edgar allan poe the fall of the house of usher essay

The Fall of the House of Usher

by Edgar Allan Poe (published 1839)

     Son coeur est un luth suspendu;     Sitot qu'on le touche il resonne.                                   - De Beranger . DURING the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was --but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me --upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain --upon the bleak walls --upon the vacant eye-like windows --upon a few rank sedges --and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees --with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium --the bitter lapse into everyday life --the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart --an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it --I paused to think --what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down --but with a shudder even more thrilling than before --upon the remodelled and inverted images of the gray sedge , and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows. Nevertheless, in this mansion of gloom I now proposed to myself a sojourn of some weeks. Its proprietor, Roderick Usher, had been one of my boon companions in boyhood; but many years had elapsed since our last meeting. A letter, however, had lately reached me in a distant part of the country --a letter from him --which, in its wildly importunate nature, had admitted of no other than a personal reply. The MS. gave evidence of nervous agitation. The writer spoke of acute bodily illness --of a mental disorder which oppressed him --and of an earnest desire to see me, as his best, and indeed his only personal friend, with a view of attempting, by the cheerfulness of my society, some alleviation of his malady. It was the manner in which all this, and much more, was said --it the apparent heart that went with his request --which allowed me no room for hesitation; and I accordingly obeyed forthwith what I still considered a very singular summons. Although, as boys, we had been even intimate associates, yet I really knew little of my friend. His reserve had been always excessive and habitual. I was aware, however, that his very ancient family had been noted, time out of mind, for a peculiar sensibility of temperament, displaying itself, through long ages, in many works of exalted art, and manifested, of late, in repeated deeds of munificent yet unobtrusive charity, as well as in a passionate devotion to the intricacies, perhaps even more than to the orthodox and easily recognisable beauties, of musical science. I had learned, too, the very remarkable fact, that the stem of the Usher race, all time-honoured as it was, had put forth, at no period, any enduring branch; in other words, that the entire family lay in the direct line of descent, and had always, with very trifling and very temporary variation, so lain. It was this deficiency, I considered, while running over in thought the perfect keeping of the character of the premises with the accredited character of the people, and while speculating upon the possible influence which the one, in the long lapse of centuries, might have exercised upon the other --it was this deficiency, perhaps, of collateral issue, and the consequent undeviating transmission, from sire to son, of the patrimony with the name, which had, at length, so identified the two as to merge the original title of the estate in the quaint and equivocal appellation of the "House of Usher" --an appellation which seemed to include, in the minds of the peasantry who used it, both the family and the family mansion. I have said that the sole effect of my somewhat childish experiment --that of looking down within the tarn --had been to deepen the first singular impression. There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase of my superstition --for why should I not so term it? --served mainly to accelerate the increase itself. Such, I have long known, is the paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as a basis. And it might have been for this reason only, that, when I again uplifted my eyes to the house itself, from its image in the pool, there grew in my mind a strange fancy --a fancy so ridiculous, indeed, that I but mention it to show the vivid force of the sensations which oppressed me. I had so worked upon my imagination as really to believe that about the whole mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their immediate vicinity-an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn --a pestilent and mystic vapour, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued. Shaking off from my spirit what must have been a dream, I scanned more narrowly the real aspect of the building. Its principal feature seemed to be that of an excessive antiquity. The discoloration of ages had been great. Minute fungi overspread the whole exterior, hanging in a fine tangled web-work from the eaves. Yet all this was apart from any extraordinary dilapidation. No portion of the masonry had fallen; and there appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of parts, and the crumbling condition of the individual stones. In this there was much that reminded me of the specious totality of old wood-work which has rotted for long years in some neglected vault, with no disturbance from the breath of the external air. Beyond this indication of extensive decay, however, the fabric gave little token of instability. Perhaps the eye of a scrutinising observer might have discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn . Noticing these things, I rode over a short causeway to the house. A servant in waiting took my horse, and I entered the Gothic archway of the hall. A valet, of stealthy step, thence conducted me, in silence, through many dark and intricate passages in my progress to the studio of his master. Much that I encountered on the way contributed, I know not how, to heighten the vague sentiments of which I have already spoken. While the objects around me --while the carvings of the ceilings, the sombre tapestries of the walls, the ebon blackness of the floors, and the phantasmagoric armorial trophies which rattled as I strode, were but matters to which, or to such as which, I had been accustomed from my infancy --while I hesitated not to acknowledge how familiar was all this --I still wondered to find how unfamiliar were the fancies which ordinary images were stirring up. On one of the staircases, I met the physician of the family. His countenance, I thought, wore a mingled expression of low cunning and perplexity. He accosted me with trepidation and passed on. The valet now threw open a door and ushered me into the presence of his master. The room in which I found myself was very large and lofty. The windows were long, narrow, and pointed, and at so vast a distance from the black oaken floor as to be altogether inaccessible from within. Feeble gleams of encrimsoned light made their way through the trellised panes, and served to render sufficiently distinct the more prominent objects around; the eye, however, struggled in vain to reach the remoter angles of the chamber, or the recesses of the vaulted and fretted ceiling. Dark draperies hung upon the walls. The general furniture was profuse, comfortless, antique, and tattered. Many books and musical instruments lay scattered about, but failed to give any vitality to the scene. I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all. Upon my entrance, Usher arose from a sofa on which he had been lying at full length, and greeted me with a vivacious warmth which had much in it, I at first thought, of an overdone cordiality --of the constrained effort of the ennuye man of the world. A glance, however, at his countenance, convinced me of his perfect sincerity. We sat down; and for some moments, while he spoke not, I gazed upon him with a feeling half of pity, half of awe. Surely, man had never before so terribly altered, in so brief a period, as had Roderick Usher! It was with difficulty that I could bring myself to admit the identity of the wan being before me with the companion of my early boyhood. Yet the character of his face had been at all times remarkable. A cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid , but of a surpassingly beautiful curve; a nose of a delicate Hebrew model, but with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar formations; a finely moulded chin, speaking, in its want of prominence, of a want of moral energy; hair of a more than web-like softness and tenuity; these features, with an inordinate expansion above the regions of the temple, made up altogether a countenance not easily to be forgotten. And now in the mere exaggeration of the prevailing character of these features, and of the expression they were wont to convey, lay so much of change that I doubted to whom I spoke. The now ghastly pallor of the skin, and the now miraculous lustre of the eve, above all things startled and even awed me. The silken hair, too, had been suffered to grow all unheeded, and as, in its wild gossamer texture, it floated rather than fell about the face, I could not, even with effort, connect its Arabesque expression with any idea of simple humanity. In the manner of my friend I was at once struck with an incoherence --an inconsistency; and I soon found this to arise from a series of feeble and futile struggles to overcome an habitual trepidancy --an excessive nervous agitation. For something of this nature I had indeed been prepared, no less by his letter, than by reminiscences of certain boyish traits, and by conclusions deduced from his peculiar physical conformation and temperament. His action was alternately vivacious and sullen . His voice varied rapidly from a tremulous indecision (when the animal spirits seemed utterly in abeyance ) to that species of energetic concision --that abrupt, weighty, unhurried, and hollow-sounding enunciation --that leaden, self-balanced and perfectly modulated guttural utterance, which may be observed in the lost drunkard, or the irreclaimable eater of opium, during the periods of his most intense excitement. It was thus that he spoke of the object of my visit, of his earnest desire to see me, and of the solace he expected me to afford him. He entered, at some length, into what he conceived to be the nature of his malady. It was, he said, a constitutional and a family evil, and one for which he despaired to find a remedy --a mere nervous affection, he immediately added, which would undoubtedly soon pass off. It displayed itself in a host of unnatural sensations. Some of these, as he detailed them, interested and bewildered me; although, perhaps, the terms, and the general manner of the narration had their weight. He suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses; the most insipid food was alone endurable; he could wear only garments of certain texture; the odours of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a faint light; and there were but peculiar sounds, and these from stringed instruments, which did not inspire him with horror. To an anomalous species of terror I found him a bounden slave. "I shall perish," said he, "I must perish in this deplorable folly. Thus, thus, and not otherwise, shall I be lost. I dread the events of the future, not in themselves, but in their results. I shudder at the thought of any, even the most trivial, incident, which may operate upon this intolerable agitation of soul. I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect --in terror. In this unnerved-in this pitiable condition --I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm , FEAR." I learned, moreover, at intervals, and through broken and equivocal hints, another singular feature of his mental condition. He was enchained by certain superstitious impressions in regard to the dwelling which he tenanted, and whence, for many years, he had never ventured forth --in regard to an influence whose supposititious force was conveyed in terms too shadowy here to be re-stated --an influence which some peculiarities in the mere form and substance of his family mansion, had, by dint of long sufferance, he said, obtained over his spirit-an effect which the physique of the gray walls and turrets, and of the dim tarn into which they all looked down, had, at length, brought about upon the morale of his existence. He admitted, however, although with hesitation, that much of the peculiar gloom which thus afflicted him could be traced to a more natural and far more palpable origin --to the severe and long-continued illness --indeed to the evidently approaching dissolution-of a tenderly beloved sister --his sole companion for long years --his last and only relative on earth. "Her decease," he said, with a bitterness which I can never forget, "would leave him (him the hopeless and the frail) the last of the ancient race of the Ushers." While he spoke, the lady Madeline (for so was she called) passed slowly through a remote portion of the apartment, and, without having noticed my presence, disappeared. I regarded her with an utter astonishment not unmingled with dread --and yet I found it impossible to account for such feelings. A sensation of stupor oppressed me, as my eyes followed her retreating steps. When a door, at length, closed upon her, my glance sought instinctively and eagerly the countenance of the brother --but he had buried his face in his hands, and I could only perceive that a far more than ordinary wanness had overspread the emaciated fingers through which trickled many passionate tears. The disease of the lady Madeline had long baffled the skill of her physicians. A settled apathy, a gradual wasting away of the person, and frequent although transient affections of a partially cataleptical character, were the unusual diagnosis. Hitherto she had steadily borne up against the pressure of her malady, and had not betaken herself finally to bed; but, on the closing in of the evening of my arrival at the house, she succumbed (as her brother told me at night with inexpressible agitation) to the prostrating power of the destroyer; and I learned that the glimpse I had obtained of her person would thus probably be the last I should obtain --that the lady, at least while living, would be seen by me no more. For several days ensuing, her name was unmentioned by either Usher or myself: and during this period I was busied in earnest endeavours to alleviate the melancholy of my friend. We painted and read together; or I listened, as if in a dream, to the wild improvisations of his speaking guitar. And thus, as a closer and still intimacy admitted me more unreservedly into the recesses of his spirit, the more bitterly did I perceive the futility of all attempt at cheering a mind from which darkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe, in one unceasing radiation of gloom. I shall ever bear about me a memory of the many solemn hours I thus spent alone with the master of the House of Usher. Yet I should fail in any attempt to convey an idea of the exact character of the studies, or of the occupations, in which he involved me, or led me the way. An excited and highly distempered ideality threw a sulphureous lustre over all. His long improvised dirges will ring forever in my ears. 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. From the paintings over which his elaborate fancy brooded, and which grew, touch by touch, into vaguenesses at which I shuddered the more thrillingly, because I shuddered knowing not why; --from these paintings (vivid as their images now are before me) I would in vain endeavour to educe more than a small portion which should lie within the compass of merely written words. By the utter simplicity, by the nakedness of his designs, he arrested and overawed attention. If ever mortal painted an idea, that mortal was Roderick Usher. 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 . One of the phantasmagoric conceptions of my friend, partaking not so rigidly of the spirit of abstraction, may be shadowed forth, although feebly, in words. A small picture presented the interior of an immensely long and rectangular vault or tunnel, with low walls, smooth, white, and without interruption or device. Certain accessory points of the design served well to convey the idea that this excavation lay at an exceeding depth below the surface of the earth. No outlet was observed in any portion of its vast extent, and no torch, or other artificial source of light was discernible; yet a flood of intense rays rolled throughout, and bathed the whole in a ghastly and inappropriate splendour. I have just spoken of that morbid condition of the auditory nerve which rendered all music intolerable to the sufferer, with the exception of certain effects of stringed instruments. It was, perhaps, the narrow limits to which he thus confined himself upon the guitar, which gave birth, in great measure, to the fantastic character of his performances. But the fervid facility of his impromptus could not be so accounted for. They must have been, and were, in the notes, as well as in the words of his wild fantasias (for he not unfrequently accompanied himself with rhymed verbal improvisations), the result of that intense mental collectedness and concentration to which I have previously alluded as observable only in particular moments of the highest artificial excitement. The words of one of these rhapsodies I have easily remembered. I was, perhaps, the more forcibly impressed with it, as he gave it, because, in the under or mystic current of its meaning, I fancied that I perceived, and for the first time, a full consciousness on the part of Usher, of the tottering of his lofty reason upon her throne. The verses, which were entitled "The Haunted Palace," ran very nearly, if not accurately, thus:    I.    In the greenest of our valleys,    By good angels tenanted,    Once fair and stately palace --    Radiant palace --reared its head.    In the monarch Thought's dominion --    It stood there!    Never seraph spread a pinion    Over fabric half so fair.    II.    Banners yellow, glorious, golden,    On its roof did float and flow;    (This --all this --was in the olden    Time long ago)    And every gentle air that dallied,    In that sweet day,    Along the ramparts plumed and pallid ,    A winged odour went away.    III.    Wanderers in that happy valley    Through two luminous windows saw    Spirits moving musically    To a lute's well-tuned law,    Round about a throne, where sitting    ( Porphyrogene !)    In state his glory well befitting,    The ruler of the realm was seen.    IV.    And all with pearl and ruby glowing    Was the fair palace door,    Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing    And sparkling evermore,    A troop of Echoes whose sweet duty    Was but to sing,    In voices of surpassing beauty,    The wit and wisdom of their king.    V.    But evil things, in robes of sorrow,    Assailed the monarch's high estate;    (Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow    Shall dawn upon him, desolate!)    And, round about his home, the glory    That blushed and bloomed    Is but a dim-remembered story    Of the old time entombed.    VI.    