Utopia

The Fall of the House of Usher

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. I looked upon the scene before me - upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain - upon the bleak walls - upon the vacant eye-like windows - upon a few rank sedges - and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees - with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium - the bitter lapse into everyday life - the hideous dropping off of the veil. 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. What was it - I paused to think - what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher ? It was a mystery all insoluble ; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression ; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down - but with a shudder even more thrilling than before - upon the remodelled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.

Nevertheless, in this mansion of gloom I now proposed to myself a sojourn of some weeks. Its proprietor, Roderick Usher, had been one of my boon companions in boyhood ; but many years had elapsed since our last meeting. A letter, however, had lately reached me in a distant part of the country - a letter from him - which, in its wildly importunate nature, had admitted of no other than a personal reply. The MS. gave evidence of nervous agitation. The writer spoke of acute bodily illness - of a mental disorder which oppressed him - and of an earnest desire to see me, as his best, and indeed his only personal friend, with a view of attempting, by the cheerfulness of my society, some alleviation of his malady. It was the manner in which all this, and much more, was said - it was the apparent heart that went with his request - which allowed me no room for hesitation; and I accordingly obeyed forthwith what I still considered a very singular summons.

Although, as boys, we had been even intimate associates, yet I really knew little of my friend. His reserve had been always excessive and habitual. I was aware, however, that his very ancient family had been noted, time out of mind, for a peculiar sensibility of temperament, displaying itself, through long ages, in many works of exalted art, and manifested, of late, in repeated deeds of munificent yet unobtrusive charity, as well as in a passionate devotion to the intricacies, perhaps even more than to the orthodox and easily recognisable beauties, of musical science. I had learned, too, the very remarkable fact, that the stem of the Usher race, all time-honored as it was, 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. It was this deficiency, I considered, while running over in thought the perfect keeping of the character of the premises with the accredited character of the people, and while speculating upon the possible influence which the one, in the long lapse of centuries, might have exercised upon the other - it was this deficiency, perhaps, of collateral issue, and the consequent undeviating transmission, from sire to son, of the patrimony with the name, which had, at length, so identified the two as to merge the original title of the estate in the quaint and equivocal appellation of the "House of Usher" - an appellation which seemed to include, in the minds of the peasantry who used it, both the family and the family mansion.

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 ? - served mainly to accelerate the increase itself. 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. I had so worked upon my imagination as really to believe that about the whole mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their immediate vicinity - an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn - a pestilent and mystic vapor, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued.

Shaking off from my spirit what must have been a dream, I scanned more narrowly the real aspect of the building. Its principal feature seemed to be that of an excessive antiquity. The discoloration of ages had been great. Minute fungi overspread the whole exterior, hanging in a fine tangled web-work from the eaves. Yet all this was apart from any extraordinary dilapidation. No portion of the masonry had fallen ; and there appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of parts, and the crumbling condition of the individual stones. In this there was much that reminded me of the specious totality of old wood-work which has rotted for long years in some neglected vault, with no disturbance from the breath of the external air. Beyond this indication of extensive decay, however, the fabric gave little token of instability. Perhaps the eye of a scrutinizing 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.

Noticing these things, I rode over a short causeway to the house. A servant in waiting took my horse, and I entered the Gothic archway of the hall. A valet, of stealthy step, thence conducted me, in silence, through many dark and intricate passages in my progress to the studio of his master. Much that I encountered on the way contributed, I know not how, to heighten the vague sentiments of which I have already spoken. While the objects around me - while the carvings of the ceilings, the sombre tapestries of the walls, the ebon blackness of the floors, and the phantasmagoric armorial trophies which rattled as I strode, were but matters to which, or to such as which, I had been accustomed from my infancy - while I hesitated not to acknowledge how familiar was all this - I still wondered to find how unfamiliar were the fancies which ordinary images were stirring up. On one of the staircases, I met the physician of the family. His countenance, I thought, wore a mingled expression of low cunning and perplexity. He accosted me with trepidation and passed on. The valet now threw open a door and ushered me into the presence of his master.

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 trellissed 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. Many books and musical instruments lay scattered about, but failed to give any vitality to the scene. I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all.

Upon my entrance, Usher arose from a sofa on which he had been lying at full length, and greeted me with a vivacious warmth which had much in it, I at first thought, of an overdone cordiality - of the constrained effort of the ennuyé ; man of the world. A glance, however, at his countenance, convinced me of his perfect sincerity. We sat down ; and for some moments, while he spoke not, I gazed upon him with a feeling half of pity, half of awe. Surely, man had never before so terribly altered, in so brief a period, as had Roderick Usher ! It was with difficulty that I could bring myself to admit the identity of the wan being before me with the companion of my early boyhood. Yet the character of his face had been at all times remarkable. 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. And now in the mere exaggeration of the prevailing character of these features, and of the expression they were wont to convey, lay so much of change that I doubted to whom I spoke. The now ghastly pallor of the skin, and the now miraculous lustre of the eye, above all things startled and even awed me. The silken hair, too, had been suffered to grow all unheeded, and as, in its wild gossamer texture, it floated rather than fell about the face, I could not, even with effort, connect its Arabesque expression with any idea of simple humanity.

In the manner of my friend I was at once struck with an incoherence - an inconsistency ; and I soon found this to arise from a series of feeble and futile struggles to overcome an habitual trepidancy - an excessive nervous agitation. For something of this nature I had indeed been prepared, no less by his letter, than by reminiscences of certain boyish traits, and by conclusions deduced from his peculiar physical conformation and temperament. His action was alternately vivacious and sullen. His voice varied rapidly from a tremulous indecision (when the animal spirits seemed utterly in abeyance) to that species of energetic concision - that abrupt, weighty, unhurried, and hollow-sounding enunciation - that leaden, self-balanced and perfectly modulated guttural utterance, which may be observed in the lost drunkard, or the irreclaimable eater of opium, during the periods of his most intense excitement.

It was thus that he spoke of the object of my visit, of his earnest desire to see me, and of the solace he expected me to afford him. He entered, at some length, into what he conceived to be the nature of his malady. It was, he said, a constitutional and a family evil, and one for which he despaired to find a remedy - a mere nervous affection, he immediately added, which would undoubtedly soon pass off. It displayed itself in a host of unnatural sensations. Some of these, as he detailed them, interested and bewildered me ; although, perhaps, the terms, and the general manner of the narration had their weight. He suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses ; the most insipid food was alone endurable; he could wear only garments of certain texture ; the odors of all flowers were oppressive ; his eyes were tortured by even a faint light ; and there were but peculiar sounds, and these from stringed instruments, which did not inspire him with horror.

