'The Fall of the House of Usher' - Edgar Allan Poe
 Lesson 2 | Introducing the Usher Family

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The letter 

The narrator has come to the house because he received a letter from his childhood friend, Roderick Usher, requesting his company. Roderick has been feeling physically and psychologically ill and requires his friend’s assistance : “a letter, however, had lately reached me in a distant part of the country” (line 4). Edgar Alan Poe draws heavily on gothic conventions using a mysterious letter as a starting point. 

Roderick Usher and the narrator 

The narrator speaks of Roderick Usher as a friend, even a close one : “my boon companions in boyhood” (line 3), “we had been intimate associates” (line 17). But what is striking in the text is that he later admits to not knowing him very well: “I really knew little of my friend” (line 18) – something that the narrator attributes to Roderick’s “excessive and habitual reserve”. Everything he knows of this man is through the lens of childhood memories and rumours. The reader is left with a strong impression of uncertainty and confusion – a sentiment that is reinforced by the use of contrastive adverbs such as “nevertheless”, “however”, “although”, “yet”. 

The Usher Family

The narrator remembers that the family has always been characterised by its “peculiar sensibility of temperament” (line 2) and its dedication to the art. In fact, the family is described as other-worldly and seem to be more connected with spiritual thoughts rather than with ordinary life and reality.
On lines 27 and 29, the narrator makes reference to the Usher’s purity of lineage :

“(…) the stem of the Usher race, all time-honoured as it was, had put forth, at no period, any enduring branch; in other words, that the entire family lay in the direct line of descent , and had always (…) so lain.”

When we pay close attention to these lines, we may infer that the Usher family is extremely inbred and has been for generations, albeit Poe takes the utmost care not to mention the term “incest” anywhere in the text. Instead, he conveys it through the description of the extraordinary nature of their family. It is worth mentioning that incest was a popular theme tackled by Romantic writers, especially for its shock effect. Incest was associated with madness and mental instability. Although Roderick and Madeline’s incestuous relationship is never explicitly stated, their strange attachment to one another, as well as their decaying health, can lead to such interpretation. Moreover, the family is so isolated from the rest of the word that the expression ‘The House of Usher’ is used interchangeably to refer to the building as well as the people:  

“(…) ‘The House of Usher’ – an appellation which seemed to include, in the minds of the peasantry who used it, both the family and the family mansion” (line 41-42).

The isolation of the family and their fateful connection to its estate is ominous of what is to come. The mansion is decaying, and so is Roderick’s and Madeline’s physical and mental health. This could suggest that the title “The Fall of the House of Usher” is a reference to both the collapse of the physical house, as well as the collapse of the Usher bloodline.

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