Setting in "The Fall of the House of Usher": A Supernatural

Actor

In simple terms, setting is the time and place of a story. Edgar V. Roberts defines it as
"the natural and artificial scenery or environment in which characters in literature live and
move;"1 while atmosphere or mood is the emotional response a reader has due to the kind of
setting that a story has. But generally, for the sake of discussion, setting and atmosphere are
considered nearly the same thing, since one is dependent on the other. To have setting without
mood and atmosphere means a lack of emotional connection, and to have only mood and
atmosphere and no concrete place invites confusion in the reader. 2
The depiction of the place in any story provides a live sense of the scene to evoke the
mood which the writer wants to convey. Generally, in eighteenth century English novel,
places, where the story is presented, are not used for significant or symbolic purposes. The
authors "merely name or designate their settings – except for some nature scenery – without
conveying connected visual data or evoking values of expression, let alone involving space or
object as fellow actors."3 The aesthetic value of the settings as one of the narrative pillars was
appreciated first by the English Gothic novel, such as Walpole's The Castle of Otranto and
Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho. Then, the use of the atmospheric traits of space
gains attention in the works of Dickens, as in Hard Times and Our Mutual Friend.
Nevertheless, space was not actually cultivated for allegorical and symbolic ends, except with
Dickens, until the nineteenth century American novel and short story, especially in the hands
of Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville.4
These authors' use of symbolism and allegory is a reflection of the Christian legacy
affected by the new spirituality of New England shown in all arts as a "preeminence of spirit
over matter" so that "no art that sprang from American roots in this period could fail to show
the marks of abstraction.''5 The religious catalyst behind the symbolic employment can be
detected only in part to the middle of the nineteenth century. The process of secularization no
more emphasizes analogies between God and nature as it does those between nature and man.
Natural objects come to reflect psychic orientations and ethical problems. 6
Under these spiritual conditions, the spatial environment gained more significance
and the Gothic novel became more interesting for its connection between spatial and psychic
elements, though as yet in a relatively superficial way. The Gothic novelists developed an
atmosphere of menace and brooding horror using an almost unvarying formula. They would
traditionally invoke sublime mountainous landscapes at the top of some wild, inaccessible
pass and place a formidable half-ruined castle or crumbling abbey. Creating these menacing
landscapes meant locating the action in bizarre or alien settings. It was typical for these

1
novelists to remove the reader from every day life and place him or her in strange locations
insulating the action from any possible interference from normal society. 7
The American writers enriched the art of the European Gothic novels as well as tales
of horror and darkness by giving the mood-invested space a symbolic character infested with
psychological and moral elements. The narrator was now working with personal symbols
interpreted according to the literary context and the associations of the reader. 8 The outcome
may be summed up in Gerhard Hoffman's words:
Within the mood-invested nature scene, within the setting featuring
the ruin, subterranean passages, labyrinths and corridors, and within
the pattern of orientations above and below, outside and inside,
these authors developed a firm topography and a system of place
relationships, which by means of certain constants of expression
facilitated the creation of atmospheric and symbolic form in the
individual work.9

This can be said about Poe's narrative spaces where the relationship between the
physical and the psychic elements reflects the relationship between space and inhabitant or
space and observer. Moral conflicts, mental exhaustion or even the unconsciousness are
transferred to places and objects, integrated with them and, at the same time, moulded by
these spaces. Poe's special achievement is that he furnishes a horror-invested space with its
own traits severed from pragmatic reality; he achieves this by combining real and phantasmic
elements in an expressive entity with symbolic significance, thus preparing the way for the
modern narrative literature of Henry James, Franz Kafka, or William Faulkner. 10 Poe's ability
is shown, among other short stories, in "The Fall of the House of Usher" in which "the most
important characteristic…, the combination of extreme intellectual and spiritual conditions
with a suggestively mood-invested space, is especially clear … pronounced" 11 and all wrapped
in supernatural features in order to induce horror.