To an anomalous species of terror I found him a bounden slave. "I shall perish," said he, "I must perish in this deplorable folly. Thus, thus, and not otherwise, shall I be lost. I dread the events of the future, not in themselves, but in their results. I shudder at the thought of any, even the most trivial, incident, which may operate upon this intolerable agitation of soul. I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect - in terror. In this unnerved - in this pitiable condition - I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR."

I learned, moreover, at intervals, and through broken and equivocal hints, another singular feature of his mental condition. He was enchained by certain superstitious impressions in regard to the dwelling which he tenanted, and whence, for many years, he had never ventured forth - in regard to an influence whose supposititious force was conveyed in terms too shadowy here to be re-stated - an influence which some peculiarities in the mere form and substance of his family mansion, had, by dint of long sufferance, he said, obtained over his spirit - an effect which the physique of the gray walls and turrets, and of the dim tarn into which they all looked down, had, at length, brought about upon the morale of his existence.

He admitted, however, although with hesitation, that much of the peculiar gloom which thus afflicted him could be traced to a more natural and far more palpable origin - to the severe and long-continued illness - indeed to the evidently approaching dissolution - of a tenderly beloved sister - his sole companion for long years - his last and only relative on earth. "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. A sensation of stupor oppressed me, as my eyes followed her retreating steps. When a door, at length, closed upon her, my glance sought instinctively and eagerly the countenance of the brother - but he had buried his face in his hands, and I could only perceive that a far more than ordinary wanness had overspread the emaciated fingers through which trickled many passionate tears.

The disease of the lady Madeline had long baffled the skill of her physicians. A settled apathy, a gradual wasting away of the person, and frequent although transient affections of a partially cataleptical character, were the unusual diagnosis. Hitherto she had steadily borne up against the pressure of her malady, and had not betaken herself finally to bed ; but, on the closing in of the evening of my arrival at the house, she succumbed (as her brother told me at night with inexpressible agitation) to the prostrating power of the destroyer ; and I learned that the glimpse I had obtained of her person would thus probably be the last I should obtain - that the lady, at least while living, would be seen by me no more.

For several days ensuing, her name was unmentioned by either Usher or myself: and during this period I was busied in earnest endeavors to alleviate the melancholy of my friend. We painted and read together ; or I listened, as if in a dream, to the wild improvisations of his speaking guitar. And thus, as a closer and still closer intimacy admitted me more unreservedly into the recesses of his spirit, the more bitterly did I perceive the futility of all attempt at cheering a mind from which darkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe, in one unceasing radiation of gloom.

I shall ever bear about me a memory of the many solemn hours I thus spent alone with the master of the House of Usher. Yet I should fail in any attempt to convey an idea of the exact character of the studies, or of the occupations, in which he involved me, or led me the way. An excited and highly distempered ideality threw a sulphureous lustre over all. His long improvised dirges will ring forever in my ears. Among other things, I hold painfully in mind a certain singular perversion and amplification of the wild air of the last waltz of Von Weber. From the paintings over which his elaborate fancy brooded, and which grew, touch by touch, into vaguenesses at which I shuddered the more thrillingly, because I shuddered knowing not why ; - from these paintings (vivid as their images now are before me) I would in vain endeavor to educe more than a small portion which should lie within the compass of merely written words. By the utter simplicity, by the nakedness of his designs, he arrested and overawed attention. If ever mortal painted an idea, that mortal was Roderick Usher. For me at least - in the circumstances then surrounding me - there arose out of the pure abstractions which the hypochondriac contrived to throw upon his canvass, an intensity of intolerable awe, no shadow of which felt I ever yet in the contemplation of the certainly glowing yet too concrete reveries of Fuseli.

One of the phantasmagoric conceptions of my friend, partaking not so rigidly of the spirit of abstraction, may be shadowed forth, although feebly, in words. A small picture presented the interior of an immensely long and rectangular vault or tunnel, with low walls, smooth, white, and without interruption or device. Certain accessory points of the design served well to convey the idea that this excavation lay at an exceeding depth below the surface of the earth. No outlet was observed in any portion of its vast extent, and no torch, or other artificial source of light was discernible ; yet a flood of intense rays rolled throughout, and bathed the whole in a ghastly and inappropriate splendor.

I have just spoken of that morbid condition of the auditory nerve which rendered all music intolerable to the sufferer, with the exception of certain effects of stringed instruments. It was, perhaps, the narrow limits to which he thus confined himself upon the guitar, which gave birth, in great measure, to the fantastic character of his performances. But the fervid facility of his impromptus could not be so accounted for. They must have been, and were, in the notes, as well as in the words of his wild fantasias (for he not unfrequently accompanied himself with rhymed verbal improvisations), the result of that intense mental collectedness and concentration to which I have previously alluded as observable only in particular moments of the highest artificial excitement. The words of one of these rhapsodies I have easily remembered. I was, perhaps, the more forcibly impressed with it, as he gave it, because, in the under or mystic current of its meaning, I fancied that I perceived, and for the first time, a full consciousness on the part of Usher, of the tottering of his lofty reason upon her throne. The verses, which were entitled "The Haunted Palace," ran very nearly, if not accurately, thus:

