At the Threshold: Aristocratic Houses in Cooper and Poe

This article reads two U.S. narrative fictions of the 1830s alongside one another, finding in them complementary commentaries on the nature of power, tradition, and freedom in a young republic. Both James Fenimore Cooper’s novel Home as Found and Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Fall of the House of Usher” use the image of the house to consider what kind of elite families should exist in a nation that prides itself on democratic freedoms. By closely observing how the fictional houses in these works are built, maintained, occupied, sold, torn down, and rebuilt, we discover a new cross-section of the discourse surrounding the United States’ colonial heritage and its republican future.