The Fall of the House of Usher represent a creation which has the purpose to express the terror, the unusual and also the shocking events. ‘ “The Fall of the House of Usher” probably measures as one of Poe’s greatest achievements in the short story, and it has admitted many approaches. The tale offers an anxiety-ridden narrator–protagonist, a haunted mansion tenanted by haunted siblings – who eventually come to “haunt” the storyteller – a mysterious doctor, whose intents seem to be nefarious.’
The narrator succeed to give to his story a sort of investigation of psychiatric stages of human mind . His old friend , Roderick Usher is that one whom the narrator had chosen to suffer for such psychiatric problems. He lives in a very strange house which send a chill down to everyone who just try to imagine how it is looking. But , most likely that it has to look in a such a way because only in a place like this a sick mind could live.
‘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.’
Through this description made by the narrator can be seen how the house itself become a character which participates to the entire action. It’s a house in which the normality is totally absent, but something phantasmagoric lives there, something that anticipates all the horrors that happens inside. Referring to the fragments as that mentioned above, Poe said that his ,,horror doesn’t come from Germany, but from his soul ” So, it can be said that, in addition to be a narrator present in the action, Allan Edgar Poe represents the terrible house soul; and by this way he tried to show a picture of what his soul really means and feels.
In his book , cited below, Richard Ruland Malcom said ,on the other hand, that ‘ the narrator, a man of reason and analysis, enters a world where veils gradually fall until everything is inverted and even the house follows its mirror image into the tarn’ , but, all in all, he have to admit that Edgar Allan Poe is present in each character, in each room of the house, in each feeling that is transmitted throw the text. ‘The bleakness of the house, its “vacant eye-like windows,” the rank weeds and pale trunks of decayed trees nearby, mirror his own countenance and thus his own mindset.’
The narrator is wearing during the whole story the mask of normality ,and puts the unusual, the supernatural, the horror and the terror on his character’s shoulders.
During the entire story , Edgar Allan Poe is constantly shocking his reader and create the illusion that more than what have happened before couldn’t happen next, but Poe really has this ability, to transmit fear, fright and terror.
What is really shocking, is the relation of Roderick Usher with his sister Madeline that the former sustain he has with his sister. Apparently, Roderick says, when the narrator noted the resemblance between both of them ,that this special , and unusual relationship that they have, is because they were twins . But, the truth was that there have had an incestuous relationship. When his sister Madeline died, Roderick felt like he is dying too , from inside to outside. Madeline represent from him, part of his being. Biologically, this may happen to those who are twins, but we have to go further more in this affirmation, and say that here is not only this aspect which really counts, but the fact that Madeline is more than a sister, she is the half of his brother’s heart, and not in the sense that they are brethren. Here, we can find what we have said at the beginning of this essay , that Edgar Allan Poe shows in this story psychiatric stages of human mind. Here, in this point, is absolutely clear that there are a lot of psychiatric problems. And also, from here we can deduce why Roderick and Madeline had chosen to live in a such a house. An isolated one. That house embodies perfectly a troubled mind. ‘ Not accidentally does Poe give us a tale of disintegrating bodies, but, more important, disintegrating psyches as well, which he frames with a mansion that looks like a human head.’
So, by this point of analysis, we can deduce that nothing in the entire story happens accidentally. Definitively not . Surely, that the reason why Madeline come back to Roderick, is that they have to die together. The connection between them was absolutely powerful. And the power of incest made them inseparable.
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