The imagery of the castle in Edgar Allan Poe

Introduction 
The house of the dream 
Oh! that my young life were a lasting dream! 
My spirit not awakening, till the beam 
Of an Eternity should bring the morrow. 
E. A. Poe <<Dreams>>. 
The literary space in Poe, as house, is presented as an intimate dimension: a place where time 
stops and goes back searching one’s lost identity because of a fictitious reality not respecting 
the needs of the cosmic evolution of a character. Robinson speaks of a transition from a 
material to an angelic level of existence. 
“Poe is most interested in the process of apocalyptic transformation- in the transitional 
medium that makes possible the movement from one level of material existence to another, 
from the human to the angelic. Transition: this is the focus of most of Poe’s poems, of the 
tales of metempsychosis and doubling, the mesmeric revelations, the angelic colloquies, and 
the sea-voyages. (...) Like Poe’s poetry, his tales at their best present the reader with a single 
narrative situation, which is developed not through character and event but through the 
accumulation of details and the horrific though strangely lyrical intensification of both 
environmental threats and the narrator’s sensations.”1 
The area and the character are then linked to each other. In a directly proportional way, the 
transformation of this area keeps up with the emotional evolution of characters in order to 
ensure the transition from an earthly to an angelic level, which draws: 
“A tableau atemporally intensified to the point of overload, (...) the point at which reality 
dissolves and (...) is transfigured.”2 
In Poe’s stories, houses and castles, as spaces for the reflection in whose intimacy the story 
develops and gets free from reality, allow us to arrive at the realm of fantastic invention, 
acquiring such an importance to become characters participating in the action. 
The space built in the setting is not a merely physical space, but rather a sort of echo of the 
main characters’ inner and emotional variations. Without it, characters wouldn’t have an 
adequate place for their action. The setting, together with its constitutional elements, 
transforms itself and reads, under a decorative key, all deep expectations of the characters, 
like in a mirror where cast images are distorted because they are mixed with the characters 
observing them. 
The castle, with its rooms, corridors, crypts, attics, and its alternation of low and high floors, 
corresponds to the character’s formative path. His identity stays following flights of rooms 
where tapestry is a symbolic background for their réveries, interpreting them in their most 
familiar essence, incorporating them in the carpet of the soul: 
“The soul of the apartment is the carpet. From it are deduced not only the hues but the forms 
of all objects incumbent.”3 
                                         
1
  Douglas Robinson. American Apocalypses. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1985, p. 111-112 
2
  Ibid. 
3
  E. A. Poe. “The Philosophy of Furniture” in The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings. Penguin, 
London, 
The carpet, with its arabesque wefts, draws the character’s intimate dream and develops its 
forms with the colours. The chromatic aspect in Poe is particularly painstaking; we will see, 
during the study, how some colours are repeated in various stories and which are their 
meanings. The palette of colours modifies substances: 
“Trasformare significa tingere. (…) Questa potenza trasformatrice (…) possiede tutti i colori, 
ossia tutte le potenzialità. Dopo aver valorizzato la tintura fino a renderla la vera radice della 
sostanza, fino a farle soppiantare la materia senza forma né vita, si possono studiare meglio le 
immagini delle proprietà infuse e delle forze di impregnazione. Il sogno di impregnare figura 
tra le più ambiziose réveries della volontà. Ha un solo complemento di tempo:l’eternità.”4 
Eternity, as a space where the dream develops, is linked to an existence level which is beyond 
earthly life, and all the symbols concerning this passage from reality to dream only respect the 
same sequential nature, made of countless particles repeated endlessly. The palette belongs to 
it, such as the repeated use of pointed windows, deep red glasses, lights coming from an 
uncertain point, arabesque carpets: the overall furniture are presented to the reader as the 
quintessence of the dream area. The characters’ hesitation in the description of castles, of 
rooms, of furniture complements, the doubt that always makes them think of having an 
altered perception of surrounding reality, supports this hypothesis. 
Dreamlike reality is represented by native house, the house of absolute intimacy. Bachelard 
affirms: “La casa del ricordo, la casa natale è costruita sulla cripta della casa onirica, cripta in 
cui si trovano la radice, l’affetto, la profondità, l’immersione dei sogni.”5 
In this house, time stops in front of a roundabout around which the character must turn to 
reach his own future. The roundabout describes a backward voyage, to the character’s past, 
which he is obliged to think back of. In this case, the dream allows the past to revive through 
the walls of the house, which is depicted in its colours: the strength of saturation of the house 
influences the character who, little by little, is capable to distinguish the premonitory signs of 
death. To go down into the past in fact means to rejoin birth, the symbiotic moment par 
excellence, and at the other side is death, the other essential and conclusive event of life. As in 
a circle, the character starts from the meeting point with life to arrive at the end of the 
roundabout, representing the definitive awakening in death. Poulet comments: 
“At the extremity of dream there is death. And yet at the extremity of the dream there is also 
the awakening, that is to say life. Sudden passage from death to life, or from the 
consciousness of death to the consciousness of life. (...) But this awakening is not concluded, 
and as first it places consciousness in a true moment, so thereafter it brings it into a true time. 
In other words, having recalled a person to the consciousness of his actual existence, it then 
recalls him to the consciousness of his nonactual life, that is to say his past and his future. 
Now aroused, he can escape neither the past nor the future. (...) By knowing who one has 
been, one knows who one will be, and when and how one will die.”6 
The recognition of his identity by the character awakens him from his dream, bringing him to 
present reality: the identification of reality relentlessly carries with itself the admission of the 
                                                                                                                                       
