A (Haunted) House is Not a Home:Antebellum Architecture, Entrapment and the Making of American Ghosts in “The Fall of the

House of Usher” and the Whitney Plantation 

By

Caryn Corliss 

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Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a B.A. with Distinction and Honors in

English and Textual Studies, Syracuse University

Spring, 2020

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Abstract

Why is the Southern gothic canon so inundated with the image of the haunted house? What is the psychic origin of this pervasive trope? In this thesis, I will attempt to make a connection between the haunted house as a trope in southern gothic literature, the history of Southern antebellum architecture, and the human rights atrocity of slavery in the American south of this same period. I have done this by selecting two texts and analyzing them in conjunction to one another. The first “text” is the Whitney Plantation in Edgard, Louisiana and the family house that remains to this day on the grounds of that plantation. Second, I have selected the literal text, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” by Edgar Allan Poe to further explore the connection between the concept of the haunted house and the details of the society at the time the story was conceived and published. This will explore the origin of these tropes of haunting, and elucidate the relationship between these tropes and the society who first imagined them.

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Executive Summary

With this thesis I will identify the psychic origin of haunted house imagery in the

Southern gothic canon by examining two texts in conjunction with one another. The first “text”

is Whitney Plantation, a former working plantation of the antebellum era that, since 2014, has

been a museum dedicated to telling the stories of the people who were at one time enslaved

there. My second text is Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The

examination of these two texts, alongside with background information regarding architectural

history of the American south in the antebellum era is key to understanding the origin of haunted

house imagery in antebellum southern gothic texts.

Pre-civil war architects in the southern United States were imitating Ancient Greek styles

to associate their new society with that of the mythicized grandeur of Ancient Greece. Builders at

the time used “false” materials in their imitations of Ancient Greek structures. For example, their

pillared houses were made of wood and painted white, rather than made of marble. In this way,

we can more clearly understand how the architecture of that time was a façade, an attempt to

create a perfect society that ultimately failed, in part, because it was based on a fantasy.

The Big House on the grounds of the Whitney Plantation is an example of the facades of

architecture of the antebellum era. It was designed to look immense, to create a sense of

grandeur. The reality is that the Big House is relatively small and not very grand.

The sculpture series that is present at Whitney Plantation represents the way in which the

plantation is haunted by the people who were once enslaved there. The series, entitled The

Children of Whitney, was created by artist Woodrow Nash based on the stories told by formerly

enslaved people prior to emancipation.

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What The Children of Whitney has in common with “The Fall of the House of Usher” is

the common theme of haunting. In “The Fall of the House of Usher” twin siblings Roderick and

Madeline Usher are entrapped by their family estate. This entrapment manifests in two different

ways, one physical, as Madeline is physically entombed beneath the house, and one

metaphorical, as Roderick’s psyche and spirit is “enchained” by the house. This story, and others

like it of the same genre, are inspired by the internalization of white guilt. As beneficiaries of

slavery in the antebellum period, white Americans internalized the fear of being enslaved

themselves. These fears manifested through horror literature, which is rife with haunted house

narratives. A haunted house, in short, could entrap anyone, regardless of race.

As with The Children of Whitney, Madeline Usher refuses to stay buried. She pries

herself out of her tomb, and haunts the house that she was buried beneath. The Children of

Whitney sculpture series works in a similar way. It, in essence, haunts the grounds of the

plantation that used to entrap them.

Madeline Usher and the children of Whitney refused to remain buried. They returned

from the dead, or the presumed dead, to haunt the spaces that once imprisoned them.

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Table of Contents

Abstract 3

Executive Summary 4

Acknowledgements 6

Thesis Body 7

1) Image of the front view of Whitney Plantation “Big House” 12

2) Image of the Children of Whitney Sculpture Series by Woodrow Nash 14

3) Image of the Big House dining room 15

4) Image of the back view of Whitney Plantation “Big House” 16

Conclusion 27

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Acknowledgements

I am so grateful to so many compassionate and intellectual spirits for the conception and

completion of this project.

For my high school English teacher, Rebecca Bowen, who introduced me to the southern gothic

canon, and for showing me the bizarre can be beautiful.

For Prof. Michael Goode, who introduced me to the idea of architecture as a means through

which to analyze a society’s priorities, schemes and dreams.

For my mentors at Syracuse University who constantly awe me with their intellect, wisdom, and

grace: My English and textual studies advisor, Sarah Harwell, who has blessed me with her

elegance, humor, and benevolence, Prof. Crystal Bartolovich, who shares with her students a

passion for the betterment of the world through education and without whom I could not have

completed this project, and Prof. Patricia Roylance, whose ingenuity and insight have been

instrumental and inspiring.

I would last like to thank Chelsea and Ada, for their remarkable thoughtfulness, open-

mindedness, and enthusiasm for the acquisition of knowledge.