Poe's distinctive writing style is described best by Harold Bloom when he declares
that "Poe has an uncanny talent for exposing our common nightmares and hysteria lurking
beneath our carefully structured lives."12 Davidson describes this style as "his few
explorations into the dark underside of human consciousness, and subconsciousness – that
variable world of thought, dream, and terror beyond life and knowledge." 13 This is partly done
through his unique use of macabre and horrifying medieval settings with supernatural
qualities in order to paint a dark and gloomy picture in our minds. The events happen all in
the same place – a remote, inaccessible surroundings – but the place each time is newly and
splendidly decorated. That is why most critics castigate Poe’s writing for its highly Gothic
style.
He created new worlds in some obscure or unknown place, or else it is set at some
distant time in the past, so that his readers would concentrate wholly on the themes or

2
atmospheres with which he infused his stories. Poe believed that the highest art existed in a
realm that was different from this world, and in order to create this realm, vagueness and
indefiniteness were necessary to alienate the reader from everyday world and to thrust him
toward the ideal and the beautiful. Thus, Poe's stories are set either in some unknown place,
such as in "The Fall of the House of Usher," or else they are set in some romantic castle on
the Rhine, or in an abbey in some remote part of England, as in "Ligeia," or else they are set
during the period of the Spanish Inquisition, as in "The Pit and the Pendulum." In other
words, Poe's reader will not find a story which is set in some recognizable place in the present
time. Even Poe's detective fiction is set in France rather than in America, thus giving it a
Romantic distance from the reader.14
The setting in Poe’s stories is generally used to fulfill three functions: to establish the
mood he wishes the reader to be in and usually it is gloomy, dreary and full of suspense, to
foreshadow the events of the story, and to reveal the character traits and how it is going to be
affected by the setting and atmosphere especially if the scenery is artificial since "a building
or a room bespeaks the character of those who build and inhabit it." 15
Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” first appeared in Burton’s Gentleman’s
Magazine in September, 1939 and was reprinted in the two editions of his Tales of the
Grotesque and Arabesque in 1840 and 1845. It presents “a detailed, symbolic account of the
derangement and dissipation of an individual’s personality.” 16 In the story, An unnamed
narrator approaches the House of Usher, the estate of his boyhood friend, Roderick Usher,
who sent him a letter earnestly requesting his company. Roderick wrote that he was feeling
physically and emotionally ill, so the narrator is rushing to his assistance. In the house,
Roderick lives with his twin sister, Madeline, in total isolation from the outside world. The
narrator mentions that the Usher family forms a direct line of descent without any outside
branches.
Upon the arrival of the narrator, Roderick tells him that his sister, Madeline, is ill
with a mysterious sickness that the doctors cannot cure or even understand. She soon dies and
Roderick decides to bury her, with the help of the narrator, temporarily in the vault below the
house because he fears that the doctors might dig up her body for scientific examination.
Over the next few days, Roderick becomes even more uneasy. One night, he and the
narrator see Madeline, supposedly coming out of her tomb. She embraces her frightened
brother and both fall dead. As the narrator escapes, the entire house cracks along the break in
the frame and crumbles to the ground.
“The Fall of the House of Usher” is a story of horror, not only in its action but the
description of the decayed house is also horrible. The vision and architecture in this splendid
short story is a great example of Poe’s ingenious skills as a writer. It is acclaimed as one of
his greatest works though it was preceded by others like “Metzengestein,” “The Assignation,”

3
“Berenice,” “Morella,” “Ligeia” in which Poe deals with the horror that stems from the
influence of Gothic settings:
The geography of these settings is generally imprecise, or only
precise enough to harmonize with the reader’s expectations of the
exotic, the “German,” and the gothic […] What is important is the
isolation that allows Poe to remove all social questions and focus
entirely on the mental dramas of his protagonists. 17

It is appropriate to say so about “The Fall of the House of Usher”. There is a sense of
remoteness and a sense of indefiniteness – that is, we are never told where or when the events
of the story take place in terms of setting; the family house is in a distant place somewhere in
a forest in an unknown country. The story could, in fact, take place anywhere as long as the
area is remote to the reader and removed from his everyday environment. 18 The unspecified
locale and time of the house makes the reader suspect, from the antiquity of the building and
the family, that the setting is English or German. 19

