A Question of Boundaries: Romanticism, the Gothic and Decadence in Edgar Allan Poe’s

‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ and the poems of Charles Baudelaire

When considering what separates the Decadence of the fin de siècle from the Romantic ideal that
ruled for the first half of the nineteenth century, it becomes clear that it is Romanticism’s ‘fury of
frenzied action [opposed to] Decadence, with its sterile contemplation’ that mainly separates the
two movements (Praz, 1970, p. 303). This essay aims to examine how Edgar Allan Poe in ‘The Fall of
the House of Usher’ (1839) scrutinizes the Romantic tropes of nature and the Romantic conscience
through a Gothic lens, casting the landscape and mind in a symbolically degenerate disease that
works as a decadent resolution to the Romantic ideal of the ‘[artist] apart from the rest of society’
(Maxwell, 2001, p. 207). Further, it will consider how ‘the poet in whom the Romantic Muse distilled
her most subtle poisons – [Charles] Baudelaire’ engages with and develops particular Romantic ideas
within a symbolic and decadent framework in the poems “Correspondences”, “A Corpse” and “Exotic
Perfume” from Les Fleurs du mal (1857).

In the opening pages of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, we are presented with a description of a
particularly desolate landscape in a mountain range. Rather specifically, the narrator contemplates
an ‘iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart - unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading
of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime’ (Poe, 2006, p. 126). The sibilance of ‘s’
combines with the low hung clouds to oppress the readers conscience in the dominating gothic and
sublime manner that culminates in a psychological problem. The sublime was a key component to
the Romantic search for a connection with Nature and God which ‘mark[ed] the limits of reason’
(Shaw, 2006, p. 2). Edmund Burke, in his study of the sublime, noted how ‘the passion caused by the
great and sublime in nature . . . is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended . . .
the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence
reason on that object which employs it’ (2008, p. 53). Although the narrator exhibits such a state of
consciousness, ‘“the simple landscape features of the domain” before him do[es] not have the
ominous intensity to reach the full Burkean sublime’ (Cook, 2012, p. 10), the ‘depression of soul
which [the narrator] can compare to no earthly sensation’ (Poe, 2006, p. 126), is more akin to Ann
Radcliffe’s horror because of how it ‘contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates [the faculties]’ (1826,
p. 50). It is only in the climax of the tale where the narrator experiences his sublime experience:
‘Whilst I gazed, th[e] fissure rapidly widened – there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind – the
entire orb of the satellite burst at once upon my sight – my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls
rushing asunder – there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters’
(Poe, 2006, p. 144). A true ‘tour de force of Gothic fiction’ that is reminiscent of the fate of the
Castle of Otranto in the first Gothic novel by Horace Walpole (Cook, 2012, p. 5), Poe harks back in
the Gothic tradition to a period when romanticism was beginning to take off. It would appear then,
that Poe attempts to confuse the interpretation of the scene by taking what is considered the
Romantic natural sublime and, through the ‘twisted [and] convoluted’ gaze of the Gothic tradition
(Magistrale, 2001, p. 17), presenting the reader with a landscape that explores the stagnant
degeneration that would later be associated with decadent writing. Camille Paglia’s description of
how ‘nature is a decadent tree loaded with rotten fruit, a “ripe” corpse bursting its skin and dribbling
foul matter’ explains what Poe is trying to do in his tale (1991, p. 423). The visual ‘white trunks of
decayed trees’, and the ‘pestilent and mystic vapor, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-
hued’ blurs the boundaries between Romanticism, the Gothic and Decadence by using the first as a
foundation from which the second can create an effect, and the third can be used as the style (Poe,
2006, pp. 126- 128). Poe’s writing thrives off of the romantic corpse ‘upon which the decadent
sensibility feeds’ and as a result, presents us with a diseased, decadent-romantic landscape (Weir,
1995, p. xii).