And travellers now within that valley,    Through the red-litten windows, see    Vast forms that move fantastically    To a discordant melody;    While, like a rapid ghastly river,    Through the pale door,    A hideous throng rush out forever,    And laugh --but smile no more. I well remember that suggestions arising from this ballad led us into a train of thought wherein there became manifest an opinion of Usher's which I mention not so much on account of its novelty, (for other men have thought thus,) as on account of the pertinacity with which he maintained it. This opinion, in its general form, was that of the sentience of all vegetable things. But, in his disordered fancy, the idea had assumed a more daring character, and trespassed, under certain conditions, upon the kingdom of inorganization. I lack words to express the full extent, or the earnest abandon of his persuasion. The belief, however, was connected (as I have previously hinted) with the gray stones of the home of his forefathers. The conditions of the sentience had been here, he imagined, fulfilled in the method of collocation of these stones --in the order of their arrangement, as well as in that of the many fungi which overspread them, and of the decayed trees which stood around --above all, in the long undisturbed endurance of this arrangement, and in its reduplication in the still waters of the tarn . Its evidence --the evidence of the sentience --was to be seen, he said, (and I here started as he spoke,) in the gradual yet certain condensation of an atmosphere of their own about the waters and the walls. The result was discoverable, he added, in that silent, yet importunate and terrible influence which for centuries had moulded the destinies of his family, and which made him what I now saw him --what he was. Such opinions need no comment, and I will make none. Our books --the books which, for years, had formed no small portion of the mental existence of the invalid --were, as might be supposed, in strict keeping with this character of phantasm . We pored together over such works as the Ververt et Chartreuse of Gresset; the Belphegor of Machiavelli ; the Heaven and Hell of Swedenborg ; the Subterranean Voyage of Nicholas Klimm by Holberg; the Chiromancy of Robert Flud, of Jean D'Indagine, and of De la Chambre; the Journey into the Blue Distance of Tieck ; and the City of the Sun of Campanella . One favourite volume was a small octavo edition of the Directorium Inquisitorum , by the Dominican Eymeric de Gironne; and there were passages in Pomponius Mela , about the old African Satyrs and AEgipans , over which Usher would sit dreaming for hours. His chief delight, however, was found in the perusal of an exceedingly rare and curious book in quarto Gothic --the manual of a forgotten church --the Vigilae Mortuorum secundum Chorum Ecclesiae Maguntinae. I could not help thinking of the wild ritual of this work, and of its probable influence upon the hypochondriac, when, one evening, having informed me abruptly that the lady Madeline was no more, he stated his intention of preserving her corpse for a fortnight , (previously to its final interment,) in one of the numerous vaults within the main walls of the building. The worldly reason, however, assigned for this singular proceeding, was one which I did not feel at liberty to dispute. The brother had been led to his resolution (so he told me) by consideration of the unusual character of the malady of the deceased, of certain obtrusive and eager inquiries on the part of her medical men, and of the remote and exposed situation of the burial-ground of the family. I will not deny that when I called to mind the sinister countenance of the person whom I met upon the stair case, on the day of my arrival at the house, I had no desire to oppose what I regarded as at best but a harmless, and by no means an unnatural, precaution. At the request of Usher, I personally aided him in the arrangements for the temporary entombment. The body having been encoffined, we two alone bore it to its rest. The vault in which we placed it (and which had been so long unopened that our torches, half smothered in its oppressive atmosphere, gave us little opportunity for investigation) was small, damp, and entirely without means of admission for light; lying, at great depth, immediately beneath that portion of the building in which was my own sleeping apartment. It had been used, apparently, in remote feudal times, for the worst purposes of a donjon-keep , and, in later days, as a place of deposit for powder, or some other highly combustible substance, as a portion of its floor, and the whole interior of a long archway through which we reached it, were carefully sheathed with copper. The door, of massive iron, had been, also, similarly protected. Its immense weight caused an unusually sharp grating sound, as it moved upon its hinges. Having deposited our mournful burden upon tressels within this region of horror, we partially turned aside the yet unscrewed lid of the coffin, and looked upon the face of the tenant. A striking similitude between the brother and sister now first arrested my attention; and Usher, divining, perhaps, my thoughts, murmured out some few words from which I learned that the deceased and himself had been twins, and that sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature had always existed between them. Our glances, however, rested not long upon the dead --for we could not regard her unawed. The disease which had thus entombed the lady in the maturity of youth, had left, as usual in all maladies of a strictly cataleptical character, the mockery of a faint blush upon the bosom and the face, and that suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so terrible in death. We replaced and screwed down the lid, and, having secured the door of iron, made our way, with toll, into the scarcely less gloomy apartments of the upper portion of the house. And now, some days of bitter grief having elapsed, an observable change came over the features of the mental disorder of my friend. His ordinary manner had vanished. His ordinary occupations were neglected or forgotten. He roamed from chamber to chamber with hurried, unequal, and objectless step. The pallor of his countenance had assumed, if possible, a more ghastly hue --but the luminousness of his eye had utterly gone out. The once occasional huskiness of his tone was heard no more; and a tremulous quaver, as if of extreme terror, habitually characterized his utterance. There were times, indeed, when I thought his unceasingly agitated mind was labouring with some oppressive secret, to divulge which he struggled for the necessary courage. At times, again, I was obliged to resolve all into the mere inexplicable vagaries of madness, for I beheld him gazing upon vacancy for long hours, in an attitude of the profoundest attention, as if listening to some imaginary sound. It was no wonder that his condition terrified-that it infected me. I felt creeping upon me, by slow yet certain degrees, the wild influences of his own fantastic yet impressive superstitions. It was, especially, upon retiring to bed late in the night of the seventh or eighth day after the placing of the lady Madeline within the donjon, that I experienced the full power of such feelings. Sleep came not near my couch --while the hours waned and waned away. I struggled to reason off the nervousness which had dominion over me. I endeavoured 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 tremour gradually pervaded my frame; and, at length, there sat upon my very heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm. Shaking this off with a gasp and a struggle, I uplifted myself upon the pillows, and, peering earnestly within the intense darkness of the chamber, hearkened --I know not why, except that an instinctive spirit prompted me --to certain low and indefinite sounds which came, through the pauses of the storm, at long intervals, I knew not whence. Overpowered by an intense sentiment of horror, unaccountable yet unendurable, I threw on my clothes with haste (for I felt that I should sleep no more during the night), and endeavoured to arouse myself from the pitiable condition into which I had fallen, by pacing rapidly to and fro through the apartment. I had taken but few turns in this manner, when a light step on an adjoining staircase arrested my attention. I presently recognised it as that of Usher. In an instant afterward he rapped, with a gentle touch, at my door, and entered, bearing a lamp. His countenance was, as usual, cadaverously wan --but, moreover, there was a species of mad hilarity in his eyes --an evidently restrained hysteria in his whole demeanour. His air appalled me --but anything was preferable to the solitude which I had so long endured, and I even welcomed his presence as a relief. "And you have not seen it?" he said abruptly, after having stared about him for some moments in silence --"you have not then seen it? --but, stay! you shall." Thus speaking, and having carefully shaded his lamp, he hurried to one of the casements, and threw it freely open to the storm. The impetuous fury of the entering gust nearly lifted us from our feet. It was, indeed, a tempestuous yet sternly beautiful night, and one wildly singular in its terror and its beauty. A whirlwind had apparently collected its force in our vicinity; for there were frequent and violent alterations in the direction of the wind; and the exceeding density of the clouds (which hung so low as to press upon the turrets of the house) did not prevent our perceiving the life-like velocity with which they flew careering from all points against each other, without passing away into the distance. I say that even their exceeding density did not prevent our perceiving this --yet we had no glimpse of the moon or stars --nor was there any flashing forth of the lightning. But the under surfaces of the huge masses of agitated vapour, as well as all terrestrial objects immediately around us, were glowing in the unnatural light of a faintly luminous and distinctly visible gaseous exhalation which hung about and enshrouded the mansion. "You must not --you shall not behold this!" said I, shudderingly, to Usher, as I led him, with a gentle violence, from the window to a seat. "These appearances, which bewilder you, are merely electrical phenomena not uncommon --or it may be that they have their ghastly origin in the rank miasma of the tarn . Let us close this casement; --the air is chilling and dangerous to your frame. Here is one of your favourite romances. I will read, and you shall listen; --and so we will pass away this terrible night together." The antique volume which I had taken up was the " Mad Trist " of Sir Launcelot Canning; but I had called it a favourite of Usher's more in sad jest than in earnest; for, in truth, there is little in its uncouth and unimaginative prolixity which could have had interest for the lofty and spiritual ideality of my friend. It was, however, the only book immediately at hand; and I indulged a vague hope that the excitement which now agitated the hypochondriac, might find relief (for the history of mental disorder is full of similar anomalies) even in the extremeness of the folly which I should read. Could I have judged, indeed, by the wild over-strained air of vivacity with which he hearkened, or apparently hearkened, to the words of the tale, I might well have congratulated myself upon the success of my design. I had arrived at that well-known portion of the story where Ethelred, the hero of the Trist, having sought in vain for peaceable admission into the dwelling of the hermit, proceeds to make good an entrance by force. Here, it will be remembered, the words of the narrative run thus: "And Ethelred, who was by nature of a doughty heart, and who was now mighty withal, on account of the powerfulness of the wine which he had drunken, waited no longer to hold parley with the hermit, who, in sooth , was of an obstinate and maliceful turn, but, feeling the rain upon his shoulders, and fearing the rising of the tempest , uplifted his mace outright, and, with blows, made quickly room in the plankings of the door for his gauntleted hand; and now pulling there-with sturdily, he so cracked, and ripped, and tore all asunder, that the noise of the dry and hollow-sounding wood alarumed and reverberated throughout the forest. At the termination of this sentence I started, and for a moment, paused; for it appeared to me (although I at once concluded that my excited fancy had deceived me) --it appeared to me that, from some very remote portion of the mansion, there came, indistinctly, to my ears, what might have been, in its exact similarity of character, the echo (but a stifled and dull one certainly) of the very cracking and ripping sound which Sir Launcelot had so particularly described. It was, beyond doubt, the coincidence alone which had arrested my attention; for, amid the rattling of the sashes of the casements, and the ordinary commingled noises of the still increasing storm, the sound, in itself, had nothing, surely, which should have interested or disturbed me. I continued the story: "But the good champion Ethelred, now entering within the door, was sore enraged and amazed to perceive no signal of the maliceful hermit; but, in the stead thereof, a dragon of a scaly and prodigious demeanour, and of a fiery tongue, which sate in guard before a palace of gold, with a floor of silver; and upon the wall there hung a shield of shining brass with this legend enwritten --    Who entereth herein, a conqueror hath bin;    Who slayeth the dragon, the shield he shall win. And Ethelred uplifted his mace, and struck upon the head of the dragon, which fell before him, and gave up his pesty breath, with a shriek so horrid and harsh, and withal so piercing, that Ethelred had fain to close his ears with his hands against the dreadful noise of it, the like whereof was never before heard." Here again I paused abruptly, and now with a feeling of wild amazement --for there could be no doubt whatever that, in this instance, I did actually hear (although from what direction it proceeded I found it impossible to say) a low and apparently distant, but harsh, protracted, and most unusual screaming or grating sound --the exact counterpart of what my fancy had already conjured up for the dragon's unnatural shriek as described by the romancer. Oppressed, as I certainly was, upon the occurrence of the second and most extraordinary coincidence, by a thousand conflicting sensations, in which wonder and extreme terror were predominant, I still retained sufficient presence of mind to avoid exciting, by any observation, the sensitive nervousness of my companion. I was by no means certain that he had noticed the sounds in question; although, assuredly, a strange alteration had, during the last few minutes, taken place in his demeanour. From a position fronting my own, he had gradually brought round his chair, so as to sit with his face to the door of the chamber; and thus I could but partially perceive his features, although I saw that his lips trembled as if he were murmuring inaudibly. His head had dropped upon his breast --yet I knew that he was not asleep, from the wide and rigid opening of the eye as I caught a glance of it in profile. The motion of his body, too, was at variance with this idea --for he rocked from side to side with a gentle yet constant and uniform sway. Having rapidly taken notice of all this, I resumed the narrative of Sir Launcelot, which thus proceeded: "And now, the champion, having escaped from the terrible fury of the dragon, bethinking himself of the brazen shield, and of the breaking up of the enchantment which was upon it, removed the carcass from out of the way before him, and approached valorously over the silver pavement of the castle to where the shield was upon the wall; which in sooth tarried not for his full coming, but fell down at his feet upon the silver floor, with a mighty great and terrible ringing sound." No sooner had these syllables passed my lips, than --as if a shield of brass had indeed, at the moment, fallen heavily upon a floor of silver, became aware of a distinct, hollow, metallic, and clangorous, yet apparently muffled reverberation. Completely unnerved, I leaped to my feet; but the measured rocking movement of Usher was undisturbed. I rushed to the chair in which he sat. His eyes were bent fixedly before him, and throughout his whole countenance there reigned a stony rigidity. But, as I placed my hand upon his shoulder, there came a strong shudder over his whole person; a sickly smile quivered about his lips; and I saw that he spoke in a low, hurried, and gibbering murmur, as if unconscious of my presence. Bending closely over him, I at length drank in the hideous import of his words. "Not hear it? --yes, I hear it, and have heard it. Long --long --long --many minutes, many hours, many days, have I heard it --yet I dared not --oh, pity me, miserable wretch that I am! --I dared not --I dared not speak! We have put her living in the tomb! Said I not that my senses were acute ? I now tell you that I heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin. I heard them --many, many days ago --yet I dared not --I dared not speak! And now --to-night --Ethelred --ha! ha! --the breaking of the hermit's door, and the death-cry of the dragon, and the clangour of the shield! --say, rather, the rending of her coffin, and the grating of the iron hinges of her prison, and her struggles within the coppered archway of the vault! Oh whither shall I fly? Will she not be here anon? Is she not hurrying to upbraid me for my haste? Have I not heard her footstep on the stair? Do I not distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of her heart? MADMAN!" here he sprang furiously to his feet, and shrieked out his syllables, as if in the effort he were giving up his soul --"MADMAN! I TELL YOU THAT SHE NOW STANDS WITHOUT THE DOOR!" As if in the superhuman energy of his utterance there had been found the potency of a spell --the huge antique panels to which the speaker pointed, threw slowly back, upon the instant, ponderous and ebony jaws. It was the work of the rushing gust --but then without those doors there DID stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the lady Madeline of Usher. There was blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame. For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon the threshold, then, with a low moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated. From that chamber, and from that mansion, I fled aghast . The storm was still abroad in all its wrath as I found myself crossing the old causeway. Suddenly there shot along the path a wild light, and I turned to see whence a gleam so unusual could have issued; for the vast house and its shadows were alone behind me. The radiance was that of the full, setting, and blood-red moon which now shone vividly through that once barely-discernible fissure of which I have before spoken as extending from the roof of the building, in a zig-zag direction, to the base. While I gazed, this fissure rapidly widened --there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind --the entire orb of the satellite burst at once upon my sight --my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder --there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters --and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the "HOUSE OF USHER."

home | biography | summaries | stories | poetry | timeline | quotes | forum

gallery | wordlist | guestbook | bookstore | links | credits | site map | contact

home | stories | poetry | timeline | gallery | site map | contact

html5   pulp8

Poe's Stories

Edgar allan poe, everything you need for every book you read..

