The Interpretation Of The Fall Of The House Of Usher From The Perspective Of Psychoanalysis

According to psychoanalytical criticism, in The Fall of the House of Usher, which reveals the most about Poe's life, Poe describes a journey into the mind and the discovery of an exotic region in the mind where elements of ordinary consciousness give way to vivid, surreal images, potent emotions and destructive urges. The journey is a Gothic nightmare of his psychic disintegration, the final escape from the psychic disintegration and the re-capture of his identification as a natural man in the world of the social men and of advanced civilization, illustrating the spiritual dilemma between rationality and aesthetic taste.The whole text can be considered as the narrator's dream, in which Poe personifies the narrator as his own self, the Ushers his guise with Roderick as his consciousness and Madeline his unconsciousness.This thesis will analyze the spiritual dilemma from two aspects: the text itself as the narrator's dream and the historical background of the author Poe. Chapter 1 is the brief introduction to the author and his work The Fall of the House of Usher. Chapter 2 analyzes the psychological state of the characters in The Fall of the House of Usher, and classifies what the author reveals by describing such a story. Chapter 3, based on a survey of Poe's identity as an abandoned child of both his family and the whole society, probes into his psychology. It also discusses Poe's artistic innovation resulting from his incompatible identity of an aesthetic poet and a novelist fishing for popularity, and thus discovers the causes for the spiritual dilemma in his horror fiction. And Chapter 4 is the conclusion that The Fall of the House of Usher is not a horror fiction, it is a psychological fiction illustrating Poe's own spiritual dilemma. It is Poe's effort to integrate intellectual order into his tastes. While he exults in the freedoms of the Romantic imagination, he was also highly suspicious of it. He is extremely horrified by the meaninglessness of life, by the evil of human being, by death, and by the loneliness of life. He needs, and calls for, the orderliness of design inherited from the civilized rational society to contain that natural free imagination.By studying Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher in the psychological perspective, I no longer limit the fiction only to horror fiction. In the portrait of horror and evil in the fiction, Poe illustrates a true reflection of his spiritual world and the spiritual world of all human beings. Then it is not hard to understand Poe's artistic innovation and prominence in the world literature.