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“But evil things, in robes of sorrow,

Assailed the monarch’s high estate;

(Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow

Shall dawn upon him, desolate!)

And, round about his home, the glory

That blushed and bloomed

Is but a dim-remembered story

Of the old time entombed”

- “The Haunted Palace” by Edgar Allan Poe

The work of George Bancroft was famous among nineteenth-century readers for

popularizing the idea of America as a new Eden. There is a relation between the City Upon the

Hill, The House Divided, and the new Eden. They are all metaphors created by early Americans

that capture the fantasy of what they envisioned their new country could be. They represent the

larger nation through a smaller form, the city, the house, the biblical garden – all spaces of

domesticity. A house is more than a place to eat meals and sleep at night, and there is perhaps no

better evidence of this than in southern gothic literature, where the spaces and houses that the

characters inhabit have the power to affect the way those who spend time in them act, think and

are. It is the haunted house that is perhaps the most evocative trope of horror literature, a trope

that has remained pervasive well into the twenty-first century The haunted house works as a

reflection of the society that the stories take place within. The structural failings of that society

are highlighted through the physical structural failings of the house. Details of decay and

abandonment - shaky foundation, abandoned antiques and lack of adequate interior light are all

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representative of a decaying society or an abandoned population within it. What the southern

gothic canon does is use symbols of domesticity microcosmically to identify problems of a

macrocosmic degree, and demonstrate how the decay of one is reflective of the decay of the

other. The effects that slavery continues to have on a nation that once condoned it represented

through the vehicle of a single household is an example of this.

The Whitney Plantation in Edgard, Louisiana and Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “The

Fall of the House of Usher,” when analyzed in conjunction with one another, are evidence

toward this phenomenon. Both the House of Usher and Whitney Plantation are manifestations of

antebellum ideology, one literary, one architectural, and the connection between these entities is

that they are both haunted. Both the House of Usher and the Whitney Plantation are occupied by

the ghosts of the people who once inhabited them. These ghosts, in short, are people who refuse

to remain buried, either in a physical tomb, or metaphorically, by being forgotten or ignored.

They are the ghosts of people who were hidden and ignored by the very forces that entrapped

them. They were prisoners, buried alive in a tomb under the house, as in The Fall of the House of

Usher, or chained on the grounds of the plantation, as with the real people who were once

enslaved at the Whitney Plantation.

As author and professor of American studies Teresa A. Goddu suggests in her book,

Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation, as based on her own reading of scholar and

author Kari J. Winter’s book, Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change, “Gothic novels actively

engage issues of slavery. The terror of possession, the iconography of entrapment and

imprisonment, and the familiar transgression found in the gothic novel were also present in the

slave system" (Goddu 73). Evidence of this phenomenon is encapsulated perfectly in Edgar

Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.” As the unnamed main character approaches the

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House of Usher for the first time to meet with a childhood friend, he describes the house as if it

were a physical manifestation of depression, or rather, a vessel that incites it:

There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart – an unredeemed

dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into

aught of the sublime. What was it – I paused to think – what was it that unnerved

me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble;

nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I

pondered. (Poe 231)

The narrator describes the sensation of looking upon the house as akin to “the after-dream

of the reveler upon opium- the bitter lapse into everyday life- the hideous dropping of the veil”

(Poe 231). What this represents is the horror of discovering that the fantasy that one has created

does not live up to the reality of the situation. When builders of the antebellum era created

plantation homes in the Greek revival style, they were making the decision to evoke the fantasy

of ancient Greece in their new society on uncharted land. The ultimate failure of the endeavor to

create a new ancient Greece in the southern region of the United States is analogous to Poe’s

description of looking upon the house as if coming off of an opium high. The fantasy is gone and

all that is left is the reality of the disarray of an uncared for estate.

In the book, Gothic America, Goddu discusses the way that race, especially a black/white

dichotomy prevalent in Western consciousness, is imbued in Gothic literature: “Indeed, the

gothic's 'blackness' has strong historical connections to slavery, and the rise of the gothic novel in

England (1790-1830) occurred during a period of increased debate over it” (Goddu 73). It is this

strong connection to slavery that in essence haunts the southern gothic canon. It is an inseparable

force that is intertwined in the southern gothic canon, and one that can be seen in many aspects

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of the American experience, including the nation’s relationship to architecture. In fact, the house

has always been analogous to the nation as a whole. It has, by and large, been a widely accepted

metaphor for the political and social state of the country. According to eighteenth and

nineteenth-century scholar Duncan Faherty, we can trace how both Washington and Jefferson

“understood the emergence of the Republic as informed by its connections to preexisting

[European] traditions” (Faherty 9).

