thesis for the fall of the house of usher

92 The Fall of the House of Usher Essay Topics & Examples

Looking for The Fall of the House of Usher essay topics? A gothic fiction masterpiece by Edgar Allan Poe is worth analyzing!

🏰 Thesis Statements
🏆 A+ Essay Examples
📌 Essay Topics
👍 Thesis Ideas

❓ The Fall of the House of Usher Essay Questions

In your The Fall of the House of Usher essay, you might want to focus on the character analysis, themes, symbolism, or historical context of the short story. Whether you’ll have to write an analytical, explanatory, or critical assignment, this article will be helpful. Here we’ve gathered top title ideas, essay examples, and thesis statements on The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Poe.

🏰 The Fall of the House of Usher Thesis Statements

The key themes of “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Poe are madness, isolation, family, and identity.
Though “The Fall of the House of Usher” is told from first-person point of view, which is typical for Poe, the story is unique: its narrator remains nameless; we don’t know anything about their gender or physical features.
The word choice and Poe’s writing style of “The Fall of the House of Usher” create a special atmosphere of horror and macabre.
It is widely accepted that in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Poe tells a story of his own madness.

🏆 A+ The Fall of the House of Usher Essay Examples

The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe: The Role of the Narrator The role of the narrator of the story The Fall of the House of Usher is great indeed; his rationality and his ability to represent the events from the side of an immediate participant of […]
“The Fall of the House of Usher” & “The Cask of Amontillado”: Summaries, Settings, and Main Themes As the narration progresses, fear arises in the reader or viewer, and finally, something horrific happens.”The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Cask of the Amontillado” share all of the features above, as […]
Madeline in “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Poe Her personality seems perplexing because she appears only three times: toward the middle of the story she passes “through a remote portion of the apartment”; some days after her supposed death she is seen in […]
Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” In “The Fall of the House of Usher”, Poe portrays the Usher family as struggling to survive albeit in a gloomy manner that involves degradation, disease, and death.”The Fall of the House of Usher” is […]
The Fall of the House of Usher Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher is a short story which makes the reader feel fear, depression and guilt from the very first page and up to the final scene.
The Theme of Love: “The Two Kinds,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and “Hill Like White Elephants” In the “Two Kinds” there is some love between the mother and daughter. This love is depicted in the way the mother prevails upon her daughter to succeed in her studies.
“The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe Literature Analysis Although “The Fall of the House of Usher” is traditionally believed to be a timeless horror story and a representation of the deepest human fears, it can also be viewed both as a product of […]
“The Birth-Mark” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” Poe in his work, The Fall of the House of Usher and Hawthorne in his work’ The Birthmark; they have employed different literary elements.
Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Black Cat” Meanwhile, in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the burial of Madeline was the last farewell to send the woman to her grave.
The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe Ideally, using the subjective understanding of Poe’s work, it is possible to evaluate some of the qualities of the story. At the same time, the setting of the story creates a lot of suspense for […]
Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, The Cask of Amontillado, The Fall of the House of Usher In particular, we may analyze such novellas as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Cask of Amontillado, and The Fall of the House of Usher.
Pure Rationality in Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” Finally, the destruction of the Usher’s house can be explained by the fact that its base was not solid and the change in weather conditions caused it destruction.
Madness in “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Poe Poe uses a wide range of tools to create an uncomfortable mood, yet it is his ability to maintain the balance between reality and madness that shines through the whole story.
“The Fall of the House of Usher” and “Benito Cereno” The narrator appears surprised of the status of his friend’s house, with the inside appearing as spooky as the compound of the house.
World’s Disintegration: “Young Goodman Brown” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” This is one of the similarities in the style of these writers. This is one of the main details that be identified.
Mini Anthology: Poe Edgar Allan and Dickson Emily’ Works The other story that Poe Allen has written is “The fall of the House of Usher” whereby the main theme is about the haunted house, which is crumbling and this aspects brings out a Gothic […]
Evans, Walter. “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Poe’s Theory of the Tale. In this article, Walter Evans discusses the narrative style of Edgar Allan Poe and speaks about the peculiarities of such a short story as The Fall of the House of Usher.
Comparing and Contrasting Good and Evil The essay is a critical examination of how evil and good are portrayed in two literatures; Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher.

📌 The Fall of the House of Usher Essay Topics

The Feeling of Scare in “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe
Roderick Usher’s Status and Changing Conditions in “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe
Negative Adjectives in “The Fall of the House of Usher”
The Transformation of the Protagonist in “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Poe, “Where Is Here” by Oates, and “The Dream Collector” by Tress
The Importance of the Setting in “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe
The Application of Chiaroscuro in “The Scarlet Letter” and “The Fall of the House of Usher”
Using the Narrator to Deepen the Tale in “The Fall of the House of Usher”
The Gothic Images and Symbolic Motifs in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”
Comparison of “Young Goodman Brown” and “The Fall of the House of Usher”
Romantic Elements in “Frankenstein” and “The Fall of the House of Usher”
An Analysis of the Imagery of the Supernatural in “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe
Women’s Role in “The Fall of the House of Usher”
Setting in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Raven,” and “The Oval Portrait” by Edgar Allan Poe
Exploring the Theme Behind the Character Names in Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”
The Use of Symbolism in “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe
The Destruction of the Feminine and Triumph of Society: Homosexuality in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”
Imagination and Hallucinations in “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe
Irrational Actions Caused by Imagination in “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe

👍 The Fall of the House of Usher Thesis Ideas

The Mockery of Transcendentalism in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”
“The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe
Psychoanalytical Approach to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”
The Dark Themes of Horror, Death, and Romance in “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe
The Theme of Incest in “The Fall of the House of Usher”
The Similarity of Roderick Usher and the Narrator in “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe
Irony, Imagination, and Description in “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe
Psycho Sexual Reading of “The Fall of the House of Usher”
The First Person Point of View in “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe
Comparison of “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Tell Tale Heart”
The Literary Elements Used by Edgar Allan Poe in “The Fall of the House of Usher”
Feminism in “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe
Overcoming Reasoning Due to Imagination and Fear in “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe
The Psychology of Fear in “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe
Imagination and Mental Instability in “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe
The Reversal of Transcendental Philosophy in “The Fall of the House of Usher”
A Journey Into the Darkness in “The Fall of the House of Usher”
Imagination Overcome Fear in “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe
The Dual Nature of the Twins and the Conflict in “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe
The Character of Madeline in “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe
The Supernatural Atmosphere in “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe
Madness and Insanity in “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Cask of Amontillado”
How Does Edgar Allan Poe Use the Supernatural to Create a Neurosis Narration in “The Fall of the House of Usher”?
What Does the Storm at the End of “The Fall of the House of Usher” Symbolize?
What Are the Fairy Tale Elements in “The Fall of the House of Usher”?
To What Does the Narrator Compare the Windows of the House in “The Fall of the House of Usher”?
Is “The Fall of the House of Usher” a True Story?
What Is the True Identity of the Narrator in “The Fall of the House of Usher”?
What Does the House of Usher Look Like in “The Fall of the House of Usher”?
What Is the Climax of “The Fall of the House of Usher”?
What Are Some Examples That Defy Logic in “The Fall of the House of Usher”?
What Causes Roderick’s Death in “The Fall of the House of Usher”?
What Is the Main Point of “The Fall of the House of Usher”?
What Does Roderick Usher Represent in “The Fall of the House of Usher”?
What Did Roderick Admit They Had Done Without the Visitor Knowing in “The Fall of the House of Usher”?
How Does the Narrator React to Lady Madeline’s Death in “The Fall of the House of Usher”?
What Is the Conflict of “The Fall of the House of Usher”?
Does Imagination Overcome Fear in “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe?
Who Is to Blame for “The Fall of the House of Usher”?
What Does Roderick Believe Is Causing His Illness in “The Fall of the House of Usher”?
What Was the Main Reason Poe Dropped Out of West Point in “The Fall of the House of Usher”?
How Are “Young Goodman Brown” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” Similar?
Why Did Edgar Allan Poe Write “The Fall of the House of Usher”?
How Far Does “The Fall of the House of Usher” Meet With the Conventions of Gothic Fiction?
How Does Roderick Change After He Announces His Sister’s Death in “The Fall of the House of Usher”?
What Is the Conclusion of “The Fall of the House of Usher”?
How Is Fear Shown in “The Fall of the House of Usher”?
What Are Five Examples of Gothic Elements in “The Fall of the House of Usher”?
What Is the Recurring Symbolism in “The Fall of the House of Usher”?
What Idea About the Relationship Between Art and Life Is Supported by These Elements of the Story “The Fall of the House of Usher”?
Who Was a Tortured Character in “The Fall of the House of Usher”?
What Is One of Roderick Usher’s Disturbing Ideas in “The Fall of the House of Usher”?
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thesis for the fall of the house of usher

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher

Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 24, 2021

Long considered Edgar Allan Poe ‘s masterpiece, “The Fall of the House of Usher” continues to intrigue new generations of readers. The story has a tantalizingly horrific appeal, and since its publication in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, scholars, critics, and general readers continue to grapple with the myriad possible reasons for the story’s hold on the human psyche. These explanations range from the pre-Freudian to the pre–Waste Land and pre-Kafka-cum-nihilist to the biographical and the cultural. Indeed, despite Poe’s distaste for Allegory, some critics view the house as a Metaphor for the human psyche (Strandberg 705). Whatever conclusion a reader reaches, none finds the story an easy one to forget.

Poe’s narrative technique draws us immediately into the tale. On a stormy autumn (with an implied pun on the word fall ?) evening, a traveler—an outsider, like the reader—rides up to the Usher mansion. This traveler, also the first-person narrator and boyhood friend of Roderick Usher, the owner of the house, has arrived in response to a summons from Usher. We share the narrator’s responses to the gloomy mood and the menacing facade of the House of Usher, noticing, with him, the dank lake that reflects the house (effectively doubling it, like the Usher twins we will soon meet) and apprehensively viewing the fissure, or crack, in the wall. Very soon we understand that, whatever else it may mean, the house is a metaphor for the Usher family itself and that if the house is seriously flawed, so are its occupants.

With this foreboding introduction, we enter the interior through a Gothic portal with the narrator. With him we encounter Roderick Usher, who has changed drastically since last the narrator saw him. His cadaverous appearance, his nervousness, his mood swings, his almost extrahuman sensitivity to touch, sound, taste, smell, and light, along with the narrator’s report that he seems lacking in moral sense, portrays a deeply troubled soul. We learn, too, that his twin sister, Madeline, a neurasthenic woman like her brother, is subject to catatonic trances. These two characters, like the house, are woefully, irretrievably flawed. The suspense continues to climb as we go deeper into the dark house and, with the narrator, attempt to fathom Roderick’s malady.

Roderick, a poet and an artist, and Madeline represent the last of the Usher line. They live alone, never venturing outside. The sympathetic narrator does all he can to ease Roderick’s hours, recounting a ballad by Roderick, which, entitled “The Haunted House,” speaks figuratively of the House of Usher: Evil and discord possess the house, echoing the decay the narrator has noticed on the outside. During his stay Roderick tells the narrator that Madeline has died, and together they place her in a vault; she looks deceptively lifelike. Thereafter Roderick’s altered behavior causes the narrator to wonder whether he hides a dark secret or has fallen into madness. A week or so later, as a storm rages outside, the narrator seeks to calm his host by reading to him a romance entitled “The Mad Trist.” The title could be evidence that both the narrator’s diagnoses are correct: Roderick has a secret (perhaps he has trysted with his own sister?) and is now utterly mad. The tale unfolds parallel to the action in the Usher house: As Ethelred, the hero of the romance, breaks through the door and slays the hermit, Madeline, not dead after all, breaks though her coffin. Just before she appears at the door, Roderick admits that they have buried her alive and that she now stands at the door. Roderick’s admission is too late. Just as Ethelred now slays the dragon, causing the family shield to fall at his feet, Madeline falls on her brother (the hermit who never leaves the house), killing them both and bringing down the last symbol of the House of Usher. As the twins collapse in death together, the entire house disintegrates into the lake, destroying the double image noted at the opening of the story.

The story raises many questions tied to gender issues: Is Madeline Roderick’s female double, or doppelgänger? If, as many critics suggest, Roderick is Poe’s self-portrait, then do Madeline and Roderick represent the feminine and masculine sides of the author? Is incest at the core of Roderick’s relationship with Madeline? Is he (like his creator, some would suggest) a misogynist? Feminists have for some time now pointed to Poe’s theory that the most poetic subject in the world is the “Death of a Beautiful Woman.” Is Madeline’s return from the tomb a feminist revenge story? Does she, as the Ethelred of the romance does, adopt the male role of the hero as she slays the evil hermit and the evil dragon, who together symbolize Roderick’s character? Has the mad Roderick made the narrator complicit in his crime (saying we rather than I buried her alive)? If so, to what extent must we view him as the unreliable narrator? Is the narrator himself merely reporting a dream—or the after-effects of opium, as he vaguely intimates at points in the story? Or, as the critic and scholar Eugene Current-Garcia suggests, can we generally agree that Poe, like Nathaniel Hawthorne, was haunted by the presence of evil? If so, “perhaps most of his tales should be read as allegories of nightmarish, neurotic states of mind” (Current-Garcia 81). We may never completely plumb the psychological complexities of this story, but it implies deeply troubling questions and nearly endless avenues for interpretation.

Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s Stories

BIBLIOGRAPHY Current-Garcia, Eugene. The American Short Story before 1850. Boston: Twayne, 1985. May, Charles E. Edgar Allan Poe: Studies in the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Fall of the House of Usher.” In The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Vol. 1, 3rd ed. Edited by Paul Lauter. Boston: Houghton Miffl in, 1998. Strandberg, Victor. “The Fall of the House of Usher.” In Reference Guide to Short Fiction, edited by Noelle Watson. Detroit: Gale Press, 1994.

