essay questions for the fall of the house of usher

• The Fall of the House of Usher

by Edgar Allan Poe

The fall of the house of usher essay questions.

Is "The Fall of the House of Usher" a sincere expression of horror, or is Poe simply mocking himself and the reader? To what extent can we read his tale as a parody?

Consider the role of the Narrator. At first he may seem the typical faceless, nameless chronicler of events, simply a window into the narrative through which the reader can examine the real man of the story, Usher himself. But he becomes a character in his own right, and the horror of the tale depends in part on our ability to see events through his experience. How does Poe lend the Narrator the qualities of a character like the others? To what extent is he reliable as a narrator?

Madeline only appears three times in "The Fall of the House of Usher." How do her appearances, explicit and implicit, develop the plot and symbolism of the narrative?

Poe wished to be remembered as a poet, but he is today more famous for his short fiction. Examine the poetic imagination and lyrical writing of the tale. Do more than simply identify the various poetic devices; examine the "poem within the story." How does Poe use the Gothic form to suggest or develop a new form of poetry?

How do words encode actions, and what is the power of words? Consider the fact that the "Mad Trist" narrative parallels the actual sounds in the house. Do the characters give themselves self-fulfilling prophecies?

Why does Poe preface his tale with an excerpt from a poem by de Beranger? What do the lines suggest, and how apt are they for the story?

How does Poe describe the Narrator's progressive understanding of Usher's condition? Does the tale offer insight about consciousness, or are we blocked from ever "knowing" any of the characters? Does Poe's story prefigure the novels of consciousness of the late nineteenth century? Consider the line, for example, "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."

What exactly is meant by "sentience," and why is this idea important in the story?

Is "The Fall of the House of Usher" a love story, a comedy, or a tragedy?

How does it matter that Roderick and Madeline are brother and sister?

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
• The Fall of the House of Usher Summary
• Character List

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

The Fall of the House of Usher e-text contains the full text of The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe.

Wikipedia Entries for The Fall of the House of Usher

• Introduction
• Character descriptions
• Publication history
• Sources of inspiration

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 […]
• 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 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 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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The Fall of the House of Usher

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1. Poe’s stories are often unclear about whether the mysterious occurrences are natural or supernatural.

• Are the events of the story mostly natural, a delusion, supernatural, or a mix of these? ( topic sentence )
• Identify three representative events, descriptions, or ideas in the story that relate to your topic sentence on Supernatural Versus Rational Explanations . Discuss how each one might be explained as either natural or supernatural.
• In conclusion, what is the likeliest explanation for the mysterious happenings in the story?

2. Part of Poe’s style involves the creative use of syntax .

• How does the author use words and sentences to create a mood of melancholy, confusion, or fear? ( topic sentence )

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• Fall of House of Usher: Summary
• Fall of House of Usher: Characters
• Fall of House of Usher: Metphors
• Fall of House of Usher: Theme
• Fall of House of Usher: Top Ten Quotations
• Fall of House of Usher: Biography

Fall of House of Usher: Essays and Questions

1. How does “The Fall of the House of Usher” reflect the Gothic style of storytelling?

Gothic fiction takes its name from the Gothic architecture of the medieval period with its dark castles and inevitable ghosts and violent histories. The eighteenth-century English author, Horace Walpole, wrote a novel called The Castle of Otranto (1764) with the formulas that were followed in subsequent Gothic horror stories. Such thrilling fiction became popular in the Romantic period (1750-1850) with tales of mysterious hauntings, family curses, imprisonment, and lost treasures. The setting was usually dreary and frightening, and terror and horror were the immediate emotions the author sought to evoke in the reader. There were often supernatural elements that could not be explained away, such as the raising of the dead from the grave, or unnatural lights, as seen in the tarn of the Usher mansion. A beautiful young woman like Madeleine was a victim of violence or threatened with it.

Other classic Gothic fiction Poe would have known include The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe (1794) and Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk , a tale of black magic (1796). These were bestsellers that set the trend for future Gothic archetypes of spooky houses and unexplained deaths.

These stories were a counterbalance to the overly rational mood of the Enlightenment writers, such as Alexander Pope, Benjamin Franklin, and Voltaire. The Gothic authors wanted to show there was something beyond the rational and that human nature was full of dark corners. The Gothic was often the literary mode that explored unbalanced states of mind before the science of psychology existed to explain such mental phenomena as Roderick’s “hypochondria” (depression) or his empathy with his twin sister.

Poe builds on the Gothic tradition by exploring psychic phenomena and the relationship of rational and irrational human urges. His use of vague suggestion to create terror is a technique still used by writers and filmmakers today. Poe knew the monster is in us and resides as the dark secret of the human soul. The Gothic writer likes to shock by challenging the assumption that goodness is the normal foundation of life. Most of Poe’s popular short stories such as “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” and “The Black Cat” are in the Gothic style.

2. Why is Poe called the inventor of modern detective fiction?

Crime fiction is associated with the city and the rise of industrial life in the 1800s. Gothic fiction was full of murder and crime, and detective work became a natural part of the plot. Such great writers as Mary Shelley ( Frankenstein, 1818), Honore de Balzac ( Pere Goriot, 1833), Charles Dickens ( Great Expectations, 1861), and Victor Hugo ( Les Miserables, 1862) include crime scenes and detectives who track the criminals. Poe knew these authors, and between 1840 and 1845 formalized the elements of the modern detective story in his short stories. “Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Mystery of Marie Roget” (1842), and “The Purloined Letter” (1844), feature his eccentric hardboiled detective, C. Auguste Dupin. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories owe their traits of the brilliant detective to Poe’s Dupin. Poe used several plot devices that became popular, such as the wrongly suspected man, the crime in a locked room, psychological insight into criminal motivation, the encrypted treasure map, false clues, the admiring Dr. Watson-type of narrator, and the unexpected solution that is presented and then logically explained. The detective uses rational deduction and close observation to outdo the police in solving difficult puzzles. The air of realism is maintained through newspaper articles and testimony in court. Other Poe detective stories include “Thou Art the Man” (1844) and “The Gold Bug” (1843), for which Poe won a prize.

In his critical writings, Poe explains how the mystery writer should proceed. The mystery has to be preserved until the end of the tale. Every detail must converge on the denouement or unraveling of the mystery. The writer is also forbidden from using tricks to conceal the solution. It should be like a puzzle in which the answer is always possible to derive and logical but not easily guessed. The popularity of these stories led to a new kind of American literary hero, a detective who had his roots in the character of Dupin, upholding the right but outside the legal system.

3. What is remarkable about Poe’s scientific theories?

Poe is generally thought of as a Romantic poet and writer who favored the imagination over reason. In his work, however, he is equally fascinated by what is mysterious and what is rational. He was interested in science and scientific phenomena, sometimes called the first science fiction writer in The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym (1838), containing the Hollow Earth theory that influenced Jules Verne.

Poe’s prose essay, “Eureka: An Essay on the Spiritual and Material Universe” was written in 1848. It was his attempt to bring together the scientific knowledge available in his time into one unified theory of how spirit and matter are related. His speculations were not respected then or now by the scientific community, since they came from a creative writer who was not basing his ideas on experiment or scientific proof. Even Poe’s friend, Evert A. Duyckinck said the theory was absurd. Poe acknowledges this fact in his essay, saying that he cannot prove what he is saying but would convince the reader through imagination. It is a view of the universe that seems intuitively correct and convincing to him and throws light on his understanding of how the physical and spiritual realms interact in a dynamic manner.

In his “survey of the universe,” he speculates that creation is a cycle that stems from unity, spreads to multiplicity, and returns to unity. Erasmus Darwin had described a universe that expanded and contracted in a cyclic manner in 1791.

Poe presents a similar vision in “Eureka,” using metaphysical principles and contemporary understanding of astronomical phenomena. Thus, the first state of matter is a single “Primordial Particle.” Through “Divine Volition” this Particle manifests itself as a repulsive force, fragmenting itself into atoms. Atoms spread evenly throughout space until the repulsive force stops. Then attraction appears as a reaction and matter begins to form by atoms clinging together to make stars. The whole material universe is produced and then drawn back together by gravity, eventually collapsing into the Primordial Particle once more. Poe describes a Newtonian universe that evolves, thus foreshadowing modern relativistic models of cosmology. His insistence on the principle of unity in nature, describing both matter and energy as different phases of one creative force, anticipates the unified field theories of today.

4. What are Poe’s contributions to literary criticism?

Poe is often considered the first professional American author and literary critic who published essays on how literature produces its effects. “The Philosophy of Composition,” for instance, appearing in April 1846, in Graham’s Magazine , explains good writing as short enough to have a “unity of effect or impression” on the reader because it can be read in one sitting. He uses his own poem, “The Raven” as an example. This would suggest that poetry and the short story are more powerful than novels, and this idea did much to make the short story a respectable genre in American literature. Poe stresses technique, tone, style, and logical construction of all elements leading to the desired effect. He asserted the power of novelty or invention of ideas and vividness of impression. His insistence on deliberate design counters the Romantic idea that composition is a spontaneous product of the imagination. Nothing should be out of the author’s control, he insists.

