‘The Fall Of The House Of Usher’ by Edgar Allan Poe
“Alive” she cried
“…[T]he stem of the Usher race…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.”
— The Fall of the House of Usher, Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe’s story first appeared in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine in September 1839. It is on the surface a symbolic account of the derangement and dissipation of an individual’s personality. The individual concerned is Roderick Usher, who along with his twin sister Madeline are the remnants of the Usher family or ‘House’ in the parlance of the time and in the idiom that Poe uses to detail his own brand of horror.
Our narrator tells of a letter sent from Roderick to his boyhood companion desperately asking for help for the peculiar malady that is afflicting him. He also adds that the Usher mansion is making him ill. His friend cannot refuse because Roderick has opened his “heart” to him and he sets off by horse.
When his friend arrives in the vicinity, he looks at the mansion and feels a sense of decay and death. Yet although the Usher mansion is in a terrible state of disrepair it still stands in an imposing and grand manner. A reminder of…