I. M. Walker traces the Gothic elements that pervades the whole story from the
opening scene saying that it

contains the ingredients of a conventional melodrama: the solitary

rider, passing through 'a singularly dreary tract of country', is
oppressed by a sense of insufferable gloom, when, as evening draws
on, he approaches the lonely, dilapidated, and melancholy house of
Usher.20

In general, settings are used as mere locations of events when writers emphasize
character, plot, or action; while in this story the setting is so significant that it virtually
becomes an active participant in the action. 21

The story begins on one “dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year,
when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens." 22 This sentence, by the unnamed
narrator, pretty much simplifies the mood of this gothic tale of death and the supernatural
through its purposefully selected words and the reference to autumn, the season of death and
despair.23

Upon looking at the building as he approaches it, the narrator refers to it as "the
melancholy House of Usher" and describes his feelings: “a sense of insufferable gloom
pervaded my spirit,”(p.365) and he speaks thereafter in a dark and foreboding tone. There are
depressed, melancholic and often very frightening surroundings which, through Poe's skillful
description, could be mistaken as being a dream, and there is often a hint of surrealism in the
surroundings – not to mention the house itself.24 The reader, from the very beginning, is aware

4
of a sense of death and decay and hence expects some novel and unusual possibilities just like
the narrator who “wondered to find how unfamiliar were the fancies which ordinary images
were stirring up."(p.368) These expectations will go on throughout the story:
the gloomy landscape in which it [the house] is located, the
furnishing of its shadowy interior, the ghastly and unnatural storm –
all of these are used to build up in the reader the sense of something
mysterious and unnatural.25

The narrator, "with an utter depression of soul,"(p.365) goes on to observe "the bleak
walls … the vacant eye-like windows … a few rank sedges … a few white trunks of decayed
trees."(Ibid.) This scene evokes in him feelings similar, he says, to "the after-dream of the
reveller upon opium … ."(Ibid.) Although he tries to view the house and its area with a
rational eye, yet the place calls inside him a certain sense of superstition:
There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart – an
unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the
imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it – I
paused to think – what was it that so unnerved me in the
contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all
insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that
crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the
unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are
combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power
of thus affecting us, still the reason, and the analysis, of this power,
lie among considerations beyond our depth. (Ibid.)

The narrator incorporates various senses: one being a sixth sense of vague and
indescribable realities behind the physical and apparent; and another being a clever, rational
interpretation of insensible phenomena. 26 The narrator feels that the structure of the house and
the image around it are the reason for their strange and unexplained effect on him, and he
believes that "a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the
picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful
impression."(p.366) To try this idea, he goes to the black and gruesome tarn and gazes down
to see the reflection of the house, yet it affects him "with a shudder even more thrilling than
before,"(Ibid.) and again he calls the house the "mansion of gloom"(Ibid.). Later he says:
"when I again uplifted my eyes to the house itself, from its image in the pool, there grew in
my mind a strange fancy …."(p.367) Not only the narrator, but the reader as well, from the
beginning of the story, feels that there is something abnormal and almost supernatural about
the structure of the house.
The narrator's description of what he sees and feels around him continues, and now he
talks about the “atmosphere” surrounding the house and tarn:
... about the whole mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere
peculiar to themselves and their immediate vicinity – an atmosphere

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 which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked
up from the decayed trees, and the grey wall, and the silent tarn, in
the form of an inelastic vapor or gas – dull, sluggish, faintly
discernible, and leaden-hued.(Ibid.)

This rich image indicates that perhaps the house and its surroundings does indeed
have supernatural characteristics and an unusual and bizarre existence, and that something of
an extraordinary power is actually holding the house intact, otherwise it would have fallen to
the ground long ago.27
The narrator's impression about the house from afar is that it is an ordinary stable
house, but as he gets closer it shows that it is rotten, especially its interiors. These first
impression and later discovery apply to Usher's mind as well; both are about to collapse. The
narrator feels as if he is peering into a vault, because everything is so tranquil, but it is still
slowly rotting nevertheless; he says:
In this there was much that reminded me of the specious totality of
old woodwork which has rotted for long years in some neglected
vault, with no disturbance from the breath of the external air.
Beyond this indication of extensive decay, however, the fabric gave
little token of instability.(Ibid.)