The Fall of the House of Usher and the Architecture of Instability

2018, The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe

This chapter examines what many scholars consider the most accomplished and representative of Poe's tales, "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1939). After a brief overview of the main axes of interpretation in the story's reception history, I propose an analysis of the tale's main narrative strategy, the unreliable narrator, which I argue is typical of Poe's short fiction in general. Linking this device to the unstable architectonics of the house in the story, the chapter shows how the unreliability of the narrator lies at the heart of the text's ability to choreograph active reader participation. I will also historicize the specific kind of unreliable narrators that Poe favors-those lacking a moral conscience or ethically-informed perception-in the context of antebellum debates about slavery.

Related Papers

Marita Nadal

This paper analyses a selection of Poe's fiction taking as a point of departure the contentions of critics such as Hillis Miller and Eric Savoy on the characteristics of American Gothic. The paper starts with a discussion of these features, which "The Fall of the House of Usher" epitomizes. After a revision of "Usher", the paper explores other Poe works, showing that the elements that make this narrative a master text for the history of American Gothic are somehow anticipated in Poe's previous tales, like "Berenice" and "Ligeia", in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and peculiarly reflected in the late tale of detection "The Purloined Letter".

Colleen McIlwain

murat goc-bilgin

Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher is a gothic masterpiece which marked the history of American literature as well as the history of world literature. The story focuses on a short trip of the narrator to the family mansion of Roderick Usher who mysteriously invited him to vist Usher and his sister, Lady Usher. Upon Lady Usher's death, the house literally falls apart and the narrator hardly manages to escape to tell the story to the rest of us. The House of Usher story is not significant for horror elements and its gothic atmosphere but beyond that it has been regarded as a cornerstone in the history of literature as it reflects radical historical and social transformation in the 19th century America, it successfully portrays the dilemmas of the enlightenment intellectuals after the fall of aristocracy, and it highlights the disillusionment of modern industrilization. In this respect, this article will seek to investigate the story that presents a world of anxiety, ambiguity, and collapse with a new historicist approach which enables a historical and ideological analysis of gothic genre, and the House of Usher story in particular.

Eszter Enikő Mohácsi

In Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” the house where the events unfold is described as a sentient being, and its first description forebodes the occurrence of dark events. In addition, Poe utilizes the house of Usher to show how the fate of the house and its inhabitants are connected. The House of Usher stands for the building itself as well as the family, and Usher himself believes that the house is alive and can also exert its influence on the people living in it. The house of Thomas Sutpen in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! is equally significant and is used to symbolize Sutpen’s will to establish his dynasty. The house is furnished luxuriously to establish his reputation in society, and Sutpen finally succeeds in bringing home a wife to the completed house. However, after the war the house is in ruins and Sutpen is unable to defy his fate anymore: he cannot rebuild the house, which – several years later – is burnt down by his own daughter, the partly black Clytemne...

The Edgar Allan Poe Review X.1

David Roche

Stefan Pajović

The aim of the paper is to examine Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” against the legacy of the Early English Gothic and establish a connection between the two. Firstly, an overview of the works of the Gothic genre in England is given, followed by a short timeline of the works in the genre on the American continent with special regard to the work of E. A. Poe and the short story upon which this paper focuses. Several pivotal points are used to establish a correlation with Poe’s story and the works of the Early Gothic, such as the setting, family relations, the treatment of madness, intensity of emotions, the role of prophecy, the structure of the narrative, and the supernatural occurrences. The conclusion summarizes the influence early Gothic works had on E. A. Poe and how his story had enriched the entire Gothic genre.

Hannes Bergthaller

Connotations 22.1 (2012/2013): 13-31.

Rodrigo Borba

This investigation compares two translations from English into Portuguese of Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. The corpus comprises a translation/adaptation for young readers, translated by Claudia Ortiz (2005), and a translation for a general audience (i.e. experienced readers), published by Oscar Mendes (1981). We investigate textual aspects such as lexical choices, omissions, and explicitations in order to compare and contrast source and target texts. Guided by this analysis, we discuss the possibility of enlarging Poe’s readership. This discussion is grounded on the Skopos Theory (Vermeer and Reiss, 2002) and the Interpretive Community Theory (Fish, 1990). The comparison of the translations indicates that the adaptation seems to respect the intended audience’s reading experiences and to be consistent with socio-discursive practices, other than translation, which usually take children and youngsters as primary audience.

Poe Studies

Mark Steven

452Of Revista De Teoria De La Literatura Y Literatura Comparada

Forrest Helvie

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19 “The Fall of the House of Usher” and the Architecture of Unreliability

Department of English, Université de Lausanne

Published: 10 July 2018
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This chapter examines what many scholars consider the most accomplished and representative of Poe’s tales, “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839). After a brief overview of the main axes of interpretation in the story’s reception history, it proposes an analysis of the tale’s main narrative strategy, the unreliable narrator, which is typical of Poe’s short fiction in general. Linking this device to the unstable architectonics of the house in the story, the chapter shows how the unreliability of the narrator lies at the heart of the text’s ability to choreograph active reader participation. It also historicizes the specific kind of unreliable narrators that Poe favors—those lacking a moral conscience or ethically informed perception—in the context of antebellum debates about slavery.

“ The Fall of the House of Usher” occupies a singular place in the Poe canon. Considered by many critics his best and most representative short fiction, the story appears in countless anthologies and collections. It is considered foundational for the American Gothic and, more specifically, Southern Gothic. 1 Despite its ubiquity and popularity among critics and readers alike, however, the meaning of “The Fall of the House of Usher” has proved elusive. Poe’s ability to create an undercurrent of suggestiveness is nowhere displayed more masterfully than in this story, and few texts have generated so many and such divergent readings. With its first-person narration, underground crypts, and multilayered literariness (including two embedded texts, an epigraph and many allusions to other texts), “Usher” epitomizes hidden depth and encrypted meaning. The result has been a dizzying array of critical interpretations claiming to offer the “key” to the textual house of Usher (as in Darrel Abel’s influential 1949 essay by that title). 2 Psychoanalytic readings held a central place in the story’s early reception history, followed by philosophical and historical allegories, and later by a range of poststructuralist readings suggesting that reading and writing themselves were the real subjects of the tale.

I propose to show that Poe constructed this story to offer both an implied meaning and an affective reading experience in which the “discovery” of the “hidden” meaning is carefully choreographed into the narrative’s temporal movement by its unreliable narration. In the critical history of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the narrator has often been subject to scrutiny and debate—especially since he calls attention to his own subjective fallibility so often and so insistently—but readings that focus on the narrator often ignore the larger historical and cultural context of the tale. By looking at how the story’s narrative unreliability is linked to cultural debates about slavery, conscience, and moral insanity, I hope to explain both the tacit content of “The Fall of the House of Usher” and its intended aesthetic effect.

Although most readers will be familiar with the tale, a short synopsis might help to refresh our sense of the story’s enigmas. An unnamed narrator approaches the house of his childhood friend and reflects on the bleakness of the landscape, his own inexplicable dread, and his inability to coax the terrible scene into assuming a sublime aspect. His optical experiment of looking at the house through its reflection in the dark tarn anticipates both the motif of doubling that will recur throughout the story and the ending, when the house actually collapses into the tarn. Inside, he finds his friend greatly altered, in the grip of an extreme nervous agitation and a “morbid acuteness of the senses” (M 2: 403). In one of the few occasions when Usher speaks, he informs the narrator—and reader—that he is terrified of any incident that would excite his overwrought nerves—in short, he fears any unusual incident at all. Shortly after, his sister Madeline seems to die and is then entombed in a dungeon deep below the house, after which the two friends resume their pastimes of music and reading. Soon, however, Usher’s demeanor changes dramatically: he appears increasingly agitated, “listening to some imaginary sound” and “laboring with some oppressive secret” (M 2: 411). The last third of the story represents the suspense building over the course of a stormy evening as the narrator attempts to distract Usher by reading him a chivalric romance, while mysterious sounds from beneath the house echo noises in the narrative. Finally, in his second monologue, the distraught Usher confesses to hearing for days his sister’s struggles in the tomb and to dreading her probable desire for revenge. A moment later Madeline appears at the door and falls upon him, killing him, at which the house splits down along its fissure and disappears into the tarn as the narrator flees.

In addition to the status (and specifically, the reliability) of the narrator, the ambiguities that have inspired critics include the oddly evanescent character of Madeline, her relationship to Usher (the possibility of an incestuous union), and her uncannily impermanent death (with the issue of medical body-snatching and catalepsy in the background). As mentioned earlier, Poe succeeds in creating an aura of multilayered suggestiveness, leading many readers and critics to speculate on the meanings of seemingly innocuous details. The perennial question of tone (so masterfully treated by Jonathan Elmer 3 ) emerges with the curious play of the narrator’s excessive self-consciousness at some moments and utter obliviousness at others. The story also treats its embedded romance (“The Mad Trist”) with so much irony that a reader is left wondering if the equally exaggerated frame narrative can be taken fully at face value. Finally, readers have been intrigued by Usher’s belief that the stones of his house are alive and sentient, something that appears to be confirmed in the latter part of the tale, when the house collapses into the tarn in which it was initially reflected. These are only some of the suggestive details generating debate among critics and scholars, several of which I will address in the sections that follow.

Critical Overview

Since the early twentieth century, when an obsessive interest in hidden meanings took center stage in Anglo-American literary scholarship, Poe—with his explicit interest in madness, secrecy, and narrative indirection—has invited a range of psychoanalytical and psychobiographical readings. Marie Bonaparte, a member of Freud’s inner circle in the 1920s, argued that Poe’s work emanated largely from his unresolved sense of loss of his mother, and that Usher was a projection of this loss. 4 Reading the tale through the prism of his own psychological concerns, D. H. Lawrence argued that Madeline and Roderick exemplify the mutual destruction and loss of soul that can occur when two people love each other too much. 5 The psychoanalytic tradition continued throughout the century. In his 1973 monograph, Poe’s Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales , G. R. Thompson meticulously demonstrates the analogies between the house and Usher’s sanity, suggesting that the story chronicles a gradual descent into madness. 6 In 1981, J. R. Hammond argued that Roderick is “a mirror image of Poe or at least a projection, a doppel-ganger, of himself as he imagined himself to be,” 7 and in 1996, Eric Carlson discussed “Usher” in A Companion to Poe Studies under the rubric of “Tales of Psychal Conflict,” focusing on the many readings taking either Usher or the narrator as psychological case studies, confirming the popularity of this approach. 8

The other most common readings are also often allegorical, but they adopt a more philosophical, political, or historical focus. For example, in 1949 Darrel Abel proposed that the tale exemplified a contest between “Life-Reason” and “Death-Madness” for the possession of Roderick Usher. 9 Similarly, Michael Hoffman, in “The House of Usher and Negative Romanticism” (1965) , argued that the house in the tale is meant to represent the Enlightenment and therefore its demise signifies that the world is not as ordered and meaningful as the Enlightenment presumed. 10 Although many critics succumb to the temptation to read the story allegorically, lured by its explicit preoccupation with hidden depths and multilayered architectonics, there is little evidence in Poe’s fictional or critical work to suggest that he worked in an allegorical mode in his stories except on rare occasions. 11 In an 1842 essay on Nathaniel Hawthorne, Poe wrote that “there is scarcely one respectable word to be said” for allegory (ER: 582). “Under the best of circumstances,” Poe continues, “it must always interfere with that unity of effect which, to the artist, is worth all the allegory in the world” (ER: 583).

Unpacking this notion of “effect” for a moment, one infers that for Poe the impact of a work of art was largely a matter of choreographing the intricate interplay between expectation and discovery as a reader progressed temporally through a text. Poe’s stories rarely either announce an explicit meaning or hide one for critical excavation; rather, it is in between: a question of attending to the fairly obvious cues Poe provides the reader. For example, the story “William Wilson” is about a capricious boy who ignores his conscience to such an extent that when it returns in an externalized form to give him unsolicited advice, he fails to recognize it and ends up murdering it, thereby becoming a sociopath (referring at the beginning of the tale to his “later years of . . . unpardonable crime”; M 2: 426). The cues, or rather, clues , in this story include the opening epigraph, which explicitly names “CONSCIENCE” (M 2: 426) as a “spectre,” anticipating the way the narrator’s conscience haunts him like a ghost until he finally eliminates it once and for all.

In short, Poe often embeds a meaning that requires the reader to notice something that he does not state explicitly, but this reading is not a question of “interpretation” in the conventional sense of the word nor of allegory, but rather of connecting the dots in order to understand the basic elements of the plot. In the late tale “Hop-Frog,” the reader is made to understand—while the unreliable narrator pointedly does not— that the abused slave Hop-Frog is planning revenge upon the king who has kidnapped and tormented him. Generating strong dramatic irony, the tale requires the reader to infer from the situation (master–slave) and the visible but otherwise unexplained signs of Hop-Frog’s internal agitation (e.g., grating his teeth) that the seemingly innocent preparations for the king’s masquerade ball are actually a desperate plot for revenge and escape (M 3: 1353).

With poststructuralism in the 1970s and 1980s, allegorical readings made way for a new and intense attention to Poe’s craftsmanship, the complexity of his irony, and a fascination with his self-consciousness as a writer. 12 In fact, Poe’s linguistic playfulness was often read as a prescient anticipation of Derridean deconstruction itself. Though more reliant on close textual analysis than allegorical approaches, many poststructuralist readings tended to reach the same conclusion--namely, that the text has no single meaning or is in fact about its own meaninglessness. For example, Joseph Riddel’s 1979 essay sees in “Usher” a self-reflexive fable about the absence that lies at the center of any text, an absence of meaning, presence, and life, except as the simulacrum of a simulacrum. 13 Riddel argues this absence is allegorized in the story by the house of Usher itself, which is constructed upon a crypt, an architectural feature that allegorizes the notion that fiction is always constructed upon a “hollow coffin,” that is, an emptiness at its center. The embedded story and the other fragments and allusions to books and manuscripts are all attempts to defer the confrontation with the terrifying contents of the crypt, which, for Riddel, is not a prematurely buried woman but the missing body of the meaning of the text. 14

Focusing more on the reading process, Harriet Hustis has argued that Poe embeds an interpretive “gap” that calls for the reader’s participation. 15 In this sense, Poe is working within a larger tradition of “Gothic reading,” which, according to Hustis, creates a “disturbance” in the reading process, and which “bothers without quite spoiling narrative pleasure,” making readers active participants in the Gothic plot. The narrator is important to this process because he is the stand-in for the reader as well as a double for Usher, though he is also different from both in that he is a naïve reader, and this difference creates the gap that characterizes so-called Gothic reading. Like Riddell and most other poststructuralist critics, Hustis concludes that the point of all this effort is ultimately to show the “interpretive uncertainty” of texts. The ease with which poststructuralist critics find ambiguity and hermeneutic gaps in this story, and in Poe in general, stems from the fact that he deliberately embeds unreliable narration into almost every story, but the unreliability has a larger rhetorical purpose than to signify only itself, as I will show later.

