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The house of Usher has its own reality and is governed by its own rules, with people having no interest in others. This extreme isolation makes the family closer and closes to the extent that they become inexplicable to the outside world. Roderick contacted him when he was suffering from emotional and mental distress. He does not know much about the house of Usher and is the first outsider to visit the house in many years. The narrator has visited the house because Roderick Usher has sent him a letter that sincerely asks him to give him company.
Further reading
'The Fall of the House of Usher': All the Buried Edgar Allan Poe References - Vanity Fair
'The Fall of the House of Usher': All the Buried Edgar Allan Poe References.
Posted: Thu, 12 Oct 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
The narrator also mentions that Roderick appears to be afraid of his own house. Madeline, the sister of Roderick, is taken with a mysterious illness that cannot be cured by the doctors. She is perhaps suffering from catalepsy in which one loses the control of his/her limbs. He also reads stories to him; however, he is able to lift the spirit of Roderick. Rather than burying his sister in the family cemetery some distance from thehouse, Roderick decides to keep her body for two weeks in one of the manyvaults within the house—for, after all, one suffering from catalepsy may seemdead but not, in fact, be dead; it would be horrible to bury Madeline alive.
“The Haunted Palace”
Roderick’s mental inability to differentiate from reality and fantasy correspond to his sister’s physical weakness. These characters are employed by Poe to explore the relationship and philosophical mystery between body and mind. He illustrates himself as a mind to her body and suffers from the mental counterpart of his sister’s physical illness. Like the narrator of the story of “Tell-Tale Heart,” the hyperactive senses of Roderick Usher are inflamed by his disease.
Fear
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. Shaking off from my spirit what must have been a dream, I scanned more narrowly the real aspect of the building. 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.
At the request of Usher, I personally aided him in the arrangements for the temporary entombment. 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. Its immense weight caused an unusually sharp, grating sound, as it moved upon its hinges. “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.
Inshort, the narrator assists his host in entombing the body temporarily in,first, a coffin with its lid screwed down, and then in a vault behind a massiveiron door of profound weight. There she remains for a week, as Roderick roamsthrough his house aimlessly, or sits and stares vacantly at nothing for longhours. His sister’s illness is only one reason for Roderick’s agitation, one reasonfor his desire to have the “solace” of the narrator’s companionship; it is notthe only—or most significant—reason. Usher himself is suffering from a “mentaldisorder,” which is “a constitutional and .
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? 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.
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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 bloomedIs but a dim-remembered story Of the old time entombed. VI.And travellers now within that valley, Through the red-litten windows seeVast 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. The unnamed narrator has finally reached Usher’s mansion after its master, Roderick Usher, summoned him to bring him solace. The effect is that of a constant alternation between excitement, indecision, fear, and a heightened sensibility to smells, noises, and colors.
The 20th century ushered in a new era of poetic expression, marked by profound shifts in global politics and culture. Eliot, critiqued the excesses of capitalism and the devastation wrought by World War I with unconventional and fragmented verse, while Dylan Thomas’ 1947 poem “Do not go gentle into that good night” served as a poignant plea for resilience in the face of mortality. In a few words, Taylor Swift makes it clear who she thinks holds a membership to the tortured poets department. But, they—just like Swift—are following a long line of Romantics who depicted the realities of their time.
However, the atmosphere and the mood of the setting are far more important than the time and place of the setting. The first of the many settings of the house, Poe describes the outside of the house as spooky. The story “The Fall of the House of Usher” belongs to the Gothic Fiction. There is a sentient house, an underground tomb, a dead body, and dark and stormy nights.
I learned, moreover, at intervals, and through broken and equivocal hints, another singular feature of his mental condition. The song Roderick sings, “The Haunted Palace,” is an extended metaphor that compares the mind of a mad person to a haunted house or a palace under siege. This metaphor is representative of Roderick’s own mental deterioration.
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. 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.
Its main character, William Stendahl, builds a house based on the specifications from Poe's story to murder his enemies. An interpretation which has more potential, then, is the idea that the ‘house of Usher’ is a symbol of the mind, and it is this analysis which has probably found the most favour with critics. Sigmund Freud would, over half a century after Poe was writing, do more than anyone else to delineate the structure of the conscious and unconscious mind, but he was not the first to suggest that our conscious minds might hide, or even repress, unconscious feelings, fears, neuroses, and desires.
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