led descriptions.
When the narrator first sees the house of Usher, "a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded [his] spirit." He notes "the bleak walls," "the vacant eye-like windows," the "rank sedges" and "decayed trees" and he experiences "an utter depression of soul," "an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart--an unredeemed dreariness of thought" (Poe 84). The narrator again and again claims that it is a "mystery" why the house affects him in this way, but if his descriptions of the physical grounds of the house, its interior and furnishings, and the people in the house (Usher, his sister, the valet, the physician, and Usher's sister) are accurate, then it would seem that any visitor to the house would have the same responses. However, the narrator himself is clearly not a psychologically, emotionally or spiritually healthy person himself, or he would immediately or soon thereafter leave the house for the sane world. Instead, he stays, for a number of weeks it appears, and quickly becomes himself almost as mad as Usher and his sister. He is there ostensibly to cheer Usher up, but he shows no ability in that area and gives not a single effective example of his cheering up his childhood friend. To the contrary, his own nature seems especially vulnerable to the Gothic atmosphere. His own madness is reflected in the fact that, to calm down the hysterical Usher, he reads the poor man a story itself full of Gothic imagery and in doing so helps brings about Usher's death. Again, in this reader's view, the fact that Poe has filled the story with Gothic characters in an entirely Gothic setting from beginning to end weakens the story because it is entirely one-dimensional.
Gilman, on the other hand, presents a story in which the protagonist alone is affected by Gothic
...