Post 2, Group B "Fall of the House of Usher" by Dianesa Sanon

The Fall of the House of Usher written by Edgar Allen Poe is a short story that starts off with the narrator going to visit his old friend who is expecting the death of his twin sister. Upon arriving the mansion the narrator describes it as a "mere house" with a "simple landscape" and goes on about how the ambience of the house chills him to his bones. Alongside the house, which is really important later, is a fissure crack that creeps up the siding and the ground as well. Within the house is Roderick Usher who is beside himself with anxiety due to superstitious thought. The heavy curtains are drawn, the rooms are poorly lit and somewhere inside the mansion is Roderick's twin sister who was dying a slow death. The master of the Usher Mansion, in his haste, lays to rest his sister, Madeline, down to rest because her pallor had made it seem as if she had passed. Plot-twist! She wasn't dead yet. She ends up coming up out of her burial place, causes the narrator and Roderick to essentially poop themselves in terror and she essentially takes her brother to death along with her. The house is swallowed into a fissure in the ground that seals once the mansion goes under.



The short story encompasses the fear of anxiety of looming death of a physical life and a more importantly, a name."Roderick's ambivalence toward death... his individual consciousness fears." (Stahlberg) The narrator makes it a point that the remaining siblings are the last of the Ushers. Madeline falls sick and Roderick is pacing around making himself sick when he realizes that her days are numbered and he'll be the only one left. The narrator stays with his friend after being called out there. Roderick Usher is so scared to be alone after having to live in the same house with what he believed to be the corpse of his sister was really wracking his nerves. The narrator talks about how his friend muttered to himself mournfully "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." (Poe, Fall of the House of Usher) Poe smartly foreshadows the death of Roderick without letting on exactly how it will take place.

Before Madeline seemingly raises up from the dead to take her brother into death with her the suspense of her coming is present from her ghoulish figure in the doorway to her pounding on the door that was sealed to keep her from leaving her death room. In Fall of the Shouse of Usher, Poe uses words to build the suspense from the very beginning when he describes the outside and inside of the Usher's home caused the narrator "an utter depression of soul" which could not be "compared to no earthly sensation." (Poe, Fall of the House of Usher)
Again Madeline represents death when she raises from the dead to find her brother who had prematurely buried her. To Roderick, all of his anxious ponderings since his sister fell ill, all the pacing and staring into nothingness, all of the "FEAR" he feared would kill him was symbolized through his sister literally taking him to hell with her.

Coincidentally, maybe not- we're discussing Edgar Allan Poe here, the two siblings were the last of the Ushers so that with there death there really is a fall of the house of Usher- hence the name. At the end of the story, the mansion is swallowed up into a hole in the ground after crumbling into nothing. If you aren't careful enough to catch the double meaning and if you just read without understanding you'll miss that the physical crumbling to the ground of the house of Usher isn't all there is to it. Roderick Usher's family previously had all fallen sick with some disease that caused their deaths and when things boiled down to just him and his sister. For the narrator, the suspense began when he arrived at his friend's home but for Roderick Usher, it began with the first death of an Usher that dominoed the last two standing. With his sister's death, he was sure he would follow soon after. The crack on the side of the mansion is symbolic of the near crumbling of the foundation and in the end, the mansion is split by that fissure and the ground opens up by it as well to swallow up the remaining Ushers.







References
Stahlberg, L. (1981). The Source of Usher's Fear. Interpretations: A Journal Of Ideas, Analysis, And Criticism, 13(1), 10-17