Poe uses the sound of words as music to create atmosphere in both poetry and short story. He explains how he chose the vowel sounds of “Lenore” and “Nevermore” in “The Raven” as part of the overall effect of sorrow. Symbolism helps to create atmosphere as well. The raven is a symbol of never-ending mourning that creates its own depressing darkness, just as the House of Usher falling into the tarn creates the experience of decay and self-destruction.

Poe asserts in this essay: “the death . . . of a beautiful woman” is “the most poetical topic in the world.” Many of his poems and stories contain the death of a young woman and the mad grief of the lover (“Annabel Lee,” “The Raven,”  “Ulalume,” “Ligeia,” “The House of Usher”). Poe has been criticized for the death of the woman motif in his writing, but it was part of his own personal grief with the loss of his wife, and it did create a sensational focus for his Gothic style.

Poe’s essay, “The Poetic Principle” was published posthumously in the Home Journal , 1850, and denounced popular concepts in poetry such as the long or epic poem and the didactic or moral poem. He defined poetry as “The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty.” The short lyric poem extolling Beauty and written for no purpose but its own sake is the ideal. Truth is not the goal of literature, but rather, only Beauty can lift the soul, and for this reason, the great poems resemble music in rhythm, sound, and rhyme. He gives examples from Byron and Tennyson.

5. What was Poe’s influence on world literature?

Poe’s pronouncements that literature should be for its own sake rather than to teach a moral lesson became popular with Aesthetic movements at the end of the nineteenth century, especially in England and France. “L’art pour l’art” or art for art’s sake was the slogan of French Impressionism and English Aestheticism. Both visual artists and writers were influenced by Poe’s ideas. His work was amply translated and illustrated on the Continent, having more influence on art abroad than in his own country.

French Symbolist poets, such as Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), were directly influenced by Poe’s ideas. Baudelaire translated Poe into French from 1852-1865, borrowing his dark moods, style, and imagery for works such as Fleurs du mal ( The Flowers of Evil , 1857). He liked the visionary essence of Poe’s work and could relate to his poverty, depression, and drug addiction. Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) and Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) drew their aesthetic manifestoes of art for its own sake in the 1860s and 1870s based on their study of Poe. They admired Poe’s emphasis on technique and the process of writing, because it was a contrast to traditional formal French verse.

By the 1880s, French Symbolisme was a popular movement that countered the realism in fiction, with its spiritual imagery favoring dreams, imagination, and the ideal. The Symbolists took Poe’s suggestive themes of the forbidden (sex, drugs, madness) and made lyric poetry of it. Other French poets who wrote in this style are Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) and Théophile Gautier (1811-1872), who popularized the motto, “art for art’s sake.” Like Poe, they preferred the suggestive sound or image or symbol that would indirectly clothe the beautiful and ideal perception of the poet. They evoked emotions rather than described things. Verlaine called the Symbolistes “poètes maudits” or accursed poets, like Poe, living tragic and misunderstood lives in the pursuit of beauty.

Poe also influenced Aesthetic writers in England like John Ruskin, Walter Pater, William Morris, Oscar Wilde and Algernon Charles Swinburne, who rebelled against Victorian morality, claiming the spirituality of art was in its pursuit of beauty and design. 

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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.

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A Summary and Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’

‘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 as he and his twin sister dwell within the ‘melancholy’ atmosphere of the house.

‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ has inspired a range of interpretations: it has been analysed as proto-Freudian and proto-Kafkaesque, among many other things. The best way to approach the story is perhaps to consider its plot alongside the accumulation of detail Poe provides. Before we come to an analysis, however, here’s a brief summary of the plot of the story.

‘The Fall of the House of Usher’: plot summary

The story is narrated by a childhood friend of Roderick Usher, the owner of the Usher mansion. This friend is riding to the house, having been summoned by Roderick Usher, having complained in his letter that he is suffering from some illness and expressing a hope that seeing his old friend will lift his spirits.

When he arrives, the narrator finds a gloomy and vaguely menacing atmosphere, and his friend, Usher, is much changed since he last saw him: overly sensitive to every sound and sight, and prone to dramatic mood swings. Meanwhile, Roderick’s twin sister Madeline is afflicted with a disease which, Roderick tells the narrator, means she will soon die. These twins are the last in the family line, the last descendants of the ‘house of Usher’.

Roderick Usher is a gifted poet and artist, whose talents the narrator praises before sharing a poem Usher wrote, titled ‘ The Haunted Palace ’. The ballad concerns a royal palace which was once filled with joy and song, until ‘evil things’ attacked the king’s palace and made it a desolate shadow of what it once was.

Several days later, Roderick tells the narrator that Madeline has died, and they lay her to rest in a vault. In the days that follow, the narrator starts to feel more uneasy in the house, and attributes his nervousness to the gloomy furniture in the room where he sleeps. The narrator begins to suspect that Roderick is harbouring some dark secret.

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.

In a shocking development, Madeline breaks out of her coffin and enters the room, and Roderick confesses that he buried her alive. Madeline attacks her brother and kills both him and herself in the struggle, and the narrator flees the house. It is a stormy night, and as he leaves he sees the house fall down, collapsing into the lake which reflects the house’s image.

‘The Fall of the House of Usher’: analysis

‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ is probably Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous story, and in many ways it is a quintessential Gothic horror story. We have a mysterious secret afflicting the house and eating away at its owner, the Gothic ‘castle’ (here, refigured as a mansion), premature burial (about which Poe wrote a whole other story ), the mad owner of the house, and numerous other trappings of the Gothic novel. Poe condenses these into a short story and plays around with them, locating new psychological depths within these features.

How does he play around with them? First, Poe renders them ambiguous rather than clear-cut. Indeed, there are no overtly supernatural elements in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’: just a general sense of something not being quite right. Many things in the story are, to use a term later popularised by Sigmund Freud, ‘ uncanny ’: simultaneously familiar yet unfamiliar; another key element of the uncanny is the secret which ‘out to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light’.

The secret that is buried and then comes to light (represented by Madeline) is never revealed. The symbol which represents the secret – Madeline herself – is hidden away by Roderick, but that symbol returns, coming to light at the end of the story and (in good Gothic fashion) destroying the family for good.

But Madeline is, if you like, a signifier without a signified: that is, she is a symbol with no code. She represents a secret, but what that secret is (an unseemly relationship between her and her brother, or some dark secret from the family’s past?) does remain hidden. The secret, as it were, remains a secret even when it is ‘revealed’.

Doubling is another aspect of the ‘uncanny’, because seeing our double is both a familiar and a strange experience. This person both is and is not me; this reflection of the house in the lake or ‘tarn’ looks exactly like the house and yet clearly is but an image of the house. And doubling is very important in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, as it is in other Poe stories: witness his tale ‘ William Wilson ’, which plays around with this idea of the doppelganger or mysterious double.

And virtually everything seems doubled in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’: the title itself has a double meaning (where the ‘house’, or family of Usher falls, but the literal bricks-and-mortar structure also collapses), the house is reflected or doubled in the lake, Roderick and Madeline are twins or ‘doubles’ of a sort, and the plot of the ‘Mad Trist’ mirrors or doubles Roderick’s own situation.

‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ can also be analysed as a deeply telling autobiographical portrait, in which Roderick Usher represents, or reflects, Poe himself. After all, Roderick Usher is a poet and artist, well-read (witness the assortment of books which he and the narrator read together), sensitive and indeed overly sensitive (to every sound, taste, sight, touch, and so on). Many critics have interpreted the story as, in part, an autobiographical portrait of Poe himself, although we should be wary, perhaps, of speculating too much about any parallels.

For instance, it has sometimes been suggested that Roderick’s relationship with Madeline echoes Poe’s own relationship with his young wife (who was also his cousin), Virginia, who fell ill, as Madeline has. But Virginia did not fall ill until after Poe had written ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’.

An interpretation which has more potential, then, is the idea that the ‘house of Usher’ is a symbol of the mind, and it is this analysis which has probably found the most favour with critics. Sigmund Freud would, over half a century after Poe was writing, do more than anyone else to delineate the structure of the conscious and unconscious mind, but he was not the first to suggest that our conscious minds might hide, or even repress, unconscious feelings, fears, neuroses, and desires.

Indeed, it was the German Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854) who distinguished between the conscious and unconscious mind in his early work System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), labelling the latter Unbewusste (i.e. ‘unconscious’). The term ‘unconscious’ was then introduced into English by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). The notion that we might have both a ‘conscious’ and an ‘unconscious’ mind, then, was already in circulation when Poe was writing ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’.

Might we then interpret Roderick as a symbol of the conscious mind – struggling to conceal some dark ‘secret’ and make himself presentable to his friend, the narrator – and Madeline as a symbol of the unconscious? Note how Madeline is barely seen for much of the story, and the second time she appears she is literally buried (repressed?) within the vault.

However, Roderick cannot keep her hidden for long, and she bursts out again in a frenzy – much as Freud would later argue our unconscious drives and desires cannot be wholly repressed and will find some way of making themselves known to us (such as through dreams).