         In what ways exactly can aesthetic decisions be indicative of a deeper, perhaps

conspiratorial truth? Faherty would suggest there are many ways. In fact, he would postulate that

the design choices that Washington made when building Mount Vernon can be considered

analogous to the decisions he was making for the country he would one day lead. For example,

Washington chose to have the outside of the house covered with sand-mixed paint so the house

would appear to be made of stone, when really it was made of wood. A further example of the

design choices of Mount Vernon revealing a contradictory truth is in the fact that Washington

took pains to mask the presence of slavery on his property even though he envisioned a future

free of an enslaved labor force.

Faherty has a distinct and evocative interpretation of Lincoln’s House Divided speech, in

which he famously compares the United States, in the midst of a brutal civil war, to a house:

“We may design the buildings, Lincoln suggested, but once built, they design us” (Faherty 4).

Which begs the questions: What sort of houses have we been building, why did we build them,

and what are they doing to us?

         Along the Mississippi river, between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, lies a corridor of

land stretching approximately seventy miles. There you will find the remains of what was once

the most financially prosperous region of the United States, where plantations in the Greek

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revival style still stand. These white columned homes are an homage to and an emulation of the

intellectual achievements and democratic practices of the well-studied and well mythicized

era of Ancient Greece. The grounds are home to well-kept lawns and southern live oaks, whose

branches, when given enough room to grow, will plunge toward the ground before growing

skyward, all stemming from a single trunk that can swell up to six feet in diameter. These

southern live oaks can live up to several hundred years, meaning that many were likely

flourishing 180 years ago when the United States’ slave population reached its peak of more than

three million enslaved peoples.

One such home sits upon the grounds of Whitney Plantation. Established in 1752 and

located in Edgard, Louisiana, about an hour west of New Orleans, Whitney Plantation is the

place I chose to visit last November. I chose Whitney Plantation as a focus of study because of

the way that it has been contextualized by a modern-day group of historians, historical archivists,

researchers, and artists. Since 2014, the grounds have been officially considered a museum

devoted to the history of the slavery that took place on that plantation, and sculptural homages to

the victims of slavery have been placed there.

Of all the River Roads in the United States, Louisiana’s is perhaps the most well-known

and evocative. Whitney Plantation is a 2,000 acre property along River Road, which, since the

mid nineteenth-century, has been the core zone of sugar production in the United States. When

traveling along River Road past sunset, the sugarcane refineries are lit up like a miniature

Emerald City from The Wizard of Oz. They appear like small, bustling cities, sparkling from the

adornment of a thousand golden lightbulbs. Many of the descendants of both enslaved people

and slave owners coexist in the town of Edgard today, population: 2,637.

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  In December of 2014, Whitney Plantation opened its doors to the public as a museum

with an exclusive focus on the lives of the people who were once enslaved there. In November of

2019 I made the seven-hour drive from Dallas, Texas to visit the plantation for myself. Before

the tour began, the tour guide emphasized that respect was a requirement of attending the one

hour and thirty minute walking tour of the grounds.

“We do not know who has been buried beneath the ground we stand on,” she began. “For

all we know, we are walking across unmarked graves.”

The tour began in the plantation chapel, moved along to the slave quarters and unattached

kitchen, and ended in the main house, or Big House, which was constructed in 1803, the same

year as the Louisiana Purchase. It was built in the French-creole style, with large, unornamented

white pillars that tapered toward the second floor, and two front double doors. The walkway up

to the big house is long and framed by an archway of southern live oak branches dripping with

grey Spanish moss.

The Big House is one of the only places on the property bereft of the Children of

Whitney, a sculpture series created by Ohio-based artist Woodrow Nash. The series was based

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Whitney Plantation Big House, Front View (2019)

on stories collected in the 1930s as part of President Woodrow Wilson’s Federal Writers Project,

an agency that aimed to record the histories and experiences of Americans. One of the sculptures

in this series, a lone ceramic statue of a boy, hands loosely in the pockets of oxidized coveralls,

stands at the end of the walkway. His eyes are covered in the shadows made by the rim of his

straw hat. He watches as you approach the Big House. You wonder what he sees when he looks

at it. What he sees in the people who have come to visit it.

The tour begins in the chapel. It is a white paneled building with a honey-colored interior.

This is where most of the Children of Whitney are congregated. As you enter the chapel two

children sit, with hands in their laps, on top of a sun-faded carmine-colored pew cushion. They

sit in the back, by the door, and are one of the first sights that visitors of the chapel lay their eyes

upon.

Seen sitting in small groups in a circle on the golden stained floorboards of the chapel or

standing alone amongst the pews are more children. They wear ill-fitting denim or linen, too big

hats, and nothing on their feet. They appear to be sun damaged, each a unique coloring of ghostly

turquoise, rusted orange, and brown. The sculptures were rendered in the image of the men and

women who lived within and beyond the era of legalized slavery in the United States. Those men

and women told their stories of living as enslaved children as part of the FWP initiative to record

the stories of once enslaved people, seventy-five years after emancipation. Nash based the

Children of Whitney upon the men and women who shared their stories as the children they were

in 1865.

