Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), the American poet and writer, was born in Boston,
Massachusetts, of a couple of travelling actors. He deserted him when he was two years old, and his mother passed away a year later. Through he was adopted by Joh Allan, a rich tobacco merchant of Richmond, he felt emotionally and financially insecure. His foster father constantly reminded him of his own charity that made Poe’s life comfortable. Consequently he broke away from Mr. Allen after the death of his foster- mother and Mr. Allan’s remarriage. Mean while he had received education in a school in long land. For a while he served in the army and worked as a journalist. He married his Cousin Virgina C Lem who died ten years later. Poverty never spared
Poe and he even attempted suicide once, through without success. In 1849 he was found dead on the streets of Rich Mond. His death remains a mystery. Poe is regarded by many not only as the first American Poet but also as the founder of modern detective stories. He wrote many Gothic short fictions. Gothic fictions is a type of fiction which lacks the exotic setting of the earlier romances, but develops a brooding atmosphere of gloom and terror, represents events that are uncanny or macabre or melodramatically violent and often deals with aberrant psychological states. The local was often a gloomy castle furnished with dungeons is the typical story focused on the sufferings imposed on an innocent heroine by a cruel and lustful villain and made bountiful use of ghosts, mysterious disappearances and othersensational and super natural occurrences.
The principal aim of such novels was to wake chilling terror by exploiting mystery and a variety of horrors. Many of them are now read mainly as period pieces, but the best opened up to fiction. The realm of the irrational and of the perverse impulses and nightmarish terrors lie beneath the orderly surface of the civilized mind. The Gothic novel was inaugurated by Horace Walpole’s “The castle of Otranto: A Gothic story” (1764). ‘The fall of the House of Usher’ was published in the Sept.1839 issue of Burton’s gentleman’s magazine. It was slightly revised in 1840 for the collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabeque. It contains with it the poem ‘ The Hacented palace’ which had earlier been published separately in April 1839 issue of the Baltimore Museum magazine.
Summary
The legend opens with the unnamed narrator arriving at the house of his friend, Roderick Usher, having received a letter from him in a distant part of the country complaining of an illness and asking for his help. Although Poe wrote this short story before the invention of modern psychological science, Roderick's condition can be described according to its terminology. They include a form of sensory overload known as hyperesthesia (hypersensitivity to light, sounds, smells, and tastes), hypochondria (an excessive preoccupation or worry about having a serious
illness), and acute anxiety. It is revealed that Roderick's twin sister, Madeline, is also ill and falls into cataleptic, deathlike trances. The narrator is impressed with Roderick's paintings, and attempts to cheer him by reading with him and listening to his improvised musical compositions. on the guitar. Roderick sings "The Haunted Palace”, then tells the narrator that he believes the house he lives in to be alive, and that this sentience arises from the arrangement of the masonryand vegetation surrounding it.
Roderick later informs the narrator that his sister died and insists that she be entombed for two weeks in a vault (family tomb) in the house before being permanently buried. The narrator helps Roderick put the body in the tomb, and he notes that Madeline has rosy cheeks, as some do after death. They inter her, but over the next week both Roderick and the narrator find themselves becoming increasingly agitated for no apparent reason. A storm begins. Roderick comes to the narrator's bedroom, which is situated directly above the vault, and throws open his window to the storm. He notices that the tarn surrounding the house seems to glow in the dark, as it glowed in Roderick Usher's paintings, although there is no lightning. The narrator attempts to calm Roderick by reading aloud The Mad Tryst, a novel involving a knight named Ethelred who breaks into a hermit's dwelling in an attempt to escape an approaching storm, only to find a palace of gold guarded by a dragon. He also finds hanging on the wall a shield of shining brass on which is written a legend: that the one who slays the dragon wins the shield. With a stroke of his mace, Ethelred kills the dragon, who dies with a piercing shriek, and proceeds to take the shield, which falls to the floor with an unnerving clatter. As the narrator reads of the knight's forcible entry into the dwelling, cracking and ripping sounds are heard somewhere in the house. When the dragon is described as shrieking as it dies, a shriek is heard, again within the house. As he relates the shield falling from off the wall, a reverberation, metallic and hollow, can be heard. Roderick becomes increasingly hysterical, and ventually exclaims that these sounds are being made by his sister, who was in fact alive when she was entombed and that Roderick Usher knew that she was alive. The bedroom door is then blown open to reveal Madeline standing there. She falls on her brother, and both land on the floor as corpses.
The narrator then flees the house, and, as he does so, notices a flash of light causing
him to look back upon the House of Usher, in time to watch it break in two, the fragments sinking
into the tarn.
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