 Hello and welcome to a summary of what you need to know about The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe. I will explain the meaning of this story as it appears in Stories of Ourselves, the University of Cambridge International Examination's anthology of short stories in English. I'll begin with some context about the author Edgar Allan Poe, before explaining the plot of The Fall of the House of Usher in a nutshell. I'll explain the characters that you should be aware of in this story, and I'll highlight important themes that you should also be aware of when studying this text. Now bear in mind that we do have a Stories of Ourselves course that goes into depth on these stories, so make sure you also sign up for our course. Now let's get started. Now, to understand this story, it's really important to have some contextual information relating to Edgar Allan Poe himself. Now, he was born in 1809 and he passed away in 1845, and it's been said that Poe was a manic depressive, a drug addict, an epileptic and an alcoholic. Also, he had syphilis, which is a sexually transmitted disease, and he fathered an illegitimate child. Now, Edgar Allan Poe's mother was a teenage widow who married David Poe, and Edgar Allan Poe was their son. Now, Poe's father deserted the family a year before he was born, and the following year Poe's mother died. He was thus taken in as a foster child by John Allan, a rich Southern Mac merchant. Allan never legally adopted Poe, but he did give him a home and a good education, and Poe attended the University of Virginia, but left after a year due to lack of money, so he ran out of money. He later moved on to Baltimore and he married his cousin Virginia Clem in 1836 when she was just 14 years old, yet she died of tuberculosis in 1847. Now, in 1845 Poe published his poem, The Raven, and this became instantly successful. However, he sadly died just a few years later in 1849, just as he was gaining fame and notoriety. Now, let's talk about the fall of the House of Usher and begin with a summary of the plot. Now, the narrator of this story is essentially summoned to the remote mansion of his boyhood friend, Roderick Usher. He is filled with a sense of dread by the sight of the house itself, and the narrator reunites with his old companion who's suffering from a strange mental illness and whose sister Madeline is near to death due to a mysterious disease. The narrator provides company to Usher, whilst he paints and plays the guitar, spending all his days inside, avoiding the sunlight and obsessing over the sentience of the nun living. When Madeline dies, Usher decides to bury her temporarily in one of his house's large forts. A few days later, however, she merges from her provisional tomb, killing her brother while the narrator flees for his life. The House of Usher then spits apart and collapses, wiping away the last remnants of the ancient family. Now, when it comes to the characters, the first character that you should be aware of is the narrator himself. Now, we know very little of his background and we never even learn his name. However, we do learn that he was a childhood friend with Roderick Usher, and he arrives to his house, his mansion on horseback, at the house with the intention of helping Usher. Though he details precisely the nature of Usher's madness, it's suggested through the course of the narrative that he too may be losing his sanity, so the narrator himself may also be losing his sanity. Indeed, given his terrified description of the ghastly house and the opening passages of the tale, the reader must wonder whether he was sane from the start. Now, the other important character is Roderick Usher. So he's the last living descendant along with his ailing sister Madeline of the Usher's, a time-worn family of wealth and prestige known as patrons of the arts and givers of charity, but also stricken with a peculiar temperament that seems to have run through the blood. Never having crossed lines with other families, the Usher name lies entirely in the direct line of descent so that after Madeline dies, Roderick is the only family soul living exponent. At the beginning of the story, Roderick Usher already suffers from severe mental illness which steadily grows worse as the tale progresses, and after his sister's death, he seems to retreat completely into madness. Before the precipitous fall, however, he dabbles in painting and shows himself to be an able guitar player. A man of culture and erudition, Roderick Usher spends his days inside his dark and cavernous mansion avoiding the sunlight or the smells of flowers and obsessing over the sentience of all vegetable things. Now Madeline is the other character, so she's Roderick Usher's sister and she suffers from a mysterious illness, catapultic in nature, never otherwise explained. Now, what's most important to this story, however, is the degree to which Roderick loves her. He seems unable to bear the thought of her death. The fact that the two of them live together without spouses in the great family mansion suggests, given the peculiarity of the two and their unusual family history, the