Usher’s Afterlives; or, Textual Travels with Poe

The gothic has crept into every aspect of American literary and cultural studies, from analyses of Crévecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782) to readings of Stephenie Meyer’s seemingly endless Twilight saga. Not only does the gothic have the power to convey social and cultural taboos (incest in Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 Wieland), or the brutality of tyrants to victims (slavery and rape in Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl), or the spectres of history (the ghost of Toni Morrison’s 1987 Beloved), or internal psychological traumas (doppelgangers in Poe’s “William Wilson” [1839]). The gothic also has the power to—as Teresa Goddu elegantly puts it—“haunt back” [Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1997), 128 and elsewhere]. The return of the repressed, the revenge of the unvanquished, the revenant who refuses to remain buried—all of these tropes move the U.S. gothic from internal psychological spaces and fantastic supernatural realms into the public political domains of Native land claims, restitution for slavery, and equal rights for women, gays, and lesbians. The manner in which these hauntings manifest themselves in political discourses and textual practices is extended in chronological terms by Dennis R. Perry and Carl H. Sederholm’s Poe, “The House of Usher,” and the American Gothic. Ranging from “Usher” (1839) to Stephen King’s The Shining (1973), Perry and Sederholm find in what they call Poe’s “masterpiece” [vii] a set of literary themes that traverse stylistic, generic, and temporal boundaries— exerting certain dark influences on the literary future. In addition to treating Poe’s story at length, this book provides textual interpretations of works by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Henry James, H. P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, and Stephen King, as well as such films as Psycho and Rosemary’s Baby. For readers interested in viewing these texts through the lens of “Usher,” Perry and Sederholm’s study will be a useful guide. It is important to see, as the authors insist, how Poe’s writing seeps into literary works grounded in a range of textual practices, from psychological horror and ghost stories to weird and haunting tales to uncanny narratives and even slasher films. In all of these forms, Perry and Sederholm perceive Poe as a gothic forefather, and they read