Literary Criticism

This New Historicist analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Fall of the House of
Usher” was written for English 235: Critical Approaches to Literature. I
argued that looking at this short story through this particular lens makes it
appear as though Poe was using zombie motifs in his story, having
predated the popular craze by about 200 years. This paper exhibits my
abilities to write argumentatively, produce and follow a thesis statement,
and write academically about a popular subject as well as write a paper
that has few outside sources and mostly contains my own ideas.
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The Fall of the House of Humanity:

A New Historicist Criticism of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”

The media of any culture reflects the dreams, beliefs, and fears of that particular culture

at any time. Literature is said to hold a mirror to society but the same can be said about

television, cinema, or fads of an epoch. This is especially true about the hidden or suppressed

fears of American culture, especially throughout the mid-nineties to early two thousands. For

example, in the fifties many movies were about monsters interrupting unsuspecting lovers at the

quintessential “make-out point” warning away teenage sexuality and promiscuity. Similarly,

movies made about aliens and spies in the fifties and sixties spoke of a prevalent fear of

communism. In the last two decades, the supernatural and paranormal has been popular in

movies and literature with a special emphasis put on vampires and zombies in the past few years.

Because vampires have been summarily humanized, made sympathetic, and stripped of their

fright factor through characters such as Edward Cullen from the Twilight series, it can only be

assumed that zombies are more frightening in some way. But lumbering, un-sentient, brainless

creatures can’t possibly be frightening enough to be an obsession of a generation; therefore, there

has to be some other factor that accounts for this craze. This fear, like many others, was found by

Edgar Allan Poe in the middle of the eighteen hundreds initially and this is the fall of

civilization. While Edgar Allan Poe does not write about zombies and the end of humanity

outright, there is one story in particular that carries the components and themes that make up a

good zombie story. “The Fall of the House of Usher,” put simply, is the story of a sister

murdering her brother after being buried alive by him; however, under the assumption that “The

Fall of the House of Usher” is a story of a disease that turns Madeline Usher into a member of

the walking dead, Poe creates a particular discourse that parallels one that exists today, almost
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175 years later. Poe realized that what scared people was not simply an individual’s loss of

reason or grip on reality, but also a loss of civilization, something he hints at in his short story.

This fear of the fall of humanity is reflected in the fascination with zombies that the generation

of today suffers from. Although the zombie apocalypse craze seems to be a recent development

in the human experience, through the motifs of decay and self-destruction in “The Fall of the

House of Usher,” it is found that death by zombies has been feared for centuries.

According to Lois Tyson’s Critical Theory Today, a discourse is a language created by

the society of a culture in a time or place that “expresses a particular way of understanding the

human experience” (285). A discourse was being described earlier by bringing attention to the

fact that certain eras in the United States of America were wrought with suppressed fears that

were revealed through a brief look at film genres in those particular time periods. Discourse can

sound a lot like ideology, a term used in many other forms of criticism, and Tyson admits that

the words can be used interchangeably. But Tyson also clarifies that discourse specifically

“draws attention to the role of language as the vehicle of ideology” (285) and this, put simply,

means that a discourse is an ongoing conversation in a society that can be looked back on and

studied, but never reproduced as the cultural conditions of the time cannot be wholly replicated.

The discourses of a period, however, are hinted at through the media and artifacts of the day such

as novels, periodicals, and short stories.

Poe’s short stories deal with many historical discourses in his time such as mental health,

industrialization, and the gold rush, but if “The Fall of the House of Usher” is looked at in a

certain way, it could be said that he also added to (or maybe even started?) the discourse

concerning zombiism. Just perusing through synopses of Poe’s works establishes that Poe was

well-versed in things that go bump in the night and while he had a particular interest in the decay
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of the mind, “House of Usher” speaks of a more physical decay. In Poe’s time, the zombie

discourse spoke of a fear of burying loved ones alive since medicine was not a completely sure

science and illnesses sometimes induced deathlike states that could not be told apart by actual

passing.

The zombie discourse of today is somewhat different. Zombies are the product of a

disease that reanimates bodies after death and causes the primal creatures to attack and feed on

living beings. Instead of the classic zombie rising out of the grave of the past, this modern

zombie is caused by a virus, such as in AMC’s television show The Walking Dead or Max

Brooks’ novel World War Z. This discourse differs from Poe’s century’s discourse because the

generation of today fears more than just the dead rising again; they fear the dead taking over the

world and causing the collapse of all of humanity.

But what makes “The Fall of the House of Usher” a zombie tale? Just like the ‘lore’ of

vampires or werewolves, zombies have specific traits that are held as canon across all of

American pop culture, with some variations in certain works; “House of Usher” is no different.

