Roderick & Madeline

Depiction of Roderick and Madeline during the film adaptation of "Fall of the House of Usher."

Literary Criticism (Library Site)

http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitCrit/jama62549/FJ3592050008

The Fall of the House of Usher - An Opera!

I found a review for an opera based on “The Fall of the House of Usher” which debuted in 2009 at the Nashville Opera.  The reviewer is a college English professor named B.J Keeton who keeps a blog documenting, as he proclaims on the site, “just about anything that grabs his attention.”  The review for “The Fall of the House of Usher” contains various pictures, and details about the show’s production.  The reviewer says that the show itself “creeped” him out.  Thus I suppose one can conclude the main theme of the short story was in fact captured by the opera.  The opera showed abstract images representing the state of mind of each of the characters flowing across the stage, behind the actors.  This is a really interesting way of portraying the depth as well as the progression of insanity experienced by Roderick and his sister.  The reviewer also mentions that the music was never in tune to the singing.  The singers were harmonious with one another, but never to the music that played behind them.  He says that this created a “visceral” feeling that something was simply wrong and out of place.  This is undoubtedly one of the trademark themes of the plot of this entire story. (http://www.professorbeej.com/2009/11/nashville-opera-fall-of-the-house-of-usher-tpac.html)

"Roderick Usher: Portrait of a Madman as an Artist"

            Gerald Garmon’s article “Roderick Usher: Portrait of a Madman as an Artist,”  (http://www.eapoe.org/pstudies/ps1970/p1972104.htm.) argues that despite the many attempts to explain Roderick’s behavior and the story “Fall of the House of Usher,” the most important aspect of Poe’s story is that Poe actually believed that all of the events within the story were plausible.  They were within his realm of understanding and Poe really believed that these events could have happened under the right circumstances.  Garmon goes on to discuss the importance of Roderick’s art in the understanding of the story.  He says “it contributes greatly to the definition of his character, pointing directly to the paradox that Usher's heredity and environment endow him with a hypersensitivity that enables him to be an artist seeking freedom and individuality but at the same time doom such endeavors to failure. The narrator describes Usher as a man intensely involved in his art.” 

Roderick’s artwork generally involves sensual themes thus exacerbating the idea that incest is a major part of the Usher twins’ lives.  Since incest has been practiced by their ancestors, it has culminated to Roderick and Madeline – the former twin experiencing extreme acuteness of the senses and the latter twin experiencing greatly reduced sentience.    Garmon explains that in an incestuous relationship, the male generally, with great gusto and lust takes the lead role, and the female takes on a passive, consenting position.  Roderick and Madeline both play into these roles.  By not producing offspring, Madeline does not take on the role of continuing the destruction of the family and by doing so falls out of her passive, consenting role.  Garmon says “deterioration of the ability to act the roles of the male and the female become nearer and nearer to each other. When at last the male is no longer able to exert his will, he has lost his most consistent male characteristic. Now, in a stunning Gothic twist, the House takes on that role.”  Poe uses the house to take on the role of the Usher family’s destructor.   The male generally propagates his own personality in and name.  Roderick is unable to properly do this and knowing this, the crack the narrator views in the house upon his arrival was probably established upon Roderick’s birth – symbolizing the ultimate end of the Usher line.  “The House has taken on the dominant, aggressive, male role and wills its own destruction with that of the last of the Ushers.”

Why Roderick Usher calls for the narrator to come is another very interesting question that remains unanswered.  Garmon suggests that his invitation to the narrator was simply a stretch out for individuality.  Since he was essentially imprisoned in the house, Roderick strives for individuality and freedom in any way he can reach it.  Roderick uses art as a means of expression.  Frankly, it comes across that art is his ONLY way of expressing himself.  “. Those paintings which the narrator describes as "pure abstractions" seem intended to paint the horror of annihilation which the House poses, but which Roderick cognitively understands only vaguely. The one painting the narrator is capable of recalling in sufficient detail to describe in words has a grim and rather pointed meaning.”  Roderick’s paintings portray his sadness and emotion – his feelings of imprisonment and ultimate horror. 

One of the paintings, which the narrator describes in great detail, ultimately portrays the tomb of Madeline.  Though the narrator sees it beforehand, he does not recognize the tomb when he sees it.  Garmon says, “This painting, seen as an attempt to communicate with the narrator, suggests that Roderick very likely doubts his own sanity and is trying to use the narrator for a standard of rational thinking.”  Roderick’s second attempt at expressing his fears to the narrator was in “The Haunted Palace.”  This attempt proves more fruitful than the previous attempt, yet, as Garmon says, the narrator misses the main gist.  He “misses the point that the song describes Roderick's fears of going insane rather than a present reality.”  Just after this, Roderick expresses the idea that the House is a sentient being to the narrator yet again, the narrator just regards these ideas as those of a madman.