Emerging from poststructuralist concerns but far more attentive to textual specificity and detail, Scott Peeples’s essay on “Usher” for the Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe offers an account that focuses on the meticulous “constructiveness” of the tale. 16 Peeples examines the technical care with which Poe built his texts, like an engineer, carefully crafting correspondences between Usher’s house and the text. 17 Ultimately, the story is “about” its own construction, and specifically about the tension between the loss of control depicted in the story and the complete control that Poe the author keeps over his fiction as he enacts the “artist’s fantasy of bringing that dead house to life.” 18 Peeples begins with Poe’s authorial stance but also brings into focus the central importance of the house itself to any reading of the story, as is evident from the pun embedded in the title, where “house” refers to both the physical structure and Usher’s family line. This focus on the rhetorical complexity of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” where the setting is an agent as well as a backdrop, brings us to the question of the possible correspondences between the story, its uncannily volatile house, and the larger cultural context of the story’s production.

To conclude this review, the critical reception of “The Fall of the House of Usher” reveals two main trends: first, a psychoanalytic and philosophical trend of assigning a single meaning to the text, and another more recent trend of denying meaning altogether. Both tendencies arise from critical paradigms (e.g., psychoanalysis, deconstruction) that search for evidence of their own pre-existing assumptions while generally ignoring the historical and cultural issues that informed Poe’s work. Recent scholarship that benefits from the insights of poststructuralism and its attention to form and language but also introduces cultural studies approaches has produced a new generation of readings linking historical questions to formal ones, helping us read “The Fall of the House of Usher” against the backdrop of antebellum America.

Cultural Criticism and Cultural Context

Possibly the most important development in Poe criticism in recent decades has been the emergence of race and slavery as central preoccupations. Discussion of Poe’s views on these issues and how they might have affected his work—however obliquely—have reshaped Poe studies since the 1990s. John Carlos Rowe’s claim in 1992 that “Poe was a proslavery Southerner and should be reassessed as such in whatever approach we take to his life and writings” can be taken as the opening salvo to this debate. 19 The same year, Toni Morrison called for an investigation into the “Africanist” presence in American literature and identified Poe as one of the key figures who have shaped the chiaroscuro dynamics of the American literary imagination. 20 Other important contributions to this discussion include Teresa Goddu’s Gothic America (1997), which proposed a more nuanced approach to reading race in Poe, and questioned specifically the facile reduction of racism to an exclusively Southern issue. 21 Lesley Ginsberg’s claim that “The Black Cat” suggests how slavery corrupts owners raised the prospect of a far more complex Poe, one who understood that slavery was at the heart of the American “political uncanny,” a horror story rife with repression, projection, and various forms of collective psychosis. In Ginsberg’s influential reading, Poe emerges as a subtle critic of slavery despite his alleged “proslavery pronouncements.” 22

Yet even these few proslavery pronouncements have been called into question in recent years. One of the most important turns in the recent debate about Poe’s racism was the publication of Terence Whalen’s Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses (1999), which explored the literary marketplace in which Poe worked, offered plausible explanations for many of Poe’s aesthetic and political positions in light of the pressures impinging upon him economically as a writer and editor, and perhaps most important, refuted the longstanding claim that Poe wrote the proslavery “Paulding-Drayton” review. 23 Analyzing internal textual evidence, Whalen painstakingly demonstrated that Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, a Southern ideologue and writer, was its author. Whalen also pointed out that it is likely that Poe entertained a centrist view on slavery that combined an “average racism” with a belief that slavery should be gradually phased out. 24 This would have been a common view among educated Southerners, and one that allowed Poe to offend neither Southern nor Northern sensibilities in his book reviews.

Not easily resolved one way or the other, given Poe’s penchant for ambiguity and irony, the debate surrounding Poe’s racial politics has continued, producing, for instance, a collection of essays devoted to the issue, J. Gerald Kennedy and Liliane Weissberg’s Romancing the Shadow (2001). In this volume, Rowe once more argues that Poe’s representations of race consistently upheld antebellum racial hierarchies and stereotypes and thereby affirmed the imperial fantasies and ambitions of the era. 25 Most of the other essays, however, adopt a more nuanced view. Leland S. Person examines the subversive reversibility of black and white race markers—especially in terms of skin and hair color—in order to argue that Poe’s Gothic fictions function to destabilize “the psychological constructs of white male racism.” 26 Kennedy painstakingly combs through Poe’s oeuvre and biographical scholarship to find evidence of Poe’s contacts with slaves, exploring his “conflicted relationship” with the South’s “peculiar institution.” Comparing The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym to the Narrative of Frederick Douglass (1845), Kennedy concludes that Poe’s novel invites oddly subversive and pessimistic readings of encounters between natives and American whites, tacitly undermining Southern proslavery arguments of that era. 27

This tendency to understand a slave’s desire to revolt, based on an implicit recognition of suffering and discontent—universally denied or ignored by proponents of slavery—gives Poe’s depictions of bondage an antislavery tinge regardless of how grotesquely racist his physical descriptions of black characters could be. For instance, as described earlier, the late story “Hop-Frog” requires the reader to understand the natural desire of the slave to punish his master in order to guess what the eponymous character is plotting for the cruel king. The character himself is depicted as “a dwarf and a cripple,” walking in an awkward and comic gait, but the entire story hinges on the reader identifying with Hop-Frog’s rage and desire for revenge against the morally blind narrator, who is a court lackey unable to perceive the injustice of the situation he describes (M 3: 1345). The inevitable desire to rebel and take revenge on one’s master is also explicitly depicted in Poe’s early comic tale “Four Beasts in One” (1833), in which wild animals that have been domesticated as “ valets-de-chambre ” stage a mutiny and eat their masters (M 2: 123).

Poe’s recognition of the violence inherent in the master–slave relationship flies directly in the face of the most common arguments put forward by defenders of slavery in the South, especially in the wake of the Nat Turner revolt of 1831. The much later work of Southern lawyer and social theorist George Fitzhugh sums up the arguments that emerged in the 1830s and 1840s. These arguments, as Sam Worley has noted, moved away from the “necessary evil” view of slavery that had held sway in earlier decades and relied increasingly on the “virtual codification of strategies that posed slavery as a positive good.” 28 In Cannibals All! Or Slaves Without Masters (1857) , Fitzhugh argues that slavery is natural to human nature: “Man is a social and gregarious animal, and all such animals hold property in each other. Nature imposes upon them slavery as a law and necessity of their existence. They live together to aid each other, and are slaves under Mr. Garrison’s higher law. Slavery arises under the higher law, and is, and ever must be, coëval and coëxtensive with human nature.” 29 In other words, Fitzhugh claims that slavery is an inherent and natural part of human society and history. Going further, he argues that the state of dependence created by slavery is the natural precondition for true affection and kindness between people, because everyone knows his or her role and place, and there is no jostling for power. In fact, Fitzhugh avers, it is the slave who is really the master in the South, because it is the slave who is maintained and cared for:

The humble and obedient slave exercises more or less control over the most brutal and hard-hearted master. It is an invariable law of nature, that weakness and dependence are elements of strength, and generally sufficiently limit that universal despotism, observable throughout human and animal nature. The moral and physical world is but a series of subordinations, and the more perfect the subordination, the greater the harmony and the happiness. 30

Fitzhugh’s argument directly refutes Harriet Beecher Stowe’s influential argument in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), that power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts the slaveowners absolutely, making them cruel and blind to slaves’ suffering. 31

Despite warnings from writers such as Stowe, the issue of slavery in the antebellum United States represents one of history’s most glaring examples of collective moral blindness. As Lesley Ginsberg explains in her article on “The Black Cat,” the Southern response to Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion was stupefaction, in particular with regard to his motives. For example, the Richmond Enquirer wrote that Turner acted “without any cause or provocation, that could be assigned.” 32 Thomas Gray, the man who extracted Turner’s confession, expresses sympathy with readers’ frustration at seeing the “insurgent slaves . . . destroyed, or apprehended, tried, and executed . . . without revealing anything at all satisfactory, as to the motives which governed them.” 33 Nothing highlights the absurdity of the slaveholding South’s failure to recognize the violence inherent to the institution of slavery more than Dr. Samuel Cartwright’s 1851 report in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal that among the “diseases and peculiarities of the Negro race,” as his article was titled, was a treatable illness called “drapetomania, or the disease causing Negroes to run away.” According to Cartwright, if slaves are kept “in the position that we learn from the Scriptures he was intended to occupy, that is, the position of submission,” and treated with kindness, then “the negro is spell-bound, and cannot run away.” 34 The notion that a slave would want to be free regardless of how kind his master might be, and that holding another human being in bondage is itself an extreme form of violence inviting the most extreme measures in return, seems not to have occurred to these self-deluded defenders of slavery.

Herman Melville’s 1855 novella “Benito Cereno” is a canny examination of precisely this kind of blindness, with the naïve Captain Amasa Delano failing to grasp that the distressed Spanish slave ship he has boarded is in the midst of a slave mutiny despite much strange behavior on the part of its crew and captain. Scholars and readers such as Toni Morrison have generally understood Captain Delano as an example of the “willful blindness” of the antebellum South. As Morrison puts it, Delano’s complacent myopia “is similar to the ‘happy, loyal slave’ antebellum discourse that peppered early debates on black civil rights.” 35 In contrast to such complacent myths, Poe’s depictions of relationships of subordination, in stories such as “Metzengerstein,” “The Black Cat,” “Hop-Frog,” and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym , are, like Stowe’s and Melville’s, consistently rife with violence, deceit, mutiny, and mutual cruelty, undermining on every level the view of human nature as affectionately hierarchical advocated by proslavery ideologues like Fitzhugh and Cartwright.

Although “The Fall of the House of Usher” does not seem to be as directly concerned with race as Hop-Frog or The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym , numerous critics have seen a link between the story and the slavery debate. 36 In 1960, Harry Levin suggested that “The Fall of the House of Usher” could be read as a prophetic comment on the plantation system of the South. Specifically, he saw the South’s “feudal pride and foreboding of doom” mirrored in the story, and Usher as “driven underground by the pressure of fear.” 37 While Levin’s reading acknowledges the vague sense of threat informing the tale, Maurice S. Lee has suggested that more specifically it is “slave rebellion” that “potentially lurks” in the story. 38 This is not to argue that the story is meant as a simple allegory of Southern slavery and the threat of revolt. Instead, the issue of slavery should be regarded as a cultural framework for understanding the emotional charge of the story’s principal tensions and tropes. For example, the subterranean crypt where Madeline is placed as a precaution against grave-robbing physicians had once been a dungeon and has subsequently been used as a store-room for gun powder or “some other highly combustible substance” (M 2: 410). As I have argued elsewhere, this oddly detailed history of the room links its past function as a site of feudal-style imprisonment to the idea of combustibility, an association that would have resonated suggestively with the fear of insurrection in the post-Turner South, though its immediate function in the story is to allow a plausible explanation for the collapse of the house. 39

Although the story anticipates the implosion of the nation around the issue of slavery twenty years later, the more immediate aspect of the text that invites reading it in terms of slavery is its preoccupation with revenge for imprisonment and premature burial (reflecting figuratively how slavery constitutes what Orlando Patterson has called “social death” 40 ). Much of the story’s powerful conclusion derives its emotional charge from the fact that Usher ignores for days Madeline’s struggle with her coffin and crypt. In fact, her long struggle is what Poe himself cited as the point of the story. In an 1845 review article of his own work, Poe wrote that the main effect (or “thesis of the story”) can be described as “the revulsion of feeling consequent upon discovering that for a long period of time we have been mistaking sounds of agony, for those of mirth or indifference” (ER: 871). 41 Literally, this refers to the sounds of Madeline’s struggle to escape her tomb, sounds which Usher has deliberately ignored and which the narrator has mistaken for the sounds in “Mad Trist.” Structurally, it recalls the masquerades and other festivities used to mask the sounds of suffering in other Poe stories, as in “The Mask of the Red Death” or “Hop-Frog.” The effect he describes here is complex, assuming both a process in time (“sounds we have been mistaking ” followed by a “consequent” feeling of revulsion) and an ethical framework (“revulsion” here being essentially an affective response akin to horror, arising from a realization of having failed to act ethically). The word “mirth” in this passage is used in the technical sense that chivalric romances, like the story the narrator reads to Usher, are a form of amusement. Moreover, the fact that the narrator chooses to read a chivalric romance would have a special purchase in the context of the South, which tended to imagine its cultural roots in the medieval and Scottish chivalric traditions. The term “indifference” is equally freighted with cultural resonance, bringing us to the issue of conscience and its absence that many abolitionists argued was a natural result of the slave relationship—namely, that it dulled the moral faculty of the master and of the culture that tolerated slavery in general, inexorably pulling it toward a kind of moral numbness and idiocy.

