Becoming “so terribly altered”: Reading transformations of the self in “The Fall of the House of Usher”

Rawoot, Bilqis

Becoming “so terribly altered”: Reading transformations of the self in “The Fall of the House of Usher”

Master Thesis

2021

Abstract

In this thesis, I try to situate the effects of the text, specifically on the reader, by looking at ideas of transformation. My primary investigation is to determine the extent of the effect on the reader and the reader's reality, and if it is possible to alter the reader by inducing a transformation. I argue that transformation is possible as a “becoming”. Transformation depends on the text's reflection and verisimilitude to reality, which aids introspection and the consequent transitioning toward a new identity. I confront these concerns via close analysis of Edgar Allan Poe's “The Fall of the House of Usher”. Whereas critics have read Poe while considering authorial intent and biography, and while limiting effect to emotion, I argue that the reader determines meaning and effect which can impose on identity. This inquiry deals directly with the interaction between the text and the reader, while acknowledging language as the common ground and means of communicating meaning and effect between them. Arnold van Gennep's theory of liminality provides a framework for transition, which I apply to character and reader becoming. And, it explains the interstitial space between the textual realm and the reader's reality. My close analysis of Poe's characters elucidates these tasks as I engage the text as a reflection of the reader's development, and as the narrator's interactions with the Usher siblings mimics the reader's relation to the text. Mikhail Bakhtin's polyphonic theory depicts the text as life-like and appropriate for this exchange. I consider metafiction for its ability to dissemble illusory distinctions between the text and reality, and as it induces consciousness in the reader. I have also placed Poe in conversation with Julia Kristeva for her insights into the psychoanalytic process of abjection, and as she illustrates the revision of identity. Much of this project deals with finding unity and reconciling the inherently contradictory elements of human existence. Ultimately, I consider how the process of textual interaction contributes to potential reader “becoming”. And, I argue that becoming and identity are intimately dependent on selfconsciousness of the vastness of human potential, as well as the dissolution of the very borders designed to limit and make sense of that vastness.

Keywords

English Literature and Modernity

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