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Whitney Plantation is, in effect, haunted by the children who once lived there. Their

images exist on the porch of a slave quarters cabin behind the Big House next to a banana tree.

The Children of Whitney ask questions. They watch as you, for a little more than an hour, peer

into the world that they were born and raised in. They are omnipresent. They ask you to see the

grounds as they see them. The plantation is essentially haunted by the children. The sculptures

made in their image is only a reminder of the real people who once lived at Whitney Plantation.

The sculptures serve of a visualization of the ghosts that haunt the grounds.

         The iconography of the southern plantation house is pervasive in the southern American

consciousness. The expansive, cream-colored homes with Grecian pillars and sweeping porches

framed by an archway of gnarled, sturdy branches are often host to grand, expensive events such

as weddings. The grandeur of the iconography, however, does not always match the reality of

these homes. The first floor of the Big House consists mainly of a dining room, a bare unadorned

room with ochre colored tiles and beige walls. There were two double doors on each side of the

dining room, which were left open, which allowed for a cool and gentle airflow to pass

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The Children of Whitney by Woodrow Nash (2019)

throughout the room. Without any sort of fan or air conditioning it was exceptionally cool even

under the warm Louisiana sun.

         There were three small rooms off the sides of the dining room, two on one side and one

on the other. These rooms, too, were mostly bare, decorated only with large ceramic pots, an

unornamented writing desk and a plain wooden table which was covered with a white linen

tablecloth, all curatorial choices made to emphasize the perspective of the enslaved children who

served there. A faux yellow bundt cake covered with plastic lemons sat on a ceramic platter,

while another white frosted cake sat on the main dining table. The house was strikingly small,

almost like an inverse of the magical houses in the Harry Potter universe which have more room

on the inside than would appear on the outside. You would not expect the Big House to be so

small.

         The back of the house is notably less grand than the front. Shutters hang in a somewhat

lopsided fashion from the upper floors. The white paneling has the thinnest layer of dirt smudged

into the white paint, and two more massive, oblong ceramic pots sit on the brick back porch.

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Big House, dining room (2019)

        

“We are in the swamplands now,” warned our tour guide to the group, consisting of tourists from

as far away as Australia and the United Kingdom; “Be careful of water moccasins and

alligators.”

         It was late November, but the sun was shining and soon all the participants were shedding

their windbreakers and putting on their sunglasses. It is hard to imagine that a place so sunny

would be haunted by ghosts, but the grounds are haunted in their own way, by the ghosts of the

children who lived to see a world in which the United States condoned slavery one day, and the

next day, did not.

In Courtney L. Novosat’s doctoral dissertation, Spectacular Struggles: Utopian

Whiteness, Black Resistance, and the National Imaginary in Nineteenth-Century America,

Novosat argues that the rhetoric of Utopia emerged from a history of envisioning the "New

World" as Utopia: "Thomas More's Utopia inspired works thereafter to mimic its interrogation of

national policies and governance through the imaginary of a more ideal nation elsewhere

arranged otherwise" (Novosat 27). Further, she mentions that writers of the time, Poe and

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Whitney Plantation, Big House, Back View (2019)

Hawthorne, wrote of their era's racial anxiety: "by situating Poe's and Hawthorne's skeptical

utopias as an alternative starting point for historiography we highlight the centrality of white

male anxiety” (Novosat 27).

 According to Mills Lane, author of Architecture of the Old South, “[the] full flowering of

the Greek Revival coincided with the flood of settlers and slaves across the southern frontier”

(Lane 8). The United States has a unique relationship with architecture based on the fact of its

relative new-ness, only having officially become a country in the late eighteenth century. Unlike

long-established cities of the “old world” the “new world” was unique in that its architecture was

designed in conjunction with the political ideologies that were developing at that time.

Some of the United States’ most famous buildings, in particular those built by the federal

government, the Capitol Building, the White House, etc., were constructed in the Greek revival

style. This style is recognizable by its symmetry and simplicity. The consciousness of a country

can be seen in the way that country chooses to design its buildings. The era that these styles

evoke says a lot about what era that country finds the most admirable, which era they want to

emulate. When we see a lot of Greek revival styles in the early United States, we can turn toward

a mythicization of Ancient Greece to determine what the builders of the country were attempting

to create for themselves in this “new” land, for example, democracy, philosophy, and medicine.

This attempt to preserve the mythology of Ancient Greece, an era that was used as

evidence for the pseudoscientific ideology of white supremacy, is an integral element that is

threaded throughout the entirety of the narrative of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of

Usher,” a short horror story published for the first time in 1839 in Burton’s Gentlemen’s

Magazine.

