Resurrecting the House of Usher

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” is not an American short story by any stretch of the imagination. This gothic tale is, rather, a look into the mind of anguish and a dive into a sea of torment in the life of Roderick Usher. From the beginning to the end, this horror story is full and complete with somber and shadowy imagery. Poe uses many aspects of insanity as well as reality to blur the lines between what is and is not going on in the House of Usher. This causes a kind of vagueness that does not turn the reader away but invites them in to figure out for themselves what is real and what is fantasy. In Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”, horrifically dark and grotesque images are used to portray a psychotic breakdown that ultimately leads to death by guilt.

The very title possesses dark imagery. One of the definitions of the word house is just as it sounds, a living quarters or a place of residence. This definition has connotations of structure and support with design and architecture. Another meaning is that of family and lineage. The connotations of family imply love, support, and structure, which make for the similitude of these definitions. A family is like a building, strong, supportive, and a place to find solace. However, should this structure become weakened then it will collapse into a pile of rubble. So then, what weakens a building? Dangers such as fire, pests, and natural disasters can all cause a building to collapse. All of these things can destroy a family as well, but some more common causes for a collapsed family are actions that lead to disagreements and thus result in a disconnect between family members or even hatred. In Poe’s story, the reason for the destruction of the family is an unforgivable act performed by a brother upon his sister, who appear to be the last in the lineage of their family. Roderick attempts to murder his sister and ends up being killed himself by his very prey. This would, indeed, qualify as an extreme disagreement in that one believes that the other should not continue to live and the other does. This creates a weakness in the structure of the House of Usher. The word Usher is not only the name of the family but an action that means to move. This is ironical because of the diseased form of both Roderick and Madeline. Also, there is a larger concept of moving into a new realm, whether it is insanity or death.

With the link between the concept of the building and the family being so strong, the details of the mansion can be interpreted as the state of the family. Upon arriving to Roderick’s home, the narrator describes having “a sense of insufferable gloom that pervaded my spirit,” going on to say that it is indescribable and words such as desolate and terrible do not do it justice (Poe 72). With the home being a physical representation of the state of the family, there is a similar description of the appearance of Roderick when the two finally meet. The narrator says, “… 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!” (Poe 76). Upon seeing, for the first time, the home of the Ushers, the narrator is entranced with the horror of the landscape upon which the house sits, as well as the home itself. Also, when the two childhood friends meet once again, the narrator is intrigued by his close friend’s emaciated figure. There exists, also, the fact that the inside of the house is even worse than the outside, and extends into Roderick.

It is apparent from the account of the meeting between the narrator and Roderick that something is terribly wrong with his old friend, “His voice varied rapidly from a tremulous indecision (when the animal spirit seemed utterly in abeyance) to that species of energetic concision… which may be observed in the lost drunkard, or the irreclaimable eater of opium, during the periods of his most intense excitement” (Poe 77). This observation is very similar to what is now known as being bi-polar, a psychological disorder in which a person will go between being very happy one minute to very sad the next. While the setting of the story is very vague, only having so much information to know the season of the year, it is not possible to know if medical doctors of the time know even what a psychological disorder is. As a matter of fact, the narrator meets the family’s physician on the stairwell en route to proceeding to Roderick’s chambers and notices a look of confusion and bafflement (Poe 75). Entering the house itself the narrator is able to see the rotting wood and crumbling stones that are barely able to support the structure of the house. Both houses are in deteriorating conditions and will soon fail when things come to a head as the psyche of Roderick breaks after trying to murder his sister, Madeline, for a reason that is very close to being as vague as the setting, but may be up for debate.

It is apparent that Roderick’s mind is going which would make almost anything he says unreliable. It is also apparent that Roderick and Madeline are brother and sister, or even twins. As the narrator helps Roderick place Madeline in a coffin, “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…” (Poe 84). But if the narrator knows that he cannot trust what a madman says, then why would he believe him when he says that Madeline is dead? He believes him because he is his oldest of friends and also feels sorry for him. His mind is going and at the same time his sister has died and appears to be that way after having handled her. One of the most twisted images of this tale of horror is the smile that rests upon Madeline’s face even after she has been entombed in the cell (Poe 84). The smile on Madeline’s face is horrific because in death, humans tend to expect that the dead look peaceful, which helps them to gain closure. However, because she lacks that look of peace it is hard for the last Usher to move on with his life. This is apparent from the fact that the narrator notices that the disillusioned Roderick has gone farther off the deep end, “He roamed from chamber to chamber with hurried, unequal, and objectless step” (Poe 84). This is associated with schizophrenia, another psychological disorder in which individuals who suffer from it see and hear things that are not actually there.

Another powerful image in Poe’s tale is the fact that Madeline is placed in a vault that was formerly used for torture in medieval times and later was used as a place of storage for gunpowder. The tomb is described as being small, dark, and damp, so damp, in fact, that the torches that the two friends are using are almost smothered because of the moisture in the air. This former torture chamber turned tomb also lies directly beneath the resting chamber of the narrator. It is appropriate that Madeline’s vengeance comes in the room above which her prison lies because it is as though on her ascent to Heaven she must take with her the one who has wronged her.

Also, at the climax of story, when Roderick is being read a story by the narrator, the audience receives an image of Roderick being almost childlike because of his guilt over what he has done to his sister that he claimed to have loved so dearly. There is a sense that Roderick is rocking back and forth in the narrator’s arms until the moment when both men hear Madeline clawing her way out of the dungeon and storming up the staircase for her revenge. Then he begins rambling to the narrator almost incoherently about something that he has done that is so terrible and the reason for his madness, he says, “I dared not speak! We have put her living in the tomb!” (Poe 89). This is the first time that the narrator finds out about what has truly happened and realizes that who he thought was his very close friend was actually someone that he knew very little about.

Madeline serves as the one that finally takes down the House, in both senses, because not only does she receive her vengeance upon her brother but she destroys the building which her family has lived in for, apparently, a very long time. It can be assumed that the cause for the actual collapse of the mansion is that the powder from the vault in which Madeline was kept, was set off. The way in which she destroys her sibling is through fear, she “bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated” (Poe 89). Roderick made a statement earlier in the tale, upon first meeting with the narrator, telling him that the way in which he will die is through fear (Poe 77). By saying that Roderick fell victim what he feared, the audience then knows that Roderick was planning to murder his sister all along but could not actually do it because of his undying love for her and needed the help of the narrator, because he knew that someone he has known for such a long time would do anything for him seeing that he is in the state that he is in.

Edgar Allan Poe does a wonderful job of showing the psychotic tendencies that all people are capable of having no matter what the circumstances may be with “The Fall of the House of Usher.” His gothic tale possesses all of the qualities necessary, whether it is the barren landscape, old world architecture, focus on art, and, in this case, the debatable topic of female heroism. Poe masters the art of horror and the ability to scare his audience by a means that would be relatively new at the time of release of this short story. Aside from the question of whether or not Madeline would be considered a heroic figure in this story, another topic that this story brings up is whether the subject matter in this story is relevant to the life of Edgar Allan Poe. That discussion should be saved for another time.

Works Cited
Poe, Edgar Allan (2004). “The Fall of the House of Usher”. In Corinne Demas (Ed.), Great American Short Stories: From Hawthorne to Hemingway (pp. 72-90). New York: Barnes & Noble.