 1986, p. 415. 
4
  Gaston Bachelard. La terra e il riposo. Le immagini dell’intimità. Red Edizioni, Como, 1994, pp. 38-39. 
Original title: La Terre et le réveries du repos. Essai sur les images de l’intimité, José Corti, Paris, 1948. 
5
  Ivi, p. 93. 
6
  Georges Poulet. “Poe”, in Eric W. Carlson (ed.), The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe. Selected Crticism since 
1829. 
 The University of Michigan Press, 1966, pp. 234-235. 
existence of life and death. The propagation area of the dream interprets everything at the 
present time, so temporal shifts are fictitious. This means that the expansion area of reality, 
differently from the dreamlike one, is not suspended in time, but based on it. The character, 
when he perceives reality and in order to make the transfer of the dream into space, is then 
obliged to create adequate locations. 
During the study, we will realize that settings are never in a well determined space: 
information is reduced to some hints to a deserted land of England or to some castles in 
unknown regions and they underline the allusion (suggested by the character or by the 
narrator) that giving a precise physical or temporal place could be a limit for the story. A limit 
having its reason because the story doesn’t want to be conditioned by geographical boundaries 
and, belonging to the category of dream, cannot show the truthfulness of its representative 
images but as psychic experiences: 
“Gli elementi che compongono il sogno non sono affatto semplici rappresentazioni, ma vere e 
proprie esperienze psichiche, come quelle che si effettuano mediante i sensi durante la veglia. 
Mentre nello stato vigile la psiche rappresenta e pensa per immagini verbali e per mezzo del 
linguaggio, nel sogno pensa e rappresenta per autentiche immagini sensoriali. Nel sogno vi è 
inoltre una coscienza dello spazio, in quanto sensazioni e immagini vengono situate, come 
nella veglia, in uno spazio esterno. (…) Se tuttavia (la psiche) sbaglia, ciò dipende dal fatto che 
nel sonno le viene a mancare il solo criterio (la legge di causalità) che può permetterle di 
discernere la provenienza esterna o interna delle percezioni sensoriali. Essa non può sottoporre 
le immagini alle sole verifiche che ne indicano la realtà oggettiva.”7 
The character’s hesitation before dreamlike images depends on the missed comparison with an 
objective reality which can confirm its authenticity: they are original until the doubt whether it 
is a dream or wakefulness remains in the dreaming subject, that is to say until he awakes. 
“Dream” for Poe is a recurrent word, both in the stories and in the poems: there are at least 
four poems (“Dream”, “A Dream Within a Dream”, “ Dream-Land” and “Dreams”) whose title 
speaks of dreams and whose theme is life as a dream. 
For Poe, the dream is a state which must be kept forever, because the awakening means the 
contact with a refused reality. Poe builds a house for the dream and raises it in every story to 
make his characters live in it and allow them to pass from the condition of an earthly 
unhappiness to another of upset serenity in the dream. Upset because of the small pieces of 
reality which loom as soon as a door is opened or one looks through a window or bewildered 
he observes the premonitory signs of the awakening. One remains blinded and paralysed in a 
prison that leaves no open holes for the escape, but only a great horror for the cruel law which 
imperatively bids the return to the order of reality. A law which resolves dream into death, 
which transforms the house into the dreamlike vision of a luxurious and terrifying coffin and 
the waiting for a cosmic reuniting into an apocalyptic disintegration before terminal symbiosis. 
The four stories chosen for the analysis of this theme are: “The Fall of the House of Usher”, 
“Ligeia”, “The Masque of the Red Death” and “Metzengerstein”. The adopted selection criterion 
was based above all on the presence of similar characteristics as to the presentation of the 
castle and of its external and internal overall. Considering the width of Poe’s canon, a deep and 
restricted analysis was fundamental not to miss a search which aims at showing how Poe’s 
spatial universe is linked to a visualisation of life’s dreamlike contents, and the use of symbolic 
                                         
