140212 House of Usher Essay

Someone I was talking with wanted me to post my essay so that they could read it. I'm not 100% happy with it, but since when am I 100% happy with any essay that I've ever written? (Besides my grade 12 Social diploma, which I was actually quite happy with.)

070312 EDIT: This is essay was good enough for 80%. XD

In 1839 Edgar Allen Poe wrote “The Fall of the House of Usher”, a story detailing the descent of the Usher family into madness. Along with the story of Roderick and Madeline Usher, Poe gives great detail to the house that they lived in, filling it with great detail and characteristics. The house of the Usher family is a reflection of the Usher family line, merged together in name, the evidence of decay and the fall of both the family and the house; the house must reflect the fate of the Ushers.

Both the physical building and the family are known as the House of Usher. The title is the first to allude to this; “The Fall of the House of Usher” does not specify whether it is talking about the fall of the family or the fall of the house itself. The two entities are tied together. The name “House of Usher”, to the people who used that name, “seemed to include...both the family and the family mansion” (1116). There is no division, no distinction. The house is the family and the family is the house. It is only natural then that whatever happens to the family also happens to the house.

The house is the first thing that is described in the story, before Roderick Usher is introduced. The outside is decayed, with “vacant eye-like windows” (1115) and “minute fungi” (1117) growing on a building that did not have any business to be standing for all of its structural dysfunctions. Yet the building was stable. The same can be seen in the Usher family. Roderick is alive, though he is being plagued with an “acute bodily illness...a mental disorder” (1115). His appearance reflects this sickness, he has a “ghastly pallor” (1115) and an overall look of unkemptness. The house also holds the secrets of the family, secrets of incest and inbreeding, which was most likely the cause of the mysterious illness that plagued the descendants of the house of Usher. The habit of inbreeding caused only a “direct line of descent” (1116) that was genetically unstable. The decayed state of the house reflects the sickly state of Roderick and the failure of the Usher line. Roderick Usher is the last of the Usher family, and therefore the family is still standing, just as the house is still standing but there are obvious signs of defects and age-old problems that cannot be covered up anymore.

The line of Usher cannot continue on the same way that is had been going for generations. With Madeline’s death, Roderick was the only Usher left and he was sick with the same mysterious disease that had killed his sister. The house of Usher was coming to an end. On a particular night a storm descended on the House of Usher, but not on the surrounding areas; the storm affected only the house. This storm affected Roderick profoundly, driving him mad. The house reflected the madness, creating the noises of the tale being told. The impossible happenings cumulate in the reappearance of Madeline Usher, an occurrence that leads to Roderick’s death. Now that the last of the Usher line has died, the house must reflect the Usher family. The house shudders with the madness that befell Roderick and “the deep and dank tarn...closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the House of Usher” (1127) forever burying it in the earth.

The house’s destruction reflects the end of the line of Usher; the end of both the physical house and the blood line of the family. The house, being tied to the Ushers, was forced to reflect Roderick’s mad end which resulted in the house being swallowed by the ground. The house needed to end, it was infected with the decay of the family and was barely standing. The fall of the house of Usher was inevitable because the fall of the family was inevitable.