Women's Role in The Fall of the House of Usher

The relationships of the three main characters in the movie are not only different but completely different compared to the short story. In the short story, Roderick and the narrator are portrayed as childhood friends, and the narrator was visiting because Roderick wrote him a letter asking the narrator to keep him company. Also, Madeline and Roderick, siblings, are matrimonial due to their family traditions. On the other hand, the movie portrays Roderick and the named narrator, Philip, seem to have no personal connection at all. Roderick doesn’t even want Philip there because he states, “I’m afraid you are going to have to leave.” Furthermore, the most shocking difference was when Philip arrived and asked for Madeline. He said that he was there because she was will and he plans to marry her. This being said, Madeline and Roderick have no other relationship other than being siblings.

Fear has the ability to alter our perception and can affect the mind. In the fall of the house of usher, The most thing usher feared was the death of his sister Madeline “For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon the threshold--then, with a low moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her violent and now final death agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated.” (Poe 30) Roderick believes that the sounds he hear are being made by his sister who was alive when she was entombed. He somehow knew that she was alive. The door is blown open and Madeline was standing there. She falls on her brother,

Corman’s film implied that the house itself was the monster. Viewers saw this throughout the film, by the objects falling mysteriously, the houses’ constant trembling, the eerie sounds etc. The role of the narrator was eliminated in the film, so the viewers had to make conclusions and descriptions based on what the viewers might have seen. This is a challenging task because the viewers were so caught up in the movie that the viewers might have not noticed a few things which would have otherwise been explained and described in the short story. In the short story Roderick asked for Phillip, through a letter. Roderick was sick and wanted comfort and company. Poe’s story was captivating and creepy but Corman changed the story and made Madeline and Phillip lovers. The story and the film both depicted the siblings’ illness the same way. The film also implied that Roderick may have viewed Philip as a romantic rival, which suggested an incestuous relationship between Madeline and Roderick. They were not regarded as twins in the film and were not at all similar. In the film, Phillip was preoccupied with Madeline and fear. In the story, he spent most of his time reading, painting, and listening to Roderick’s music. His whole purpose of being there was to cheer Roderick up. In the story, Madeline was barely mentioned or known of until the end. In the film, she was a critical character and essential to the plot of the movie. The foreshadowing in the film was much more

In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Rodrick Usher’s twin sister Madeline, is a major, yet flat character. While there is no recorded dialog with Madeline, there is still a vivid description of her outward presentation which characterizes her as an ill, pale, woman, who is “wasting away” (Usher 5). However, Madeline is more than Rodrick’s diseased sister and her imminent death makes Rodrick nervous. Rodrick does not want loose his “soul companion” and find himself the “last of the ancient race of Ushers” (Usher 5). This applies to the theme of the fear of death, as Madeline’s impending fate makes Rodrick increasingly afraid as both the story and Madeline’s disease

Edgar Allan Poe used fear to attract his readers into his gothic world. Poe realized that fear intrigues as well as frightens, and sew it as a perfect motif for many of his stories, particularly The Fall of the House of Usher. Poe emphasized the mysterious, desolate, and gloomy surroundings throughout the story to set up the fear that got the reader involved. Then he extended the fear to the characters in order to reveal the importance of facing and overcoming fear. Poe suggested in the story that the denial of fears can lead to madness and insanity. This has clearly shown through the weakening of Roderick Usher's mind and the resulting impact on the narrator of the story.

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.

If Madeline was indeed a figment of Roderick’s imagination, Poe is here exploring the difference between the mental and physical self, and the importance that the two are similar.

All these things put together and a few others help to connect the house to Roderick and Lady Madeline. When the narrator first sees Roderick after a long period of time, he thinks that he resembles that of a corpse. Then Roderick tells him the reason for his appearance, why he looks so bad. He said he had an illness that was a “morbid acuteness of the senses.” The word morbid, when used anywhere, has very strong meaning and it is of the negative type. He uses the word tortured when he is describing his eyesight and says that even the slightest sound is almost unbearable. Thinking about having all of these symptoms put together is a very bad picture to paint in your mind. His condition, in this case, is very comparable to that of the condition of the house.

