Women's Role in The Fall of the House of Usher

Edgar Allan Pole was a very obscure person: I cannot argue that; however, this does not necessarily mean that all of his stories depict evil. In the case of “The Fall of the House of Usher”, for example, it was not evil that caused the mansion to collapse. It was fear and insanity. Fear of a long, poisoned direct ancestry that haunts the living descendants each day, and the unhealthy mental mind of a product of that lineage, is what figuratively ended the House of Usher, not evil. Additionally, the mental disorder that paranoid Roderick Usher led to his believe in the being of plants, and that in order to maintain balance in the world, he must maintain sanity within himself.

The 19th century, the time around Edgar Allan Poe’s being, was a time filled with clashing opinions on the ideas of family, particularly in the females of the family. The ideal woman had a duty to strengthen and preserve the legitimacy of her bloodline. As May states, “Feminine desire…had to be contained and channeled…to will its own constraint and negation…to will itself as a kind of impossible purity and virtuousness…while offering respite, relaxation, love and servitude to at least one of the bloodied [male] warriors [partner]” (May 389). In other words, the role of the 19th century female was to put aside her own desires and make her family her priority. These pressures brought upon to the women generated fears and concerns in them that led to severe physical and emotional problems such as May said, ”The failure of disciplined feminine desire results in the instability, slippage, uncertainty and unreliability of desire within the family” (May 390). Lady Madeline is no exception to this argument.

The Fall of the House of Usher revolves around parallelism....

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... Madeline was the physical appearance of Roderick’s fears, and in the end, fear is what killed Roderick Usher (Poe 395).

Works Cited

May, Leila S. "`Sympathies Of A Scarcely Intelligible Nature': The Brother-Sister Bond In Poe's `Fall Of The.." Studies In Short Fiction 30.3 (1993): 387. Literary Reference Center. Web. 5 Mar. 2014.

Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Fall of the House of Usher." Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Ed. X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. 9th ed. Vol. 1. New York: Pearson, 2005. 391-404. Print.

Smith, Herbert F. "Usher's Madness And Poe's Organicism: A Source." American Literature 39.3 (1967): 379. Literary Reference Center. Web. 5 Mar. 2014.

Timmerman, John H. "House Of Mirrors: Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall Of The House Of Usher." Papers On Language & Literature 39.3 (2003): 227-244. Academic Search Complete. Web. 3 Mar. 2014.