The Fall of the House of Usher - Edgar Allen Poe (1839)

 

The Fall of the House of Usher

It was a surprise to learn that “The Fall of the House of Usher” is not a novel but a short story, 27 pages in the collection I found. Considering its standing and that Netflix created an entire TV-series on it, let me to expect something... bigger. It is however not its volume that matters here but its quality, or perhaps rather ambience. A quality the world of literature is forever indebted to.

The story is told from a first person view of an unnamed narrator. He has been invited by his old friend Roderick Usher to the Usher estate. Things are not well with Roderick, though, and he is changed. There is a gloom and sense of doom to him, which extends to the entire manor house. It is described as dark, old and musty, with creaking strange sounds and is more of a mausoleum than a house to actually live in. Even the weather is grey, dark, windy and ominous.

The narrator catches a glimpse of Roderick’s sister, Madeline Usher, who is suffering from a wasting disease, and she dies shortly after. Her sickness and eventual death is partly the reason for Roderick’s poor state. They entomb her in a deep basement of the house and then the narrator set about trying to cheer up his old friend.

This attempt is largely unsuccessful. Instead, both seem to slide into madness where the storm, the house and the corpse merge into a final collapse.

It is a short story and for that reason, not a terribly lot is happening in the story. Instead, it is all about the ambience of the scene. Poe makes a lot out of painting the setting and manage to get the external setting to match up with the despair and gloom of the mental state of the characters of the story. The house itself, which appears like an old gothic castle the likes of which belong in Europe, not in nineteenth century America, is a reflection of the mind. It is a living thing that breathes, is getting old and tired and prepares to die.

In the climactic scene, Roderick and the narrator are reading from an old volume in a dark room with a storm raging outside, when they both hear and feel something terrible approaching. There is a blend here of reality and lunacy that transports both of them to a horrific place where the dead comes alive to ensnare them and drag them into their tomb.

In this single setting, Poe refines the gothic genre to its condensed essence. Poe did not invent the gothic novel, it was a popular genre even back in the eighteenth century and I have reviewed a few of them, but when we think gothic today, it is not “The Castle of Otranto” or “Melmoth the Wanderer” we think of. It is “The Fall of the House of Usher”.

I bought a collection of Poe’s short stories, which includes one of the later entries on the List, and sort of expected that all the stories would be gothic, but that is not at all the case. Poe wrote quite varied, even comedies, but what all the stories have in common is that they in relatively few pages manage to condense a single message into a clear picture that manages to stand alone, completed. I do not know the history of the short story, but my guess is that Poe’s contribution to that genre is as great as that of the Gothic novel.

“The Fall of the House of Usher” is a short and rewarding read. My only reservation is that I would have loved to read an entire novel rather than a short story. That is just me being greedy.