Note that such an analysis of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ complements the uncanny elements in the story: the secret which ought to have remain hidden but has come to light is something deep within the unconscious which has broken out.

But when our unconscious breaks out and communicates with us, it usually does so in ways which are coded: ways which reveal, without revealing, the precise nature of our desires and fears. (As the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan once quipped, ‘a neurosis is a secret that you don’t know you are keeping’.)

Dreams, for instance, are the way our unconscious mind communicates with our conscious mind, but in such a way which shrouds or veils their message in ambiguous symbolism and messages.

If the unconscious did communicate with us clearly and openly, it would overwhelm and destroy us. Perhaps that is what happens at the end of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’: Roderick comes face-to-face with his darkest unconscious, and it destroys him.

And this explains why both Madeline and Roderick are destroyed: the mind, both conscious and unconscious, is killed at once. The house (the body which houses the mind?) cannot function without the mind, so it must also be destroyed.

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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 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 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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Poe's Stories

Edgar allan poe, everything you need for every book you read..

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Edgar Allan Poe

• Literature Notes
• "The Fall of the House of Usher"
• Edgar Allan Poe Biography
• About Poe's Short Stories
• Summary and Analysis
• "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"
• "The Purloined Letter"
• "The Tell-Tale Heart"
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• "The Cask of Amontillado"
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• "The Masque of the Red Death"
• Critical Essays
• Edgar Allan Poe and Romanticism
• Poe's Critical Theories
• Cite this Literature Note

Summary and Analysis "The Fall of the House of Usher"

The first five paragraphs of the story are devoted to creating a gothic mood — that is, the ancient decaying castle is eerie and moldy and the surrounding moat seems stagnant. Immediately Poe entraps us; we have a sense of being confined within the boundaries of the House of Usher. Outside the castle, a storm is raging and inside the castle, there are mysterious rooms where windows suddenly whisk open, blowing out candles; one hears creaking and moaning sounds and sees the living corpse of the Lady Madeline. This, then, is the gothic and these are its trappings; one should realize by now that these are all basic effects that can be found in any modern Alfred Hitchcock-type of horror film, any ghost movie, or in any of the many movies about Count Dracula. Here is the genesis of this type of story, created almost one hundred and fifty years ago in plain, no-nonsense America, a new nation not even sixty years old.

Besides having a fascination for the weird and the spectral, Poe was also interested in the concept of the double, the schizophrenic, the ironic, and the reverse. He investigated this phenomenon in several stories, including "William Wilson" (a story which is analyzed in this volume), and so it is important to note that there is a special importance attached to the fact that Roderick Usher and the Lady Madeline are twins. Poe is creating in this story his conception of a special affinity between a brother and his twin sister; it is almost as if Poe were "inventing" ESP, for this accounts for the fact that Roderick Usher has heard the buried Lady Madeline struggling with her coffin and her chains for over three days before the narrator hears her. Unfortunately, modern readers tend to be a little jaded by the many gothic effects. ESP, for example, is rather old hat today as a gothic device, but in Poe's time, it was as frightening and mysterious as UFOs are today.

"The Fall of the House of Usher" exemplifies perfectly Poe's principle of composition that states that everything in the story must contribute to a single unified effect. Late in the story, Roderick Usher says: "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." Clearly, Poe has chosen the "grim phantasm, FEAR" for his prime effect to be achieved in this story. As a result, every word, every image, and every description in the story is chosen with the central idea in mind of creating a sense of abject terror and fear within both the narrator and the reader. From the opening paragraphs, ominous and foreboding as they are, to the presentation of the over-sensitive, hopelessly frail and delicate Roderick Usher, to the terrible conclusion with the appearance of the living corpse, all of Poe's details combine to create the anxiety accompanying that "grim phantasm, FEAR."

Like so many of Poe's stories, the setting here is inside a closed environment. From the time the unnamed narrator enters the House of Usher until the end of the story when he flees in terror, the entire story is boxed within the confines of the gloomy rooms on an oppressive autumn day where every object and sound is attenuated to the over-refined and over-developed sensitivities of Roderick Usher.

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. In terms of what plot there is, it is set somewhere in the past, and we find out that the narrator and Roderick Usher have been friends and schoolmates previous to the story's beginning. At least Usher considers the narrator to be his friend — in fact, his only friend — and he has written an urgent letter to him, imploring him to come to the Usher manor "post-haste." As the narrator approaches the melancholy House of Usher, it is evening time and a "sense of insufferable gloom pervades" his spirit. This is the first effect Poe creates, this "sense of insufferable gloom." There are no gothic stories or ghost stories which take place in daylight or at high noon; these types of stories must occur in either darkness or in semi-darkness, and thus the narrator arrives at this dark and cryptic manor just as darkness is about to enshroud it. The house, the barren landscape, the bleak walls, the rank sedges in the moat — all these create a "sickening of the heart — an unredeemed dreariness." This is a tone which will become the mood throughout the entire story.

Poe next sets up a sense of the "double" or the ironic reversal when he has the narrator first see the House of Usher as it is reflected in the "black and lurid tarn" (a dark and gruesome, revolting mountain lake) which surrounds it. The image of the house, you should note, is upside down. At the end of the story, the House of Usher will literally fall into this tarn and be swallowed up by it. And even though Poe said in his critical theories that he shunned symbolism, he was not above using it if such symbolism contributed to his effect. Here, the effect is electric with mystery; he says twice that the windows of the house are "eyelike" and that the inside of the house has become a living "body" while the outside has become covered with moss and is decaying rapidly. Furthermore, the ultimate Fall of the House is caused by an almost invisible crack in the structure, but a crack which the narrator notices; symbolically, this is a key image. Also central to this story is that fact that Roderick and the Lady Madeline are twins. This suggests that when he buries her, he will widen the crack, or fissure, between them. This crack, or division, between the living and the dead will be so critical that it will culminate ultimately in the Fall of the House of Usher.

It is possible that Poe wanted us to imagine that when Usher tries to get rid of that other part of himself, the twin half, he is, in effect, signing his own death warrant. Certainly at the end of the story, Lady Madeline falls upon him in an almost vampire-like sucking position and the two of them are climactically, totally one, finally united in the light of the full moon, by which the narrator is able to see the tumultuous Fall of the House of Usher. (The full moon, of course, is a traditional prop for stories of this sort; that is, one finds it in all gothic, ghostly, and vampire-type stories.)

Upon entering the gothic archway of the deteriorating mansion, the narrator is led "through many dark and intricate passages" filled with "sombre tapestries," "ebon blackness," and "armorial trophies." As noted earlier, these details of old armor standing in the shadows and the intricate passageways leading mysteriously away are all traditional elements in all gothic horror stories. Over everything, Poe drapes his "atmosphere of sorrow . . . and irredeemable gloom." He evokes here his primary effect: We sense that some fearful event will soon transpire.

When the narrator sees Roderick Usher, he is shocked at the change in his old friend. Never before has he seen a person who looks so much like a corpse with a "cadaverousness of complexion." Death is in the air; the first meeting prepares us for the untimely and ghastly death of Roderick Usher later in the story. Usher tries to explain the nature of his illness; he suffers from a "morbid acuteness of the senses." He can eat "only the most insipid food, wear only delicate garments," and he must avoid the odors of all flowers. His eyes, he says, are "tortured by even a faint light," and only a few sounds from certain stringed instruments are endurable.

As Roderick Usher explains that he has not left the house in many years and that his only companion has been his beloved sister, the Lady Madeline, we are startled by Poe's unexpectedly introducing her ghostly form far in the distance. Suddenly, while Roderick is speaking, Madeline passes "slowly through a remote portion of the apartment" and disappears without ever having noticed the narrator's presence. No doctor has been able to discover the nature of her illness — it is "a settled apathy, a gradual wasting away of the person" in a "cataleptical" state; that is, Lady Madeline cannot respond to any outside stimuli. The narrator then tells us that nevermore will he see her alive. Of course, then, the question at the end of the story is: Was the Lady Madeline ever alive? Or is the narrator deceiving the reader by this statement? Roderick Usher and the narrator speak no more of the Lady Madeline; they pass the days reading together or painting, and yet Usher continues to be in a gloomy state of mind. We also learn that one of Usher's paintings impresses the narrator immensely with its originality and its bizarre depiction: It is a picture of a luminous tunnel or vault with no visible outlet. This visual image is symbolic of what will happen later; it suggests both the vault that Usher will put his sister into and also the maelstrom that will finally destroy the House of Usher.

Likewise, the poem "The Haunted Palace," which Poe places almost exactly in the center of the story, is similar to the House of Usher in that some "evil things" are there influencing its occupants in the same way that Roderick Usher, the author of the poem seems to be haunted by some unnamed "evil things." After he has finished reading the poem, Usher offers another of his bizarre views; this time, he muses on the possibility that vegetables and fungi are sentient beings — that is, that they are conscious and capable of having feelings of their own. He feels that the growth around the House of Usher has this peculiar ability to feel and sense matters within the house itself. This otherworldly atmosphere enhances Poe's already grimly threatening atmosphere.

