Similarities Between The Fall Of The House Of Usher And House Taken Over

Both Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Julio Cortazar’s “House Taken Over” have similar settings because they both take place in large, scary houses. However, in Poe’s story, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the house is much more eerie as with the description given of this house, it gives off a mood of incoming misfortune. By contrast, in Cortazar’s story, the larger parts of the house, like the dining room and the library, is blocked off away where the characters of this story mainly stays. This gives the house a mysterious vibe, because if anything happens in the blocked off part of the house, the event is not know specifically, opening it up for interpretation.
In gothic literature, elements such as bleak settings,

tortured characters, strange or violent plots, descriptions using fancier vocabulary and structure, a gloomy setting, such as bad weather, and recurring symbolism are used frequently. In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” all of these elements are included and used well making this a great example of gothic literature. For example, this quote from the story, “minute fungi overspread the whole exterior, hanging in a fine tangled web-work from the eaves. Yet all of this was apart from any dilapidation” (Poe 15) shows the use of a bleak setting. The dark manner in which this house was described shows that this story is going to in a downwards direction, away from any joyful events. This is just one of the many examples that shows that “The Fall of the House of Usher” is a model work of gothic literature.
Magical realism, it is a genre combining two polar opposite ideas: realism and fantasy, as stated by the name of the genre. Cortazar’s story, “House Taken Over,” uses many of the elements often found in magically realistic works, such as normal, recognizable characters, realistic settings and details, but still include fantastic events. For example, in the middle of their everyday life, the brother of the story hears a sound, “the sound came through muted and indistinct, a chair being knocked over onto the carpet or the muffled buzzing of a conversation”(Cortazar 39). This sound does not have a specified origin, therefore it can be interpreted in many ways. This is a shining example of magical realism, as it gives the reader’s imagination something it can think about. Though in general, there’s two ways this can be interpreted. It can be thought about as something of the world of fantasy, such as ghosts, or something reasonable, like people breaking into the house with malicious intent. Cortazar’s “House Taken Over” fits very well into the genre of magical realism for this reason.
Gothic literature and magical realism do share a similarity, a similarity in which events that are magical/fantastic occur sooner or later.

. For instance, in Poe’s story, Usher said that “We have put her living in the tomb!...I now tell you that i heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin”(Poe 29). This quote refer to the character Madeline, who was presumed dead and encoffined. She was not dead, but even more surprisingly, she manages to scrape herself out of the entombment that had an immense weight that “caused an unusually sharp, grating sound as it moved upon its hinges”(Poe 24). This detail is pretty bizarre, and it is related to the event mentioned above in Cortazar’s story in the sense that somehow, with such unlikely odds, it was reasonable for someone as weak and frail as her to break out of a tomb such as that one, unassisted, just to enact revenge on her brother. This event is also related to Cortazar’s story, but in a way that flipped the fiction/ non-fiction possibility scale backwards, switching the weight on the two sides. As in “House Taken Over,” it would make much more sense that people broke into the house searching for the brother and sister that are hiding so cleverly, rather than to assume that it was a fantastical event.Therefore, the two stories are related because they both include a presumably magical event, but those events are still open for interpretation, and that is work given only to the reader’s

mind.
In conclusion, these two amazing stories written by Poe and Cortazar have both differences, and similarities. “The Fall of the House of Usher” has a much greater emphasis on the “fear,” while “House Taken Over” had more of a mysterious feel to it. Magical events made them similar. These two short story were fun to read.