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher

Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 24, 2021

Long considered Edgar Allan Poe ‘s masterpiece, “The Fall of the House of Usher” continues to intrigue new generations of readers. The story has a tantalizingly horrific appeal, and since its publication in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, scholars, critics, and general readers continue to grapple with the myriad possible reasons for the story’s hold on the human psyche. These explanations range from the pre-Freudian to the pre–Waste Land and pre-Kafka-cum-nihilist to the biographical and the cultural. Indeed, despite Poe’s distaste for Allegory, some critics view the house as a Metaphor for the human psyche (Strandberg 705). Whatever conclusion a reader reaches, none finds the story an easy one to forget.

Poe’s narrative technique draws us immediately into the tale. On a stormy autumn (with an implied pun on the word fall ?) evening, a traveler—an outsider, like the reader—rides up to the Usher mansion. This traveler, also the first-person narrator and boyhood friend of Roderick Usher, the owner of the house, has arrived in response to a summons from Usher. We share the narrator’s responses to the gloomy mood and the menacing facade of the House of Usher, noticing, with him, the dank lake that reflects the house (effectively doubling it, like the Usher twins we will soon meet) and apprehensively viewing the fissure, or crack, in the wall. Very soon we understand that, whatever else it may mean, the house is a metaphor for the Usher family itself and that if the house is seriously flawed, so are its occupants.

With this foreboding introduction, we enter the interior through a Gothic portal with the narrator. With him we encounter Roderick Usher, who has changed drastically since last the narrator saw him. 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.

Roderick, a poet and an artist, and Madeline represent the last of the Usher line. They live alone, never venturing outside. The sympathetic narrator does all he can to ease Roderick’s hours, recounting a ballad by Roderick, which, entitled “The Haunted House,” speaks figuratively of the House of Usher: Evil and discord possess the house, echoing the decay the narrator has noticed on the outside. During his stay Roderick tells the narrator that Madeline has died, and together they place her in a vault; she looks deceptively lifelike. Thereafter Roderick’s altered behavior causes the narrator to wonder whether he hides a dark secret or has fallen into madness. A week or so later, as a storm rages outside, the narrator seeks to calm his host by reading to him a romance entitled “The Mad Trist.” The title could be evidence that both the narrator’s diagnoses are correct: Roderick has a secret (perhaps he has trysted with his own sister?) and is now utterly mad. The tale unfolds parallel to the action in the Usher house: As Ethelred, the hero of the romance, breaks through the door and slays the hermit, Madeline, not dead after all, breaks though her coffin. Just before she appears at the door, Roderick admits that they have buried her alive and that she now stands at the door. Roderick’s admission is too late. Just as Ethelred now slays the dragon, causing the family shield to fall at his feet, Madeline falls on her brother (the hermit who never leaves the house), killing them both and bringing down the last symbol of the House of Usher. As the twins collapse in death together, the entire house disintegrates into the lake, destroying the double image noted at the opening of the story.

The story raises many questions tied to gender issues: Is Madeline Roderick’s female double, or doppelgänger? If, as many critics suggest, Roderick is Poe’s self-portrait, then do Madeline and Roderick represent the feminine and masculine sides of the author? Is incest at the core of Roderick’s relationship with Madeline? Is he (like his creator, some would suggest) a misogynist? Feminists have for some time now pointed to Poe’s theory that the most poetic subject in the world is the “Death of a Beautiful Woman.” Is Madeline’s return from the tomb a feminist revenge story? Does she, as the Ethelred of the romance does, adopt the male role of the hero as she slays the evil hermit and the evil dragon, who together symbolize Roderick’s character? Has the mad Roderick made the narrator complicit in his crime (saying we rather than I buried her alive)? If so, to what extent must we view him as the unreliable narrator? Is the narrator himself merely reporting a dream—or the after-effects of opium, as he vaguely intimates at points in the story? Or, as the critic and scholar Eugene Current-Garcia suggests, can we generally agree that Poe, like Nathaniel Hawthorne, was haunted by the presence of evil? If so, “perhaps most of his tales should be read as allegories of nightmarish, neurotic states of mind” (Current-Garcia 81). We may never completely plumb the psychological complexities of this story, but it implies deeply troubling questions and nearly endless avenues for interpretation.

Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s Stories

BIBLIOGRAPHY Current-Garcia, Eugene. The American Short Story before 1850. Boston: Twayne, 1985. May, Charles E. Edgar Allan Poe: Studies in the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Fall of the House of Usher.” In The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Vol. 1, 3rd ed. Edited by Paul Lauter. Boston: Houghton Miffl in, 1998. Strandberg, Victor. “The Fall of the House of Usher.” In Reference Guide to Short Fiction, edited by Noelle Watson. Detroit: Gale Press, 1994.

Share this:

Categories: Literature , Mystery Fiction , Short Story

Tags: American Literature , Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher , criticism of Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher , Edgar Allan Poe , Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher , Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher appreciation , Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher guide , Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher notes , Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher plot , Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher structure , Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher summary , Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher themes , Essays of Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher , Gothic Literature , guide of Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher , Literary Criticism , Notes of Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher , plot of Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher , structure of Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher , Summary of Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher , Themes of Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher

Related Articles

You must be logged in to post a comment.

• Update your cookie preferences
• The Hypercritic Project
• Hypercritic for Companies
• Media coverage of Hypercritic’s work
• Meet the Hypercritics
• Collections
• Write To Us

Don’t miss a thing

Supported by

Copyright 2022 © All rights Reserved. Iscrizione registro stampa n. cronol. 4548/2020 del 11/03/2020 RG n. 6985/2020 al Tribunale di Torino. Use of Hypercritic constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use , Privacy Policy , Cookie Policy

• The Fall of the House of Usher | Gloom and decay in Poe’s gothic parable

Big - Little

Fast - Slow

Easy - Hard

Clean - Dirty

Original language

Decay , paranoia , and mental illness all characterize Edgar Allan Poe ’s The Fall of the House of Usher . Set in an old gloomy mansion – the house of the Usher family – this short story is a perfect example of gothic horror and is one of Poe’s most representative works.

It first appeared in 1839 in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine , a publication to which Poe contributed as editor and author. Later, in 1840 , it was included in the first volume of the collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque . In the preface to this collection, Poe wrote that “the epithets ‘Grotesque’ and ‘Arabesque’ will be found to indicate with sufficient precision the prevalent tenor of the tales here published”.

Despite that, he did not clearly define the two terms, generally used to refer to two decorative styles. The author left it to readers to capture the sense of bizarreness and fancy that marks the stories collected. Built on correspondences and Gothic tropes , The Fall of the House of Usher is particularly illustrative of Poe’s style and favorite themes; its enduring legacy and modern media transpositions are evidence of its success.

A crescendo of terror

Poe’s short story opens in a dreadful setting. The unnamed narrator has finally reached Usher’s mansion after its master, Roderick Usher , summoned him to bring him solace. A nervous agitation of mysterious etiology indeed affects Roderick. The effect is that of a constant alternation between excitement, indecision, fear, and a heightened sensibility to smells, noises, and colors.

The decayed appearance of his friend particularly strikes the narrator, but not only. The house itself seems surrounded by an atmosphere that reeks of decayed trees; fungi spread on its walls, and stones appear dilapidated. What causes Roderick’s agitation is his sister Madeleine’s illness . She is mentioned but a few times, and never formally introduced to the guest who sees her just once in passing. When Roderick informs him that Madeleine has died and that her corpse is going to be preserved in the family’s vault, the narrator hopes that his friend might, at last, find some peace. However, Roderick’s agitation and fear increase until, on a stormy night, they reach a climax of paranoia and terror .

Madeleine was, in fact, not dead : she breaks free from her tomb and kills Roderick in revenge. While the narrator is running away from this terrifying scene, a fissure on the mansion’s walls suddenly widens and engulfs the house and its inhabitants. Therefore, the fall of the House of Usher refers to both the moral and physical decay of the family, and to the building itself.

Metaphysical connections

The whole story builds on connections and resonances . The sickening atmosphere that surrounds the house mirrors the decay of Roderick’s soul and his visions and rapturous artistic creations reveal an unstable mind. In this sense, Charles Baudelaire ‘s poem Correspondances , part of his 1857 collection Les Fleurs du Mal , seems to respond to Poe’s gothic tale.

Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité, Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté, Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent. Charles Baudelaire, Correspondances, ll. 5-8.

In this poem, Baudelaire defines Nature as a forest of symbols that speak to each other. Poets can capture this mysterious harmony between colors, smells, and sounds through synesthesia . This rhetorical device allows access to the real meaning of reality and into the connections that bring humans and nature together. Through his artistic endeavors, Roderick Usher had probably glimpsed into the fatal analogy that linked the mansion to the destiny of its inhabitants.

An enduring success

The Fall of the House of Usher has inspired composers like Claude Debussy , novelists like Ray Bradbury , playwrights, and film directors. The most recent transposition is that of the eponym miniseries by Mike Flanagan , first released on Netflix on October 12, 2023 . It features Bruce Greenwood as Roderick, Mary McDonnell as his sister Madeleine, and a mysterious and ominous presence played by Carla Cugino , going by the name of Verna , an acronym for “raven”.

This limited series draws from different figures that animate Poe’s novelistic and poetic universe, such as the raven , the black cat , and the character of Arthur Gordon Pym . Each episode takes inspiration and its name from a different tale written by the author. Altogether, the eight episodes manage to depict the atmosphere that is peculiar to The Fall of the House of Usher , characterized by gloomy correspondences and metaphysical questions .

These aspects contribute to the ongoing success of Poe’s short story. His ability to portray the dark side of life resonates with modern readers and appeals to their feelings of insecurity and fear. At the same time, the unity of elements and the cathartic role of art described in the story offer glimpses of a more complex reality than its surface might suggest.

Lovingly Related Records

To a passer-by | Charles Baudelaire’s lost opportunity

Posted on 04 May, 2021

The Raven | Poe's study on paranoia

Posted on 09 November, 2021

The sleep of reason produces monsters | When reason leaves the imagination

Posted on 25 July, 2022

• The Fall of the House of Usher

by Edgar Allan Poe

The fall of the house of usher essay questions.

Is "The Fall of the House of Usher" a sincere expression of horror, or is Poe simply mocking himself and the reader? To what extent can we read his tale as a parody?

Consider the role of the Narrator. At first he may seem the typical faceless, nameless chronicler of events, simply a window into the narrative through which the reader can examine the real man of the story, Usher himself. But he becomes a character in his own right, and the horror of the tale depends in part on our ability to see events through his experience. How does Poe lend the Narrator the qualities of a character like the others? To what extent is he reliable as a narrator?

Madeline only appears three times in "The Fall of the House of Usher." How do her appearances, explicit and implicit, develop the plot and symbolism of the narrative?

Poe wished to be remembered as a poet, but he is today more famous for his short fiction. Examine the poetic imagination and lyrical writing of the tale. Do more than simply identify the various poetic devices; examine the "poem within the story." How does Poe use the Gothic form to suggest or develop a new form of poetry?

How do words encode actions, and what is the power of words? Consider the fact that the "Mad Trist" narrative parallels the actual sounds in the house. Do the characters give themselves self-fulfilling prophecies?

Why does Poe preface his tale with an excerpt from a poem by de Beranger? What do the lines suggest, and how apt are they for the story?

How does Poe describe the Narrator's progressive understanding of Usher's condition? Does the tale offer insight about consciousness, or are we blocked from ever "knowing" any of the characters? Does Poe's story prefigure the novels of consciousness of the late nineteenth century? Consider the line, for example, "I fancied that I perceived, and for the first time, a full consciousness on the part of Usher, of the tottering of his lofty reason upon her throne."

What exactly is meant by "sentience," and why is this idea important in the story?

Is "The Fall of the House of Usher" a love story, a comedy, or a tragedy?

How does it matter that Roderick and Madeline are brother and sister?

The Fall of the House of Usher Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Fall of the House of Usher is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

describe the room in which Roderick Usher is staying (267).

I would think a quote would be the best example for you. From there you can put these ideas into your own words. It's not hard, give it a try!

The room in which I found myself was very large and lofty. The windows were long, narrow, and pointed,...

which details in Usher's appearance of suggest that he has been cut off from the outside world for many years?

"Surely, man had never before so terribly altered, in so brief a period, as had Roderick Usher!"

"A cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid, but of a...

What forms of artistic expression does Usher share with thr narrator ?

Usher is a painter and he shares his art with the narrator. They also read poetry, stories, and share music.

Study Guide for The Fall of the House of Usher

The Fall of the House of Usher study guide contains a biography of Edgar Allan Poe, literature essays, a complete e-text, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About The Fall of the House of Usher
• The Fall of the House of Usher Summary
• Character List

Essays for The Fall of the House of Usher

The Fall of the House of Usher essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe.

• The Influence of Edgar Allan Poe's Predecessors on His Work
• Domains in 'The Fall of the House of Usher'
• Structural Purposes and Aesthetic Sensations of the Narrator's Language of "Fall of the House of Usher" within the Opening Paragraph
• Sonnet “X” and “The Fall of the House of Usher”
• Uncertainty: Poe’s Means, Pynchon’s End

E-Text of The Fall of the House of Usher

The Fall of the House of Usher e-text contains the full text of The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe.