Roderick’s only hope in achieving his own individuality is by breaking free of both Madeline and the House.  Garmon says “The House, Madeline and his ancestry have fixed the limits of his individuality. Only in breaking these limiting factors can Roderick hope to gain his freedom as a man and an artist.”  His first step towards becoming his own man involves a separation from his sister.  He attempts to accomplish this by inviting in an outsider (the narrator) and by avoiding his sister.  Throughout the story, the narrator says he does not see very much of Madeline Usher.  Roderick fears he is set to die alongside Madeline yet Garmon supposes that with her death prior to his own, Roderick saw a gleam of hope that he had in fact achieved his own freedom.  There is much speculation over whether or not Roderick “willed” Madeline’s death or whether or not he truly believed her dead when she fell into her cataleptic state.  Nevertheless, she is entombed where nobody can examine her body.  The reader soon learns, that Madeline is not dead.  “The House, in one tremendous display of will, tears open the coffin--perhaps in the shifting of the foundations which a few minutes later will cause the House to fall… Thus is Roderick destroyed by his fatal flaw: the very quality of his nature that makes him an artist: his extreme sensitivity, which simultaneously makes him long for freedom and yet makes him incapable of ever achieving it. The House of his heredity claims him for its own.” 


Roderick Usher is essentially destroyed by his yearning for freedom.  Garmon shows this throughout “Roderick Usher: Portrait of a Madman as an Artist.”  Both Madeline, and the House in which they are imprisoned hinder Roderick’s individuality and freedom and consequently lead to his ultimate demise. 

The Psycho-Sexual Reading of "The Fall of the House of Usher"

             I found this article about Poe's story on http://www.eapoe.org/pstudies/ps1970/p1972102.htm.  It is written by John L. Marsh who is a professor at Edinboro State College.  

Marsh’s argument suggests that the explanation for Roderick’s behavior and mental condition is a result of extreme guilt from having an incestuous relationship with his sister Madeline.  All moral fiber of the Usher family has been broken for intermarriage has been the family tradition for years.  Marsh explains the doctor’s inability to treat Madeline’s perplexing illness with the idea that broken moral fiber is irreparable.  He explains that a doctor of the times would have been prepared to treat physical maladies but those of moral issues are impossible to cure.

Roderick Usher’s deteriorating state can also be explained by this idea of guilt.  The reader notices that Roderick gets more and more anxious, and seems to go crazier and crazier as the story progresses.  This can be explained as a culmination of fear and guilt for his sin.  His incestuous relationship with his sister has ultimately led to his demise.  Roderick’s paintings also seem to have sexual implications.  Though the reader is never actually shown any of the paintings nor are they described in full detail, the details given enable the reader to conclude that within the paintings lie “erotic symbolism intensifying the introverted sympathies of brother and sister that are hastening them down the road to mutual destruction.”

Marsh furthers his argument of immorality and extreme guilt when describing why Usher chose to bury his sister beneath the house.  He asks “Is he bent in his inordinate lust on violating her dead body? While scarcely pleasant to contemplate, this possibility would account for Poe's final description of the Lady Madeline: ‘There was blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame.’”  Marsh suggests that Roderick’s immorality and guilt lie beyond incest; he seems to suggest that Roderick has a tendency towards necrophilia.

            The death of Roderick at the end of the story is explained simply as a buildup of his guilt.  “It is in his mind that she has come back to take vengeance for the violation of her defenseless body. He has no answer, no defense; there is only the inevitable judgment--death.”  Marsh goes on to conclude that “If Usher is an archetypal hero, if this is a drama of fatal cognition, it rests in the discovery by Poe, through the perverse sensuality of the Ushers, that man dwells in the dark rather than the light. Man, a creature of hitherto unimagined vulnerability, has come into a legacy of degeneration, desolation, and moral ruin.”

            Marsh’s argument suggests that Roderick’s entire being is plagued with extreme guilt for all he has done with and to his sister Madeline.  He dies with her, because he can no longer bear the guilt of his incest and necrophilia.  Roderick seems to portray a character that is full of lust, passion, madness, and simply misery. 

The Usher Waltz

The Fall of the House of Usher is the inspiration for this guitar piece. Written in 1984, the Usher Waltz by Nikita Koshkin is Koshkin’s interpretation of the story.  The music is “Cast in a single movement, it is a motoric waltz whose careering harmonic progression around A minor threatens, and ultimately succeeds, in tearing the music apart. Its climax is an extraordinarily effective sequence of pounded right-hand chords, 'Bartok pizzicato' (where the strings are deliberately snapped back against the fingerboard), and then ghostly harmonics.”  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_of_the_House_of_Usher)

 

When you listen to the nearly six minute piece, you can hear the variations of chords as John Williams performs the piece.  The music shows the internal issues that Roderick is having within his own mind.  The music speeds up and slows down rhythmically enabling the listener to catch the idea that Roderick is suffering with great instability of his own mind.  Moreover, we can attribute the climax of the music as the point where Madeline is returns from her premature grave and dies simultaneously with Roderick.  The final notes and chords are strummed using the staccato method of playing.  It manages to create the image of death enabling us to know that Roderick, Madeline and the house have all crumbled.