                         I.
     In the greenest of our valleys,
         By good angels tenanted,
     Once a fair and stately palace -
         Radiant palace - reared its head.
     In the monarch Thought's dominion -
         It stood there !
     Never seraph spread a pinion
         Over fabric half so fair.
                         II.
     Banners yellow, glorious, golden,
         On its roof did float and flow;
     (This - all this - was in the olden
         Time long ago)
     And every gentle air that dallied,
         In that sweet day,
     Along the ramparts plumed and pallid,
         A winged odor went away.
                         III.
     Wanderers in that happy valley
         Through two luminous windows saw
     Spirits moving musically
         To a lute's well-tunéd law,
     Round about a throne, where sitting
         (Porphyrogene  !)
     In state his glory well befitting,
         The ruler of the realm was seen.
                          IV.
     And all with pearl and ruby glowing
         Was the fair palace door,
     Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing,
         And sparkling evermore,
     A troop of Echoes whose sweet duty
         Was but to sing,
     In voices of surpassing beauty,
         The wit and wisdom of their king.
                         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 bloomed
     Is but a dim-remembered story
         Of the old time entombed.
                         VI.
     And travellers now within that valley,
         Through the red-litten windows, see
     Vast 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.
I well remember that suggestions arising from this ballad, led us into a train of thought wherein there became manifest an opinion of Usher's which I mention not so much on account of its novelty, (for other men have thought thus,) as on account of the pertinacity with which he maintained it. This opinion, in its general form, was that of the sentience of all vegetable things. But, in his disordered fancy, the idea had assumed a more daring character, and trespassed, under certain conditions, upon the kingdom of inorganization. I lack words to express the full extent, or the earnest abandon of his persuasion. The belief, however, was connected (as I have previously hinted) with the gray stones of the home of his forefathers. The conditions of the sentience had been here, he imagined, fulfilled in the method of collocation of these stones - in the order of their arrangement, as well as in that of the many fungi which overspread them, and of the decayed trees which stood around - above all, in the long undisturbed endurance of this arrangement, and in its reduplication in the still waters of the tarn. Its evidence - the evidence of the sentience - was to be seen, he said, (and I here started as he spoke,) in the gradual yet certain condensation of an atmosphere of their own about the waters and the walls. The result was discoverable, he added, in that silent, yet importunate and terrible influence which for centuries had moulded the destinies of his family, and which made him what I now saw him - what he was. Such opinions need no comment, and I will make none.

Our books - the books which, for years, had formed no small portion of the mental existence of the invalid - were, as might be supposed, in strict keeping with this character of phantasm. We pored together over such works as the Ververt et Chartreuse of Gresset ; the Belphegor of Machiavelli ; the Heaven and Hell of Swedenborg ; the Subterranean Voyage of Nicholas Klimm by Holberg ; the Chiromancy of Robert Flud, of Jean D'Indaginé, and of De la Chambre ; the Journey into the Blue Distance of Tieck ; and the City of the Sun of Campanella. One favorite volume was a small octavo edition of the Directorium Inquisitorium , by the Dominican Eymeric de Gironne; and there were passages in Pomponius Mela, about the old African Satyrs and Oegipans, over which Usher would sit dreaming for hours. His chief delight, however, was found in the perusal of an exceedingly rare and curious book in quarto Gothic - the manual of a forgotten church - the Vigiliae Mortuorum secundum Chorum Ecclesiae Maguntinae .

I could not help thinking of the wild ritual of this work, and of its probable influence upon the hypochondriac, when, one evening, having informed me abruptly that the lady Madeline was no more, he stated his intention of preserving her corpse for a fortnight, (previously to its final interment,) in one of the numerous vaults within the main walls of the building. The worldly reason, however, assigned for this singular proceeding, was one which I did not feel at liberty to dispute. The brother had been led to his resolution (so he told me) by consideration of the unusual character of the malady of the deceased, of certain obtrusive and eager inquiries on the part of her medical men, and of the remote and exposed situation of the burial-ground of the family. I will not deny that when I called to mind the sinister countenance of the person whom I met upon the staircase, on the day of my arrival at the house, I had no desire to oppose what I regarded as at best but a harmless, and by no means an unnatural, precaution.

At the request of Usher, I personally aided him in the arrangements for the temporary entombment. The body having been encoffined, we two alone bore it to its rest. The vault in which we placed it (and which had been so long unopened that our torches, half smothered in its oppressive atmosphere, gave us little opportunity for investigation) was small, damp, and entirely without means of admission for light ; lying, at great depth, immediately beneath that portion of the building in which was my own sleeping apartment. 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. The door, of massive iron, had been, also, similarly protected. Its immense weight caused an unusually sharp grating sound, as it moved upon its hinges.

Having deposited our mournful burden upon tressels within this region of horror, we partially turned aside the yet unscrewed lid of the coffin, and looked upon the face of the tenant. A striking similitude between the brother and sister now first arrested my attention ; and Usher, divining, perhaps, my thoughts, murmured out some few words from which I learned that the deceased and himself had been twins, and that sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature had always existed between them. Our glances, however, rested not long upon the dead - for we could not regard her unawed. The disease which had thus entombed the lady in the maturity of youth, had left, as usual in all maladies of a strictly cataleptical character, the mockery of a faint blush upon the bosom and the face, and that suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so terrible in death. We replaced and screwed down the lid, and, having secured the door of iron, made our way, with toil, into the scarcely less gloomy apartments of the upper portion of the house.

And now, some days of bitter grief having elapsed, an observable change came over the features of the mental disorder of my friend. His ordinary manner had vanished. His ordinary occupations were neglected or forgotten. He roamed from chamber to chamber with hurried, unequal, and objectless step. The pallor of his countenance had assumed, if possible, a more ghastly hue - but the luminousness of his eye had utterly gone out. The once occasional huskiness of his tone was heard no more; and a tremulous quaver, as if of extreme terror, habitually characterized his utterance. There were times, indeed, when I thought his unceasingly agitated mind was laboring with some oppressive secret, to divulge which he struggled for the necessary courage. At times, again, I was obliged to resolve all into the mere inexplicable vagaries of madness, for I beheld him gazing upon vacancy for long hours, in an attitude of the profoundest attention, as if listening to some imaginary sound. It was no wonder that his condition terrified - that it infected me. I felt creeping upon me, by slow yet certain degrees, the wild influences of his own fantastic yet impressive superstitions.

It was, especially, upon retiring to bed late in the night of the seventh or eighth day after the placing of the lady Madeline within the donjon, that I experienced the full power of such feelings. Sleep came not near my couch - while the hours waned and waned away. I struggled to reason off the nervousness which had dominion over me. I endeavored to believe that much, if not all of what I felt, was due to the bewildering influence of the gloomy furniture of the room - of the dark and tattered draperies, which, tortured into motion by the breath of a rising tempest, swayed fitfully to and fro upon the walls, and rustled uneasily about the decorations of the bed. But my efforts were fruitless. An irrepressible tremor gradually pervaded my frame ; and, at length, there sat upon my very heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm. Shaking this off with a gasp and a struggle, I uplifted myself upon the pillows, and, peering earnestly within the intense darkness of the chamber, harkened - I know not why, except that an instinctive spirit prompted me - to certain low and indefinite sounds which came, through the pauses of the storm, at long intervals, I knew not whence. Overpowered by an intense sentiment of horror, unaccountable yet unendurable, I threw on my clothes with haste (for I felt that I should sleep no more during the night), and endeavored to arouse myself from the pitiable condition into which I had fallen, by pacing rapidly to and fro through the apartment.