The root of Poe’s reasoning behind this movement from Romanticism to Decadence cannot however
be found in nature alone, but in the connection that exists between nature and the human
conscience. In Poe’s work, ‘many of the buildings or even individual rooms may symbolize the
interior of human heads, i.e., minds’ (Fisher, 2002, p. 84), and the narrator’s descent through ‘many
dark and intricate passages in [his] progress to the studio of [Usher]’ can be interpreted as the
narrator’s metaphysical entrance into Roderick Usher’s head. Further, the ‘gradual wasting away of
[Usher]’ is in accordance with the decay of nature and the house (Poe, 2006, p. 132). The narrator
expresses how ‘Usher himself believes that the stones of his house . . . have a life and will of their
own’ (Hoffman, 1965, p. 165). An idea that, considering the ‘long undisturbed endurance of th[e
houses] arrangement’ (Poe, 2006, p. 136), and the head like descriptions of the houses exterior,
could be possible, for the house ‘collapse[s] in sympathy with [Usher’s] fall . . . suggesting that the
house is in some way alive’ (Peeples, 2002, p. 183). This undeniable connection between Usher and
his building and nature reasserts a connection between his state of health and the landscape
surrounding the House of Usher. In creating this link, Poe forms a hybrid tale consisting of Romantic
and Decadent ideals (Poe, 2006, p. 132). In Usher’s mind then the boundaries between Romanticism
and Decadence are murky and questionable, but Poe’s reason is one of clarity. It would appear that
Poe wishes to explore the effects and dangers of man cutting himself off from society, an idea
practiced by the Lake Poets, Marcell Proust and explored by Joris-Karl Huysman’s protagonist, Jean
des Esseintes. Similar to the decadent setting of À rebours (1884), there are lists of rare literary
works in Usher’s house (p. 136) and a narrative discussion of art consummating in the symbolist
picture of the vault (p. 133). Unlike Des Esseintes however, Usher has inherited his ‘family evil’ (Poe,
2006, p. 131), which is the result of the family ‘paradoxically contaminat[ing] itself by trying to
contain and control [its] lineage’ (Peeples, 2002, p. 184). Usher’s ‘morbid acuteness of the senses’ is
‘displayed . . . in a host of unnatural sensations’ (Poe, 2006, p. 131). Although a malady that a
decadent aesthete may thrive on, Usher’s suffering only withdraws him from the world even more,
allowing darkness to ‘pour . . . forth upon objects of the moral and physical universe, in one
unceasing radiation of gloom’ that augments Gothic Symbolism through corrupting Romantic
thought and linking Decadence to nature (Poe, 2006, p. 133).

Baudelaire’s sonnet “The Setting of the Romantic Sun” casts light on the position of Romanticism in
the later half of nineteenth century France and how Decadence, in the guise of the ‘Remorseless
Night establishe[d] her reign’ (1993, p. 297; l 10). Baudelaire wishes to ‘trap one ray, at least one
fading thing’ which can be interpreted as the sensational aspect of Romanticism that decadence
would later develop to embody into the technique synaesthesia (1993, p. 297; l 8). Although it is not
apparent in this poem, Baudelaire explored synaesthesia with his “theory of correspondence” that
considered that ‘in some obscure way the objects of Nature hold communication with man’ (Leakey,
1969, p. 204). For ‘man walks within these groves of symbols’ and in a mystical and uncertain way,
senses the spiritual presence of nature that musicality further stresses through the harmony and
expressiveness of poetry (Baudelaire, 1993, p. 19; l 3). In this way ‘perfumes, colours [and] sounds
may correspond’ in order to connect man with nature in art (Baudelaire, 1993, p. 19; l 8). The idea is
similar to that proposed by Percy Bysshe Shelley in his A Defence of Poetry (1821): ‘Poetry . . .
awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended
combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil of the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar
objects be as if they were unfamiliar’ (1821, n.p.). Baudelaire’s correspondences works as a symbolic
advancement that has enabled him to further integrate man into the ‘single, vast unified system of
interrelationships in which all things, near and far . . . correspond’ (Leakey, 1969, p. 209). The
boundaries between romanticism and symbolism are almost non-existent and only the synaesthetic
expression of ‘Odours . . . fresh as a baby’s skin, / Mellow as oboes, green as meadow grass’, holds
any form of separation between the two styles of writing (Baudelaire, 1993, p. 19; ll. 9 – 10). The
reason for Baudelaire’s romantic engagement is purely aesthetic. The notion of connecting with
nature is not so much the attractive factor as the sensory engagement that writers such as William
Wordsworth and John Keats took part in and began to develop.

