Apologies about being curt in editing The Fall of the House of Usher, I re-edited it to take the edge off. It raised my hackles that anyone would suggest Usher is anything but a story of incest. While working on my undergraduate degree in English I recall once going to a professor about the topic of a paper on Usher being a story about incest and he very politely pulled me aside and said I had nothing to discuss because that's very obviously the point of the story. Poe adores squick and this is simply a case of getting crap past the radar for early Victorian America that he doesn't sit down and say 'now everyone, Roderick usher is having sex with his sister' but saying that the Usher family tree has no branches is Poe's way of saying exactly that in not so many words.
Apologies about being curt in editing The Fall of the House of Usher, I re-edited it to take the edge off. It raised my hackles that anyone would suggest Usher is anything but a story of incest. While working on my undergraduate degree in English I recall once going to a professor about the topic of a paper on Usher being a story about incest and he very politely pulled me aside and said I had nothing to discuss because that's very obviously the point of the story. Poe adores squick and this is simply a case of getting crap past the radar for early Victorian America that he doesn't sit down and say 'now everyone, Roderick usher is having sex with his sister' but saying that the Usher family tree has no branches is Poe's way of saying exactly that in not so many words.