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Books Dissecting the Dark Descent The Rot Goes Deep: “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe A terrifying portrait of a nobleman driven insane by inbreeding, generational trauma, and his own refusal to leave his ancestral home… By Sam Reader | Published on May 21, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome back to Dissecting The Dark Descent, where we lovingly delve into the guts of David Hartwell’s seminal 1987 anthology story by story, and in the process, explore the underpinnings of a genre we all love. For a more in-depth introduction, here’s the intro post. There aren’t many names in American gothic literature that carry the weight of Edgar Allan Poe. A journalist and writer by trade, Poe melded an early form of pulp fiction and the preoccupations of (for his time) modern American with a deconstructive eye of his literary counterparts across the Atlantic. From this fertile imagination grew classic horror stories like “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Feather,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” works that incorporated (in a rudimentary way) both the focus on his characters’ psychology that characterized Poe’s own unique approach to gothic fiction, and issues like insufficient mental healthcare, class violence, and other social concerns. “The Fall of the House of Usher,” a gothic work published in Grotesques and Arabesques, is a terrifying portrait of a nobleman driven insane by inbreeding, generational trauma, and his own refusal to leave his ancestral home. Within the traditional gothic framework of the story, Poe also takes jabs at aristocracy, the idea of families as institution, and various conventions of gothic literature itself. On a gloomy fall day, the unnamed narrator rides to the House of Usher, the ancestral manor of his former best friend Roderick Usher and his family. The house is in disarray, a ruin afflicted by fungal rot and disrepair only matched by the mental and physical decay of its sole surviving inhabitants, Madeleine and Roderick Usher. While the narrator helps Roderick in every way possible to shake off his gloom and find his way back to health, it’s clear that the rot goes much deeper than the House itself. As the House of Usher’s darkness threatens to envelop the three of them, the narrator must escape before both the family and the house drag him down with them. The sickly environment of the Usher siblings’ home provides a feedback loop for Roderick. By the time the narrator arrives at the titular house, it’s in disturbing disarray, with the narrator even mentioning multiple times that there’s a horrifying malaise to the air. Gothic fiction relies heavily on visual cues to help cultivate its atmosphere of unease, and the environment feeding off Roderick’s advancing mental illness (and clear environmental illness, given that his sensitivities are signs of an advancing case of mold toxicity from all the fungus) exemplifies this. It’s clear that between the loss of his family, his clinging to the moldering ruin as the last vestige of his family’s memory, and the deeply toxic relationship between himself and his sister, he’s not doing well either mentally or physically. The longer he stays in that depressive loop without any kind of change, the worse things get. Eventually, it leads to him accidentally burying his sister alive, and the two of them dying as the house crumbles and falls apart around them. Within that gothic tragedy, Poe finds an unusual note of grim and deadpan humor about the situation. While there’s a supernatural air about the House and the Ushers within, everything in “The Fall of the House of Usher” has a reasonable explanation. The unnatural glow at night is swamp gas, Madeleine’s ghostly appearance is due to the fact that she’s been locked in a vault underneath the house, and the constant descriptions of the House (itself a sideswipe at the need to detail every inch of the architecture frequently found in older gothic works) foreshadow it eventually falling apart completely. The story isn’t sympathetic to Roderick, with the narrator consistently more unnerved and terrified by his former friend than anything else. The Usher family line, fallen far from whatever nobility they held in the past, is portrayed as so inbred their family tree is basically a trunk. Roderick even becomes one of the earliest depictions of the dreaded Guy Breaking Out an Acoustic Guitar as he holds the narrator hostage in order to perform his original compositions, which the narrator describes as “unnerving.” The combined effect of the empathic environment, Roderick’s numerous failings, and the deadpan way Poe pokes fun at the traditional conventions of gothic literature center the blame mainly on Roderick for being idle, privileged, and doing nothing to change his situation. He’s intellectual and clearly has a great taste for art, music, and literature but lives isolated and alienated from everyone in a moldering gothic ruin infested by fungi. In the end, it’s that stubborn refusal to change, and the narrator’s