Saturday, November 03, 2007

The Fall of the House of Usher---



What a wonderful horror story. It gripped me from start to finish. My skin crawled as the thought of the incest between the Usher twins manafested itself in my mind and how that incident represents so much of what we are becoming in this country. The whole edifice is corrupted and collasping from with in.


The Fall of the House of Usher disturbed me a great deal as I read it. Poe managed to create a scene of disolation and dispair by a powerful use of language that almost corrupted you as you read it. It might stand as an analogy for the corruption that engulfs a society inbreeding with itself in order to remain pure and eventually destroying all sembalance of what it is trying to preserve. Poe may have aimed his story at the American South but that is pure speculation.


Poe managed to create a real impression of a drug induced hallucination. I could almost smell the opium pipes buring with every paragraph. I indentified with the speaker and the feelings of helplessness that are beginning to assault me about affecting the world around me. Maybe Paddy is right and we should just flee it all, as the speaker did at the end. Who knows maybe we will have a story entitled "The Fall of the House of Hogwarts". It and every place like it may be truly corrupt and venial.

All of these things passed through my mind. "Usher" was a decent into hell.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

wow! I only have a few minutes here before I must gather my things and head to Samhain. I read the story, but I have to admit the incest thing never really entered my mind. I was rather struck by the inter-connectedness of Usher, the House, and nature. As Poe writes: "there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth."

Anonymous said...
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Anonymous said...

would anybody like to contribute a reason for continued existence

Anonymous said...

Not if you're not willing to contribute a reason for continued non-existence first.

MrC said...

I leave you all this paragraph from which comes my ideas of the incest and bi-sexuality of the Ushers. The narrator is a vital part of the triangle that exists between Usher, his sister, and the outside world.

"Although, as boys, we had been even intimate associates, yet I really knew little of my friend. His reserve had been always excessive and habitual. I was aware, however, that his very ancient family had been noted, time out of mind, for a peculiar sensibility of temperament, displaying itself, through long ages, in many works of exalted art, and manifested, of late, in repeated deeds of munificent, yet unobtrusive charity, as well as in a passionate devotion to the intricacies, perhaps even more than to the orthodox and easily recognizable beauties, of musical science. 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, and had always, with very trifling and very temporary variation, so lain. It was this deficiency, I considered, while running over in thought the perfect keeping of the character of the premises with the accredited character of the people, and while speculating upon the possible influence which the one, in the long lapse of centuries, might have exercised upon the other—it was this deficiency, perhaps, of collateral issue, and the consequent undeviating transmission, from sire to son, of the patrimony with the name, which had, at length, so identified the two as to merge the original title of the estate in the quaint and equivocal appellation of the “House of Usher”—an appellation which seemed to include, in the minds of the peasantry who used it, both the family and the family mansion"

Anonymous said...
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MrC said...

You were the one who stated that "I read the story, but the incest thing never really entered my mind..." I think that the incest and sexuality was at the heart of the story and presented material from the actual story that supports that idea.