Home-Sickness, Nostalgia, and therapeutic narrative in Poe's "The fall of the house of usher"

This article examines how the disease nostalgia, or home-sickness, as understood by nineteenth-century medical science, structures one of the most famous of Poe's tales and informs his aesthetic principles more generally Through its subject and its form, "The Fall of the House of Usher" asks the reader to consider competing theories of mental illness and therapeutic treatment, in particular the "moral treatment," which relied on sympathetic conversation between doctor and patient to elicit the patient's story and engage the imagination in the process of healing Tracking Poe's deployment of nostalgia and therapeutic narrative in "The Fall of the House of Usher" not only extends what we know about Poe's familiarity with contemporary medical discourse but also reveals his ambivalence regarding scientific attempts to diagnose, categorize, and cure the emotional and spiritual dis-ease that he understood so well and explored so compellingly in his tales.