“The Fall of the House of Usher” 875house) and that of Roderick Usher himself. “It was
with difficulty that I could bring myself to admit the
identity of the wan being before me with the com-
panion of my early boyhood,” the narrator states.
“Yet the character of his face had been at all times
remarkable.” Usher’s illness symbolizes the begin-
ning of the end of the Usher family: “And now in
the mere exaggeration of the prevailing character of
these features, and of the expression they were wont
to convey, lay so much of change that I doubted to
whom I spoke. The now ghastly pallor of the skin,
and the now miraculous luster of the eye, above all
things startled and even awed me.” The nature of
Usher’s malady is a “constitutional and a family evil.”
Usher is a mirror of what used to be, a family estate
that has slowly decayed over time.
The double identity of the estate, which is now
collapsing in around Usher, is depicted clearly in the
ballad “The Haunted Palace,” which is contained
within the story. First, in the second stanza, the lyric
states:
Banners yellow, glorious, golden,
On its roof did float and flow;
(This—all this—was in the olden
Time long ago)
And every gentle air that dallied,
In that sweet day,
Along the ramparts plumed and pallid,
A winged odour went away.The stanza depicts the way life used to be, glorious
and full of celebration. The ballad’s third stanza
mentions the music and glamour of the “[s]pirits,”
which the wanderers in the valley could see in the
window.
By stanza five, a change comes over the palace’s
celebratory atmosphere:
But evil things, in robes of sorrow,
Assailed the monarch’s high estate;
(Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow
Shall dawn upon him, desolate!)
And, round about his home, the glory
That blushed and bloomed
Is but a dim-remembered story
Of the old time entombed.This stanza suggests that the estate, and perhaps the
family, have met their demise. The outward appear-
ance of the Usher home, now covered with fungi
and surrounded by decayed trees, shows signs of age
and wear.
Perhaps a much more difficult symbol to com-
prehend as it relates to identity in the story is the
appearance of Usher’s twin sister, Madeline. The
fact that Madeline is his twin is significant in two
ways. First, she serves as an extension of the Usher
estate. Though ill, Madeline is a reminder of what
used to be—the beauty of the Usher lineage. Sec-
ond, Madeline represents the sanity of her brother,
Roderick. She is slowly dying, and once she passes
away, Usher and the narrator are quick to entomb
her, as referenced in the last line of the fifth stanza of
“The Haunted Palace.” Madeline’s sudden resurrec-
tion serves as the undying reminder that Roderick
cannot bury the memories of his past, which haunt
him constantly.
Andrew AndermattILLneSS in “The Fall of the House of Usher”
Illness is used in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story
“The Fall of the House of Usher” both literally and
figuratively. From the three main characters—Rod-
erick Usher, Madeline Usher, and the narrator—to
Usher’s mansion’s interior and exterior condition,
Poe plays with the idea of illness as a double mirror
of affliction both on the inside and outside.
The most predominant occurrences of illness
in the story are within the characters themselves.
Poe uses Roderick Usher’s illness to illustrate the
increasingly complex culmination of the story’s
events. When readers first meet Usher, they are
given a physical explanation of his illness. The nar-
rator informs readers that Usher suffers from mul-
tiple sclerosis (MS), which explains Usher’s nervous
agitation and his failing appearance on the outside.
The narrator describes Usher’s exaggerated features
and laments, “Surely, man had never before so ter-
ribly altered, in so brief a period, as had Roderick
Usher!”
Upon further study, it seems that Usher’s condi-
tion goes deeper, as Poe gives the reader several indi-
cations that he is suffering not only from a physical
deterioration but an inner one as well—a mental