Why Does the House of Usher Fall? Two Possibilities

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” challenges readers to discover what causes the fall of the house of Usher, both the house itself and the remaining members of the family. Two possibilities, in particular, present themselves as options for readers: a physical explanation and a psychological, moral explanation. If the cause of the fall of the house and its members is physical, involving the decay of the stones of the house and the hereditary disease Roderick and Madeline share, then the story has no moral judgment to pass upon its ill-fated twins. In this case, they are simply victims of processes that are beyond their control. However, if the cause of the “fall” is some sort of moral transgression, perhaps involving forbidden sexuality, then the story is in fact a commentary on the fruits of spiritual corruption. Poe renders the cause ambiguous to force readers into an ambivalent attitude towards the Ushers, an ambivalence that is the product of the ambiguity of the reason for the fall.

The story is rife with physical explanations of both the house and its inhabitants. The House of Usher is the immediate setting of the story and is described by the narrator in ways that make its fall seem imminent. The narrator tells us, as he approaches the house, that he brings his horse to “the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled luster by the dwelling, and gazed down” (1345). The narrator’s use of the adjective “precipitous” to describe the tarn seems to foreshadow the fall of the house into it. The house is figuratively poised on the brink of a “precipice.” Moreover, the atmosphere about the house is described in terms that make the house seem in a state of diseased decay. The narrator speaks of an atmosphere that “had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn: a pestilent and mystic vapor, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued” (1346). Immediately following this description of the unhealthy, diseased, corrosive atmosphere around the house are further details about the house, all of which suggest that its physical condition is precarious: “No portion of the masonry had fallen; and there appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of parts, and the crumbling condition of the individual stones” (1346). There is no single flaw in the masonry of the house, but each stone is so damaged by the corrosive air that repair is unthinkable. However, the narrator does note that there is a “barely perceptible fissure [. . .] extending from the roof of the building in front, [which] made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn” (1346). The house, for obvious physical reasons, is on the brink of collapse, both splitting in half and cracking in thousands of minute pieces.

Its inhabitants, it appears, are as well, and they are described in physical terms analogous to that of the house itself. Their diseased state corresponds to the decay of the house. The narrator describes Usher’s complexion as “cadaverous” and remarks the “ghastly pallor of the skin” (1347). These are symptoms, apparently, of a “morbid acuteness of the senses,” ultimately a disease that runs in the Usher line. The narrator tells us, “It was, [Roderick] said, a constitutional and a family evil, and one for which he despaired to find a remedy [. . .]” (1348). Like the condition of the house itself, its constitution riddled with cracks, that of Usher is irremediable. The narrator later tells us that Usher’s family tree is almost totally in the “direct line of descent” (1346), suggesting that the disease that afflicts the family has been passed along unmitigated by new blood in the family. They have preserved not only the purity of their bloodline but also the strength of the disease that destroys them. The “direct line of descent,” too, seems to mirror the crack that runs down and descends into the tarn. The directly transmitted hereditary illness will lead to, it seems, the collapse of the Ushers into the tarn much as the crack points to the demise of the house.

Madeline’s disease, like Usher’s, is characterized by bodily wasting and mental decline. The disease “had long baffled the skill of her physicians,” the narrator tells us, and is characterized by “a gradual wasting away of the person, and frequent although transient affections of a partially cataleptical character [. . .]” 91349). The narrator says that Usher’s gloom and nervous irritability could in fact “be traced to a [. . .] natural and far more palpable origin—to the severe and long-continued illness” of Madeline (1349, emphasis added). Poe presents us, then, with a “natural,” physical (“palpable”) explanation for both the impending collapse of the house and the Ushers. These details suggest that the “fall” of the House of Usher, unlike the “fall” of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, is a matter of mere physical accident and inevitability. The cause of the decline, thus, seems something totally disconnected from the actions and behavior of the Ushers.

However, this simple, “palpable,” physical explanation is not the only one suggested by the story, for the narrator employs adjectives and notes details that suggest “moral” causes as well. For example, in his description of the house and its atmosphere, the narrator notes that it “had no affinity with the air of heaven” (1346). The narrator thus suggests that there is something unheavenly or even hellish about the house and its environs. Usher tells us, inserting into the physical description of his disease a moral note, that the disease is a “family evil” (1348). Is there something buried in the family vault, a proverbial skeleton in the closet, that makes the fall a product of evil? Adding to this possibility is the narrator’s description Usher’s weak chin, which he thinks signifies “a want [lack] of moral energy” in Usher’s character. Presumably the word “moral” here refers to psychological strength, but it could also signify moral weakness (1347). Has Usher given in to temptation because of a lack of moral fortitude. After all, we learn, he has been living alone with his sister since they inherited the Usher estate.

