The construction of the self under the light of the other in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The fall of the house of Usher”

Résumé

Theconcept of identity has been broadly discussed in the Western Cultures since the threshold of the Enlightenment in the Eighteenth Century. However, before the advent of Multiculturalism at the end of the Twentieth Century, when the construction of identities achieved a diversity of expressions, it passed by a remarkable transformation in the Nineteenth Century, especially during Romanticism, whose shape was characterized by an individual centered on himself/herself, despite some attempts to take otherness into account. Therefore, this essay aims at focusing on the identities of the chief characters of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The fall of the House of Usher” and their interaction with themselves and the environment where they are inserted. In order to achieve such objective, the Semiotics, with some help from the Freudian Psychoanalysis, will provide the theoretical support for the analyses that follow.