Wikipedia Entries for The Fall of the House of Usher

• Introduction
• Character descriptions
• Publication history
• Sources of inspiration

The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe Essay

The understanding of the American Literary Canon is a fundamental aspect of literature that everybody should embrace. Reading through “the fall of the house of usher” by Edgar Allan Poe, I realized that the classification of artistic content based on the title might be misleading at some point. This article is a masterpiece guided by several aspects of society portraying multiple traits of a good story. Ideally, using the subjective understanding of Poe’s work, it is possible to evaluate some of the qualities of the story. I enjoyed reading the narrative, which seems to be dwelling on family, madness, supernatural powers, and the role of art in society. I think Poe is one the best authors in mysteries, romanticism, and perhaps social realities engulfed in imagery and symbolism.

While reading the story, I connected with much of Poe’s explanation of the setting, splendid environment. Poe sets the mood of the story right from the introduction, and I thought it was real life. In essence, the way he introduces the environment, the weather, and the event succinctly illustrate his prowess in mood-setting, which makes it relevant for all generations. One can vividly visualize the contextual implications of all the events unfolding within the introductory scene as a result of Poe’s diction.

At the same time, the setting of the story creates a lot of suspense for the reader as Poe describes his ordeal. I realized that the article provides a captivating scenario where one would want to know what happens next, from the physical location of the house, the owner- Roderick’s role, and how the two grew up together. This approach conveys a conventional picture of what would transpire in the life of modern youth, enjoying peer moments and enduring various climatic conditions. The mood is an essential aspect of story-telling because it attracts and retains the audience’s attention to detail.

In my view, the thematic choices also play a crucial role in determining whether the story should be in the canon or not. Poe focuses on the context of Usher’s family, where the members, including Roderick, are insane. Poe executes fear in almost every scene as the families go through traumatizing and pain-inflicting challenges within their community. Their belief in some supernatural power and the influence of nature indicates cultural aspects of their community. In my view, such elements of humanity exist in almost every society around the world. Therefore, the story seems to correlate with the real issues which occur in everyone’s life. The narrative triggered my memory of some horror movies I could watch as a young star because of the sufferings and bloodsheds.

The artistic values of the story are overstretching to include both political and moral values in touch with reality. For instance, the narrator talks about oppression and terror dominance as some of the main concerns in his community. He highlights the struggles they had to go through on a daily basis to survive the harsh conditions as a way of exposing how the systems of governance functioned during their era. In my view, such illustrations are pivotal in documenting the history of a country alongside the social ills endured by generations under different regimes. Notably, the allusions to Sir Launcelot’s narrations seem to point at the role of leadership in Poe’s community.

Unfortunately, the article fails to point out the historical moments within which the story would fall. Nonetheless, it is important to understand that much of what Poe writes relates to what America was facing during colonialism and provides a clear mimic of the scenarios which many citizens endured during the era.

The other aspect of the story standing out is its design of conclusion, which seems to showcase a symbolic ending. In my view, short stories should be readable within a single moment and indicate the climax of what authors would wish to achieve among the audiences. Notably, there appears critical use of symbolism in showing how Poe chooses to highlight the theme of family ties and social units. I would opine that the story ends in a satisfying state whereby the mansion is destroyed, and the characters die together as a household.

I like the way Poe makes the narration lively, bringing in the characters’ role in an enjoyable pattern. While reading the story, one can vividly imagine how Roderick faced the challenges, losing touch with reality at some point while another segment of the community continued with their life as usual. Nonetheless, I wouldn’t say I disliked the way the author portrays his role in the story as the villain, whose presence is articulated in the manners his people faced challenges throughout the story. There are multiple instances prompt to help the reader comprehend some of the major societal themes which affected ancient communities.

Succinctly, I feel this tale represents my notion of America, where life has a mixed taste. Although everyone would wish to live the American dream, a considerable number of people endured sufferings and difficulties, which would then be alluded to nature and supernatural beings. The use of blood and terror instance, in my view, would implicate the reigning challenges faced by minority groups because of the dominance of native colonial masters and Native Americans. Such forces still exist in modern society, which is marred by conspiracies and racial challenges.

Poe, Edgar Allan. The fall of the house of usher . Web.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2022, October 19). The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-fall-of-the-house-of-usher-by-edgar-allan-poe/

"The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe." IvyPanda , 19 Oct. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/the-fall-of-the-house-of-usher-by-edgar-allan-poe/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe'. 19 October.

IvyPanda . 2022. "The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe." October 19, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-fall-of-the-house-of-usher-by-edgar-allan-poe/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe." October 19, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-fall-of-the-house-of-usher-by-edgar-allan-poe/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe." October 19, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-fall-of-the-house-of-usher-by-edgar-allan-poe/.

• Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”
• Madeline in “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Poe
• The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe: The Role of the Narrator
• “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe Literature Analysis
• Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Black Cat"
• "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "Benito Cereno"
• "The Fall of the House of Usher" & "The Cask of Amontillado": Summaries, Settings, and Main Themes
• Pure Rationality in Poe’s "The Fall of the House of Usher"
• The Fall of the House of Usher
• Edgar Allan Poe, an American Romanticism Writer
• Robert Munsch's "Smelly Socks" Book for Children
• William Faulkner: Abner Snopes Character
• Black Women’s Studies: The Early Developments
• The “Allergic” Graphic Novel by Lloyd and Nutter
• Literature Analysis of Faulkner Journeys

Recommended

The Untold Story of Anne Frank’s Diary: A Behind-the-Scenes Look

5 Reasons I Love Ebooks (Digital Reading) #Books

• African American Literature
• April Fool's Day
• Atwood, Margaret
• Austen, Jane
• Award Winners
• Banned Books
• Behn, Aphra
• Bestsellers
• Black History Month
• Book Adaptations
• Book Destination
• Book Publishing
• Book Reviews
• Books & Titles
• Bookshelves
• Children's Books
• Christie, Agatha
• Controversy
• Don Quixote
• Entertainment
• Erdrich, Louise
• Evanovich, Janet
• Fitzgerald, F Scott
• Fitzgerald, Zelda
• Frank, Anne
• Harlem Renaissance
• Hemingway, Ernest
• Holidays and Events
• Holocaust Literature
• Homework Help
• Inspiration
• King Arthur
• King, Stephen
• Klein, Naomi
• Life Lessons
• Little Mermaid
• Lost Generation
• Momaday, N Scott
• Native American Literature
• Patterson, James
• Rowling, JK
• Science Fiction
• Shakespeare, William
• Storytelling
• Top Authors
• Uncategorized
• Wharton, Edith
• Wiesel, Elie
• Women's Literature
• Young Adult

Don't miss it

Delightful Pranks and Delicious Reads: Unleashing the Best April Fool’s Day Books!

Get Egg-cited: The Best Easter Reading Picks to Hop into this Spring!

Discover the Soaring Popularity of Spanish Audio in the US and Latin America

The Enigmatic Life and Literary Legacy of Zelda Fitzgerald: Uncovering the Untold Stories of American Writers

Literary Powerhouse: Celebrating Louise Erdrich

Aphra Behn: Exploring Her Impact on English Literature

About a book geek.

We bring you the best news, reviews, and insights on everything related to books, literature, lifestyle, and beyond. Check back for more details.

What’s Happening?

Decoding Edgar Allan Poe’s Masterpiece, the Fall of the House of Usher

You might also like

The Influence of Stephen King on Modern Horror Literature

Introduction to edgar allan poe and his works.

Edgar Allan Poe, an iconic figure in literature, is widely regarded as the master of Gothic fiction. Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1809, Poe’s life was marked by tragedy and darkness.

Throughout his career, Poe wrote numerous short stories and poems. “The Fall of the House of Usher” stands as one of his most haunting and enduring masterpieces. This article will delve into the depths of Poe’s mind and explore the intricacies of this chilling tale.

Overview of “The Fall of the House of Usher”

“The Fall of the House of Usher” is a short story published in 1839, and it is considered one of Poe’s finest works. The story follows the unnamed narrator as he visits his childhood friend, Roderick Usher, at his crumbling ancestral home. Usher, who suffers from a range of peculiar ailments, lives in isolation with his twin sister, Madeline.

As the story unfolds, the house becomes a character, mirroring the decay and madness that consumes the Usher family. The narrative is filled with suspense, supernatural elements, and psychological horror, making it a quintessential example of Gothic literature.

Analysis of the Gothic Elements in the Story

A dark, gloomy atmosphere, supernatural occurrences, and an exploration of the human psyche characterize Gothic literature. “The Fall of the House of Usher” encapsulates these elements perfectly. With its fissures and ghostly aura, the decaying mansion sets the stage for the impending doom that looms over the characters. Poe’s vivid descriptions create a sense of unease and foreboding, intensifying the Gothic atmosphere.

Furthermore, the supernatural occurrences in the story add to its eerie nature. The mysterious illness that afflicts Roderick Usher and the eventual resurrection of Madeline Usher from her premature burial blur the boundaries between life and death, reality and illusion. These supernatural events heighten the sense of dread and contribute to the overall Gothic ambiance of the story.

Themes and Symbolism in “The Fall of the House of Usher”

“The Fall of the House of Usher” explores several prevalent themes in Poe’s works. One theme is the disintegration of the human mind. Roderick Usher’s descent into madness mirrors the crumbling state of the house itself, reflecting the decay of the human psyche. The theme of duality is also prominent, as seen in the relationship between Roderick and Madeline, who are not only siblings, but also mirror images of one another.

Symbolism plays a crucial role in the story as well. The house symbolizes the Usher family’s decline and the decay of their bloodline. The storm that rages outside the mansion represents the tumultuous emotions within the characters. The tarn, a murky pool surrounding the house, symbolizes the repressed secrets and hidden darkness that lurk beneath the surface. These symbols add depth to the narrative and enhance its overall meaning.

The Role of the Narrator in the Story

The unnamed narrator in “The Fall of the House of Usher” serves as the reader’s guide into the macabre world of the Usher family. He acts as a rational observer, contrasting with the irrationality and madness that consume Roderick and Madeline. 

The narrator’s presence allows the readers to experience the story’s events from a objective standpoint, although his feelings of unease and terror gradually emerge. Through the narrator’s perspective, Poe heightens the sense of horror and creates a sense of empathy with the readers.

The Characters in “The Fall of the House of Usher”

Poe’s characters in “The Fall of the House of Usher” are complex and psychologically tormented. Roderick Usher, the central figure, embodies the fragile nature of the human mind. His hypersensitivity to sound and light and his artistic temperament show his highly strung disposition. Madeline Usher, his twin sister, represents the supernatural and the repressed feminine power within the story. The relationship between the twins blurs the boundaries of familial love and incestuous desire.

The unnamed narrator, a foil to the Usher siblings, brings a sense of normalcy and reason to the narrative. His presence highlights the abnormality of the Usher family and provides a contrasting perspective for the readers. These characters’ psychological complexities and intertwined relationships contribute to the story’s overall sense of unease and suspense.

Comparisons to Edgar Allan Poe’s Other Works

“The Fall of the House of Usher” shares thematic and stylistic similarities with many of Poe’s other works. The motif of decay and madness can be found in stories such as “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Masque of the Red Death.” Symbolism and supernatural elements are prevalent throughout Poe’s body of work, as seen in “The Raven” and “The Pit and the Pendulum.”

Poe’s exploration of the human psyche and the dark corners of the human mind is a recurring theme in his writings. His ability to create an oppressive atmosphere and evoke a sense of dread is evident in multiple stories, establishing him as a master of psychological horror.

The Influence of “The Fall of the House of Usher” on American literature

“The Fall of the House of Usher” profoundly impacted American literature. Poe’s unique blend of psychological horror, Gothic elements, and intricate storytelling techniques inspired future writers. His ability to delve into the depths of the human psyche and explore themes of decay, madness, and the supernatural paved the way for the development of the horror genre.

Authors such as H.P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, and Shirley Jackson have acknowledged Poe’s influence on their works. The chilling atmosphere and psychological depth found in “The Fall of the House of Usher” continue to shape the landscape of American literature, leaving an indelible mark on the genre.

Critical Reception of the Story

Upon its publication, “The Fall of the House of Usher” received mixed reviews from critics. Some praised Poe’s mastery of atmosphere and his ability to create a sense of unease, while others found the story overly morbid and lacking in substance. However, as time passed, the story gained recognition for its innovative use of Gothic elements and psychological complexity.

Modern critics consider “The Fall of the House of Usher” one of Poe’s greatest achievements. Its exploration of the darker aspects of human nature, atmospheric descriptions, and intricate symbolism have solidified its place in literary history.

The Enduring Legacy of Edgar Allan Poe and His Masterpiece

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” stands as a testament to his unparalleled talent as a writer. Through his use of Gothic elements, psychological horror, and intricate symbolism, Poe crafted a masterpiece that continues to captivate readers today. The story’s exploration of decay, madness, and the supernatural has left an indelible mark on American literature.

Poe’s influence can be seen in the works of countless authors inspired by his unique style. His ability to tap into the darkest corners of the human psyche and create an oppressive atmosphere of terror has shaped the horror genre as we know it. “The Fall of the House of Usher” remains a timeless classic, reminding us of the enduring legacy of Edgar Allan Poe, the master of macabre.

Esther Lombardi

Esther A. Lombardi is a freelance writer and journalist with more than two decades of experience writing for an array of publications, online and offline. She also has a master's degree in English Literature with a background in Web Technology and Journalism. 

Related Posts

Introduction to Zelda Fitzgerald Zelda Fitzgerald, a name that resonates with the elegance and mystique of the Jazz Age, was...

• 21.3k Followers

April Fool's Day is a time of laughter, pranks, and good-natured trickery. It's a day when we play practical jokes...

Elie Wiesel’s ‘Night’ – Lines of Remembrance

Emily Dickinson: Examining the Influences and Impact of Her Revolutionary Poetry

Why Is ‘The Catcher In The Rye’ Important? 7 Ways

Practicing Gratitude Quotes

‘The Secret Garden’ of Writing

‘Little House’ – Writing the Story of Our Lives

© 2023 A Book Geek

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Remember Me

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Add New Playlist

- Select Visibility - Public Private

You cannot copy content of this page

Discover more from A Book Geek

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Type your email…

Continue reading

Breaking Down ‘The Fall Of The House Of Usher’s’ Edgar Allen Poe References, From ‘The Raven’ to ‘The Black Cat’

By Hunter Ingram

Hunter Ingram

• ‘The Regime’ Star Matthias Schoenaerts on Working With Hugh Grant, and That Crazy Sex Scene With Elena: ‘He Gives Her What She Wants’ 2 weeks ago
• ‘Young Royals’ Stars on Series Finale’s ‘Biblical’ Decision, That ‘Tom Cruise’ Moment and What Part of the Ending They Initially Thought Was ‘Cringe’ 2 weeks ago
• Eugene Levy Looks Back on ‘American Pie’ and ‘Schitt’s Creek,’ Working With Son Dan and Catherine O’Hara, and Whether He Finds Himself Funny 4 weeks ago

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for all eight episodes of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” now streaming on Netflix, and several works of Edgar Allan Poe that have been available to read for more than 150 years.

