Why is this story supposed to be about incest? I’m unable to see why everyone says that Usher and Madeline were sexually involved.
Also, what was the point of the story? For instance, The Cask of Amontillado has the revenge motif going for it. But for TFotHoU? I can’t feel the thread that should be holding the narrative in place.
Story in brief:
Protagonist responds to a call for help from an old friend. Comes to friend’s spooky home, finds him overwrought, his sister half-dead. The sister ‘dies’, is buried. She claws her way out of her coffin, comes for Usher, and we find out that Usher knew she was alive when he placed her in the casket. He collapses from shock, our protagonist regains his wits enough to run away, and the whole physical structure of the Usher estate collapses in his wake.
What am I missing here, folks? Help me appreciate this much-vaunted story, please.
I’ve never heard the incest angle, but then I’ve never studied the story too closely. One thing to consider is that according to Roderick, an only child would be perfectly fine; only when there was more than one Usher child in a generation would the curse go into effect. Tthe question of whether the offspring must be brother and sister, or if children of the same sex would suffer in the same way, is never explored.
If you’re trying to look for anything beyond the general feeling of eerieness and creepiness (Poe was good at eerie and creepy), I think you’re trying too hard. Poe was seriously morbid, and this story is just one of the ones where his morbidness is all there is to it. In my little opinion.
A google search on “house of usher incest” comes up with more than 36,000 references to theme. Problem is, no one approaches it directly or explains why they feel it is present. There are links to ‘model’ essays that purport to analyse the issue, but I’m not paying $$$ to look at some kid’s half-assed paper!
Would that this were so!
While we’re at it, could someone explain the whole “curse” thing to me too? My reading comprehension seems to have left the building.
Could it be the case that the morality and/or law of the day only allowed deviant behaviour to be referred to in an extremely indirect or coded manner?
I know of one example in contemporary literature. In Dickens’ David Copperfield there is a subplot involving a “fallen woman” whose supposed misdeeds are never explained. She presumably had had some sort of affair, but there are zero clues as to what her sins may have been. It seems the subject was too horrible to even mention but everyone in the novel seems to understand exactly what the situation is.
On that basis I would guess that Poe was concerned about censorship or worse if he made any direct reference to incest that he could not easily refute.
It is more than possible that Poe was circumspect about his allusions owing to the standards of morality prevalent in his day. However, hordes of people seem able to penetrate his veil. I am unfortunately not one of them.
I wrote a whole essay predominantly on the theme of incest in the story. Basically, there is this quote: *“I had learned too, the very remarkable fact, that the stem of the Usher race, all time-honored as it was, had put forth, at no period any enduring branch, in other words that the entire family lay in the direct line of descent.” * Meaning, of course, that the whole family was inbred. So there is a history of incest, which already puts Roderick and Madeline in suspicion.
Then there is this quote: “He admitted, however, although with much hesitation, that much of the peculiar gloom which this afflicted him could be traced to a more natural and far more palatable origin – to the severe and long continued illness indeed to the evidently approaching dissolution of a tenderly beloved sister – his sole companion of long years, his last and only relative on Earth.” Sole companion? Tenderly beloved? Sure - it could very much being just familial love, but they already have one strike against them in the incest department.
The entire point of the story is to display the utter insanity of the unfortunate Usher family. The whole family descended into madness due to illnesses (both mental and physical) and incest and were just totally screwed up. It is a look into a family not like many of our own (or is it? Dirty little family secretssssss…).
The story probably also reflects Poe’s own unease, however repressed and subconscious, about his marriage to his much younger cousin, Virginia, when he was about 26 and she was 13, in 1835. (“Usher” was penned several years later.) Not to mention his own emotional troubles…
doesn’t refer to incest. It means that in each generation, only one child went on to have children of their own. There were no cousins and second cousins and third cousins.
I’m guessing that the lack of vigor in the family line would be interpreted, in Poe’s time, as a sign that the bloodline had become over-refined to the point of weakness. That is the curse of the Ushers.
As to the sister not leaving home and being a dear companion, that, too, was common to the time. What was uncommon was that she was attending to a brother who had no wife and children. Again, this would be a sign of lack of vigor.
The horror of the House of Usher is of getting enough of what everyone is pining for to make a blessing a curse. In a world of dirt roads and outdoor privies and untreatable disease and no birth control, there was a yearning for gentility and refinement. Vigor is rude and so up to its elbows in offspring that you can’t get ahead because resources must be so divided.
Refinement and Gentility is nobler than Vigor, and wiser and finer, and more likely to amass resources, but there’s a price. Vigor is needed to keep things from crumbling. Get too refined and a family can get too weak to regenerate itself.
The modern equivalent would be saying that too much money will kill you, mysteriously and horribly.
Scrivener everything I’ve read about his marriage indicates that it was for legal purposes. He wanted to protect his cousin and marriage made him her next of kin. Friends described their relationship as (non-incestuous) brother and sister.
Thanks for bringing up Poe. I hadn’t read him for years and just found my book of his works. I’ll have to re-read them.
Having said that I can’t remember the brother’s past with regards to marriage or children. Is it possible that he was gay? Given the time Poe wrote it in, that could be seen as a curse.
Again, it’s been well over 10 years since I’ve read the story. Correct anything I’ve gotten wrong here.
It’s available online, if you would like to refresh your memory.
Having just re-read it, I would like to theorize that the incest idea came about because there’s no apparent “moral” to the story. Its just sickness, insanity, and decay.
I re-read it for a class a couple of years ago, but not since then. As I recall, my professor’s take on it was that it was an allegory for the Civil War; the house, dying - the siblings, victims of their cursed heritage.
Is that what Poe intended? I have no clue, but it’s an interesting thought.
I never suspected this angle in Fall of the House of Usher either. Nor did I ever hear it posited in any class I took that included the story on the syllabus. But I have to say…I LOVE covering stuff like this one my own, as an adult. Thanks for the creepy tip…I’m going back to read this again.
I haven’t read this since I was… 13? (So it’s been about a decade). Even back then, I had automatically read that there was incest in there. I can’t recall many of the details to explain why, but kushiel’s first quote (the latter part) is probably a good one.