possibility of an incestuous relationship, which of course also contributes to their illness. Now, when it comes to the themes of this story, the first is that of mortality. Now, the plot of this story essentially involves a woman who dies, is buried, then rises from the grave. But we wonder, as readers, does she ever die? Near the horrific finale of the tale, Usher screams, we've put her living in the tomb. Premature burial was something of an obsession for Edgar Allan Poe himself, who featured it in many of his stories. Now, in this story in particular, however, it's not clear to what extent the supernatural can be said to account for the strangeness of their events in the tale. Madeline may actually have died and risen like a vampire, much as Usher seems to possess vampiric qualities arising from a sofa on which she had been lying at full length. When the narrator first sees him, avoiding all daylight and most food and roaming through his crypt like a bode. Yet a more realistic version of events suggests that she may have been mistaken for dead, so his sister may have been mistaken for dead and luckily managed to escape her tomb. Either way, the line between life and death is a real fine one in Poe's fiction, and Usher's study of the sentience of all vegetable things fits aptly with Edgar Allan Poe's own preoccupations. The other theme is that of madness. Now, Poe writes that Usher, and to quote from the text, entered at some length into what he conceived to be the nature of his melody. Now, what exactly his melody is we never learn. Even Usher seems uncertain, contradictory in his description to quote from the passage, it was, he said, a constitutional and a family evil, and one for which he disbared to find a remedy, a mere nervous affection he immediately added, which would undoubtedly soon pass off. The narrator notes an incoherence and inconsistency in his old friend, however, he offers little by way a scientific explanation of the condition, so as a result the line between sanity and insanity becomes blurred, which pays the way for the narrator's own descent into madness. The other theme is that of fear, so if we were to try to define Roderick Usher's illness, we might diagnose him with acute anxiety. What seems to terrify Usher is fear itself. Now to quote from the passage, to an anomalous species of terror, Poe writes, I found him a bound enslaved. Usher tries to explain to the narrator that he dreads the events of the future, not in themselves but in their results, so he dreads the intangible and the unknowable. He fears precisely what cannot be rationally feared. Fear for no apparent reason except ambiguity itself is an important motif in Poe's tale, which after all begins with the narrator's description of his own irrational dread to quote from the passage, I know not how it was but with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. Later Usher identifies with fear itself as the thing that will kill him, suggesting that his own anxiety is what conjures up the bloodstain Madeline or that she's simply a manifestation of his own deepest neuroses. The other important theme is that of incest, so what binds Usher to Madeline and what renders him terrified of her, we ask? If he conjures up his spectre, a risen from the grave to bring him to his own, why does he do so? Now there's a clear incestuous undertone to the relationship between the brother and his sister. Without spouses they essentially live together in the great family home, each of them wasting away within the building's dark rooms and the narrator describes the strange qualities of the Usher family that it has never put forth any enduring branch and that the entire family lay in the direct line of descent. So the implication is that incest is the norm for the Usher family and that Roderick's and Madeline's strange illnesses may actually stem from their in-bred genes from the fact that they perhaps are the children of incestuous relationships. The other theme is that of friendship, so the narrator arrives at the house of Usher in order to visit a friend and while the relationship between him and Roderick is never fully explained, the reader does learn that they were boyhood friends. That Usher writes the narrator, urging him to give him company in time of distress, suggests the close rapport between the two men. Yet post-story is a chronicle of both distancing and identification. In other words, the narrator seems to remove himself spiritually from Usher, terrified of his house's illness, his appearance, but as the narrative progresses he can't help but be drawn into Usher's twisted world. Alas, family if not incest trumps friendship at the end when Usher and Madeline are reunited and the narrator is cast off into his own raging storm. So that's all, if you found this summary video useful do make sure you sign up for our Stories of Ourselves course. Also do check out our website www.firstrate tutors.com where you can find plenty of other English revision worksheets, model answers and online courses covering all the major syllabuses in English including Edexcel, AQA and IGCSE. Thank you so much for watching.