Poe’s use of foreshadowing, the act of providing hints of future actions, in “The Fall of the House of Usher” foretells the “death” of Madeline Usher, along with her grandiose return. “She succumbed (as her brother told me at night with inexpressible agitation) to the prostrating power of the destroyer”. The "destroyer" here is Roderick Usher, referring to the end of the story, when he buries his sister alive. Poe uses foreshadowing again when Roderick “stated his intention of preserving her corpse for a fortnight, in one of the numerous vaults within the main walls of the building”. By “preserving” Madeline’s corpse, Roderick leads the audience, as well as the narrator, to believe that she is still alive, thus giving her the ability to “rise from the dead”.

From entering the Usher household blank and faceless, he left the house with the characteristics of Madeline and Roderick. The narrator is scarred for life from what he witnessed and went through during his stay at the mansion. Poe purposefully transfers the qualities of the Ushers to the narrator. The narrator is very different from most narrators as he is able to tell the story clearly and have an effect on outcomes of it. In the past, the Usher family was known for starting a pure bloodline through incest. Throughout the generations the tradition on incest and keeping their bloodline pure was passed down as older family passed away. In a way, Roderick and Madeline passed down their mental illness to the narrator. Poe lends the narrator qualities of a character through his experience of the events that took place in the household. Poe makes the narrator into his own character by involving him in the story and allowing him to change the outcome of the events in the story.

The downfalls of Roderick and the narrator juxtapose in order to emphasize the House’s true reign over the characters. The House began haunting the narrator from the moment he first viewed it. Yet it seems only to disturb him in subtle ways whereas Roderick, a resident of the House, seems to be degenerating at a pace similar to it. Just as the

Madeline, who is Roderick’s sister and wife, represents the incestuous romance, which connects to Poe’s love life with his young cousin. Brett Zimmerman makes the connection with the statement of “the In light of our new understanding of Madeline as the allegorical-phrenological representative of perverse sexuality, we may have to revise our understanding of Poe's Platonic and idolatrous attitudes toward women.” The image of incest is again repeated with the reflection on the lake, where the twins are on top of one another, only Madeline is weaker than Roderick just like the reflection. Brett Zimmerman displays this when he writes “the narrator has already experienced a visual analogue of the sister atop the brother in the image of the House astride its reflection in the tarn.” Critics consider the house itself to symbolize Roderick, while the paler, weaker reflection represents Madeline. Madeline represents the incestuous romance, the bigotry of Poe’s time, and the constant decay of households he shared with the women in his life.

In the story “ The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe, has an American romanticism with its characters. Edgar Allan Poe is considered a Dark Romanticism because of the way he writes his poems and short stories centered around the concept of evil human nature, darkness, and death. Roderick and Madeline Usher were said to be related during the middle of the story; they were twins. It explained how they were sick, Roderick had a mental disorder and Madeline was physically sick. As the narrator enters the desolate house, he finds both Roderick and his sister in a severe state of depression and they both appear sick like. The narrator tries to make Roderick feel better, but Roderick wouldn’t budge. Roderick thinks that the house is making him sick and making him to appear crazy.

“The Fall of the House of Usher” follows a similar symbolic storyline. Throughout the story, the narrator uncovers significant details regarding the mysterious childhood friend of his and many of the important elements are revealed. Specifically, Poe designed the plot in such a way that the Usher siblings represent two sides of the same individual; Madeline and Roderick as the body and the mind respectively (Miller par 32). Since the twins are the first in their family, it shows the separation from original unity (genetically) and foreshadows that the twins must die in order for the restoration of peace. The House of Usher also has a significant symbolic value in the story; it represents Roderick’s psychological state of mind and is described by the narrator as having disturbing realistic qualities (Poe 893). Nevertheless, toward the end of the story, the epitome of the symbolic nature of this story is revealed and is concluded by an epic turn of events. Madeline collapses on Roderick as the narrator rushes to leave the house; the siblings death at the end symbolize the destruction of the physical world as shown by Madeline and the destruction of the spiritual world as displayed by Roderick’s immediate death

Men, of course, were seen as the mind and intellect of the household, and the one qualified to receive an education and work in the outside world. A woman’s mental ability was regarded as essentially limited to superficial sensing, while a man would have been seen as the one responsible for complex thought and reflection in a household. In a way, Madeline’s suppression by her twin brother and the way she generally presents herself reflects this. Madeline does not speak, and simply obeys the orders of everyone else in the house. Roderick, on the other hand, always has the final word. This is exemplified once again the Roderick’s live burial of Madeline, in which Madeline could not do anything to change her fate.