Bad Conscience, or Moral and Epistemological Unreliability

If slavery forms a backdrop to the story, the more immediate subject of the tale’s construction and specific effect is the issue of conscience and moral apperception. This is a concern of Poe’s in many of his short stories and is a key feature of the unreliability of his narrators. 42 Conscience, as a specific cognitive faculty, was the subject of particular interest and attention in the 1830s, as the debate over slavery was heating up. Francis Wayland devoted five chapters to “Conscience, or the Moral Sense” in his tract on moral philosophy, Elements of Moral Science (1835), describing its specific function as “repelling vice” and contesting a subject’s “lower propensities” but lacking the power to do more than advise. Wayland’s language gives conscience an independent existence and agency, conceptualizing it as an entity separate from the decision-making subject. He repeatedly stresses the importance of “hearkening” and “obeying” the “impulses” of conscience and argues that one’s conscience could be strengthened or atrophied, like a muscle, by use or disuse. Moreover, not only could individuals weaken and destroy their conscience by failing to obey it, but entire communities could collectively deaden and lose their moral sense by repeated acts of cruelty or violence. Citing gladiatorial Rome and revolutionary France as examples, Wayland argues that failure to heed conscience on a collective level produces a collective loss of moral sensibility. 43

In light of the great political issues at stake in the question of conscience in a slaveholding society, it is no surprise that a writer as acutely aware of the subtleties of power, exclusion, and social repression as the once privileged and then disowned and nearly destitute Poe would take this up as a key concern. 44 What is surprising is how Poe scholarship has largely overlooked the fact that lack of conscience is the main form of unreliability that many of his first-person narrators display. Poe uses morally unreliable first-person narrators in stories such as “William Wilson,” “The Business Man,” “The Black Cat,” “The Imp of the Perverse,” and “The Cask of Amontillado,” and their function is always to describe but then to neglect crucial elements of a specifically ethical nature. An obvious example is “The Tell-Tale Heart,” where the narrator betrays his moral insanity quite quickly by avowing at the end of the second paragraph that he is a murderer (“I made up my mind the take the life of the old man”; M 3: 792). At the other end of the spectrum, the narrator of “Berenice” is revealed only at the end of the story to be the perpetrator of a horrible crime. When we learn that Berenice’s teeth are in his possession, we are forced to infer that he has pulled them out from her alive (as her body is disfigured and his own clothes are “clotted with gore”; M 2: 218). Even the ending is narrated “unreliably” by never using the word “teeth.” Instead, the narrator describes “thirty-two small, white, and ivory-looking substances” falling to the floor (M 2: 219). This absurdly indirect description (after all, who could recognize that there are thirty-two of anything in a single glance?), like all unreliable narration, requires the reader to produce the final meaning himself or herself by recognizing them as teeth, even though the narrator does not name them as such. In “The Cask of Amontillado,” by contrast, the reader gradually discerns that the seemingly congenial narrator is a sociopath intent upon revenge. His sadism is only fully revealed at the moment near the end when he mocks his victim’s pleas for mercy by repeating them sarcastically (“ For the love of God, Montresor !” “Yes” I said, “for the love of God!”; M 3: 1263).

Similarly, the narrator of “The Fall of the House of Usher” betrays the limitations of his unimaginative subjectivity gradually during the course of the last section of the narrative. It could be argued that the narrator plants doubts in the reader’s mind with his initial lengthy descriptions of his unexplained emotions upon first seeing the house, and his provocative comparisons to narcotics (repeated again soon after when he tries to describe Usher’s manner as that of an “irreclaimable eater of opium”; M 2: 402). This is because the entire narrative is structured to prepare the reader for the specific effect that Poe wanted to create—as mentioned above, “the revulsion of feeling consequent upon discovering that for a long period of time we have been mistaking sounds of agony, for those of mirth or indifference” (ER: 871).

To create that temporally complex effect, involving “a long period of time” during which “sounds of agony” are mistaken for sounds of “mirth,” Poe structures the story in roughly two parts, with Madeline’s apparent death as the fulcrum. In the first section, he establishes all the necessary cues and clues to help the reader make sense of what is happening, but which the narrator will fail to understand, namely, that Madeline has been entombed alive and has managed to escape the underground crypt. These clues include references to the narrator’s unreliability, Madeline’s catalepsy, and her lifelike appearance but also the explanations foreshadowing Usher’s own “unreliability,” since he is the first to fail to attend to Madeline’s struggle. Thus, Usher’s most extensive speech occurs in this section, partly paraphrased and partly quoted. Usher informs the narrator (and the reader) that he has preternaturally sensitive hearing as well as a general acuteness of the senses, and then explains his fear of any incident, “even the most trivial,” which would operate upon his “intolerable agitation of the soul” (M 2: 403). In short, he is hypersensitive and morbidly perceptive of sounds, and terrified of anything that would upset him. These elements, along with some suspicion that the narrator’s judgment is not entirely transparent and reliable, are all that are needed after Madeline is entombed and Usher’s manner dramatically changes—as he appears to be “listening to some imaginary sound” and “laboring with some oppressive secret”—for the reader to guess that the cataleptic Madeline was not dead when she was entombed and that Usher can hear her stirring (M 2: 411). We know that he is terrified of any unusual incident, and we are given thereby a motive for why he does not dare to tell anyone what he hears. Usher’s strange behavior thus constitutes a hermeneutic gap that invites the reader to fill it with a plausible explanation, which Poe has carefully prepared.

The long last section of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” in which the narrator describes hearing “low and indefinite sounds” that continue to grow louder and more alarming as he reads the “Mad Trist” to Usher in order to distract him, is the dramatic and emotional heart of the story (M 2: 411). Its rhetorical power depends on the fact that most readers—even first-time readers, I would contend, if they have read attentively—are aware or suspect that Madeline has been buried alive and that the narrator and the brother seem (or pretend) to not recognize this fact. I say “pretend” because Usher turns out to have heard her struggles all along. He is, in fact, the sociopath at the heart of the story, who has suppressed his conscience and moral judgment, like the narrator of “William Wilson.” In contrast to Usher’s deliberate failure to rescue his sister, the narrator is merely blind (and deaf) to her suffering. The seeming stupidity of the narrator is illustrated in at least one film adaptation by making him into a myopic, bumbling fool. 45 The effect for the reader is a curious combination of uneasiness about Madeline’s torture and resurrection and epistemological pleasure from drawn-out scenes of dramatic irony (the reader knows something crucial the protagonist seems unable to grasp). Poe prolongs this scene to amplify its uncanny effects: an angry Madeline laboriously draws closer while the two men read and listen to sounds of her approach in a state of denial. The situation generates a peculiar, ethical position for the reader, aware of suffering that the main characters ignore or fail to recognize.

The climax coincides with Usher’s revelation, prompted by the “distinct, hollow, metallic, and clangorous” sound of Madeline’s tomb door being opened. This noise makes the narrator jump to his feet but leaves Usher “undisturbed,” once more proving that he has already been listening to—and ignoring—the sounds of Madeline’s struggle. Now, characterized by a “stony rigidity” and “sickly smile,” Usher confesses his self-deception and failure to act: “Not hear it?—yes, I hear it, and have heard it. Long—long—long—many minutes, many hours, many days, have I heard it—yet I dared not—oh, pity me, miserable wretch that I am!—I dared not—I dared not speak! We have put her living in the tomb! Said I not that my senses were acute? I now tell you that I heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin. I heard them—many, many days ago—yet I dared not— I dared not speak! ” (M 2: 416). Here Usher fills the hermeneutic gap in the conclusion, which the reader had been invited to guess at as soon as the narrator mentioned that Usher seemed to be “laboring with some oppressive secret” and “listening to some imaginary sound” (M 2: 411).

Usher’s monologue illuminates the latter part of the story in more detail:

[“]And now—to-night—Ethelred—ha! ha!—the breaking of the hermit’s door, and the death-cry of the dragon, and the clangour of the shield!—say, rather, the rending of her coffin, and the grating of the iron hinges of her prison, and her struggles within the coppered archway of the vault! Oh whither shall I fly? Will she not be here anon? Is she not hurrying to upbraid me for my haste? Have I not heard her footstep on the stair? Do I not distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of her heart? Madman!”—here he sprang furiously to his feet, and shrieked out his syllables, as if in the effort he were giving up his soul— “Madman! I tell you that she now stands without the door!” (M 2: 416)

Usher here reveals the specific fear at the crux of his agitation, namely, that Madeline is coming to reproach and possibly punish him for his failure of conscience and will. The climax simultaneously evokes the unspoken but pervasive anxiety about slave rebellion—that men and women prematurely consigned to the social death of slavery will refuse to stay dead and instead seek justifiable retribution—that hung over the antebellum South and that still gives this story its peculiar frisson , even if the cultural particulars remain unspecified. 46

One odd aspect of this final speech is Usher’s calling the narrator “madman.” We have been led by the narrator to regard Roderick as verging on insanity, and yet this accusation from Usher reminds us of the many clues the narrator had dropped about his own mental instability: his references to opium consumption, to his “insufferable gloom,” his “superstition,” and to his long familiarity with “the paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as their basis” (M 2: 399). The fact that the term “madman” can easily apply at this point to either Usher or the narrator himself is also one of many instances of the radical convertibility that characterizes Poe’s work (as Joan Dyan has noted 47 ), namely, that things and people are oddly convertible and interchangeable, like Rowena and Ligeia in the tale titled after the latter.

Another odd thing about this speech, as many critics have noted, is the overly formal expression “ without the door ” for “outside the door.” This curious phrase has been used to argue that Usher has had incestuous relations with his sister while she was alive, or even after she has been entombed, since “ without the door ” could be read to mean that she has lost her hymen (the figurative door to her physical self). 48 While it is true that Poe may have followed Gothic tradition in permitting suggestions of incest to arise, the curious expression shows again how narrative content is mirrored by and inseparable from the oppressive and unreliable architectonics of the house. For instance, the door of the dungeon produces portentous sounds that the narrator and Usher hear and/or ignore.

Similarly, the whole structure of the house proves a source of crucial ambiguities. For example, while giving “little token of instability,” the house is nevertheless doomed to collapse (M 2: 400). The narrator early alludes to the fracture that ultimately causes the collapse of the house—and does so in that highly subjectivized and uncertain way that characterizes his sensibility from the outset. He reports the crack while appearing not to see it: “Perhaps the eye of a scrutinizing observer might have discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn” (M 2: 400). Both the conditional tense (“might have”) and adverb evoking uncertainty (“perhaps”) call attention to the fact that the narrator is precisely NOT the “scrutinizing observer” needed to convey the meaning of the “barely perceptible” flaw in the structure.

The house is central and present to the story in other ways as well, from the pun of the title, collapsing the family and the physical building into one entity, to the suggestively black (“ebon”) floors, hinting at the black substratum of Southern society, and the general gloom both inside and outside the mansion, as well as the crucial details of the placement of the crypt underneath the house, which causes Madeline’s muffled sounds of struggle to arise from below . John Timmerman has argued, “In no other work . . . has Poe structured this sentience, or interconnectedness, between the physical world and mental/psychological world more powerfully and tellingly” than in “Usher.” 49 In fact, Poe emphasizes the importance of the house by including the poem “The Haunted Palace,” recited by Usher in a moment of “artificial excitement,” hinting that Usher and the narrator have possibly indulged in “artificial”—that is, narcotic—diversions. Despite Poe’s reluctance to use allegory in fiction, here, as in other poems, he indulges in another artificial pleasure—an extended comparison of the face-like castle inhabited by the “monarch Thought” with Usher’s mind and reason “tottering . . . upon her . . . throne,” as the narrator remarks (M 2: 406). With this embedded poem, Poe traces connections between house and mind as explicitly as possible, framing the story—on one level—as a descent into madness by Usher, or the narrator, or both, triggered by mechanisms of denial, repression, and lack of conscience. Lindon Barrett’s association of reason with whiteness in antebellum America opens the door to a more tacitly racialized reading of “The Haunted Palace,” while Betsy Erkkila explicitly sees the “hideous throng” of the poem, which invades and overcomes the reign of reason behind “the pale door,” as an allusion to American fear of insurrection by “Negroes and lower classes.” 50

Another example of the house’s importance to the unfolding of the story is the strange importance given to Usher’s theory that the atmosphere around his house derives intimately from the fungi covering the stones of the house and the trees around it, linking all together in a close network of charged and sentient matter. This theory (discussed in a later chapter by Branka Arsić) evokes further evidence of the narrator’s unreliability. He keeps insisting that Usher’s theory is untrue and even beneath notice (“Such opinions need no comment, and I will make none”; [M 2: 408]), and yet the end of the narrative bears out Usher’s version. During the final scene, a thick gaseous and glowing cloud indeed envelopes the house before vanishing with it into the tarn.

Usher’s belief in the sentience of the physical mansion and tarn takes on a still more ironic significance when read in light of a culture whose laws defined certain human beings as things. If we consider that African Americans were bought and sold as chattel on the premise that they were not human, the debate about Usher’s belief in the consciousness of his physical environment assumes a sinister suggestiveness. It was, after all, the condition of the white Southern master to be surrounded by sentient beings whose intelligence and emotions had to be denied in order for the plantation and the slave economy itself to endure.

To conclude, “The Fall of the House of Usher” is the keystone to Poe’s later work. With suggestive indirection, the story evokes sympathy for the sufferer of a grave injury, namely, living entombment accompanied by abandonment—conscious malice on the part of the sociopathic Usher and heedless neglect in the case of the “inept” narrator, as Timmerman characterizes him. 51 Like many of Poe’s stories (including, notably, “Hop-Frog”), “Usher” betrays what Kennedy has described as “potential empathy for those in bondage.” 52 It is perhaps also no accident that Poe’s later work Eureka makes a strangely moving case for the absolute equality of all souls and all animate beings as mere figments of a larger “Divine Being” into which all will one day melt (“the sense of individual identity will be gradually merged in the general consciousness” [L1: 106]). In any case, although the narrative is dense with details and allusions never entirely accounted for by any single reading or interpretation, the emotional effect of the tale clearly depends on the horror and repugnance that readers are invited to feel as they discover the cruelty on which the unstable House of Usher stands.

1. Dennis R. Perry and Carl H. Sederholm , Poe, “The House of Usher,” and the American Gothic (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

2. Darrel Abel , “A Key to the House of Usher,” University of Toronto Quarterly 18, no. 2 (January 1849): 176–185.

3. Jonathan Elmer , Reading at the Social Limit: Affect, Mass Culture, and Edgar Allan Poe (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 90–91.

