“The Fall of the House of Usher” was written by Edgar Allan Poe and first appeared in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine (Sept 1839). Poe (1809-1849) was somewhat well-regarded in his own time, but since his early and untimely death he has become a major figure in world literature, regarded as the architect of the modern short story, the inventor of the mystery fiction, a major poet and literary critic, and a writer extremely influential on the French Symbolists of the late nineteenth century, among a number of other achievements.

“The Fall of the House of Usher” begins with the nameless narrator approaching the home of his childhood friend Roderick Usher. Usher’s home projects “a sense of insufferable gloom¼an utter depression of soul,”¹ and its “principal feature seemed to be that of an excessive antiquity.”² Its stones are crumbling, there seems to be substantial wood-rot, and from roof to ground runs a “barely perceptible fissure.”³ The narrator enters nonetheless, and finds Usher prostrate on a couch, wan and cadaverous. His physical condition is poor, and his personality varies from sullen to frantic. But he is happy to see the narrator because of the Usher malady, “a constitutional and family evil, and one for which he despaired to find a remedy.”⁴ Usher suffers from “a morbid acuteness of the senses”⁵ and from an idée fixe that he will soon die from pure fear. Usher admits that much of his gloom arises from the approaching death of his sister, Madeline, who suffers from a debilitating and soon to be mortal disease. As Usher describes her Madeline passes through the room, and “a sensation of stupor”⁶ accompanies her presence. Usher describes how the doctors have been unable to help her, and how her resistance to the disease is faltering.

The narrator stays with Usher for several days, reading and painting, but nothing can shake Usher from his melancholy, which manifests itself not only in his statements but also his art and his music. One night Usher abruptly tells the narrator that Madeline has died and that she will be interred for a fortnight in a family vault before she is buried. The narrator helps Usher with the arrangements and carries Madeline’s coffin to the vault. They screw down the lid of the coffin and lock the door of the vault. But after several days of grief Usher’s mood changes. He becomes even more pale and haunted and acts as if his “unceasingly agitated mind was labouring with some oppressive secret.”⁷ On the seventh or eighth night after Madeline’s internment, the narrator experiences a feeling of alarm and is then approached by Usher, who with a “restrained hysteria” opens a window. A furious storm is approaching, the wind is full of “impetuous fury,” and a “faintly luminous” glow surrounds the house. The narrator hurriedly dismisses it as an electrical phenomena, or perhaps swamp gas, and tries to calm Usher by reading to him. But both Usher and the narrator hear a “most unusual screaming or grating sound,”⁸ followed by a metallic reverberation. Usher begins ranting:

"Not hear it? --yes, I hear it, and have heard it. Long –long --long --many minutes, many hours, many days, have I heard it --yet I dared not --oh, pity me, miserable wretch that I am! --I dared not --I dared not speak! We have put her living in the tomb! Said I not that my senses were acute? I now tell you that I heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin. I heard them --many, many days ago --yet I dared not --I dared not speak! And now --to-night --Ethelred --ha! ha! --the breaking of the hermit's door, and the death-cry of the dragon, and the clangour of the shield! --say, rather, the rending of her coffin, and the grating of the iron hinges of her prison, and her struggles within the coppered archway of the vault! Oh whither shall I fly? Will she not be here anon? Is she not hurrying to upbraid me for my haste? Have I not heard her footstep on the stair? Do I not distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of her heart? MADMAN!" here he sprang furiously to his feet, and shrieked out his syllables, as if in the effort he were giving up his soul --"MADMAN! I TELL YOU THAT SHE NOW STANDS WITHOUT THE DOOR!"⁹

The door slowly swings open, revealing Madeline Usher. She trembles and then falls on Usher, “and in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated.”¹⁰ The narrator flees, aghast, and sees the fissure in the walls of the house widen. The house of Usher collapses and is swallowed by the tarn.

“The Fall of the House of Usher” is perhaps the quintessential Edgar Allan Poe story. Like many of his other works, it will probably not have been looked at by readers since they were assigned it in high school or college, and so the story’s strangeness will have been forgotten. Poe’s usual motifs–the dying woman, the weak man, the atmosphere of death and decay–all appear in “The Fall of the House of Usher” but they are articulated more vividly in “Usher” than in many of his other stories. Poe follows his theory of the “unity of effect,” that everything about a story should be dedicated to creating an emotional response in the reader, and he combines plot, character, tone, and vocabulary to create a haunting tale. The story’s atmosphere is heavy and almost suffocating, and although Poe’s vocabulary and story construction are old-fashioned his descriptions are effective in building an environment haunted not by anything as mundane as ghosts, but by something more nebulous and hard to resist: Fate.

Similarly, Roderick Usher is memorably drawn. In another story, by another writer, Usher’s high-strung self-obsession and conviction that he is doomed might be humorous or annoying; he is a man of Sensibility (see: The Gothic) in a Gothic horror story, and so is an almost natural target for satire. But the deadpan, unironic tone of the story and the mounting feeling of doom all contribute to the reader taking Usher seriously. The difference between Roderick Usher and later Usher-style characters like M.P. Shiel’s Prince Zaleski (see: Prince Zaleski) is that Poe tells “The Fall of the House of Usher” with a conviction which Shiel and the Poe imitators cannot muster. It is the difference between establishing a style and imitating it, the difference between using a style because it is the only one in which the story can be told and aping that style. Even the Dupin stories are not entirely free of Poe winking at the reader. But Poe takes Usher’s wyrd so seriously and describes his death-obsession so well that the reader is almost forced to take it as seriously as Usher does.

“The Fall of the House of Usher” is a critic’s darling, attracting as many interpretations as there are readers. “More recent critical appraisals of the story have largely followed two directions: a reappraisal of the genre of the story as a Gothic romance and a close attention to Madeline Usher as a type of Poe’s other female characters.”¹¹ As a Gothic, “The Fall of the House of Usher” both works within the traditional confines of the genre and is aware of itself as a Gothic: “not merely Gothick, but rather a ‘Gothick’ which at every turn signals a consciousness of its operation.”¹² The critical attention to Madeline Usher takes a variety of positions, few of which are in agreement. Part of the power of “The Fall of the House of Usher” are its ambiguities and narrative gaps, which cannot be filled no matter how hard critics and academics try to.

Print: Edgar Allan Poe, The Collected Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Modern Library, 1992.

¹ Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Tales of Mystery and Imagination (London: H. Frowde, 1909), 199.

² Poe, “Usher,” 202.

³ Poe, “Usher,” 203.

⁴ Poe, “Usher,” 205.

⁵ Poe, “Usher,” 205.

⁶ Poe, “Usher,” 206.

⁷ Poe, “Usher,” 213.

⁸ Poe, “Usher,” 217.

⁹ Poe, “Usher,” 219.

¹⁰ Poe, “Usher,” 219.

¹¹ John H. Timmerman, “House of Mirrors: Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’” Bloom’s Modern Interpretations: “The Tell-Tale Heart” and Other Stories–New Edition (New York: Infobase, 2009), 159.

¹² Mark Kinkead-Weeks, “Reflections On, and In, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’” in A. Robert Lee, ed., Edgar Allan Poe: The Design of Order (Northport, AL: 1987), 17.