The House of Usher

Oh, what a large cavern of elegance to be allowed into for the price of a ticket.

Leaving behind the sunlight and heat and noise, life was transitioned to a fancy, almost a gaudy brothel, world of glittering gold and red velvet and soft lighting.

When the lights deemed we all went quiet with our cardboard boxes of greasy popcorn and sweet colas amazed at what was being shown to us on the big screen.

At first all the color went away as the fuzzy black and white newsreels, cowboy adventures, foreign monsters and cartoons drew us into an adventure that would take hours away from our parents babysitting us.

The weekly transport from reality to whatever Hollywood could produce for us to stare at became a ritual.

The gentleman (a white lad just a bit older than we were) would stand at the door in his almost military garb and a pile box hat and take our tickets before entering this chamber that was almost ethereal.

He’d (for there were no ladies to perform this duty) walk us down the carpet to the row of seats and then point out our selection with a flashlight. As we scooted our way to our folded seat trying not to trip over feet or knees and avoid spilling our munchies horde, the usher would walk back to the door to direct the next patiently waiting ticket holder.

He was the usher.

The usher was a sort of police of the theater.

If in the dark if you started acting up making too much ruckus, the usher would walk down the aisle and point the flashlight at you. It was a shame factor that made all the patrons to shish your bad behavior.

If you continued to cause a stir, the usher would point you out and escort you out of the theatre.

The usher ruled.

“The Fall of the House of Usher” is a narrative short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1839 in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine before being included in the collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in 1840. The short story is a work of gothic fiction and includes themes of madness, family, isolation, and metaphysical identities.

Narrator

In “The Fall of the House of Usher”, Roderick Usher calls Poe’s unnamed narrator to visit the House of Usher. As his “best and only friend”, Roderick tells of his illness and asks that he visit. He is persuaded by Roderick’s desperation for companionship. Though sympathetic and helpful, the narrator is continually made to be the outsider. From his perspective, the cautionary tale unfolds. The narrator also exists as Roderick’s audience, as the men are not very well acquainted and Roderick is convinced of his impending demise. The narrator is gradually drawn into Roderick’s belief after being brought forth to witness the horrors and haunting of the House of Usher.

From his arrival, he notes the family’s isolationist tendencies as well as the cryptic and special connect between Madeline and Roderick. Throughout the tale and her varying states of consciousness, Madeline ignores the Narrator’s presence. After Roderick Usher claims that Madeline has died, he helps Usher place her in the underground vault despite noticing Madeline’s flushed appearance.

During one sleepless night, the Narrator reads aloud to Usher as sounds are heard throughout the mansion. He witnesses Madeline’s reemergence and the subsequent death of the twins, Madeline and Roderick. The narrator is the only character to escape the House of Usher, which he views as it cracks and sinks into the tarn, or mountain lake.

Roderick Usher

Roderick Usher is the twin of Madeline Usher and one of the last living Ushers. Usher writes to the narrator, his boyhood friend, about his illness. When the narrator arrives, he is started to see Roderick’s appearance is eerie and off-putting. He is described by the narrator: gray-white skin; eyes large and full of light; lips not bright in color, but of a beautiful shape; a well-shaped nose; hair of great softness — a face that was not easy to forget. And now the increase in this strangeness of his face had caused so great a change that I almost did not know him. The horrible white of his skin, and the strange light in his eyes, surprised me and even made me afraid. His hair had been allowed to grow, and in its softness it did not fall around his face but seemed to lie upon the air. I could not, even with an effort, see in my friend the appearance of a simple human being.

Roderick Usher is a recluse. He is unwell both physically and mentally. In addition to his constant fear and trepidation, Madeline’s catalepsy is also a cause of his decay. He is tormented by the sorrow of watching his sibling die. The narrator states: “He admitted [that] much of the peculiar gloom which thus affected him could be traced [to] the evidently approaching dissolution [of] his sole companion”. According to Terry W. Thompson, he meticulously plans for her burial to prevent “resurrection men” from stealing his beloved sister's corpse for experimentation, as was common in the 18th and 19th centuries for medical schools and physicians in need of cadavers.

As his twin, the two share an incommunicable connection that critics conclude may be either incestuous or metaphysical, as two individuals in an extra-sensory relationship embodying a single entity. To that end, Roderick’s deteriorating condition speeds up his own torment and eventual death. His mental health deteriorates faster as he begins to hear Madeline’s attempts to escape the underground vault she was buried in.

Like with his sister, Roderick Usher is tied to the mansion. He believes the mansion is sentient and responsible, in part, for his deteriorating mental health and melancholy. Despite this admission, Usher remains in the mansion and composes art containing the Usher mansion or similar haunted mansions. Roderick falls to his death out of fear in a manner similar to the House of Usher’s cracking and sinking.