Fissure

I found this really cool article entitled "A Fissure of Mind: The Primal Origins of Poe's Doppelganger as Reflected in Roderick Usher,” by David Grantz. (http://www.poedecoder.com/essays/fissure/)

The essay goes into great detail about the mind of Roderick Usher.  It explains the idea that his mind is sick and deteriorating alongside the house.  Grantz says “Roderick Usher yearns to free himself from his mortality. Every aspect of his gloomy existence transpires in his house from which he never ventures forth. The house encloses him as if it were a burial vault in which he has been laid to rest prematurely. There he resides with his twin sister Madeline. They are the last in a long line of Ushers; the decayed condition of the house corresponds to the decline of the once flourishing family.”

Roderick Usher is a gloomy, sad and depressed man.  The house, personified by Poe in by his description, seems to represent Roderick.  Grantz points out that “At some juncture, and for reasons unclear, the House of Usher, the mind of Roderick was invaded by ‘evil things.’ Described in the poem's final stanzas is the ensuing decay which manifests both in the physical description of the House and in the decline of the palace of Roderick's mind.”  The house has become so intertwined with the physical being of Roderick. 

Grantz goes into further detail of the deep connection between Roderick and his family home.  He says “As long as Roderick's mortal side lives, his palace remains standing because the ‘House of Usher is, in allegorical fact, the physical body of Roderick Usher, and its dim interior is, in fact, Roderick Usher's visionary mind.’ (Wilbur 107) His twin sister Madeline, the only other surviving Usher, is ill, and will soon die. While she lives, Roderick must remain in his mortal shell, for Madeline represents not so much a character in the story as a symbol of the last vestige of electrical, repulsive energy which keeps the body and soul of Roderick and his palace in a differentiated state. Roderick knows that when she dies, he can unburden himself of his body, rejoining a more primitive state, nearer to the Unity for which he rages. Finally, he performs a premature burial of his twin sister, oddly aware that she might not be ‘entirely’ dead.” 

The essay really depicts the essence of Roderick Usher.  Grantz makes the point that the House is in essence the doppelganger to Roderick Usher himself. 

Silent Movie (1928)

Cover Art

         This image is very interesting to the eye.  It really gives the reader a summary of the story without actually giving away any of the details.  The mansion is shown, reflected in a mirror image beneath it.  The mansion is very spooky looking on its own however the black mass in the background exemplify this spookiness.  Moreover the depiction of the mansion almost looks like it has eyes and a mouth, thus personifying the mansion as Poe does within the short story itself. This image consequently portrays important aspects of the story such as the idea of the doppleganger as well as the idea that the house is in and of itself an important character to the story.

Parts of a Whole

"The Usher family and the Usher mansion are analogous, - stained with time, used up. crumbling from within, awaiting collapse. Roderick Usher and his sister Madeline, identical twins, are almost two faculties aof the same soul, and they can be interpreted together as the soul of which their mansion is the body. All three decline together, and the inference is that the disappearance of one means the disappearance of the others, which in fact is what comes to pass. The Fall of the House of Usher is a mosaic of incidents, psychological attitudes, symbols, all cemented into place in a unified structure according to the prescription of an exacting and skillful art. Poe's theory of the short story demands unity of effect, and here he achieves it as nowhere else. (Buranelli p. 78,79)." - (http://watershedonline.ca/literature/Poe/pousher5.html)


There is a lot of evidence backing up the aforementioned idea that in Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, it is easily inferred that the house, Roderick and his twin sister Madeline are intertwined and form one being that lives, breathes and dies together.

The Connection of Roderick, Madeline & the House

"The two are twins and thus look identical to each other. And then, Lady Madeline survives being buried alive, as though she can not die without her twin brother dying as well. She then somehow, maybe psychically, finds Roderick who dies with her, as the mansion collapses over them; their death bringing an end to the family and, as though psychically linked, to the family mansion." - (http://bibliographies.wordpress.com/2007/08/18/the-house-of-the-fall-of-usher/)


The connection between Roderick, Madeline and the mansion in which they live is undeniable.  The House is personified and given its own character.  Roderick and Madeline are portrayed as two parts of a whole.  As the excerpted quote describes, the three lived together, deteriorated together and finally died together as one.