Roderick Usher Research Paper

The Usher mansion is slowly deteriorating, just like Roderick Usher himself. The “sombre tapestries,” “ebon blackness,” and “phantasmagoric armorial trophies” did not just start showing in the house; these elements have had time to develop and is now represented as a never ending darkness, which is just like Roderick Usher’s mental illness. Not only does Poe create an image of the house, he also uses lucid details describing the Usher’s mansion and the rooms inside the home to show that Roderick’s mental illness has physically and mentally trapped him. Roderick is a gloomy and mysterious character who looks as if he is dead. Poe describes Roderick’s appearance as one to not easily be forgotten (Poe 152). In Roderick’s mind, he feels as if he has no escape from this illness, which terrifies him. His biggest fear is fear himself. The evil that has overcame his body will take a toll on his life and he is aware of it because he says “I shudder at the thought of any, even the most trivial, incident, which may operate upon this intolerable agitation of soul. I have, indeed no abhorrence of danger, except in it absolute effect-in terror” (Poe 153). As described in the story, the Usher house has rooms that create a somber life and with this creation, Poe is able to portray the kind of life that Roderick Usher is living and will live. Not only is this technique used in “The Fall of the House of

The catalog of the Usher mansion symbolises its inhabitants. The article Themes and Construction: "The Fall of the House of Usher" from Gale Cengage Learning, remarks, “The Usher mansion is the most important symbol in the story; isolated, decayed, and full of the atmosphere of death, the house represents the dying Usher family itself”. Poe writes that Roderick and Madeline are the last two members of the Usher family left alive. Also, Madeline is on the brink of death, and Roderick mental state isn’t stable. Nevertheless, there are more symbolisms between the setting and the family of Usher. The melancholy

The house seems to be absorbing Usher’s mental health and physical health. Evidence of this is shown by the faltering health and growing fears of Roderick Usher in relation to the growing scariness of the house.

Filled with a sense of dread by the sight of the house itself, the Narrator reunites with his old companion, who is suffering from a strange mental illness and whose sister, Madeline, is near to death due to a mysterious disease. The Narrator provides company to Usher while he paints and plays guitar, spending all his days inside, avoiding the sunlight and obsessing over the sentience of the non-living. When Madeline dies, Usher decides to bury her temporarily in one of his house's large vaults. A few days later, however, she emerges from her provisional tomb, killing her brother while the Narrator flees for his life. The House of Usher splits apart and collapses, wiping away the last remnants of the ancient family. Edgar’s inspiration for this story might have come from true events of the Usher House, located on Boston's Lewis Wharf. As that story goes, 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 1800, two bodies were found embraced in a cavity in the cellar (Neilson).

“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.

In the story, “The Fall of The House of Usher”, there are many mysterious happenings that go on throughout the story between the characters Roderick Usher and the narrator. Throughout the story, Edgar Allan Poe uses themes such as madness and insanity to connect the house back to Roderick Usher. In the “Fall of The House of Usher”, the narrator goes through many different experiences when arriving to the house. The narrator’s experiences start out as almost unnoticeable in the beginning, turn into bigger ones right before his eyes, and end up becoming problems that cause deterioration of the mind and the house before the narrator even decides to do anything helpful for Roderick and his mental illness. In “The Fall of The

In Edgar Allan Poe’s, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the three characters are the unknown narrator, the narrators old time friend Roderick Usher, and Roderick’s sister Madeline Usher. The three characters are unique people with distinct characteristics, but they are tied together by the same type of “mental disorder”. They all suffer from insanity but they each respond to it differently. Roderick and his sister seem to have a spiritual attatchment, and the narrator begins to get sucked into it.

Dr. Jeff Roderick is an experienced chiropractor who is certified in the Active Release Technique and trained in the myofascial release modality. He also holds an official Certified Chiropractic Sports Physician designation. Over the course of his career, he has served as a chiropractic sports medicine physician at the Salt Lake City Olympics, the team physician for the Madison and South Fremont high schools, and a chiropractor with Madison Ridge Chiropractic. While working for Madison Ridge, Dr. Jeff Roderick earned special recognition for excellent service and dedication to the chiropractic profession from the Logan College of Chiropractic.

In Usher, the allegory is psychological, Zimmerman explains, and the scholar believes (along with many other scholars) that the actual "house" of Usher represents Roderick's psyche. In the story the narrator enters the house and he is then led through "many dark and intricate passages" while looking for Roderick's studio; but Zimmerman suggests that that tour through the house is actually an allegorical journey into the organs in the human skull. Poe clearly gives clues that allow the alert reader to "detect the correspondence between Roderick's cranial features and his activities and temperament" (Zimmerman, 2).

American Romanticism has been around for quite some time now, having made an incline in popularity in the early 1800’s. Two very popular stories associated with American Romanticism include: “The Minister’s Black Veil” published in 1832, and the “Fall of the House of Usher” which was published in 1839. These two stories correlate nicely and contrast evenly in the theme of American Romanticism, such as the many supernatural elements both stories posses.

The “Fall of the House of Usher” is about an anonymous narrator who gets a request to go visit one of his oldest friends from boyhood. He visits his friend, Roderick Usher, who has a mental illness that prospers through out the story. His insanity reaches it's peak when he realizes that he buried his twin sister, Lady Madeline, alive. “We have put her living in her tomb!... I heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin…-I dared not speak!”(29) He may have buried her alive but what he feared more was the return of his twin. “Is she not hurrying to upbraid me for my haste?” (30) It drove him crazy just waiting for his desired death. It was unknown how he was going to perish and he knew it was coming but he never would have imagined he would have gone the way that he did.

In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Roderick Usher sends out a letter to an old friend from college and requests for him to visit Roderick Usher because he was suffering from health issues. The narrator feels a sense dreary as he arrives at Roderick Usher's home. Roderick Usher is a very ill man who lives isolated in an old creepy house with his sister in a place isolated from civilization and when the narrator met Roderick, and he describes Roderick Usher in a very distinct way from regular people; he sees that Roderick Usher has physical actions and characteristics of a vampire. Roderick Usher is a vampire because the location of Usher’s home is located in a creepy place, which is isolated from the rest of the community.

One of the most primitive human emotions is fear. In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Poe left many things unanswered. One of the main things he left out was that The Ushers aren't your ordinary family. They were vampires! Both Roderick and Madeline were suffering the effects of vampirism. “From that chamber and from that mansion, I fled aghast”. The narrator experiences all of the frightening phenomenon of the Usher House as he ‘fled aghast” or ran away while showing signs of terror. All of these phenomenon can only be explained by one thing and that is vampirism.

Later in the text, the narrator mentions that Usher is “enchained by certain superstitious impressions in regard to the dwelling which he tenanted”(Poe 599). The narrator is trying to explain that due to his poor living conditions in the Usher Mansion, Usher has found himself following groundless superstitions. This alone is evidence of demented behavior, and, in this case, is easily linked back to the environment in which Usher lives in. Dull settings as well as obscure plotlines create mental derangement in characters in Dark Romantic texts and explain the behaviors, effects, and causes of guilt.

In the story “The Fall of the House of Usher”, there are many connections that can be made between the house and its inhabitants. Roderick and Madeline Usher were just as unstable and oppressive as the home they lived in. You can see the resemblance considering Edgar Allen Poe’s description of the setting and comparing it to his description of the Usher’s. After doing so you can see how much an affect the house has on them. The parallels between the house and family start with the title, “House of Usher”.