The fall of the House of Usher

Themes

Major themes• Mortality• Madness• Fear• Incest

• Friendship• Burial• The Arts

Let’s take a closer look

Mortality:

The plot of Poe's tale involves a woman who

dies, is buried, and rises from the grave.

The line between life and death is a fine one in

Poe's fiction

Madness"It was, he said, a constitutional and a family evil, and one for which he despaired to find a remedy--a mere nervous affection, he immediately added, which would undoubtedly soon pass off."

The Narrator notes an "incoherence" and "inconsistency" in his old friend, but he doesn’t explain it. As a result, the line between sanity and insanity becomes blurred.

Fear

What seems to terrify Usher is fear itself. Fear for no apparent reason is an important motif in Poe's tale, which begins with the Narrator's description of his own irrational dread: "I know not how it was--but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit."

Later, Usher identifies fear itself as the thing that will kill him, suggesting that his own anxiety is what conjures up the blood-stained Madeline--or that she is simply a manifestation of his own deepest neuroses.

IncestWhat binds Usher to Madeline, and what makes him terrified of her? Without spouses, they live together in the great family home, each of them wasting away within the building's dark rooms

The Narrator describes the strange qualities of the Usher family--that it never has put forth "any enduring branch," that "the entire family lay in the direct line of descent." The implication is that incest is the norm for the Ushers, and that Roderick's and Madeline's strange illnesses may stem from their inbred genes.

Friendship The Narrator arrives at the House of Usher in order to visit a friend, they were boyhood friends. Usher writes to the Narrator, urging him to give him company in his time of distress, suggests the close bond between the two men.Sadly in this case, family trumps friendship at the end, when Usher and Madeline are reunited and the Narrator is cast off on his own into the raging storm.

Burial• There are three images of

"tombs" or "crypts" in "The Fall of the House of Usher.“

• The house itself is shut off

from the daylight, its cavernous rooms turned into spacious vaults, in which characters who never seem entirely alive--Madeline and Usher--waste away.

• Second, Usher's painting is of "an immensely long and rectangular vault or tunnel," foreshadowing the third image of a tomb, the real one of Madeline's temporary burial.

• The implication, especially once the entire House of Usher sinks into a new grave below the tarn, is that the world itself is a kind of crypt.

The ArtsUsher is skilled at music and apparently is quite a painter. Art might be considered as an attempt at immortality, and the death-obsessed Usher, so certain of his own death, strives to cling to life by producing works which can last beyond him. Ironically, though, the one painting of his that the Narrator describes portrays a tomb, and everything is finally destroyed by the House's collapse. It would seem that his art fails Roderick Usher.