“THE FALL OF THE

HOUSE OF USHER”
Gloria Mª Cadenas Rodríguez
 EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809-1849)

- Hard life -> he started writing to get financial support.

- Began his literary career as a poet. For him, poetry is the

“Rhythmical Creation of Beauty” - beauty and the pleasure it
produces are the chief goal of the poet.

- Also a literary critic - he was the first American critic to evaluate

literary works by close analysis. Critical ideas about poetry in
“The Poetic Principle” - “The death of a beautiful woman is,
unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world”.
- Poe’s “Theory of Effect”: literary works must be short. Poems
shouldn’t have more than 100 lines and the reading of a short
story shouldn’t take more than 2 hours. Otherwise, the reader
loses interest and the writing isn’t effective.

- Best known for short stories. Divided into tales of mystery and
imagination and tales of ratiocination.

- Gothic conventions and suggesting multiple or indeterminate

meanings
The Fall of The House of Usher

- 1839. Tales of The Grotesque and Arabesque =

tales of mystery and imagination.

- Gothic literature features.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkXzGD
cT46g
- An unnamed narrator arrives at the House of Usher, a very creepy mansion owned by his boyhood friend
Roderick Usher, who has been sick lately (a disease of the mind), and wrote to his friend asking for help.
- Roderick and his sister are the last of the Usher bloodline, a family that is famous for its dedication to the
arts (music, painting, literature, etc.).
- Roderick indeed appears to be a sick man. He suffers from hyper-sensitivity to light, sound, taste, and
tactile sensations; he feels that he will die of the fear he feels. He attributes part of his illness to the fact
that his sister, Madeline, suffers from catalepsy and will soon die, and part of it to the belief that his creepy
house is able to perceive things and has a great power over him.
- Narrator tries to help him get his mind off all this death and gloom by poring over the literature, music, and
art that Roderick so loves. It doesn’t seem to help.
- Madeline apparently dies, or so Roderick tells the narrator.
- At Roderick’s request, the narrator helps him to entomb her body in one of the vaults underneath the
mansion. While they do so, the narrator discovers that the two of them were twins and that they shared
some sort of supernatural, probably extrasensory, bond.
- Later, on a dark and stormy night, the narrator and Usher find themselves unable to sleep. They decide to
pass away the scary night by reading a book. As the narrator reads the text aloud, all the sounds from the
fictional story can be heard resounding from below the mansion. Usher jumps up and declares that they
buried Madeline alive and that now she is coming back.
- The doors blow open and there stands a trembling, bloody Madeline. She throws herself at Usher, who
falls to the floor and, after "violent" agony, dies along with his sister.
- The narrator flees; outside he watches the House of Usher crack in two and sink into the dark, dank pool
that lies before it.
Diction

- Complex syntax
- Lack of full stops and overuse of
commas
- Many adjectives and nouns that
suggest sadness
- Refined, ornate and learned vocabulary
- Use of many words derived from Latin
to give a sense of antiquity.
Setting of the house

- Exact location - never known. Somewhere in the countryside.

- Time: in the past but exact time not indicated.
- MYSTERIOUS ATMOSPHERE
- Gloomy mood from the start: narrator arrives one EVENING in AUTUMN.
- House surrounded by “black and lurid tarn! Which, like a moat, separates the
house from the rest of the world” -> symbolic isolation
- Inverted image of the house in the lake -> distorted psyche of the people
living there.
- Mansion -> gothic architecture and
decoration -> A huge, old and decayed
mansion with moss covering its “bleak
walls”.
- Dark corridors, carvings in the ceiling,
gloomy tapestries and phantasmagoric
armorial trophies.
Main themes: GOTHIC STYLE

- Somber settings (castles, prisons,

tombs).
- Haunting figures (ghosts, supernatural).
- Use of gory colors (black and red).
- Suspense as the protagonist.
- Recurrent symbols are eyes and black
cats.
- The gothic style is represented when the weather changes
completely: electrical storm outside. It mirrors the
narrator’s mood.
- Usher enters the narrator’s room more pale than usual and
asks: “And you have not seen it?” he said abruptly, after
having stared about him for some moments in
silence—“you have not then seen it?—but, stay! you shall.”
- The two characters - interrupted by noises coming from
the house = Poe creating distractions to make the reader
feel like the two characters.
- Usher is convinced that his sister was buried alive and she is
coming back.
- She is standing outside the door and enters falling into her
brother’s arms killing him.
- The color red is very present in this final scene, being the color
Madeline is covered up with (blood) and the color of the moon
when the narrator flees from the house and when it collapses
into the earth
 Main themes: SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS

- Continuous feeling: the physical world is connected to him or

somehow aware of his presence. House as sentient.

- Once he sees the house, he is filled with terror for some reason
that he can’t explain: “I know not how it was—but, with the first
glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded
my spirit.”

- When he rides over the “tarn”, he sees a reflection of the house in

the water, and the image is way more dreadful than the real one:
“I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid
tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed
down—but with a shudder even more thrilling than before—upon
the remodelled and inverted images of the gray sedge”
- Then, he’s led to a room with high windows, but it is so
dark that he struggles to see. However, he realizes that is
filled with musical instruments and books: “The windows
were long, narrow, and pointed, and at so vast a
distance from the black oaken floor as to be altogether
inaccessible from within”

- “Many books and musical instruments lay scattered

about, but failed to give any vitality to the scene. I felt
that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow.” The room
again makes him feel like he was somewhere else.
 Main themes: THE DEATH & THE LIVING

- Narrator describes Roderick Usher: “A cadaverousness of

complexion; an eye large, liquid, and luminous beyond
comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid but of a
surpassingly beautiful curve; a nose of a delicate Hebrew
model, but with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar
formations; a finely moulded chin, speaking, in its want
of prominence, of a want of moral energy; hair of a more
than web-like softness and tenuity”.

- Poe is already making a distinction between the death

and the living world.
 - Another recurrent symbol in Poe’s work is the
EYE, for Poe, the eye was ‘the symbol of the
soul’, and in this case, Usher’s was filled with
lustre due to his sickness.
“The now ghastly pallor of the skin, and the now
miraculous lustre of the eye, above all things startled
and even awed me”

- Another symptom of Usher’s condition is a

psychological disorder which he relates to the
building itself. He believes that the decaying
structure of the house is making him feel
decayed and rotted.
- Again, the house making the characters feel
conscious about its supernatural power.
 - The character of Lady Madeline
appears in the scene. She has a
terminal disease and she is already
presented as a ghost for how she
walks. Her presence makes the
narrator feel horrified, emotionally
and physically.

“I regarded her with an utter astonishment

not unmingled with dread; and yet I found it
impossible to account for such feelings. A
sensation of stupor oppressed me as my
eyes followed her retreating steps”
- Once she has died, the two characters decide to bury her body in a vault
underneath the narrator’s bedroom: “A small picture presented the interior of an
immensely long and rectangular vault or tunnel, with low walls, smooth, white,
and without interruption or device. Certain accessory points of the design served
well to convey the idea that this excavation lay at an exceeding depth below the
surface of the earth.”

- Poe is giving the impression that the vault is an impossible place to escape ->
people cannot escape death.
BIBLIOGRAPHY

- https://www.litcharts.com/lit/poe-s-stories/the-fall-of-the-house-of-usher
- https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Fall-of-the-House-of-Usher