Poe was writing in an age that believed in transcendatilism,of the power of human soul to achieve happiness in unification with the greater soul,and a general belief in goodness in human life.

poe said-think again.

He was never dazzled by the bright promises generated by the new world.he considered life to be this hugely and comically grotesque joke that has gained the dark knowledge,by anticipating the anguished and tortured psyche of the post-nietzschean existential man.his obsession with morbid themes,macabre imagery,musical verse and aesthetic pleasure reminded me of baudelair.those who are  familiar with baudelair might consider."the fall of the house of usher" is a mockery of transcendentalism in its belief that isolation and self-reliance opens up the deep,repressed desires of human mind in its inherent propensity to insanity and self-destruction in a morally vacant universe where we seek pain rather than tranquility in the psyche’s infinite capacity for evil.the house itself becomes symbolic of the decay in the biological space of roderick and madeline inducing a hauntingly beautiful picture of insanity that is so very strangely addictive that one wants to travel down the same downward spiral into a universe of moral nihilism.i did.

The simultaneous attraction and revulsion we feel towards tales of gothic and grotesque horror in stories or movies is because somewhere deep down our psyche we recognise those very impulses to a perverse and wild delight to participate in the grotesque action  and gore .the images of anthromorphized evil adapted from dark-romanticism where individuals in their quests are forever interrupted  and doomed in a dark,decaying world explores the self destructive nature of conscious and unconscious mind(remember"lord of the flies" by golding?) when it creates.it would help to remember that roderick is a painter and a sublime musician-maybe he starts painting when he fails to explain himself in words,for to be an artist is not normal for rationality is reason and imagination is essentially that drive to escape from the wants of the mind to kill the body to gain transcendence ,the desire to that transcendence is expressed in our writing or painting or so on...it would help to consider why we like images of unstable minds in movies of serial killers,of tales of death and gore,of abhorrent psychological manifestations,object-fixations,sadomasochism,the undead rising from graves,perversity,self-loathing,incest,the grotesque ,gruesome and macabre.poe leads us deep into the vortex of  the darkest aspect of romanticism-insanity.its like the beauty of medusa-impossible to look upon but leprous and tainted with pain,decay and corruption.

The double-meaning in the title that connects the destruction of a physical space of the house and the body with the psychological space of the minds of roderick and madeline seemed particularly interesting to me.it is as if emotions dont die,or are abstract.they become embedded in the physical space making it come alive and imbued with an infernal energy ,so much so that the obsessed characters cant live outside the sequestered space.the story begins in autumn of the year in an extreme gloom.the first person narrator’s feelings of gloom is reflected in the setting and the strange malady that inflicts usher.he owns a library and obsessively searches for one book-i was reminded of "moby dick",for whereas ahab is  doomed by a will to power usher is doomed by a will to know(libido sciendi),a cosmic allegory of the Faustian futility in search for knowledge at the cost of learning.there is almost a graveyard  atmosphere, lighted not by natural darkness, but the unnatural light of a blood-red moon,a universal symbol of ill-omen.roderick is obsessively faithful to the prophecy of the end of his house,by which he buries his sister alive almost self-fulfilling it.the obsession of the story with necrophilia, internment of the live woman,death under pallid beauty follows the mid-19th century beliefs in cult of mask,memory and death symbolized in roderick’s preparation of madeline’s death bed and his wait for her death which becomes a fetishized spectacle.by the rise of madeline from the undead is also anticipated by riderick wherein we see a curious use of vampiricism of the undead returning to the place of haunting.madeline thus becomes the symbol of the primordial repressed ,a release of the feminine space in unconscious desire for incestuous sisterhood as they bond at last in a death embrace as the house falls apart.to me,the central crack in the building of the house signifies this personality split,incest and vampiricism if not necrophilic desires in being interned alive.

This tale reminds you of death’s enormity and our own convoluted selfs.the images of death decay destruction marked by lurid images and morbid descriptions of the process of going insane or dying slowly,premature burial and rise of the undead might be an esoteric but extreme representation of our own curious and mixed reflexes of aversion and attraction to all grotesqueness rising from a double drive to stir the almost semi-mythological drive of basic anxieties and fears of decay,illegal incests,death projecting them onto images of obsession.the aversion arises from our negation to accept these realities of the dark  recesses of our mind.

Poe has always been a controversial writer.to most of us he is writer of horrors. but there’s more to him and his tales than we even consciously realise.
Insanity being the first.

Plot Revealed In The Review:	No Comment
Purchase Price (INR):	No Comment
Purchased From:	No Comment