4. Marie Bonaparte , The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-Analytic Interpretation , trans. John Rodker , foreword by Sigmund Freud (London: Imago, 1949), 237–250.

5. D. H. Lawrence , Studies in Classic American Literature , ed. Ezra Greenspan , Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 66–80. Similarly, Patrick Quinn saw incest as the secret heart of the story, proposing that the main conflict staged by the tale is “the warfare taking place in Roderick . . . by his consciousness against the evil of his unconscious.” See Patrick F. Quinn , The French Face of Poe (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1954), 245.

6. G. R. Thompson , Poe’s Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1973), 96.

7. J. R. Hammond , An Edgar Allan Poe Companion (London: Macmillan Press, 1981), 71.

8. Eric W. Carlson , “Tales of Psychal Conflict: ‘William Wilson’ and ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ ” in A Companion to Poe Studies , ed. Eric W. Carlson (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), 188–208.

Darrel Abel, “A Key to the House of Usher,” 179.

10. Michael J. Hoffman , “The House of Usher and Negative Romanticism,” Studies in Romanticism 4, no. 3 (Spring 1965): 158–168.

This is not to say that Poe never uses allegory at all. He certainly uses it in his poetry, and stories such as “The Masque of the Red Death” lend themselves well to allegorical readings, but the emotional and aesthetic effect of a tale is far more likely to be his main focus.

For more on Poe’s irony, see Elmer’s Reading at the Social Limit.

13. Joseph N. Riddel , “The ‘Crypt’ of Edgar Poe,” boundary 2 7, no. 3 (Spring 1979): 117–144, 130.

Riddel, “The ‘Crypt’ of Edgar Poe,” 128–129.

15. Harriet Hustis , “ ‘Reading Encrypted but Persistent’: The Gothic of Reading and Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ ” Studies in American Fiction 27, no. 1 (March 22, 1999): 3–20.

16. Scott Peeples , “Poe’s ‘constructiveness’ and ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ ” in The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe , ed. Kevin J. Hayes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 178–190.

Peeples, “Poe’s ‘Constructiveness’ and ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ ” 182.

Peeples, “Poe’s ‘Constructiveness’ and ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ ” 188.

19. John Carlos Rowe , “Poe, Antebellum Slavery and Modern Criticism,” in Poe’s Pym: Critical Explorations , ed. Richard Kopley (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 117.

20. Toni Morrison , Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 31–33.

21. Teresa Goddu , Gothic America: Narrative History, and Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 93.

22. Lesley Ginsberg , “Slavery and the Gothic Horror of Poe’s ‘The Black Cat,’ ” in American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative , ed. Robert K. Martin & Eric Savoy (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 1889), 123, 122.

23. Whalen, Terence. Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses: The Political Economy of Literature in Antebellum America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 111–146. For an earlier discussion of the controversy surrounding the “Paulding-Drayton” review, see Dana D. Nelson , The Word in Black and White: Reading “Race ” in American Literature, 1638–1867 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 90–92. Stefan Schöberlein confirms that N. Beverley Tucker wrote the review in “Poe or Not Poe? A Stylometric Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s Writings,” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 32, no. 3 (2017): 643–659.

Whalen, Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses , 111.

25. John Carlos Rowe , “Edgar Allan Poe’s Imperial Fantasy and the American Frontier,” in Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race , ed. by J. Gerald and Liliane Weissberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 100.

26. Leland S. Person , “Poe’s Philosophy of Amalgamation: Reading Racism in the Tales,” in Romancing the Shadow , 207.

27. J. Gerald Kennedy , “‘Trust No Man’: Poe, Douglass, and the Culture of Slavery,” in Romancing the Shadow , 225–257.

28. Sam Worley , “ The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and the Ideology of Slavery,” ESQ 40 (1994): 222.

29. George Fitzhugh , Cannibals All! Or Slaves Without Masters (Richmond, VA: A. Morris, 1857), chap. 32, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/35481/35481-h/35481-h.htm .

Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! Or Slaves Without Masters , Chap. 22, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/35481/35481-h/35481-h.htm .

31. Harriet Beecher Stowe , Uncle Tom’s Cabin , ed. Elizabeth Ammons (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994), 7.

Quoted in Ginsberg, “Slavery and the Gothic Horror of Poe’s ‘The Black Cat,’ ” 100.

Quoted in Ginsberg, “Slavery and the Gothic Horror of Poe’s ‘The Black Cat,’ ” 101.

35. Toni Morrison , “Melville and the Language of Denial,” The Nation , January 7, 2014, https://www.thenation.com/article/melville-and-language-denial/ .

36. See, for example, J. Gerald Kennedy’s short overview of these approaches in Strange Nation: Literary Nationalism and Cultural Conflict in the Age of Poe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 67.

37. Harry Levin , The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville (New York: Vintage Books, 1960), 160–161.

38. Maurice S. Lee , “Absolute Poe,” in Slavery, Philosophy, and American Literature, 1830–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 23. Stephen Dougherty has also recently read the tale as a “nightmarish prophecy of the cultural and political defeat of American slave society,” only with a Foucaultian focus on “modern, bourgeois identity” and miscegenation, in “Foucault in the House of Usher: Some Historical Permutations in Poe’s Gothic,” Papers on Language & Literature 37, number 1 (2001): 19.

39. The chief abolitionist newspaper took Nat Turner’s revolt as the beginning of the end for the South, writing dramatically that “the first drops of blood, which are but the prelude to a deluge from the gathering clouds, have fallen” ( The Liberator , Boston, September 3, 1831). The writer warns that the entire country will be the scene of bloodshed and righteous vengeance if slaves are not immediately freed, and that more revolts like Turner’s will naturally follow: “Woe to this guilty land, unless she speedily repents of her evil doings! The blood of millions of her sons cried aloud for redress! IMMEDIATE EMANCIPATION can alone save her from the vengeance of Heaven” (reprinted in Henry Irving Tragle , The Southampton Slave Revolt of 1831: A Compilation of Source Material [Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1971], 64 ). My source for the implications of the combustible dungeon is G. R. Thompson, Poe’s Fiction , 94. For my own discussion of this, see The Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2010), 51.

40. Orlando Patterson , Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985).

Although this review was anonymous, and Thomas Mabbott attributes it to someone else, G. R. Thompson has argued that it is “almost certainly” written by Poe, and as editor of the Library of America volume of Poe’s Essays and Reviews so included it.

42. An excellent discussion of conscience in antebellum literature is Richard H. Brodhead, in “Sparing the Rod: Discipline and Fiction in Antebellum America,” Representations 21 (Winter 1988): 67–96 , where he quotes an antebellum guidebook in which the conscience is described as something that seems uncanny for children: “another than themselves, and yet themselves” (79).

43. Francis Wayland , The Elements of Moral Science , ed. Joseph Blau (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963), 49.

44. J. Gerald Kennedy even muses that “without employment or income, Poe must nevertheless have drawn occasional, ironic comparisons between his circumstances and those of the slave.” See “A Brief Biography,” in A Historical Guide to Edgar Allan Poe , ed. J. Gerald Kennedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 31.

Most notably, Jean Epstein’s La Chute de la maison Usher (1928).

46. Madeline’s role as embodiment of repressed conscience is also paralleled by similar characters in other Poe stories, such as William Wilson’s double, already discussed, or the “mummer” who stands in the shadow of the “ebony clock” (one more allusion to the black slave population of the South?) in “The Masque of the Red Death” and causes the death of Prince Prospero, who had also tried to lock his people’s suffering outside his castle gates and mask the sound with revels. All these figures function as personifications of stifled conscience returning to exact justice. For a discussion of Southern anxieties about black violence and revenge, see Elizabeth Young , Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor (New York: New York Press, 2008).

47. Joan Dayan , “Amorous Bondage: Poe, Ladies, and Slaves,” in The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe , ed. Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 179–209.

48. See David Leverenz , “Poe and Gentry Virginia,” in The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe , 221.

49. John H. Timmerman , “House of Mirrors: Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ ” in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” and Other Stories , ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009), 163.

50. Lindon Barrett , “Presence of Mind,” in Romancing the Shadow , 172 ; Betsy Erkkila , “The Poetics of Whiteness: Poe and the Racial Imaginary,” in Romancing the Shadow , 58.

Timmerman, “House of Mirrors: Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ ” 160.

52. J. Gerald Kennedy , “‘Trust No Man’: Poe, Douglass, and the Culture of Slavery,” in Romancing the Shadow , 237.

Goddu, Theresa A. Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation . New York: Columbia University Press, 1997 .

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Hayes, Kevin J. , ed. The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002 .

Kennedy, J. Gerald , ed. A Historical Guide to Edgar Allan Poe . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001 .

Kennedy, J. Gerald , and Liliane Weissberg , eds. Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001 .

Martin, Robert K. , and Eric Savoy , eds. American Gothic: Interventions in a National Narrative . Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998 .

Perry, Dennis R. , and Carl H. Sederholm . Poe, “The House of Usher,” and the American Gothic . London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009 .

Rosenheim, Shawn , and Stephen Rachman , eds. The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995 .

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The Fall of the House of Usher

by Edgar Allan Poe

The fall of the house of usher themes.

The plot of Poe's tale essentially involves a woman who dies, is buried, and rises from the grave. But did she ever die? Near the horrific finale of the tale, Usher screams: "We have put her living in the tomb!" Premature burial was something of an obsession for Poe, who featured it in many of his stories. In " The Fall of the House of Usher ," however, it is not clear to what extent the supernatural can be said to account for the strangeness of the events in the tale. Madeline may actually have died and risen like a vampire--much as Usher seems to possess vampiric qualities, arising "from a sofa on which he had been lying at full length" when the Narrator first sees him, avoiding all daylight and most food, and roaming through his crypt-like abode. But a more realistic version of events suggests that she may have been mistaken for dead--and luckily managed to escape her tomb. Either way, the line between life and death is a fine one in Poe's fiction, and Usher's study of the "sentience of all vegetable things" fits aptly with Poe's own preoccupations.

Poe writes that Usher "entered, at some length, into what he conceived to be the nature of his malady." What exactly is his "malady" we never learn. Even Usher seems uncertain, contradictory in his description: "It was, he said, a constitutional and a family evil, and one for which he despaired to find a remedy--a mere nervous affection, he immediately added, which would undoubtedly soon pass off." The Narrator notes an "incoherence" and "inconsistency" in his old friend, but he offers little by way of scientific explanation of the condition. As a result, the line between sanity and insanity becomes blurred, which paves the way for the Narrator's own descent into madness.

If we were to try to define Roderick Usher 's illness precisely, we might diagnose him with acute anxiety. What seems to terrify Usher is fear itself. "To an anomalous species of terror," Poe writes, "I found him a bounden slave." Usher tries to explain to the Narrator that he dreads "the events of the future, not in themselves but in their results." He dreads the intangible and the unknowable; he fears precisely what cannot be rationally feared. Fear for no apparent reason except ambiguity itself is an important motif in Poe's tale, which after all begins with the Narrator's description of his own irrational dread: "I know not how it was--but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit." Later, Usher identifies fear itself as the thing that will kill him, suggesting that his own anxiety is what conjures up the blood-stained Madeline--or that she is simply a manifestation of his own deepest neuroses.

What binds Usher to Madeline, and what renders him terrified of her? If he conjures up her specter, arisen from the grave to bring him to his own, why does he do so? There is a clear incestuous undertone to the relationship between the brother and sister. Without spouses they live together in the great family home, each of them wasting away within the building's dark rooms. The Narrator describes the strange qualities of the Usher family--that it never has put forth "any enduring branch," that "the entire family lay in the direct line of descent." The implication is that incest is the norm for the Ushers, and that Roderick's and Madeline's strange illnesses may stem from their inbred genes.

The Narrator arrives at the House of Usher in order to visit a friend. While the relationship between him and Roderick is never fully explained, the reader does learn that they were boyhood friends. That Usher writes to the Narrator, urging him to give him company in his time of distress, suggests the close rapport between the two men. But Poe's story is a chronicle of both distancing and identification. In other words, the Narrator seems to remove himself spiritually from Usher, terrified of his house, his illness, his appearance, but as the narrative progresses he cannot help but be drawn into Usher's twisted world. Alas, family (if not incest) trumps friendship at the end, when Usher and Madeline are reunited and the Narrator is cast off on his own into the raging storm.

There are three images of would-be "tombs" or "crypts" in " The Fall of the House of Usher." The house itself is shut off from the daylight, its cavernous rooms turned into spacious vaults, in which characters who never seem entirely alive--Madeline and Usher--waste away. Second, Usher's painting is of "an immensely long and rectangular vault or tunnel," foreshadowing the third image of a tomb, the real one of Madeline's temporary burial. What Poe has constructed therefore is a kind of mise-en-abime (story-within-a-story)--tombs being represented within tombs. The implication, especially once the entire House of Usher sinks into a new grave below the tarn, is that the world itself is a kind of crypt.

Despite (or because) of his madness, Usher is skilled at music and apparently is quite a painter. The Narrator compares Roderick's "phantasmagoric conceptions" to those of a real artist, Fuseli, and the Narrator seems both entranced and terrified by them. "If ever mortal painted an idea," he proposes, "that mortal was Roderick Usher." Insofar as art might be deemed a stab at immortality, the death-obsessed Usher, so certain of his own demise, strives to cling to time itself by producing works which can last beyond him. And insofar as art is a fleeting good in itself, Usher might at least claim a bit of beauty in the midst of his anxieties. Ironically, though, the one painting of his that the Narrator describes portrays a tomb, and everything is finally destroyed by the House's collapse. It would seem that his art fails Roderick Usher.

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The Fall of the House of Usher Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Fall of the House of Usher is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

describe the room in which Roderick Usher is staying (267).

I would think a quote would be the best example for you. From there you can put these ideas into your own words. It's not hard, give it a try!

The room in which I found myself was very large and lofty. The windows were long, narrow, and pointed,...

which details in Usher's appearance of suggest that he has been cut off from the outside world for many years?

"Surely, man had never before so terribly altered, in so brief a period, as had Roderick Usher!"

"A cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid, but of a...