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        Upon staying at the House of Usher, the narrator discovers that his childhood friend,

Roderick, has a twin sister, Madeline, who is very ill. Madeline’s symbolism in the story is

fundamentally reflective. First, she is the psychic flip side to Roderick, she serves as a double or

parallel to his character. Secondly, the entrapment of both siblings represents a psychic flip side

to the trauma of slavery. The siblings, and their respective entrapments within the house, both in

a figurative and literal sense, represent white guilt. Scholar Darrel Abel wrote of the Usher

siblings:

His sister Madeline does not relieve his isolation...she intensifies it, for they are

twins whose 'striking similitude' and 'sympathies' of a scarcely intelligible nature'

eliminate that margin of difference which is necessary to social relationships

between persons. They are not two persons, but one consciousness in two bodies,

each mirroring the other, intensifying the introversion of the family character.

(Abel 35)

White people of the United States, no matter what region of the nation they resided in,

were beneficiaries of slavery. White Americans of the antebellum era were bystanders to one of

the greatest atrocities of modern human history, and, while they justified this atrocity in any

number of pseudoscientific ways (phrenology, for example) they still knew that slavery was

wrong, whether or not they acknowledged that fact. The gothic trope of entrapment is a direct

result of this. It is a manifestation of white guilt and white fear, a distortion of their own guilt of

entrapping and enslaving others.

Madeline is an exceptionally important figure in the text. She is described as Roderick’s

tenderly beloved sister, “his sole companion for long years, his last and only relative on earth.

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‘Her decease,’ he said, with a bitterness which I can never forget, ‘would leave him (him, the

hopeless and the frail) the last of the ancient race of Usher,” (Pg. 236)

The racial anxiety present in the time and place of this story’s publication is evident in

this line. In this text, race can refer to many things simultaneously. As modern readers, we

understand that the entire concept of a race of people is at best a great oversimplification and at

worse a dangerous inaccuracy. In this context, however, race can denote numerous things. It

could be referring to a group of people who are categorized based on similar physical

characteristics or a common language. It could also refer to a particular family lineage, the

lineage of the Ushers, of which Roderick and Madeline are all that remains. This makes the

Ushers their own racial entity, and what’s at stake in the story is more than a manifestation of

white guilt; it is a commentary on a white race. The connotations of this are numerous. It reveals

fears of the white population of the United States that go beyond their fear of becoming the

enslaved race; it reveals a fear of non-existence. Just in the way that the house is decaying and

will eventually fall into the tarn, it reveals that white Americans of the antebellum era feared

eventually succumbing to extinction as a race, falling into the metaphorical tarn.

The House of Usher, as a building, is notably detached from any sort of architectural,

historical realism. The house is described as incredibly old, built in a gothic style and already

falling to decay after being lived in by the Usher family for many generations. The real history of

American architecture, however, is inconducive to this facet of the story. There is not a history of

American architecture that goes back farther than the Fairbanks House, a timber-framed

domestic space constructed by Puritan settler Jonathan Fairbanks beginning in 1637. That house,

unornate, made of dark timber, exemplifies the prevalent architectural design in the United States

of that era. Its foremost purpose was protection. Its style was not indicative of anything because

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it was not crafted in the tradition of houses or manors that came before it; it was the first of its

kind: New England Colonial. So, while there are ample descriptions of the House of Usher as it

pertains to the atmosphere that it conjures for those that walk through it – the decay of the outer

walls, the cracks in the façade, and the darkness within its rooms – it is notably lacking in any

description of the architectural layout of the building. It would be impossible, in fact, for an artist

to render a blueprint of the House of Usher with any accuracy, as the layout of the house is never

specified, a feature that is not uncommon in the gothic genre.

Ultimately the house is meant to impress upon the readers a sense that it is extremely old,

with an incredibly storied history. It is meant to bring to mind the likes of Lacock Abbey, an

abbey in Wiltshire, England that was built in the thirteenth century, well known for its medieval

parapets and monastic cloisters. The description of the House of Usher brings to mind an age and

a history that simply didn’t exist in the early to mid-nineteenth century in the United States. It is

not representative of any sort of realism. The house and its decay, in its time and place is one big

anachronism, one large spectral relic that transported itself into a time and place in which it does

not belong, not unlike a ghost. The United States’ architecture, from the outset, was attempting

to create a false history, a history that it didn’t have. The same way that the House of Usher is

designed in a style that was anachronistic for the United States in the early 1800s, many other

real buildings of that same time and place are anachronisms, built based on a history that the

United States has no connection to, like ancient Greece.

There is a connection, however, between Old World English culture and Southern

plantation culture. There is an idea that in the nineteenth century, southern plantation owners

were attempting to evoke a cavalier, old-world grandeur. This can be seen in their massive

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houses and enslaved workforce, similar to the feudal system that existed in Europe between the

tenth and fifteenth century.

