The claustrophobia of the mansion affects the relations
among characters. For example, the narrator realizes late in the
game that Roderick and Madeline are twins, and this realization
occurs as the two men prepare to entomb Madeline. The cramped and
confined setting of the burial tomb metaphorically spreads to the
features of the characters. Because the twins are so similar, they
cannot develop as free individuals. Madeline is buried before she
has actually died because her similarity to Roderick is like a coffin
that holds her identity. Madeline also suffers from problems typical
for women in -nineteenth--century literature. She invests all of
her identity in her body, whereas Roderick possesses the powers
of intellect. In spite of this disadvantage, Madeline possesses
the power in the story, almost superhuman at times, as when she
breaks out of her tomb. She thus counteracts Roderick’s weak, nervous,
and immobile disposition. Some scholars have argued that Madeline
does not even exist, reducing her to a shared figment Roderick’s
and the narrator’s imaginations. But Madeline proves central to
the symmetrical and claustrophobic logic of the tale. Madeline stifles
Roderick by preventing him from seeing himself as essentially different
from her. She completes this attack when she kills him at the end
of the story.
Doubling spreads throughout the story. The tale highlights
the Gothic feature of the doppelganger, or character double, and
portrays doubling in inanimate structures and literary forms. The
narrator, for example, first witnesses the mansion as a reflection
in the tarn, or shallow pool, that abuts the front of the house.
The mirror image in the tarn doubles the house, but upside down—an
inversely symmetrical relationship that also characterizes the relationship between
Roderick and Madeline.
The story features numerous allusions to other works of
literature, including the poems “The Haunted Palace” and “Mad Trist” by
Sir Launcelot Canning. Poe composed them himself and then fictitiously
attributed them to other sources. Both poems parallel and thus predict
the plot line of “The Fall of the House of Usher.” “Mad Trist,”
which is about the forceful entrance of Ethelred into the dwelling
of a hermit, mirrors the simultaneous escape of Madeline from her
tomb. “Mad Trist” spookily crosses literary borders, as though Roderick’s
obsession with these poems ushers their narratives into his own
domain and brings them to life.
The crossing of borders pertains vitally to the Gothic
horror of the tale. We know from Poe’s experience in the magazine
industry that he was obsessed with codes and word games, and this
story amplifies his obsessive interest in naming. “Usher” refers
not only to the mansion and the family, but also to the act of crossing
a -threshold that brings the narrator into the perverse world of
Roderick and Madeline. Roderick’s letter ushers the narrator into
a world he does not know, and the presence of this outsider might
be the factor that destroys the house. The narrator is the lone
exception to the Ushers’ fear of outsiders, a fear that accentuates
the claustrophobic nature of the tale. By undermining this fear
of the outside, the narrator unwittingly brings down the whole structure.
A similar, though strangely playful crossing of a boundary transpires
both in “Mad Trist” and during the climactic burial escape, when
Madeline breaks out from death to meet her mad brother in a “tryst,”
or meeting, of death. Poe thus buries, in the fictitious gravity
of a medieval romance, the puns that garnered him popularity in
America’s magazines.
