'The Fall of the Firm of Usher' is an 1839 curt story by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49), a pioneer of the short story and a author who arguably unleashed the full psychological potential of the Gothic horror genre. The story concerns the narrator's visit to a strange mansion owned by his babyhood friend, who is behaving increasingly oddly every bit he and his twin sister dwell within the 'melancholy' atmosphere of the house.

'The Fall of the House of Usher' has inspired a range of interpretations: it has been analysed every bit proto-Freudian and proto-Kafkaesque, among many other things. The best way to approach the story is mayhap to consider its plot alongside the accumulation of item Poe provides. Before we come to an assay, however, here's a brief summary of the plot of the story.

'The Fall of the House of Conductor': plot summary

The story is narrated by a childhood friend of Roderick Usher, the possessor of the Usher mansion. This friend is riding to the house, having been summoned by Roderick Usher, having complained in his letter that he is suffering from some disease and expressing a promise that seeing his old friend will lift his spirits.

When he arrives, the narrator finds a gloomy and vaguely menacing atmosphere, and his friend, Usher, is much inverse since he terminal saw him: overly sensitive to every sound and sight, and prone to dramatic mood swings. Meanwhile, Roderick'south twin sis Madeline is afflicted with a disease which, Roderick tells the narrator, means she will soon die. These twins are the last in the family line, the terminal descendants of the 'house of Usher'.

Roderick Usher is a gifted poet and artist, whose talents the narrator praises before sharing a poem Usher wrote, titled 'The Haunted Palace'. The ballad concerns a royal palace which was once filled with joy and vocal, until 'evil things' attacked the king'south palace and made it a desolate shadow of what it once was.

Several days later, Roderick tells the narrator that Madeline has died, and they lay her to rest in a vault. In the days that follow, the narrator starts to experience more uneasy in the firm, and attributes his nervousness to the gloomy furniture in the room where he sleeps. The narrator begins to doubtable that Roderick is harbouring some dark secret. Roderick grows more than erratic in his behaviour, and the narrator reads to his friend to try to soothe him. The plot of the romance (a fictional title invented past Poe himself, chosen 'Mad Trist') concerns a hero named Ethelred who enters the business firm of a hermit and slays a dragon.

In a shocking development, Madeline breaks out of her coffin and enters the room, and Roderick confesses that he buried her live. Madeline attacks her brother and kills both him and herself in the struggle, and the narrator flees the business firm. Information technology is a stormy nighttime, and as he leaves he sees the house fall down, collapsing into the lake which reflects the house's epitome.

'The Fall of the Firm of Usher': analysis

'The Fall of the House of Conductor' is probably Edgar Allan Poe'due south near famous story, and in many ways it is a quintessential Gothic horror story. We have a mysterious secret afflicting the business firm and eating away at its owner, the Gothic 'castle' (here, refigured as a mansion), premature burial (well-nigh which Poe wrote a whole other story), the mad possessor of the house, and numerous other trappings of the Gothic novel. Poe condenses these into a short story and plays around with them, locating new psychological depths within these features.

How does he play effectually with them? First, Poe renders them ambiguous rather than clear-cut. Indeed, in that location are no overtly supernatural elements in 'The Fall of the Firm of Usher': only a full general sense of something not beingness quite right. Many things in the story are, to use a term later popularised by Sigmund Freud, 'uncanny': simultaneously familiar however unfamiliar; another key element of the uncanny is the undercover which 'out to accept remained secret and hidden only has come up to light'.

The clandestine that is buried and then comes to calorie-free (represented past Madeline) is never revealed. The symbol which represents the secret – Madeline herself – is hidden away by Roderick, but that symbol returns, coming to light at the end of the story and (in good Gothic fashion) destroying the family for good.

But Madeline is, if yous like, a signifier without a signified: that is, she is a symbol with no lawmaking. She represents a secret, simply what that secret is (an unseemly relationship between her and her brother, or some dark secret from the family's past?) does remain hidden. The secret, as it were, remains a secret fifty-fifty when information technology is 'revealed'.

