The Fall of the House of Usher

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As much fun as it is to become immersed slowly and deeply into the worlds of long-winded novels (of the three-four hundred page variety), sometimes you yearn for the same fix, but in a fraction of the time. Cue Edgar Allen Poe! This morning I had a very exciting little adventure into madness and the dark of the human psyche with The Fall of the House of Usher.

This short story centres on the tale of an unnamed narrator travelling to an isolated and decaying mansion in response to a summons from his childhood friend Roderick Usher. Roderick is dreadfully melancholy and ill and the narrator spends over two weeks in his company reading, playing music, discussing art, and burying his sister alive!

When we think of Gothic literature, the mind immediately goes to Poe. His stories are a literary embodiment of the genre, with the settings, the themes, and the characters all gearing towards the macabre and an inevitable demise. The Fall of the House of Usher is probably one of his more confusing stories, with the majority of the drama being implied and left to interpretation than actually explained.

There are a number of ways in which you can interpret the story, though my mind reads it as a macabre exploration into mental illness and its affects not only on the sufferer, but those around them. Roderick Usher’s hypochondria and melancholia (which we’re led to believe are caused by the house and its isolation) actually begins to infect the mind of the narrator, posing two thrilling questions about the classic unreliable narrator: 1) is he unreliable because he is already suffering from mental illness himself, or 2) is Usher’s mental illness contagious. Considering Poe was writing at a time when internal disease of the mind and psyche was something relatively new and unexplored, the story is very complex because of its intimately internal conflicts.

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Poe’s signature delve into the mindset of his characters is what makes The Fall of the House of Usher so exciting and immersive despite it’s very short length. While there is no outer world for readers to explore, they are still given the complete and enveloping reading experience that many well-written novels offer, being placed right in the thick of the decaying mansion and its decaying inhabitants.

A lot of modern literature would not be what it is today without Poe’s thrilling and exciting prose and the Fall of the House of Usher is probably one of his best known and most delightfully entangling works.

The Fall of the House of Usher was written by Edgar Allen Poe and was serialised in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine. It was first published in its entirety in 1839 by W. Burton, Philadelphia.