are buried.

            In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the Ushers’ family mansion represents the history of this ancient and seemingly morally degenerate family, who “[lies] in the direct line of descent” (Poe 17). While there are metaphorical uses of ruins relating to the Usher family, more specifically, Roderick Usher, who feels himself connected to the house, the narrator of the story first notices the literal ruins surrounding the House of Usher. Upon seeing the ancient mansion, the narrator states that “insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit,” (Poe 15) which is generally a feeling associated with a disturbing scene that does not seem quite right without any real justification. The narrator also asks himself: “what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher?” (Poe 16). The mansion itself does seem to be in ruins, at least in a decayed condition. It appears that “the discoloration of ages had been great,” (Poe 18) which hints to the idea that the house is quite ancient. The added details of the “minute fungi” that “overspread the whole exterior” (Poe 18) and “the crumbling condition of the individual stones” (Poe 18) suggest that the mansion has not been taken care of, and instead has been left to rot in a way that reminded the narrator of “the specious totality of old wood-work which has rotted for long years” (Poe 19).

            In Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls,” the description of the mansion, before the restoration, also suggests that it is an ancient building that represents a desolate, decaying symbol of the past. The narrator, who is a member of the de la Poer family says that at first he saw his family mansion named “Exhume Priory” as “a jumble of tottering medieval ruins covered with lichens and honeycombed with rooks’ nests” (Lovecraft 391), again hinting at an aging, decaying, and unkempt element to the building. Even when the narrator decides to restore his family home, some of the old elements remain. The narrator states, “the new parts blended perfectly with the original walls and foundations” (Lovecraft 393). They also unintentionally preserve the “ghastly array of human or semi-human bones” (Lovecraft 401) hidden in the house, which are other literal ruins. Of course, as mentioned earlier, all the physical, literal ruins seen in both stories are used to hide metaphorical family ruins in their depths.

            Family secrets are a main element in both “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Rats in the Walls.” Whether these family secrets are purposely suppressed, like Roderick Usher tries to do, or whether they are unknowingly being hidden away, like with the narrator of Lovecraft’s story, these family secrets always find a way of resurfacing out of the depths of the family’s ruins. This idea can be related to element of the Uncanny, which can be described, in part, as “the resurfacing of primitive beliefs thought to be surmounted” (Savoy 16), or more commonly by the return of the repressed.

            The resurfacing of hidden secrets is exactly what is happening in these two gothic tales. Roderick Usher is a character who comes from a family born out of incest. It is because of this deficiency that Roderick and his sister, Madeline, both suffer from illnesses that seem to have plagued the whole Usher line. Roderick’s illness is described as “an acute bodily illness – of a mental disorder which oppressed him,” (Poe 16) while Madeline’s illness is “a settled apathy, gradual wasting away of the person” (Poe 23). It seems as though Roderick and Madeline are the ruins of the family, and their illnesses are the truths of the Usher line. Although Roderick is aware of his illness and the connection it has with his family, he still tries to repress it, using Madeline to do so. When Roderick tells his friend that Madeline has died, he states “his intention of preserving her corpse for a fortnight […], in one of the numerous vaults within the main walls of the building” (Poe 29).

            The walls of House of Usher already hold all the secrets of the Usher family. Roderick decides to bury his sister in the walls, in the hopes of repressing her illness; ultimately hoping to save himself from the same illness. While in Lovecraft’s story the family secrets are hidden to protect the de la Poers’ reputation, Roderick Usher hides his secrets to save himself. It is fear that leads Roderick to bury his sister, who we discover is not actually dead: “We have put her living in the tomb!” (Poe 37). In Poe’s story, the ruins of the Usher family are alive, which makes them harder to bury, but in Lovecraft’s story, the family secrets seem to be dead and buried, at least for the time being. The de la Poer’s disgraceful family secret is hidden in the walls of the family house; walls that are “thought to be of solid limestone blocks” (Lovecraft 399). The ruins, in this case, are bones, “human bones, […] some fallen apart, but others wholly or partly articulated as skeletons,” (Lovecraft 402) and most importantly, bones “clutching other forms with cannibal intent” (Lovecraft 402).

