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 were there in reality, “I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium” (Poe 177).
Roderick Usher’s sister Madeline has been buried in the family vault, yet he believes s...