![]() Without spouses they live together in the great family home, each of them wasting away within the building's dark rooms. What binds Usher to Madeline, and what renders him terrified of her? If he conjures up her specter, arisen from the grave to bring him to his own, why does he do so? There is a clear incestuous undertone to the relationship between the brother and sister. Fear for no apparent reason except ambiguity itself is an important motif in Poe's tale, which after all 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. ![]() "To an anomalous species of terror," Poe writes, "I found him a bounden slave." Usher tries to explain to the Narrator that he dreads "the events of the future, not in themselves but in their results." He dreads the intangible and the unknowable he fears precisely what cannot be rationally feared. What seems to terrify Usher is fear itself. If we were to try to define Roderick Usher's illness precisely, we might diagnose him with acute anxiety. As a result, the line between sanity and insanity becomes blurred, which paves the way for the Narrator's own descent into madness. ![]() Even Usher seems uncertain, contradictory in his description: "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 offers little by way of scientific explanation of the condition. Poe writes that Usher "entered, at some length, into what he conceived to be the nature of his malady." What exactly is his "malady" we never learn. ![]() Either way, the line between life and death is a fine one in Poe's fiction, and Usher's study of the "sentience of all vegetable things" fits aptly with Poe's own preoccupations. But a more realistic version of events suggests that she may have been mistaken for dead-and luckily managed to escape her tomb. Madeline may actually have died and risen like a vampire-much as Usher seems to possess vampiric qualities, arising "from a sofa on which he had been lying at full length" when the Narrator first sees him, avoiding all daylight and most food, and roaming through his crypt-like abode. In " The Fall of the House of Usher," however, it is not clear to what extent the supernatural can be said to account for the strangeness of the events in the tale. ![]() But did she ever die? Near the horrific finale of the tale, Usher screams: "We have put her living in the tomb!" Premature burial was something of an obsession for Poe, who featured it in many of his stories. The plot of Poe's tale essentially involves a woman who dies, is buried, and rises from the grave. ![]()
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