While the layout of the house is intentionally left ambiguous, there are some descriptors

that allude to the layout of the house without organizing it too properly in the minds of the

reader. For example, the narrator describes being led through “dark and intricate passages” and

goes into great detail to describe the vast vaults beneath the house: “A small picture presented

the interior of an immensely long and rectangular vault of tunnel…Certain accessory points of

the design served well to convey the idea that this excavation lay at an exceeding depth below

the surface of the earth” (237).

The dark and intricate passageways are demonstrative of hidden motivations or truths,

realities that are tucked away and out of sight– buried that is– beneath what is visible. This

passage is indicative of the “falseness” that is often described in this paper. The very foundation

of the house, for example, is cavernous, an immense empty space on which the house stands.

This is tied intimately to the idea that southern plantation houses were built with a false

foundation, that foundation being the concept of the white Utopia that the builders were

attempting to evoke. The same way that the House of Usher was built upon an empty foundation,

the white Utopia was too. There never was a white Utopia to begin with that would lend itself to

imitation; the very concept was untrue and detached from any reality, nothing more than

convenient mythology.

The house is full of objects that serve to represent defamiliarization. The narrator speaks

of the objects scattered about in the mansion: the carved ceilings, somber tapestries, black-

colored floor and the “phantasmagoric armorial trophies”, which he testifies as being both

familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. There is a duality to the experience of the house, a de-

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familiarization of benign objects: “[The objects of the house] were but matters to which I had

been accustomed from my infancy – while I hesitated not to acknowledge how familiar was all

this – I still wondered to find how unfamiliar were the fancies which ordinary images were

stirring up” (233).

What the House of Usher does in great part is defamiliarize ordinary images. It creates a

dual consciousness in the inhabitants of the house, causing them to see things with new eyes as it

were. The sculpture series the Children of Whitney, which conditions visitors to observe the

plantation, not as twenty-first-century tourists, but as nineteenth-century slaves, works in a

similar way. The house has, from the onset of his exposure to it, been a source of disquiet for the

narrator. He describes the house as having the characteristics one might more easily associate

with a human being, as having “eye-like windows”, the gray walls and turrets having a

“physique” (235). It would be uncommon for a person to describe a house as having human-like

qualities, yet another example of seeing an ordinary thing in a new way. Haunting, often times, is

tied to defamiliarization or demonization of ordinary objects, for example, cursed or possessed

dolls or amulets. There are, in fact, many objects lying about in the house that seem to be

uncared for to such a degree it reads as alarming. This is representational of abandonment. When

valuable objects such as musical instruments, books, and furniture, all hand crafted and high-

priced for that era, are left in disarray or states of decay, there is a natural reaction of confusion

or repulsion: “Dark draperies hung upon the walls. The general furniture was profuse,

comfortless, antique and tattered. Many books and musical instruments lay scattered about, but

failed to give any vitality to the scene” (234). Rather than serving to represent luxury, as antiques

are often associated with today, they are a reminder of the antiquated condition of the house.

They serve to demonstrate that the house is not entirely in the present. It is in many ways stuck in

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the past, perhaps because it is trying to preserve the past, or because it does not have the capacity

to join the present.

What all of this decay points to, ultimately, is the possibility for haunting. The house is

decaying because it is old, it has history, and haunted houses are never newly built. The decay is

indicative of its capacity to be haunted, a place where ghosts reside.

The initial description of the house of Usher is one that is deeply concerned with its

decay. It is a building of great status and grandeur that has since fallen from its previous prestige

through abandonment:

Its principal feature seemed to be that of an excessive antiquity. The

discoloration of ages had been great…Perhaps the eye of a scrutinizing observer

might have discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the

roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction,

until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn. (233)

The socio-economic status of the Usher family has clearly decayed itself as they can no

longer afford the upkeep of such a large estate. This is represented by, among other things, the

single fissure that extends from the roof line to the very foundation of the house. It is a small

fissure, barely perceptible, but it leads to the eventual structural failing of the entire house. The

cracks in the façade, in short, are indicative of greater un-ignorable truths that, even if they

appear to be minute, can cause the destruction of an entire structure.

Additionally, the rooms are described as being inconducive to adequate lighting. The

studio where the narrator meets with Roderick after so many years apart is a perfect example of

this: “Feeble gleams of encrimsoned light made their way through the trellised panes, and served

to render sufficiently distinct the more prominent objects around; the eye, however, struggled in

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vain to reach the remoter angles of the chamber, or the recesses of the vaulted and fretted

ceiling” (234).

This lack of light in the outer reaches of the room is demonstrative of the darker, hidden

realities of the architecture of the time, for example, the aforementioned Mount Vernon which

was financed by slave labor, that took pains to conceal the slave quarters. The detail of the

windows in the studio is another important aspect to consider. They are described as being “…at

so vast a distance from the black oaken floor as to be altogether inaccessible from within,” (234).