When a certain setting, in addition to its mechanical function, has a metaphoric role,
then it is a form of imagery, "for the qualities of a setting, like anything else, can be
abstracted; if these qualities are generally true, then the setting is metaphorical and may
become symbolic."28 When Poe writes of the incompatibility between the house's "still perfect
adaptation of parts, and the crumbling condition of the individual stones,"(Ibid.) it is obvious
that Poe speaks not only of the house but also of the deteriorating psych of Roderick Usher.

The narrator notices that there is an almost invisible crack in the structure of the
house extending in a zigzag manner from the front top of the construction down the wall and
reaching the sullen waters of the tarn. Symbolically, the fissure is a key image. It suggests that
there is a fundamental split, not clearly seen yet, in the unity of the house and its tenants. Also
central to this story is the fact that Roderick and the Lady Madeline are twins. They, too,
however, are simultaneously splitting apart, Madeline into her mysterious cataleptic trance
and Roderick into an irrationally surrealistic world of frenzied art-making. 29 This suggests
that when he buries her, he will widen the 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 and the Ushers themselves.30

Hence, both the Ushers and the mansion are undergoing a simultaneous process of
splitting. In his letter to the narrator, Roderick admits to mental disturbance that threatens his
stability.31 The appearance of the house itself mirrors the mysterious atmosphere that shrouds

6
its inhabitant: "The discoloration of the ages had been great. Minute fungi overspread the
whole exterior, hanging in a fine tangled web-work from the eaves ... ."(Ibid.) The land and
plants around the house lack colour and beauty. This can be said to represent Usher's
surroundings; they emit an air of darkness and despair. Perhaps it is this milieu wholly or
partly, that gives him depression.

Upon entering "the Gothic archway of the hall"(p.368) of the deteriorating mansion,
the narrator is led "through many dark and intricate passages"(Ibid.) where he sees "the
sombre tapestries of the walls, the ebon blackness of the floor, and the phantasmagoric
armorial trophies."(Ibid.) Again, all that he encounters, he says, call for the same "vague"
feelings he experienced before when he was outside the mansion. Hence, like the outer
atmosphere, the interior is equally airless, dismal, and repellent. Its entire contents are in a
state of deterioration, the furniture "profuse, comfortless, antique, and tattered."(Ibid.) Even
the "Many books and musical instruments . . . failed to give any vitality" to the place wherein
an "air of stem, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all". (Ibid.)

Poe drapes his "atmosphere of sorrow,"(Ibid.) with evoking the primary effect: the
reader senses that some fearful event will soon transpire, and the narrator himself becomes
more suspicious about the house having some dreary supernatural effect. He later describes
his own superstition when he remarks, "I endeavored to believe that much, if not all of what I
felt, was due to the bewildering influence of the gloomy furniture of the room ...".(p.377) The
narrator's role, at the beginning, is an observer and witness to the strange events in the house.
Yet, later he turns into a participant in these events when he starts to feel the effect of the
building and its surroundings on him and on its inhabitants. He becomes one of the Ushers
through whom Poe tries to reveal the depths of the human psyche and its secrets, as Maurice
Beebe clarifies that saying:

turning inward is where the story as such begins and where the
narrator – an outsider physically and psychologically at first –
becomes an insider and participant in a drama clearly his own – and
the age's – with Roderick and Madeline as players. 32

I. M. Walker sums up this observation best when he writes that the narrator’s mental
balance is obviously being disturbed by his new environment; and after meeting Roderick and
talking to him, he becomes more convinced that the setting and atmosphere inside and outside
the house is the reason behind the odd behaviour and personalities of its inhabitants. Walker
believes that the story “concerns the total disintegration of Roderick Usher,” and “the sinister
tarn which so appalls the narrator in the first scene, contributes actively to Usher’s
destruction. The black tarn is associated with imagery of desolation (grey sedge) and decay

