SOURCE: "The Journey from Reason to Madness: Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Fall of the House of Usher,'" Essays in Arts and Sciences, Vol. XIV, May, 1985, pp. 23-31.

In the following essay, Engel argues that in "The Fall of the House of Usher, " Edgar Allan Poe uses language and imagery relating to enclosure as a means of tracing the journey of the narrator from reason to insanity.

In an essay some years ago, David Hirsch remarked that in many of Poe's tales houses were symbols of the mind, and in "The Fall of the House of Usher," in particular, Roderick's "strangely furnished chamber is symbolic of his strangely furnished mind."¹ Hirsch noted how Poe's language expressed "a modern sense of alienation and disintegration."² This fact, among others, has, no doubt, made "Usher" extremely popular not only among critics and scholars of Poe but among students, especially college students...