Mike Flanagan never met a haunted house he didn’t want to peel back the wallpaper on and see what horrors lurk beneath.

At Netflix, the writer/director has become a Halloween staple by exploring the hallowed halls of novelists Shirley Jackson (“The Haunting of Hill House”) and Henry James (“The Haunting of Bly Manor”). On the big screen, he even helmed a Stephen King-endorsed return trip to Overlook Hotel for “The Shining” sequel “Doctor Sleep.”

But for his final act at Netflix before his production company Intrepid Pictures begins an overall deal at Amazon , Flanagan gets lost in a different type of literary labyrinth –– the mind of Edgar Allan Poe. In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Flanagan uses Poe’s 1839 short story to dismantle the dynasty of morally bankrupt Fortunato Pharmaceuticals CEO Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood), who built a legacy on his consumer’s dependence on his highly addictive opioid named Ligodone. But Flanagan doesn’t stop there: The series mines Poe’s archives for inspiration on how to gruesomely dispatch Roderick’s six children –– Frederick (Henry Thomas), Tamerlane (Samanatha Sloyvan), Victorine (T’Nia Miller), Leo (Rahul Kohli), Camille (Kate Siegel) and Perry (Sauriyan Sapkota). The line of succession is severed by fate in the form of a mysterious shapeshifting harbinger named Verna (Carla Gugino), with whom a young Roderick and his sister Madeline (Mary McDonnell) made a deal for boundless success in exchange for the lives of his eventual offspring.

Each episode is named for the Poe story that serves as its narrative spine, but none are to-the-letter adaptations. Instead, Flanagan filters this modern take on the toxicity of power and the persistence of karma through Poe’s creations, offering a sort of Sackler-esque family slaughterfest dressed up as a greatest hits homage to the master of the macabre.

Whether you know Poe or not, here’s how “The Fall of the House of Usher” faithfully adapts –– and sinisterly subverts –– his classics.

The Fall of the House of Usher

Poe’s Premise: An unnamed man is summoned to the crumbling estate of his friend Roderick Usher, who informs the man that his twin sister Madeline has died. After entombing Madeline, the two men start to feel unsettled by the malevolent sounds of the old house and learn Madeline is not as dead as Roderick led his friend to believe.

Flanagan’s Spin: The framework of Flanagan’s series puts the audience in the hands of Poe’s favorite perspective –– an unreliable narrator driven mad. But in Flanagan’s story, the man visiting Usher at his deteriorating childhood home is notably not his friend. He is C. Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly), the assistant U.S. attorney hellbent on convicting Roderick and the Usher family for their crimes. Dupin is an original character Poe created who, despite not ever being identified as a detective, would serve as the inspiration for iconic ones like Sherlock Holmes. But Dupin isn’t part of the “The Fall of the House of Usher” story, nor are the Usher children seen in the series. Instead, Flanagan pulls at three threads key to “The Fall of the House of Usher” story — the set-up, the twist and the climax. First, Flanagan lets Dupin stand in for Poe’s narrator, who is given a front-row seat to Roderick’s reckoning. Although Dupin isn’t there for comfort but rather to get a long-awaited confession from his elusive target. Secondly, Flanagan lets the dreadful possibility of Madeline’s likely death hang over viewers longer than Poe, as Roderick constantly reassures Dupin she’s just tinkering in the basement. In both versions, Roderick’s withering mind truly believes Madeline is dead only for her to emerge in the final moments to literally scare the life out of her brother. Flanagan, however, doesn’t just entomb her. His Roderick gives her an Egyptian queen’s burial after he kills her –– complete with a hot poker up the nose and jade stones replacing her eyes. It makes her jump-scare resurrection an even more gruesome sight. Finally, as Dupin and his literary counterpart escape their versions of the Usher home in fear for their lives, the weight of the tainted Usher legacy literally brings down the house on top of the siblings.

The Masque of the Red Death

Poe’s Premise: As a plague known as the Red Death sweeps across the land, Prince Prospero and a horde of high-society people wall themselves off in a castle-like abbey. To pass the time, Propsero hosts a lavish masquerade ball with attendees welcomed to navigate seven color-themed rooms –– the final one coated in blood red. But Prospero is intrigued by the emergence of a mysterious shrouded figure, to whom he catches up in the red room and immediately dies. The enraged guests attempt to uncloak the figure only to learn it is the Red Death, and they have all been infected.

Flanagan’s Twist: Indifference is at the heart of both tellings of “The Masque of the Red Death.” For Poe, it’s indifference to the plight of the average person in the face of an invisible killer savagely claiming those who can’t escape to the perceived safety of privilege. But on the show, Prospero aka Perry, the youngest of Usher kids, shows indifference to the deadly Usher legacy he blindly seeks to inherit, at least in name. Flanagan’s Roderick offers all of his coddled children an initial investment to encourage them to get rich, as he did. But Perry’s dream of an exclusive club where the wealthy need not worry about punitive things like morals or credit card limits doesn’t meet his father’s standards. Still, he plans a one-night-only version in one of the Usher’s shuttered testing facilities set for demolition, and spares no expense for his guest list. There’s only one condition: the orgy can’t begin until the sprinklers rain water down on the guests. Ultimately, his callous dismissal of anything but his vision doesn’t account for the fact that Roderick had ordered toxic acid be stored in the facility’s water supply to hide it from federal prosecutors sniffing around the family’s malpractice. So when Perry flips the switch, he showers himself and nearly 100 guests with a flesh-eating party favor. But don’t worry: Flanagan didn’t forget the signature red room from Poe’s story. Before Perry’s meltdown, he follows a cloaked, seductive Verna into a vacant room bathed in red, where he is presented with an opportunity to divert from his path of arrogance –– an option she will offer most of the Usher kids. But just as in Poe’s original, indifference proves to be a sweeter and deadlier option.

 Murder in the Rue Morgue

Poe’s Premise: In his debut appearance, C. Auguste Dupin casually investigates the violent murders of Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter Camille in Paris. He finds clumps of non-human hair and learns neighbors heard two voices coming from the scene of the crime –– one spoken by a Frenchman, and another language believed not to be human. Through deduction, Dupin determines the killer is an escaped orangutan, who climbed up to the women’s fourth floor home on Rue Morgue street and killed them in a fit of rage and confusion.

Flanagan’s Twist: It might seem hard to modernize a murder mystery with a monkey as its culprit, but never underestimate Flanagan. In Poe’s story, Camille and her mother are just a case to be solved. This meant Flanagan’s version had to give Camille a life to live before it carries out Poe’s prescribed demise –– a task wisely handed to Kate Siegel, Flanagan’s wife and long-time muse. Every family business needs a good spokesperson, and Camille is a pro at wielding the media to clean the mud off the Usher name. But her status as the family’s publicist puts Camille at the mercy of her own ego. When the Ushers learn one of their own might be an informant for Dupin’s criminal case against them, Roderick puts a bounty on the head of the traitor. Like a shark, Camille responds to the scent of blood in the water and zeros in on her half-sister Victorine as the mole. Victorine (the subject of a later story) is conducting cruel medical tests on chimpanzees in her lab, and Camille goes looking for leverage. Again, Verna shows up to talk Camille off the ledge of her own making, but all she can see is the long-simmering hatred for her half-sister. That blind pursuit means she doesn’t notice when one of the chimps is released and mauls her. Again, Poe only catches up to Camille’s story after she’s been crammed down a chimney headfirst. While she’s good at her job, even Camille would struggle to spin a “death by monkey” scenario to the press.

The Black Cat

Poe’s Premise: An alcoholic’s excessive drinking leads him to become violent toward his and his wife’s black cat, eventually gauging out one of its eyes and hanging it from a noose. Burdened by guilt (as he damn well should be), he adopts a similar-looking cat to cover his tracks, but is tormented by the imposter’s presence. When he tries to kill it, his wife stops him and, in a fit of rage, he kills her instead. After hiding her body in the wall, the cat disappears and he feels at ease. Until the police come by and hear a cat’s meow behind the wall, exposing his crime.

Flanagan’s Twist: Video-game seller/player Leo is less interested in his family’s fame and just wants to wallow in the wealth. It’s only when his vices — drugs, promiscuity, etc. — get him into trouble that he actually starts to become desperate. After drunkenly killing the cat of his boyfriend Julius (Daniel Chae Jun), he rushes to replace it. Verna, disguised as an animal shelter worker, offers him the chance to show a little humanity by rescuing other cats in need but all he wants is what he can’t have –– the perfect replacement cat she says is unavailable. Instead, he throws money at the problem against her advice. Soon, the new cat and Leo are waging war with each other. The sharp claws of guilt begin to leave a mark –– literally –– until Leo is tearing the walls out of their luxury apartment to catch the cat. Eventually, his obsession with defeating his furry foe leads him to dive off the balcony and to his death. Thankfully, Julius is never the significant other in the wall like in Poe’s story, and Flanagan’s version even reveals something about the Ushers. Leo’s indiscretions (being unfaithful, killing a cat) haunt him more than murder ever could. The Ushers are well acquainted with blood on their hands. For them, the little things cut deeper.

 The Tell-Tale Heart

Poe’s Premise: An unnamed narrator speaks of being driven to murder by the cloudy, “vulture-like” eye of their elderly roommate. Despite meticulously planning to carry out the deed while he sleeps, the old man wakes up, and the narrator kills him quickly to silence the sound of his pounding heart. They dismember the old man and stow the pieces under the floorboards to hide the crime. But when the police are called for a wellness check, the narrator begins to hear what they believe to be the old man’s heartbeat growing louder under the floor, driving them mad enough to confess.

Flanagan’s Twist: “The Tell-Tale Heart” is one of Poe’s most beloved and adapted stories, and Flanagan goes quite literal in his take. Victorine Usher wants to give her family’s reputation legitimacy after decades of questionable medicinal contributions to society. Her vision, carried out by her girlfriend and actual doctor Alessandra “Al” Ruiz (Paola Núñez), is to patent a vaguely revolutionary device that seems to provide an artificial heartbeat. Stuck doing trials on medically paralyzed monkeys, Victorine’s aspirations are outpacing regulatory oversight. With a sickly Roderick selfishly demanding she enter human trials immediately, Victorine enlists a naive human participant without Al’s consent. The patient is Verna in yet another disguise, testing Victorine’s willingness to sacrifice a human life for her ambition. When Al threatens to expose Victorine, she kills her without hesitation. But soon, Victorine begins to hear a squishy beating noise, almost like the croak of a frog if it had a cold. It grows louder and louder, to the point she begins to lose her grip on everything that isn’t the sound. By the time Roderick visits her to apologize for his reckless persistence, Victorine is so delusional she willfully shows him Al’s mutilated body that she ripped open to try and use the device on. The noise haunting her was the device squeezing Al’s long-dead heart. Faced with what she did, Victorine shoots herself in front of her father. Along with “The Black Cat,” Poe doesn’t kill his narrator so they can tell their tales. But Flanagan is happy to let Verna put a period on Leo and Victorine.

Poe’s Premise: This episode draws from two unconnected Poe stories: “The Gold-Bug” and “Tamerlane.” The former is a story set in South Carolina about a man who loses his fortune and works with his slave Jupiter to hunt down a treasure buried by the pirate Captain Kidd after finding a gold scarab-like bug. Conversely, “Tamerlane” is a poem loosely inspired by a Turco-Mongol conqueror named Timur Lenk or Tamerlane, who cast the woman he loved aside to pursue power.

Flanagan’s Twist: Flanagan’s adaptations take pleasure in twisting Poe’s warped worldview, especially when it comes to Roderick’s first-born daughter, Tamerlane, aka Tammy. In the middle of launching her own health and wellness brand named Goldbug –– which totally isn’t a knock-off Goop –– Tamerlane is beyond stressed. To let off steam, she and her fitness guru husband Billy (Matt Biedel) pay sex workers (hello again, Verna!) to fill the role of the dutiful and attentive wife while Tamerlane watches and, ahem, enjoys the view. But in time, the man who would do anything for her isn’t enough. She believes she is better than Billy, and rejects him. Left with only her work, she completely fumbles the launch and goes home to a house where every wall, including the bedroom ceiling, is a mirror reflecting her failure. Believing she sees Verna’s seductive substitute in all of them, she smashes every mirror until the shards have impaled her like a pincushion. The conqueror “Tamerlane” is the strongest Poe connection here, with “The Gold-Bug” story merely providing the branding (aka the treasure) Tammy sacrifices everything to secure. But the scarab does harken back to the on-screen Usher family’s affinity for Egyptian artifacts.

The Pit and the Pendulum

Poe’s Premise: A man is sentenced to death during the Spanish Inquisition and awakens in a dark cell with a pit in the center. He is repeatedly left unconscious and wakes to find his situation worsening. Eventually, he is tied to a board and made to look upward at an image of Father Time swinging a slowly lowering pendulum. But he manages to escape before he is dissected by the blade or forced into the pit.

Flanagan’s Twist: In many ways, Flanagan saved the most upsetting story for Roderick’s oldest child, Frederick. Earlier in the series, Frederick’s wife, Morelle (Crystal Balint), attends Perry’s invite-only orgy and is the only survivor of the acid bath. After she’s been left disfigured and completely dependent on her family, Frederick begins to punish her for being seduced by his youngest brother. He drugs her to keep her quiet in their home hospital suite, refuses to change her bandages and even wallpapers her room with a collage of their wedding photo. Frederick himself descends into a debilitating drug addiction as he tries to better position himself as Roderick’s successor, going as far as to oversee the demolition of Perry’s party factory. Wanting a glimpse of what lured his wife away from their marriage, Frederick goes inside and mistakes his drugs for his wife’s paralytic. He is incapacitated but alert as the demolition begins, with the titular pendulum formed by a serrated bit of building that slowly swings over him as the walls crumble. Gone are Poe’s allusions to the Spanish Inquisition and the escape of his narrator. Instead, Flanagan lets the first and final Usher offspring slowly watch death descend on him, with Verna at his side espousing why he’s the worst of them all. One twist on Poe’s story –– it’s Morelle who escapes Frederick’s cell of torture just in time.