One day, Roderick Usher announces that the Lady Madeline is "no more"; he says further that he is going to preserve her corpse for two weeks because of the inaccessibility of the family burial ground and also because of the "unusual character of the malady of the deceased." These enigmatic statements are foreboding; they prepare the reader for the re-emergence of the Lady Madeline as a living corpse.

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.

After some days of bitter grief, Usher changes appreciably; now he wanders feverishly and hurries from one chamber to another. Often he stops and stares vacantly into space as though he is listening to some faint sound; his terrified condition brings terror to the narrator. Then we read that on the night of the "seventh or eighth day" after the death of the Lady Madeline, the narrator begins to hear "certain low and indefinite sounds" which come from an undetermined source. As we will learn later, these sounds are coming from the buried Lady Madeline, and these are the sounds that Roderick Usher has been hearing for days. Because of his over-sensitiveness and because of the extra-sensory relationship between him and his twin sister, Roderick has been able to hear sounds long before the narrator is able to hear them.

When Usher appears at the narrator's door looking "cadaverously wan" and asking, "Have you not seen it?," the narrator is so ill at ease that he welcomes even the ghostly presence of his friend. Usher does not identify the "it" he speaks of, but he throws open the casement window and reveals a raging storm outside — "a tempestuous . . . night . . . singular in its terror and its beauty." Again, these details are the true and authentic trappings of the gothic tale. Night, a storm raging outside while another storm is raging in Usher's heart, and a decaying mansion in which "visible gaseous exhalations . . . enshrouded the mansion" — all these elements contribute to the eerie gothic effect Poe aimed for.

The narrator refuses, however, to allow Usher to gaze out into the storm with its weird electrical phenomena, exaggerated by their reflection in the "rank miasma of the tarn." Protectively, he shuts the window and takes down an antique volume entitled Mad Trist by Sir Launcelot Canning and begins reading aloud. When he comes to the section where the hero forces his way into the entrance of the hermit's dwelling, the narrator says that 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 very cracking and ripping sound" which was described in the antique volume which he is reading to Usher. The narrator continues reading, and when he comes to the description of a dragon being killed and dying with "a shriek so horrid and harsh, and withal so piercing," he pauses because at the exact moment, he hears a "low and apparently distant, but harsh, protracted and most unusual screaming or grating sound" which seems to be the exact counterpart of the scream in the antique volume. He observes Usher, who seems to be rocking from side to side, filled with some unknown terror. Very soon the narrator becomes aware of a distinct sound, "hollow, metallic and clangorous, yet apparently muffled." When he approaches Usher, his friend responds that he has been hearing noises for many days, and yet he has not dared to speak about them. The noises, he believes, come from Lady Madeline: "We have put her living in the tomb!" He heard the first feeble movements a few days ago while she was in the coffin, then he heard the rending of the coffin and the grating of the iron hinges of her prison and then her struggling with the vault and, finally, she is now on the stairs and so close that Usher can hear "the heavy and horrible beating of her heart." With a leap upwards, he shrieks: "Madman! I tell you that she now stands without the door!" At this moment, with superhuman strength, the antique doors are thrown open and in the half darkness there is revealed "the lofty and enshrouded figure of the Lady Madeline of Usher." There is blood upon her white robes and the evidence of a bitter struggle on every portion of her emaciated frame. With the last of her energy, while she is trembling and reeling, she falls heavily upon 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."

The narrator tells us that he fled from the chamber and from the entire mansion and, at some distance, he turned to look back in the light of the "full, setting and blood-red moon" (emphasis mine) and saw the entire House of Usher split at the point where there was a zigzag fissure and watched as the entire house sank into the "deep and dank tarn" which covered, finally, the "fragments of the 'House of Usher.'" There are more varying interpretations of this story than there are of almost any of Poe's other works. 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. An usher is someone who lets one in or leads one in. 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 the concept of twins, there is also a reversal of roles. It is Usher himself who seems to represent the weak, the over-sensitive, the over-delicate, and the feminine. In contrast, Lady Madeline, as many critics have pointed out, possesses a superhuman will to live. She is the masculine force which survives being buried alive and is able, by using almost supernatural strength, to force her way out and escape from her entombment in the vaults, and then despite being drained of strength, as evidenced by the blood on her shroud, she is able to find her brother and fall upon him.

Another reading of the story involves the possibility that Roderick Usher's weakness, his inability to function in light, and his necessity to live constantly in the world of semi-darkness and muted sounds and colors is that the Lady Madeline is a vampire who has been sucking blood from him for years. This would account for his paleness and would fit this story in a category with the stories of Count Dracula that were so popular in Europe at the time. In this interpretation, Roderick Usher buries his sister so as to protect himself. Vampires had to be dealt with harshly; thus, this accounts for the difficulty Lady Madeline encounters in escaping from her entombment. In this view, the final embrace must be seen in terms of the Lady Madeline, a vampire, falling upon her brother's throat and sucking the last drop of blood from him.

The final paragraph supports this view in that the actions occur during the "full blood-red moon," a time during which vampires are able to prey upon fresh victims.

At the opposite end of this phantasmal interpretation is the modern-day psychological view that the twins represent two aspects of one personality. The final embrace, in this case, becomes the unifying of two divergent aspects into one whole being at birth. 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. If Usher embodies the incertitude of life — a condition somewhere between waking and sleeping — when Lady Madeline embraces him, this embrace would symbolize the union of a divided soul, indicating a final restoration and purification of that soul in a life to come. They will now live in pure spirituality and everything that is material in the world is symbolized by the collapse of the House of Usher — the dematerialization of all that was earthly in exchange for the pure spirituality of Roderick Usher and the Lady Madeline.

Even though Poe maintains that he did not approve of symbols or allegory, this particular story has been, as suggested above, subjected to many and varied types of allegorical or symbolic interpretations. Basically, however, the story still functions as a great story on the very basic level of the gothic horror story, in which the element of fear is evoked in its highest form.

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• The Fall of the House of Usher

Background of the Story

“The Fall of the House of Usher” is a short story published in 1839 in American writer Edgar Allan Poe. It was first published in Gentleman’s Magazine by Burton and later included in the collection Tales of Grotesque and Arabesque in 1840. The story is a work of Gothic Fiction and deals with the themes of isolation, madness, family, and metaphysical identities.

Hezekiah Usher House could provide a source of inspiration for Poe’s story. The house was located in the Usher estate. The house was built in 1684 and was relocated in 1830. The sources indicate that the owner of the house caught a sailor and his young wife in the house and entombed them in their place of trysting. In 1830, when the house was torn down, two bodies were found in the cellar cavity.

The short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” is regarded as the best example of the totality of Poe as every detail and element in the short story is relevant and related.

The characteristic element of Poe’s work is the presence of capacious and disintegrating houses; such houses in the stories symbolize the destruction of the human soul and the human body.

This short story illustrates the ability of Poe to create an emotional tone in his work by employing feelings such as guilt, doom, and fear. The emotions are central to the personality of Roderick Usher, who has been suffering from an unknown disease like many of the characters of Edger Allan Poe.

Like the narrator of the story of “Tell-Tale Heart,” the hyperactive senses of Roderick Usher are inflamed by his disease. Even though the illness is displayed physically, it is based on the moral and mental state of Roderick Usher. His sickness is suggestive because he is expected to be sick based on the illness in his family’s history. Moreover, he buries his sister alive to fulfill his self-creating prophecy.

The Fall of the House of Usher Summary

The short story opens with an unnamed narrator who approaches House of Usher on the dark, dull, and soundless day. The house belongs to his boyhood friend Roderick Usher. The house is mysterious and gloomy. The narrator noticed the diseased atmosphere and absorbed evil in the house from the murky pond and decaying trees around the house. He also observes that even though the house appears to be decaying, its structure is fairly solid. In front of the building, there is no small crack from the roof to the ground.

The narrator has visited the house because Roderick Usher has sent him a letter that sincerely asks him to give him company. In the letter, Roderick has mentioned that he has been physically and emotionally ill due to which the narrator has rushed to help his friend.

The narrator then mentions the Usher family. He says that though they are an ancient clan, they have never flourished. From generation to generation, only one member of the family survives. Therefore, they formed a direct line of descent with no branches from outside. With its estate, the Usher family becomes so much identified that people often confuse the inhabitants with the home.

The narrator further mentions that the inside of the house is as scary and frightening as inside. He goes to the room where Roderick is waiting for him. He observes him be less energetic and paler. Roderick tells him that he is suffering from fear and nerves, and his senses get heightened.

The narrator also mentions that Roderick appears to be afraid of his own house. Madeline, the sister of Roderick, is taken with a mysterious illness that cannot be cured by the doctors. She is perhaps suffering from catalepsy in which one loses the control of his/her limbs. To cheer up his friend, the narrator spends several days with him. He listens to his friend and plays guitar. He also reads stories to him; however, he is able to lift the spirit of Roderick. Soon afterward, Roderick claims that the house is unhealthy.

