The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe

About the Author (Edgar Allan Poe)

• Called one of literature's "most brilliant, but erratic stars."
• The Raven is often named the best-known poem in American literature, and The Fall of the House of Usher is a masterpiece of gothic horror. These are two of Poe's creations.
• Was abandoned by his father as an infant and lost his mother to tuberculosis by the age of 3.
• John Allan, a wealthy Virginia businessman, took him in.
• Poe got kicked out of college for gambling debt.
• He often sabotaged himself.
• Lived in misery (no $) because he always behaved badly at jobs and got fired.
• Formed a new family with his wife and cousin, Virginia Clemm (married when she was 13).
• She died 11 years later, and a devastated Poe died 2 years after her.
• There are many rumors for the cause of Poe's death (alcoholism, brain lesions, rabies...)
• His most common themes were madness, untimely death, and obsession (reflections of his state of mind).
• He was fascinated by the macabre and interested in logic.
• Created the character that inspired Sherlock Holmes (detective C. Auguste Dupin).
• Poe exhibits a division of the self: beautiful ideals and dark impulses.

Summary

• In Autumn, the narrator will visit a childhood friend, Roderick Usher.
• His house had a simple landscape, bleak walls, eye-like windows, white trunks of decayed trees, and a zig-zag fissure that extended from the roof down the wall.
• Roderick had written the narrator a letter in which he said he had a mental disorder and wanted to see him.
• Roderick's passion was music.
• His family displayed itself in works of exalted art, unobtrusive charity, and devotion to intricacies.
• The "House of Usher" was the house but also the family that inhabited it.
• Inside, the house had carved ceilings, sombre tapestries on the walls, ebon black floors, and phantasmagoric armorial trophies. The furniture was comfortless, antique, and tattered.
• Roderick Usher had a cadaverous complexion:
• large and luminous eyes
• thin and pallid lips
• delicate Hebrew-model nose
• finely moulded chin
• web-like, soft hair
• His twin sister, Madeline Usher, had a bodily illness physicians couldn't figure out.
• To alleviate Roderick's melancholy, the narrator painted with him, read with him, and listened to him play guitar.
• When his twin sister died, the narrator and Roderick put her in a vault.
• He became more and more temerous the days following her death because he heard things.
• His illness made his senses very acute and perspective.
• An unnatural-looking storm/whirlwind soon surrounded the house.
• The gaseous "exhalation" personifies the house.
• The narrator reads a book called Mad Trist by Sir Launcelot Canning to Roderick.
• It talked about a dragon-slaying warrior called Ethelred, but Roderick kept hearing the noises. He started swaying uniformly.
• Madeline of Usher came into the room and bore her brother to the floor.
• He died from fear, she died from the physical impact of being buried alive.
• The narrator left, and saw the fissure (crack) expanding and a wild light (souls escaping).
• When the last two Ushers die, the house falls because the house and the family are one.

Theme

• Emotional challenges lead to the decay of the human body and the human mind.