I had taken but few turns in this manner, when a light step on an adjoining staircase arrested my attention. I presently recognised it as that of Usher. In an instant afterward he rapped, with a gentle touch, at my door, and entered, bearing a lamp. His countenance was, as usual, cadaverously wan - but, moreover, there was a species of mad hilarity in his eyes - an evidently restrained hysteria in his whole demeanor. His air appalled me - but anything was preferable to the solitude which I had so long endured, and I even welcomed his presence as a relief.

"And you have not seen it ?" he said abruptly, after having stared about him for some moments in silence - "you have not then seen it ? - but, stay ! you shall." Thus speaking, and having carefully shaded his lamp, he hurried to one of the casements, and threw it freely open to the storm.

The impetuous fury of the entering gust nearly lifted us from our feet. It was, indeed, a tempestuous yet sternly beautiful night, and one wildly singular in its terror and its beauty. A whirlwind had apparently collected its force in our vicinity ; for there were frequent and violent alterations in the direction of the wind ; and the exceeding density of the clouds (which hung so low as to press upon the turrets of the house) did not prevent our perceiving the life-like velocity with which they flew careering from all points against each other, without passing away into the distance. I say that even their exceeding density did not prevent our perceiving this - yet we had no glimpse of the moon or stars - nor was there any flashing forth of the lightning. But the under surfaces of the huge masses of agitated vapor, as well as all terrestrial objects immediately around us, were glowing in the unnatural light of a faintly luminous and distinctly visible gaseous exhalation which hung about and enshrouded the mansion.

"You must not - you shall not behold this !" said I, shudderingly, to Usher, as I led him, with a gentle violence, from the window to a seat. "These appearances, which bewilder you, are merely electrical phenomena not uncommon - or it may be that they have their ghastly origin in the rank miasma of the tarn. Let us close this casement ; - the air is chilling and dangerous to your frame. Here is one of your favorite romances. I will read, and you shall listen ; - and so we will pass away this terrible night together."

The antique volume which I had taken up was the "Mad Trist" of Sir Launcelot Canning ; but I had called it a favorite of Usher's more in sad jest than in earnest ; for, in truth, there is little in its uncouth and unimaginative prolixity which could have had interest for the lofty and spiritual ideality of my friend. It was, however, the only book immediately at hand ; and I indulged a vague hope that the excitement which now agitated the hypochondriac, might find relief (for the history of mental disorder is full of similar anomalies) even in the extremeness of the folly which I should read. Could I have judged, indeed, by the wild overstrained air of vivacity with which he harkened, or apparently harkened, to the words of the tale, I might well have congratulated myself upon the success of my design.

I had arrived at that well-known portion of the story where Ethelred, the hero of the Trist, having sought in vain for peaceable admission into the dwelling of the hermit, proceeds to make good an entrance by force. Here, it will be remembered, the words of the narrative run thus:

"And Ethelred, who was by nature of a doughty heart, and who was now mighty withal, on account of the powerfulness of the wine which he had drunken, waited no longer to hold parley with the hermit, who, in sooth, was of an obstinate and maliceful turn, but, feeling the rain upon his shoulders, and fearing the rising of the tempest, uplifted his mace outright, and, with blows, made quickly room in the plankings of the door for his gauntleted hand ; and now pulling therewith sturdily, he so cracked, and ripped, and tore all asunder, that the noise of the dry and hollow-sounding wood alarummed and reverberated throughout the forest."

At the termination of this sentence I started, and for a moment, paused ; for it appeared to me (although I at once concluded that my excited fancy had deceived me) - it appeared to me that, from some very remote portion of the mansion, there came, indistinctly, to my ears, what might have been, in its exact similarity of character, the echo (but a stifled and dull one certainly) of the very cracking and ripping sound which Sir Launcelot had so particularly described. It was, beyond doubt, the coincidence alone which had arrested my attention ; for, amid the rattling of the sashes of the casements, and the ordinary commingled noises of the still increasing storm, the sound, in itself, had nothing, surely, which should have interested or disturbed me. I continued the story:

"But the good champion Ethelred, now entering within the door, was sore enraged and amazed to perceive no signal of the maliceful hermit ; but, in the stead thereof, a dragon of a scaly and prodigious demeanor, and of a fiery tongue, which sate in guard before a palace of gold, with a floor of silver ; and upon the wall there hung a shield of shining brass with this legend enwritten -

     Who entereth herein, a conqueror hath bin ;
     Who slayeth the dragon, the shield he shall win;
And Ethelred uplifted his mace, and struck upon the head of the dragon, which fell before him, and gave up his pesty breath, with a shriek so horrid and harsh, and withal so piercing, that Ethelred had fain to close his ears with his hands against the dreadful noise of it, the like whereof was never before heard."

Here again I paused abruptly, and now with a feeling of wild amazement - for there could be no doubt whatever that, in this instance, I did actually hear (although from what direction it proceeded I found it impossible to say) a low and apparently distant, but harsh, protracted, and most unusual screaming or grating sound - the exact counterpart of what my fancy had already conjured up for the dragon's unnatural shriek as described by the romancer.

Oppressed, as I certainly was, upon the occurrence of this second and most extraordinary coincidence, by a thousand conflicting sensations, in which wonder and extreme terror were predominant, I still retained sufficient presence of mind to avoid exciting, by any observation, the sensitive nervousness of my companion. I was by no means certain that he had noticed the sounds in question ; although, assuredly, a strange alteration had, during the last few minutes, taken place in his demeanor. From a position fronting my own, he had gradually brought round his chair, so as to sit with his face to the door of the chamber ; and thus I could but partially perceive his features, although I saw that his lips trembled as if he were murmuring inaudibly. His head had dropped upon his breast - yet I knew that he was not asleep, from the wide and rigid opening of the eye as I caught a glance of it in profile. The motion of his body, too, was at variance with this idea - for he rocked from side to side with a gentle yet constant and uniform sway. Having rapidly taken notice of all this, I resumed the narrative of Sir Launcelot, which thus proceeded:

"And now, the champion, having escaped from the terrible fury of the dragon, bethinking himself of the brazen shield, and of the breaking up of the enchantment which was upon it, removed the carcass from out of the way before him, and approached valorously over the silver pavement of the castle to where the shield was upon the wall ; which in sooth tarried not for his full coming, but fell down at his feet upon the silver floor, with a mighty great and terrible ringing sound."