Madeline dies, and Roderick resolves to bury her in the house temporarily. Since her disease was rare and unique, he fears that the doctors may take her dead body scientific research, so he wants to keep her in house. The narrator helps his friend to put Madeline’s body in the tomb and observes that her cheeks are rosy. He also realizes that Madeline and Roderick were twins.

With passing days, Roderick becomes more uncomfortable. The narrator was unable to sleep one night. Roderick knocks on the door in a hysterical state. He takes the narrator to the window. The see a bright-looking gas nearby the house. The narrator tells him that such gas is natural; there is nothing uncommon in it.

In order to pass the night, the narrator reads a story to Roderick. He reads Sir Launcelot Canning’s “Mad Twist,” a medieval romance. When he reads the story, he starts hearing the noises that resemble the description in the story. Initially, he ignores the noises thinking it to be his imagination. However, the noises become more clear and more distinct after some time that it cannot be ignored.

He also observes that Roderick has fallen over his chair and is muttering to himself. To listen to him, the narrator approaches him. Roderick discloses that he has been hearing such noises for days and thinks that they have buried Madeline alive. It is Madeline trying to escape. He cries that she is standing behind him. The door opens with the wind blowing, and Madeline was standing behind it in a white bloodied robe. She instantly attacks him, and he dies of fear. The narrator runs from the house. As soon as he escapes, the house of Usher cracks and crumbles to the ground.

Roderick Usher

He is the owner of the Usher estate. He is the last surviving male member of the Usher Family. He acts as a twin of his sister, Madeline. He illustrates himself as a mind to her body and suffers from the mental counterpart of his sister’s physical illness.

Roderick is one of the character doubles of Edger Allan Poe. He is a bookish and intellectual man while his sister is sick and bedridden. Roderick’s mental inability to differentiate from reality and fantasy correspond to his sister’s physical weakness. These characters are employed by Poe to explore the relationship and philosophical mystery between body and mind.

Poe imagines what would happen if the connection between the body and mind are served and assigned to different people. The imagery of the twin and the incestuous history in Ushers’ family line shows Roderick is inseparable from his sister. Poe maintains the idea that even though the mind and body are inseparable, they depend on each other for survival. When one of the elements suffers from a breakdown, the interdependence causes a chain reaction. The physical death of Madeline parallels the collapse of Roderick’s sanity and the house of Usher.

Madeline Usher

She is the twin sister of Roderick; she is suffering from mysterious illness catalepsy. When the narrator discovers that she is the twin sister of his friend, it points out the outsider’s relationship of the narrator to the house of Usher.

Unnamed narrator

He is the boyhood friend of Roderick. Roderick contacted him when he was suffering from emotional and mental distress. He does not know much about the house of Usher and is the first outsider to visit the house in many years.

The short story, “The Fall of the House of Usher” is an account of a madman whose sickness is suggestive because of the sickness in the family line. His fears are apparent and manifest themselves through the sentient and supernatural family estate. The story deals with both mental and physical illness and its effects on people who are close to you.

Much of the apparent madness in the story does not appear to be due to supernatural elements. The main character is not really crazy or mad. However, the house he lives in is haunted. Considering this, one can interpret that Roderick does not bury his sister alive, but she is back from the dead. One can also interpret that madness is imaginary.

“The Fall of the House of Usher” is an account of a family that is self-isolated, bizarre, and so remote from normalcy that the very existence of this family has become supernatural and eerie. The bond between the brother and sister is inexplicable and intense. It could possibly be supernatural or incestuous. This between them even surpasses death. One can interpret that twin siblings are actually one person that is split into two. That is why they are inseparable from each other.

The story deals with the family that is so remote and isolated from the world that they have developed their own non-existing barriers to interact with the world outside. The house of Usher has its own reality and is governed by its own rules, with people having no interest in others. This extreme isolation makes the family closer and closes to the extent that they become inexplicable to the outside world.

The idea of fear is worse for Roderick Usher than the object he fears. In fact, it is fear that causes his death in the story. One can interpret the last action in a way that fear of any occurrence manifests it in real life. Roderick has feared his death, and he brings his own death.

The short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” shows a split-personality disorder in a dramatized way. The tale explores the various aspects of identity and the means through which these aspects could possibly be fractioned. The story emphasized the difference between the mental and physical parts and how these parts interact with each other.

Literary Analysis

The short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” contains a quintessential characteristic of gothic fiction. 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. Instead of using standard narrative markers, Poe employed gothic elements such as a barren landscape and inclement weather.

The readers are left alone with the narrator as it is such a haunted place. Even though the narrator is the boyhood friend of Roderick, he does not know much about him – even he does not know the basic fact about him that he has a twin sister. Poe makes the readers ponder on why Roderick contacts the narrator in his state of need and the persistence of the response of the narrator.

Though Poe gives the identifiable elements of the Gothic take, he contrasts the standard form of a tale with the plot that is sudden, inexplicable, and filled with unexpected interruptions. The story opens without providing complete information about the motives of the narrator’s arrival at the house of Usher. This ambiguity sets the plot of the story that vague the real and the fantastic.

Edger Allan Poe also creates a claustrophobic sensation in his story. The narrator of the story is trapped in the charm of Roderick’s attraction, and he cannot escape it until the house of Usher completely collapses. Because of the structure of the house, the characters cannot act or move freely in the house. Thus the house is assumed to be a monstrous character/structure in itself. It is a mastermind that controls the actions and fate of its residents.

Poe also creates confusion between the inanimate and living objects by doubling the house of Usher to the genetic family line of the Usher family. The narrator refers to the house of Usher as the family line of the Usher Family.

Even though he metaphorically employs the word “house,” he also uses it to describe the real house. The narrator is not only trapped inside the house, but the house also describes the biological fate of the family as well, as the Usher family has no branches, all the genetic transformation takes place through incestuous relationships within the domain of the house. The people and peasantry also confuse the house with the family as the physical structure effectively portrays the genetic pattern of the family.

The claustrophobia of the house of Usher has a deep influence on the relationship among the characters of the story. Due to claustrophobia, the narrator is not able to realize that Roderick and Madeline are twins. He realizes when they prepare to entomb her dead body. Moreover, he is confined, and the cramped setting of the tomb metaphorically characterizes the characters. The twins are so similar, and it is impossible for them to develop separately. Because of Madeline’s similarity to Roderick, she has been buried before she is actually dead, and this similarity is shown by the coffin that holds her identity.

Madeline appears to be suffering from the typical problems of nineteen-century women. All of her identity is invested in her body. While on the other hand, Roderick possesses intellectual powers. However, when Madeline comes out from the tomb, she possesses more power in the story and counteracts the weak, immobile, and nervous disposition of her brother.

Some scholars and critics argue that the character of Madeline does not exist at all. They have reduced her to the shared figment of the imagination of the narrator and Roderick. However, Madeline appears to be central to the claustrophobic and symmetrical logic of the story. Madeline suppresses Roderick by not permitting him to see her separate or essentially different from him. This attack is completed when she finally attacks and kills him at the end of the story.

Throughout the story, there is a doubling. The story emphasizes the Gothic character of the doppelganger. Doppelganger is the character double and portrays the doubling of the literary forms or inanimate structures. For example, the narrator observes that the mansion is a reflection in the shallow pool or tarn that joins the front of the house. The house is doubled through its image in the tarn; however, the image is upside down, which characterizes the relationship between Madeline and Roderick.

The story also alludes to many other works of literature. It alludes to the poems “Mad Trist” and “The Haunted Palace” by Sir Launcelot Canning. These poems are composed by Poe; however, in the story, he attributed these poems to the other sources. Both of these poems counteract and therefore predict the plotline of the story. The poem “Mad Trist” is about breaking into the dwelling of a hermit by Ethelred and mirrors Madeline’s escape from the tomb.

The overpass of the border is vitally related to the Gothic horror of the story. Poe’s experience in the magazine industry makes him excessively obsessed with word games and codes. This story highlights his obsession with naming characters. The word “Usher” not only refers to the family of the mansion. It is actually the act of crossing a border that carries the narrator into the tenacious world of Madeline and Roderick.

The letters of Roderick ushers the narrator into an unknowable world. And maybe the presence of narration – an outsider – leads to the destruction of the house. The narrator is excluded from the Usher’s fear of the outsider, a fear that highlights the claustrophobic nature of the story. The narrator unwittingly draws the whole structure by undermining the fear of the outside. The poem “Mad Trist” and Madeline escapes also show the similar yet playful crossing of the borders. Thus Poe buries the pun in tales in an invented severity of medieval romance, and this earned him popularity in the magazines of America.

The tone of the story “The Fall of the House of Usher” is deliberate. It is a terrifying story. The narrator of the story is the center of the strange parts of the story. However, an important point should be kept in mind that the story is narrated in retrospect; that is why the deliberate tone of the story is not compromised by the frantic mania of a terrified narrator.

For example, considering the second last paragraph of the story:

“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.”