  The Raven

Poe’s Premise: “Once upon a midnight dreary,” a man sits by the fire and mourns the loss of his love, Lenore. When a raven flutters in from outside, it sits atop a bust of Pallas and watches the man. Questioning the raven about the torments of grief and the possibility of moving on, he discovers the raven can parrot one word in response –– “Nevermore.” Locked in the dead-end conversation, the man is frustrated to realize he will never be free of his grief.

Flanagan’s Twist: Literally and figuratively, the ancient figure of Verna is Flanagan’s raven. Not only does she take the form of it to watch over Roderick in good times and bad. Verna’s looming specter also represents the temptation of power Roderick and Madeline Usher succumbed to in their youth. Verna’s deal for them was simple: they will have all the success they desire, but the bloodline will die with them. Poe’s narrator constantly asks his raven questions knowing the inevitability of its singular answer –– “Nevermore.” Nothing will change how the narrator feels about his lost love, and nothing can change the fate Roderick and Madeline sealed long ago for their family. But for both stories, the painful loss of Lenore is the emotional gut punch. In Flanagan’s story, Lenore may be Roderick’s innocent granddaughter, but she’s still part of the bloodline, which Verna reluctantly points out before she sends her into a peaceful, eternal slumber. The Usher kids were lost causes of inherited greed from the jump, but Lenore was the empathetic future that could have broken the cycle. And yet, she was born of the same deal and therefore fated to be among its casualties. Never to be forgotten, just as Poe intended.

BONUS POE: The Cask of Amontillado

Poe’s Premise: A nobleman named Montresor plots revenge against a man named Fortunato during the Carnival season. Tempting Fortunato with a tasting of Amontillado wine, the two men venture into the catacombs under Montresor’s home where he chains up his drunken acquaintance and begins to entomb him with a brick wall. When Fortunato comes to, he pleads with Montresor, who only remarks that no one will hear his screams from behind the wall.

Flanagan’s Twist: While it is not one of the titled episodes throughout the series, “The Fall of the House of Usher” is an undeniable and consequential adaptation of “The Cask of Amontillado.” The series ends with the reveal that on New Year’s Eve 1980, the night they made the fateful deal with Verna, Roderick and Madeline drugged and killed his despicable boss at Fortunato Pharmaceuticals, Rufus Griswold (Michael Trucco). That name is no coincidence. Rufus Griswold was Poe’s real-life nemesis, who falsified the author’s obituary as a post-mortem slight in 1849. Maybe as a means of carrying out some century-old justice for the author, Flanagan turns Griswold into the villain that first drove the Ushers to a point of no return. Roderick and Madeline also build a brick tomb for Rufus like Poe’s story, but they do so into the foundation of Fortunato headquarters. There’s that name again –– Fortunato. It is both Poe’s victim in his story and the namesake of the very company Roderick sold his entire bloodline to gain control over. It might be Rufus in the wall at the end of the series, but it was the Ushers who sealed their fate over a spiked glass of Amontillado.

More From Our Brands

Halle bailey to sing opposite da’vine joy randolph in pharrell williams, michel gondry musical, pamela churchill harriman’s onetime georgetown home hits the market for $10 million, a’s to play in sacramento for three years ahead of vegas move, the best loofahs and body scrubbers, according to dermatologists, is young sheldon shooting a funeral scene, verify it's you, please log in.

Presentations made painless

• Get Premium

109 The Fall of the House of Usher Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

Inside This Article

The Fall of the House of Usher, a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, is a classic gothic tale that has captivated readers for generations. With its eerie atmosphere, haunting themes, and complex characters, it is no wonder that this story has inspired countless essays and academic papers.

If you are struggling to come up with a topic for your essay on The Fall of the House of Usher, fear not! Here are 109 essay topic ideas and examples to help get you started:

• Analyze the role of the narrator in The Fall of the House of Usher.
• Discuss the theme of isolation in the story.
• Explore the symbolism of the house itself.
• Compare and contrast the characters of Roderick and Madeline Usher.
• Examine the use of foreshadowing in the story.
• Discuss the importance of setting in The Fall of the House of Usher.
• Analyze the theme of madness and mental illness in the story.
• Explore the motif of decay and deterioration in the Usher family.
• Discuss the role of art and creativity in the story.
• Examine the theme of duality in the characters of Roderick and Madeline.
• Compare and contrast the house in The Fall of the House of Usher with other gothic settings in literature.
• Discuss the significance of the storm in the story.
• Analyze the relationship between Roderick and the narrator.
• Explore the theme of death and mortality in the story.
• Discuss the influence of Edgar Allan Poe's own life experiences on The Fall of the House of Usher.
• Examine the role of gender in the story.
• Discuss the theme of family and inheritance in The Fall of the House of Usher.
• Analyze the use of sound and music in the story.
• Explore the motif of doubles and doppelgangers in the story.
• Discuss the significance of the title of the story.
• Analyze the use of color imagery in The Fall of the House of Usher.
• Discuss the theme of fear and terror in the story.
• Examine the role of nature in the story.
• Compare and contrast the endings of the story with different interpretations.
• Analyze the theme of guilt and responsibility in the story.
• Explore the motif of mirrors and reflections in the story.
• Discuss the role of the supernatural in The Fall of the House of Usher.
• Analyze the theme of memory and nostalgia in the story.
• Discuss the theme of art and aesthetics in the story.
• Explore the motif of sickness and disease in the story.
• Analyze the role of the senses in the story.
• Discuss the theme of obsession in the story.
• Examine the motif of imprisonment and confinement in the story.
• Explore the theme of time and decay in the story.
• Analyze the role of the Gothic genre in The Fall of the House of Usher.
• Discuss the theme of doubles and duality in the story.
• Examine the motif of madness and hysteria in the story.
• Explore the theme of alienation and estrangement in the story.
• Analyze the role of the house as a character in the story.
• Discuss the theme of fate and destiny in the story.
• Compare and contrast the different adaptations of The Fall of the House of Usher in film and literature.
• Analyze the role of music and sound in creating atmosphere in the story.
• Discuss the use of symbolism in The Fall of the House of Usher.
• Explore the theme of identity and selfhood in the story.
• Analyze the motif of dreams and nightmares in the story.
• Discuss the role of the uncanny in the story.
• Examine the theme of madness and genius in the story.
• Explore the motif of forbidden knowledge in the story.
• Analyze the role of the supernatural in creating suspense in the story.
• Discuss the theme of trauma and repression in the story.
• Examine the motif of doubles and doppelgangers in the story.
• Explore the theme of obsession and possession in the story.
• Analyze the role of memory and trauma in the story.
• Discuss the theme of love and loss in the story.
• Examine the motif of decay and decomposition in the story.
• Explore the theme of reality and illusion in the story.
• Analyze the role of the senses in creating atmosphere in the story.
• Discuss the theme of power and control in the story.
• Examine the motif of mirrors and reflections in the story.
• Explore the theme of time and temporality in the story.

With so many options to choose from, you are sure to find a topic that sparks your interest and inspires a compelling essay on The Fall of the House of Usher. Happy writing!

Want to create a presentation now?

Instantly Create A Deck

Let PitchGrade do this for me

Hassle Free

We will create your text and designs for you. Sit back and relax while we do the work.

Explore More Content

• Privacy Policy
• Terms of Service

© 2023 Pitchgrade

Screen Rant

Every edgar allan poe poem in the fall of the house of usher.

In its eight-episode runtime, Mike Flanagan's The Fall of the House of Usher draws several references and easter eggs for Edgar Allan Poe's poems.

WARNING! This article contains SPOILERS for The Fall of the House of Usher.

• Despite featuring unsavory characters, Netflix's The Fall of the House of Usher keeps viewers hooked with its well-timed twists and attention to detail.
• The series draws inspiration from several Edgar Allan Poe poems, using lines and themes to evoke sorrow, question reality, and explore the nature of death.
• The use of Poe's works in the show adds depth and symbolism, highlighting the characters' guilt, regrets, and the inescapable nature of their fate.

Netflix's horror series The Fall of the House of Usher is jampacked with verses and references from several Edgar Allan Poe poems. Created by Mike Flanagan, who has an impressive line of work in horror television, The Fall of the House of Usher risks revolving its storyline around unsavory characters. However, despite featuring a not-so-likable roster of elite characters, Netflix's The Fall of the House of Usher keeps viewers hooked with its well-timed twists, attention to detail, and depiction of horrifying character deaths.

In all of its terrors and drama, The Fall of the House of Usher adopts several narrative and character beats from Edgar Allan Poe's stories. For instance, its title and central Usher family characters , Madeline and Roderick, have been derived from Poe's short story, The Fall of the House of Usher . Apart from stories, Mike Flanagan's The Fall of the House of Usher also draws inspiration and borrows quotes from Edgar Allan Poe's poems.

The Raven & Jester Explained In The Fall Of The House Of Usher

10 for annie.

In its opening scenes, Netflix's The Fall of the House of Usher sets the stage for its drama by revealing that Roderick Usher's children are dead. As Roderick and his granddaughter, Lenore, sit in the pews of a church where the funeral of three of his children is being held, the preacher recites lines from many Edgar Allan Poe stories and poems. A few of these lines are also from the poem, For Annie , which Poe had written as a tribute to his late wife after she died from tuberculosis. The lines from the poem in the series, " The danger, is past, and the lingering illness Is over at last — and the fever called 'Living' is conquered at last, " reflect the sorrow Roderick feels following the death of his children.

9 A Dream Within A Dream

Roderick refers to this poem and questions the nature of reality as he tells Lenore about his visions of his dead children. The Edgar Allan poem, A Dream Within A Dream , explores the fleeting nature of time and the impermanence of human existence. After Roderick loses all the members of his family one by one, he, too, starts questioning the elusive nature of his reality like the narrator in A Dream With A Dream and wonders if his existence is a mere dream and if his daydreams of his dead children are dreams within dreams.

Edgar Allan Poe's Eureka: A Prose Poem gives a glimpse of the author's view on a myriad of topics, including cosmology, metaphysics, philosophy, and the origins of the universe. In the ambitiously speculative poem, Poe also mentions the asteroid Juno, which might have been the inspiration behind the name of Ruth Codd's character in The Fall of the House of Usher . Although Eureka 's subject matter does not directly align with the themes of the Mike Flanagan show, it could be one among the many mundane references made by the series to the author's works.

7 The Raven

The Raven is one of the most recognized poems written by Edgar Allan Poe. Owing to this, it is not surprising that it also holds immense narrative significance in Mike Flanagan's The Fall of the House of Usher . Not only is the title of the show's opening episode, " A Midnight Dreary, " the opening sentence of Poe's The Raven, but even Carla Gugino's The Fall of the House of Usher character, Verna , is portrayed as a shape-shifting raven. Just like the titular Raven in Edgar Allan Poe's poem symbolizes the narrator's grief towards a dead loved one, Verna (anagram for "Raven") in the series serves as a metaphor for Roderick's guilt towards crossing all moral boundaries to reach material success.

6 To My Mother

Like Roderick and Madeline lose their mother, Eliza, at a young age in The Fall of the House of Usher , Edgar Allan Poe also lost his mother, Eliza Poe, when he was barely three years old. After losing his mother at such a tender age, the author went on to dedicate several different poems and stories to her. For instance, his first published story, Metzengerstein , is believed to refer to the fire that destroyed a theater where his mother worked as an actress. By drawing parallels to Eliza Poe in its opening arc and highlighting how her demise impacts Roderick, The Fall of the House of Usher also gives a nod to Poe's poem To My Mother , which is an ode to the author's memory of his mother.

5 Annabel Lee

The Fall of the House of Usher reveals how Roderick has had children with several women over the years. However, the flashbacks from the 1979 timeline confirm that his first wife's name was Annabel Lee. The name Annabel Lee has been derived from the title of another Edgar Allan Poe poem that explores a man's undying love for his beloved Annabel Lee. Although the original poem highlights how the narrator's devotion to Annabel Lee remains unshaken long after her death, The Fall of the House of Usher mentions verses from the poem to portray how Roderick regrets betraying his wife and separating from her even though she was his one true love.

Owing to this regret, he continues feeling her presence and even sees her ghost in the church, reminding him of what his life could have been if his mindless pursuit of earning material success had not blinded him. In the Mike Flanagan Netflix show , Annabel Lee is not only a symbol of Roderick's persistent love for his first wife but also a tragic projection of how Roderick holds himself responsible for her death. Towards the end of The Fall of the House of Usher , as he recalls Annabel Lee, he realizes that he sacrificed the warmth of love to fortune and fame.

4 The Bells

After young Madeline and Roderick Usher shut Griswold behind a wall of bricks on the climactic New Year's Eve of 1979, they hear the bells from Griswold's jester costume for hours from behind the walls. Towards the end of The Fall of the House of Usher , as Roderick sits across the same wall and recalls how the 1979 night sealed their fate, he hears the same bells from Griswold's costume. The bells are a nod to Edgar Allan Poe's poem, The Bells , in which the author describes iron bells as a symbol of mourning and death. By showing how Roderick starts hearing iron bells from Griswold's jester costume, The Fall of the House of Usher foreshadows his imminent doom.

3 The City In The Sea

Verna recites Edgar Allan Poe's The City In The Sea to Madeline Usher, reminding her of the inescapable nature of death. The poem uses dark imagery to personify death, which stands as a tall god-like figure over a decaying city. In The Fall of the House of Usher , Madeline always seems to have a false sense of immortality as she believes that as long as they have influence and power, no one can touch them, even in death. By quoting the poem to her, Verna tries to warn her about the inexorable advance of time and how death spares no one.

2 Tamerlane

Samantha Sloyan's The Fall of the House of Usher character, Tamerlane Usher, is based on Edgar Allan Poe's poem, Tamerlane . Written in the first person, the poem describes the pain the narrator feels after looking back at their shallow pursuits of chasing power at the expense of relationships. It highlights how, in their dying moments, the narrator realizes that their one-dimensional ambitions and dreams have left them feeling empty because they came at a terrible cost. The poem's thematic explorations not only apply to Tamerlane in the Netflix series but to every other member of The Fall of the House of Usher 's central family.