No sooner had these syllables passed my lips, than - as if a shield of brass had indeed, at the moment, fallen heavily upon a floor of silver - I became aware of a distinct, hollow, metallic, and clangorous, yet apparently muffled reverberation. Completely unnerved, I leaped to my feet ; but the measured rocking movement of Usher was undisturbed. I rushed to the chair in which he sat. His eyes were bent fixedly before him, and throughout his whole countenance there reigned a stony rigidity. But, as I placed my hand upon his shoulder, there came a strong shudder over his whole person ; a sickly smile quivered about his lips ; and I saw that he spoke in a low, hurried, and gibbering murmur, as if unconscious of my presence. Bending closely over him, I at length drank in the hideous import of his words.

"Not hear it ? - yes, I hear it, and have heard it. Long - long - long - many minutes, many hours, many days, have I heard it - yet I dared not - oh, pity me, miserable wretch that I am ! - I dared not - I dared not speak ! We have put her living in the tomb ! Said I not that my senses were acute ? I now tell you that I heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin. I heard them - many, many days ago - yet I dared not - I dared not speak ! And now - to-night - Ethelred - ha ! ha ! - the breaking of the hermit's door, and the death-cry of the dragon, and the clangor of the shield ! - say, rather, the rending of her coffin, and the grating of the iron hinges of her prison, and her struggles within the coppered archway of the vault ! Oh whither shall I fly ? Will she not be here anon ? Is she not hurrying to upbraid me for my haste ? Have I not heard her footstep on the stair ? Do I not distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of her heart ? Madman !" - here he sprang furiously to his feet, and shrieked out his syllables, as if in the effort he were giving up his soul - " Madman ! I tell you that she now stands without the door ! "

As if in the superhuman energy of his utterance there had been found the potency of a spell - the huge antique pannels to which the speaker pointed, threw slowly back, upon the instant, their ponderous and ebony jaws. It was the work of the rushing gust - but then without those doors there did stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the lady Madeline of Usher. There was blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame. For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon the threshold - then, with a low moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated.

From that chamber, and from that mansion, I fled aghast. The storm was still abroad in all its wrath as I found myself crossing the old causeway. Suddenly there shot along the path a wild light, and I turned to see whence a gleam so unusual could have issued ; for the vast house and its shadows were alone behind me. The radiance was that of the full, setting, and blood-red moon, which now shone vividly through that once barely-discernible fissure, of which I have before spoken as extending from the roof of the building, in a zigzag direction, to the base. While I gazed, this fissure rapidly widened - there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind - the entire orb of the satellite burst at once upon my sight - my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder - there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters - and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the "House of Usher ."

Short Summary

An unnamed protagonist (the Narrator) is summoned to the remote mansion of his boyhood friend, Roderick Usher. Filled with a sense of dread by the sight of the house itself, the Narrator reunites with his old companion, who is suffering from a strange mental illness and whose sister Madeline is near death due to a mysterious disease. The Narrator provides company to Usher while he paints and plays guitar, spending all his days inside, avoiding the sunlight and obsessing over the sentience of the non-living. When Madeline dies, Usher decides to bury her temporarily in one of his house's large vaults. A few days later, however, she emerges from her provisional tomb, killing her brother while the Narrator flees for his life. The House of Usher splits apart and collapses, wiping away the last remnants of the ancient family.

Character List

The Narrator

We know little of his background, and we never even learn his name. He was childhood friends with Roderick Usher. He arrives on horseback at the house with the intention of helping Usher. Though he details precisely the nature of Usher's madness, it is suggested through the course of the narrative that he too may be losing his sanity. Indeed, given his terrified description of the ghastly house in the opening passages of the tale, the reader must wonder whether he was sane from the start.

Roderick Usher

The last living descendant, along with his ailing sister Madeline, of the Ushers, a time-worn family of wealth and prestige, known as patrons of the arts and givers of charity, but also stricken with a peculiar temperament that seems to run through their blood. Never having crossed lines with other families, the Usher name lies entirely "in the direct line of descent"--so that, after Madeline dies, Roderick is his family's sole living exponent. At the beginning of the story he already suffers from a severe mental illness, which steadily grows worse as the tale progresses. After his sister's death, he seems to retreat completely into madness. Before that precipitous fall, however, he dabbles in painting and shows himself to be an able guitar player. A man of culture and erudition, Roderick Usher spends his days inside his dark and cavernous mansion, avoiding sunlight or the smells of flowers, and obsessing over "the sentience of all vegetable things."

Madeline

Roderick Usher's sister. She suffers from a mysterious illness, cataleptic in nature, never otherwise explained. What is most important to the story, however, is the degree to which Roderick loves her. He seems unable to bear the thought of her death. The fact that the two of them live together without spouses in the great family mansion suggests, given the pecularity of the two and their unusual family history, the possibility of an incestuous relationship.

Glossary of Terms

"Son coeur est un luth suspendu;/Sitot qu'on le touch il resonne"

French for "His heart is a hanging lute;/Whenever one touches it, it resounds."

