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However, the atmosphere and the mood of the setting are far more important than the time and place of the setting. The first of the many settings of the house, Poe describes the outside of the house as spooky. The story “The Fall of the House of Usher” belongs to the Gothic Fiction. There is a sentient house, an underground tomb, a dead body, and dark and stormy nights. In supernatural gothic, weird, and strange things, happenings can be attributed to the supernatural happening.
What Moves the Dead Is Delicate, Atmospheric, and Thoroughly Creepy - Paste Magazine
What Moves the Dead Is Delicate, Atmospheric, and Thoroughly Creepy.
Posted: Fri, 15 Jul 2022 07:00:00 GMT [source]
“The Haunted Palace”
Accordingly, commentaries on social injustice, morality, and utilitarianism proliferated in the mid-19th century. Poe conceived of his writing as a response to the literary conventions of this period. In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” he deliberately subverts convention by rejecting the typical practices of preaching or moralizing and instead focusing on affect and unity of atmosphere. At Roderick’s words, the door bursts open, revealing Madeline all in white with blood on her robes. With a moan, she falls on her brother, and, by the time they hit the floor, both Roderick and Madeline are dead. Outside, he looks back just in time to see the house split in two and collapse.
Haunted Mansion, Several Dark and Stormy Nights
The Usher family has become so identified with its estate that the peasantry confuses the inhabitants with their home. The setting of the novel is several dark and stormy nights and the haunted mansion. Any particular geographic location of the story or the time of occurrence is completely unknown to the readers.
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“The Fall of the House of Usher” follows a traditional story arc withconflict, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. The openingscene of the narrator riding up to an old and ominous house foreshadows thedarkness to come. The main conflict that drives the story is the narrator’scoming to help Roderick recover from an illness. Action rises with Madeline'sapparent death and Roderick's descent into madness over his fears about thehouse being sentient. The raging storm, Madeline’s rising from the dead, andher subsequent collapse onto Roderick, which kills them both, acts as theclimax. Action falls when the narrator flees the house and watches it sink intothe tarn.
The vaporousclouds which gather about the turrets of the house are lit from below byluminous exhalations of the tarn. These clouds part just once, as the narratorflees from the house, to display a blood-red moon. It is by the ominous lightof that celestial lantern that he sees the narrow crack widen, tearing thehouse apart from top to bottom so that its debris might collapse entirely intothe tarn. The narrator also acts as a symbol of both rationality and a bridge to theoutside world for the Usher siblings. The narrator thinks critically about fearand its causes from the first time he sees the house.
Literary Analysis
In this view, the final embrace must be seen in terms of the Lady Madeline, a vampire, falling upon her brother's throat and sucking the last drop of blood from him. Poe next sets up a sense of the "double" or the ironic reversal when he has the narrator first see the House of Usher as it is reflected in the "black and lurid tarn" (a dark and gruesome, revolting mountain lake) which surrounds it. At the end of the story, the House of Usher will literally fall into this tarn and be swallowed up by it. And even though Poe said in his critical theories that he shunned symbolism, he was not above using it if such symbolism contributed to his effect. Here, the effect is electric with mystery; he says twice that the windows of the house are "eyelike" and that the inside of the house has become a living "body" while the outside has become covered with moss and is decaying rapidly.
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Because of Poe's disdain for didactic writing, hewas little regarded by the literary establishment in his day. The setting is referred to by the narrator as “House of Usher” to refer to both the physical structure of the house and the last of the Usher race; Roderick and Madeline are the last of the Usher family. Poe begins by description and continues with description to the extent that the whole story becomes a descriptive account of the mental breakdown of Roderick. Poe focuses on settings that had many descriptions and details such as the dark, gloomy, and dull places in the story. What he desires is to present a psychological analysis of the life of that strange family.
Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory
His cadaverous appearance, his nervousness, his mood swings, his almost extrahuman sensitivity to touch, sound, taste, smell, and light, along with the narrator’s report that he seems lacking in moral sense, portrays a deeply troubled soul. We learn, too, that his twin sister, Madeline, a neurasthenic woman like her brother, is subject to catatonic trances. These two characters, like the house, are woefully, irretrievably flawed. The suspense continues to climb as we go deeper into the dark house and, with the narrator, attempt to fathom Roderick’s malady. During the time Poe was writing, a distinct and mature body of Americanliterature was beginning to develop with the contributions of such authors asPoe Nathaniel Hawthorne John Greenleaf Whittier Harriet Beecher Stowe HenryWadsworth Longfellow, and James Fenimore Cooper.
“The Fall of the House of Usher” (
Madeline takes the initiative to bring an end to the negative and destructive union of souls. (Knapp, 139) Clearly, the supernatural happenings in this story are unreal and so must be seen as symbolic. The gloomy appearance of the house gives it a supernatural atmosphere that gives the house life-like characteristics. Madeline Usher, Roderick’s twin sister is given to trances and sleepwalking and is completely unaware of the world surrounding her, even the visitor’s presence in the family home. Madeline Usher is the anima figure in the story Poe’s use of symbolism in his gothic stories is a guiding thread to his literary art. That he is not persistently a symbolist is one of his strengths, for it means that he only turns to symbolism when it has a distinct role to play.
Even though the narrator is the boyhood friend of Roderick, he does not know much about him – even he does not know the basic fact about him that he has a twin sister. Poe makes the readers ponder on why Roderick contacts the narrator in his state of need and the persistence of the response of the narrator. 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.
By extension, Madeline's barren womb also symbolizes the Usherlineage, house, and Roderick. When she dies, he is the last of the Ushers; whenhe dies, it will indeed be the fall of the House of Usher. No one else had drawn such parallels so minutely, nor mapped the courseof a symbolic tempest so accurately. The storm which precipitates the final destruction of the edifice ismanifestly unnatural, originating within rather than without.
Since thenarrator is a symbol of rationality, he also then represents Roderick’sconnection to sanity. The speaker’s final flight from the house shows theUshers’ complete departure from reality. In The Fall of the House of Usher, Poe tries to explore the nature of humanity. The story focuses on several interrelated themes, namely death, isolation and madness. This is why he is all the time looking and thinking, speaking about death, isolation, madness and violence. But there are other and more factors that build up an atmosphere of horror.
His fears are apparent and manifest themselves through the sentient and supernatural family estate. The story deals with both mental and physical illness and its effects on people who are close to you. Summoned to the House of Usher by a “wildly importunate letter,” which “gaveevidence of nervous agitation,” the first-person narrator goes to reside for atime with the writer of this letter, Roderick Usher.
Healso observes an almost imperceptible crack extending in a zigzag fashion fromthe roof to the foundations. SparkNotes Plus subscription is $4.99/month or $24.99/year as selected above. TO CANCEL YOUR SUBSCRIPTION AND AVOID BEING CHARGED, YOU MUST CANCEL BEFORE THE END OF THE FREE TRIAL PERIOD. You may cancel your subscription on your Subscription and Billing page or contact Customer Support at Your subscription will continue automatically once the free trial period is over.
Everything in the house is breaking down, even the mentality of its owners. Doppelganger is the character double and portrays the doubling of the literary forms or inanimate structures. For example, the narrator observes that the mansion is a reflection in the shallow pool or tarn that joins the front of the house. The house is doubled through its image in the tarn; however, the image is upside down, which characterizes the relationship between Madeline and Roderick. The readers are left alone with the narrator as it is such a haunted place.
He attempts to determinewhat specifically about the house makes him uneasy and recognizes that he whathe fears could be the result of his imagination. However, the longer thenarrator stays in the house, the more fear overcomes him, showing that fear andimagination often overcome rationality. Although doctors come and go to monitorRoderick’s and Madeline’s health, the narrator is their main connection to theoutside world. Roderick’s letter asking the narrator to come cheer him updemonstrates that the doctors’ presence does not ease his isolation.
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