7
(rotting trees) ...”33 which represents the decay and disintegration of Usher's own psych, and
thus becoming "a victim of the terrors he had anticipated".(p.382)

The pairing between Roderick and the mansion is sustained in the careful detailing of
descriptions, as the narrator observes first the one, then the other, and discerns unnerving
similarities.34 When Usher reveals that he has not left the mansion in many years, he describes
the effect that the form and substance of this mansion has had upon him: "an effect which the
physique of the gray walls and turrets, and of the dim tarn into which they all looked down,
had, at length, brought upon the morale of his existence." (p.370)

Later, the narrator and Usher fall into a conversation on "the sentience of all
vegetable things".(p.374) Usher complains to the narrator that, as a result of the arrangement
of the stones, the house has taken on life, and the same thing has happened to the moss and
fungi propagating on the stones. He even likens the inanimate objects to humans in having
sentiments and thoughts, and he believes that his sickness, depression, and his sister's gradual
decline are due to the impact of the grimness of the house itself. Beebe states that Roderick's
"first step towards insanity [is] his acceptance of animism and his sense of intimate
relationship with the objects around him."35 Remembering Usher's belief, the narrator
describes the preternatural interconnectedness of mansion and family, and concludes, in
Usher's terms, that "The result was discoverable … in that silent, yet importunate and terrible
influence which for centuries had moulded the destinies of his family, and which made him
what I now saw him-what he was."(p.375) Hence, the narrator's mind finally succumbs to the
power of Roderick's fantasies after his futile attempts to rationalize the strangeness he
encounters since his arrival to the House of Usher.
This use of a mental landscape is nothing new to Poe. Yet, in no other work, however,
has Poe structured this sentience, or interconnectedness, between the physical world and the
mental/psychological world more powerfully and tellingly than in "The Fall of the House of
Usher."36 in which his imagery of the house and its interior, as well as the life-like
characteristics of the inanimate object, serve to give a supernatural quality to the house and
the story as a whole. makes it interesting and suspenseful especially in the way Poe handles
the effect of the house on its occupants.
The mansion itself becomes a character When it is described as a death-head looming
out of a dead landscape. In fact, Bailey interprets the whole story in terms of vampire lore
saying “In a vampire lore, places or houses may be possessed." 37 He believes that there is a
contrast between “the dead vegetation – around the house, [the] parasitic vegetation that
forms a part of the house, grows from it and seems to knit its crumbling stones together ... in
luxuriant growth.”38 From this comparison Bailey wants to reach the conclusion that the

8
vegetation that grows in the house has an affinity with Roderick’s "unheeded ... wild"(p.369)
hair and that it is this affinity which makes it possible to state that “the house as a psychic
sponge drains Roderick’s vitality through his hair and lives on it.” 39 To explain this, Bailey
again refers to vampire lore:
Though most vampires feed upon blood “there is a vampire who can
... support his life and re-energize his frame by drawing upon the
vitality of others. He may be called a spiritual vampire or as he has
been dubbed a “psychic sponge” …40

The 'House of Usher,' then, is explicitly meant to stand for family as well as estate;
and both of these entities are equally deathly, equally verging on collapse. The narrator
finally leaves the house with a sense of supernatural fatality accomplished with no natural
explanation.41

Like so many of Poe's stories, the setting here is inside a closed environment. It is the
"enclosing" setting of which V. Roberts states that it "serves as the place of the entire action
and that is constant and prominent throughout the story." 42 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.43

Additionally, the story exemplifies perfectly Poe's principle of composition which

states that everything in the story must contribute to a single unified effect. Clearly, Poe has
chosen the eerie and ghostly atmosphere of "the grim phantasm FAER" (p.370) for his prime
effect to be achieved in this story, and to do so Poe emphasizes the physical aspects of the
various structures – description of the house from the outside and from the inside as well as
its surrounding. 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.