The answer may be suggested by the artistic products of Usher’s mind. Usher’s painting, which the narrator notes, evokes the burial of something deep within the earth and suggests that Usher is hiding something. The narrator notes, “A small picture presented the interior of an immensely long and rectangular vault or tunnel [. . .] Certain accessory points of the design served well to convey the idea that this excavation lay at an exceeding depth below the surface of the earth” (1350). Yet what is buried there is left open to interpretation. Its abstraction allows is to wonder about what it represents, and the fact that the narrator says that the light that illuminates the tunnel in the painting gives it an “inappropriate splendor” makes it seem transgressive, improper (1350, emphasis added).

Usher’s poem and music contribute to this suggestion that there is a moral as well as a physical taint in the Usher line. The song Usher sings, clearly an allegory of his own impending fall, tells a story about a “monarch” that lives happily until “assailed” by “evil things.” Whereas in the old time people looking through the palace windows see the inhabitants “moving musically/ To a lute’s well-tuned law,” later they behold “vast forms that move fantastically/ To a discordant melody” (1351, emphasis added). The mention of the monarch moving in accord with the “law” but then dancing to a “discordant melody” suggests perhaps that once Usher, too, moved in harmony with the law but now dances to a lawless tune.

Another suggestion of possible immorality and spiritual dissolution crops up in the description of the vault into which Madeline is placed, which, the narrator notes, “had been used, apparently, in feudal times, for the worst purposes of a donjon-keep” (1353). Is Usher’s purpose in burying Madeline alive in the tomb just as bad, we are prompted to wonder? Indeed, is Usher an innocent victim of physical, hereditary decay, or is there something “inappropriate,” “evil,” and “bad” in his purposes?

The hint of sexual impropriety or transgression is perhaps introduced symbolically in the tale. Madeline’s tomb, we are told, lies “immediately beneath” the narrator’s “sleeping apartment.” That is, Madeline is buried beneath a bed. More suggestive is the book the narrator proposes to read to Usher, a medieval romance entitled “the Mad Trist of Sir Launcelot Canning” (1355). The word “tryst” refers to a secret meeting, especially one between lovers. The “tryst” in the story, then, is perhaps an echo of the “secret meeting” between Roderick and Madeline, something that needs to be buried beneath the bed on which it occurred.

The final suggestion that the disease that causes the fall may be more than merely physical is Usher’s reaction when he hears Madeline approaching the chamber where he is listening to the story of a “tryst.” Rather than rejoice that Madeline is alive, Usher acts as though he is guilty and that his punishment is imminent: “Oh whither shall I fly? Will she not be here anon? Is she not hurrying to upbraid me for my haste?” Although Roderick’s “haste” here appears to refer to his premature burial of Madeline, it also suggests impulsivity. Madeline bursts into the room and is united with her brother in a fatal embrace that itself has sexual overtones: “For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon the threshold—then, with a low moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother [. . .] and bore him to the floor a corpse [. . .]” (1357). The Ushers thus “die” together, which is an old euphemism for orgasm.

While there is ample evidence to suggest that what happens to the House of Usher is a matter of physical decay and the effects of a hereditary disease, the story also opens the possibility that the decay is a result of moral dissolution, a fall that is comparable to the fall of Adam and Eve. Indeed, the literal fall of the House of Usher is rendered in terms that make it seem like the destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, which also sunk into the earth after being blasted, much as the House of Usher is, by a supernatural storm. Even Judgment Day, the day when the dead of the earth are prophesied to rise in the Bible and when the living will be judged and consigned to Heaven or Hell, is evoked by the ending of the story, which includes both a body rising from the dead and a judgment from which Usher cannot fly. Moreover, the house collapses with a “sound like the voice of a thousand waters” (1357) and ultimately sinks in the tarn, a scene which evokes the Biblical flooding of the earth after forty days and nights of rain. These physical events, then, evoke Biblical punishments for evil. Poe ultimately leaves it to each reader to resolve the ambiguous cause of the fall of the House of Usher.