The Fall of the House of Usher

The Fall of the House of Usher is a short story by the American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in September 1839 in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine. Narrated by an unnamed visitor summoned to the isolated, decaying ancestral mansion of his childhood friend Roderick Usher, the story describes Roderick's extreme nervous sensitivity and the parallel decline of his twin sister Madeline, who suffers from a mysterious cataleptic illness that leaves her prone to trance-like states resembling death. When Madeline apparently dies, Roderick, unwilling to have her examined by the family physician, insists on temporarily entombing her body in a vault beneath the house, but as the days pass he grows increasingly agitated, and during a stormy night, as the narrator reads aloud to calm him, Madeline reappears at the door in her burial shroud, bloodied from having clawed her way free, and collapses upon Roderick in what proves to be their mutual and simultaneous death. As the narrator flees the house, its central fissure widens and the entire structure, along with the ancient Usher line it represents, splits apart and sinks into the dark tarn before it. Built around Poe's central theory of a single unified effect governing every short story, and read by many critics as an allegory of hereditary decline, incestuous intimacy and the disintegration of the aristocratic self, the story is regarded as one of Poe's masterpieces and a foundational text of American Gothic fiction.