What forms of artistic expression does Usher share with thr narrator ?

Usher is a painter and he shares his art with the narrator. They also read poetry, stories, and share music.

Study Guide for The Fall of the House of Usher

The Fall of the House of Usher study guide contains a biography of Edgar Allan Poe, literature essays, a complete e-text, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

About The Fall of the House of Usher
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Essays for The Fall of the House of Usher

The Fall of the House of Usher essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe.

The Influence of Edgar Allan Poe's Predecessors on His Work
Domains in 'The Fall of the House of Usher'
Structural Purposes and Aesthetic Sensations of the Narrator's Language of "Fall of the House of Usher" within the Opening Paragraph
Sonnet “X” and “The Fall of the House of Usher”
Uncertainty: Poe’s Means, Pynchon’s End

E-Text of The Fall of the House of Usher

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The Fall Of The House Of Usher Essay

The Fall of the House of Usher is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. The story is about the fall of the house of Usher, and the events that lead up to it. The story is narrated by an unnamed person who tells the story of his visit to the house of Usher, and the events that transpired there. The house of Usher is haunted by the ghost of Madeline Usher, who died under mysterious circumstances.

The narrator is interested in finding out what happened to Madeline, and he begins to suspect that her brother, Roderick Usher, may have had something to do with her death. The narrator eventually learns that Roderick has been cursed by Madeline’s ghost, and that the house will soon fall apart.

The house of Usher eventually falls apart, and Roderick dies in the process. The story is a classic example of Gothic fiction, and it has been praised for its chilling atmosphere and suspenseful plot. The Fall of the House of Usher is considered to be one of Poe’s best works, and it has been adapted into a number of films and television shows.

The Fall of the House of Usher is a classic example of Gothic fiction. The story is set in a dark and spooky house, and it is filled with suspenseful scenes and mysterious characters. The plot revolves around the fall of the house of Usher, and the events that lead up to it. The story is narrated by an unnamed person who tells the story of his visit to the house of Usher, and the events that transpired there. The house of Usher is haunted by the ghost of Madeline Usher, who died under mysterious circumstances.

The House of Usher is a gloomy castle inside the city limits of Ravenswood, Illinois. The family has become sick with strange maladies that may be linked to their intermarriage.

The family estate, named Usher, is said to be haunted by the ghost of Madeline’s mother. The house itself seems to be alive and is in a state of decay. The story progresses with Roderick telling his friend, Philip, about the day that Madeline died. She was found in a pool of her own blood and there was a great gash on her forehead (Jacobs and Roberts, pg. 463). The servants refused to go back into the house, so Roderick had to bury her himself.

Roderick fears that he will also die and leave Usher without an heir. He tells Philip that he has been studying the secrets of life and death and that he may have found a way to cheat death. Philip is apprehensive about this, but goes to stay at Usher anyhow. Roderick shows him around the house and leads him down into the crypt. There, they find a hidden door that leads them down into the bowels of the earth (Jacobs and Roberts, pg. 465). They enter a dark and dreary chamber where Madeline’s body is entombed. The air is thick with moisture and it smells of death. The sound of dripping water can be heard from all directions.

Roderick tells Philip that he has been bringing Madeline back to life by giving her doses of a potion that he has made himself. He believes that he can bring her back completely by using an elixir that he has also made. Philip is horrified by all of this and tells Roderick that he needs to get out of the house. The next day, Madeline’s body is found in her bed and it appears that she has died in her sleep (Jacobs and Roberts, pg. 466). The funeral is held and Roderick mourns his sister’s death.

Shortly after the funeral, strange things start happening at Usher. The walls seem to be closing in on Roderick and he complains about the oppressive atmosphere of the house. The windows are boarded up and there is no way for any light or air to enter (Jacobs and Roberts, pg. 467).

Madness, the supernatural, and artistic purpose are all recurring themes in “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The Usher family is known for its history of incest, which has resulted in recent generations including Roderick being afflicted with madness.

The supernatural: The house of Usher is said to be haunted and is full of secret passages and hidden rooms. The narrator is not sure whether the events that take place in the story are caused by the supernatural or by Roderick’s mental illness, but either way, the house exerts a powerful grip on the family. Artistic purpose: The story is written in such a way that it blurs the line between reality and fiction.

The reader is never quite sure what is really happening, which may be intentional on Poe’s part. Some critics have interpreted “The Fall of the House of Usher” as a commentary on the Romantic movement, which was at its peak when Poe wrote the story. Romanticism prized emotion over reason and emphasized individualism and creativity. The story may be seen as an attack on these values, or as a warning against their dangers.

A man discovers a savage family curse while visiting his fiancée’s family home, and he worries that his future brother-in-law has prematurely entombed his bride-to-be. Philip Winthrop contacts his girlfriend Madeline Usher at her home. Roderick, Madeline’s brother, is particularly irritated by Philip’s presence.

The siblings have a strange, but close, bond. Winthrop learns from Madeline that their family is cursed and that Roderick believes she died prematurely. The locals whisper about the house’s malignant influence. Winthrop tries to persuade Madeline to leave the house for her own safety, but she refuses.

Roderick tells Winthrop about an incident in which he and Madeline were swimming in a nearby river. Madeline saw a vision of her death and became so terrified that she drowned while trying to get back to shore. Roderick was able to save her, but since that day he has been convinced that she has an “evil eye.”

Winthrop soon realizes that Roderick has entombed Madeline alive in the family crypt.

Roderick finally agrees to release Madeline from her tomb, but only if Winthrop stays and watches over her. The morbid agreement gives Winthrop just enough time to realize that he is also cursed and that he will soon join Madeline and Roderick in death. The mansion’s oppressive atmosphere overwhelms him, and he dies screaming. The story concludes with a description of the Usher family home crumbling into ruins.

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Comparing "The Fall of The House of Usher" and "House Taken Over"

Categories: House Taken Over The Fall of The House of Usher

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Atmosphere and mood, themes of isolation and decay, narrative techniques: first-person vs. third-person, symbolism and allegory, exploration of the unseen and supernatural, cultural and historical contexts, conclusion: reflecting on dual dimensions of fear and mystery.

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The Fall of the House of Usher

by Edgar Allan Poe (published 1839)

