Abstract
At the opening of Poe's story, Fall of the House of Usher, the narrator encounters a lugubrious double of Roderick Usher in the form of his house. The vacant and eye-like windows are remarked upon twice; the parallel is reinforced by the connection between the minute fungi growing in a web-work across the eaves and Roderick's web-like hair, grown all unheeded, and even between the moulded chin and the moldy bricks. The mutual interp?n?tra? tion of spirit and matter in Poe's prose drags spirit into the tarn of signifying matter, confines the loftiness of reason in w7hat eventually appears, in Roderick's painting, as a sealed underground vault. The passage between body and mind in the figure of the house allows the commingling of the inorganic and the organic, of death and life. If the body is the temple of the spirit, it is also its casket and dungeon. The dome of the mind becomes the skull of the brain.
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