Lenore is both a recurring name and theme in Edgar Allan Poe's works, especially in his poems Lenore and The Raven . In the two poems, Lenore is often the evocative symbol of a narrator's longing who cannot help but have haunting visions of his beloved Lenore. Roderick's granddaughter in The Fall of the House of Usher is named Lenore, who, like the one in the poems, passes away at a young age. Like the one in the poems, she becomes a tragic allegory for Roderick's guilt and suffering from the realization that his path to material success was marred with the blood of his dead loved ones.

The Fall of the House of Usher

Publisher description.

An unnamed protagonist (the Narrator) is summoned to the remote mansion of his boyhood friend, Roderick Usher. Filled with a sense of dread by the sight of the house itself, the Narrator reunites with his old companion, who is suffering from a strange mental illness and whose sister, Madeline is near death due to a mysterious disease. The Narrator provides company to Usher while he paints and plays guitar, spending all his days inside, avoiding the sunlight and obsessing over the sentience of the non-living. When Madeline dies, Usher decides to bury her temporarily in one of his house's large vaults. A few days later, however, she emerges from her provisional tomb, killing her brother while the Narrator flees for his life.

More Books by Edgar Allan Poe

Customers also bought.

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER

Edgar allan poe.

De Béranger.

D URING the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was—but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium—the bitter lapse into every-day life—the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart—an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down—but with a shudder even more thrilling than before—upon the remodelled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.

Nevertheless, in this mansion of gloom I now proposed to myself a sojourn of some weeks. Its proprietor, Roderick Usher, had been one of my boon companions in boyhood; but many years had elapsed since our last meeting. A letter, however, had lately reached me in a distant part of the country—a letter from him—which, in its wildly importunate nature, had admitted of no other than a personal reply. The MS. gave evidence of nervous agitation. The writer spoke of acute bodily illness—of a mental disorder which oppressed him—and of an earnest desire to see me, as his best and indeed his only personal friend, with a view of attempting, by the cheerfulness of my society, some alleviation of his malady. It was the manner in which all this, and much more, was said—it was the apparent heart that went with his request—which allowed me no room for hesitation; and I accordingly obeyed forthwith what I still considered a very singular summons.

Although, as boys, we had been even intimate associates, yet I really knew little of my friend. His reserve had been always excessive and habitual. I was aware, however, that his very ancient family had been noted, time out of mind, for a peculiar sensibility of temperament, displaying itself, through long ages, in many works of exalted art, and manifested, of late, in repeated deeds of munificent yet unobtrusive charity, as well as in a passionate devotion to the intricacies, perhaps even more than to the orthodox and easily recognizable beauties, of musical science. I had learned, too, the very remarkable fact, that the stem of the Usher race, all time-honored as it was, had put forth, at no period, any enduring branch; in other words, that the entire family lay in the direct line of descent, and had always, with very trifling and very temporary variation, so lain. It was this deficiency, I considered, while running over in thought the perfect keeping of the character of the premises with the accredited character of the people, and while speculating upon the possible influence which the one, in the long lapse of centuries, might have exercised upon the other—it was this deficiency, perhaps, of collateral issue, and the consequent undeviating transmission, from sire to son, of the patrimony with the name, which had, at length, so identified the two as to merge the original title of the estate in the quaint and equivocal appellation of the “House of Usher”—an appellation which seemed to include, in the minds of the peasantry who used it, both the family and the family mansion.

I have said that the sole effect of my somewhat childish experiment—that of looking down within the tarn—had been to deepen the first singular impression. There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase of my superstition—for why should I not so term it?—served mainly to accelerate the increase itself. Such, I have long known, is the paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as a basis. And it might have been for this reason only, that, when I again uplifted my eyes to the house itself, from its image in the pool, there grew in my mind a strange fancy—a fancy so ridiculous, indeed, that I but mention it to show the vivid force of the sensations which oppressed me. I had so worked upon my imagination as really to believe that about the whole mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their immediate vicinity—an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn—a pestilent and mystic vapor, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued.

Shaking off from my spirit what must have been a dream, I scanned more narrowly the real aspect of the building. Its principal feature seemed to be that of an excessive antiquity. The discoloration of ages had been great. Minute fungi overspread the whole exterior, hanging in a fine tangled web-work from the eaves. Yet all this was apart from any extraordinary dilapidation. No portion of the masonry had fallen; and there appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of parts, and the crumbling condition of the individual stones. In this there was much that reminded me of the specious totality of old wood-work which has rotted for long years in some neglected vault, with no disturbance from the breath of the external air. Beyond this indication of extensive decay, however, the fabric gave little token of instability. Perhaps the eye of a scrutinizing observer might have discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn.

Noticing these things, I rode over a short causeway to the house. A servant in waiting took my horse, and I entered the Gothic archway of the hall. A valet, of stealthy step, thence conducted me, in silence, through many dark and intricate passages in my progress to the studio of his master. Much that I encountered on the way contributed, I know not how, to heighten the vague sentiments of which I have already spoken. While the objects around me—while the carvings of the ceilings, the sombre tapestries of the walls, the ebony blackness of the floors, and the phantasmagoric armorial trophies which rattled as I strode, were but matters to which, or to such as which, I had been accustomed from my infancy—while I hesitated not to acknowledge how familiar was all this—I still wondered to find how unfamiliar were the fancies which ordinary images were stirring up. On one of the staircases, I met the physician of the family. His countenance, I thought, wore a mingled expression of low cunning and perplexity. He accosted me with trepidation and passed on. The valet now threw open a door and ushered me into the presence of his master.

The room in which I found myself was very large and lofty. The windows were long, narrow, and pointed, and at so vast a distance from the black oaken floor as to be altogether inaccessible from within. Feeble gleams of encrimsoned light made their way through the trellised panes, and served to render sufficiently distinct the more prominent objects around; the eye, however, struggled in vain to reach the remoter angles of the chamber, or the recesses of the vaulted and fretted ceiling. Dark draperies hung upon the walls. The general furniture was profuse, comfortless, antique, and tattered. Many books and musical instruments lay scattered about, but failed to give any vitality to the scene. I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all.

Upon my entrance, Usher rose from a sofa on which he had been lying at full length, and greeted me with a vivacious warmth which had much in it, I at first thought, of an overdone cordiality—of the constrained effort of the ennuyé man of the world. A glance, however, at his countenance convinced me of his perfect sincerity. We sat down; and for some moments, while he spoke not, I gazed upon him with a feeling half of pity, half of awe. Surely, man had never before so terribly altered, in so brief a period, as had Roderick Usher! It was with difficulty that I could bring myself to admit the identity of the man being before me with the companion of my early boyhood. Yet the character of his face had been at all times remarkable. A cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid, but of a surpassingly beautiful curve; a nose of a delicate Hebrew model, but with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar formations; a finely moulded chin, speaking, in its want of prominence, of a want of moral energy; hair of a more than web-like softness and tenuity;—these features, with an inordinate expansion above the regions of the temple, made up altogether a countenance not easily to be forgotten. And now in the mere exaggeration of the prevailing character of these features, and of the expression they were wont to convey, lay so much of change that I doubted to whom I spoke. The now ghastly pallor of the skin, and the now miraculous lustre of the eye, above all things startled and even awed me. The silken hair, too, had been suffered to grow all unheeded, and as, in its wild gossamer texture, it floated rather than fell about the face, I could not, even with effort, connect its Arabesque expression with any idea of simple humanity.

In the manner of my friend I was at once struck with an incoherence—an inconsistency; and I soon found this to arise from a series of feeble and futile struggles to overcome an habitual trepidancy—an excessive nervous agitation. For something of this nature I had indeed been prepared, no less by his letter, than by reminiscences of certain boyish traits, and by conclusions deduced from his peculiar physical conformation and temperament. His action was alternately vivacious and sullen. His voice varied rapidly from a tremulous indecision (when the animal spirits seemed utterly in abeyance) to that species of energetic concision—that abrupt, weighty, unhurried, and hollow-sounding enunciation—that leaden, self-balanced and perfectly modulated guttural utterance, which may be observed in the lost drunkard, or the irreclaimable eater of opium, during the periods of his most intense excitement.

It was thus that he spoke of the object of my visit, of his earnest desire to see me, and of the solace he expected me to afford him. He entered, at some length, into what he conceived to be the nature of his malady. It was, he said, a constitutional and a family evil, and one for which he despaired to find a remedy—a mere nervous affection, he immediately added, which would undoubtedly soon pass off. It displayed itself in a host of unnatural sensations. Some of these, as he detailed them, interested and bewildered me; although, perhaps, the terms and the general manner of the narration had their weight. He suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses; the most insipid food was alone endurable; he could wear only garments of certain texture; the odors of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a faint light; and there were but peculiar sounds, and these from stringed instruments, which did not inspire him with horror.

To an anomalous species of terror I found him a bounden slave. “I shall perish,” said he, “I must perish in this deplorable folly. Thus, thus, and not otherwise, shall I be lost. I dread the events of the future, not in themselves, but in their results. I shudder at the thought of any, even the most trivial, incident, which may operate upon this intolerable agitation of soul. I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect—in terror. In this unnerved, in this pitiable, condition I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, F EAR.”

I learned, moreover, at intervals, and through broken and equivocal hints, another singular feature of his mental condition. He was enchained by certain superstitious impressions in regard to the dwelling which he tenanted, and whence, for many years, he had never ventured forth—in regard to an influence whose supposititious force was conveyed in terms too shadowy here to be re-stated—an influence which some peculiarities in the mere form and substance of his family mansion had, by dint of long sufferance, he said, obtained over his spirit—an effect which the physique of the gray walls and turrets, and of the dim tarn into which they all looked down, had, at length, brought about upon the morale of his existence.

He admitted, however, although with hesitation, that much of the peculiar gloom which thus afflicted him could be traced to a more natural and far more palpable origin—to the severe and long-continued illness—indeed to the evidently approaching dissolution—of a tenderly beloved sister, his sole companion for long years, his last and only relative on earth. “Her decease,” he said, with a bitterness which I can never forget, “would leave him (him the hopeless and the frail) the last of the ancient race of the Ushers.” While he spoke, the lady Madeline (for so was she called) passed slowly through a remote portion of the apartment, and, without having noticed my presence, disappeared. I regarded her with an utter astonishment not unmingled with dread; and yet I found it impossible to account for such feelings. A sensation of stupor oppressed me as my eyes followed her retreating steps. When a door, at length, closed upon her, my glance sought instinctively and eagerly the countenance of the brother; but he had buried his face in his hands, and I could only perceive that a far more than ordinary wanness had overspread the emaciated fingers through which trickled many passionate tears.

The disease of the lady Madeline had long baffled the skill of her physicians. A settled apathy, a gradual wasting away of the person, and frequent although transient affections of a partially cataleptical character were the unusual diagnosis. Hitherto she had steadily borne up against the pressure of her malady, and had not betaken herself finally to bed; but on the closing in of the evening of my arrival at the house, she succumbed (as her brother told me at night with inexpressible agitation) to the prostrating power of the destroyer; and I learned that the glimpse I had obtained of her person would thus probably be the last I should obtain—that the lady, at least while living, would be seen by me no more.

For several days ensuing, her name was unmentioned by either Usher or myself; and during this period I was busied in earnest endeavors to alleviate the melancholy of my friend. We painted and read together, or I listened, as if in a dream, to the wild improvisations of his speaking guitar. And thus, as a closer and still closer intimacy admitted me more unreservedly into the recesses of his spirit, the more bitterly did I perceive the futility of all attempt at cheering a mind from which darkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe in one unceasing radiation of gloom.

I shall ever bear about me a memory of the many solemn hours I thus spent alone with the master of the House of Usher. Yet I should fail in any attempt to convey an idea of the exact character of the studies, or of the occupations, in which he involved me, or led me the way. An excited and highly distempered ideality threw a sulphureous lustre over all. His long improvised dirges will ring forever in my ears. 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. From the paintings over which his elaborate fancy brooded, and which grew, touch by touch, into vagueness at which I shuddered the more thrillingly, because I shuddered knowing not why—from these paintings (vivid as their images now are before me) I would in vain endeavor to educe more than a small portion which should lie within the compass of merely written words. By the utter simplicity, by the nakedness of his designs, he arrested and overawed attention. If ever mortal painted an idea, that mortal was Roderick Usher. 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.

One of the phantasmagoric conceptions of my friend, partaking not so rigidly of the spirit of abstraction, may be shadowed forth, although feebly, in words. A small picture presented the interior of an immensely long and rectangular vault or tunnel, with low walls, smooth, white, and without interruption or device. Certain accessory points of the design served well to convey the idea that this excavation lay at an exceeding depth below the surface of the earth. No outlet was observed in any portion of its vast extent, and no torch or other artificial source of light was discernible; yet a flood of intense rays rolled throughout, and bathed the whole in a ghastly and inappropriate splendor.

I have just spoken of that morbid condition of the auditory nerve which rendered all music intolerable to the sufferer, with the exception of certain effects of stringed instruments. It was, perhaps, the narrow limits to which he thus confined himself upon the guitar which gave birth, in great measure, to the fantastic character of the performances. But the fervid facility of his impromptus could not be so accounted for. They must have been, and were, in the notes, as well as in the words of his wild fantasias (for he not unfrequently accompanied himself with rhymed verbal improvisations), the result of that intense mental collectedness and concentration to which I have previously alluded as observable only in particular moments of the highest artificial excitement. The words of one of these rhapsodies I have easily remembered. I was, perhaps, the more forcibly impressed with it as he gave it, because, in the under or mystic current of its meaning, I fancied that I perceived, and for the first time, a full consciousness on the part of Usher of the tottering of his lofty reason upon her throne. The verses, which were entitled “The Haunted Palace,” ran very nearly, if not accurately, thus:—

I well remember that suggestions arising from this ballad, led us into a train of thought wherein there became manifest an opinion of Usher’s which I mention not so much on account of its novelty (for other men * have thought thus), as on account of the pertinacity with which he maintained it. This opinion, in its general form, was that of the sentience of all vegetable things. But, in his disordered fancy, the idea had assumed a more daring character, and trespassed, under certain conditions, upon the kingdom of inorganization. I lack words to express the full extent, or the earnest abandon of his persuasion. The belief, however, was connected (as I have previously hinted) with the gray stones of the home of his forefathers. The conditions of the sentience had been here, he imagined, fulfilled in the method of collocation of these stones—in the order of their arrangement, as well as in that of the many fungi which overspread them, and of the decayed trees which stood around—above all, in the long undisturbed endurance of this arrangement, and in its reduplication in the still waters of the tarn. Its evidence—the evidence of the sentience—was to be seen, he said, (and I here started as he spoke), in the gradual yet certain condensation of an atmosphere of their own about the waters and the walls. The result was discoverable, he added, in that silent yet importunate and terrible influence which for centuries had moulded the destinies of his family, and which made him what I now saw him—what he was. Such opinions need no comment, and I will make none.