Poe unfolds the story in a calm and careful manner by keeping a respectful distance from the inexpressible details and maintains the perspective of the narrator on the crazy events going on. Such a calm approach to terrifying and uncommon events is horrifying.

The story “The Fall of the House of Usher” belongs to the Gothic Fiction. There is a sentient house, an underground tomb, a dead body, and dark and stormy nights. All of these feature a tale as Gothic fiction. “Supernatural Gothic” is one of the subgenres of Gothic fiction. In supernatural gothic, weird, and strange things, happenings can be attributed to the supernatural happening.

Moreover, the inexplicable diseases of the mind and body in Roderick Usher and Madeline Usher show the story belongs to the genre of Gothic or horror fiction.

The title of the story “The Fall of the House of Usher” can be interpreted in various ways. The first interpretation can be of the actual fall of the house of Usher. The House of Usher is the place or mansion that the narrator visits and the main action of the story occur. The house of Usher falls at the end of the story into the pool of water situated before the house. The small crack that the narrator sees when he enters the house foreshadows the fall of the house. Since from the beginning of the story, the readers see that there is something wrong with the house, and certainly, the fissure/crack splits the house and destroys it.

Now comes the symbolic interpretation of the house of Usher. The narrator tells the readers the term “The House of Usher” does not only refer to the house but also the family dwelling in the house and the Usher bloodline. The title does not only refer to the literal fall of the house but also to the fall of the Usher family with the death of Roderick Usher. The narrator mentions that Roderick and his sister Madeline are the only two surviving family members, so their death makes the death of the family line.

The decline of the Usher family is also foreshadowed in the story. Roderick Usher prophecies his death to the narrator in the manner it really occurs. Roderick claims that he will die of fear. However, it is worth noting that the death of Roderick is another literal fall.

All of the falls in the novel, the fall of Roderick, the fall of the bloodline of the Usher Family, and the fall of the house, occurs at the same time at the end of the story. This coincidence illustrates the fantastical nature of the story.

The setting of the novel is several dark and stormy nights and the haunted mansion. Any particular geographic location of the story or the time of occurrence is completely unknown to the readers. However, the atmosphere and the mood of the setting are far more important than the time and place of the setting. Poe creates a powerful atmosphere. The first of the many settings of the house, Poe describes the outside of the house as spooky. There is an ominous fissure that runs down the center of the house.

Poe creates a more scary setting inside the house. Even though the corridors in the house are filled with the apparently ordinary things, they scream out horror. Moreover, another horrific element of the story is the dank underground tomb. It is masterfully-crafted mini-setting the house of Usher.

The mansion is carefully crafted to emphasize the atmosphere and mood of the story. There are creepy furnishings and tapestries inside the house. The story becomes claustrophobic when the readers know that Roderick Usher has not left the house in ages. In fact, once entered, the narrator also does not leave the house until the story ends.

Writing Style

The writing style of the short story is ornate and rhythmic. Edgar Allan Poe is known for his melodramatic macabre. “The Fall of the House of Usher” indeed bears the mark of this authorial stamp. The story is widely admired for its nearly-poetic rhetoric. For example, the first sentence contains the phrase “singularly dreary tract of country.” The length and weight of the “y” sound are in contrast with the hard and cutting “c” sound in the next two sentences. Moreover, the last sentence also contains rhythmic style as “

“the deep and dark tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the ‘House of Usher.’” 

There are lots of more rhythmic gems in the story. 

Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory

Reality and art.

In the story “The Fall of the House of Usher,” strangely mingles the real with the fictional. The artistic creation of Roderick is directly connected to what happens in the house of Usher. He creates an underground tomb and then entombed Madeline in the tomb. He then prophecies about the destruction of the house, and the house is destroyed. He yells that Madeline is standing behind the door, and when the door opens with the storm, she is standing. Even at the beginning of the story, Roderick claims that he will die because of fear, and he does indeed die because of fear.  

One can assume that Roderick can see the future with his lustrous and magical eyes. He is aware of the upcoming events, and he speaks about them before. One can also assume that Roderick causes the things to happen; that is why he is preoccupied with the fear that he manifests in reality. 

Besides art mirroring or foreshadowing reality in the story, the other thing such as “reflection” and “doubling” is also going on in the story. When the story opens, we see that the narrator observes the inverted image of the house of Usher in the water pool that lies in front of the house. Moreover, there is also an inverted dichotomy between Roderick Usher and Madeline Usher. 

The House of Usher

The narrator tells the readers the term “The House of Usher” refers to the house and the family dwelling in the house and the Usher bloodline. The title does not only refer to the literal fall of the house but also to the fall of the Usher family with the death of Roderick Usher. The narrator mentions that Roderick and his sister Madeline are the only two surviving family members, so their death makes the death of the family line. 

The decline of the Usher family is also foreshadowed in the story. Roderick Usher prophecies his death to the narrator in the manner it really occurs. Roderick claims that he will die of fear. However, it is worth noting that the death of Roderick is another literal fall.   

The Small Fissure

The narrator, while entering the House of Usher, sees a small crack in the house, this crack not only refers to the crack in the house, but also the crack in the Usher family. There is a symbolic connection between the literal fissure and the metaphorical fissure. This small fissure shows disruption in the family, specifically between Roderick and Usher. This small fissure splits the family and the house of Usher. 

Narrator Point of View

The story “The House of Usher is narrated in the first person with the peripheral narrator. The narrator of the story is nameless, suggesting that his only job is to narrate the story. The readers are not provided much information about the narrator. Instead of focusing on the narrator, much of the interest of the readers are drawn towards the strange events that are being narrated. 

The narrator insists on portraying all of the happenings in the house of Usher with vivid and accurate descriptions. This description is one of the most interesting things to note and very futile to observe.  For example, the narrator writes that 

“…an influence, whose supposititious force was conveyed in terms too shadowy here to be re-stated. 

“I would in vain endeavour to reduce more than a small portion which should lie within the compass of merely written words.” 

“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.” 

One of the most interesting statements made by the narrator is:

“I lack words to express the full extent, or the earnest abandon of his persuasion.” 

In this statement, the narrator is more like pointing out towards something. By claiming the events in real life are scarier and horrifying that it sounds like the story, Poe tries to render his story more horrifying. Whatever the narrator is telling is actually happening, and the real happening was even worse than that. 

Moreover, there is a mixture of reality and fiction in the narration. Whatever the narrator is reading aloud to Roderick also manifests in reality. Over here, the narrator tries to explain that words are insufficient to describe reality. The words he reads to Roderick Usher turns real. So one can say that the fictional words, read by the narrator to Roderick, are prophetic words that foreshadow or prophesize the upcoming events. These words are similar to the words of Roderick in which he prophesied his death early at the beginning of the story. Thus one can say the narration of the story is prophetic in nature.

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Kristen Cruzata

Opinion Chief of Staff

This Basketball Season, Root for the Women

One chilly evening late last month, I visited my favorite bar in Bloomington, Ind., my hometown, and the conversation turned to March Madness. Hoosiers always love college basketball, but this year everyone wanted to talk about the women: Sara Scalia of Indiana University, Angel Reese of L.S.U. and, yes, Caitlin Clark of Iowa. In Indiana, as in much of the country, fans are showing up for women’s basketball, and — crucially — they’re buying tickets.

I saw it myself just a few days earlier. I was in the stands at Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall as the Hoosiers beat Oklahoma and won their place in the Sweet Sixteen. As the players rushed the student section after the game, locals and students alike hung back to watch them revel. Though the architects of Title IX, Representative Patsy Mink and Senator Birch Bayh, are no longer around to see it, I can imagine this is exactly what they were hoping for when President Richard Nixon signed the law in 1972. But good policy takes time.

It’s thanks to Title IX that the entire country is now talking about Caitlin Clark, who deserves her obsessive following. Clark is a fantastic shooter , a disciplined player and a fierce competitor. She’s the all-time leading scorer in Division I history, men or women. And she’s not afraid to act like it . She’s very likely going to be the first pick at the W.N.B.A.’s draft on April 15. And there’s a good chance that she’ll end up playing for the Indiana Fever.

My hope is that wherever Clark ends up, her star power fuels the W.N.B.A. There’s already an indication that “ Clarkenomics ” — her unique ability to fill stadiums and even raise ticket prices — is real. She definitely sold out stadiums when Iowa was on the road.

Women’s basketball deserves devoted fans, and more of them. Professional women’s basketball is ripe for the groundswell that has come for the college teams. Whether I’m watching the Fever take on the Liberty at Barclays Center later this spring or sipping beers at a local dive with the game on TV, I’ll be cheering on the women. That’s where the real fun and, yes, drama is happening this year.

Ross Douthat

Opinion Columnist

Scotland’s Censorship Experiment Threatens Free Expression

In 2002, the English journalist Ed West penned an essay entitled “Britain Isn’t a Free Country.” His evidence was straightforward: Through the aggressive enforcement of laws against hate speech, Britain was harassing, investigating and sometimes imprisoning its own citizens, effectively consigning the right to free expression to the dustbin of history.

