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Analysis: Poe's Fall of the House of Usher

featured Article guest submission by [Lady of Lore]


An analysis of the short story “Fall of the House of Usher”

This dark and dismal tale of the end of a noble family is one deeply immersed in Gothic devices. The pace of the story picks up more and more as the reader continues, each new paragraph unveiling some new suspenseful scene. Each line adds to the tingle that slowly creeps up your neck as you can almost hear what the characters are hearing.
To begin with, the tale opens with a detailed description of the great house of Usher. This is meant to be taken in two ways, one as the literal building in which the family resides, and the other as the lineage of the family Usher. It is described to have “vacant eye like windows” and to have a sense of “insufferable gloom” about it (Poe 1265). The protagonist reveals that to him, as he goes to visit his friend Usher, the house as giving him an “iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart, an unredeemed dreariness of thought” (Poe 1256). He sees a great tarn, or lake, beside the house, chilled and veiled in a “mystic vapor” (Poe 1266). The house is further described as excessively antique, worn and discolored by time but the house as a whole stood. No portion of the ancient house had yet crumbled and the protagonist notices that the individual bricks are crumbling. There is one great flaw in the building that is not seen until closer inspection. A great hairline crack runs from the roof zigzagging all the way to the tarn.
This description of the house greatly mirrors the description of its master and mistress. The last remaining members of the Usher family are ill with some incurable and un-diagnosable illness that is slowly wasting them away. Usher has a “cadaverousness” in his appearance and his hair is wispy resembling gossamer. His eyes are pale and luminous and exceedingly wide as he lives mostly in the gloom of his house. The Lady Madeline, Usher’s sister too has a deathlike appearance. Both brother and sister seem to have some kind of madness to them as well for Usher is alternately emphatic and then placid. His tone suddenly full of life and then soft again. He reveals to his friend, the protagonist, that he has only one great fear that keeps him in constant agony, the fear of fear. Usher is bound a prisoner to his fear of being afraid. “I feel that I must inevitably abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR” Usher explains but thinks too that his despair could be from the inevitable death of his sister to her illness and of the illness he too suffers.
It is as if the family of Usher is crumbling, the last remaining members lost in some unexplainable sickness. It seems as though Usher himself is on the edge of madness with his fear of fear. His senses are heightened and he can hear things beyond the normal hearing for his body is in an almost constant state of apprehension. All this adds to the suspension as the fear and hysteria of Usher starts to rub off on the protagonist, especially after Lady Madeline dies. Usher insists upon putting her coffin in a vault below the house as her tomb and after that is inconsolable. He paced and spoke in a thin voice locked in terror as if he expected death to come for him too. The protagonist attempts to sooth him by reading to him but as he reads sounds described in the book occur in reality; the thundering crack of wood, a scream, the clang of metal. Usher is lost in his hysteria saying that it is his sister, that they must have accidental buried her and she was still alive. He screams that he hears her on the stairs, at the door and then she does burst through the door and falls on him killing him, a “victim to the terrors he had anticipated” (Poe 1277). The protagonist looks back as her runs away and sees the crack in the building tears open and pulls the house into the ground where the tarn closes over it, gone forever.
The destruction of the house represents the end of not only the man Usher but the family name of Usher. The house is destroyed as its last members die. The descriptions of the house and Usher mirror one another so much it seems as if the two are connected, Usher cannot exist without the house and the house cannot exist without him. As the family decays, the house decays as well. There is also the question of why Usher buried his sister and yet when he heard her for days trying to break out he did nothing but wait in fear? Did he fear death and thought that by locking away his twin he could lock away the same fate? Did he think that he could lock away and bury the decay and despair of his family? Is it possible he wanted to lock her away because she was a woman, therefore a symbol of carrying on the family line? Did he want to end what he felt like was his accursed family line? This is up to the reader; their own interpretation of the events may cause them to think one way or another. That is part of Poe’s genius in writing such a dark tale of irony, terror, and mystery.




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