Research Paper On The Fall Of The House Of Usher

The Fall of the House of Usher is a gothic short story by Edgar Allen Poe, perhaps the most iconic early american gothic writer. The Gothic is classed as a subcategory of Romanticism often depicting characters as Byronic heroes, delusional narrators as well as eerie, desolate and ghostly settings typically in haunted houses or otherwise old and decrepit buildings. Resulting in an ‘uncanny’ experience for the reader in accordance to Freud’s The Uncanny. In his writing Poe uses numerous common themes, motifs and structures that make his work easily recognisable leading to his stories being easily classified of being of the gothic.
In this short story Poe uses these elements of the Gothic but also utilises other elements not mentioned above,

This reinforces the genre of the story, due to this element creating a sense of remoteness and indefiniteness as a consequence the reader is thrown out of their everyday surroundings and situations. Simply put the norm is disrupted. This closely relates to Freud’s Das Unheimlich due to the unheimlich ‘etymologically corresponding to unhomely (in English)’. In The Uncanny, Freud continues by stating that it is frightening ‘precisely because it is unknown and unfamiliar’. This concept of Das Unheimlich can also be taken literally considering that the Narrator has not been to the House of Usher since he was a young

The Gothic being believed drive from the Goths, the ancient Germanic people, who where not Christian and thus ‘barbarians’

In The Fall of the House of Usher insanity takes cis interwoven to the very story itself since Roderick is clearly losing his mind in addition when the narrator is informed of Madeline’s Poe implies that her condition could be madness also
Ironically, their mental instability is what ties them together

Distressingly, the narrator admits to being a participant in Usher's hysteria: "Rationally Usher's condition terrified, it infected me... I felt creeping upon me, by slow yet uncertain degrees, the wild influence of his own fantastic yet impressive superstitions.” The narrator giving the impression of first being of a rational mindset makes this even more unsettling.

Allegorically, Madeline could symbolise the return of the repressed. Freud coins the term ‘return of the repressed’ to explain the appearance of hidden unwelcome desires. These unwelcome desires were confined to the darkest recesses of the mind; the Id.

The experience of the uncanny is most prevalent in people in relation to death and corpses, to the return of the dead, and to spirits and