The Rise of the House of Usher: The Landscape Chamber by Sarah Orne Jewett as a Textual Palimpsest
The Rise of the House of Usher: The Landscape Chamber by Sarah Orne Jewett as a Textual Palimpsest

Summary/Abstract: The paper is an analysis of an intertextual relationship between “The Landscape Chamber”, a story by Sarah Orne Jewett of 1887, and Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” in terms of Gérard Genette’s theory of the literary palimpsest. As it turns out, a number of details in Poe’s gothic tale have their functional equivalents in Jewett’s realistic story even though the gothic underpinning of the latter does not seem explicit. Poe’s ahistorical romantic apocalypse is translated in “The Landscape Chamber” into a gendered interpretation of New England’s post-Civil War history as a period of cultural crisis possibly to be overcome by the succession of generations. Paradoxically, Jewett’s story demonstrates the continuity of the US literary tradition by a revisionist misprision of a “strong” writer’s exemplary hypotext.

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