“The Fall of the House of Usher” Essay Sample

In Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” there is grounds that characterizes the narrative as Gothic literature. Gothic literature is a genre or manner of literature that combines elements of both horror and love affair. A Gothic literature tale trades with horror. desperation and grotesque such as mutant in animate beings. workss. and worlds. The intent of Gothic literature is to make horror. to open fiction to the kingdom of the irrational and to show the presence of the eldritch bing in the universe that we know nationally through experience. Some features of Gothic literature are: the ambiance is of somberness. panic and enigma. the narrative is set in bleak or distant topographic points. the characters are in a province of psychological or physical torture. visions. a supernatural or other secular elements are present. adult females in hurt and an undependable storyteller. “The Fall of the House of Usher” has all of these features.

The scene of “The Fall of the House of Usher” is a “dull. dark. and silent twenty-four hours in the fall of the twelvemonth. when the clouds hung oppressively low in the celestial spheres. ” ( Poe 297 ) The century and the location were ne’er straight given to the reader nevertheless it does province that the scene is a “mansion of somberness. ” ( Poe 297 ) The storyteller observes that the house seems to hold absorbed an immorality and diseased atmosphere from the decaying trees and cloudy pools around it. The characters in the narrative are Roderick Usher. Lady Madeline ( merely two left of the Usher household ) and the storyteller. Roderick Usher wrote the storyteller stating him that he was experiencing physically and emotionally ill. Soon after Madeline dies. Roderick decides to bury her temporarily in the grave below the house. The storyteller helps Roderick to bury her. After “the seventh or 8th twenty-four hours of puting lady Madeline within the donjon” ( Poe 304 ) Roderick becomes even more uneasy. The storyteller besides experiences something really similar. He can non kip and go through back and Forth. At this point the storyteller is undependable. Like Roderick. he has become brainsick.

The last and most of import Gothic component in “The Fall of the House of Usher” is a supernatural or other worldly element. The storyteller decides to read to Roderick to go through the dark. He reads “Mad Trist” by Sir Launcelot Canning. As he reads he hears noises that are similar to those in the narrative. At first he ignores them because he believes they are his imaginativeness. They have become so loud that he can no longer disregard them. Roderick has been hearing the sounds for yearss and believes that it is Madeline in the grave. alive. Madeline is standing the room access in a white robe covered with blood. Madeline “in her violent and now concluding decease torments. bore him to the floor a cadaver. and a victim to the panics he anticipated” ( Poe 308 )

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Work Cited
Poe. Edgar Allan. “”The Fall of the House of Usher”” The American Experience. Upper Saddle River. New jersey: Prentice-Hall. 2000. 297-308. Print.