Gothic in Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher"

Edgar Allan Poe is an author that has mastered the choice of words in his stories to create just the right mood and the right feelings. In The Fall of the House of Usher, a man will visit a childhood friend who is suffering from a strange illness. Strange events will occur under his host’s roof. In this short story, Poe uses conventions of gothic literature to push the story’s protagonists into a state of constant distress of the mind and eventually drive them into madness. Gothic conventions such as the gothic setting, death and the supernatural will slowly bring fear upon his characters. Firstly, in the short story, the author uses the gothic setting to create a frightful gloomy mood and atmosphere that inspires fright to the narrator. At his first arrival at the Usher domain, the narrator describes his feelings of the house saying “with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded [his] spirit.” (263) The house looks dreary and unwelcoming giving away “an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn…”(264), which will affect the narrators perception of the residence during his stay. Later on, Usher will lead the storyteller to the vaults. He feels a certain uneasiness in the undergrounds where the air is heavy and damp and the atmosphere “oppressing”(272). He is also told that the vaults were actually once used as “don-jon-keep”(272). He thus pays more attention to his surroundings and notices the long archways sheathed with copper and “the door, of massive iron, also, similarly protected”(272). Furthermore he notes they are located directly under his room. A sense of entrapment and imprisonment takes over him and fear slowly creeps into him by this “region of horror”(272). Furthermore, Poe also employs the elements of the supernatural to bring fright upon the characters. Odd sentiments will take over the narrator at night and he describes it as “an irrepressible tremor gradually pervaded my frame; and at sat upon my very heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm”(273). These peculiar phenomenons greatly affect the storyteller who cannot find sleep. Restless in his bed, he can also hear a faint sound of an “instinctive spirit”(273) through the storm. Distressed and frightened by these things that escape his usual rationalism, he leaves his bed to walk off and shake off these feelings that oppress him (273). Afterwards, to relieve some tension, the narrator reads a story to Usher, by some supernatural coincidence every sound that is emitted in the book, occurs in similar way in the Usher house. “Oppressed” (275), he feels himself agitated “by a thousand conflicting sensations, in which wonder and extreme terror were predominant…”(275). Finally, death is very present in this short story and its imminence creates fear amongst the characters. Usher confesses to his friend that he is soon bound to die. Yet he assures his friend that he worries not about death itself, but of fear of death. He wants to avoid panic in the face of this fatality (VCU). “ ‘I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR.’" (267) His desire to avoid a fear of death in this way creates another anxiety. With mysterious circumstances, Madeleine will come back from the grave and “bore [Roderick] to the floor a corpse” (276). Seeing how a sister that rose from the death will kill her brother by simple contact, the narrator will portray her as death and will flee the mansion “aghast” (276). In conclusion, given the narrator’s agitated and anxious state of mind at the end of the story, we can see how the gothic setting, the elements of the supernatural and the presence of death pushed the character to fright and madness. Interestingly, the narrator finds himself at the end of the story at the same place where he was at the first introduction to the house, but now looking at it with a totally different perception and different state of mind. It is at this moment that the extent of his metamorphose is seized.

686 words.

Work Cited

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Barnes & Noble. 1992. 262-77.

The Fall of the House of Usher. Online. 3 Mar 2008.
<http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/webtexts/usher/>.

The Fall of the House of Usher-Study Guide. Online. 6 Mar 2008.
<http://www.gradesaver.com/classicnotes/titles/usher/>.

Cited: Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Barnes & Noble. 1992. 262-77. The Fall of the House of Usher. Online. 3 Mar 2008. <http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/webtexts/usher/>. The Fall of the House of Usher-Study Guide. Online. 6 Mar 2008. <http://www.gradesaver.com/classicnotes/titles/usher/>.