Madeline Usher

"Her decease," he said, with a bitterness which I can never forget, "would leave him (him the hopeless and the frail) the last of the ancient race of the Ushers. " While he spoke, the lady Madeline (for so was she called) passed slowly through a remote portion of the apartment, and, without having noticed my presence, disappeared" Roderick is the main character of the entire story, but when Madeline dies he becomes a lot weirder than he already is. It's a scary weird that is going on with him. He starts to hear voices in his head.

“‘Her decease,’ he said, with a bitterness which I can never forget, “ would leave him the last of the ancient race of the Ushers”’(Poe). The narrator's exaggeration stretches the differences between the Usher’s and standard families. Roderick Usher’s desperation affects him in a negative way as he only has one relationship in his life for the many years that he has been isolated for. His dependence on Madeline allows any influence by her to affect him negatively without any interference. The narrator notes the “striking similitude” between the two Usher siblings, as siblings it is surmised that they resemble each other, but the author draws attention to this detail, as if proposing another more complicated factor about their relationship on account of an† alliteration (Poe). This observation advocates an even closer relationship between the two siblings. Which can provide a better explanation for why she had to come back from the vault to kill Roderick, as they were twins, which were born together and must die together. Finally, Stein postulates that Roderick Usher’s mental state “cannot be clearly understood unless it is directly related to the illness of his twin sister.” Stein conveys that Roderick’s mental illness is a consequence of his relationship with Madeline. As twins they share the same mind through a certain supernatural way allowing her unnamed problem to directly affect him. The relationship between Madeline and Roderick expresses the twin relationship intrudes Roderick’s mind and his dependence on Madeline allows for negative influence on him to be

A concern of Roderick Usher is the waning health of his twin sister, Lady Madeline. Usher explains to his dear friend, the narrator, that she is the only surviving relative he has. He further explains that his sister’s health condition baffles any physician that has come to the house. After a few days of the narrator’s visit, Lady Madeline dies. Usher explains to the narrator that he wishes to preserve her body by placing her into the underground crypt of the house. I believe that Poe is trying to use symbolism in Lady Madeline’s death in relation to Roderick’s faltering mental stability. For example, Lady Madeline represents a part of Usher that he has lost; a part of him that has become so strange and frightening to him. When he and the narrator place Lady Madeline’s body into the crypt, it is a desperate act to help preserve a part of himself.

This brings about the next point. A theory is that Roderick and Madeline symbolize the dualism of emotion/body and rationality/mind within people. Roderick is supposedly symbolic of the human’s mental capacity and intellect because he has a mental

This was one of the motives behind inviting the narrator to the house. Roderick was trying to inform his old friends about his life shorting illness. After Roderick saw madeline’s corpse, he started going crazy. His illness trigged the storm.

In the Veldt, the parents realized “Why, they’ve locked it from the outside!” (Bradbury 13). The kids had locked their parents in the nursery, in Africa. They were so afraid of their parents shutting off the nursery and the whole house, they plotted a murder on them. In the Fall of the House of Usher, “Lady Madeline of Usher fro upon the threshold - then with a low moaning crying, fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother… bore to him to the floor corpse” (Poe 47). She was supposedly dead, and buried - in a tomb underneath the house - now coming back as a ghost for the death of her brother, Roderick Usher. After the death of both her and her brother, since there was no one else in the family tree to take care of the House of Usher, it had fallen into complete rubel. Imagination took over all these characters in these three different stories through their thoughts, actions, and events that

In the story fall of the house of usher at the end the two of the men die because Madeline comes out of her tomb and kills them both. “In her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated”. This quote shows that in the story Madeline comes out of her tomb and kills

This act is significant because it shows that he could not kill his double; he could only conceal her in a vault, which gave her the opportunity to escape. Once Usher claims Madeline is dead, his spirits and creativity immediately rise. Usher believes he is finally free, until his repressed secrets can no longer be contained. The narrator observes a change within Usher’s mental state soon after Madeline’s entombment (60). Usher’s repression of madness causes him to act like he possesses a dark secret. While Usher’s aversion to Madeline increased his creativity, it weighed him down in the end; he finally had to succumb to the madness and accept his fate.

