The Fall of the House of Usher Essay | Critical Essay #3

The Fall of the House of Usher Critical Essay #3

In the following brief essay, Shackelford comments on the relationship between Henri Fuseli's painting, The Nightmare, andPoe's story.

In "The Fall of the House of Usher," Edgar Allan Poe entices his readers to view the narrator's experiences as a dream. Many critics have noted the tale's iterative images of water, mist, sleep, and descent, connoting the subconscious, as well as the explicit verbal clues Poe provides in such passages as "I looked upon the scene before me ... with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the afterdream of the reveller upon opium..., "Shaking off from my spirit what must have been a dream ...," and ".. .Ilistened, asifinadream, to the wild improvisations of his speaking guitar," No critical attention, however, has yet been given to the significance of Poe's allusion to the eighteenth-century artist John Henry Fuseh.