Table Of Content
For Poe's sea tales, one should read "A Descent into the Malestrom"with its overtones of Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," "MS Foundin a Bottle," and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym which, claimsVincent Buranelli, may have a "descendant in Moby Dick." Located in an unspecified place, the house and its bleak surroundingsare primarily described in terms of the impressions they create in thenarrator’s mind. He is unnerved by the building itself, with its “vacanteye-like windows,” but he takes worse fright from its image reflected in the“black and lurid tarn” which lurks around and beneath it.
Fear
Lady Madeline can then be seen as the incarnation of "otherworldliness," the pure spirit purged of all earthly cares. She is, one might note, presented in this very image; at one point in the story, she seems to float through the apartment in a cataleptic state. If Usher embodies the incertitude of life — a condition somewhere between waking and sleeping — when Lady Madeline embraces him, this embrace would symbolize the union of a divided soul, indicating a final restoration and purification of that soul in a life to come. They will now live in pure spirituality and everything that is material in the world is symbolized by the collapse of the House of Usher — the dematerialization of all that was earthly in exchange for the pure spirituality of Roderick Usher and the Lady Madeline. The first five paragraphs of the story are devoted to creating a gothic mood — that is, the ancient decaying castle is eerie and moldy and the surrounding moat seems stagnant. Immediately Poe entraps us; we have a sense of being confined within the boundaries of the House of Usher.
Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher: Summary & Analysis
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Roderick eventually declares that he has been hearing these sounds for days, and that they are being made by his sister, who was in fact alive when she was entombed. After some days of bitter grief, Usher changes appreciably; now he wanders feverishly and hurries from one chamber to another. Often he stops and stares vacantly into space as though he is listening to some faint sound; his terrified condition brings terror to the narrator. Then we read that on the night of the "seventh or eighth day" after the death of the Lady Madeline, the narrator begins to hear "certain low and indefinite sounds" which come from an undetermined source. As we will learn later, these sounds are coming from the buried Lady Madeline, and these are the sounds that Roderick Usher has been hearing for days. Because of his over-sensitiveness and because of the extra-sensory relationship between him and his twin sister, Roderick has been able to hear sounds long before the narrator is able to hear them.
Notes
The house isconnected to the surrounding land by a narrow causeway, but the link is tenuousand precarious. The atmosphere above and around the house has been poisoned bythe exudations of the tarn, becoming eerie and pestilential. The Fall of the House of Usher shows Poe’s ability to create an emotional tone in his work, specifically, feelings of fear, doom, and guilt.
As the story goes, a sailor and the young wife of the older owner were caught and entombed in their trysting spot by her husband when the Usher house was, down in 1800, two bodies were found embraced in a cavity in the cellar. The German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann, the role model and inspiration for Poe, published the story “Das Majorat” in 1819, having similarity with Poe’s story. There are atmospheric similarity- eerie sounds in the night, the story within a story and the house-owner being called “Roderick”. Roderick Usher is a gifted poet and artist, whose talents the narrator praises before sharing a poem Usher wrote, titled ‘The Haunted Palace’. The ballad concerns a royal palace which was once filled with joy and song, until ‘evil things’ attacked the king’s palace and made it a desolate shadow of what it once was.
Edgar Allan Poe
During a storm, Roderick is overcome by a severe nervous agitation, and his friend reads aloud from a medieval romance, whose horrifying episodes coincide with strange sounds from outside the room. Finally Madeline appears, enshrouded, and she and her brother fall dead together. The friend rushes from the house, and as he looks back in the moonlight, sees the whole House of Usher split asunder and sink into the tarn.
Poe's Short Stories
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Moreover, another horrific element of the story is the dank underground tomb. The narrator tells the readers the term “The House of Usher” does not only refer to the house but also the family dwelling in the house and the Usher bloodline. It alludes to the poems “Mad Trist” and “The Haunted Palace” by Sir Launcelot Canning.
The title does not only refer to the literal fall of the house but also to the fall of the Usher family with the death of Roderick Usher. The narrator mentions that Roderick and his sister Madeline are the only two surviving family members, so their death makes the death of the family line. Even though the corridors in the house are filled with the apparently ordinary things, they scream out horror.
The narrator, for example, first witnesses the mansion as a reflection in the tarn, or shallow pool, that abuts the front of the house. The mirror image in the tarn doubles the house, but upside down—an inversely symmetrical relationship that also characterizes the relationship between Roderick and Madeline. The narrator also realizes suddenly that Roderick and Madeline were twins.
A dramatization of "The Fall of the House of Usher" was taped in 1965 aspart of the "American Story Classics" series. Available from Film VideoLibrary, this adaptation runs 29 minutes and is in black and white. This is an abridged summary and analysis of "The Fall of the House of Usher." For the complete study guide (including quotes, literary devices, analysis of the major characters, and more), click here. Members will be prompted to log in or create an account to redeem their group membership. Poe’s inspiration for the story may be based upon events of the Usher House, located on Boston’s Lewis wharf.
Roderick’s letter ushers the narrator into a world he does not know, and the presence of this outsider might be the factor that destroys the house. The narrator is the lone exception to the Ushers’ fear of outsiders, a fear that accentuates the claustrophobic nature of the tale. By undermining this fear of the outside, the narrator unwittingly brings down the whole structure. A similar, though strangely playful crossing of a boundary transpires both in “Mad Trist” and during the climactic burial escape, when Madeline breaks out from death to meet her mad brother in a “tryst,” or meeting, of death. Poe thus buries, in the fictitious gravity of a medieval romance, the puns that garnered him popularity in America’s magazines. The tale highlights the Gothic feature of the doppelganger, or character double, and portrays doubling in inanimate structures and literary forms.
Might we then interpret Roderick as a symbol of the conscious mind – struggling to conceal some dark ‘secret’ and make himself presentable to his friend, the narrator – and Madeline as a symbol of the unconscious? Note how Madeline is barely seen for much of the story, and the second time she appears she is literally buried (repressed?) within the vault. The final rule will restore and extend the right to overtime pay to many salaried workers, including workers who historically were entitled to overtime pay under the FLSA because of their lower pay or the type of work they performed. The narrator tells the readers the term “The House of Usher” refers to the house and the family dwelling in the house and the Usher bloodline.
He turns back in time to see the Moon shining through the suddenly widened crack in the house. As he watches, the House of Usher splits in two and the fragments sink away into the lake. The narrator is impressed with Roderick's paintings and attempts to cheer him by reading with him and listening to his improvised musical compositions on the guitar. Roderick sings "The Haunted Palace", then tells the narrator that he believes the house he lives in to be alive, and that this sentience arises from the arrangement of the masonry and vegetation surrounding it. Further, Roderick believes that his fate is connected to the family mansion.
When she reappears in her blood stained shroud, the visitor rushes to leave as the entire house splits and sinks into a lake. Madeline soon dies, and Roderick decides to bury her temporarily in the tombs below the house. He wants to keep her in the house because he fears that the doctors might dig up her body for scientific examination, since her disease was so strange to them. The narrator helps Roderick put the body in the tomb, and he notes that Madeline has rosy cheeks, as some do after death.
The house of Usher has its own reality and is governed by its own rules, with people having no interest in others. This extreme isolation makes the family closer and closes to the extent that they become inexplicable to the outside world. Roderick contacted him when he was suffering from emotional and mental distress.
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