Use of Tropes: The Fall of the House of Usher

Art by Harry Clarke

Published in 1839, this is one of the more famous Edgar Allan Poe tales and is sometimes seen to have a vampirism element, though it is certainly not explicit, and I would say that it certainly uses tropes that would later feel as at home in a vampire tale as in one of Poe’s gothic masterpieces.

I trust most readers will know the story but, just in case, it follows an unnamed narrator who is called to the side of his friend Roderick Usher. Usher and his twin sister Madeline, live in the House of Usher (the title referring to the bricks and mortar building and the familial line). The line is notable for not producing issue except for the direct heirs.

Once he reaches the house, he discovers that the melancholy Usher suffers from a hypersensitivity of the sense (in the Peter Hammill exploration of the story, the libretto names this as hyperaesthesis). Madeline too is ill and suffers from catalepsy and is dying. Of course, catalepsy and the fear on entombment is a device used in some vampire material – most notably the marvellous Isle of the Dead. There is a psychic connection, it seems, between the twins, but the house is also a character in its own right and seems intimately connected to the Ushers (in a way much more real than just being the family home, it may actually be the source of their maladies). J O Bailey, in the paper “What Happens in “The Fall of the House of Usher”?” (American Literature, vol 35, No 4 (Jan 1964) pp445-466) Points out that the vegetation around the house is dead and the waters of the Tarn it stands on are “black and lurid” and suggests that this is the opposite of life and caused by the presence of the house. Indeed, it is anthropomorphised from the start as the narrator suggests it has “vacant eye-like windows”. Poe repeats the phrase to make sure the significance is well known. The narrator also feels that the house carries an atmosphere of the uncanny – with the familiar feeling unfamiliar and the building stirring up fancies. The house also has a strange fungal growth through it – almost like a nervous system.

Bailey suggests it is the house itself that caused both Usher’s sensitivities and Madeline’s illness, reminding their reader that Summers suggests that vampiric locations are a thing. As for its impact on the twins’ respective health; Roderick is described as cadaverous and having a “ghastly pallor of the skin”. His hyperaesthesis affects him so he “suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses; the most insipid food was alone endurable; he could wear only garments of certain texture; the odors of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a faint light; and there were but peculiar sounds, and these from stringed instruments, which did not inspire him with horror.” Madeline is described as wasting away and Usher, as mentioned, expects that she will die soon.

When she does, indeed, die, Usher intends to intern her in a vault for two weeks prior to final internment. It is interesting that she is described as having “the mockery of a faint blush upon the bosom and the face, and that suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so terrible in death.” Whilst it is described as terrible, the description makes her seem healthier than when she was alive and looking better in repose than in life would make its way into vampire literature through Varney the Vampire and Dracula in respect of Clara in the former and Lucy in the latter.

However, a week or more later, as Roderick tells a story, sounds (matching the story he tells) reverberate around the house. The sounds are then seen to be her escape from the tomb and Roderick seems fully aware that he buried her alive (and has heard her movement for some time due to his over acute senses). She appears and the narrator tells us “there did stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the lady Madeline of Usher. There was blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame.” She falls upon her twin and they both fall dead. The narrator escapes the house, just in time, as it dies, rent asunder and falling into the waters of the Tarn – perhaps, unable to feed any longer now the Usher line has gone, it too dies.

A vampire reading does not necessarily have to be centred on the house itself. In the paper The Vampire Motif in "The Fall of the House of Usher" (College English, Vol. 24, No. 6 (Mar., 1963), pp. 450-453) Lyle H. Kendall, Jr. argues that it is Madeline who is the vampire. The description of her, the entombment but, more important, the emaciated woman’s escape (which perhaps indicates an unnatural strength, given the obstacles she has to pass, escaping not only from the sealed coffin but shifting the iron door described as having “immense weight”) and her final act of killing Roderick (who failed to deal with her troublesome corpse in more traditional manners, ie staking), are all part of the argument. Some commentators have suggested that Poe’s story intimates incest between Roderick and Madeline and, of course, such relations are a pathway to becoming a vampire and this can be built into such a reading. Finally, one might suggest that, in this reading, the fall of the physical house foreshadows the fall of Dracula’s castle, which was Stoker’s planned ending of his novel – the castle falling as the vampire died. Of course, Stoker forewent that ending.

Whether you chose to read the Fall of the House of Usher as a vampire story (and whether the vampire is the house, Madeline or both) or not, it is a fine piece of American Gothic writing and you can read it for yourself via Project Gutenberg.