SOURCE: “‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ and Elegiac Romance,” in Southern Literary Journal, Vol. 19, No. 1, Fall, 1986, pp. 68-78.

In the following essay, Howes presents an interpretation of “The Fall of the House of Usher” as an elegiac romance, a form of storytelling that blends romance and elegy to present the tale of a heroic figure through the eyes of a narrator embarked on a quest.

One of the central concerns in “Usher” criticism has been the relationship between Roderick and the narrator. At the poles lie treatments that deal primarily with one character or the other. Thus we find essays on Roderick as vampire, practitioner of incest or necrophile, heroic artist moving into the intense inane, or object lesson in fatalism.¹ Essays on the narrator present him as a successful or defeated representative of reason, a portrait of mental collapse, or even a heroic figure.² “Usher...