In the “Fall of the House of Usher,” Roderick Usher prematurely buries his sister, Madeline Usher, because he thinks she has died from an unknown illness. Poe describes the burial as, “We replaced and screwed down the lid, and having secured the door of iron, made out the way with the toll…” (Poe 425). When Roderick bolted the iron lid upon his sister’s coffin, all trust that had previously been built between the two had been broken. In Poe’s life, after the burial of his wife and mother, he felt like he could never trust anyone as well. He believed that all people that entered his life were bound to die, and if he got close to them, they would just leave him.
Roderick and Madeline Usher have been riddled with many illnesses as a result of the many generations hailing from a “direct line of descent” (Poe 196). The twins are the last members of their family and are on the edge of extinction. It can be possible that the Usher’s had turned their backs on God and “betrayed the Holy Ghost in themselves” (The Fall of the House of Usher 167). As the last of the Usher House, Madeline and Roderick symbolize the end of “an Enlightenment tradition still standing but about to collapse” (The Fall of the House of Usher 167). The physical house reflects the end of the Usher bloodline as it still stands on the edge of ruin, away from civilization.
The narrator tries to distract and cheer Rodrick by playing the guitar and he loves the paintings that Usher has in his house. Roderick lives in a big, creepy mansion were there is a lot of dying plants. Roderick than, tells the narrator that his sister Madeline is his twin. Than Roderick tells the narrator to help him burry his sister, which is alive, since he doesn 't want to take his sister to the doctors because he thinks that they can cause her more damage. So they buried her somewhere in the house.
In the Fall of the House of Usher, Madeline breaks free from her tomb and causes Roderick to have a heart attack because Roderick mistakenly buried her alive. What a person goes through sometimes define them. The narrator becomes traumatized because of what he witnessed. For example, “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Raven” both discuss a disorder of the brain. These stories are written by the same author.
Madeline, sister of Roderick Usher, has a physical illness. She dies, they burry her. Roderick hears sounds, Roderick tells him that he hears those sounds earlier. The narrator starts to hear as well. Roderick is afraid that it might be his sister’s sounds and she comes for him.
Written by Edgar Allan Poe in 1839, The Fall of the House of Usher, is one of the most important gothic stories in the American Literature. The story shows the virtuosity of Poe in “the creation of a psychological state of terror, loneliness and wickedness of his characters” (Howarth), and also the excellence in the using of figurative speech to create parallelism between the characters and the rest of the elements in the story. The aim of this paper is to examine how the incest instead of keeping a bloodline intact, eventually destroys an entire family generating its complete disappearance. In The Fall of the House of Usher incest is explored in a very subtle way. Traditionally “incest has been done by Royal or aristocratic families in order
In Graham Greene's “The Destructors,” Mr. Thomas’s house symbolizes England after World War II. First of all, the structure of the house, known as the “Old Misery’s,” represents the past glory of England. The elaborateness of the house is symbolic of the old class structure. Trevor, or T., describes the house to be “beautiful,” and this word worries Blackie, the initial leader of the gang, because it “[belongs] to a class world” (90). To the new generation, the class structure is an unpleasant remnant of the past.
I felt creeping upon me, by slow yet uncertain degrees, the wild influence of his own fantastic yet impressive superstitions." So we are left hanging with the question, does he lives only to tell the tale? Moving on to the characteristic of genre, „The Fall of the House of Usher” can be considered as a gothic or horror fiction. The metonymy of gloom and horror, an atmosphere of mystery and suspense, high, even overwrought emotion are also part of characteristics of the story. In this case we have a creepy house, dark atmosphere and awful weather and also a tomb.
The house literal shows the house falling and how the house is no longer there. The figurative of the house falling is the fall of the family name as there are no more Usher left. This effects the reader as it shows a theme to the story of darkness and destruction as the actions of the Usher lead to the house falling unveiling a theme to the story. Poe also shows symbolism in his poetry as in his poem Annabel Lee he use symbolism to affect the mood of the story.”In this kingdom by the sea) That the wind came out of the cloud by night, Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.” The wind in this also shows something literal and figurative, as it is literal a wind from the Angels that killed her. But also the wind represents sickness and disease as the wind spread it to causing her to die.
The building hysteria finally culminates in the return of Madeline Usher. With her final death, she takes with her Roderick. Madeline is the tie of Roderick and the narrator to the tangible world. In her absence, their grip on reality grows increasingly nebulous until they implode. Without her, regression to childhood is impossible and so Roderick dies.