SOURCE: “Poe's Gothic Sublimity: Prose Style, Painting, and Mental Boundaries in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’” in Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, Vol. 11, No. 3-4, August, 1990, pp. 353-59.

In the following essay, Brennan proposes that Poe used an ambiguous prose style in “The Fall of the House of Usher” to convey the psychotic condition of Roderick Usher's mind. Brennan also draws a parallel between the abstract-expressionism of Roderick's painting and actual nineteenth century art.

Several recent critics of Gothic fiction—notably David Morris and David Saliba—have connected this genre to such features of the sublime as obscurity and terror. For example, Morris has written that “in its excessive violations of excess sense, Gothic sublimity demonstrates the possibilities of terror in opening the mind to its hidden and irrational powers” (306). In the case of Poe's gothic short story “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the sublime's...