The end of the story implies the complete mental disintegration of Roderick Usher. He was pretty unhinged to begin with, but as Madeline suddenly emerges from the confines of the family tomb, he loses his mind completely. With the fall of the House of Usher, both the family and the stately home in which they live, goes Roderick's last tenuous grip on reality.
His psychological death is a prelude to his physical death; first the mind went, then the body. This process is paralleled by the decline and fall of the House of Usher itself. The spirit went out of both the family and the old house long ago. But now, as Roderick's insanity reaches its cataclysmic peak, the physical structure of the building follows suit, cracking up in quite a literal sense.
At the end of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," both Roderick and his sister Madeline, the last of the Usher family, are dead. More specifically, Madeline escapes from her tomb deep in the vaults of the house and locks her brother in a deadly embrace that results in the deaths of both siblings. It also motivates the narrator of the story to flee from the home (and its apparently crazy former inhabitants), whereupon he witnesses the house of the Usher family ruinously tearing itself in two.
In short, the ending of the story implies the destruction of the House of Usher in two ways. On a literal level, the actual house of the family (which potentially exerted a sinister will over the members of the family) is in ruins. On a more subtle level, the Usher family (or "house," as prominent families were sometimes called) has just gone extinct after generations of incestuous relationships. As such, at the end of the story we're not only witnessing the destruction of a physical house but also the disintegration of a familial line that has become weakened by incest.
No comments:
Post a Comment