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.
Symbols & Motifs
The House of Usher
Though it is unusual for an inanimate object to operate as a character in fiction, the House of Usher is the story’s antagonist. It is the antagonist because it is the entity that is stopping the protagonist from achieving his goal of saving Usher from his illness. Themes of the sentience of non-sentient beings, supernatural forces, and horror tropes that upend the laws of nature are built up, making the house an entity that exerts an evil will on its inhabitants.
Houses are a key feature of the Gothic literary genre. Houses in Gothic literature are old and almost always in a state of decay. They have housed generations of the same family and have been the site of countless sins, intrigues, and aberrations. Houses in Gothic literature are frequently haunted, and the hauntings are often the residue of memory and shame rather than supernatural phenomena.
In Gothic literature, the house or mansion need not be “Gothic” in the strictly architectural sense. Though the houses at the center of Gothic novels are often castles, it is more important that they evoke themes of moral, structural, and aesthetic corruption than that they contain flying buttresses and ribbed vaults. The house in Gothic literature is, most importantly, a symbolic and psychological space that brings characters face to face with their greatest fears and tests the limits of their sanity. When a house in literature is described as having Gothic features, it is a starting point for a network of themes that set the mood and create the conditions for deeper, more disturbing revelations.
When the narrator arrives at the House of Usher, he enters a “Gothic archway” (7). He is crossing a threshold where the “collocation…and arrangement” of the stones is one of the forces responsible for Usher’s condition (15). In a display of Gothic literature’s perversion of the natural world, when non-sentient elements, such as the house, are granted life, the life they produce is more like death, and they bring that lifelike death upon the beings that inhabit their space.
The narrator casts doubt on Usher’s belief in the house’s sentience, and depending on how the reader interprets the story, Usher may be the antagonist who uses the idea of the house’s evil to distract the narrator. Even if the house is not sentient, it is the symbolic cause of Usher’s madness because it forces him to confront his family history.
Weather and Landscape
The weather and landscape are symbolic because they affect the protagonist’s mood and reflect the plot’s ominous events. It is now a cliché to begin a scary story with the phrase “it was a dark and stormy night,” but Poe and other early Gothic writers established this trope to create an atmosphere of danger. Gothic literature is a subset of Romantic fiction. Romantic fiction contains other genres, such as the idyll, in which the beautiful landscape and calm, pleasant weather evoke feelings of love and harmony in the story’s characters.
Romanticism operates on the principle that emotions rather than reason are people’s primary motivators. Therefore, Romantic works must establish a world that both influences and reflects the characters’ emotional states. Dark Romantic and Gothic fiction focus on themes of terror, death, and sexual inversion and create landscapes that evoke these states. “The Fall of the House of Usher” begins with a sentence that establishes, through descriptions of the weather, landscape, and time of year, the story’s dark tone. The sight of the house combined with the oppressive weather creates a feeling of gloom in the protagonist. He characterizes the feeling as “insufferable” (3). The protagonist—and by extension, all the story’s characters—are at the mercy of the natural world.
As the story nears its climax, the stormy weather intensifies. Preceding Madeline’s appearance, Usher throws open the window to reveal a raging storm and an unnatural light hovering around the house. Now, the weather not only creates a gloomy mood. It has created an unnatural atmosphere, which emotionally and psychologically prepares the reader for a supernatural event.
“The Mad Trist”
“The Mad Trist” by Sir Lancelot Canning is a fictitious romance that the narrator reads to Usher in an attempt to calm him before Madeline’s arrival. “The Mad Trist” provides a symbolic narrative that parallels the story’s events. The narrator considers “The Mad Trist” a bad story. He refers to it as “uncouth and unimaginative” and hopes the “extremeness of its folly” will distract Usher from his terrified state (21). The narrator says the story is well known, creating the impression that a reader of the day should be familiar with it—another ruse to suggest “The Mad Trist’s” authenticity.
In “The Mad Trist,” the knight Ethelred is seeking entry to a hermit’s dwelling. A storm is brewing and Ethelred slashes through the wooden door with his sword, tearing apart the wood with his gauntleted hand. The narrator describes the sounds of “dry, hollow-sounding wood […] reverberate[d] throughout the forest” (21). At the same moment, the narrator hears the same sounds coming from somewhere in the house. When Ethelred breaks into the dwelling, he is surprised to find a dragon guarding a palace of gold with a silver floor. On the wall hangs a brass shield, engraved with the couplet: “Who entereth herein, a conqueror hath bin; who slayeth the dragon, the shield shall win” (22). Ethelred easily slays the dragon, and its death cries are so awful that he nearly covers his ears. At the same moment, the narrator hears horrible shrieks coming from inside the house.
Ethelred makes his way toward the shield, but before he reaches it, it falls with a terrible clang against the floor. At the same time, the narrator hears a metallic clang, which Usher interprets as Madeline breaking through the vault’s iron door. Though “The Mad Trist” has been interpreted in many ways, the symbolism of the narrative is most important for the sounds that create tension by paralleling Ethelred’s journey with Madeline’s imminent arrival.
The Physicians
References to physicians and doctors appear several times in the narrative. They are always accompanied by negative undertones and suggest that something is amiss. The narrator’s encounter with the family physician is brief but seeds suspicion in the protagonist’s mind about the nature of Madeline’s and Usher’s diseases. When the narrator first encounters the family doctor, who is leaving the house, the doctor acts strangely: “His countenance, I thought, wore a mingled expression of low cunning and perplexity. He accosted me with trepidation and passed on” (7). Given the mysterious nature of Usher’s and Madeline’s illnesses, it is reasonable for the doctor to be perplexed, but the detail about his expression of “low cunning” suggests that he is engaging in some form of deceit to suit his own ends.
Physicians are referenced again when the narrator reports that Madeline’s illness “baffled the skill of her physicians” (11). The intensity of Madeline’s illness is a vessel to veil the subtle, ironic comment that the physicians lack skill. More important is the hint that her inexplicable disease does not have a strictly medical cause. Another negative reference to physicians appears when Usher is explaining that the doctors suggested he keep Madeline’s body in the vault rather than burying it in the family burial ground. The narrator reports that the doctors’ inquiries were “obtrusive and eager,” which like the first reference implies that their interest in the disease goes beyond medical curiosity (17). At that moment, the narrator recalls the “sinister” expression on the family doctor’s face and decides not to oppose the suggestion.
One inference from these allusions is that Madeline is or was pregnant with Usher’s child. Another is that the doctors were performing medical experiments on Madeline and want to keep her body in the vault for further observation. They may have induced a state which would mimic death in order to see what will happen when Usher buries her alive. Many other interpretations are possible, but at the very least, the doctors’ furtive behavior suggests that outside sources are involved with Madeline’s illness and death.
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