Doubling is some other aspect of the 'uncanny', because seeing our double is both a familiar and a foreign experience. This person both is and is not me; this reflection of the business firm in the lake or 'tarn' looks exactly like the house and yet conspicuously is but an image of the house. And doubling is very of import in 'The Fall of the House of Usher', every bit it is in other Poe stories: witness his tale 'William Wilson', which plays around with this idea of the doppelganger or mysterious double.

And about everything seems doubled in 'The Fall of the House of Conductor': the title itself has a double meaning (where the 'house', or family of Conductor falls, but the literal bricks-and-mortar structure also collapses), the business firm is reflected or doubled in the lake, Roderick and Madeline are twins or 'doubles' of a sort, and the plot of the 'Mad Trist' mirrors or doubles Roderick'due south own state of affairs.

'The Fall of the Business firm of Usher' can also be analysed as a deeply telling autobiographical portrait, in which Roderick Conductor represents, or reflects, Poe himself. After all, Roderick Conductor is a poet and artist, well-read (witness the array of books which he and the narrator read together), sensitive and indeed overly sensitive (to every audio, taste, sight, touch on, and so on). Many critics take interpreted the story as, in part, an autobiographical portrait of Poe himself, although nosotros should be wary, possibly, of speculating too much about any parallels.

For instance, it has sometimes been suggested that Roderick'southward relationship with Madeline echoes Poe's own relationship with his immature wife (who was also his cousin), Virginia, who fell sick, as Madeline has. But Virginia did non fall ill until subsequently Poe had written 'The Fall of the Business firm of Conductor'.

An interpretation which has more potential, and then, is the idea that the 'house of Usher' is a symbol of the heed, and it is this analysis which has probably establish the most favour with critics. Sigmund Freud would, over half a century after Poe was writing, do more than anyone else to delineate the structure of the witting and unconscious listen, simply he was not the commencement to advise that our witting minds might hide, or even repress, unconscious feelings, fears, neuroses, and desires.

Indeed, it was the German Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854) who distinguished between the conscious and unconscious listen in his early on work Organisation of Transcendental Idealism (1800), labelling the latter Unbewusste (i.eastward. 'unconscious'). The term 'unconscious' was then introduced into English past the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). The notion that we might have both a 'conscious' and an 'unconscious' mind, then, was already in circulation when Poe was writing 'The Fall of the House of Usher'.

Might we and then interpret Roderick as a symbol of the conscious mind – struggling to conceal some night 'hush-hush' and brand himself presentable to his friend, the narrator – and Madeline every bit a symbol of the unconscious? Notation how Madeline is barely seen for much of the story, and the 2d time she appears she is literally cached (repressed?) within the vault.

Nevertheless, Roderick cannot keep her subconscious for long, and she bursts out again in a frenzy – much as Freud would later argue our unconscious drives and desires cannot be wholly repressed and will find some way of making themselves known to united states of america (such as through dreams).

Note that such an assay of 'The Fall of the House of Usher' complements the uncanny elements in the story: the secret which ought to accept remain hidden simply has come up to low-cal is something deep within the unconscious which has broken out. Just when our unconscious breaks out and communicates with us, information technology usually does so in ways which are coded: ways which reveal, without revealing, the precise nature of our desires and fears. (As the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan once quipped, 'a neurosis is a secret that y'all don't know you lot are keeping'.) Dreams, for example, are the style our unconscious mind communicates with our conscious mind, only in such a way which shrouds or veils their message in ambiguous symbolism and letters.

If the unconscious did communicate with us clearly and openly, it would overwhelm and destroy us. Mayhap that is what happens at the end of 'The Fall of the House of Usher': Roderick comes contiguous with his darkest unconscious, and it destroys him. And this explains why both Madeline and Roderick are destroyed: the mind, both conscious and unconscious, is killed at once. The house (the torso which houses the heed?) cannot function without the mind, and then it must also be destroyed.