This is further textual evidence supporting the notion that the light is representational of the

truth. The windows are tall and slanted, and unreachable from inside the house. When you are

inside the house the windows are too high to reach, and you cannot open them. Only when you

are outside of the house is the darkness within made evident by the light on the other side of the

walls. The inaccessible windows are yet another example of the way the House of Usher entraps

the people who live inside of it.

The House of Usher is a building that entraps those who live in it. The unnamed narrator

has come to visit his boyhood friend who has requested his presence to help him heal from a

mysterious and ambiguous malady which is determined, by the narrator, to be nothing more than

a severe case of hypochondria. Roderick is described as having difficulty eating, listening to

music, feeling the texture of particular fabrics. His malady, in short, is a state of hypersensitivity,

a state which causes in him aversions to the most benign of stimuli. The narrator readily

correlates this state with the house of Usher itself, the place of residence that Roderick has

occupied since childhood:

He was enchained by certain superstitious impressions in regard to the

dwelling which he tenanted, and whence, for many years, he had never ventured

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forth …his family mansion had, by dint of long sufferance, he said, obtained over

his spirit- an effect which the physique of the gray walls and turrets, and of the

dim tarn into which they all looked down, had, at length, brought upon the morale

of his existence.” (235)

It is clear that the narrator understands that the sickness of Roderick, which he still

determines to be hypochondria, is in large part a direct effect of living in the house. The house

figuratively “enchains” its residents. It has powers and it changes the people who live within its

walls. It brings on hypersensitivity to the mundane and an illness of both body and spirit. The

house clearly impacts Roderick’s spirit. He is more of a prisoner in his home than a resident. For

many years he had never “ventured forth” from the house, and it has severe adverse effects on

his emotional and physical being. He is entrapped by the house. The same way that Madeline,

Roderick’s double in the story, is eventually entrapped, coffined and locked away in the

underground recesses of the house, her brother is too. Roderick’s spirit is shaped by the house. It

molds his very psyche. Both Ushers are buried.

Eventually Madeline is incorrectly determined dead, and buried in a tomb beneath the

house: “ one evening, having informed me abruptly that the lady Madeline was no more,

[Roderick] stated his intention of preserving [Madeline’s] corpse for a fortnight (previously to its

final interment), in one of the numerous vaults within the main walls of the building” (240).

Roderick’s desire to preserve his twin sister’s corpse for a fortnight is representative of the way

in which builders and architects of the antebellum era attempted in their own way to preserve the

corpse of a long dead civilization, that of ancient Greece and Rome, by constructing buildings in

the image of those found in Greece in the ninth to twelfth centuries B.C. Madeline has passed on,

or so both Roderick and the narrator believed, but Roderick refuses to fully accept the death of

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his sister. Roderick made an attempt to preserve her corporeality even when her spirit and mind

were presumed to have gone on to the afterlife. The same way that builders of the antebellum era

used false materials in their houses that were meant to evoke the grandeur of ancient Greece, this

attempt at preservation ultimately failed.

Her dead body does not only represent the “dead” civilization of ancient Greece, but it

also represents the mythicization of ancient Greece that is often cited as evidence to support the

false ideology of white supremacy. Europeans of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would

often focus on the accomplishments of the white Greek civilization, while ignoring equally

advanced developments of other non-white civilizations of the same time period. Madeline’s

spirit or mind, for example, has gone on, and when she is presumed dead, all that is presumably

left of her is her body. Her personhood, in essence, has left. What she meant to Roderick, what

she stood for as a figure in his life and as a twin sister was no longer tangible. It was made

intangible with her passing. But Roderick refused to fully acknowledge this and instead

attempted to keep her spirit, mind, and symbolism in his life by keeping her in the walls of his

house. This is analogous to the false materials that builders and architects of the antebellum era

were using to construct their Greek revival homes: wood painted white to look like stone, rather

than actual stone. In both cases, the attempt at preservation fails. The South cannot remain the

most financially prosperous region of the United States. It eventually succumbs to great financial

hardship overall as a region and Madeline does not stay buried. Just as the impact of the great

trauma of slavery continues to haunt the entire United States, the country that once condoned

such an atrocity, the attempt to bury Madeline was not successful. In fact, in his attempt to

preserve her, Roderick essentially turns his dear twin sister into a ghost, and she, in effect, haunts

the house that they both used to reside in side by side as living corporeal entities. Roderick, in

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essence, strips his sister of her corporeality by mistakenly interpreting her ill and sleeping body

as deceased.

         White Americans were the beneficiaries of slavery. Whether they were from the North or

the South, and whether or not they were slave owners, all white Americans of the nineteenth-

century benefited from the impact slavery had on the national economy. White people of that era,

in witnessing the trauma of slavery, internalized the trauma as their own fears of entrapment, of a

complete lack of autonomy. They internalized the fear, synthesized the fear of the trauma of

being enslaved into a context that would apply to them. White people, essentially, could still be

“touched” by the supernatural, by ghosts and by haunted houses. The inundation of haunted

house narratives was a manifestation of the fear of being enslaved, the fear of being captured or

acted upon in traumatic ways without power or autonomy to resist.