West’s list of examples, which included some cases involving deeply unsympathetic racists and others that looked more like the criminalization of cultural conservatism, is worth revisiting now that Scotland has passed an especially expansive hate speech statute.

The new Scottish law criminalizes public speech deemed “insulting” to a protected group (as opposed to the higher bar of “abusive”), and prosecutors need only prove that the speech was “likely” to encourage hatred rather than being explicitly intended to do so. One can offer a defense based on the speech in question being “reasonable,” and there is a nod to “the importance of the right to freedom of expression.” But a plain reading of the law seems like it could license prosecutions for a comedian’s monologue or for reading biblical passages on sexual morality in public.

The law has attracted special attention because J.K. Rowling responded to its passage with a series of social media posts about transgender individuals that seemed to fall afoul of the law’s dictates. If they do, she wrote, “I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment.”

My prediction is that neither Rowling nor any figure of her prominence will face prosecution. Rather, what you see in West’s examples is that the speech police prefer more obscure targets: the teenage girl prosecuted for posting rap lyrics that included the N-word or the local Tory official hauled in by the cops after posting to criticize the arrest of a Christian street preacher.

Which is, of course, a normal way for mild sorts of authoritarianism to work. Exceptions are made for prominent figures, lest the system look ridiculous, but ordinary people are taught not to cross the line.

Europe is often depicted as caught between an embattled liberal order and a post-liberal form of populism. But the reality is that there are two incipient European post-liberalisms, both responses to the challenges of managing aging, anxious societies being transformed by mass migration. One is the right-wing politics of national identity; the other is a more technocratic attempt to maintain social peace through a regime of censorship.

Scotland is experimenting with the second option. Both could usher out the liberal age as we have known it.

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Lydia Polgreen

Ramy Youssef’s ‘S.N.L.’ Monologue Was a Love Letter to Muslim America

It is a rare thing in our rapidly secularizing country to be confronted with piety and devotion in popular culture. So it was a surprise, and a balm, to watch a man who prays daily and talks openly about his devout faith storm a bastion of earthly godlessness: “Saturday Night Live.”

I am referring, of course, to the comedian Ramy Youssef, who hosted the show on what he described in his opening monologue as “an incredibly spiritual weekend,” noting Ramadan, Easter and the arrival of a new Beyoncé album.

“I’m doing the Ramadan one,” he quipped, to peals of laughter, unspooling a very funny bit about how loving Muslims are. Youssef has mined his experience as a believer among the profane in gentle standup specials and a namesake sitcom. His entire monologue glowed with a welcoming warmth — Muslims, he seemed to say: We’re just like you.

In a country that is supposedly obsessed with diversity and inclusion, it is remarkable how rare it is to hear from a practicing Muslim in America.

Surveys by the Institute for Policy and Understanding, a nonpartisan research organization focused on Muslim Americans, have consistently found that Muslims are the most likely group to report religious discrimination in the United States. According to a Pew survey conducted in 2021, 78 percent of Americans said that there was either a lot or some discrimination against Muslims in our society. Muslims are no more likely to commit crimes than members of any other group, but crimes in which Muslims are suspects get outsized media coverage, research has shown .

It is no surprise, then, that Islamophobia is perhaps the most tolerated form of religious prejudice. Right now, Senate Republicans appear to have persuaded several Senate Democrats to vote against a Muslim judicial nominee after smearing him, with no evidence at all, as an antisemite.

Many of the skits that toyed with religion on “S.N.L.” on Saturday were funny — Ozempic for Ramadan! Genius. But part of me winced through them as well, because I saw in Youssef something that other members of minority groups have had to do to “earn” their place in the safety of the mainstream: the performance of normalcy, of being nonthreatening and sweet, the requirement to prove that your community belongs in America just like everyone else’s.

I loved Youssef’s monologue, in which he bravely pleaded, “Please, free the people of Palestine. And please, free the hostages. All of the hostages.”

“I am out of ideas,” Youssef declared toward the end of his monologue. “All I have is prayers.”

To which this nonbeliever can only say: Same, Ramy. Same.

Nicholas Kristof

Israel’s Attack on Aid Workers Can Only Make Hunger in Gaza Worse

The Israeli strikes that killed seven aid workers overnight as they tried to avert famine in Gaza will be much debated, but three points seem clear to me.

First, the killings reinforce the widespread criticism that Israeli forces often appear to act recklessly in Gaza, with too little concern for civilian casualties. The latest deaths were unusual in that they included foreigners, even an American, but there is nothing new about Israeli strikes killing aid workers in Gaza: At least 196 humanitarian workers have been killed in Gaza and the West Bank since the war began in October, the United Nations says.

Second, the tragedy will compound the hunger crisis in Gaza that is already leading to deaths from starvation and risking both famine and epidemics. The result is that just as famine looms and children are dying, international efforts to ease it may be reduced, not amplified.

Third, Israeli credibility will take another hit, and America’s with it. Some elements of the Israeli narrative are entirely accurate: Hamas started the latest round of fighting and uses civilians as human shields. But Israel also argues that it is doing everything possible to reduce civilian casualties, and that is hard to argue in this case — and this is also an embarrassment for the Biden administration, which provides an endless flow of weaponry for airstrikes like these (although the origin of the particular weapons that killed these seven workers is unclear for now).

The seven people worked with World Central Kitchen, a charity founded by chef José Andrés, and were in clearly marked vehicles . The nonprofit group, which has now suspended its aid efforts in Gaza, said that it had cleared its movements with Israeli forces, and The Financial Times reported that the vehicles were hit over a two-kilometer stretch, implying targeting by multiple strikes rather than a single errant missile. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has promised an investigation.

The killing of humanitarians puts aid groups in an impossible situation. The organizations focus on easing suffering, yet they also must look after the safety of their own people. If Israel continues to kill aid workers at such a pace, it will be very difficult to distribute aid to the people who need it.

And increasingly, it may be essential to have trained aid workers to provide special emergency foods to children with severe acute malnutrition. All that is now uncertain.

The Biden administration is issuing tougher statements about the situation, but President Biden still seems unwilling to use his leverage to press Israel to ease up. Politico reported on Monday that the U.S. government is considering a major new weapons sale to Israel.

Michelle Cottle

Opinion Writer

An Abortion Rights Vote May Not Be Enough for Biden in Florida

Just when you thought it was safe to ignore Florida politics, up pops the state Supreme Court with an abortion-rights decision seemingly designed to provoke electoral turmoil this year.

The court allowed a six-week abortion ban to go into effect while ruling that Floridians can vote in November on a state constitutional amendment to protect abortion access before fetal viability (around 24 weeks). The combined rulings immediately shoved reproductive rights to the political front lines. But how will things shake out in this increasingly red state ? And not to make everything about the presidential race, but how much could it help President Biden?

The issue of reproductive rights has been a boon to Democrats pretty much everywhere it has appeared on the ballot, directly or otherwise, since the death of Roe v. Wade. And there’s reason to be optimistic that Florida’s amendment will succeed as well. Though passage requires at least 60 percent support, a November poll by the University of North Florida put support at 62 percent, including 53 percent of Republicans. And that was before things got real with the court ruling.

But can this new wrinkle save Biden there? I mean, this is Florida. The state didn’t show him the love in 2020, and more generally, its Democratic Party has been a hot mess for several years. Registered Republicans now outnumber Democrats by nearly one million . In 2022, Floridians re-elected Gov. Ron DeSantis with almost 60 percent of the vote. Ron. DeSantis .

More troubling, Republican state lawmakers have shown themselves happy to thwart the will of the public to tilt the field in their team’s favor. (See: voting rights of felons who have completed their sentences.) And it is the adopted — and spiritual — home of perhaps the ultimate Florida Man, Donald Trump. (When thinking of the MAGA king kicked back in his so-called Southern White House, I like to picture him with a state-appropriate mullet.)

With the proper mix of sweat and strategy, abortion rights advocates and Dems should be able to save reproductive rights in the state — not to mention force Republicans to burn time and cash there. But pry it away from Trump? That feels like a reach.

Zeynep Tufekci

A Farm Worker With Avian Flu Means a Rapid Response Is Urgent

The discovery of the country’s second human case of H5N1 avian flu, found in a Texas dairy farm worker following an outbreak among cows, is worrying and requires prompt and vigorous action.

While officials have so far said the possibility of cow-to-cow transmission “cannot be ruled out,” I think we can go further than that.

The geography of the outbreak — sick cows in Texas, Idaho, Michigan, Ohio and New Mexico — strongly suggests cows are infecting each other as they move around various farms. The most likely scenario seems to be that a new strain of H5N1 is spreading among cows, rather than the cows being individually infected by sick birds.

Avian flu is not known to transmit well among mammals, including humans, and until now, almost all known cases of H5N1 in humans were people in extended close contact with sick birds. But a cow outbreak — something unexpected , as cows aren’t highly prone to get this — along with likely transmission between cows, means we need to quickly require testing of all dairy workers on affected farms as well as their close contacts, and sample cows in all the dairy farms around the country.

