The Demise of the House Usher: A Gothic Horror Story
The Demise of the House Usher is a horror story published in 1839 by Edgar Allan Poe. The story is set in a haunted medieval castle with a desolate landscape and is marked by gloom, which is characteristic of the gothic genre (Herbert, 1975).
Gothic Elements and First-Person Narration
Furthermore, Allan employs typical gothic elements such as bleak scenery and inclement weather. The novel employs a first-person narrator who contributes to the reader's sense of fear and dread (Herbert, 1975).
The Visit to the House Usher
The story revolves around an unnamed character who is asked to pay a visit to an ailing childhood friend Roderick and his bleak ancestral home. The narrator is keen to observe an evil that engulfed the remote castle of the house of usher. In the fall of the House Usher story, Edgar Poe tempts to lecture the readers to view the nature, permeation, and causes of evil experienced at the castle and it inhabitants.
The Theme of Incest and Family Disorder
An illuminating fact about the house usher is the family lineage that the narrator describes it as pure, which has direct descent. "The stem of the Usher race had put forth, at no period an enduring branch"; that is the entire family comes from the same bloodlines. Therefore, the theme of incest which is an "unpardonable sin" is clustered around the House. Roderick explicates that he agonizes from a family disorder, in which he first calls "a family evil" and then he dismisses it as just "mere nervous infection." As a result, Roderick states to be suffering a nervous illness that causes heightened sensory acuteness accompanied with the blandest food, the slightest touch, and the faintest sounds causing him great pain. His sister Madeline suffers from an illness that exhibits a settled apathy, in which she is gradually fading away of the person hence causing her to lose consciousness and feeling. Therefore the evil behind the curse the family suffers from is as a result of the long history of inbreeding and incest within the household.
The Permeability of Evil and Deterioration of the House
The permeability of evil is supported by the deterioration of the House of Usher which is stressed in the description of the castle and the occupants, as well as the physical condition of the house. The Usher family is removed from normalcy that their very existence has become eerie and of spiritual nature (Benoit, 2000). The twins share a bond that is very inexplicable, incestuous and intense that it even transcend death thus one unable to survive without the other (Poe, 1976). Roderick and Madeline are twins who are the last line of the House Usher. The represent the mental and physical components of being one soul though they share the same blood line. The twins share "sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature" which symbolizes the connection of Roderick mental suffering and disintegration with Madeline physical decline. The twins not only experience the hardship of the diseases, but one feels the pain of the other. They are facing their mortality.
Symbolism and the Final Ruin
Poe-Allan employs symbolism in the representation of the link between the house physical structure of the family mansion and the deteriorating conditions of the twins. The crack in the Usher castle which is at first hardly visible by the narrator symbolically suggest a flaw or a fundamental split in the dual personalities hence foretelling the final ruin of the castle and the family (Benoit, 2000). Mortality and death of the lineage of the house of usher. Enchained by superstition, Roderick believed that the castle had a conscious which embodied the fate of the Usher family.
"Enchained by some superstitious impressions regarding the house in which he lived, and whence for many years, he had never attempted forth...." From the windows in the room and inside where Roderick Usher devotes most of his time are at "so vast distance from the black oaken floor as to be altogether inaccessible from within." The twins were isolated from the rest of the world causing them to develop their superstition barriers. Hence, the notion caused them to believe that death lingered among them because of their families apparently cursed bloodline.
The Supernatural Connection and the House's Demise
Finally, at the end of the narrative, Madeline returns from her premature tomb to claim the infuriated Roderick, and the two are reunited in death. The House of Usher falls, the end of a lineage, but even death cannot separate the supernatural connection of the twins. The house which symbolizes deranged individual crumbles into the "deep and dank tarn," as the narrator manages to flee for his sanity (Poe, 1976).
References
Benoit, Raymond. Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2000.
Poe, Edgar Allan, and Levine, Stuart and Levine, Susan. The short fiction of Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Edition. New York: University of Illinois Press, 1976.
Herbert, Wray Congdon. “Archetype and reality: Psychological approaches to” The Fall of the House of Usher.” Taylor &Francis, 1975.
