Then we read that on the night of the "seventh or eighth day" after the death of the Lady Madeline, the narrator begins to hear "certain low and indefinite sounds" which come from an undetermined source. As we will learn later, these sounds are coming from the buried Lady Madeline, and these are the sounds that Roderick Usher has been hearing for days.
Because of his over-sensitiveness and because of the extra-sensory relationship between him and his twin sister, Roderick has been able to hear sounds long before the narrator is able to hear them. When Usher appears at the narrator's door looking "cadaverously wan" and asking, "Have you not seen it? Usher does not identify the "it" he speaks of, but he throws open the casement window and reveals a raging storm outside — "a tempestuous. Night, a storm raging outside while another storm is raging in Usher's heart, and a decaying mansion in which "visible gaseous exhalations.
The narrator refuses, however, to allow Usher to gaze out into the storm with its weird electrical phenomena, exaggerated by their reflection in the "rank miasma of the tarn. When he comes to the section where the hero forces his way into the entrance of the hermit's dwelling, the narrator says that it "appeared to me that, from some very remote portion of the mansion, there came, indistinctly, to my ears, what might have been, in its exact similarity of character.
The narrator continues reading, and when he comes to the description of a dragon being killed and dying with "a shriek so horrid and harsh, and withal so piercing," he pauses because at the exact moment, he hears a "low and apparently distant, but harsh, protracted and most unusual screaming or grating sound" which seems to be the exact counterpart of the scream in the antique volume.
He observes Usher, who seems to be rocking from side to side, filled with some unknown terror. Very soon the narrator becomes aware of a distinct sound, "hollow, metallic and clangorous, yet apparently muffled. The noises, he believes, come from Lady Madeline: "We have put her living in the tomb! I tell you that she now stands without the door!
With the last of her energy, while she is trembling and reeling, she falls heavily upon her brother, and "in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated.
The narrator tells us that he fled from the chamber and from the entire mansion and, at some distance, he turned to look back in the light of the "full, setting and blood-red moon" emphasis mine and saw the entire House of Usher split at the point where there was a zigzag fissure and watched as the entire house sank into the "deep and dank tarn" which covered, finally, the "fragments of the 'House of Usher.
For some of the widely differing interpretations, the reader should consult the volume Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Poe's " Fall of the House of Usher. An usher is someone who lets one in or leads one in. Thus, the narrator is ushered into the house by a bizarre-looking servant, and he is then ushered into Roderick Usher's private apartment and into his private thoughts.
Finally, usher also means doorkeeper, and as they had previously ushered Lady Madeline prematurely into her tomb, at the end of the story Lady Madeline stands outside the door waiting to be ushered in; failing that, she ushers herself in and falls upon her brother. In the concept of twins, there is also a reversal of roles. It is Usher himself who seems to represent the weak, the over-sensitive, the over-delicate, and the feminine.
In contrast, Lady Madeline, as many critics have pointed out, possesses a superhuman will to live. She is the masculine force which survives being buried alive and is able, by using almost supernatural strength, to force her way out and escape from her entombment in the vaults, and then despite being drained of strength, as evidenced by the blood on her shroud, she is able to find her brother and fall upon him. Another reading of the story involves the possibility that Roderick Usher's weakness, his inability to function in light, and his necessity to live constantly in the world of semi-darkness and muted sounds and colors is that the Lady Madeline is a vampire who has been sucking blood from him for years.
This would account for his paleness and would fit this story in a category with the stories of Count Dracula that were so popular in Europe at the time.
In this interpretation, Roderick Usher buries his sister so as to protect himself. Vampires had to be dealt with harshly; thus, this accounts for the difficulty Lady Madeline encounters in escaping from her entombment. In this view, the final embrace must be seen in terms of the Lady Madeline, a vampire, falling upon her brother's throat and sucking the last drop of blood from him.
The final paragraph supports this view in that the actions occur during the "full blood-red moon," a time during which vampires are able to prey upon fresh victims. At the opposite end of this phantasmal interpretation is the modern-day psychological view that the twins represent two aspects of one personality.
The final embrace, in this case, becomes the unifying of two divergent aspects into one whole being at birth. Certainly many Romantics considered birth itself to be a breaking away from supernatural beauty, and they believed that death was a reuniting of oneself with that original spirituality.
Lady Madeline can then be seen as the incarnation of "otherworldliness," the pure spirit purged of all earthly cares. Answer Expert Verified I believe the correct answer is Gothic and slightly scary. The ordinary word is normal, and something the narrator is used to. However, once he enters the House, it seems as if he entered another dimension because of how different the House is when compared to the rest of the world.
Madeline Usher dies as a result of having been entombed alive by her brother, Roderick. She frees herself from her coffin but succumbs to starvation, dehydration, and terror. One conclusion to be drawn from the final scene is that Roderick dies of fear.
Madeline rushes upon him and he falls to the floor a corpse, too terrified to go on living. Further, Roderick believes that his fate is connected to the family mansion. Roderick later informs the narrator that Madeline has died. Fearing that her body will be exhumed for medical study, Roderick insists that she be entombed for two weeks in the family tomb located in the house before being permanently buried. There was a bright gas outside that surrounded only the house.
He hears the cracking and ripping of wood, a shriek, and he hears a shield fall. This is ironic because the noises he hears are the same ones they read about in the story. He notices a strong resemblance between Roderick and Madeline twins.
The narrator tells Roderick that the gas is a natural phenomenon, not altogether uncommon. The narrator decides to read to Roderick in order to pass the night away. As he reads, he hears noises that correspond to the descriptions in the story. At first, he ignores these sounds as the vagaries of his imagination.
Soon, however, they become more distinct and he can no longer ignore them. He also notices that Roderick has slumped over in his chair and is muttering to himself. The narrator approaches Roderick and listens to what he is saying. Roderick reveals that he has been hearing these sounds for days, and believes that they have buried Madeline alive and that she is trying to escape.
He yells that she is standing behind the door. She attacks Roderick as the life drains from her, and he dies of fear. The narrator flees the house. As he escapes, the entire house cracks along the break in the frame and crumbles to the ground. For all its easily identifiable Gothic elements, however, part of the terror of this story is its vagueness. We cannot say for sure where in the world or exactly when the story takes place. Instead of standard narrative markers of place and time, Poe uses traditional Gothic elements such as inclement weather and a barren landscape.
We are alone with the narrator in this haunted space, and neither we nor the -narrator know why. While Poe provides the recognizable building blocks of the Gothic tale, he contrasts this standard form with a plot that is inexplicable, sudden, and full of unexpected disruptions. Poe creates a sensation of claustrophobia in this story.
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