Sublimity In Usher

This underlying structure of sublimity is in- scribed into the very plot of “Usher”: the narrator comes from the outside world (the pre-sublime, the normal); he encounters the house, its inhabitants, and its environs (the moment of trauma); he dwells briefly in the house (which,asan objectification of Roderick’s disordered mind, embodies the sublime moment itself); then returns to the outside world (the recovery). What Poe has altered in his rendi- tion of the experience is not the form or structure of sublime experience but its character, reversing anticipated movements and frustrating our expec- tations. The narrator encounters an external ob- ject that, as Howes notes, he expects will excite his faculties; instead, he experiences precisely the opposite:
“childish” and ill-fated attempt to dispel …show more content…
Burke, as Howes points out, traces the roots of sublime experience to a human desire for self- preservation, but Roderick’s case is one for which Burkean theory cannot account. Insisting that ter- ror is necessary for the sublime, Burke also insists
(aswill Kant) that the sublime cannot exist when the agent of terror threatens the life of the ob- server. Howes has shown that the source of Rod- erick’s terror lies in the historical and socio-sexual background of Roderick and his “house,” yet these are not among the sources of terror which, both Kant and Burke agree, threaten us so directly as to obviate the sublime.’’ Clearly, there is a dimen- sion of terror beyond the pale of both Burkean and Kantian theory, and it this dimension with which Poe is most concerned.” “Usher” sets forth an experience of terror which is neither excluded by extant theories of the sublime nor accounted for by them, and in so doing, the story challenges the utility of these theories. When an aesthetics can- not cope with the experience of terror which has such consequences for Usher, what is its