            While the illness of the Usher family is a mental illness stemming from incest, the de la Poer family illness is more complicated, as it stands for a figurative representation of social or institutional degeneration. It is discovered that the de la Poers seem to be not only cannibals themselves, but are also housing some creatures “of the half-human drove”*insert page number* who had been eating other humans. It was a vicious cycle where human ate human, leaving the remains for the rats to chew on: “all the bones were gnawed, mostly by rats, but somewhat by others of the half-human drove” (Lovecraft 402). The ruins of this horrendous family secret were the only indications left of the cannibalistic cycle, which was only stopped by the narrator’s ancestor Walter de la Poer, who killed all the members of his family to do so. With both the Ushers and the de la Poers, the reasons for the repressions of the family secrets are not so simple.

            Ruins represent the past; they are the remains of histories long gone and hidden away. However, ruins can also be indications of collapse; collapses that in Poe’s and Lovecraft’s works are both of the self and of the thing. In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Roderick Usher ultimately fails to repress the unfortunate family illness that has plagued both him and his sister Madeline. Although he tries to bury his sister’s remains, Madeline ends up escaping from her coffin and, at the same time, allows the family illness to escape with her. When Madeline appears to her brother once again, she embodies Roderick’s fear, more specifically, she was “a victim to the terrors he had anticipated” (Poe 38). Therefore, as much as the ruins of the Usher family were able to repress family secrets, they also brought them back.

            The same happens in “The Rats in the Walls,” where the bones that the living de la Poer finds are what allow him to discover, and to manifest, his family’s cannibalistic characteristics. It is the discoveries in Poe’s and Lovecraft’s stories that later lead to the collapses of the characters and the whole family lines. The Uncanny can also be seen as a form of collapse, representing in these works the collapses of the self and of the binary notions of the past and the present. When Roderick Usher fails to bury his family’s illness, he causes the past and present to collapse in a way that forces him to relive the same traumas that his family members were forced to live. After Madeline appears to Roderick and the narrator, he hurries out of the House of Usher, due to utter fear and disbelief. Upon exiting the mansion, the narrator turns to see that “the entire orb of the satellite burst at once upon my sight – my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder” (Poe 38).

            The mighty House of Usher literally collapses at the end, leaving only fragments as a representation of the ruins of both Roderick Usher and the entire Usher family. Here, the great collapse is the end of the family disease, and the end of the family altogether. While the Usher family is wiped out, the de la Poer family rises. Upon discovering his family secrets, the final de la Poer in “The Rats in the Walls” is found “crouching in the blackness over the plump, half-eaten body of Capt. Norry’s, with my own cat leaping and tearing at my throat” (Lovecraft 404). Here, the uncanny collapse between past and present is seen again. The ruins of the de la Poer family cause the cannibalistic family traits to be awoken within the narrator. He begins to devour another human, and his cat acts as the rats, devouring what is left of him. Roderick Usher and the narrator both fall victim to repressed truths that are uncovered, and which they have no control over. They are consumed by their own family histories.

            Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls” are stories that focus on the undeniable realization that repressed secrets and truths always have a way of resurfacing. In both cases, the truths are of traumatic, degenerate family illnesses, conditions, or events. The secrets of the Usher family and the de la Poer family are buried deep within the ruins of either family home and of the remaining descendants. Roderick and Madeline Usher live in the family mansion, a mansion that has long held the secrets of their incestuous family. But while their home is the literal ruin, Roderick and Madeline are ruins as well, presenting the family illnesses that, in the end, resurface and destroy the whole Usher line. Lovecraft’s narrator from the de la Poer family unknowingly resurfaces his family’s cannibalistic secret when he rebuilds his family home. Here, the ruins uncover such a terrifying secret that the narrator awakens the cannibalistic family trait in himself. In the gothic, the past always finds a way to inhabit the present, the same way truths always have a way of resurfacing. When characters discover hidden secrets about their own families, they are forced to relive the same fates.

 

 

Works Cited

Lovecraft, H. P. “Rats in the Walls, The.” Telling Stories. Ed. Joyce Carol Oates. New York:

Norton, 1998. 389-404.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “Fall of the House of Usher, The.” The Poe Reader. Ann Arbor, MI: State        Street Press, 1996. 15-38.

Savoy, Eric. “The Rise of the American Gothic.” Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Ed.

Jerrold E. Hogle, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 167-188.