House Of Usher
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Poe’s The Fall Of The House Of Usher is the story of a man obsessed by intellectual pursuits to the point of social isolation and possible insanity. The story’s main vehicle for dramatizing this dilemma is to place a narrator, who in temperament and interests closely mirrors Usher, as voice-over, one who gives us mostly descriptions of the environment. As with Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator and Usher seem to have maladies that mirror their environment. At the outset of the story we are given an ominous depiction of the environment by the narrator, a long-time friend of Usher, who, like Usher has grown isolated from social contact. As he states when he first lays eyes on the place, “I know not how-but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit” (Poe 177). Like the owner of the House of Usher, the environment affects the sensibilities of the narrator, “What was it-I paused to think-what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher?” (Poe 177). Poe is arguably the best sensory writer in American history in the sense that he is able to recreate how we perceive things and formulate ideas from our sensory abilities. Poe does not just describe or recreate the environment for us, his use of sensory language and his personification of environment actually put us inside it by appealing to our own senses much as the scene might if we w
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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” (Poe 179).
While Roderick confesses that his sister’s illness is the cause of his own malady, he also admits that the environment in which is lives is an integral part of it, “He was enchained by certain superstitious impressions in regard to the dwelling which he tenanted” (Poe 181). The setting is used by Poe to represent the deterioration that is occurring in the character as much as the female narrator and setting of The Yellow Wallpaper. The environment not only acts as a catalyst of mental illness, but it also helps it progress to its inevitable deterioration. As surely as many of Poe’s short stories involve the entombing of living beings, so Roderick and his sister are entombed psychologically and physically in the House of Usher. The entombment of Roderick’s sister while thought to be alive is a parallel of Roderick’s own condition of being entrapped psychologically by the House of Usher. Usher has become obsessed by the House of Usher and he has not left its environs in years bec
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Approximate Word count = 1232
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)
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