SOURCE: “Explanation in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 23, No. 4, Fall, 1986, pp. 419-28.

In the following essay, Voloshin examines “The Fall of the House of Usher” as a unique variation of the gothic genre of short fiction that blends natural, preternatural, and supernatural elements to create an unusually haunting effect.

I shall argue here that in his masterwork, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Poe produces a unique turn to the possibilities the gothic genre had developed for explaining its mysteries. While mysterious and frightening appearances in gothic fiction exist partly and sometimes largely for their shock value, they are also expressive of the epistemological dilemmas of an enlightened age. Beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century, gothic fiction opened out what was problematic in the epistemological component of the enlightened bourgeois order. This epistemology was given its fullest...