own realization that Roderick has destroyed not only himself but his sister Madeleine (and is possibly on the way to destroying the narrator), that proves to be the undoing for two-thirds of the cast, as the vengeful Madeleine dies strangling Roderick to death only for the house to collapse upon them, ending the line of Usher. Roderick, in perfect adherence to the genre conventions, ends the story in a state of terror as he realizes that Madeleine’s clawed her way out of the vault and is probably not particularly happy that her brother and sole companion buried her alive. There’s not much nobility and romance to the story, just a grotesque man forcing the narrator to paint horrid landscapes with him, listen to his bad poetry, and read depictions of historical atrocity, none of which seems to help improve his mental or physical health. “The Fall of the House of Usher” functions as a send-up of both gothic tradition and the more right-leaning conventions of genre—the doomed family cannot be saved, the dead woman who haunts the estate isn’t dead, the misogynist subtext of gothic literature is made distinctly text as Roderick would rather lock his sister away (much like the classic tropes of the madwoman in the attic and the mysteriously ill waif) than deal with her problems, the stately manor is a crumbling wreck that collapses in on itself, and the noble yet doomed scion of the cursed family is the maniac result of centuries of incest who holds his good friend emotionally hostage in a damp moldy ruin. In the end, there’s no cruel whims of fate or supernatural curses, just the narcissistic and literally toxic influence of a self-destructive noble unable to (literally) see beyond his own front door. Institution in “Fall of the House of Usher” is not upheld. It is a poisonous and ultimately fatal thing, clung to by someone for whom family name and generational property are all they have left. And now to turn it over to you. Did “The Fall of the House of Usher” successfully criticize the decadence of the upper classes through the medium of gothic literature? What story first got you started reading Poe? What’s your favorite depiction of an annoying guy forcing everybody to listen to him jam on an acoustic guitar in all of literature? Also, please join us next time for an exploration of Stephen King’s own dalliances with gothic fiction.[end-mark] The post The Rot Goes Deep: “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe appeared first on Reactor.

Colleges are considering suspensions and expulsions for students who vandalized campuses and committed violence over the past month. These consequences are entirely appropriate—and overdue. School officials in North Carolina are even reallocating more funds to campus safety. What took so long? The answer may help prevent violent riots on campuses in the future. MIT officials recently announced they were suspending “dozens” of students who forced their way back into the area of campus where students had set up encampments. School personnel had warned those encamped, then cleared the tents and set up fencing around the area, telling students not to reenter. Students proceeded to break through the fences—ignoring the warnings and destroying property. Now, school administrators have announced sanctions are coming. Events such as these have happened at schools nationwide. The incidents at MIT, UCLA, Columbia University, and elsewhere were not examples of free speech. These were violent acts showing disregard for law and campus rules. School officials should not have waited as long as they did to call law enforcement, and the rioters who were not students, faculty, or college staff should face charges. But administrators should be considering suspensions and expulsions for students involved. College personnel are partly to blame for the disruptions that universities faced over the past month. Campus riots have a long history, but in the most recent iterations of campus unrest dating back at least as far as 2015, colleges were slow to respond to students and rioters who deplatformed or shouted down professors and invited lecturers. Middlebury College in Vermont and Evergreen State College were just a few of the sites of violent shout-downs over the past decade. Students regurgitated the Marxist slogans from critical race theory and diversity, equity, and inclusion as they deplatformed speakers—and in some cases, college administrators did not punish students. Predictably, surveys over the past decade have found that students are afraid to speak their minds on campus for fear of being canceled, shouted down—or worse. Blocking someone else’s expressive rights is not a protected form of speech. Yet surveys found that some on campus approved of violence in the face of ideas with which they disagree. In response to the shout-downs at Middlebury and the like, state lawmakers around the country—Alabama, Colorado, North Carolina, Tennessee, and more—adopted provisions to reinforce the U.S. Constitution and protect free-speech rights. But with few notable exceptions, lawmakers did not include provisions that