Table Of Content
The writers and critics of Poe’s day rejected many of that movement’s core tenets, including its emphasis on the emotions and the experience of the sublime. Poe’s contemporaries favoured a more realistic approach to writing. Accordingly, commentaries on social injustice, morality, and utilitarianism proliferated in the mid-19th century. Poe conceived of his writing as a response to the literary conventions of this period. In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” he deliberately subverts convention by rejecting the typical practices of preaching or moralizing and instead focusing on affect and unity of atmosphere.
Setting
There is a dreary landscape, haunted house, mysterious sickness, and double personality. Even though the gothic elements in the story are easily identifiable, some of the terror in the story is because of its vagueness. The readers cannot identify the location of the house or when the story takes place.
Plot summary
Within a few hours of the narrator’s arrival, Roderick begins to share some of his theories about his family. Much to the narrator’s surprise, Roderick claims that the Usher mansion is sentient and that it exercises some degree of control over its inhabitants. According to Roderick, Madeline suffers from a cataleptic disease that has gradually limited her mobility.
Plot
The narrator is the only character to escape the House of Usher, which he views as it cracks and sinks into the mountain lake. As the narrator reads of the knight's forcible entry into the dwelling, he and Roderick hear cracking and ripping sounds from somewhere in the house. When the dragon's death cries are described, a real shriek is heard, again within the house. As he relates the shield falling from off the wall, a hollow metallic reverberation can be heard throughout the house. At first, the narrator ignores the noises, but Roderick becomes increasingly hysterical. Roderick eventually declares that he has been hearing these sounds for days, and that they are being made by his sister, who was in fact alive when she was entombed.
Analysis
At the request of Usher, the narrator helps carry the "encoffined" body to an underground vault where the atmosphere is so oppressive that their torches almost go out. Again Poe is using a highly effective gothic technique by using these deep, dark underground vaults, lighted only by torches, and by having a dead body carried downward to a great depth where everything is dank, dark, and damp. Before this time, Americanreaders considered British literature the only serious literature available.American writers wrote imitations derived from British models. But with theadvent of a new group of American writers who were writing about specificallyAmerican subjects, settings, and characters, a distinctly American literaturebegan to emerge. Poe was one of the American writers of the time who helped toformulate this national literature. However, while Poe’s story is a success for its overall effect, the problemthat exists in his credo extends into the story—that is, reason and probabilityare treated as unimportant.
The Fall of the House of Usher Study Tools
Certainly many Romantics considered birth itself to be a breaking away from supernatural beauty, and they believed that death was a reuniting of oneself with that original spirituality. Lady Madeline can then be seen as the incarnation of "otherworldliness," the pure spirit purged of all earthly cares. She is, one might note, presented in this very image; at one point in the story, she seems to float through the apartment in a cataleptic state.
Literary significance and criticism
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One wonders, until one recallsthat, in the third paragraph of this story, even before Roderick has been seenfor the first time, the narrator mentions that the ancient “stem” of the Usherfamily never “put forth . The entire family layin the direct line of descent, and had always . So lain.” In other words,Roderick and Madeline Usher are the products and inheritors of an incestuousfamily lineage—one that has remained predominantly patrilineal, so that thename of the family always remained Usher. When all six of his children die in the span of two weeks, he calls Dupin to an old house to confess his crimes. As Dupin begins recording, Roderick tells him the story of his and his sister’s life as well as how each of his children died.
Roderick is the last heir, a fact that makes the narrator’s ability to cure Usher even more urgent. She appears near the narrator, but never acknowledges his presence. The narrator and Roderick place her in a tomb despite her flushed, lively appearance.
Poe implies incestuous relations sustained the genetic line and that Roderick and Madeline are the products of extensive intermarriage within the Usher family. At Roderick’s words, the door bursts open, revealing Madeline all in white with blood on her robes. With a moan, she falls on her brother, and, by the time they hit the floor, both Roderick and Madeline are dead.
Instead of using standard narrative markers, Poe employed gothic elements such as a barren landscape and inclement weather. For some of the widely differing interpretations, the reader should consult the volume Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher." One key to the story is, of course, the name of the main character. Thus, the narrator is ushered into the house by a bizarre-looking servant, and he is then ushered into Roderick Usher's private apartment and into his private thoughts. Finally, usher also means doorkeeper, and as they had previously ushered Lady Madeline prematurely into her tomb, at the end of the story Lady Madeline stands outside the door waiting to be ushered in; failing that, she ushers herself in and falls upon her brother. In fact, the greatness of this story lies more in the unity of design and the unity of atmosphere than it does in the plot itself.
"The Fall of the House of Usher" centers on Roderick Usher and his twinsister Madeline, the last surviving members of the Usher family. The storm which precipitates the final destruction of the edifice ismanifestly unnatural, originating within rather than without. The vaporousclouds which gather about the turrets of the house are lit from below byluminous exhalations of the tarn.
The Martian Chronicles, a 1950 collection of stories by Ray Bradbury, contains a novella called "Usher II," a homage to Poe. Its main character, William Stendahl, builds a house based on the specifications from Poe's story to murder his enemies. Roderick grows more erratic in his behaviour, and the narrator reads to his friend to try to soothe him. The plot of the romance (a fictional title invented by Poe himself, called ‘Mad Trist’) concerns a hero named Ethelred who enters the house of a hermit and slays a dragon.
The bedroom door is then blown open to reveal Madeline, bloodied from her arduous escape from the tomb. In a final fit of rage, she attacks her brother, scaring him to death as she herself expires. The narrator then runs from the house, and, as he does, he notices a flash of moonlight behind him. He turns back in time to see the Moon shining through the suddenly widened crack in the house.
The poem “Mad Trist” is about breaking into the dwelling of a hermit by Ethelred and mirrors Madeline’s escape from the tomb. Another literary device used masterfully by Poe is foreshadowing. Roderick'sterrible fate is foretold in the description of the house that totters on thebrink of collapse. The details of the bleak exterior prepare the reader for thedescription of the house's interior and of Roderick and Madeline Usher.
Then we read that on the night of the "seventh or eighth day" after the death of the Lady Madeline, the narrator begins to hear "certain low and indefinite sounds" which come from an undetermined source. As we will learn later, these sounds are coming from the buried Lady Madeline, and these are the sounds that Roderick Usher has been hearing for days. Because of his over-sensitiveness and because of the extra-sensory relationship between him and his twin sister, Roderick has been able to hear sounds long before the narrator is able to hear them. When the narrator sees Roderick Usher, he is shocked at the change in his old friend.
