SOURCE: “Locke, Kant, and Gothic Fiction: A Further Word on the Indeterminism of Poe's ‘Usher,’” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 26, No. 4, Fall, 1989, pp. 547-60.

In the following essay, Thompson analyses “The Fall of the House of Usher” as a tale of Gothic fiction.

In her article “Explanation in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’”¹ Beverly R. Voloshin offers a “Lockean” perspective on the idea of “merging” objective and subjective in “gothic fiction” and in Poe's story in particular. Her observations about the multiplicity of merged interpretations of gothic events parallel my own in several studies she does not cite,² and in two studies she does cite.³ Therefore I was a little surprised to read that “though in the past several decades much important criticism of Romantic poetry has analyzed it as a response to the crisis in epistemology, gothic fiction is less often seen as having...