An Essay on The Withered Arm, by Thomas Hardy

“The Fall of the House of Usher”, a short story by Edgar Allen Poe, follows an unnamed narrator as he rushes to the aid of Roderick Usher per his request. When the narrator arrives at the Usher’s house, he finds it in a dilapidated state with a crack running from the base of the house to the roof. The narrator finds his friend, a man whom he has known since he was young, pale and lacking the appearance of a human being. The narrator quickly comes to see some connection between his friend’s ailment and the state of his sister, Madeline. Shortly after the arrival of the narrator, Roderick’s sister dies of the illness that has plagued her for so long. However, with her death, Roderick begins to change and fear starts to close its cold hands

“I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in an unruffled luster by the dwelling, and gazed down--but with a shudder even more thrilling than before--upon the remodelled and inverted images of the grey sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows” (Poe). In the exposition of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”, the narrator travels to the house of his boyhood friend, Roderick Usher, and in an attempt to rectify the rise of negative emotions, gazes at a small lake, at the reflection of the eerie house surrounded by dead trees. Like the narrator, who uses unorthodox methods to obtain a clearer image, Roderick Usher’s strange behavior, surrounding his twin sister and the forms of art that he partakes in, appear as madness, but actually reveal deep insight.

‘The Darkness Out There’ and ‘The Withered Arm’ are both short stories. The characterization techniques they use are contrasting and similar. Each story is from a different time; ‘The Withered Arm’ being 19th century and ‘The Darkness Out There’ being 20th century. Thomas Hardy writes ‘The Withered Arm’ as a 3rd person narrative whereas Penelope Lively uses a mixture between 3rd and 1st person.

The narrator comes to the House to aid his dying friend, Roderick Usher. As he arrives at the House he comes upon an “aura of vacancy and decay… creating a pathologically depressive mood” (Cook). The state of the House is daunting to the narrator – he describes it with such features as “bleak walls”, “eye-like windows”, “rank sedges”, “decayed trees”, and “an utter depression of the soul”. These images foreshadow a less than pleasant future for the narrator and his dear friend Roderick. Poe continues to foreshadow the narrators turn of events with a description of the House’s “dark” and “comfortless” furniture. The House becomes a living hell for the narrator as he watches Roderick’s condition evolve and struggles to understand the mystery tying unfortunate events together. However, as the narrator gradually becomes more enveloped in Roderick and the House’s malady, he seems to develop a malady of his own. While the narrator’s illness is less prominent than that of Roderick and his sister Lady Madeline, the sicknesses are one in the same.

In the short story, ¨The Fall of the House of the Usher¨ by Edgar Allan Poe, the unnamed narrator arrives at his childhood friends, Roderick Usher’s house. Immediately the house can be pictured as a modern haunted house with “inverted images of the grey sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems and the vacant and eye like windows.” Lately, Roderick has been sick, stricken with a mental illness and wrote to the narrator asking for help. After living with Roderick for some time, the narrator learns some details about Roderick’s life, including his battle with his fears and the close relationship he shares with his sister, Madeline. All through the story, fear and isolation are prevalent themes; from the appearance of the house to the death of Roderick.

The story is about the sickness, incest, danger of unrestrained creativity and madness of the decaying house of his childhood friend, Roderick who lived with his sister Madeline Usher. The tale told from an unnamed narrators perspective, tells of the desperate desire by Usher to see his old friend in a letter that depicted a certain “mental disorder”. The author obeys summon and visited his

The social hierarchy during the early modern period was convoluted, with social standing being not only defined by class but also education, gender, birth and linage among other things. For the purposes on this essay, however, this can be divided between the educated elite (Nobility and Gentry) and the popular beliefs and the lower classes. The belief in magic and witchcraft can broadly be divided into elite who had a more theoretical fear of witchcraft and the beliefs of the lower classes which were more practical and immediate, however, differences between the two was not always absolute. The term elite can also be defined in terms of who it leaves out. The main exclusion is ordinary working people, who had little or no formal education.

In "The Tell-Tale Heart" the action is filtered through the eyes of a delusional narrator. The narrator fixates upon the old man's eye and determines to commit a conscious act of murder. He prides himself on his careful planning and mastery at deceiving others. While he acts friendly towards the old man and the police, dark secrets are hidden deep inside of him. This leads to a false confidence. He insists on seating the policemen in the very room where he had slain the old man just a few hours before, the old man's body was revealed to be beneath the floorboards at the narrator's own admission and admits his crime because of the loud beating of the heart.

First of all, both of these gothic literatures contain some frightening physical deformities. In Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”, Roderick Usher, suffered from an illness that provoked his physical deformities. Although, Poe didn’t come straight out and tell the reader that Roderick Usher had deformities, they are implied. Roderick appeared to look unwell, very pale, and resembled a corpse. The appearance of Roderick Usher frightened the narrator. In fact, the narrator described Roderick’s appearance as a “ghastly pallor of the skin, and the now miraculous lustre of the eye, all things startled and even awed me”. He also called Roderick’s appearance a “cadaverousness of complexion”. In comparison, in Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”, the old man’s eye was the physical deformity. The narrator described the old man’s eye as “a pale blue eye, with a film over it”. The physical deformity also frightened the narrator in this short story. The eye frightened the narrator so much that he wanted to rid himself of the eye forever. Brittany Hamilton claimed that “the old man’s physical deformity was enough to drive the narrator to being crazy”.

Edgar Allen Poe is one of the best short stories writers and known for his insane crimes and gruesome murders. How he portrays the murderer is his art and how he makes the readers feel is his talent. Often in his short stories he used common themes, but the plots are different. In comparing three of Poe’s short stories “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “Hop Frog” and “The Cask of the Amontillado” a reader can see common themes such as love and hate, revenge and insanity.

Lilly B. Campbell comments in “Grief That Leads to Tragedy” on Queen Gertrude’s sinful state:

The cleverness of the young men's fixation on witches, apparitions, and cemeteries papers over, to some degree, the genuine frightfulness of the circumstances to which the young men are uncovered for instance, grave burrowing, homicide, starvation, and endeavored mutilation. The relative straightforwardness with which they acclimatize these unpleasant occasions into their whimsical world is maybe one of the slightest sensible parts of the novel. Foreseeing that If the novel were composed today, we may hope to peruse about the psychic harm these great adolescence encounters have done to these young men.) The young men arrange this ghastliness in light of the fact that they exist in a world suspended some place in the middle of reality and pretend.

Poe’s effective use of personification, foreshadowing, symbolism, and doubling create a morbid tale leading to, the fall of (the house of) Usher and its what ultimately set the tone for gothic elements in the story. Roderick and Madeline are both suffering from the alluring stranger illnesses and effects that the house exhibits and illuminates. Roderick pragmatically suffers from the morbid acuteness of the sense, because he believes that the

In this study there were no physical participants because all the information was gathered from books. “The Withered Arm” and “The Melancholy Hussar of The German Legion” were selected from the list of Hardy’s short stories for analysis. The method used in this study was mixed approaches.

Roderick Usher is our main character in the Edgar Allen Poe’s horror story “The Fall of the House of Usher”, who is described in the story as gloomy and mysterious. In the poem being bother by his hyper senses, Roderick are seemed with less energy and pallor of the skin than the narrator found him. (Poe, 17) Although the narrator puts a lot of effort to uplift his mood, he still seemed very depressed and nervous.