The Fall Of The House Of Usher Research Paper

Nathaniel Hawthorn and Edgar Allan Poe are two great historical Arthurs that have both wrote amazing pieces, the infamous Scarlet Letter, The Raven and Tell-Tale heart. Although Hawthorn and Poe never met there writing styles and theme’s were very alike in their work. To both Hawthorn and Poe humanity and nature was a dark evil and supernatural place that left reality and imagination a mystery to the reader. Even though Poe and Hawthorn never met their works were closely related in the dark romanticism and could be confused with Gothicism. Both Arthurs place their stories in a dark time or place were something usually goes wrong and leads to some ones demise.

“The Fall of the House of Usher,” written by Edgar Allan Poe in 1839, is regarded

The short story being discussed here doesn’t provide us with an exact time period and place in which the story takes place just like in some of Hawthorns writings. The overall setting of “The Fall of the House of Usher” plays an important part in establishing the atmosphere that prevails throughout the plot. The story takes place in the Usher family mansion, which is isolated and located in a “singularly dreary tract of country”.

The basic theme of Poe’s story is terror that comes from the complication of human relation. The horrific events described at the very end of the story, with Madeline coming back from the dead and back to the mansion, are not the result of a single fact but from a reaction of events. One of the most promising themes that are visible in Poe’s gothic fiction is death and darkness. Both of which are essential themes in the story. The gloomy and sad atmosphere of the setting is recognizable through the description of the “vacant eye-like windows upon a few ranked sedges and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees” which Poe compares to the “after dream of the reveler upon opium”. Without doubt all the elements are there; the aged house with its decaying, half-mad and ill residents, by-the-house family crypt, and even the reading of a poem that mirrors his current state of body and mind in a gothic style. In this story the supernatural element is also evident at the point where we come to see the

While doing so Poe creates a pattern of so called “ironic doubles “that appear throughout the story. They are seen where the author describes the house, compares the fissures in the construction with the fissures in Roderick’s and Madeleine’s relationship, makes a separation between the living and the dead, and the most direct “double” being the protagonist twins.

From Poe to Hawthorn and the “Scarlet Letter”, you see many similar themes as dark, mysterious, decay, evil and supernatural. In the “scarlet Letter” a women named Hester commits adultery with the priest and is bound with a child. She gets shunned and is forced to wear an embroidered A on her clothes as one of her many punishments. She does not admit who the father is of her child (little Pearl) and is criticized even more. You witness most of the darkness and supernatural from Pearl and in human like attitude that her mother even admits to. Hester’s husband is filled with hatred and looks to uncover the truth to who the other man is; this darkness destroys him and gives him the appearance of a decaying