As a professional genealogist, I have to ask — how could any descendants of the Usher branch not be direct? Branch/descendants = direct descendants.
I don’t look at it all that deeply. My interpretation of Poe is that he was trying to make a living writing and threw together whatever crap he thought would sell, but that sort of attitude is one reason I changed my major to anything besides English.
There is nothing even remotely implausible about this. I have a degree in Eng. Lit. and I’d say it’s perfectly possible for supposedly ‘learned’ professors to stick to, or offer, interpretations which are wholly arbitrary or even dead wrong. The point is not whether someone has seemingly important credentials. The point is whether the position they put forward is based on good evidence and sound reasoning. (People offering bogus arguments often use a lame ‘appeal to authority’ which shouldn’t deflect sound reasoning.)
If your professors can put forward a good case for the theory / interpretation that incest is a key theme of the story, that’s fine. But it may well be that they can’t, and that they are simply re-hashing the interpretation that they were told was ‘correct’, when in fact it may be wrong, or when a different interpretation may have just as much merit.
This is an interesting interpretation. However, the curse is supposed to have been in the family for generations. If every male Usher was gay, well, there wouldn’t really be any Ushers then.
On the whole, I guess the incest interpretation can be supported.
Anyone want to try a take at Walloon’s post?
Well, I’ll take a wack at it. Poe may have been writing carelessly. I think what he meant to say that was that each generation of Ushers had only one son, and no daughter, who had offspring. Sublight and Yllaria had this interpretation above.
Steerforth, the bounder, seduced Li’l Em’ly. Seemed perfectly clear to me.
I agree that the case of Emily is clear enough, and she is the major “fallen woman” character in the book. I was referring to Martha, whose situation foreshadows that of Emily. She’s introduced towards the end of Chapter 22.
Heh. See what happens when to take a WAG about a story you haven’t read in a decade? :smack:
Lovecraft’s Facts concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and his family contains the following lines:
If you read the story - and you should because Lovecraft rocks - you will see that the lack of branches in the family tree has nothing to do with incest. The author makes open references in the story to various Jermyns marrying outside the family and to only one Jermyn within a generation reproducing, the rest being physically or mentally unfit to do so.
So did Poe use the phrase ‘putting forth branches’ in the same sense? I don’t know. If he did, it negates the incest interpretation, I would think, and gives credence to what Yllaria said in his/her post.
Any further ideas, or should I let this dog lie already?
I did a paper on this very subject my sophomore year of HS. Specifically, I stated that they were in an incestuous relationship, and that the destruction of the mansion was a symbolic representation of the end of the family.
The decay of the mansion represents the decay of the Usher family. This is represented by the crack in the wall that grew steadily as the relationship between Roderick and Madeline progressed. There were no heirs, and due to their relationship, the family line would not be continued. No family=no house. Since the reason of the family “death” was because of flaw in the family, the house eventually succumbed to the foundation weakness and crumbled inward on itself.
IIRC, Poe was in an incestuous relationship himself (married his cousin, or something like that). He got a lot of flak, so the story could have been his subconscious way of venting.
The teacher refused to give me anything higher than a B on the paper because she didn’t believe in my topic. I hope she sees this thread.
Though one of the reason Jeymen’s ancestors were not reproducing because they kept being distracted by…other things.
Nitpick:
Not to be a party pooper, but “bill clinton incest” came up with 93,300 references to theme, and “donald duck incest” gave me 45,200 hits; Google doesn’t give you only pages that have all of the search terms together in a related article.