7
  Sigmund Freud. L’interpretazione dei sogni. Bollati Boringhieri, Torino, 1988, pp. 67-68. Original title: Die 
 Traumdeutung, 1899. 
systems leading towards the discovery of a kind of metaphysics opposite to globally accepted 
differentiation codes. A kind of metaphysics which, in the story, embroiders its own subversive 
plot. Going on in the reading, you are going to notice how dreamlike space is a consequence of 
this conception which establishes the absolute supremacy of dream on real life, of definitive 
awakening in death as an association between God and infinite, in a fusion with mankind. 
 Chapter I 
The Fall of the House of Usher 
The Reflected Castle 
Amis, ne creusez pas vos chères rêveries ; 
Ne fouillez pas le sol des vos plaines fleuries. 
Victor Hugo « La pente de la rêverie ». 
The image of the castle in “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), since the very first lines, is 
presented as central for the narrative development. The story starts from the description of 
the surrounding landscape to move towards the Ushers’ estate. The narrator will afterwards 
explain how the name of the owners, Usher, in the end has also identified the house, because 
of a direct transmission of the property and the name from father to son. 
The first adjective we find referred to the house of Usher is “melancholy”8 and the narrator 
affirms to be pervaded by a "sense of insufferable gloom"9 at the first look he casts on the 
house: 
"I looked upon the scene before me -upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features 
of the domain -upon the bleak walls -upon the vacant eye-like windows -upon a few 
ranksedges -and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees -with an utter depression of soul 
which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the 
reveller upon opium -the bitter lapse into everyday life-the hideous dropping off of the veil."10 
Decadence, oppression and vacuity essentially characterize this scene, which is enriched by 
other gloomy pieces of landscape, like the tarn, which is next to the house: 
"I had so worked upon my imagination as really to believe that about the whole mansion and 
domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their immediate vicinity an 
atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the 
decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn- a pestilent and mystic vapour, dull, 
sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued."11 
At this point, it is permitted to think that the narrator is so influenced by the atmosphere of 
the place that he cannot give an objective description of the scene. Considering this fact, we 
can only go on reading, the narrator being the only point of view we can rely upon for the 
study of the story. David Ketterer writes, on this point: 
“No reassuringly tidy viewpoint is possible because the tale is <<one of the phantasmagoric 
conceptions of Poe>>. Phantasmagoric may be defined as <<a fantastic series of illusive 
images or real forms>>. Thus, the narrator is unable to distinguish between the illusive image 
in the tarn and the real form of the house. The <<armorial trophies>> in a hall are similarly 
                                         
8
  E.A. Poe "The Fall of the House of Usher" in The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings. Penguin, 
London, 1986, p. 138. 
9
  Ibid. 
10
  Ibid. 
11
  Ivi, p. 140. 
<<phantasmagoric>>; and in the first version, the influence of the furniture is said to be 
<<phantasmagoric>>.”12 
Now, let’s listen the narrator: 
"Shaking off from my spirit what must have been a dream, I scanned more narrowly the real 
aspect of the building."13 
We could think that what has been told up to now is a mere invention of the narrator, a 
dream, like he himself affirms, but if we pay attention to what follows, we will be able to notice 
that the characteristics of the house do not change, they are rather harmonious with the 
surrounding landscape, previously described: 
"Its principal feature seemed to be that of an excessive antiquity. The discoloration of ages 
had been great. Minute fungi overspread the whole exterior, hanging in a fine tangled webwork 
from the eaves. Yet all this was apart from any extraordinary dilapidation. No portion of the 
masonry had fallen; and there appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still perfect 
adaptation of parts, and the crumbling condition of the individual stones. In this there was 
much that reminded me of the specious totality of old wood-work which has rotted for long 
years in some neglected vault, with no disturbance from the breath of the external air. Beyond 
this indication of extensive decay, however, the fabric gave little token of instability. Perhaps 
the eye of a scrutinising 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."14 
The fissure which, starting from the house arrives at the tarn, foreshadows the final collapse of 
the house. The whole estate, in fact, expresses the decadence and the oppression of 
something lived outside the limits of time: the extreme antiquity of the house, its stability 
undermined by a zigzag fissure arriving at the tarn, are the foreshadowing signs of dissolution, 
a ruin which, even if foretold, takes place only a the end of the narration. 
“Though the house is crumbling slowly, it gives no outward sign of dilapidation. The form, still 
perfect in appearance, is rotten from its core; it is dissolving at all points simultaneously.”15 
The windows of the house are described as empty eyes, "eye-like windows": eyes which 
cannot see, blind, while the rest of the house is covered with mushrooms, indicating the 
devastation which hit it. The corrupted state of each stone, in opposition to the one of 
masonry, which is undamaged, confirms the decay. The narrator’s comparison between the 
house and an old wooden work left to decay in an abandoned cellar, and so not influenced by 
external air, means that the least contact with the outside could make it collapse and that the 
estate is isolated from the rest of the world and that’s why it still survives. 
As Wilbur says: “This mansion stands islanded in a stagnant lake, which serves it as a 
defensive moat. And beyond the moat lies the Usher estate, a vast barren tract having its own 
peculiar and forbidding weather and atmosphere.”16 The isolation of the house is double: first 
                                         
12
  David Ketterer. The Rationale of Deception in Poe, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge-London, 
1979, p. 193. 
13
  “The Fall of the House of Usher”, cit., p.140. 
14
  Ivi, pp.140-141. 
15
  Michael J. Hoffman. The Subversive Vision. American Romanticism in Literature. National University 
Publications, Kennikat Press, Port Washington, N.Y.-London, 1972, p. 23. 
16
  Richard Wilbur. “The House of Poe”, in Eric W. Carlson (ed.), The Recognition of Egar Allan Poe. Selected 
Criticism