In his Further Notes on Edgar Poe, Baudelaire expresses that ‘for Poe, the imagination was the queen
of the faculties . . . Imagination [wa]s a virtually divine faculty that apprehends immediately, by
means of lying outside philosophical methods, the intimate and secret relation of things, the
correspondences and analogies’ (1972, p. 199). The power of the imagination for Baudelaire was
central to his theories on aesthetics, for correspondences requires imagination to ‘apprehend’ the
mingled voices of nature. In “Exotic Perfume”, the narrator is transported by the ‘warm scent’ of a
woman’s breast to exotic lands (Baudelaire, 1993, p. 49; l 2). The dream like vision reveals an ‘idle
isle’ where a rich and full existence is played out, ‘led by [the woman’s] fragrance’ (Baudelaire,
1857/1993, p. 49; ll. 5 - 9). The sensual experience culminates in a climax:

‘While verdant tamarind’s enchanting scent,

Filling my nostrils, swirling to the brain,
Blends in my spirit with the boatmen’s chant’ (Baudelaire, 1993, p. 49; ll. 12 – 14).

A moment of synaesthesia is reached where the narrator’s spirit is the plain on which the scents and
sounds meet. The poem ascends on a symbolic level whilst drawing on Shelley’s defamiliarizing
technique to make a simple night of sex transform into a completely new sensual experience.

However, Baudelaire’s engagement with romanticism and symbolism is not purely situated on a
sensory level. It is in the style of “A Carcass” where Baudelaire juxtaposes Romantic lyricism
alongside the decadent ‘artistic concern for the morbid, the perverse [and] the sordid’ (Goldfarb,
1962, p. 373). The delight expressed by ‘the young man look[ing] back to the past, in a typical
romantic fashion’ in the first stanza (Weir, 1995, p. xi), is immediately countered in the second with
a sensual assault that paints the ‘poisonous fumes’ rising from the ‘festering womb’ (Baudelaire,
1993, p. 59; ll. 6 – 8). Throughout the poem Baudelaire embellishes the description of the corpse
using naturalistic imagery:

‘The flies buzzed and droned on these bowels of filth

Where an army of maggots arose,
Which flowed with a liquid and thickening stream
On the animate rags of her clothes.

And it rose and it fell, and pulsed like a wave,

Rushing and bubbling with health’ (1993, p. 61; ll. 17 – 22).

The water metaphor and simile both work specifically to question the role of nature. For whereas
the Romantics would have ‘looked at nature from a distance and saw something sublime, something
behind or beyond nature’, the degenerate nature of decadence allowed its writers to not be clouded
by the Romantic veil of metaphysical meaning (Meir, 1995, p. xiii). They saw the process of nature in
a way that demonstrated the art for art sake movement, looking only at the surface and seeing
‘living matter in decay’ (Meir, 1995, p. xiii). Here in “A Carcass”, we see Baudelaire engaging in such
thoughts, for although romanticism and decadence fight for meaning in the corpse, it is ultimately
the latter that triumphs, ‘accept[ing] . . . the reality that man is an animal not an angel’ (Weir, 1995,
p. xiii). To further its reign, the decadent form of artifice exudes its dominance:

‘Ah then, o my beauty, explain to the worms

Who cherish your body so fine,
That I am the keeper for corpses of love
Of the form, and the essence divine!’ (Baudelaire, 1993, p. 63; ll. 45 – 48).

For ‘art is superior to romantic “nature” when decadent reality is part of the picture’ and whereas
nature may produce such striking images as the subject of Baudelaire’s poem (Meir, 1995, p. xiv), it
is ultimately through decadent art that it achieves the Romantic trope of transcendence, for art gives
the subject immortality, allowing the sensations the narrator felt at seeing the carcass originally to
be rekindled by the reader.

It is clear that Poe and Baudelaire experiment with the boundaries between aesthetic movements
and genres. Whereas Poe’s aim is mainly to examine the romantic conscience in relation to nature,
Baudelaire’s objective lies in developing and promoting a new style of writing that draws on
romanticism as a primary source. Both writers share an interest in what romanticism can offer to a
new generation of writers and Poe was a rather huge influence on Baudelaire’s own work. It was in
the name of developing their art that these writers blurred and crossed literary boundaries and
without them, the literature of the fin de siècle would not have been what it was.
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