The Fall Of The House Of Usher : Poe's And Dark Romanticism

Mysterious, captivating, dark, and eerie are some factors that can come to mind when considering the stories composed by Edgar Allan Poe. The Fall of the House of Usher is no deviant from those factors, and leads to many open doors of observation. From the very beginning Poe encloses the setting within an eerie mood, bringing readers though the gothic archway leading to a house of sorrow, foreboding fear all throughout.

While most of the primary characters in the American Gothic cannon are members of the aristocracy, their societally dominant position does not guarantee them satisfying lives. The focus of this analysis will be the portrayal of the individual as it relates to his or her economic status: does having wealth mean that upper class characters are more likely to lead fulfilling lives than middle/lower class characters? Through a close reading of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, Kate Chopin’s “Désirée’s Baby,” and Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, readers can clearly see a pattern of social commentary in which the members of the aristocracy are—in general—the most restricted,

A Sense of Tension in The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe was a unique man that most people could not understand. Many recognize that he is a talented writer with a very strange and dark style. One of his most well known short stories is “The Fall Of The House Of Usher.” Many argue the different meanings of this story and how it is symbolic to his life. Poe was a very confused individual who needed to express himself, he accomplished this through the short story of “The Fall Of The House Of Usher.” Through this story, Edgar was trying to show the fear he had for him self, he did not understand him self so therefore Poe ran from his own personality and mind. This story enables the reader to take a look at Poe’s mind and

Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, sets a tone that is dark, gloomy, and threatening. His inclusion of highly descriptive words and various forms of figurative language enhance the story’s evil nature, giving the house and its inhabitants eerie and “supernatural” qualities. Poe’s effective use of personification, symbolism, foreshadowing, and doubling create a morbid tale leading to, and ultimately causing, the fall of (the house of) Usher.

The main themes of Edgar Allan Poe’s works are death, perversity, revenge and destruction. The settings he employed in the given short stories, especially in The Fall of the House of Usher and The Black Cat are Gothic. Therefore, naturally the mood of these stories would be dark and sepulchral. However, this is not a trivial employment undertaken to put the reader in a certain kind of zone.

Bipolar disorder affects many people today as well as in the time of Edgar Allen Poe when it was then called melancholia. Poe was diagnosed with this disorder and it plays an integral role in his story, “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839). This story is heavily influenced by this disorder or its presently associated symptoms and also describes one way that bipolar disorder can genetically affect an entire family.

First of all Poe uses the decaying setting to give a sense of dread. The narrator describes the atmosphere as similar “to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium”. It is dreary unearthly. The narrator also says that it is a dreary autumn day. Poe chose to set the story in autumn because it is a season commonly corresponding with death and fear. The actual house is decaying and covered in fungi with a large fissure going down the front of it.. This represents Usher’s state of mind during the visit. Moreover the shape of the house is said to be skull-like which could symbolize the presence of death throughout the story. The interior of the house is no different form its exterior. Once the narrator is led inside the house he finds

In the first few lines of the story, Poe describes the setting as, “During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens”. Even before the characters are revealed, readers can sense that darkness will succumb the “melancholy House of Usher”. The story’s vagueness, which is part of the horror, leaves no indication in which the house and its residents lie. We do not know when or where the narrator arrived, but we do know that the narrator seems to be all alone. The mystery behind the house and its family is one of the many elements Poe uses to make his readers use their imagination.

Edgar Allan Poe is an extremely well known American writer and is famous for his horrific and mysterious works such as, “The Raven” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Poe was born in 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts in an era that seems to have many dark and ominous writers and pieces of literature originating from that time period. Poe is said to have launched the interest in many of the detective type stories that we read from modern day writers. “In the early 1800s, romanticism was the dominant literary mode in Europe and influenced all major forms of American literature until around 1870 (Gandlgruber 1).”

It says in The Fall of The House of Usher “upon the bleak walls-upon the vacant eye-like windows-upon a few rank sedges-and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees-with an utter depression of soul” (The Fall of the House of Usher). Just the scenery of this swampy like place of where this house is shows its creepy area of how he describes it. Not only he describes the house and its surroundings but he describes the time of the year and the day too. In the text it says “the whole of a dull dark, and soundless day in the the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens” (The Fall of the House of Usher). Poe describes how it is a quite and darker day compared to other days of the year.

Edgar Allan Poe is famous for his work with “The Raven” and “The Fall of the House of Usher”. He was born January 19th 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts. Edgar Allan Poe worked as a writer, critic, and an editor. He captured the imagination of people around the world, gaining the nickname “Father of the Detective Story”. Poe had a reputation for being a cut-throat critic. His combative personality strained his relationship with the publisher, making it difficult to get his stories out to the world. He left the magazine that was publishing his stories and picked up alcohol, becoming an addict. Poe was taken by grief after the death of his wife Virginia in 1847. He continued to work, he was in poor health and struggled financially. His final days

Edgar Allan Poe is a well known author and poet whose style is characterized with the usage of a wide range of literary elements that convey a dark mood. Due to Poe’s experiences of poverty and tragedies throughout his life, he became depressed, which affected his writing greatly. Along with his experiences, Poe incorporated many literary elements to enhance the mood of his stories like The Cask of Amontillado and The Fall of The House of Usher.

The story has no definite right or wrong answer to its meaning. It is just a story concocted up by Poe’s vivid imagination. The falling of the house is quite the equivocal, it can mean a lot of different things. Relating it back Roderick and Madeline could explain the overall fall of the house. Yes, there was a fierce storm but that house had been standing for decades and had been through many storms. Though it is a stretch the deaths of the last two Usher’s and the collapsing of the household could mean an awful lot. The narrator had mentioned that the Usher family had been powerful for a long time and the house was passed down through generations. Adding on to that, all of the Usher’s also died in the house. So from birth till death, the entire Usher family had lived in the same house. All taking their turns in the glorious home. This would connect the family and the house greatly. Hundreds of spirits of the same blood all under the same roof. Meaning that all the spirits would take care of not only the residents but the house as well. The walls of the house were the binds that kept the spirits safe so they returned the

Regarded in the literary world as the architect of impeccably crafted short stories and poems, Edgar Allan Poe revitalized American literature. He was a main author in the nineteenth century during the movement of European literature. He is recognized as one of the leading progenitors of modern literature, in both horror and mystery fiction, and in its more complex and self-conscious form, which represent the essential artistic manner of the twenty century. He investigated the profound corners of the mind and its consciousness, with the abnormalities of his narrators. I will analyze two of Edgar Allan Poe’s most popular works, “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale”, based on the effective use of characters, themes, setting, and literacy devices respectively; furthermore, I will highlight these concepts by comparing and contrasting their significance to each other.