Fear In The Fall Of The House Of Usher

Since the dawn of humans, we have always had fear, whether it be in the form of actual life-threatening situations, or man-made fabrications to scare us. The root of the fear generated from invented tales could be stated as just humans being scared of “monsters” or the “unknown”, but it’s much more complicated. We as humans are afraid of what we don’t understand in any sense, we are given a set idea of the laws of our world that the world's itself needs to follow, and when presented with another addition to our beliefs, we instead fear from it, believing it to not be true or some sort of outer force affecting our laws. History has shown us this, and stories in general have demonstrated it, from “The Fall of the House of Usher” to

I present an incredibly overused quote by Andrew Smith, “People fear what they don't understand and hate what they can't conquer.” (Andrew Smith). The quote in itself is a statement of human ignorance, but it makes so much sense in relation to the question at hand. As humans, we have an identity of things, we have pre-set instances of ignorance and ideas, and when something threatens that, we believe it to be an attack of our wisdom and knowledge, so we fight it, or worse, we fear it. Take example of the current global climate change crisis, where a large part of the human population denies the existence of our effect on our own planet, no matter which side you are on, you must acknowledge the evidence, but they dismiss it. Some may be open to the idea, but others believe the proof is nothing more than made-up and a sorry excuse to try to change us from using green energy. This displays why the unknown in general, and change, can be incredibly frightening for

Edgar Allen Poe showed us this with flying colors in the famous poem, the raven, “Till I scarcely more than muttered, "Other friends have flown before- On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before,” Then the bird said, "Nevermore."” (Edgar Allen Poe, The Raven). In the poem, a man pining for his female companion is surprised by a raven, who is able to allegedly speak. After back and forth between the two characters, the man becomes full of rage, beginning to yell in anger. Now, we could interpret this as a call for his wife, but that’s not very exciting, so I will demonstrate how the quote shows the human ignorance. Firstly and foremost, the character begins to talk to the raven, as if he was acknowledging a “normal” existence (the fact the raven is talking) but as the poem progresses, the man begins to believe the raven isn’t just making a random noise, but is actually talking to the him, which sends him into a frenzy of disbelief. The raven challenged his way of thinking, and in-turn, it frightened the human-character in the story, partially because I doubt the character was ever told that animals besides humans could talk, which sums up how and why humans find the unknown to be so