Journal for Poe

"The effect of Gothic fiction feeds on a pleasing sort of terror, an extension of Romantic literacy pleasures that were relatively new at the time of Walpole's novel."http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_fiction

"I know not how it was - but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable doom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible." p 1553

The opening of "The Fall of the House of Usher" is ironic in the way that it distances itself from the typical Dark Romantic tale. The narrator is saying, in effect, I know there are a lot of stories where there is a poetic sort of thrill in a creepy atmosphere like the one I am describing, but this is not one of those stories, believe me. He then goes on to employ every traditional element of the gothic story: the decaying mansion, the dark corridors and secret passages, ghosts, mysterious sounds, deep secrets, ancestral curses, a bloody demise on a stormy night under a full moon. He heightens the horror of the story by distancing himself from the mere conventions of horror. He gives his story a cloak of believability by referring to the pleasures of terrifying fiction, and preparing us for something truly horrible. He likens it to the "bitter lapse into common life" (p.1553) after an opium-induced dream, whereas in fact, of course, it is clearly nothing of the sort. This itself has become a convention of horror fiction. The narrator is one who is well-versed in the genre and acknowledges its pleasures, but is still wholly unprepared for the horrors that await him. He tries to explain away the shudder the appearance of the place induces in him, by saying that a different arrangement of the particulars of the scene would probably have a completely different effect. This way he makes us feel that we are in the hands of a rational narrator.