SOURCE: "'Sympathies of a Scarcely Intelligible Nature': The Brother-Sister Bond in Poe's 'Fall of the House of Usher'," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 30, No. 3, Summer, 1993, pp. 387-96.

In the following essay, May undertakes a feminist analysis of the relationship between Madeline and Roderick Usher, and its implications in Victorian society.

Matthew Arnold was in a distinct minority when, in 1853, he criticized the action of Sophocles's Antigone, saying that it "is no longer one in which it is possible that we should feel a deep interest." Arnold finds that we moderns cannot use as a model "that which is narrow in the ancients, nor that with which we can no longer sympathize." Unfortunately, he thinks, such is the case with Antigone, "which turns on the conflict between a heroine's duty to her brother's corpse and that to the laws of her country." Arnold's condemnation is uncharacteristic—both of...