NOTES

9
 1
Edgar V. Robert, Writing Themes about Literature, 4th ed., (New York: Prentice-Hall,
Inc., 1977), 75.
2
Julie Leto Klapka, "Where Am I ? The Importance of Setting to Your Romance
Novel," (http:// julieleto.com), p.1 of 4, 17 May 2004.
3
Gerhard Hoffman, "Space and Symbol in the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe," trans.
Elizabeth Gilord, Poe Studies, vol. 12, no.1 (June 1979): 2.
4
Ibid.
5
Ibid.
6
Ibid., 3.
7
John H. Timmerman, "House of Mirrors: Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Fall of the House of
Usher'," 2003 (http:// www. Findarticles.com/p/ articles/ mysa3780), p.2 of 8, 12 may 2005.
8
Hoffman, "Space and Symbol in the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe," 5.
9
Ibid.
10
Ibid.
11
Ibid., 7.
12
Harold Bloom, ed., Modern Critical Views on Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Chelsea
House Publishers, 1985), 7.
13
Edward H. Davidson, Poe: a Critical Study (Cambridge: the Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 1966), 206.
14
Timmerman, "House of Mirrors: Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Fall of the House of
Usher'," p.3 of 8.
15
Robert, Writing Themes about Literature, 76.
16
Davidson, Poe: a Critical Study, 172.
17
Thomas Woodson, "Introduction" in The Fall of the House of Usher: A Collection
of Critical essays, ed. Thomas Woodson, (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1969), 11.
18
Timmerman, "House of Mirrors," p.5 of 8.
19
Thomas Woodson, "Introduction," 11.
20
L. M. Walker, "The Legitimate Sources of Terror in The Fall of the House of Usher,"
in Poe's Tales: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. William Howarth (Englewood Cliffs:
Prentice-Hall Inc., 1971), 48.
21
Robert, Writing Themes about Literature, 78.
22
John Seelye, Edgar Allan Poe: The Complete Stories (London: Everyman's Library,
1992), 365. All subsequent quotations of Poe's works are taken from this edition, and will be
followed parenthetically by page number.
23
William L. Howarth, "Introduction," in Poe's Tales: A Collection of Critical Essays,
ed. William L. Howarth (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1971), 20.

10
 24
Kristoffer Gustafson, "Beyond the Mountain of Madness: a look at the Shared
Themes of Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft," 2005 (http:// www. Ah LTU-CUPP 05058-
se.edu.), p.5 of 23, 7 Mar. 2005.
25
Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, "The Fall of the House of Usher" in, ed.,
The fall of the House of Usher: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Thomas Woodson, 23.
26
Leila S. May, "Sympathies of Scarcely Intelligible Nature; The Brother-Sister bond
in Poe's 'The Fall of the House of Usher'," 1993 (http://www.findarticles.com/p_g2455), p.2
of 9, 3 Feb. 2004.
27
Ibid.
28
Robert, Writing Themes about Literature, 79.
29
Timmerman, "House of Mirrors," p.3 of 8.
30
Leila S. May, "Sympathies of scarcely intelligible nature," p.4 of 9.
31
Timmerman, "House of Mirrors," p.3 of 8.
32
Maurice Beebe, "The Universe of Roderick Usher," in ed., Poe: A Collection of
Critical Essays, ed. Robert Rogan (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall , Inc., 1967), 131.
33
Walker, "The Legitimate Sources of Terror in 'The Fall of the House of Usher'," 48.
34
Timmerman, "House of Mirrors," p.5 of 8.
35
Maurice Beebe, "The Universe of Roderick Usher," 128.
36
Timmerman, "House of Mirrors," p.6 of 8.
37
J. O. Bailey, "What Happens in 'The Fall of the House of Usher'," American
Literature (January 1964): pp. 448-9.
38
Ibid., 449.
39
Martha Womack, "Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Fall of the House of Usher'," Poe
Decoder, 2001 (http:// www. poedecoder.com/essays/usher), p.2 of 7, 3 Sep. 2004.
40
Bailey, "What Happens in 'The Fall of the House of Usher'," p. 440.
41
Womack, "Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Fall of the House of Usher'," p. 4 of 7.
42
Robert, Writing Themes about Literature, 79.
43
Ibid.

Abeer O. Al-Mahdawi

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