Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 109leaving narrator and reader alone with their thoughts and surmises. In short, the
house of Usher is a house of mirrors. Every feature of the story is at once destabilizing
and self-reflexive, referring us back to the actual process of creative production, by its
author, and re-production, by its readers. Like so many other tales by Poe, “The Fall
of the House of Usher” stands at the beginning of a long line of Southern narratives
that incline toward narcissism and nostalgia, the movement inward and the movement
back. And it stands at the beginning, also, of an even longer line of fiction, American
and European, that disconcerts the reader by jettisoning the mundane in favor of the
magical, bare fact in favor of mysterious fantasy – and turning the literal world into a
kind of shadow play.
Poe had, perhaps, his own reasons for wanting to turn the world into shadow play,
and for associating women with death. His own mother had died when he was only
two, which was why he went to live with the Allans; and, in 1847, his young wife
Virginia died after a long, debilitating, and painful illness. Even during his more
successful periods – when, for instance, “The Raven” was published in 1844 and
became an overnight success – he was haunted by feelings of insecurity and
inadequacy, reasonless fears that nothing seemed to diminish. In his last few years he
remained prolific: in 1848 he published, among other things, a long philosophical
work, Eureka, and in 1849 he wrote one of his best-known poems, “Annabel Lee.” But
he was finding it increasingly difficult to place his work. Suffering from periodic
attacks of what he called “brain fever,” or temporary mental instability, Poe turned
for comfort to a series of relationships with women much older than himself, and to
the simpler, chemical release offered by alcohol and opium. Nothing, however,
seemed to relieve him; he attempted suicide. Then, in 1849, he disappeared in
Baltimore on a journey; he was discovered five days later, in a delirious condition and
wearing someone else’s clothes. He never recovered enough to explain what he had
been doing; he simply died four days after this. It was like one of his own stories; and,
bizarre and disconcerting though it was, it seems an appropriate end for a writer who
thrived on mystery, viewed life as a masquerade and death as a voyage into another,
truer world. As we look at the story of Poe’s forty years, we can see certain experiences
and obsessions emerging to haunt his writing and aesthetic: death and beauty,
alienation and subterfuge, loss and despair. What is perhaps more marked, however,
is not this or that particular theme but a guiding impulse: the living and the writing
show us someone who by sheer effort of will transforms everything he inhabits, who
dissolves the sights and sounds of the world just as he touches them. Poe turned
personality into performance, poetry and story into a series of ghostly gestures; in the
process, he marked out boundaries for American Romanticism and its succeeding
movements that few writers have been able, or even perhaps dared, to cross.Legends of the Old Southwest
Straddling the borders between the myth of the West and the myth of the South are
those heroes and writers who are associated with the humor and legends of the Old
Southwest. As for heroes, the notable figures here are Davy Crockett (1786–1836)GGray_c02.indd 109ray_c 02 .indd 109 8 8/1/2011 7:54:38 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 38 AM