"which in sooth tarried not for his full coming"

which in truth did not wait for him to arrive

collocation

arrangement or juxtaposition

doughty

brave

ennuye

French for bored or apathetic

Fuseli

Henry Fuseli (1741-1825) was a painter in the Romantic style. He thereby participated in much the same artistic tradition which originally inspired Edgar Allan Poe. Noted for their grandiose intensity and wild imagination, Fuseli's paintings are referred to in this story as "reveries," reflecting the even more dreamlike, less "concrete" works of Usher.

hold parley

discuss or converse; negotiate with an antagonist

pinion

wing

porphyrogene

royal--in "The Haunted Palace," the implication is that the inhabitants of the palace are of royal descent (note that the ruler is called a "monarch")

prolixity

long-windedness. Much as Poe was famous for ripping apart works of literature in his reviews, here the Narrator flatly denounces the silly "Mad Trist" he reads to Usher as a way of calming both of them down.

seraph

celestial winged being

tarn

mountain lake, river

Major Themes

Mortality

The plot of Poe's tale essentially involves a woman who dies, is buried, and rises from the grave. But did she ever die? Near the horrific finale of the tale, Usher screams: "We have put her living in the tomb!" Premature burial was something of an obsession for Poe, who featured it in many of his stories. In "The Fall of the House of Usher," however, it is not clear to what extent the supernatural can be said to account for the strangeness of the events in the tale. Madeline may actually have died and risen like a vampire--much as Usher seems to possess vampiric qualities, arising "from a sofa on which he had been lying at full length" when the Narrator first sees him, avoiding all daylight and most food, and roaming through his crypt-like abode. But a more realistic version of events suggests that she may have been mistaken for dead--and luckily managed to escape her tomb. Either way, the line between life and death is a fine one in Poe's fiction, and Usher's study of the "sentience of all vegetable things" fits aptly with Poe's own preoccupations.

Madness

Poe writes that Usher "entered, at some length, into what he conceived to be the nature of his malady." What exactly is his "malady" we never learn. Even Usher seems uncertain, contradictory in his description: "It was, he said, a constitutional and a family evil, and one for which he despaired to find a remedy--a mere nervous affection, he immediately added, which would undoubtedly soon pass off." The Narrator notes an "incoherence" and "inconsistency" in his old friend, but he offers little by way of scientific explanation of the condition. As a result, the line between sanity and insanity becomes blurred, which paves the way for the Narrator's own descent into madness.

Fear

If we were to try to define Roderick Usher's illness precisely, we might diagnose him with acute anxiety. What seems to terrify Usher is fear itself. "To an anomalous species of terror," Poe writes, "I found him a bounden slave." Usher tries to explain to the Narrator that he dreads "the events of the future, not in themselves but in their results." He dreads the intangible and the unknowable; he fears precisely what cannot be rationally feared. Fear for no apparent reason except ambiguity itself is an important motif in Poe's tale, which after all begins with the Narrator's description of his own irrational dread: "I know not how it was--but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit." Later, Usher identifies fear itself as the thing that will kill him, suggesting that his own anxiety is what conjures up the blood-stained Madeline--or that she is simply a manifestation of his own deepest neuroses.

Incest

What binds Usher to Madeline, and what renders him terrified of her? If he conjures up her specter, arisen from the grave to bring him to his own, why does he do so? There is a clear incestuous undertone to the relationship between the brother and sister. Without spouses they live together in the great family home, each of them wasting away within the building's dark rooms. The Narrator describes the strange qualities of the Usher family--that it never has put forth "any enduring branch," that "the entire family lay in the direct line of descent." The implication is that incest is the norm for the Ushers, and that Roderick's and Madeline's strange illnesses may stem from their inbred genes.

Friendship

The Narrator arrives at the House of Usher in order to visit a friend. While the relationship between him and Roderick is never fully explained, the reader does learn that they were boyhood friends. That Usher writes to the Narrator, urging him to give him company in his time of distress, suggests the close rapport between the two men. But Poe's story is a chronicle of both distancing and identification. In other words, the Narrator seems to remove himself spiritually from Usher, terrified of his house, his illness, his appearance, but as the narrative progresses he cannot help but be drawn into Usher's twisted world. Alas, family (if not incest) trumps friendship at the end, when Usher and Madeline are reunited and the Narrator is cast off on his own into the raging storm.

Burial

There are three images of would-be "tombs" or "crypts" in "The Fall of the House of Usher." The house itself is shut off from the daylight, its cavernous rooms turned into spacious vaults, in which characters who never seem entirely alive--Madeline and Usher--waste away. Second, Usher's painting is of "an immensely long and rectangular vault or tunnel," foreshadowing the third image of a tomb, the real one of Madeline's temporary burial. What Poe has constructed therefore is a kind of mise-en-abime (story-within-a-story)--tombs being represented within tombs. The implication, especially once the entire House of Usher sinks into a new grave below the tarn, is that the world itself is a kind of crypt.

The Arts

Despite (or because) of his madness, Usher is skilled at music and apparently is quite a painter. The Narrator compares Roderick's "phantasmagoric conceptions" to those of a real artist, Fuseli, and the Narrator seems both entranced and terrified by them. "If ever mortal painted an idea," he proposes, "that mortal was Roderick Usher." Insofar as art might be deemed a stab at immortality, the death-obsessed Usher, so certain of his own demise, strives to cling to time itself by producing works which can last beyond him. And insofar as art is a fleeting good in itself, Usher might at least claim a bit of beauty in the midst of his anxieties. Ironically, though, the one painting of his that the Narrator describes portrays a tomb, and everything is finally destroyed by the House's collapse. It would seem that his art fails Roderick Usher.

 Plot summary

"The Fall of the House of Usher" begins with one of Poe's most famous descriptions: "During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year . . . " The Narrator is describing his arrival on horseback at Roderick Usher's isolated abode one dreary evening. Immediately he feels an irrational fear upon viewing the huge, decrepit house. Among the mansion's singular features are windows which resemble eyes and a fissure in the stone zig-zagging its way through the faÕade.

We learn that the Narrator and Usher were childhood friends. Recently, the Narrator received a letter from Usher. In the letter, Roderick described a certain "mental disorder" that was plaguing him, and he communicated a desperate desire to see his old companion. Due to the urgent tone of the letter, the Narrator never thought twice; without hesitation he obeyed this "very singular summons."

Usher, the Narrator informs us, was always excessively reserved and was somewhat mysterious. He belongs to an ancient family that has never put forth "an enduring branch." There are hints of incest over the years, but more important is the fact that Usher is now the only male descendant of the line. Tellingly, he lives not with a wife but with his sister, Madeline.

Musing on the Ushers' "peculiar sensibility of temperament"--this is, after all, a family which has over the ages served as patron to the arts, charity to the poor, and lover of music--the Narrator surveys the house. He notes how old it appears. He sees that individual stones seem on the verge of crumbling while the edifice as a whole appears remarkably stable (despite the fissure). He rides down a causeway to the entrance, over a "tarn" (a small mountain lake) that borders the construction. A servant takes his horse, and a valet escorts him into the house.

