Gothic Mycology and Posthuman Ethics in Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher"

ABSTRACT: In light of the recent popularity of fungi in ecohorror literature and film, this essay coins the term "Gothic mycology" to describe instances of human-fungal hybridity that suggest posthuman entanglement and symbiosis, using Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" as an early and exemplary illustration. Gothic mycology is frightening due to the very nature of fungi themselves: they resist categories, being more closely related to animals than plant life; they proliferate at seemingly unnatural rates; they grow in darkness; they are agents of decomposition; they are mysterious, chthonic, and Other. However, Gothic mycology is also inherently hopeful, offering a glimpse of how we might reimagine our entanglement with the nonhuman that goes beyond mere posthuman hybridity and embraces instead a novel becoming. Poe's tale undermines anthropocentric individualism and prioritizes human entanglement through the fungal colonization of both house and human. In doing so, Poe's tale transgresses the boundary of what defines the human and suggests the necessity, or, perhaps more accurately, the current reality of our hybrid, dependent, and symbiotic relationship with the more-than-human.