Son coeur est un luth suspendu; Sitot qu'on le touche il resonne. - De Beranger . DURING the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was --but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me --upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain --upon the bleak walls --upon the vacant eye-like windows --upon a few rank sedges --and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees --with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium --the bitter lapse into everyday life --the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart --an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it --I paused to think --what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down --but with a shudder even more thrilling than before --upon the remodelled and inverted images of the gray sedge , and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows. Nevertheless, in this mansion of gloom I now proposed to myself a sojourn of some weeks. Its proprietor, Roderick Usher, had been one of my boon companions in boyhood; but many years had elapsed since our last meeting. A letter, however, had lately reached me in a distant part of the country --a letter from him --which, in its wildly importunate nature, had admitted of no other than a personal reply. The MS. gave evidence of nervous agitation. The writer spoke of acute bodily illness --of a mental disorder which oppressed him --and of an earnest desire to see me, as his best, and indeed his only personal friend, with a view of attempting, by the cheerfulness of my society, some alleviation of his malady. It was the manner in which all this, and much more, was said --it the apparent heart that went with his request --which allowed me no room for hesitation; and I accordingly obeyed forthwith what I still considered a very singular summons. Although, as boys, we had been even intimate associates, yet I really knew little of my friend. His reserve had been always excessive and habitual. I was aware, however, that his very ancient family had been noted, time out of mind, for a peculiar sensibility of temperament, displaying itself, through long ages, in many works of exalted art, and manifested, of late, in repeated deeds of munificent yet unobtrusive charity, as well as in a passionate devotion to the intricacies, perhaps even more than to the orthodox and easily recognisable beauties, of musical science. I had learned, too, the very remarkable fact, that the stem of the Usher race, all time-honoured as it was, had put forth, at no period, any enduring branch; in other words, that the entire family lay in the direct line of descent, and had always, with very trifling and very temporary variation, so lain. It was this deficiency, I considered, while running over in thought the perfect keeping of the character of the premises with the accredited character of the people, and while speculating upon the possible influence which the one, in the long lapse of centuries, might have exercised upon the other --it was this deficiency, perhaps, of collateral issue, and the consequent undeviating transmission, from sire to son, of the patrimony with the name, which had, at length, so identified the two as to merge the original title of the estate in the quaint and equivocal appellation of the "House of Usher" --an appellation which seemed to include, in the minds of the peasantry who used it, both the family and the family mansion. I have said that the sole effect of my somewhat childish experiment --that of looking down within the tarn --had been to deepen the first singular impression. There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase of my superstition --for why should I not so term it? --served mainly to accelerate the increase itself. Such, I have long known, is the paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as a basis. And it might have been for this reason only, that, when I again uplifted my eyes to the house itself, from its image in the pool, there grew in my mind a strange fancy --a fancy so ridiculous, indeed, that I but mention it to show the vivid force of the sensations which oppressed me. I had so worked upon my imagination as really to believe that about the whole mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their immediate vicinity-an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn --a pestilent and mystic vapour, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued. Shaking off from my spirit what must have been a dream, I scanned more narrowly the real aspect of the building. Its principal feature seemed to be that of an excessive antiquity. The discoloration of ages had been great. Minute fungi overspread the whole exterior, hanging in a fine tangled web-work from the eaves. Yet all this was apart from any extraordinary dilapidation. No portion of the masonry had fallen; and there appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of parts, and the crumbling condition of the individual stones. In this there was much that reminded me of the specious totality of old wood-work which has rotted for long years in some neglected vault, with no disturbance from the breath of the external air. Beyond this indication of extensive decay, however, the fabric gave little token of instability. Perhaps the eye of a scrutinising observer might have discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn . Noticing these things, I rode over a short causeway to the house. A servant in waiting took my horse, and I entered the Gothic archway of the hall. A valet, of stealthy step, thence conducted me, in silence, through many dark and intricate passages in my progress to the studio of his master. Much that I encountered on the way contributed, I know not how, to heighten the vague sentiments of which I have already spoken. While the objects around me --while the carvings of the ceilings, the sombre tapestries of the walls, the ebon blackness of the floors, and the phantasmagoric armorial trophies which rattled as I strode, were but matters to which, or to such as which, I had been accustomed from my infancy --while I hesitated not to acknowledge how familiar was all this --I still wondered to find how unfamiliar were the fancies which ordinary images were stirring up. On one of the staircases, I met the physician of the family. His countenance, I thought, wore a mingled expression of low cunning and perplexity. He accosted me with trepidation and passed on. The valet now threw open a door and ushered me into the presence of his master. The room in which I found myself was very large and lofty. The windows were long, narrow, and pointed, and at so vast a distance from the black oaken floor as to be altogether inaccessible from within. Feeble gleams of encrimsoned light made their way through the trellised panes, and served to render sufficiently distinct the more prominent objects around; the eye, however, struggled in vain to reach the remoter angles of the chamber, or the recesses of the vaulted and fretted ceiling. Dark draperies hung upon the walls. The general furniture was profuse, comfortless, antique, and tattered. Many books and musical instruments lay scattered about, but failed to give any vitality to the scene. I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all. Upon my entrance, Usher arose from a sofa on which he had been lying at full length, and greeted me with a vivacious warmth which had much in it, I at first thought, of an overdone cordiality --of the constrained effort of the ennuye man of the world. A glance, however, at his countenance, convinced me of his perfect sincerity. We sat down; and for some moments, while he spoke not, I gazed upon him with a feeling half of pity, half of awe. Surely, man had never before so terribly altered, in so brief a period, as had Roderick Usher! It was with difficulty that I could bring myself to admit the identity of the wan being before me with the companion of my early boyhood. Yet the character of his face had been at all times remarkable. A cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid , but of a surpassingly beautiful curve; a nose of a delicate Hebrew model, but with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar formations; a finely moulded chin, speaking, in its want of prominence, of a want of moral energy; hair of a more than web-like softness and tenuity; these features, with an inordinate expansion above the regions of the temple, made up altogether a countenance not easily to be forgotten. And now in the mere exaggeration of the prevailing character of these features, and of the expression they were wont to convey, lay so much of change that I doubted to whom I spoke. The now ghastly pallor of the skin, and the now miraculous lustre of the eve, above all things startled and even awed me. The silken hair, too, had been suffered to grow all unheeded, and as, in its wild gossamer texture, it floated rather than fell about the face, I could not, even with effort, connect its Arabesque expression with any idea of simple humanity. In the manner of my friend I was at once struck with an incoherence --an inconsistency; and I soon found this to arise from a series of feeble and futile struggles to overcome an habitual trepidancy --an excessive nervous agitation. For something of this nature I had indeed been prepared, no less by his letter, than by reminiscences of certain boyish traits, and by conclusions deduced from his peculiar physical conformation and temperament. His action was alternately vivacious and sullen . His voice varied rapidly from a tremulous indecision (when the animal spirits seemed utterly in abeyance ) to that species of energetic concision --that abrupt, weighty, unhurried, and hollow-sounding enunciation --that leaden, self-balanced and perfectly modulated guttural utterance, which may be observed in the lost drunkard, or the irreclaimable eater of opium, during the periods of his most intense excitement. It was thus that he spoke of the object of my visit, of his earnest desire to see me, and of the solace he expected me to afford him. He entered, at some length, into what he conceived to be the nature of his malady. It was, he said, a constitutional and a family evil, and one for which he despaired to find a remedy --a mere nervous affection, he immediately added, which would undoubtedly soon pass off. It displayed itself in a host of unnatural sensations. Some of these, as he detailed them, interested and bewildered me; although, perhaps, the terms, and the general manner of the narration had their weight. He suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses; the most insipid food was alone endurable; he could wear only garments of certain texture; the odours of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a faint light; and there were but peculiar sounds, and these from stringed instruments, which did not inspire him with horror. To an anomalous species of terror I found him a bounden slave. "I shall perish," said he, "I must perish in this deplorable folly. Thus, thus, and not otherwise, shall I be lost. I dread the events of the future, not in themselves, but in their results. I shudder at the thought of any, even the most trivial, incident, which may operate upon this intolerable agitation of soul. I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect --in terror. In this unnerved-in this pitiable condition --I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm , FEAR." I learned, moreover, at intervals, and through broken and equivocal hints, another singular feature of his mental condition. He was enchained by certain superstitious impressions in regard to the dwelling which he tenanted, and whence, for many years, he had never ventured forth --in regard to an influence whose supposititious force was conveyed in terms too shadowy here to be re-stated --an influence which some peculiarities in the mere form and substance of his family mansion, had, by dint of long sufferance, he said, obtained over his spirit-an effect which the physique of the gray walls and turrets, and of the dim tarn into which they all looked down, had, at length, brought about upon the morale of his existence. He admitted, however, although with hesitation, that much of the peculiar gloom which thus afflicted him could be traced to a more natural and far more palpable origin --to the severe and long-continued illness --indeed to the evidently approaching dissolution-of a tenderly beloved sister --his sole companion for long years --his last and only relative on earth. "Her decease," he said, with a bitterness which I can never forget, "would leave him (him the hopeless and the frail) the last of the ancient race of the Ushers." While he spoke, the lady Madeline (for so was she called) passed slowly through a remote portion of the apartment, and, without having noticed my presence, disappeared. I regarded her with an utter astonishment not unmingled with dread --and yet I found it impossible to account for such feelings. A sensation of stupor oppressed me, as my eyes followed her retreating steps. When a door, at length, closed upon her, my glance sought instinctively and eagerly the countenance of the brother --but he had buried his face in his hands, and I could only perceive that a far more than ordinary wanness had overspread the emaciated fingers through which trickled many passionate tears. The disease of the lady Madeline had long baffled the skill of her physicians. A settled apathy, a gradual wasting away of the person, and frequent although transient affections of a partially cataleptical character, were the unusual diagnosis. Hitherto she had steadily borne up against the pressure of her malady, and had not betaken herself finally to bed; but, on the closing in of the evening of my arrival at the house, she succumbed (as her brother told me at night with inexpressible agitation) to the prostrating power of the destroyer; and I learned that the glimpse I had obtained of her person would thus probably be the last I should obtain --that the lady, at least while living, would be seen by me no more. For several days ensuing, her name was unmentioned by either Usher or myself: and during this period I was busied in earnest endeavours to alleviate the melancholy of my friend. We painted and read together; or I listened, as if in a dream, to the wild improvisations of his speaking guitar. And thus, as a closer and still intimacy admitted me more unreservedly into the recesses of his spirit, the more bitterly did I perceive the futility of all attempt at cheering a mind from which darkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe, in one unceasing radiation of gloom. I shall ever bear about me a memory of the many solemn hours I thus spent alone with the master of the House of Usher. Yet I should fail in any attempt to convey an idea of the exact character of the studies, or of the occupations, in which he involved me, or led me the way. An excited and highly distempered ideality threw a sulphureous lustre over all. His long improvised dirges will ring forever in my ears. Among other things, I hold painfully in mind a certain singular perversion and amplification of the wild air of the last waltz of Von Weber. From the paintings over which his elaborate fancy brooded, and which grew, touch by touch, into vaguenesses at which I shuddered the more thrillingly, because I shuddered knowing not why; --from these paintings (vivid as their images now are before me) I would in vain endeavour to educe more than a small portion which should lie within the compass of merely written words. By the utter simplicity, by the nakedness of his designs, he arrested and overawed attention. If ever mortal painted an idea, that mortal was Roderick Usher. For me at least --in the circumstances then surrounding me --there arose out of the pure abstractions which the hypochondriac contrived to throw upon his canvas, an intensity of intolerable awe, no shadow of which felt I ever yet in the contemplation of the certainly glowing yet too concrete reveries of Fuseli . One of the phantasmagoric conceptions of my friend, partaking not so rigidly of the spirit of abstraction, may be shadowed forth, although feebly, in words. A small picture presented the interior of an immensely long and rectangular vault or tunnel, with low walls, smooth, white, and without interruption or device. Certain accessory points of the design served well to convey the idea that this excavation lay at an exceeding depth below the surface of the earth. No outlet was observed in any portion of its vast extent, and no torch, or other artificial source of light was discernible; yet a flood of intense rays rolled throughout, and bathed the whole in a ghastly and inappropriate splendour. I have just spoken of that morbid condition of the auditory nerve which rendered all music intolerable to the sufferer, with the exception of certain effects of stringed instruments. It was, perhaps, the narrow limits to which he thus confined himself upon the guitar, which gave birth, in great measure, to the fantastic character of his performances. But the fervid facility of his impromptus could not be so accounted for. They must have been, and were, in the notes, as well as in the words of his wild fantasias (for he not unfrequently accompanied himself with rhymed verbal improvisations), the result of that intense mental collectedness and concentration to which I have previously alluded as observable only in particular moments of the highest artificial excitement. The words of one of these rhapsodies I have easily remembered. I was, perhaps, the more forcibly impressed with it, as he gave it, because, in the under or mystic current of its meaning, I fancied that I perceived, and for the first time, a full consciousness on the part of Usher, of the tottering of his lofty reason upon her throne. The verses, which were entitled "The Haunted Palace," ran very nearly, if not accurately, thus: I. In the greenest of our valleys, By good angels tenanted, Once fair and stately palace -- Radiant palace --reared its head. In the monarch Thought's dominion -- It stood there! Never seraph spread a pinion Over fabric half so fair. II. Banners yellow, glorious, golden, On its roof did float and flow; (This --all this --was in the olden Time long ago) And every gentle air that dallied, In that sweet day, Along the ramparts plumed and pallid , A winged odour went away. III. Wanderers in that happy valley Through two luminous windows saw Spirits moving musically To a lute's well-tuned law, Round about a throne, where sitting ( Porphyrogene !) In state his glory well befitting, The ruler of the realm was seen. IV. And all with pearl and ruby glowing Was the fair palace door, Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing And sparkling evermore, A troop of Echoes whose sweet duty Was but to sing, In voices of surpassing beauty, The wit and wisdom of their king. V. But evil things, in robes of sorrow, Assailed the monarch's high estate; (Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow Shall dawn upon him, desolate!) And, round about his home, the glory That blushed and bloomed Is but a dim-remembered story Of the old time entombed. VI. And travellers now within that valley, Through the red-litten windows, see Vast forms that move fantastically To a discordant melody; While, like a rapid ghastly river, Through the pale door, A hideous throng rush out forever, And laugh --but smile no more. I well remember that suggestions arising from this ballad led us into a train of thought wherein there became manifest an opinion of Usher's which I mention not so much on account of its novelty, (for other men have thought thus,) as on account of the pertinacity with which he maintained it. This opinion, in its general form, was that of the sentience of all vegetable things. But, in his disordered fancy, the idea had assumed a more daring character, and trespassed, under certain conditions, upon the kingdom of inorganization. I lack words to express the full extent, or the earnest abandon of his persuasion. The belief, however, was connected (as I have previously hinted) with the gray stones of the home of his forefathers. The conditions of the sentience had been here, he imagined, fulfilled in the method of collocation of these stones --in the order of their arrangement, as well as in that of the many fungi which overspread them, and of the decayed trees which stood around --above all, in the long undisturbed endurance of this arrangement, and in its reduplication in the still waters of the tarn . Its evidence --the evidence of the sentience --was to be seen, he said, (and I here started as he spoke,) in the gradual yet certain condensation of an atmosphere of their own about the waters and the walls. The result was discoverable, he added, in that silent, yet importunate and terrible influence which for centuries had moulded the destinies of his family, and which made him what I now saw him --what he was. Such opinions need no comment, and I will make none. Our books --the books which, for years, had formed no small portion of the mental existence of the invalid --were, as might be supposed, in strict keeping with this character of phantasm . We pored together over such works as the Ververt et Chartreuse of Gresset; the Belphegor of Machiavelli ; the Heaven and Hell of Swedenborg ; the Subterranean Voyage of Nicholas Klimm by Holberg; the Chiromancy of Robert Flud, of Jean D'Indagine, and of De la Chambre; the Journey into the Blue Distance of Tieck ; and the City of the Sun of Campanella . One favourite volume was a small octavo edition of the Directorium Inquisitorum , by the Dominican Eymeric de Gironne; and there were passages in Pomponius Mela , about the old African Satyrs and AEgipans , over which Usher would sit dreaming for hours. His chief delight, however, was found in the perusal of an exceedingly rare and curious book in quarto Gothic --the manual of a forgotten church --the Vigilae Mortuorum secundum Chorum Ecclesiae Maguntinae. I could not help thinking of the wild ritual of this work, and of its probable influence upon the hypochondriac, when, one evening, having informed me abruptly that the lady Madeline was no more, he stated his intention of preserving her corpse for a fortnight , (previously to its final interment,) in one of the numerous vaults within the main walls of the building. The worldly reason, however, assigned for this singular proceeding, was one which I did not feel at liberty to dispute. The brother had been led to his resolution (so he told me) by consideration of the unusual character of the malady of the deceased, of certain obtrusive and eager inquiries on the part of her medical men, and of the remote and exposed situation of the burial-ground of the family. I will not deny that when I called to mind the sinister countenance of the person whom I met upon the stair case, on the day of my arrival at the house, I had no desire to oppose what I regarded as at best but a harmless, and by no means an unnatural, precaution. At the request of Usher, I personally aided him in the arrangements for the temporary entombment. The body having been encoffined, we two alone bore it to its rest. The vault in which we placed it (and which had been so long unopened that our torches, half smothered in its oppressive atmosphere, gave us little opportunity for investigation) was small, damp, and entirely without means of admission for light; lying, at great depth, immediately beneath that portion of the building in which was my own sleeping apartment. It had been used, apparently, in remote feudal times, for the worst purposes of a donjon-keep , and, in later days, as a place of deposit for powder, or some other highly combustible substance, as a portion of its floor, and the whole interior of a long archway through which we reached it, were carefully sheathed with copper. The door, of massive iron, had been, also, similarly protected. Its immense weight caused an unusually sharp grating sound, as it moved upon its hinges. Having deposited our mournful burden upon tressels within this region of horror, we partially turned aside the yet unscrewed lid of the coffin, and looked upon the face of the tenant. A striking similitude between the brother and sister now first arrested my attention; and Usher, divining, perhaps, my thoughts, murmured out some few words from which I learned that the deceased and himself had been twins, and that sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature had always existed between them. Our glances, however, rested not long upon the dead --for we could not regard her unawed. The disease which had thus entombed the lady in the maturity of youth, had left, as usual in all maladies of a strictly cataleptical character, the mockery of a faint blush upon the bosom and the face, and that suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so terrible in death. We replaced and screwed down the lid, and, having secured the door of iron, made our way, with toll, into the scarcely less gloomy apartments of the upper portion of the house. And now, some days of bitter grief having elapsed, an observable change came over the features of the mental disorder of my friend. His ordinary manner had vanished. His ordinary occupations were neglected or forgotten. He roamed from chamber to chamber with hurried, unequal, and objectless step. The pallor of his countenance had assumed, if possible, a more ghastly hue --but the luminousness of his eye had utterly gone out. The once occasional huskiness of his tone was heard no more; and a tremulous quaver, as if of extreme terror, habitually characterized his utterance. There were times, indeed, when I thought his unceasingly agitated mind was labouring with some oppressive secret, to divulge which he struggled for the necessary courage. At times, again, I was obliged to resolve all into the mere inexplicable vagaries of madness, for I beheld him gazing upon vacancy for long hours, in an attitude of the profoundest attention, as if listening to some imaginary sound. It was no wonder that his condition terrified-that it infected me. I felt creeping upon me, by slow yet certain degrees, the wild influences of his own fantastic yet impressive superstitions. It was, especially, upon retiring to bed late in the night of the seventh or eighth day after the placing of the lady Madeline within the donjon, that I experienced the full power of such feelings. Sleep came not near my couch --while the hours waned and waned away. I struggled to reason off the nervousness which had dominion over me. I endeavoured to believe that much, if not all of what I felt, was due to the bewildering influence of the gloomy furniture of the room --of the dark and tattered draperies, which, tortured into motion by the breath of a rising tempest , swayed fitfully to and fro upon the walls, and rustled uneasily about the decorations of the bed. But my efforts were fruitless. An irrepressible tremour gradually pervaded my frame; and, at length, there sat upon my very heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm. Shaking this off with a gasp and a struggle, I uplifted myself upon the pillows, and, peering earnestly within the intense darkness of the chamber, hearkened --I know not why, except that an instinctive spirit prompted me --to certain low and indefinite sounds which came, through the pauses of the storm, at long intervals, I knew not whence. Overpowered by an intense sentiment of horror, unaccountable yet unendurable, I threw on my clothes with haste (for I felt that I should sleep no more during the night), and endeavoured to arouse myself from the pitiable condition into which I had fallen, by pacing rapidly to and fro through the apartment. I had taken but few turns in this manner, when a light step on an adjoining staircase arrested my attention. I presently recognised it as that of Usher. In an instant afterward he rapped, with a gentle touch, at my door, and entered, bearing a lamp. His countenance was, as usual, cadaverously wan --but, moreover, there was a species of mad hilarity in his eyes --an evidently restrained hysteria in his whole demeanour. His air appalled me --but anything was preferable to the solitude which I had so long endured, and I even welcomed his presence as a relief. "And you have not seen it?" he said abruptly, after having stared about him for some moments in silence --"you have not then seen it? --but, stay! you shall." Thus speaking, and having carefully shaded his lamp, he hurried to one of the casements, and threw it freely open to the storm. The impetuous fury of the entering gust nearly lifted us from our feet. It was, indeed, a tempestuous yet sternly beautiful night, and one wildly singular in its terror and its beauty. A whirlwind had apparently collected its force in our vicinity; for there were frequent and violent alterations in the direction of the wind; and the exceeding density of the clouds (which hung so low as to press upon the turrets of the house) did not prevent our perceiving the life-like velocity with which they flew careering from all points against each other, without passing away into the distance. I say that even their exceeding density did not prevent our perceiving this --yet we had no glimpse of the moon or stars --nor was there any flashing forth of the lightning. But the under surfaces of the huge masses of agitated vapour, as well as all terrestrial objects immediately around us, were glowing in the unnatural light of a faintly luminous and distinctly visible gaseous exhalation which hung about and enshrouded the mansion. "You must not --you shall not behold this!" said I, shudderingly, to Usher, as I led him, with a gentle violence, from the window to a seat. "These appearances, which bewilder you, are merely electrical phenomena not uncommon --or it may be that they have their ghastly origin in the rank miasma of the tarn . Let us close this casement; --the air is chilling and dangerous to your frame. Here is one of your favourite romances. I will read, and you shall listen; --and so we will pass away this terrible night together." The antique volume which I had taken up was the " Mad Trist " of Sir Launcelot Canning; but I had called it a favourite of Usher's more in sad jest than in earnest; for, in truth, there is little in its uncouth and unimaginative prolixity which could have had interest for the lofty and spiritual ideality of my friend. It was, however, the only book immediately at hand; and I indulged a vague hope that the excitement which now agitated the hypochondriac, might find relief (for the history of mental disorder is full of similar anomalies) even in the extremeness of the folly which I should read. Could I have judged, indeed, by the wild over-strained air of vivacity with which he hearkened, or apparently hearkened, to the words of the tale, I might well have congratulated myself upon the success of my design. I had arrived at that well-known portion of the story where Ethelred, the hero of the Trist, having sought in vain for peaceable admission into the dwelling of the hermit, proceeds to make good an entrance by force. Here, it will be remembered, the words of the narrative run thus: "And Ethelred, who was by nature of a doughty heart, and who was now mighty withal, on account of the powerfulness of the wine which he had drunken, waited no longer to hold parley with the hermit, who, in sooth , was of an obstinate and maliceful turn, but, feeling the rain upon his shoulders, and fearing the rising of the tempest , uplifted his mace outright, and, with blows, made quickly room in the plankings of the door for his gauntleted hand; and now pulling there-with sturdily, he so cracked, and ripped, and tore all asunder, that the noise of the dry and hollow-sounding wood alarumed and reverberated throughout the forest. At the termination of this sentence I started, and for a moment, paused; for it appeared to me (although I at once concluded that my excited fancy had deceived me) --it appeared to me that, from some very remote portion of the mansion, there came, indistinctly, to my ears, what might have been, in its exact similarity of character, the echo (but a stifled and dull one certainly) of the very cracking and ripping sound which Sir Launcelot had so particularly described. It was, beyond doubt, the coincidence alone which had arrested my attention; for, amid the rattling of the sashes of the casements, and the ordinary commingled noises of the still increasing storm, the sound, in itself, had nothing, surely, which should have interested or disturbed me. I continued the story: "But the good champion Ethelred, now entering within the door, was sore enraged and amazed to perceive no signal of the maliceful hermit; but, in the stead thereof, a dragon of a scaly and prodigious demeanour, and of a fiery tongue, which sate in guard before a palace of gold, with a floor of silver; and upon the wall there hung a shield of shining brass with this legend enwritten -- Who entereth herein, a conqueror hath bin; Who slayeth the dragon, the shield he shall win. And Ethelred uplifted his mace, and struck upon the head of the dragon, which fell before him, and gave up his pesty breath, with a shriek so horrid and harsh, and withal so piercing, that Ethelred had fain to close his ears with his hands against the dreadful noise of it, the like whereof was never before heard." Here again I paused abruptly, and now with a feeling of wild amazement --for there could be no doubt whatever that, in this instance, I did actually hear (although from what direction it proceeded I found it impossible to say) a low and apparently distant, but harsh, protracted, and most unusual screaming or grating sound --the exact counterpart of what my fancy had already conjured up for the dragon's unnatural shriek as described by the romancer. Oppressed, as I certainly was, upon the occurrence of the second and most extraordinary coincidence, by a thousand conflicting sensations, in which wonder and extreme terror were predominant, I still retained sufficient presence of mind to avoid exciting, by any observation, the sensitive nervousness of my companion. I was by no means certain that he had noticed the sounds in question; although, assuredly, a strange alteration had, during the last few minutes, taken place in his demeanour. From a position fronting my own, he had gradually brought round his chair, so as to sit with his face to the door of the chamber; and thus I could but partially perceive his features, although I saw that his lips trembled as if he were murmuring inaudibly. His head had dropped upon his breast --yet I knew that he was not asleep, from the wide and rigid opening of the eye as I caught a glance of it in profile. The motion of his body, too, was at variance with this idea --for he rocked from side to side with a gentle yet constant and uniform sway. Having rapidly taken notice of all this, I resumed the narrative of Sir Launcelot, which thus proceeded: "And now, the champion, having escaped from the terrible fury of the dragon, bethinking himself of the brazen shield, and of the breaking up of the enchantment which was upon it, removed the carcass from out of the way before him, and approached valorously over the silver pavement of the castle to where the shield was upon the wall; which in sooth tarried not for his full coming, but fell down at his feet upon the silver floor, with a mighty great and terrible ringing sound." No sooner had these syllables passed my lips, than --as if a shield of brass had indeed, at the moment, fallen heavily upon a floor of silver, became aware of a distinct, hollow, metallic, and clangorous, yet apparently muffled reverberation. Completely unnerved, I leaped to my feet; but the measured rocking movement of Usher was undisturbed. I rushed to the chair in which he sat. His eyes were bent fixedly before him, and throughout his whole countenance there reigned a stony rigidity. But, as I placed my hand upon his shoulder, there came a strong shudder over his whole person; a sickly smile quivered about his lips; and I saw that he spoke in a low, hurried, and gibbering murmur, as if unconscious of my presence. Bending closely over him, I at length drank in the hideous import of his words. "Not hear it? --yes, I hear it, and have heard it. Long --long --long --many minutes, many hours, many days, have I heard it --yet I dared not --oh, pity me, miserable wretch that I am! --I dared not --I dared not speak! We have put her living in the tomb! Said I not that my senses were acute ? I now tell you that I heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin. I heard them --many, many days ago --yet I dared not --I dared not speak! And now --to-night --Ethelred --ha! ha! --the breaking of the hermit's door, and the death-cry of the dragon, and the clangour of the shield! --say, rather, the rending of her coffin, and the grating of the iron hinges of her prison, and her struggles within the coppered archway of the vault! Oh whither shall I fly? Will she not be here anon? Is she not hurrying to upbraid me for my haste? Have I not heard her footstep on the stair? Do I not distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of her heart? MADMAN!" here he sprang furiously to his feet, and shrieked out his syllables, as if in the effort he were giving up his soul --"MADMAN! I TELL YOU THAT SHE NOW STANDS WITHOUT THE DOOR!" As if in the superhuman energy of his utterance there had been found the potency of a spell --the huge antique panels to which the speaker pointed, threw slowly back, upon the instant, ponderous and ebony jaws. It was the work of the rushing gust --but then without those doors there DID stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the lady Madeline of Usher. There was blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame. For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon the threshold, then, with a low moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated. From that chamber, and from that mansion, I fled aghast . The storm was still abroad in all its wrath as I found myself crossing the old causeway. Suddenly there shot along the path a wild light, and I turned to see whence a gleam so unusual could have issued; for the vast house and its shadows were alone behind me. The radiance was that of the full, setting, and blood-red moon which now shone vividly through that once barely-discernible fissure of which I have before spoken as extending from the roof of the building, in a zig-zag direction, to the base. While I gazed, this fissure rapidly widened --there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind --the entire orb of the satellite burst at once upon my sight --my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder --there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters --and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the "HOUSE OF USHER."