It is possible — and much easier — to contain an early outbreak when an emergent virus isn’t yet adapted to a new host and perhaps not as transmissible. If it gets out and establishes a foothold, then all bets are off. With fatality rates estimated up to 50 percent among humans, H5N1 is not something to gamble with.

Additionally, H5N1 was found in the unpasteurized milk of sick cows. Unpasteurized milk, already a bad idea, would be additionally dangerous to consume right now.

Public officials need to get on top of this quickly, and transparently, telling us the uncertainties as well as their actions.

The government needs to gear up to potentially mass-produce vaccines quickly ( which we have against H5N1 , though they take time to produce) and ensure early supplies for frontline and health care workers.

It’s possible that worst-case scenarios aren’t going to come true — yet. But evolution is exactly how viruses get to do things they couldn’t do before, and letting this deadly one have time to explore the landscape in a potential new host is a disastrously bad idea.

Mike Johnson Is Trying to Explain Simple Math to the Far Right

I come today not to bury Mike Johnson, but to praise him.

No. Seriously. I mean it.

Johnson, the House speaker, sat down with Trey Gowdy of Fox News over the weekend to discuss “realistic expectations” for Republicans in this era of narrowly divided government.

Quipping that he was there as an “ambassador of hope on Easter Sunday,” Johnson offered “three simple things” his party should be focusing on: No. 1, “Show the American people what we’re for. Not just what we’re against.” No. 2, “We have to unite. We have to stand together.” And No. 3, “We’ve got to drive our conservative agenda and get the incremental wins that are still possible right now.”

Nos. 1 and 2 are the sort of meaningless boilerplate politicians are forever blathering about. But No. 3 was clearly the core message of his mission, and he really leaned in, repeatedly noting that his team’s right-wingers — with whom he has long identified, mind you — need to come to terms with the political reality of holding “the smallest majority in U.S. history.”

“We got to realize I can’t throw a Hail Mary pass on every single play,” he said, with that mild manner and beatific smile that makes him seem thoughtful and genial even when he’s speaking harsh truths. “It’s three yards and a cloud of dust. Right? We’ve got to get the next first down. Keep moving.”

Southerners do love their football metaphors.

When asked about Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s motion to remove him, he acknowledged that she is “very frustrated” with how certain negotiations have gone of late, especially when it comes to spending. “Guess what? So am I,” he said. But with Republicans clinging to the majority by their fingernails, “we’re sometimes going to get legislation that we don’t like.”

This kind of squish talk isn’t very MAGA. And working with Dems is what got the previous speaker kicked to the curb. (Poor Kev.) But Johnson is in some ways in a better spot than was Kevin McCarthy. A smattering of Democrats have suggested they would save Johnson from a coup attempt, especially on a key issue such as funding Ukraine. Plus, ousting another speaker so soon would only lock in House Republicans’ rep as a bunch of hopeless chaos monkeys — not a shrewd move in an election year.

This is not to say that Johnson is shaping up to be an effective or competent speaker. But it takes a certain courage to talk reality — and math — to today’s House Republicans. Kudos to him for going there.

David French

There’s Valuable Speech on Social Media, Even for Kids

Last week I wrote a rather long column arguing that blanket bans on social media for children are a bad idea, even if you are persuaded (as I am) that smartphones and social media are a significant reason for increasing childhood mental health struggles. My basic point was simple: The First Amendment rights of children and adults are too precious to diminish, especially when there are less restrictive alternatives for combating the problem.

I received an enormous amount of helpful feedback, but I want to briefly highlight one response. The American Enterprise Institute’s Brad Wilcox posted a thread on X that began like this: “Could not disagree more w/ @DavidAFrench here, partly because he doesn’t fully ack how much the teen problem w/ social media is not just about the message(s) but the *medium* itself. Social media does not function like some debating society for teens.”

I respect Wilcox greatly, and he’s got many valuable things to say about kids and social media, but he’s wrong in one key respect: Social media is, in fact, a debating society for teens, just as it is for adults. It’s often a miserable and contentious debating society, but social media is where an immense amount of our nation’s substantive debates takes place. Kids debate one another, and they read adult debates.

Protecting political speech is a core purpose of the First Amendment. As the Supreme Court held in Garrison v. Louisiana , “Speech concerning public affairs is more than self-expression; it is the essence of self-government.” One reason children enjoy First Amendment rights is that they are essentially citizens in training. They have to learn how to engage in political debate.

There are certainly issues with the medium itself, and there are ways to combat the pernicious effects of the medium without obliterating access to the content. The First Amendment, for example, permits reasonable and content-neutral restrictions on the time, place and manner of freedom of expression, and it’s easy to see a valid ban on smartphones during school hours. It’s also worth considering whether certain features of social media — such as infinite scroll — could be limited.

But it’s important to note that time, place and manner restrictions can’t function as a form of disguised content discrimination. If you’re looking for reasons to ban social media because of what’s on the platform, then you’re playing a dangerous constitutional game.

Jessica Grose

The Christians Who Aren’t Buying Donald Trump’s Sales Pitch

Last week, former President Donald Trump hawked his “God Bless the USA Bible” in a video posted to social media , stating “we must make America pray again.” In a story published today, The Times’s Michael C. Bender notes that Trump — despite a background few would call pious — “is framing his 2024 bid as a fight for Christianity, telling a convention of Christian broadcasters that ‘just like in the battles of the past, we still need the hand of our Lord.’”

A new report on religious change in the United States from The Public Religion Research Institute suggests that Trump’s attempts to tie Christianity tightly to a particular set of Republican political values may be turning some Americans away from Christianity.

P.R.R.I. surveyed Americans who left their childhood religions to become “unaffiliated,” a group that includes people who call themselves atheists, agnostics and nothing in particular. The vast majority of people who become unaffiliated are Christians. While the largest percentage say they left religion because they no longer believe the religion’s teachings, 47 percent of those who became unaffiliated say they did so because of negative treatment or teaching about L.G.B.T.Q. Americans, and 20 percent say they became unaffiliated because their church or congregation became too focused on politics.

“Among white Christian groups, the largest decline in the past decade took place among white evangelical Protestants, whose numbers saw a 3 percentage point decrease, from 17 percent in 2013 to 14 percent in 2023. In 2023, the percentages of white mainline/non-evangelical Protestants (14 percent) and white Catholics (12 percent) remain largely similar to those of 2013,” according to P.R.R.I.’s survey. Trump has frequently and closely aligned himself with white evangelical Christians.

P.R.R.I.’s findings align with what I learned last year when reporting on those leaving religion. As one woman I spoke to put it, she became less religious “because evangelicals became apostates who worship Trump, nationalism and the Republican Party.” Trump promoting a Bible is just another example of his modus operandi: He may make a quick buck, but at what cost to the institution in the long run?

Whether it’s a political or religious institution, the outcome always appears to be the same.

Patrick Healy

Deputy Opinion Editor

Have Swing Voters Stopped Listening to Joe Biden?

Every Monday morning on The Point, we kick off the week with a tipsheet on the latest in the presidential campaign. Here’s what we’re looking at this week:

One of the worst things that can happen to a president seeking re-election is to have voters stop listening to you. As the campaign unfolds this week, I’m curious whether President Biden says or does things that really command attention from voters, and in particular might be persuasive to swing voters.

My curiosity stems from reading the latest polls and my colleague Nate Cohn’s article on Saturday. This is how Nate summed up Biden’s standing in the race since his strong State of the Union speech on March 7: “It has gotten harder to see signs of any Biden bump. Taken together, new polls from Fox , CNBC and Quinnipiac suggested that the presidential race was essentially unchanged, with Mr. Trump still holding a narrow lead nationwide. The president’s approval rating doesn’t seem discernibly higher, either.”

Now, State of the Union speeches themselves rarely produce a bump. But Biden was a new man in March, with a sharper message, lots of campaigning, strong ads and any number of Trump comments to whack. Yet we enter April with Trump in a narrow lead.

Something is not working for Joe Biden right now. Trump is behind him in campaign money , tied up in court, making crazy comments and posting videos showing Biden hogtied. For all that, Biden doesn’t seem to have changed large numbers of minds. Are voters still listening to the president?

Previous presidents who lost re-election, including Trump, George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter, struggled to persuade voters they were effective and sympathetic. In their own ways, the three men were seen as all talk, no action, and that’s what some progressive Democrats and young voters think about Biden’s handling of the war in Gaza. While his administration is talking tougher about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, the bombs keep falling on Gaza (and more American bombs are on the way) and the aid keeps being blocked from reaching starving people.

And it’s not just Gaza: It’s immigration, abortion rights and, especially, the economy. Nate Silver had a striking chart last week showing how “even as consumer and investor sentiment has improved, President Biden’s approval rating hasn’t , or at least it hasn’t by much .”

Right now, Biden doesn’t have the same galvanizing, persuasive political narrative for swing voters that he had in 2020 — I think Trump nostalgia is very real — nor does he have the results enough voters want. Some voters have already written him off because of his age. But I think the bigger threat to re-election is that more voters will stop listening to him if he doesn’t offer a stronger narrative and stronger results.