A striking similitude between the brother
and the sister now first arrested my attention. . . .
(See Important Quotations Explained)
Summary
An unnamed narrator approaches the house of Usher on a
“dull, dark, and soundless day.” This house—the estate of his boyhood friend,
Roderick Usher—is gloomy and mysterious. The narrator observes that
the house seems to have absorbed an evil and diseased atmosphere
from the decaying trees and murky ponds around it. He notes that
although the house is decaying in places—individual stones are disintegrating,
for example—the structure itself is fairly solid. There is only
a small crack from the roof to the ground in the front of the building.
He has come to the house because his friend Roderick 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. The narrator mentions that the Usher family,
though an ancient clan, has never flourished. Only one member of
the Usher family has survived from generation to generation, thereby
forming a direct line of descent without any outside branches. The
Usher family has become so identified with its estate that the peasantry
confuses the inhabitants with their home.
The narrator finds the inside of the house just as spooky
as the outside. He makes his way through the long passages to the
room where Roderick is waiting. He notes that Roderick is paler
and less energetic than he once was. Roderick tells the narrator
that he suffers from nerves and fear and that his senses are heightened.
The narrator also notes that Roderick seems afraid of his own house. Roderick’s
sister, Madeline, has taken ill with a mysterious sickness—perhaps
catalepsy, the loss of control of one’s limbs—that the doctors cannot
reverse. The narrator spends several days trying to cheer up Roderick.
He listens to Roderick play the guitar and make up words for his
songs, and he reads him stories, but he cannot lift Roderick’s spirit.
Soon, Roderick posits his theory that the house itself is unhealthy,
just as the narrator supposes at the beginning of the story.
Madeline soon dies, and Roderick decides to bury her temporarily
in the tombs below the house. He wants to keep her in the house
because he fears that the doctors might dig up her body for scientific
examination, since her disease was so strange to them. The narrator
helps Roderick put the body in the tomb, and he notes that Madeline
has rosy cheeks, as some do after death. The narrator also realizes
suddenly that Roderick and Madeline were twins. Over the next few
days, Roderick becomes even more uneasy. One night, the narrator
cannot sleep either. Roderick knocks on his door, apparently hysterical.
He leads the narrator to the window, from which they see a bright-looking
gas surrounding the house. The narrator tells Roderick that the
gas is a natural phenomenon, not altogether uncommon.
The narrator decides to read to Roderick in order to pass
the night away. He reads “Mad Trist” by Sir Launcelot Canning, a medieval
romance. As he reads, he hears noises that correspond to the descriptions
in the story. At first, he ignores these sounds as the vagaries
of his imagination. Soon, however, they become more distinct and
he can no longer ignore them. He also notices that Roderick has
slumped over in his chair and is muttering to himself. The narrator
approaches Roderick and listens to what he is saying. Roderick reveals
that he has been hearing these sounds for days, and believes that
they have buried Madeline alive and that she is trying to escape.
He yells that she is standing behind the door. The wind blows open
the door and confirms Roderick’s fears: Madeline stands in white
robes bloodied from her struggle. She attacks Roderick as the life
drains from her, and he dies of fear. The narrator flees the house.
As he escapes, the entire house cracks along the break in the frame
and crumbles to the ground.
Analysis
“The Fall of the House of Usher” possesses the quintessential -features
of the Gothic tale: a haunted house, dreary landscape, mysterious
sickness, and doubled personality. For all its easily identifiable
Gothic elements, however, part of the terror of this story is its vagueness.
We cannot say for sure where in the world or exactly when the story
takes place. Instead of standard narrative markers of place and
time, Poe uses traditional Gothic elements such as inclement weather
and a barren landscape. We are alone with the narrator in this haunted
space, and neither we nor the -narrator know why. Although he is
Roderick’s most intimate boyhood friend, the narrator apparently
does not know much about him—like the basic fact that Roderick has
a twin sister. Poe asks us to question the reasons both for Roderick’s
decision to contact the narrator in this time of need and the bizarre
tenacity of narrator’s response. While Poe provides the recognizable
building blocks of the Gothic tale, he contrasts this standard form
with a plot that is inexplicable, sudden, and full of unexpected
disruptions. The story begins without complete explanation of the
narrator’s motives for arriving at the house of Usher, and this
ambiguity sets the tone for a plot that continually blurs the real
and the fantastic.
Poe creates a sensation of claustrophobia in this story.
The narrator is mysteriously trapped by the lure of Roderick’s attraction, and
he cannot escape until the house of Usher collapses completely. Characters
cannot move and act freely in the house because of its structure,
so it assumes a monstrous character of its own—the Gothic mastermind
that controls the fate of its inhabitants. Poe, creates confusion
between the living things and inanimate objects by doubling the
physical house of Usher with the genetic family line of the Usher
family, which he refers to as the house of Usher. Poe employs the
word “house” metaphorically, but he also describes a real house.
Not only does the narrator get trapped inside the mansion, but we
learn also that this confinement describes the biological fate of
the Usher family. The family has no enduring branches, so all genetic
transmission has occurred incestuously within the domain of the
house. The peasantry confuses the mansion with the family because
the physical structure has effectively dictated the genetic patterns
of the family.
