46 pages • 1 hour read
Edgar Allan PoeThe Fall of the House of Usher
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1839A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
Incest, Madness, and Moral Consequences
At the beginning of the story, the narrator notes the artistic persuasion, or as he puts it, “a peculiar sensibility of temperament,” that has run through the Usher family line for generations (5). They were prolific artists, musicians, and philanthropists. The narrator attributes this strong family characteristic to the fact that the Usher clan has only had one line of descendants. He credits the “deficiency […] of collateral issue” with the undeviating nature of the Usher personality and with the close association of the House of Usher with its family (5).
Readers can assume that the brothers and sisters of the Usher family became the parents of the next generation and so forth. The narrator notes that this singular family line has lasted through the “long lapse of centuries,” implying that the Usher issue of today are the descendants of generations of interbreeding (5).
Inbreeding has long been associated with the aristocracy. European royal families believed that they were superior to others and did not want individuals of a lower social class marrying into their family and creating lesser offspring. By breeding within the same gene pool for generations, royal families created and passed on genetic anomalies. One famous example is the Hapsburg jaw, a protruding chin that was characteristic of the Spanish line of the Hapsburg dynasty. In addition to wanting to maintain pure bloodlines, royal families intermarried to secure political alliances. The Hapsburgs ruled much of Europe and the Holy Roman Empire from the sixteenth to the beginning of the eighteenth centuries. In each generation, however, the health of the monarchs grew progressively worse, and the protruding jaw became more pronounced. The line ended with King Charles II, who suffered from many health problems and died in 1700 without an heir.
Like Charles II, Usher and Madeline are the product of extreme inbreeding throughout generations and are suffering the physical and mental consequences. The Ushers have persistent unexplained illnesses. Madeline suffers from a wasting disease that causes intermittent seizures and body rigidity (catalepsy). Usher’s illness has physical and mental symptoms. He has a nervous condition, with symptoms similar to schizophrenia and paranoia. His behavior is frantic, and he is convinced some terrible event will befall him. Madeline and Usher may not only be physically unsound because they are products of incest, but they may also be suffering from fear of the moral consequences of their behavior. The potential impact of their incest is even more frightening when the narrator discovers that they are twins and therefore share genetic material that is even closer than that of non-twin siblings. The implication is that their offspring could be not only weak, but monstrous. On some level, Usher must be aware of this because when he begins to hear strange sounds, he knows that it is his sister coming to seek revenge.
Sentient Decay
Incest, a failing lineage, and madness go hand in hand, and each is embodied in the decrepitude of the House of Usher. The narrator notes that the house’s “physique,” as he calls it, “of gray walls and turrets and the dim tarn into which they looked down” operates on its inhabitants’ “morale” (10). The “morale” that had come upon Usher, in addition to his sickness, is that he began to believe in the sentience of plant life. Plants are, of course, living, but Usher’s notion of sentience imbues them with intent; the intention of contaminating and consuming him.
Here Poe inserts a footnote with the names of scholars and publications from which the view comes. The citation references the 1771 essay of a Dr. Watson who states: “It should be well weighed by the metaphysicians, whether they can exclude vegetables from the faculty of perception, by other than by comparative argument” (15). The eighteenth-century origin of this essay, which did in fact exist, is no coincidence, as it draws on some of the same ideas espoused in early Gothic literature. Poe’s narrator notes that Usher, in his madness, has gone beyond this idea to claim that sentience applied to the “gray stones” of the house, on which the fungi, decaying trees, and the tarn’s dank water have had an infectious effect that “for centuries had moulded the destinies of his family, and which made him what I now saw him—what he was” (15-16).
The relationship between a decaying house and a decaying mind goes beyond the negative emotional effect a dark, rainy day could have on someone’s mood. Usher has become part of the sentience of the decaying house and landscape—a human fungus—that paradoxically cannot live without being attached to the house, even though the house will ultimately spell his demise.
Narrative Reliability and Supernatural Versus Rational Explanations
A narrative of mysterious events is weaved that, depending on one’s interpretation, can have rational or supernatural causes. The Usher family is inextricably linked to its house and environment. By the narrator’s account, that link is responsible for the house’s and the family’s deterioration. Madeline’s escape from the vault despite her weakened state and her killing of Usher suggest supernatural causes. Even if she was buried alive, she would have lacked the strength to break out of the coffin and the vault. The narrator escapes and watches the house crack open in a flash of lightning and sink into the tarn.
The reader’s task is to decide whether these uncanny and destructive events have rational or supernatural causes—or a combination of both. The possibility of multiple causes suggests another variable: the narrator’s reliability.
On the surface, the narrator objectively reports his own emotional condition and experiences during his stay with Usher. His levelheadedness, detached tone, and lack of passing judgment lend themselves to his credibility. Though he experiences unexplained fears, he retains his sanity and is able to escape. He appears sane in comparison with Usher, whose insanity the narrator seeks to tame.
Because this is a Gothic horror story, it is possible that like Usher, the narrator is losing his sanity the longer he remains in the house. Usher’s madness may be magnified because the narrator is becoming paranoid. The final scenes, in which Madeline bursts into the room and the narrator escapes are confusing and demonstrate a muddled perception on the part of the narrator. An extreme interpretation of the story is that the narrator has imagined everything and he, not Usher, is the one who is insane. If the narrator is not reliable, the reader must decide the extent of the madness or reality of the story’s events. This trope allows the horror to linger, as the discomfort of not knowing is part of the Gothic genre.
Related Titles
By Edgar Allan Poe
