The Fall of the House of Usher

Analysis

1894 illustration by Aubrey Beardsley

"The Fall of the House of Usher" is considered the best example of Poe's "totality", wherein every element and detail is related and relevant.[16]

The presence of a capacious, disintegrating house symbolizing the destruction of the human body continues to be a characteristic element in Poe's later work.[15]

"The Fall of the House of Usher" shows Poe's ability to create an emotional tone in his work, specifically emphasizing feelings of fear, impending doom, and guilt.[17] These emotions center on Roderick Usher, who, like many Poe characters, suffers from an unnamed disease. Like the narrator in "The Tell-Tale Heart", this disease inflames Roderick's hyperactive senses. The illness manifests physically but is based in Roderick's mental or even moral state. He is sick, it is suggested, because he expects to be sick based on his family's history of illness and is, therefore, essentially a hypochondriac.[18] Similarly, he buries his sister alive because he expects to bury her alive, creating his own self-fulfilling prophecy.

The House of Usher, itself doubly referring both to the actual structure and the family, plays a significant role in the story. It is the first "character" that the narrator introduces to the reader, presented with a humanized description: Its windows are described as "eye-like" twice in the first paragraph. The fissure that develops in its side is symbolic of the decay of the Usher family and the house "dies" along with the two Usher siblings. This connection was emphasized in Roderick's poem "The Haunted Palace", which seems to be a direct reference to the house that foreshadows doom.[19]

L. Sprague de Camp in his Lovecraft: A Biography wrote that "[a]ccording to the late [Poe expert] Thomas O. Mabbott, H.P. Lovecraft, in 'Supernatural Horror', solved a problem in the interpretation of Poe" by arguing that "Roderick Usher, his sister Madeline, and the house all shared one common soul".[20]

The plot of this tale has prompted many critics to analyze it as a description of the human psyche, comparing, for instance, the House to the unconscious, and its central crack to a split personality. An incestuous relationship between Roderick and Madeline never is explicitly stated, but seems implied by the attachment between the two siblings.[21]

Opium, which Poe mentions several times in both his prose and poems, is mentioned twice in the tale.[1] The gloomy sensation occasioned by the dreary landscape around the Usher mansion is compared by the narrator to the sickness caused by the withdrawal symptoms of an opiate-addict. The narrator also describes Roderick Usher's appearance as that of an "irreclaimable eater of opium."[22]

While there are no direct statements supporting their conclusions, scholars have demonstrated the language deployed by Roderick to describe his sister as full of hints of the possible incestuous relationship between the twins. They argue that this perversion is the actual cause of the fall of the house as well as an end to the lineage of Ushers.[23]

Allusions and references

  • The opening epigraph quotes "Le Refus" (1831) by the French songwriter Pierre-Jean de Béranger, translated to English as "his heart is a suspended lute, as soon as it is touched, it resounds".[1] Béranger's original text reads "Mon cœur" (my heart) and not "Son cœur" (his/her heart).
  • The narrator describes one of Usher's musical compositions as a "singular perversion and amplification of the wild air of the last waltz of Von Weber". Poe here refers to a popular piano work of his time – which, though going by the title "Weber's Last Waltz" was actually composed by Carl Gottlieb Reissiger.[24] A manuscript copy of the music was found among Weber's papers upon his death in 1826 and the work was mistakenly attributed to him.
  • Usher's painting reminds the narrator of the Swiss-born British painter Henry Fuseli.

Usher's library is mentioned to have "formed no small portion of the mental existence of the invalid [Roderick Usher]". A list of titles is provided in the story, all of which are allusions to real-world works. Several notable examples include:

  • The Belphegor of Machiavelli, a tale involving demonic possession.
  • Emanuel Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell, a book about divine visions and the afterlife.
  • Directorium Inquisitorum, a list of heretical forbidden works.
  • "Civitas Solis", a short Utopian work about a theocratic society. The philosopher and poet Tommaso Campanella believed that the world has a spiritual nature.[25]

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