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Doom can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
From the start of the story, Roderick sees little hope for his condition and seems to hasten his own doom. Although he nominally invites the narrator to help alleviate his nerves, the narrator finds him “a bounden slave” to his anxiety, unable or unwilling to do anything to improve his situation. Roderick mumbles consistently about his conviction that he will die of fright, and yet both surrounds himself with and creates his own macabre art, music, and literature. He believes that the very house he lives in causes his malady, and yet has not left it in years. He states that losing Madeline will leave him as the last of the Usher line, and yet he has not attempted to find a wife to build his own family with. Roderick is in fact so convinced that his sister does not have long to live that he inters her prematurely. Even doing all he can to cheer up Roderick, the narrator is forced to conclude that Roderick is so convinced of his own impending demise that nothing will help him. Furthermore, by interring Madeline alive, Roderick sets up a chain of events that will inevitably cause a fright, thereby fulfilling his own prophecy of how he will die. Roderick thus can be read as the architect of his own demise.
A person’s mind creates their own fear.
Although both the narrator and Roderick speak of the Usher manor as having an evil, sickening atmosphere, only Roderick truly takes that pronouncement to heart. The narrator observes the apparent gloom of the house but dismisses the idea that it could possibly be a real phenomenon, considering it a childish dream. Roderick, however, appears trapped in the house’s atmosphere. While the two boyhood friends breathe the same air, read the same grim and fanciful books, and listen to the same melancholy songs of Roderick’s devising, the narrator, while disturbed, does not truly grow ill, but Roderick continues to deteriorate. Thus, the story explores the subjectivity of madness. That is, situations in and of themselves are not the sole determinant of madness, but it’s rather about how each individual reacts to that situation. With so many of the events in the story itself left up to interpretation, whether or not a reader decides to see supernatural elements in the story also plays out along these lines. The ambiguity of what actually happens in the story means that “The Fall of the House of Usher” functions as a kind of literary Rorschach test, revealing whether the reader is inclined to imagine a macabre Gothic tale or a strange family tragedy.
Old orders will fall.
The story chronicles the last days of what is described as an aristocratic family whose life and home are embedded in the lives of the peasantry who surround them. Nevertheless, everything about the House of Usher, both the family and the physical house, is mired in decay. Though the narrator insists that the foundations of the house look old but stable, aside from a shallow crack, the individual stones are crumbling, and the building is covered with fungi. Similarly, although the Usher family is ancient and respected, the only remaining Usher children are ill. The family tree has grown so narrowly that only one branch of it exists, meaning that all hope of continuing the line begins and ends with them. Everything about the House of Usher, from stone to family tradition is “ancient,” and its inability to change has left it stagnant and rotting. Roderick refuses to even leave the house, much less humor the narrator’s attempts to alleviate his illness, which he describes as a “family evil.” At the end, Madeline and Roderick cause each other’s death, and the house crumbles with the death of its occupants. In this sense, the Usher way of being, their traditions, their maladies, have run their course. The House of Usher was always, in the end, going to fall.