Our books—the books which, for years, had formed no small portion of the mental existence of the invalid—were, as might be supposed, in strict keeping with this character of phantasm. We pored together over such works as the “Ververt et Chartreuse” of Gresset; the “Belphegor” of Machiavelli; the “Heaven and Hell” of Swedenborg; the “Subterranean Voyage of Nicholas Klimm” by Holberg; the “Chiromancy” of Robert Flud, of Jean D’Indaginé, and of De la Chambre; the “Journey into the Blue Distance” of Tieck; and the “City of the Sun” of Campanella. One favorite volume was a small octavo edition of the “Directorium Inquisitorium,” by the Dominican Eymeric de Gironne; and there were passages in Pomponius Mela, about the old African Satyrs and Œgipans, over which Usher would sit dreaming for hours. His chief delight, however, was found in the perusal of an exceedingly rare and curious book in quarto Gothic—the manual of a forgotten church—the Vigiliæ Mortuorum Secundum Chorum Ecclesiæ Maguntinæ .

I could not help thinking of the wild ritual of this work, and of its probable influence upon the hypochondriac, when, one evening, having informed me abruptly that the lady Madeline was no more, he stated his intention of preserving her corpse for a fortnight (previously to its final interment), in one of the numerous vaults within the main walls of the building. The worldly reason, however, assigned for this singular proceeding, was one which I did not feel at liberty to dispute. The brother had been led to his resolution (so he told me) by consideration of the unusual character of the malady of the deceased, of certain obtrusive and eager inquiries on the part of her medical men, and of the remote and exposed situation of the burial-ground of the family. I will not deny that when I called to mind the sinister countenance of the person whom I met upon the staircase, on the day of my arrival at the house, I had no desire to oppose what I regarded as at best but a harmless, and by no means an unnatural, precaution.

At the request of Usher, I personally aided him in the arrangements for the temporary entombment. The body having been encoffined, we two alone bore it to its rest. The vault in which we placed it (and which had been so long unopened that our torches, half smothered in its oppressive atmosphere, gave us little opportunity for investigation) was small, damp, and entirely without means of admission for light; lying, at great depth, immediately beneath that portion of the building in which was my own sleeping apartment. It had been used, apparently, in remote feudal times, for the worst purposes of a donjon-keep, and, in later days, as a place of deposit for powder, or some other highly combustible substance, as a portion of its floor, and the whole interior of a long archway through which we reached it, were carefully sheathed with copper. The door, of massive iron, had been, also, similarly protected. Its immense weight caused an unusually sharp, grating sound, as it moved upon its hinges.

Having deposited our mournful burden upon tressels within this region of horror, we partially turned aside the yet unscrewed lid of the coffin, and looked upon the face of the tenant. A striking similitude between the brother and sister now first arrested my attention; and Usher, divining, perhaps, my thoughts, murmured out some few words from which I learned that the deceased and himself had been twins, and that sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature had always existed between them. Our glances, however, rested not long upon the dead—for we could not regard her unawed. The disease which had thus entombed the lady in the maturity of youth, had left, as usual in all maladies of a strictly cataleptical character, the mockery of a faint blush upon the bosom and the face, and that suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so terrible in death. We replaced and screwed down the lid, and, having secured the door of iron, made our way, with toil, into the scarcely less gloomy apartments of the upper portion of the house.

And now, some days of bitter grief having elapsed, an observable change came over the features of the mental disorder of my friend. His ordinary manner had vanished. His ordinary occupations were neglected or forgotten. He roamed from chamber to chamber with hurried, unequal, and objectless step. The pallor of his countenance had assumed, if possible, a more ghastly hue—but the luminousness of his eye had utterly gone out. The once occasional huskiness of his tone was heard no more; and a tremulous quaver, as if of extreme terror, habitually characterized his utterance. There were times, indeed, when I thought his unceasingly agitated mind was laboring with some oppressive secret, to divulge which he struggled for the necessary courage. At times, again, I was obliged to resolve all into the mere inexplicable vagaries of madness, for I beheld him gazing upon vacancy for long hours, in an attitude of the profoundest attention, as if listening to some imaginary sound. It was no wonder that his condition terrified—that it infected me. I felt creeping upon me, by slow yet certain degrees, the wild influences of his own fantastic yet impressive superstitions.

It was, especially, upon retiring to bed late in the night of the seventh or eighth day after the placing of the lady Madeline within the donjon, that I experienced the full power of such feelings. Sleep came not near my couch—while the hours waned and waned away. I struggled to reason off the nervousness which had dominion over me. 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. Shaking this off with a gasp and a struggle, I uplifted myself upon the pillows, and, peering earnestly within the intense darkness of the chamber, hearkened—I know not why, except that an instinctive spirit prompted me—to certain low and indefinite sounds which came, through the pauses of the storm, at long intervals, I knew not whence. Overpowered by an intense sentiment of horror, unaccountable yet unendurable, I threw on my clothes with haste (for I felt that I should sleep no more during the night), and endeavored to arouse myself from the pitiable condition into which I had fallen, by pacing rapidly to and fro through the apartment.

I had taken but few turns in this manner, when a light step on an adjoining staircase arrested my attention. I presently recognized it as that of Usher. In an instant afterward he rapped, with a gentle touch, at my door, and entered, bearing a lamp. His countenance was, as usual, cadaverously wan—but, moreover, there was a species of mad hilarity in his eyes—an evidently restrained hysteria in his whole demeanor. His air appalled me—but anything was preferable to the solitude which I had so long endured, and I even welcomed his presence as a relief.

“And you have not seen it?” he said abruptly, after having stared about him for some moments in silence—“you have not then seen it?—but, stay! you shall.” Thus speaking, and having carefully shaded his lamp, he hurried to one of the casements, and threw it freely open to the storm.

The impetuous fury of the entering gust nearly lifted us from our feet. It was, indeed, a tempestuous yet sternly beautiful night, and one wildly singular in its terror and its beauty. A whirlwind had apparently collected its force in our vicinity; for there were frequent and violent alterations in the direction of the wind; and the exceeding density of the clouds (which hung so low as to press upon the turrets of the house) did not prevent our perceiving the life-like velocity with which they flew careering from all points against each other, without passing away into the distance. I say that even their exceeding density did not prevent our perceiving this—yet we had no glimpse of the moon or stars, nor was there any flashing forth of the lightning. But the under surfaces of the huge masses of agitated vapor, as well as all terrestrial objects immediately around us, were glowing in the unnatural light of a faintly luminous and distinctly visible gaseous exhalation which hung about and enshrouded the mansion.

“You must not—you shall not behold this!” said I, shuddering, to Usher, as I led him, with a gentle violence, from the window to a seat. “These appearances, which bewilder you, are merely electrical phenomena not uncommon—or it may be that they have their ghastly origin in the rank miasma of the tarn. Let us close this casement;—the air is chilling and dangerous to your frame. Here is one of your favorite romances. I will read, and you shall listen:—and so we will pass away this terrible night together.”

The antique volume which I had taken up was the “Mad Trist” of Sir Launcelot Canning; but I had called it a favorite of Usher’s more in sad jest than in earnest; for, in truth, there is little in its uncouth and unimaginative prolixity which could have had interest for the lofty and spiritual ideality of my friend. It was, however, the only book immediately at hand; and I indulged a vague hope that the excitement which now agitated the hypochondriac, might find relief (for the history of mental disorder is full of similar anomalies) even in the extremeness of the folly which I should read. Could I have judged, indeed, by the wild overstrained air of vivacity with which he hearkened, or apparently hearkened, to the words of the tale, I might well have congratulated myself upon the success of my design.

I had arrived at that well-known portion of the story where Ethelred, the hero of the Trist, having sought in vain for peaceable admission into the dwelling of the hermit, proceeds to make good an entrance by force. Here, it will be remembered, the words of the narrative run thus:

“And Ethelred, who was by nature of a doughty heart, and who was now mighty withal, on account of the powerfulness of the wine which he had drunken, waited no longer to hold parley with the hermit, who, in sooth, was of an obstinate and maliceful turn, but, feeling the rain upon his shoulders, and fearing the rising of the tempest, uplifted his mace outright, and, with blows, made quickly room in the plankings of the door for his gauntleted hand; and now pulling therewith sturdily, he so cracked, and ripped, and tore all asunder, that the noise of the dry and hollow-sounding wood alarumed and reverberated throughout the forest.”

At the termination of this sentence I started and, for a moment, paused; for it appeared to me (although I at once concluded that my excited fancy had deceived me)—it appeared to me that, from some very remote portion of the mansion, there came, indistinctly to my ears, what might have been, in its exact similarity of character, the echo (but a stifled and dull one certainly) of the very cracking and ripping sound which Sir Launcelot had so particularly described. It was, beyond doubt, the coincidence alone which had arrested my attention; for, amid the rattling of the sashes of the casements, and the ordinary commingled noises of the still increasing storm, the sound, in itself, had nothing, surely, which should have interested or disturbed me. I continued the story:

“But the good champion Ethelred, now entering within the door, was sore enraged and amazed to perceive no signal of the maliceful hermit; but, in the stead thereof, a dragon of a scaly and prodigious demeanor, and of a fiery tongue, which sat in guard before a palace of gold, with a floor of silver; and upon the wall there hung a shield of shining brass with this legend enwritten—

Here again I paused abruptly, and now with a feeling of wild amazement—for there could be no doubt whatever that, in this instance, I did actually hear (although from what direction it proceeded I found it impossible to say) a low and apparently distant, but harsh, protracted, and most unusual screaming or grating sound—the exact counterpart of what my fancy had already conjured up for the dragon’s unnatural shriek as described by the romancer.

Oppressed, as I certainly was, upon the occurrence of this second and most extraordinary coincidence, by a thousand conflicting sensations, in which wonder and extreme terror were predominant, I still retained sufficient presence of mind to avoid exciting, by any observation, the sensitive nervousness of my companion. I was by no means certain that he had noticed the sounds in question; although, assuredly, a strange alteration had, during the last few minutes, taken place in his demeanor. From a position fronting my own, he had gradually brought round his chair, so as to sit with his face to the door of the chamber; and thus I could but partially perceive his features, although I saw that his lips trembled as if he were murmuring inaudibly. His head had dropped upon his breast—yet I knew that he was not asleep, from the wide and rigid opening of the eye as I caught a glance of it in profile. The motion of his body, too, was at variance with this idea—for he rocked from side to side with a gentle yet constant and uniform sway. Having rapidly taken notice of all this, I resumed the narrative of Sir Launcelot, which thus proceeded:

“And now, the champion, having escaped from the terrible fury of the dragon, bethinking himself of the brazen shield, and of the breaking up of the enchantment which was upon it, removed the carcass from out of the way before him, and approached valorously over the silver pavement of the castle to where the shield was upon the wall; which in sooth tarried not for his full coming, but fell down at his feet upon the silver floor, with a mighty great and terrible ringing sound.”

No sooner had these syllables passed my lips, than—as if a shield of brass had indeed, at the moment, fallen heavily upon a floor of silver—I became aware of a distinct, hollow, metallic, and clangorous, yet apparently muffled, reverberation. Completely unnerved, I leaped to my feet; but the measured rocking movement of Usher was undisturbed. I rushed to the chair in which he sat. His eyes were bent fixedly before him, and throughout his whole countenance there reigned a stony rigidity. But, as I placed my hand upon his shoulder, there came a strong shudder over his whole person; a sickly smile quivered about his lips; and I saw that he spoke in a low, hurried, and gibbering murmur, as if unconscious of my presence. Bending closely over him, I at length drank in the hideous import of his words.

“Not hear it?—yes, I hear it, and have heard it. Long—long—long—many minutes, many hours, many days, have I heard it—yet I dared not—oh, pity me, miserable wretch that I am!—I dared not—I dared not speak! We have put her living in the tomb! Said I not that my senses were acute? I now tell you that I heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin. I heard them—many, many days ago—yet I dared not— I dared not speak! And now—to-night—Ethelred—ha! ha!—the breaking of the hermit’s door, and the death-cry of the dragon, and the clangor of the shield!—say, rather, the rending of her coffin, and the grating of the iron hinges of her prison, and her struggles within the coppered archway of the vault! Oh! whither shall I fly? Will she not be here anon? Is she not hurrying to upbraid me for my haste? Have I not heard her footstep on the stair? Do I not distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of her heart? Madman!”—here he sprang furiously to his feet, and shrieked out his syllables, as if in the effort he were giving up his soul— “Madman! I tell you that she now stands without the door!”

As if in the superhuman energy of his utterance there had been found the potency of a spell, the huge antique panels to which the speaker pointed threw slowly back, upon the instant, their ponderous and ebony jaws. It was the work of the rushing gust—but then without those doors there did stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the lady Madeline of Usher. There was blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame. For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon the threshold—then, with a low moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated.

From that chamber, and from that mansion, I fled aghast. The storm was still abroad in all its wrath as I found myself crossing the old causeway. Suddenly there shot along the path a wild light, and I turned to see whence a gleam so unusual could have issued; for the vast house and its shadows were alone behind me. The radiance was that of the full, setting, and blood-red moon which now shone vividly through that once barely-discernible fissure of which I have before spoken as extending from the roof of the building, in a zigzag direction, to the base. While I gazed, this fissure rapidly widened—there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind—the entire orb of the satellite burst at once upon my sight—my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder—there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters—and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the “ House of Usher .”

* Watson, Dr. Percival, Spallanzani, and especially the Bishop of Landaff.—See “Chemical Essays,” vol. v.