Usher Mental Illness

Mistakes, accidental incidents, the hard truth; all come together to create a larger picture of one truth. The picture tells the truth about a subject that seems to be made out of pieces of a puzzle rather than a whole; being the pieces may be oddly shaped. Though this sounds unreasonable, the undesirable occurs to people in any situation; some being dealt with positively while others in an hyperbolic way. In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Edgar Allan Poe creates a metaphor of the codependence of one’s mind and body through the use of the Usher twins.
First, the twins are bond together in an excessive mean that the two are as of one psychologically unfit person. The relation of the two Usher siblings is not alluded to until later in the
story. The only relation that is known is they are brothers and sisters, yet during the entombment of Madeline there is new revelations in the two’s actual relationship. The narrator learns they are twins. He also learns that “the sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature had always existed between them” (Poe 10). There is a bond between the two siblings that is unnaturally close and they have an intimate connectivity. The two are cut in ties of mind and body that connect together as a mean to a whole.
As a matter of fact, Poe utilizes Madeline Usher within his metaphor as a representation of physical aspect of one’s being. The creation of Madeline is one side in an unhealthy psychological essence, the weakness of the body. The narrator talks about Madeline’s disease from what he learns from Roderick. In the story, the disease Madeline carries is a bafflement for the physicians that are caring for her. The effects of this unknown disease cause the character to be in “a gradual wasting away of a person” and in a “cataleptic character” (6). The outcome of her illness constructs a weak person. The details add to her characterization with having a frail and feeble body. For the purpose of showing her weakness, Poe makes her illness to be so strong and her so sickly it makes her body deteriorate further. The narrator states, “She succumbed to the prostrating power of the destroyer” (6). Madeline’s body gives into the malady and she “dies.” She is so physically weak due to the sickness that she is no longer able to live. To conclude, Madeline is a character whose illness is so great that it physically deteriorates her body to be frail, creating one piece in an unhealthy psychological mind.
In addition to Madeline, Poe uses the character Roderick Usher as a symbol for the psychological aspect of one’s self.
Poe characterizes Roderick with having a mental illness early in the story. In the letter to the narrator it states, “The MS. have evidence of nervous agitation. The writer spoke of acute bodily illness-of a mental disorder which oppressed him” (2). Roderick explains to the narrator about his illness through a letter in order to get the narrator to visit him. The mental illness is also shown, with the toll it partakes on Roderick’s physical appearance. The narrator describes him when he is younger with having, “an eye large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison” to a more recent description of having, “ghastly pallor of the skin” (4). Poe adds more vivid descriptions about the character and compares his appearance from his earlier years. The traits of the past were more lively comparatively to the more recent characterization. The words “luminous” and “ghastly” are vast contradictions in his appearance. “Luminous” describes the bright light in his life while “ghastly” describes the frightful death within Roderick. The death description allows to show the formation from a healthy person to unhealthy with a mental illness. Lastly, Roderick talks to the narrator about the conceivement of the disease itself. He explains to him the reason of his illness is due to a “constitutional and family evil” (5). He is mentally ill because in his family, they connect in
all means. Madeline is sick physically which causes Roderick to become sick himself, though in his case it is mental. Overall, the creation of Roderick Usher is a use to show the mentally ill side of one personality.
Furthermore, the twins are codependent due to their way of being brought up.
The two are part of a family that is a direct line which excludes many outsiders. As it states in the story, Madeline is “his sole companion for long years” (5). Due to the fact that the siblings are always together in their life, the two become similar or as one. The two are parts of one person. Moreover, the two are the same which is shown in their death. Roderick talks to the narrator of his sister's sickness. He talks of when she dies, he states that he will be “the last of the ancient race of the Ushers” (6). When Poe kills off Madeline he only does so temporarily and under false pretenses. Later in the story, the death of the twins is shown simultaneously. The story states, “In her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse” (15). Rather than having one of the twins die at the same time in the story, as Roderick hints at in the beginning, Poe causes them to die at the same time. The scene of their death adds to their connectedness. If one twin would have died, then the other twin would have been left to fend for themselves alone. They would be the last of their line. Yet, instead the two die together as though they are one person. In sum, the two are bond together as though to be one person from the result of their family lineage and its isolation as a
child.
In conclusion, Poe incorporates the metaphor of the connectivity of mind and body within a human through the Usher twins. Roderick’s creation and characterization exemplifies the prominence of being mentally ill through his actions and descriptions. He adds to the side of an ailing mind. While Madeline’s death and descriptions exhibit the frailty the human body can be. She integrates the deterioration of the body in the connectedness. With the mental and illness combine together creating an unhealthy psychological whole. The two are pieces in a puzzle that are misshapened though they create something whole.