Finished: 16/10/2024
short stories a couple of months ago and I've only read a handful of them. I've heard that The Fall of the House of Usher is pretty influential in the horror media world, so I thought I'd give it a shot. Like most of Poe's works, in my opinion, it was overhyped but still not bad. I also want to talk more about Poe's personal life later in this report because I have an opinion I'd like to share.
To start with the summary, an unnamed protagonist rides his horse to the house of Usher, which is a giant, dull, dark mansion. The protagonist received a letter from Roderick Usher, his childhood friend and owner of the mansion, telling him to come over for a while because he needs some company. Right from when the protagonist walks through the door, it's clear to him that Roderick is in a bad way. Roderick's things are scattered all over his office and he's complaining about things that have never bothered him before, like string instruments and the texture of clothes. The first spook comes up when Roderick laments about his sister, Madeline Usher's, death; but the protagonist saw Madeline walking through the hallway on his way up to Roderick's office.
The protagonist does what he can for a couple weeks to keep Roderick occupied, but Roderick still seems to be on edge. Eventually, Roderick proposes that the protagonist and him should finally lay Madeline to rest in the family crypt. During the private ceremony, the protagonist learns that Roderick and Madeline were twins.
The protagonist hardly sees Roderick after the ceremony. A couple nights later, during a huge storm, Roderick comes into the protagonist's room and speaks but doesn't make any sense. The protagonist tries to calm Roderick down by reading him a story called "The Mad Trist" by Sir Lancelot Canning. I'm putting the title in quotations instead of italics because from what I can tell, this is entirely made up by Poe. "The Mad Trist" parallels what's happening outside of it; as lighting and thunder strike, Roderick says his realization out loud: they buried his sister alive!
Just then, Madeline, very thin and covered in rags, walks through the door. The protagonist gets so spooked he runs out of the house as fast as he can. When he's eventually out and away, he looks back at the house for the final time only to see that it's in ruins and what's left of it is overgrown. -Very scary!
The first thing I want to point out is the Victorian Era trope of an embedded narrative and how Poe doesn't break this format. Even though Poe is American and he wrote this at the very beginning of the Victorian Era, this is still something he uses. "The Mad Trist" is blatantly an expression for Roderick's feelings; "trist" of course meaning "sadness." Roderick is so consumed in his sadness it's altering who he is as a person.
I'm not the biggest fan of embedded narratives. I think it's a good tool to use now as sort of a homage to older times, but in these older pieces, it's always this weird meta-story that just explains what you're reading more clearly. I know that not everybody knew how to read at this time, and having the time and ability to analyze literature was more of a privilege than it is now; maybe these embedded narratives were used to make literature easier to understand and therefore have a bigger audience? I know there's a saying in film and theater that's something like "show me, don't tell me," but maybe it took another 100 or more years of human evolution from Poe's time to really have that saying become common place?
Something Poe does great, and he's always done this very well, is his attention to detail in the setting of his stories. This also corelates to his style of writing. From what I know about Poe as a person was that he was very eccentric and kind of just an odd guy all around. His writing isn't straightforward, the wording can be hard to understand and it takes a minute to fully visualize what he's writing. The attention, and almost over-description, of the setting of Usher's house in this short story was really well done. In my opinion, more than anything else, the setting is the build-up of the eventual climax in horror media.
A big question that popped in my mind while reading this, and one that I've thought about after finishing, is that: is there a meaning to this story? Is there some sort of higher purpose, symbolism, critique, or personal experience that Poe is pushing out into the world with House of Usher? I think the answer is no, but that's not a bad thing. Not every piece of media needs to have indepth literary reasoning behind it, and that's fine. It can just be for the fun of it; or in this horror short stories case, the purpose is just to disturb and scare you for a bit. I think that types of media with a "higher purpose" are the ones that stick with you longer, but not everything needs to be like that.
Finally, since this is a much shorter report than my other ones, I want to talk a little bit about Poe's death and try to debunk the "mystery" of it. To summarize what happened, one early morning, Poe was found wondering around the streets of his town looking very sick. Some people found him and took him to the hospital. At the hospital he revealed that he didn't know what he was doing outside and whose clothes he was wearing; overall he seemed very out of it and confused. Later that day he died in the hospital.
The piece of evidence that's left out here is that he was a drunk. His wife/first cousin passed away a couple years before he died and after she was gone he just spiraled. All evidence points to him going out one night and getting trashed, at some point switching clothes with someone, and then dying of alcohol poisoning later that day. I think the only two reasons that his death is presented as this "mystery" is because 1. the nurses and doctors never confirmed what happened to him and 2. he was a horror author in his life, having a mysterious death just fits with the type of person you'd expect him to be. A "mysterious" death is much more interesting than just being a drunk.
House of Usher took me about an hour or so to read, which is a really nice length for a short story. After this I'm going to continue with some more scary books, that used to be my jam as a teenager and I'm excited to get into it as the weather gets colder. That's all, thanks for reading!
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