Poe: “The Fall of the House of
Usher”
 Exposition
 The narrator responds to an urgent, vague
emotional appeal
 Rising Action




Madeline = ghostlike
Madeline’s worsening illness
Madeline = Usher’s twin (new twist in the plot)
Noises in “Mad Trist” echo sounds in the house
Usher Plot
 Climax
 “We have put her living in the tomb!”
 Madeline (or guilt, loss, anxiety) claims
Roderick

 Falling Action
 Narrator’s flight
Usher Plot continued
 Resolution (denouement)
 Usher’s fate (death) attached to sister
 House’s fate attached to twins
 Literally and figuratively the house of Usher
dies – they are the only offspring
User key ideas
 Conflict
 Struggle to remain sane when all of the senses
distort reality (reason)
 Narrator and / or Madeline may be an alter ego

 Autobiography?
 Twin / first cousin  Psychoanalytical (internal conflict: superego /
conscience = guilt)
Key ideas Usher continued
 Curse = Incest (some critics claim)
 Madeline’s malady = pregnancy (Roderick’s
child)
 Family tomb (echo of “womb”)
 Poe married 13 – year old cousin
(autobiographical?)
 Curse = TB or consumption (Poe’s curse)
Allegorical / Psychological
 Allegory (literal + symbolic meaning)
 House = tortured mind
 House has “eyes” + “fissure” (shattering) –
mind
 Psychoanalysis -the human psyche- the house
is the unconscious mind – there are both
melancholia / depression and a split
personality (a fissure in the house and his
mind) –
 Gothic = Madeline = Vampire (“full blood-red
moon," a time during which vampires are able to
prey upon fresh victims. In this interpretation,
she has been sucking blood from him for years –
hence he is pale / sensitive to light– in the end
she falls upon him to suck the life out of him)
 Twin connection = early ESP story – a fascinating
concept in Poe’s time & an new one- the psychic
connection allows him to hear her in the tomb
Usher Key ideas
 Romanticism - Romantics considered birth itself to be
a breaking away from supernatural beauty, and they
believed that death was a reuniting of oneself with
that original spirituality.
 When Lady Madeline embraces him, this embrace
would symbolize the union of a divided soul. They will
now live in pure spirituality and everything that is
material in the world is symbolized by the collapse of
the House of Usher.

Key Ideas
 Ambiguity (more than one meaning)
 Psychological or supernatural?
 Madness (insanity) vs. ghost story (vampire/ ESP)
Romantic Ideas:
 Self - madness
 Supernatural / Gothic (setting + ghost story)
 Past - unspecified
Eight Page Book
 Title Page
 Setting – when(clock, calendar, era) and
where
 Characters – Protagonist, antagonist
 Plot (exposition / rising action / crisis)
 Plot (exposition / rising action / crisis)
 Climax – highest tension
 Conflict (force working against protagonist)
 Resolution / dénouement