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The Fall of the House of Usher

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"The Fall of the House of Usher" is a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe which was first published in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine in 1839. It was heavily revised before being included in a collection of his fiction entitled Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in 1845. It contains within it the poem The Haunted Palace, which had earlier been published separately in the April 1839 issue of the Baltimore Museum magazine.

Contents

Synopsis

[Spoiler warningSpoiler warning]: Plot and/or ending details follow.
The tale opens with the narrator having arrived at the house of his friend, Roderick Usher, after having received a letter from him in a distant part of the country, which complained of an illness and asked for his comfort. The symptoms of this illness include extreme hypersensitivity to light, sounds, smells, and tastes. It is revealed that Usher's twin sister, Madeline, is also ill, suffering from catalepsy. The narrator attempts to cheer Roderick by painting and reading with him, and listening to his improvised musical compositions on the guitar. Usher sings The Haunted Palace. Usher tells the narrator that he believes the house he lives in to be sentient, and that this sentience arises from the arrangement of the masonry and vegetation surrounding it. Usher informs the narrator that his sister has died and insists that she is entombed for two weeks in a vault in the house before being permanently buried. They inter her, but over the next week both Usher and the narrator find themselves becoming increasingly agitated for no apparent reason. A storm begins. Usher comes to the narrator's bedroom, which is situated directly above the vault, and throws open his window to the storm. He notices that the bog surrounding the house seems to [[wiktionary:glow|glow]] in the dark, though there is no lightning. The narrator attempts to calm him by reading aloud The Mad Trist. The story involves a knight who breaks into a hermit's dwelling and finds a palace guarded by a dragon, which he kills, and a brass shield, which falls off the wall. As he reads of the knight's forcible entry into the dwelling, cracking and ripping sounds are heard somewhere in the house. When the dragon is described as shrieking as it dies, a shriek is heard. As he relates the shield falling off the wall, there is a metallic ringing sound. Usher gets up and exclaims that these sounds are being made by his sister, who was in fact alive when she was put in the vault. The bedroom door is blown open to reveal Madeline standing there. She comes in and dies, falling on her brother, who also dies. The narrator quickly escapes from the house, and as he hurries away, sees the house break in two and the fragments sink into the tarn at its base.

Themes

Poe always conveys one human characteristic in each of his short stories as one of his major themes. The theme that Poe conveys through this story is that of fear.

The doppelgänger theme, prominent in many of Poe's works, such as William Wilson, appears in The Fall of the House of Usher. The reflection of the house in the tarn is described in the opening paragraph, and "a striking similitude between the brother and sister" is mentioned when Madeline "dies".

The death and resurrection of a woman, a main theme in Ligeia and Morella, is also present here.

The theme of mental illness is explored in this work, as it is in numerous other tales such as Berenice.

Internment while alive is also explored in The Premature Burial and The Cask of Amontillado.

There are also various Gothic elements and signs of decay, such as the decrepit castle and tarn, which also reflect the mental condition of Usher, which is rapidly deteriorating.

References to other works of art

Son coeur est un luth suspendu;
Sitôt qu'on le touche il résonne.

His heart is a suspended lute;
Whenever one touches it, it resounds.

Béranger's original text reads "Mon coeur" (my heart) and not "Son coeur" (his heart).

"Among other things, I hold painfully in mind a certain singular perversion and amplification of the wild air of the last waltz of Von Weber."

Poe here refers to Aufforderung zum Tanz (Invitation to the Dance) by the German composer Carl Maria Friedrich Ernst von Weber (1786-1826).

"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 canvas, 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."

The reference here is to the British painter Henry Fuseli (1741-1825). Also, the line:

I endeavored 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. But my efforts were fruitless. An irrepressible tremor gradually pervaded my frame; and, at length, there sat upon my very heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm.

from near the end of the story is inspired by Fuseli's painting entitled The Nightmare.

Roderick Usher's library

All of the books mentioned in the story are real works except for The Mad Trist. No book like the Vigiliae Mortuorum secundum chorum Ecclesiae Maguntinae exists exactly as Poe described it, though there is a real (and very rare) book by that title, which means "The Office of the Dead as sung by the choir of the Church of Mainz". Aside from these the books are:

Notes:

Criticism and analysis

L. Sprague de Camp, in his Lovecraft: A Biography [p.246f], wrote that "[a]ccording to the late [Poe expert] Thomas O. Mabbott, [H.P.] Lovecraft, in 'Supernatural Horror,' solved a problem in the interpretation of Poe" by arguing that "Roderick Usher, his sister Madeline, and the house all shared one common soul".

Other writers have claimed that themes of incest and vampirism are suggested in the work.

Adaptations and influences

In the movie, the narrator falls in love with the sickly Madeline much to Roderick's horror. As Roderick reveals, the Usher family has a history of evil and cruelty so great that he and Madeline pledged in their youth never to have children and to allow their family to die with them. When Madeline falls into a deathlike slumber, her brother rushes to have her placed in the family crypt. When she wakes up, Madeline goes insane from being buried alive and breaks free through insanity induced strength. She confronts her brother only to fall dead at his feet. Suddenly the house begins to collapse and the narrator flees as Roderick is killed by the falling house.

Themes similar to this were echoed in Stephen King's The Shining and Rose Red.

Czech surrealist animator Jan Švankmajer made a movie based on this story.

Ray Bradbury's story "Usher II," which appeared in The Martian Chronicles, was an adaptation of Poe's story.

Peter Hammill composed and recorded an opera based on the story.

Composer Nikita Koshkin wrote a piece for classical guitar entitled "Usher Waltz." The name possibly refers to the "perversion... of the wild air of the last waltz of Von Weber" which Roderick improvises on his guitar, but the relationship between Koshkin's piece and Von Weber's "Aufforderung zum Tanz" is unclear. "Usher Waltz" more clearly relates to Poe's work in its dark mood and its compositional structure.

The Alan Parsons Project included an instrumental with the same name on Tales of Mystery and Imagination, an album of songs based on short stories by Poe.

Brian Stableford's 1988 science fiction story, The Growth of the House of Usher expands on Poe's idea of the house being sentient. It features a dying architect who invites a friend to his house, which is entirely a product of biotechnology with Poe-related features (for instance, its basement produces cloned 'Madelines' whose life-cycle is to climb to higher levels of the house then die).

The actor and director Steven Berkoff wrote a play based on the story.

The ending of the story is somewhat parroted at the end of Brian DePalma's film Carrie, when the house collapses into itself.

In an episode of the British science-fiction series Doctor Who, Ghost Light, the primary antagonist Josiah Samuel Smith appears to be inspired by the character of Roderick Usher.

The novel House of Leaves features similar themes of a 'living' house.

List of films

See also

External links

 

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