Music, Madness, and Disenchantment: Roderick Usher and the Ballad “The Mad Trist”

This article primarily revisits Roderick Usher of “The Fall of the House of Usher” as a ballad figure. By considering some new sources for and connections to the text, it problematizes the notion that Usher was a musician in any way that can be directly related to real, heard, nineteenth-century Western tonal musical traditions. In doing so, the paper opens up questions about Poe’s general use of the ballad as representative of a postlapsarian mythology.