Madeline Usher

Madeline Usher is the twin sister and doppelgänger of Roderick Usher. She is deathly ill and cataleptic. She appears before the narrator, but never acknowledges his presence. She returns to her bedroom where Roderick claims she has died. She is entombed despite her flushed appearance. In the tale’s conclusion, Madeline escapes her tomb and returns to Roderick, only to scare him to death.

According to Poe’s detective methodology in literature, Madeline Usher may be the physical embodiment of the supernatural and metaphysical worlds. Her limited presence is also explained as a personification of Roderick's torment and fear. Madeline does not appear until she is summoned through her brother's fear, as is foreshadowed in the epigraph, a quote from French poet Pierre-Jean de Béranger: “Son cœur est un luth suspendu; / Sitôt qu'on le touche il résonne”, meaning “His heart is a tightened lute; as soon as one touches it, it echoes”.

Poe’s inspiration for the story may be based upon events of the Hezekiah Usher House, which was located on the Usher estate that is now a three-block area bounded in modern Boston by Tremont Street to the northwest, Washington Street to the southeast, Avery Street to the south and Winter Street to the north. The house was constructed in 1684 and either torn down or relocated in 1830. Other sources indicate that a sailor and the young wife of the older owner were caught and entombed in their trysting spot by her husband. When the Usher House was torn down in 1830, two bodies were found embraced in a cavity in the cellar.

Another source of inspiration may be from an actual couple by the name Mr. and Mrs. Luke Usher, the friends and fellow actors of his mother Eliza Poe. The couple took care of Eliza’s three children (including Poe) during her time of illness and eventual death.

German writer E. T. A. Hoffmann, who was a role model and inspiration for Poe, published the story Das Majorat in 1819. There are many similarities between the two stories, like the breaking in two of a house, eerie sounds in the night, the story within a story and the house owner being called “Roderich”. As Poe was familiar with Hoffmann’s works he certainly knew the story and cleverly drew from it using the element for his own purposes.

Another German author, Heinrich Clauren’s, 1812 story The Robber’s Castle, as translated into English by John Hardman and published in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1828 as “The Robber's Tower”, may have served as an inspiration according to Arno Schmidt and Thomas Hansen. As well as common elements, such as a young woman with a fear of premature burial interred in a sepulcher directly beneath the protagonist's chamber, stringed instruments and the living twin of the buried girl, Diane Hoeveler identifies textual evidence of Poe’s use of the story, and concludes that the inclusion of Vigiliae Mortuorum secundum Chorum Ecclesiae Maguntinae (Vigils for the Dead according to the Use of the Church of Mainz) is drawn from the use of a similarly obscure book in “The Robber’s Tower”.

The theme of the crumbling, haunted castle is a key feature of Horace Walpole’s “Castle of Otranto” (1764), which largely contributed in defining the Gothic genre.

In the low-budget Roger Corman B-film from 1960, known in the United States as House of Usher starring Vincent Price as Roderick Usher, the narrator is Philip Winthrop (Mark Damon), who had fallen in love with the sickly Madeline (Myrna Fahey) during her brief residence in Boston and become engaged to her. As Roderick reveals, the Usher family has a history of evil and cruelty so great that he and Madeline pledged in their youth never to have children and to allow their family to die with them. Winthrop tries desperately to convince Madeline to leave with him in spite of Roderick’s disapproval, and is on the point of succeeding when Madeline falls into a deathlike catalepsy; her brother (who knows that she is still alive) convinces Winthrop that she is dead and rushes to have her placed in the family crypt. When she wakes up, Madeline goes insane from being buried alive and breaks free. She confronts her brother and begins throttling him to death. Suddenly the house, already aflame due to fallen coals from the fire, begins to collapse, and Winthrop flees as Madeline kills Roderick and the falling house consumes both her and the Ushers’ sole servant. The film was Corman’s first in a series of eight films inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe.”

Stumbling outside after hours of staring at the screen and eating junk food, we’d shelter our dilated eyes from the blinding light.

As our lives became more casual and for these grand houses of entertainment save some money, the usher was replaced with first come, first served seating. The lush interiors were replaced for plain walls with giant over-volume speakers and smaller theaters and screens. The atmosphere of silence was replaced with continual laughter and heckling and throwing popcorn at the screen. The actors in the seats competed with the actors on the screen.

As television screens became larger and home entertainment amplification became more qualified and a full movie could be recorded to a disc or downloaded that could be watched at anytime and paused for those potty breaks. The ease of never leaving your comfy recliner, in your cuddly jammies, drinking your favorite adult beverage what was always a one out became an easy binge watched over and over again.

It was the fall of the House of Usher.