As the narrator notes, “To an anomalous species of terror I found him a bounden slave,” everything Roderick does revolves around his fears and how to overcome them. Earlier his nervous behavior was due to him fighting his fears and losing, “ I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, Fear.” Unfortunately, he completely loses the battle and fear harasses him shortly after Lady Madeline passes away, “species of mad hilarity in his eyes-an evidently restrained hysteria in his whole demeanor.” This indicates that Roderick’s insanity has worsened; his fears are ruling his mind and body and no way to escape them. Eventually, he starts to talk to himself as if he were to be conversing with someone, “Not hear it?—yes, I hear it, and have heard it. Long—long—long—many minutes, many hours, many days, have I heard it—yet I dared not—oh, pity me, miserable wretch that I am!—I dared not—I dared not speak! We have put her living in the tomb! Said I not that my senses were acute?” At this point, it seems as though Roderick is hiding a secret and it has occupied his mind entirely. The secret: they buried Madeline alive. It seems as though Roderick knew that his sister was not dead but alive in fact. Roderick states, “I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect--in terror.” It is not death that he fears, however, fear itself. His fear of his own terrors is exactly what kills him when Madeline returns from the dead and kills

As the narrator and Roderick prepare to bury Madeline in the tomb the narrators realises that Roderick and Madeline are actually twins. The cramped and enclosed setting of the tomb, in which Madeline will be buried in, acts as metaphor for the twins. Because of their similarities and the fact they have grown up together in an isolated place means that they cannot develop as free individuals. Madeline is integral to the claustrophobic logic of the story. Madeline stifles Roderick so much that it essentially stops him from seeing himself as a different person from his

Madeline and Roderick both exhibit strong emotional and physical attributes in their actions that make them the two extreme ends opposite each other on the spectrums for these attributes. When the narrator first meets each of the Ushers, he feels a different, extreme

Poe continuously presents death to be inevitable throughout “The Fall of the House of Usher”. Roderick is deeply frightened by his sister, Madeline, and ends up burying her alive, thinking he will escape any type of violence or altercation with her, but that was simply not the case. Poe utilizes the fact that Roderick cannot escape death, even to his sister by making her “bore [Roderick] to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated” (Poe

In another one of his momentous writings, he revisits the theme in a symbolic and artistic way. He revisits the theme of the premature burial in his book the Fall of the House of Usher. The readers can follow the experiences of another unnamed narrator as he visits his childhood friend who he had lost acquaintance with in the previous years. Roderick, the friend in question, is ailing from the unspecified malady, which has a deep effect on his mental faculties. During the visit, Roderick has to bury his twin sister Madeline after she succumbs to a cataleptic disease. Roderick says "Long— long—long—many minutes, many hours, many days, have I heard it—yet I dared not—oh, pity me, miserable wretch, that I am!—I dared not—I dared not speak! We have put her living in the tomb!" (Poe and Perry 12). Roderick has a deep fear that he will bury his sister alive, which seems to be a prophecy of the forthcoming events. This is a probable explanation to Roderick's insistence on burying Madeline in the premises of the house. He explains that he had a feeling of his actions, but he dared not speak. Roderick says to the narrator. "OH whither shall I fly? Will she not be here anon? Is she not hurrying to upbraid me for my haste? Have I not heard her footstep on the stair? Do I not distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of her heart? Madman!"(Poe and Perry 19). Premature burial signifies cutting short an individual's

Madeline, like her brother, is not fatally but allegedly ill. The difference is that Madeline seems to have accepted living with her mental illness, unlike her brother who realizes his mental state but refuses to give in to it. She wonders around the mansion with unknown and unheard thoughts. Neither Roderick nor the narrator interacts with Lady Madeline in the story. Moreover, when the narrator states, “[When] Madeline…passed slowly through a remote portion of the apartment…without having noticed my presence… [I noticed] her gradual wasting away of…cataleptical character”, it is clear that she seems to be in her own little world at the time; however, she continues her fight against her rare disease (Poe 395). Would she have been like Roderick, lying on his deathbed waiting for the end of his life, could the outcome of the story have been different? Perhaps then, Roderick would have seen no threat and thus have not tried to take her life.

Roderick has a strange and rare case of sensory overload. He was sensitive to light, sound, smells, taste, and also touch, which made him only wear garments of a certain texture, if he were to take these symptoms to a doctor of today’s world, he would be diagnosed as hyperesthesia. Madeline's illness is catalepsy. When she suffers from an attack of it, she goes into a catatonic, comatose-like state. She is unable to react to outside stimuli. These are both strange illnesses to have, and is their being products of an incestous relationship explains their illnesses. Incest not only happened to produce Madeline and Roderick, but is also happening between them. Madeline is the same person as Roderick, just in a female version. The incest that happens between them is ironic because its a literal journey into self by Roderick. Madeline being his other half explains why he cannot live without her when she dies. His illness increases when she is gone. One needs another to survive that is why they both die together: “and in her [Madeline]violent and now final death-agonies, bore him[Roderick] to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had