         Madeline’s undead burial is representative of the fear of being enslaved, of being stripped

of one’s autonomy, of being imprisoned, and there are particular patterns that emerge of people

who are imprisoned in traumatic ways. The same way the Children of Whitney haunt the grounds

on which they were trapped, Madeline began to haunt the house in which she was trapped. In

many ways, that which is buried comes out in the end. The truth, if buried will turn into a

phantom of that truth. The Greek revival houses are false. The grandeur of the Big House on

Whitney Plantation is false. The truth is seen in the sculptures that are speckled across the

grounds. The truth comes out as ghosts. The wood used to build the big houses on the sugar

plantations was a “false” material. The wood is what is being ignored. The horrific reality of

slavery is being ignored. Madeline’s death is being ignored. What is ignored becomes a ghost.

What “The Fall of the House of Usher” supplies for us is an opportunity to understand the

traumas of a nation through the trauma of a household. Antebellum architecture is a means for

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modern critics to understand the way that Americans of that era wanted to create a Utopia

through their invocation of a romanticized past. An attempt to preserve this past is analogous to

the way that Roderick Usher puts off burying his sister for a fortnight. He is attempting to

preserve something that is already lost. Further, when Roderick eventually does bury Madeline,

the place of burial is underneath the House of Usher. This is analogous with the way that

architects of the antebellum era merged their fantasies of the new nation they were building with

the antiquated fantasy of ancient Greece, and their attempt to preserve this fantasy, and the

failure to do so.

It is clear that many of the horror tropes found in southern gothic literature are based in

great part on white anxiety and black trauma. Gothic tropes are therefore an apt vehicle through

which to understand the traumas of a nation, for what we fear, even without conscious

recognition of this fear, will eventually make itself known. Woodrow Nash knew that the

children of Whitney needed to be remembered by future visitors of Whitney Plantation, so he

created his sculpture series as an act of defiance against their “burial.” Madeline was buried alive

by her brother within the walls of their childhood home, but she returns from the walls, and from

the presumed dead to have her revenge. In other words, you cannot keep buried that which

chooses to rise.

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Bibliography

Lane, Mills. Architecture of the Old South. Beehive Press Book, 1996.  

Poe, Edgar Allan, Complete Tales and Poems. Random House Vintage Books Ed. 1975

Faherty, Duncan. Remodeling the Nation: The Architecture of American Identity, 1776-1858. University of New Hampshire Press, 2007. Ch. 1 "When Buildings Re of Durable Materials" : The  American Home and the Structural Legacies of History" and Ch. 2 "No Longer Assigned Its Ancient Use: Biloquial Architecture and the Problem of Remodeling" 

Gray, Sarah B. (2017) A Life Less Gothic: Gothic Literature, Dark Reform, and the Nineteenth-Century American Periodical Press (Doctoral Dissertation). Retrieved from ProQuest (10262141) Chapter 1: "I Trust Myself To Your Protection": Coverture, Economic Independence, and Domestic Captivity

Novosat, C. L. (2016) Spectacular Struggles: Utopian Whiteness, Black Resistance, and the National Imaginary in Nineteenth- Century America (Doctoral Dissertation). Retrieved from ProQuest (10110141) Chapter 1: "A Favoring Providence, Calling Our Institutions into Being" : Re/Historicizing the White Utopian Complex in Nineteenth - Century America AND Chapter 2: Exhibiting (In)Civility: Reframing the Eugenic Logics of the White City Beautiful and Reclaiming a Space for Black Resistance

Abel, Darrel. Poe - House of Usher. Columbus, Ohio, Charles E. Merrill Publishing Company, 1971. Chapter 2: A key to the House of Usher

Davidson, Edward H.  Poe - House of Usher. Columbus, Ohio. Charles E. Merrill Publishing Company, 1971. Chapter 11: The Tale as Allegory

Goddu, Teresa A. Gothic America: Narrative, History and Nation. New York, New York, Columbia University Press, 1997. Chapter 4: The Ghost of Race: Edgar Allan Poe and the Southern Gothic AND Chapter 6: Haunting Back: Harriet Jacobs, African - American Narrative, and the Gothic

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A (Haunted) House is Not a Home:Whitney Plantation and The Fall of the House of Usher, an Exploration of Antebellum

Architecture, Entrapment and the Making of American Ghosts

By

Caryn Corliss

Directed by: Professor Patricia Roylance

Approved___________________________ Patricia Roylance, Adviser

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___________________________ Crystal Bartolovich, Reader

Date_______________________

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