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Much to the narrator’s surprise, Roderick claims that the Usher mansion is sentient and that it exercises some degree of control over its inhabitants. He declares that his illness is the product of “a constitutional and a family evil.” (The narrator later dismisses this as a cognitive symptom of Roderick’s “nervous affection.”) Roderick also reveals that Madeline, his twin sister and sole companion in the house, is gravely ill. According to Roderick, Madeline suffers from a cataleptic disease that has gradually limited her mobility. As Roderick talks about his sister’s illness, the narrator sees her pass through a distant part of the house. During one sleepless night, the narrator reads aloud to Usher as eerie sounds are heard throughout the mansion.
Roderick Usher
'The Fall of the House of Usher': All the Edgar Allan Poe references - Entertainment Weekly News
'The Fall of the House of Usher': All the Edgar Allan Poe references.
Posted: Thu, 12 Oct 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Madeline suppresses Roderick by not permitting him to see her separate or essentially different from him. This attack is completed when she finally attacks and kills him at the end of the story. Though Poe gives the identifiable elements of the Gothic take, he contrasts the standard form of a tale with the plot that is sudden, inexplicable, and filled with unexpected interruptions. The story opens without providing complete information about the motives of the narrator’s arrival at the house of Usher. This ambiguity sets the plot of the story that vague the real and the fantastic. He says that though they are an ancient clan, they have never flourished.
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Moreover, he is confined, and the cramped setting of the tomb metaphorically characterizes the characters. The twins are so similar, and it is impossible for them to develop separately. Because of Madeline’s similarity to Roderick, she has been buried before she is actually dead, and this similarity is shown by the coffin that holds her identity. She is the twin sister of Roderick; she is suffering from mysterious illness catalepsy. When the narrator discovers that she is the twin sister of his friend, it points out the outsider’s relationship of the narrator to the house of Usher. He is a bookish and intellectual man while his sister is sick and bedridden.
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It is a mastermind that controls the actions and fate of its residents. The story deals with the family that is so remote and isolated from the world that they have developed their own non-existing barriers to interact with the world outside. The house of Usher has its own reality and is governed by its own rules, with people having no interest in others. This extreme isolation makes the family closer and closes to the extent that they become inexplicable to the outside world. Roderick contacted him when he was suffering from emotional and mental distress. He does not know much about the house of Usher and is the first outsider to visit the house in many years.
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In an instant afterward he rapped, with a gentle touch, at my door, and entered, bearing a lamp. His countenance was, as usual, cadaverously wan — but, moreover, there was a species of mad hilarity in his eyes — an evidently restrained hysteria in his whole demeanor. His air appalled me — but anything was preferable to the solitude which I had so long endured, and I even welcomed his presence as a relief. For me at least — in the circumstances then surrounding me — there arose out of the pure abstractions which the hypochondriac contrived to throw upon his canvass, an intensity of intolerable awe, no shadow of which felt I ever yet in the contemplation of the certainly glowing yet too concrete reveries of Fuseli.
Sleep came not near my couch—while the hours waned and waned away. I struggled to reason off the nervousness which had dominion over me. I endeavoured to believe that much, if not all of what I felt, was due to the bewildering influence of the gloomy furniture of the room—of the dark and tattered draperies, which, tortured into motion by the breath of a rising tempest, swayed fitfully to and fro upon the walls, and rustled uneasily about the decorations of the bed. An irrepressible tremour gradually pervaded my frame; and, at length, there sat upon my very heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm.
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The disease of the lady Madeline had long baffled the skill of her physicians. A settled apathy, a gradual wasting away of the person, and frequent although transient affections of a partially cataleptical character, were the unusual diagnosis. Shaking off from my spirit what must have been a dream, I scanned more narrowly the real aspect of the building. Its principal feature seemed to be that of an excessive antiquity.
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A striking similitude between the brother and sister now first arrested my attention; and Usher, divining, perhaps, my thoughts, murmured out some few words from which I learned that the deceased and himself had been twins, and that sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature had always existed between them. Our glances, however, rested not long upon the dead—for we could not regard her unawed. The disease which had thus entombed the lady in the maturity of youth, had left, as usual in all maladies of a strictly cataleptical character, the mockery of a faint blush upon the bosom and the face, and that suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so terrible in death. We replaced and screwed down the lid, and, having secured the door of iron, made our way, with toil, into the scarcely less gloomy apartments of the upper portion of the house. Upon my entrance, Usher arose from a sofa on which he had been lying at full length, and greeted me with a vivacious warmth which had much in it, I at first thought, of an overdone cordiality—of the constrained effort of the ennuyé man of the world. A glance, however, at his countenance, convinced me of his perfect sincerity.
Fear
The short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” shows a split-personality disorder in a dramatized way. The tale explores the various aspects of identity and the means through which these aspects could possibly be fractioned. The story emphasized the difference between the mental and physical parts and how these parts interact with each other. Like the narrator of the story of “Tell-Tale Heart,” the hyperactive senses of Roderick Usher are inflamed by his disease. Even though the illness is displayed physically, it is based on the moral and mental state of Roderick Usher.
As the narrator reads of the knight's forcible entry into the dwelling, he and Roderick hear cracking and ripping sounds from somewhere in the house. When the dragon's death cries are described, a real shriek is heard, again within the house. As he relates the shield falling from off the wall, a hollow metallic reverberation can be heard throughout the house. At first, the narrator ignores the noises, but Roderick becomes increasingly hysterical.
The overpass of the border is vitally related to the Gothic horror of the story. Poe’s experience in the magazine industry makes him excessively obsessed with word games and codes. It is actually the act of crossing a border that carries the narrator into the tenacious world of Madeline and Roderick. The claustrophobia of the house of Usher has a deep influence on the relationship among the characters of the story. Due to claustrophobia, the narrator is not able to realize that Roderick and Madeline are twins.
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