Kushal Parekh

Mr. Linskey
AP Literature & Composition
28 September 2020
The Fall of the Mind of Usher
The human mind is a remarkable yet mysterious object that many find hard to truly and
wholly grasp and perceive. With the addition of mental illness, the mind becomes even more
incomprehensible and complex. Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher attempts to
characterize Frederick Usher’s, the owner of the House of Usher, mind by physically portraying
it as the House of Usher itself. Poe, using imagery, analogic anecdote, and foreshadowing, pairs
the house’s decay and fall with that of the family itself.
Poe physically characterizes the House of Usher in a way that gives it humanistic
properties. The narrator describes it as having “bleak walls…vacant eye-like windows…white
trunks of decayed trees-with an utter depression of soul,” (Poe 1). The bleak walls are the
decayed skin of the house, the tree stumps in front are the teeth of the house, and the windows of
the house and soul are the eyes. However, the eyes are vacant, and the house gives off an air of
depression, indicative of mental illness and bad health. Imagery alone describes the house as
decrepit, unkempt, in a state that is reflective of the house owner’s own mind.
The narrator reads a poem that is an analogy for the House of Usher. The anecdote’s end
resonates well with the state of the house by saying that “evil things, in robes of sorrow, assailed
the monarch’s high estate…his home, the glory That…bloomed Is but a dim-remembered story
of the Old time entombed…Through the…windows, see Vast forms that move…To a discordant
melody,” (Poe 8). The anecdote is directly parallel to the House of Usher, that was once full of
glory and happiness but is now full of sadness, sorrow, and discord. The evil that caused the
disruption of the kingdom of glory in this case is mental illness, which possessed the rulers and
brought the kingdom to shambles through its harmful effects.
Poe foreshadows the Fall of the House of Usher very carefully from the beginning when
describing the house. He describes the house’s structure as being in “extensive decay, however
[it] gave little token of instability…[an observing eye] might have discovered a barely
perceptible fissure…extending from the roof of the building [down to the tarn],” (Poe 3). Like
most people with mental illness, it is hard to tell that they are on the edge of collapse. As the
House and family of Usher are connected, the deep fissure and corrosion of the house should’ve
been indicative of major instability in the family, however one would not get that alone from
Roderick Usher or by just glancing at the house. The collapse of the Ushers was foreshadowed
from the start, both from the title and the house’s structure, yet it was unaware to the narrator at
the time, and the extent of the fall was much broader than expected.
The House of Usher is characterized as a mind throughout the short story through a
variety of rhetorical devices. It paired up with Roderick Usher’s own mind and the fate of the
Usher family in general. As the house corroded, so did the Usher family and mind. Once
Roderick died of fear, the house collapsed, showing the death of the mind of Usher and the
House of the Usher. Poe characterizing the House of Usher as the Mind of Usher added onto the
futility of the Fall of Usher and made the outcome of the story become more of a commentary on
how mental illness degrades the mind and can cause one’s own downfall.