He goes through a Gothic archway, then up a staircase, where he meets the sinister-looking family doctor. Finally, he enters his old friend's studio, a dark and cavernous room. Usher arises from a sofa on which he has been lying and welcomes the Narrator with "overdone cordiality." Meanwhile, the Narrator notes that all of Usher's usual facial features--pale skin, thin lips, large and liquid eyes, web-like hair--have become exaggerated. The skin is now "ghastly" in hue, and the hair floats wildly over his forehead. Moreover, Usher seems incoherent and excessively nervous, bouncing back and forth between vivacity and depression.

He tells the Narrator of his illness, a "nervous affection" which has resulted in a few bizarre symptoms. For one, Usher's senses seem now incredibly acute. He cannot bear most food. He can only wear certain types of fabric. The smell of flowers makes him sick. His eyes cannot stand light. And almost all sounds save those of certain stringed instruments--like the guitar he sometimes plays--"inspire him with horror." All in all, the man seems overwhelmed by his malady, obsessed with the idea of fear. He calls the source of his fear a "grim phantasm."

The causes for this affliction are mysterious. One possible factor Usher mentions is the failing health of his beloved sister. The Narrator himself catches a glimpse of Madeline passing through a hall. She is bound to die, we learn, and the notion of being "the last of the ancient race of the Ushers" fills Roderick with dread and sorrow.

Still, the two boyhood friends do try to make the days pass decently. The primary reason the Narrator is even at the House is to provide some company if not also some cheer. He watches while Roderick paints. One of the paintings depicts the interior of a long vault or tunnel, clearly well below the earth, with no source of artificial light, yet bathed in "a flood of intense rays." Another pastime of Usher's is playing guitar. Due to his excitement and nervousness, he seems to excel at playing it. He revels in strange improvisations, and he often sings along.

One of these sets of verses, called "The Haunted Palace," tells of a beautiful castle in a green valley, inhabited by "the monarch Thought." Spirits move, and troops of "Echoes" sing the wisdom of their king. It is a kind of paradise. But "evil things" invade, reducing the palace to a place of "discordant melody."

Roderick also spends time in intellectual pursuit. He has become fixated on the idea of the sentience of all "vegetable," as well as even inanimate, things. He pores over books in his vast library, speaks of a living "atmosphere" about the waters and walls of the house.

When Madeline finally dies, he decides to preserve her corpse for a fortnight in one of the building's vaults. It seems a reasonable precaution, given how far away the family burial grounds are, so the Narrator accepts the idea.

In the process of this "temporary entombment," the Narrator gets his first good look at the face of the deceased. He is struck by how similar in appearance she and Roderick are. He learns that they were twins and that there had always existed some kind of intangible bond between them.

In the days that follow, the Narrator notes the increasing madness of Usher: his skin grows whiter, his ordinary occupations are forgotten, and he roams through the house or stares into space for hours and hours. What frightens the Narrator even more is that he too is beginning to feel "infected" by Usher's condition. The Narrator fears that he too may be going mad.

One night, when a storm rages outside and the Narrator is too terrified to sleep, he and Usher sit together in a bedroom and read from the "Mad Trist" by Sir Launcelot Canning. It is a ridiculous old romance about a knight's battle with a dragon. In it, Ethelred, the hero, breaks down the door of a hermit's abode, making quite a noise. But when the Narrator reads aloud the account of this act, he thinks he hears the same kind of noise described in the book--"the very cracking and ripping sound Sir Launcelot had so particularly described."

Trying to calm himself down, the Narrator continues reading to his friend, arriving at the spot in the story when Ethelred finds a dragon inside instead of the hermit and then promptly slays it. The dragon lets out a horrible shriek, and as the Narrator reads the description he hears a "most unusual screaming" sound. Terrified, he looks to Usher, who has now positioned his chair to face the door of the room and rocks from side to side while murmuring to himself.

The Narrator returns to the book, in which Ethelred removes the dragon's corpse and tries to grasp the shield on the wall (apparently the object he has been seeking). The shield, however, falls at his feet, making a "terrible ringing sound." Yet again, the Narrator hears with his own ears the same kind of noise. Finally Usher addresses him: "We have put her living in the tomb!"

Horrified about receiving retribution for "his haste" in the burial, leaping from his chair, Usher shrieks: "Madman! I tell you that she now stands without the door!" As if on command, the doors to the chamber spring open--due to the storm, the Narrator explains--and there stands Madeline, her white robes stained with blood. With a "low, moaning cry" she attacks her brother, instantly killing him, while the Narrator flees into the storm.

The last image the Narrator describes seeing is that of the House of Usher splitting apart along the previously noted zig-zag fissure. The walls are bursting and the fragments are swiftly disappearing into the "deep and dank tarn."

Analysis

As he does with so many of his short stories, Poe prefaces "The Fall of the House of Usher" with a relevant quoted passage: "Son coeur est un luth suspendu; Sitot qu'on le touche il resonne." From a poem by French lyric poet Pierre Jean de Beranger, the verse translates roughly as: "His heart is a hanging lute [an ancient stringed instrument]; Whenever one touches it, it resounds." Aside from the importance of stringed instruments in the tale--Roderick Usher can stand the sound of no other noises--the passage touches on one of the story's most important themes, mortality.

That the heart in the poem is related to a musical instrument, which requires the touch of a hand to function, underlines its very fragility. Suspended in air, it cannot operate on its own, but it instead demands to be "played." The very definition of animate objects is that they move on their own initiative; indeed, movement is one of the features most commonly associated with animal life. The ability to produce sound is a feature of more advanced animals.

Yet, Roderick Usher is convinced that the inanimate universe is full of "sentience," that seemingly dead objects or matter, such as the "atmosphere" he describes encircling his home, are endowed with senses and perhaps even life of their own. When Poe introduces this concept, it seems almost a digression. The principal arc of the narrative has been Usher's madness, his fear of what he regards as his own inevitable doom. Rather than a window into his tortured psyche, as provided by the bizarre painting of the vault or the improvised song of the "Haunted Palace," the intellectual pursuit of "sentience" seems a projection into the outer world, as though Usher is trying to occupy his mind with something other than himself.

Then Madeline dies, and everything changes. Even when the Narrator and Usher bury her in the vault, the Narrator notes "the mockery of a faint blush upon the bosom and the face, and that suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so terrible in death." It is almost as if Madeline were already mocking death (or is in some way still alive), and as though she is already mocking her brother and his friend. It would be possible to say that she does have the last laugh, breaking free from the vault and killing the raving Roderick--if this irony were not so harrowing and tragic.

