Roderick Usher Personification

Laura Wakefield
Mrs. Schnizler
LNG 322
09 February 2018
Everyone Falls

The death of a sibling takes a twisted and horrid turn. Roderick Usher is an unstable man with a sister named Madeline Usher who is dying from a disease. The Ushers are old friends with the narrator who goes unnamed the entire story. He receives a letter from Roderick telling him that his sister is sick and he needs help. She ends up dying from catalepsy putting them both in a stressful situation. They end up burying her alive under the house. She crawls out and attacks Roderick and he dies from fear while she ends up dying completely . The narrator runs away from the house as it falls apart behind him. In Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher,”

When he talks about the house he gives it human characteristics. For example in Disfiguration in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’; or, Poe’s Mad Lines it states “in other words, the house, described in human terms with its “eye-like windows” making it sound like the house is a face (Pahl 1). The way the narrator describes listening to Roderick talk gives human characteristics to an inanimate object. In “The Fall of the House of Usher” he states “to the wild improvisations of his speaking guitar” explaining how the guitar speaks like a human (Poe11). There are multiple examples of personification used in this dark short story. Another piece of evidence suggest the house represents the head of a human due to the description of the blonde hair and it described as having eyes. On page two in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’; or, Poe’s Mad Lines it states “the logic of this imagery suggests that the House Of Usher is supposed to represent a human skull, but one that is “haunted” or falling apart”

It is used in multiple ways to represent different objects. One of the symbols is the house, it means death of the family. For example in Short Stories for Students it states “the Usher mansion is the most important symbol in the story; isolated, decayed and full of the atmosphere of death, the house represents the dying Usher family itself” because at the end of the story the house falls apart (Wilson 7 and 8). The fissure is known to be a symbol in this short story. On page eight of Short Stories for Students it says “the fissure in the house is also an important symbol. Although it is, at first, barely visible to the narrator, it suggests a fundamental split or fault in the twin personalities of the last surviving Ushers”(Wilson). The next example of how the fissures could represent the family is in Disfiguration in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’; or, Poe’s Mad Lines it states “but if this mad line is to represent the status of textual lines, it must also be seen to represent the status of family lines, for as the story indicates” (Pahl 7). There is symbolism used all throughout the story these are just a few of the examples.

The short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” uses all these devices to express the theme of gothic literature because of how dark and horrid it is. The different descriptions of the house and the nature around the house as well as the characters suggests this story is more of a gloomy sad