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What's a good thesis for "The Fall of the House of Usher" as a Gothic
An additional example might be to examine the realism in American Gothic genre. A related thesis might be, "Even though the horror of "The Fall of the House of Usher" might make Poe's style seem ...
92 The Fall of the House of Usher Essay Topics & Examples
In your The Fall of the House of Usher essay, you might want to focus on the character analysis, themes, symbolism, or historical context of the short story. Whether you'll have to write an analytical, explanatory, or critical assignment, this article will be helpful. Here we've gathered top title ideas, essay examples, and thesis statements on The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Poe.
A Summary and Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Fall of the House of
'The Fall of the House of Usher' is an 1839 short story by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49), a pioneer of the short story and a writer who arguably unleashed the full psychological potential of the Gothic horror genre. The story concerns the narrator's visit to a strange mansion owned by his childhood friend, who is behaving increasingly oddly ...
The Fall of the House of Usher Essays and Criticism
PDF Cite Share. Of the many short stories Edgar Allan Poe wrote, "The Fall of the House of Usher" is likely the most cerebral. There is little action to carry the plot, no trips into a catacomb ...
Poe's Stories: The Fall of the House of Usher Summary & Analysis
Analysis. The narrator of "House of Usher" is passing on horseback through a dull part of the country on a grim day, when he comes across the House of Usher. The sight of the house fills him with dread for some reason. He calls this feeling "unsufferable" because it is not accompanied by the romantic feeling that sights of desolation often ...
Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher
Long considered Edgar Allan Poe 's masterpiece, "The Fall of the House of Usher" continues to intrigue new generations of readers. The story has a tantalizingly horrific appeal, and since its publication in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, scholars, critics, and general readers continue to grapple with the myriad possible reasons for ...
(PDF) The Fall of the House of Usher and the Architecture of
25 11 Darrel Abel, "A Key to the House of Usher," Twentieth Century Interpretations of 'The Fall of the House of Usher': A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Thomas Woodson (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1969), 179. 12 Michael J. Hoffman, "The House of Usher and Negative Romanticism," Studies in Romanticism 4.3 (Spring ...
The Fall of the House of Usher Study Guide
The Fall of the House of Usher Study Guide. "The Fall of the House of Usher" was one of Edgar Allan Poe 's first contributions to Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, of which he was an associate editor. The story was printed in 1839, a little over a year after "Ligeia," which Poe always considered his best tale.
Poe's Short Stories "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839) Summary
A summary of "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839) in Edgar Allan Poe's Poe's Short Stories. Learn exactly what happened in this chapter, scene, or section of Poe's Short Stories and what it means. Perfect for acing essays, tests, and quizzes, as well as for writing lesson plans.
The Fall of the House of Usher Full Text and Analysis
Edgar Allan Poe. Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Fall of the House of Usher" combines aspects of Gothic literature with psychological horror to provide readers with an unforgettably chilling experience. "The Fall of the House of Usher" relates the events in the final days of the Usher family as Roderick Usher's sister, Madeline ...
"The Fall of the House of Usher" and the Architecture of Unreliability
This chapter examines what many scholars consider the most accomplished and representative of Poe's tales, "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839). After a brief overview of the main axes of interpretation in the story's reception history, it proposes an analysis of the tale's main narrative strategy, the unreliable narrator, which is ...
The Fall of the House of Usher Themes
Themes. Fear, Imagination, and Madness. Fear is a pervasive theme throughout "The Fall of the House of Usher," playing a prominent role in the lives of the characters. The story shows that ...
The Fall of the House of Usher Themes
Burial. There are three images of would-be "tombs" or "crypts" in " The Fall of the House of Usher." The house itself is shut off from the daylight, its cavernous rooms turned into spacious vaults, in which characters who never seem entirely alive--Madeline and Usher--waste away. Second, Usher's painting is of "an immensely long and rectangular ...
The Fall of the House of Usher
September 1839. " The Fall of the House of Usher " is a short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1839 in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, then included in the collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in 1840. [1] The short story, a work of Gothic fiction, includes themes of madness, family, isolation, and ...
The Fall of the House of Usher
The Fall of the House of Usher, supernatural horror story by Edgar Allan Poe, published in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine in 1839 and issued in Poe's Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840).. Summary "The Fall of the House of Usher" begins with the unidentified male narrator riding to the house of Roderick Usher, a childhood friend whom the narrator has not seen in many years.
The Fall Of The House Of Usher Essay Essay
The House of Usher is a gloomy castle inside the city limits of Ravenswood, Illinois. The family has become sick with strange maladies that may be linked to their intermarriage. The family estate, named Usher, is said to be haunted by the ghost of Madeline's mother. The house itself seems to be alive and is in a state of decay.
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During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.
Fall of the House of Usher and House Taken Over ...
Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Fall of the House of Usher." The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings: Poems, Tales, Essays, and Reviews, edited by David Galloway, Penguin Books, 1986. Cortázar, Julio. "House Taken Over" (Casa Tomada). Translated by Gregory Rabassa, Blow-up and Other Stories, Pantheon Books, 1967. Quiroga, Horacio.
Order and Sentience in 'The Fall of the House of Usher'
78 Order and Sentience in uThe Fall of the House of Usher". filled with Oedipus-like horror at an unnatural are keenly living and awake, and meanwhile the deed, which he had committed unconsciously, powers of thought lie dormant. A dead weight or at most subconsciously. Yet, being a romantic hung upon us" (i, 4).
(PDF) Psychoanalysis of The Fall of the House of Usher from the
The Fall of the House of Usher is one of Edgar Allan Poe's most famous horror stories. ... this thesis explored Roderick Usher's death and concluded that his death was a natural outcome as his ...
Comparing "The Fall of The House of Usher" and "House Taken Over"
As the curtains of literary comparison draw open, two haunting tales emerge from the shadows: Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" and Julio Cortázar's "House Taken Over." These stories, though separated by time and cultural contexts, share thematic threads that explore fear, mystery, and human vulnerability.
The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe
Noticing these things, I rode over a short causeway to the house. A servant in waiting took my horse, and I entered the Gothic archway of the hall. A valet, of stealthy step, thence conducted me, in silence, through many dark and intricate passages in my progress to the studio of his master.
The Fall of the House of Usher
The analogy of house as both home and lineage—a clever double entendre—is made once again explicit in the final sentence. Because the mansion, as well as both Usher siblings, have been destroyed in the collapse, "the fragments of the 'HOUSE OF USHER'" refer to the remains of the building as well as Madeline and Roderick.

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