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Sir Roderick Usher
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A horror story by Edgar Allan Poe about a mysterious house and its owner, Roderick Usher, who is ill and asks for his friend's help. The narrator, a visitor, is overcome by the gloom and sadness of the place and its surroundings, and imagines a mysterious atmosphere that oppresses him.
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The Fall of the House of Usher, supernatural horror story by Edgar Allan Poe, published in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine in 1839 and issued in Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840).
“The Fall of the House of Usher” begins with the unidentified male narrator riding to the house of Roderick Usher, a childhood friend whom the narrator has not seen in many years. The narrator explains that he recently received a letter from Roderick detailing his worsening mental illness and requesting the narrator’s company. Out of sympathy for his old friend, the narrator agreed to come. Aside from his knowledge of Roderick’s ancient and distinguished family, the narrator knows very little about his friend. Upon arriving, the narrator describes the Usher family mansion in great detail, focusing on its most fantastic features and its unearthly atmosphere. Shortly after entering, the narrator is greeted by Roderick, who displays a number of strange symptoms. He claims his senses are especially acute: therefore, he cannot wear clothes of certain textures or eat particularly flavourful foods, and his eyes are bothered by even the faintest lights.
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Within a few hours of the narrator’s arrival, Roderick begins to share some of his theories about his family. Much to the narrator’s surprise, Roderick claims that the Usher mansion is sentient and that it exercises some degree of control over its inhabitants. He declares that his illness is the product of “a constitutional and a family evil.” (The narrator later dismisses this as a cognitive symptom of Roderick’s “nervous affection.”) Roderick also reveals that Madeline, his twin sister and sole companion in the house, is gravely ill. According to Roderick, Madeline suffers from a cataleptic disease that has gradually limited her mobility. As Roderick talks about his sister’s illness, the narrator sees her pass through a distant part of the house.
The narrator spends the next few days painting, reading, and listening to Roderick play music. He recalls the eerie lyrics from one of Roderick’s songs, endearingly titled “The Haunted Palace.” The penultimate stanza goes:
But evil things, in robes of sorrow,
It is not uncommon for Poe to use first-person narration in his stories. In fact, the majority of Poe’s short stories use this type of narration. The narrator of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” however, is unique in that he is unidentified aside from his gender. The story contains no descriptions of his physical features, his age, or where he is traveling from. Apart from his boyhood friendship with Roderick, his history is unknown. This is all intentional: Poe designed the character as a surrogate, or stand-in, for the reader. The absence of a specific description of his character allows the reader to easily identify with the narrator. In effect, the reader assumes the role of the narrator and experiences the fall of the house of Usher as both an observer and a participant—just as Poe intended. Poe sought to inspire powerful emotional responses to his stories. “The Fall of the House of Usher” is carefully crafted to elicit feelings of dread, stress, and, above all, what it calls “the grim phantasm, FEAR.”
In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the setting, diction, and imagery combine to create an overall atmosphere of gloom. Death and decay are evoked at the outset. The story opens on a “dull, dark, and soundless day” in a “singularly dreary tract of country.” As the narrator notes, it is autumn, the time of year when life begins to give way to old age and death. The house is as melancholy as its environment. A mere glimpse of the Usher mansion inspires in the narrator “an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart.” Upon entering the house, the reader as the narrator navigates through a series of dark passages lined with carvings, tapestries, and armorial trophies. Poe draws heavily on Gothic conventions, using omens and portents, heavy storms, hidden passageways, and shadows to set the reader on edge. The overwhelming sensation is one of entrapment.
Whether the reader is trapped by the house or by its inhabitants is unclear. Poe uses the term house to describe both the physical structure and the family. On the one hand, the house itself appears to be actually sentient, just as Roderick claims. Its windows are described as “eye-like,” and its interior is compared to a living body. Roderick suspects that the house controls its inhabitants. On the other hand, there are plenty of strange things about the Usher family. For one, “the entire family lay in the direct line of descent,” meaning that only one son from each generation survived and reproduced. Poe implies incestuous relations sustained the genetic line and that Roderick and Madeline are the products of extensive intermarriage within the Usher family.
In the end, both houses “die” at the same time: Madeline falls on her brother, and the mansion collapses.
When “The Fall of the House of Usher” was first published in 1839, many people assumed that it was about Poe himself. They observed that the narrator’s description of Roderick also applied to the author:
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.
Poe was often dismissed by contemporary literary critics because of the unusual content and brevity of his stories. When his work was critically evaluated, it was condemned for its tendencies toward Romanticism. The writers and critics of Poe’s day rejected many of that movement’s core tenets, including its emphasis on the emotions and the experience of the sublime. Poe’s contemporaries favoured a more realistic approach to writing. Accordingly, commentaries on social injustice, morality, and utilitarianism proliferated in the mid-19th century. Poe conceived of his writing as a response to the literary conventions of this period. In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” he deliberately subverts convention by rejecting the typical practices of preaching or moralizing and instead focusing on affect and unity of atmosphere.
When Poe began writing short stories, the short story was not generally regarded as serious literature. Poe’s writing helped elevate the genre from a position of critical neglect to an art form. Today Poe’s short stories are lauded as masterpieces of fiction. “The Fall of the House of Usher” stands as one of Poe’s most popular and critically examined stories.
A short story by Edgar Allan Poe, 'The Fall of the House of Usher' is a Gothic horror story about a mysterious mansion, a mad twin, and a secret that threatens to destroy the family. The story explores the themes of the uncanny, the double, and the psychological portrait of the narrator and the house.
The Fall of the House of Usher: Created by Mike Flanagan. With Carla Gugino, Bruce Greenwood, Mary McDonnell, Henry Thomas. Siblings Roderick and Madeline Usher have built a pharmaceutical company into an empire of wealth, privilege and power; however, secrets come to light when the heirs to the Usher dynasty start dying.
- Drama, Horror
- Carla Gugino, Bruce Greenwood, Mary McDonnell
- 2023-10-12
- 3 min
A summary and analysis of Poe's Gothic horror story "The Fall of the House of Usher", which depicts the horror of a house and a family with a mysterious and tragic history. Learn about the themes, characters, symbols, and literary devices of this classic tale of suspense and horror.
A Gothic tale of a haunted house, mysterious sickness, and a family curse. A narrator approaches the house of Usher, where his friend Roderick is ill and his sister Madeline is dead, and hears a voice calling from the grave. The house collapses and the narrator flees in terror.
Poe, creates confusion between the living things and inanimate objects by doubling the physical house of Usher with the genetic family line of the Usher family, which he refers to as the house of Usher. Poe employs the word “house” metaphorically, but he also describes a real house. Not only does the narrator get trapped inside the mansion ...
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