In Edgar Allen Poe's classic short story "The Fall of the House of Usher", the characters of Roderick Usher and his twin sister Madeline are on the brink of dissolution, where Madeline is presumed dead hand has been buried while Usher himself wastes away from a disease which heightens his senses to a painful state. The composition between Madeline - entombed in the earth - and Usher - elevating himself to an almost celestial nature - creates a situation in which the divine and the earthly meet and bring about the "fall" of the family of Usher.
The dual nature of these two twins serves to present the conflict of the work, where one source writes that:
"Roderick himself is associated with the abstract, a temporal, and ideal. Roderick's world is one of abstract pattern in black, white, and gray...He himself is a man of ideality, as the
narrator remarks, and as shown in phrenological terms by the expanse of his temples; that is, in the nineteenth-century contrast of ideal and real, Roderick is a person who seeks or perceives the truth beyond merely mundane phenomena [and that] As Roderick is aligned with the ideal, his twin Madeline is associated with the material and temporal-in other words, the real." (Voloshin: 21, 23)
All papers and essays are for research and reference purposes only!
Copyright 2002-2009
Direct Essays , LLC. All Rights Reserved. DMCA Webmasters make $$$$