required school administrators to consider suspension or expulsion when students deplatformed a speaker or otherwise engaged in violence. The message to students was clear: You can be disruptive with minimal or no consequences. Today, however, students have pushed the bounds even further, creating so much disturbance that some schools were forced to cancel classes and graduation ceremonies because campuses were not physically safe for anyone. Lawmakers in North Carolina and Arizona were among the few who included disciplinary sanctions in provisions adopted after the outbreak of shout-downs between 2015 and the school closures caused by COVID-19. School officials should copy the University of North Carolina Board of Trustees’ latest decision to close its “diversity, equity, and inclusion” office and reallocate spending to campus safety. DEI offices promote censorship by supporting “bias response teams,” which courts have found to “chill” speech. The offices also promote racial bias in college admissions and other school functions—none of which improves school safety or the free exchange of ideas. Had school personnel acted decisively during riots over the past 10 years, consistently suspending or expelling violent students, perhaps disrupters would have had second thoughts. State lawmakers should revisit their conduct codes and require public college administrators to involve law enforcement and consider suspension or expulsion when students destroy school property, injure others, violate free-speech protections, or otherwise commit violence. Considering suspension or expulsion to counter—and perhaps prevent—violence is not new. Yale University officials recommended these consequences in the Woodward Report issued in 1974, a seminal document protecting campus speech. College educators must teach students the difference between free speech and violence. The former deserves protection. The latter should be met with consequences. Originally published by Tribune News Service. The post Let’s Put Suspension or Expulsion Back on Table for Violent College Students appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The European Parliament (EP) elections are taking place next month and, considering that the president of the European Commission (effectively, “the EU government”) and all its commissioners are confirmed by the EP, no wonder many of them are currently on a campaign trail. One is European Commission Vice President for Values and Transparency Vera Jourova, and she is toeing the line the EU has taken ahead of this election: fear mongering about misinformation, AI, and Russia. This is then used to make sure current, contested, and controversial policies remain at a minimum unchanged, and best-case scenario, from the EU bureaucrats’ point of view – ramped up. What those policies amount to is succinctly demonstrated in just one recent statement by Jourova: not only is the bloc embracing “fact-checking”, and not only is this supposed to take car2 of “misinformation” – the intent seems far more profound, and threatening to democracy : fact-checking is already influencing user behavior, bragged Jourova. “We believe our fact-checking is already influencing user behavior. We see that when people realize something is wrong with the material, they often refrain from sharing it with friends on social media,” she said. She chose to take her “Democracy Tour” to a number of EU countries that are likely believed to be the most susceptible to her message of an impending “misinformation” doom around the election (the message framed around by and large unproven allegations of misinformation campaigns). https://video.reclaimthenet.org/articles/Jourova-9.mp4 To promote current EU leadership policies, Jourova talks up all those things that have put the EU and its understanding of democracy and freedom of expression under so much scrutiny over the last years: various new regulations that allow for mass censorship and/or surveillance, and continued reliance on “fact-checkers.” So far, so good, as far as Jourova is concerned – she shared that fact-checking is managing to steer public opinion in the desired direction. “Reeducation of the population” would be another way of putting it. EU studies are quoted which reveal as many as 70 to 80 percent of people in the EU are “are aware of the problem (of misinformation.)” And it doesn’t stop there: “We believe our fact-checking is already influencing user behavior. We see that when people realize something is wrong with the material, they often refrain from sharing it with friends on social media,” the EU commissioner said, regarding what concrete effect that “awareness” is producing. But even so, Jourova and those like her are unwilling to declare victory in the “war on misinformation” – unless it actually produces their victory in the polls. “Only after the election will we be able to assess whether our measures have been effective,” said Jourova. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post EU Commission VP: “We Believe Our Fact-Checking Is Already Influencing User Behavior” appeared first on Reclaim The Net.