Ok, so I'm just going to give you guys a heads up I'm a huge Poe fan, so this chapter made me fan girl hard. And when I say I'm a fan I really mean it--as in I have the complete collection of Poe and have read it all, so just be forewarned.
At the beginning of UsherII Mr. Bigelow is looking at a house modeled after the House of Usher. This house comes from Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Fall of the House of Usher." "The Fall of the House of Usher" is a short story published in 1839. In the story the narrator, who goes unnamed, gets a letter asking him to come to the Usher house. In the Usher house lives Roderick Usher who is sick mentally and physically. The narrator describes the house by saying when he saw it "a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded [his] spirit." This is much like how throughout the martian there is the feeling by at least one of the characters that something is going to go wrong.
"The Fall of the House of Usher" is also very much a horror story. The narrator and Usher end up burying Usher's twin alive and when she escaped it kills Usher and the entire house collapses. I think linking this story into the Martian Chronicles really shows the horror side of the Martian Chronicles.
Poe's stories were often what I'd call romantic horrors. Many of his short stories started out with love, such as the platonic love the narrator shows he feels for Usher by coming to help him, and then turn into a horror in a turn of events. I think this is a great reflection on "The Martian Chronicles" because it also shows elements of romance and horror in a very similar style. For example in the beginning of the book you see romance by having Ylla dream of a handsome man and then turning into horror by having the Martians trap the Humans and then eventually having the Martians all die.
Now totally off topic there is one more thing I find interesting-- Bradbury's obsession with banned and burned books. It's addressed in Usher II by talking about Poe booked being banned and burned so nobody could read them. This is also addressed in Fahrenheit 451 where they ban books and burn all of them.
Lot of the references in this book went right over my head thanks for explaining them. The element of horror in this book makes it really interesting to me because normally I hate horror but I really enjoyed this both.
ReplyDeleteI refered to this chapter as the "Fahrenheit 451 chapter" in my head too.
Bradbury's got this real dislike of orthodoxy, doesn't he? Or maybe we should say "orthodoxy"--the idea that everyone should conform to some moral standard imposed by committee--but I think Bradbury's arguing that orthodoxy is already a parody of itself to begin with, so maybe there's no distinction to be made, here.
ReplyDeleteWe get the destruction of "orthodoxy" at least two times in the book--in Usher II, and with Spender. In banning books, the censors think they're doing the world a favor, improving its morality. But the people in "And the Moon Be Still as Bright" are just careless jerks. So Spender sets out to destroy them, and Mr. Stendhal spares no expense in destroying the people in this section (at least for a while. Both are trying to hold off some onslaught from Earth, maybe against impossible odds).
I'd love to hear about the impulses behind censorship in more detail, and how they match up with this section.
And yes, I can see a lot of _Farenheit 451_ in its incipient stages here, too!