What is particularly intriguing about this grotesque resurrection is that Poe finally attributes lifelike characteristics to Madeline: "There was blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame." Compare this sentence to the first description of the diseased woman as seen by the Narrator: "The lady Madeline ... passed slowly through a remote portion of the apartment, and, without having noticed my presence, disappeared." Poe's narrative choices are worth analysis, and it is telling that he writes "disappeared" without suggesting any additional movement. She was introduced with a sudden vanishing like a ghost, and she is never seen "alive" until she reappears after her burial--unless she is now a real, embodied ghost.

Tracing the progress of Madeline through the story, one quickly notes that in life she is akin to a floating waif, already a kind of apparition, while once escaped from the grave she lets out "a low, moaning cry" and falls "heavily inward" upon her brother, killing him instantly. Death gives her a strength that life did not. Likewise, the noises that continually accompany the Narrator's reading of the "Mad Trist" are essentially the first sounds Madeline ever makes in the narrative--suggesting that she has had to struggle mightily to get out of the vault. It is as if, imbued with the force of motion and the ability to produce sound, Madeline becomes "alive" only after she was buried in the vault.

This curious development may help explain Roderick's strange decision to temporarily bury his sister in the vault. Throughout the story, Usher is overwhelmed with a sense of his own impending demise: "I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive," he tells the Narrator, "when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR." By entombing Madeline, he creates that very "grim phantasm" with which he will struggle to the death--his prophecy becomes self-fulfilling. Thus, just as the Narrator's reading of the "Mad Trist" seems to summon or conjure the strange noises from below, so does Usher essentially craft his own death. The vault in which he buries Madeline echoes the one he paints, another instance of otherworldly foresight; but if one considers the vault as less a grave than a place of birth, less a tomb than a womb, then Roderick puts Madeline inside in order to finally give her a new life. If he understood what he was doing, it would be a gesture of filial love. Madeline has become one of the "vegetable things" that Usher is convinced possess sentience. Or, perhaps, he unwittingly grants the power of sentience to her, like a would-be Frankenstein resurrecting his lost loved one.

Returning to the painting of the vault, it is important to note the strange light the Narrator describes: "No outlet was observed in any portion of [the vault's] vast extent, and no torch, or other artificial source of light was discernible; yet a flood of intense rays rolled throughout." From where does this light originate? While death is associated with darkness, life is linked to light, and thus this painted vault may hold hints of life-giving conception--a new beginning rather than merely an end.

The concepts of the vault and of premature burial are crucial to Poe's oeuvre. "The Cask of Amontillado" tells the story of a man who wreaks revenge on another by locking him in a cellar and building a wall over him. In "The Tell-Tale Heart," the Narrator discovers (or madly believes) that the heart of the old man he murdered and buried under his floorboards is still beating. "The Pit and the Pendulum" culminates inside a windowless chamber, the walls of which slowly contract before nearly crushing the protagonist. Other tales involving corpses in vaults and walls or the fear of being buried alive include "The Black Cat" and the aptly titled "The Premature Burial." It was perhaps less a case of claustrophobia than a fascination with the fine line between life and death that inspired these flights of fancy. Roderick Usher, then, may serve as Poe's alter ego, a surrogate for the author's own morbid obsession with "sentience" and "the grim phantasm."

Other interpretations of "The Fall of the House of Usher" have focused on the Narrator himself, who seems slowly to slip into madness, perhaps through the very process of narrating Usher's own mental breakdown. Key moments include the opening passage, in which the Narrator seems terrified of the sight of the house itself; the inability to sleep toward the end of the story; and the last, final, nearly apocalyptic but certainly symbolic image of the house breaking apart. Rarely has Poe's writing veered into fantasy more explicitly than in the closing lines of his most famous tale: "While I gazed, this fissure rapidly widened--there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind--the entire orb of the satellite burst at once upon my sight--my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder--there was a long and tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters--and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of 'The House of Usher.'"

The loudest of noises to the deepest of silences, a vast construction collapsing as if it were made of sticks, the whole enterprise sinking to what might be interpreted as hell: this imagery is over the top, to say the least. But it is deliberate language which does more than express the Narrator's experience and possibly his mental state. It also recalls the Narrator's descriptions of Usher's paintings earlier in the story, in which he notes "an intensity of intolerable awe, no shadow of which felt I ever yet in the contemplation of the certainly glowing yet too concrete reveries of Fuseli." In a certain sense, the Narrator has become an Usher by the story's close, adopting Roderick's eye and seeing his world. This is a friendship that has joined the Narrator to the madman rather than provided much sanity for him. Poe's tale may thus be read as an allegory of identification: the two halves of a split consciousness reuniting, the rational and the irrational becoming one and the same--with the irrational overtaking the rational.

Nevertheless, there is always a naturalistic explanation for the possibly supernatural events. Perhaps Madeline is a dangerous ghost, or maybe she really did fight her way out of the vault. The house falls apart, after all, in the most likely way, following the existing fissure. The coincidences of the loud sounds may merely be coincidences.

Similarly, and just as Poe dwells on the blurred boundary between the living and the dead, the line between sanity and madness figures prominently. Shortly after Madeline's entombment, the Narrator writes of the "contagious nature" (Burduck, 74) of fear and madness: "It was no wonder that his condition terrified--that it infected me. I felt creeping upon me, by slow yet certain degrees, the wild influences of his own fantastic yet impressive superstitions." "Infected" and "impressive" present a somewhat rhymed pair that makes of this passage a sort of poem. While Usher's malady may be a contagious disease, the Narrator seems almost willfully to succumb to it, impressed as he is by its nature. Just as the house's scale and stability inspire him with awe as well as fear, so does Usher's madness inspire as well as terrify him.

That give-and-take, the dialectic between the beautiful and the horrifying, between amazement and dread, informs not just "The Fall of the House of Usher" but Poe's work in general. There is indeed a poetic quality to his writing, whether it be the use of the "Haunted Palace" as a metaphor for the mind--invaded by "evil things, in robes of sorrow"--or the description of the House of Usher as if it were a human face, with its "vacant eye-like windows." The Narrator describes, early in the story, "an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime." Yet, that is precisely what Poe's imagination did: it took the dreary, the dark, the dreadful--and found within it the sublime