The Fall of the House of Usher

Amanda Onalaja

October 9, 2009

Pd. 2 – Ms. Brown

If one has never read a piece by Edgar Allen Poe then surely you’ve heard of him. His eerie style of writing can be traced back to the Gothic Age. Poe examines the human psyche in his odd yet carefully pieced tales. Many if not all of his stories challenge the limits of your average mystery and actually dive into the mentality of his characters. That can also be said about “The Fall of the House of Usher”. The story was somewhat challenging to understand but piece by piece I believed I figured out the underlying angst. In “The Fall of the House of Usher”, Poe uses the common myth of being buried alive to scare his readers. It actually makes me wonder the mental state of Poe, who wrote so many horrifying stories and I really do wonder what kind of menacing images he had thought of to base so many narratives on them.

“The Fall of the House of Usher” is if anything a definite appeal to pathos. The story carries a supernatural tone from beginning to end, “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”. The opening sentence seemed to set the entire setting of the story. The use of depressing imagery such as, “dull, dark, soundless, oppressively low, alone, dreary, shades, and melancholy”, convey the exact factors needed in a Gothic story like this. In fact, the entire first paragraph is used to address the haunted looking manor of Usher.

Aside from the story’s obvious tone, Poe’s credibility also had a factor in this story. Poe likes to shroud his readers with an air of mystery, and for one thing, we never got to know our narrator’s identity, when or where these events took place, or even what inclined the narrator to accept this invitation. Furthermore, we learn that the narrator and Usher are supposed to be childhood friends, but it seems the narrator knows little about him, “Although, as boys, we had been even intimate associates, yet I really knew little of my friend”. The vagueness of the story adds to the tone. There’s also a peculiar connection between the house and it’s residents, “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…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”. It’s almost as if the house exists through its single line of descendents. It’s practically foreshadowed by Usher himself, “‘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.’”.

As assumed, there is a plot in Poe’s madness, the relationship between Madeline, Roderick, and the house. “…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…”, at nearly the narrative’s end we learn that not only are they siblings but twins which makes the story’s climax much more understandable. Because Madeline is physically sick, Roderick is practically mentally sick, as in what afflicts one twin afflicts the other. It’s almost a weird psychic connection between the two which becomes even more prominent when Roderick announces his sister’s mistaken burial, “We have put her living in the tomb! …Madman! I tell you that she now stands without the door”. In her last resolve Madeline falls upon Roderick, scaring him to death, which frightened our narrator, causing him to flee from the manor before it could collapse, enclosing its last remaining inhabitants.