Whether Poe intended it or not—and I maintain he did—“The Fall of the House of Usher” is a

zombie story through and through, as it holds true to zombie attributes that are true of any

zombie book, movie, or television show. George Snell, a former journalist, collects these

attributes and condenses them into five specific traits in his article, “Is Edgar Allan Poe the

Grandfather of the Modern Zombie Story?” First, zombies are mindless, unfeeling living

corpses. Madeline Usher enters Roderick’s room at the climax of the story with blood on her

dress and stands “trembling and reeling,” a characteristic lope of a mindless zombie (Poe 216).

What’s more, Poe also writes that Madeline utters a “low, moaning cry,” a signature sound of

any zombie (216). Second, zombies eat human flesh and Madeline falls “heavily inward upon the
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person of her brother and in her violent and now final death-agonies, [bears] him to the floor a

corpse” (216). Sure, Poe doesn’t say explicitly that Madeline eats her brother, but he leaves

enough room in his language to let the reader wonder what ‘falling heavily’ is and how this

action causes Roderick to die.

Third, zombies can be killed by destroying the brain or lighting them on fire. No one

directly defeats the zombies in “House of Usher,” but the house is swallowed up by a classic Poe

maelstrom and that probably defeats the zombies well-enough (216). Fourth, as mentioned

before, zombies are caused by a plague. Madeline and Roderick Usher are both ill from the same

thing and Poe writes, “the disease of the lady Madeline had long baffled the skill of her

physicians” and the symptoms include “a gradual wasting away of the person” (205). Roderick is

also described by the narrator as being wan and emaciated (205). This illness could be an

eighteenth century precursor to the accepted zombie disease of today due to its corpse-like

symptoms and being beyond the skill of physicians.

Finally, and most importantly, the zombie is usually associated with the end of

civilization and this is where Poe’s “House of Usher” really holds true to the zombie discourse of

today. Symbolically, the house has been said to represent the mind and its destruction mirrors the

destruction of Roderick Usher’s own mind. Or, the house itself has been a mirror of itself and its

destruction represents the destruction of self. In a zombie discourse, the destruction of the house

represents the destruction of civilization and this undercurrent of the fall of humanity is what

makes “The Fall of the House of Usher” frightening.

Edgar Allan Poe is exposing a real fear in “House of Usher” by relating not the collapse

into madness but the collapse of humanity in both the individual and societal sense. Zombiism

means, on a psychological level, a complete abandonment of the ego and superego and total
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takeover by the id. Humans, based on principle, fear this primal creature because the id is

something that we try to suppress every single day of our lives. A zombie apocalypse also

generally brings about the fall of humanity in the sense that it usually hits so quickly and

destructively that there is nothing left of society, culture, or government, which in a well-

structure society like the United States of America is inherently terrifying. Without society to tell

us what to do, what to like, or who to follow, what are we supposed to do? Poe figured this out

long before the first zombie thriller because the descent into madness is scary, but the fall of

civilization is unthinkably horrific; this, of course, causes the morbid fascination in our society

that we experience today.

So how does something that was written almost two hundred years ago affect a pop

cultural craze today? While there is a sense of disconnect between ourselves and our ancestors,

humans have been the same for centuries. This means that things that Poe wrote centuries ago

can still be applied to lives today. “The Fall of the House of Usher,” like many of Poe’s works,

has motifs of self-destruction and decay that are found in zombie films and literature today. This

isn’t just talking about the literal self-destruction and decay of the human body because it has a

zombie virus, but the destruction of human society by human hands. This mirroring and doubling

is found in many of Poe’s works with Roderick and Madeline having a “striking similitude” (Poe

211), or in “William Wilson” where the title character murders his doppelganger. The topic of

most zombie texts is over humans killing the zombies (and vice versa) and this can be taken as a

killing of the mirror self since the zombies themselves used to be human. This is found in

“House of Usher” when Madeline ultimately kills her brother (216). This symbolic “self”

destruction is a strong theme throughout “House of Usher” and is found in every zombie text

available.
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The human mind’s fear of the fall of structure and civilization is repeated again and

again throughout history, but not so potently than by various zombie novels, shows, and movies,

of which “The Fall of the House of Usher” is one. Reading “House of Usher” as a zombie text

allows us to believe that Edgar Allan Poe understood that while the individual being mad was a

frightening topic in itself, the world around an individual going mad was far worse. This

suppressed fear is mirrored in the perverse obsession the generation of today has with the zombie

apocalypse, because, like Poe, we like to think about and talk about what scares us the most in

some sort of “safe environment,” such as literature.

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Works Cited

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe.

Ed. G. R. Thompson. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004. 199-216. Print.

Snell, George F. “Is Edgar Allan Poe the Grandfather of the Modern Zombie Story?” Artful

Hatter. n.p. 5 May 2011. Web. 23 November 2013.

Tyson, Lois. “New Historical and Cultural Criticism.” Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly

Guide. New York: Routledge, 2006. 281-315. Print.