Madeline Usher is quite a mysterious character in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”. We know her as a sick girl in the story. Her personality seems perplexing because she appears only three times: toward the middle of the story she passes “through a remote portion of the apartment”; some days after her supposed death she is seen in her coffin, with “the mockery of a faint blush upon the bosom and the face, and that suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so terrible in death”; in the final paragraph but one she reappears to die again, falling “heavily inward upon the person of her brother.”
It is revealed in the story that her brother Roderick is not merely a sibling but a twin. Inside the Usher house, the unnamed narrator encounters the Usher twins, Roderick and Madeline, whose complexions are cadaverous and who both suffer from “excessive nervous agitation”. Roderick’s condition is worsened by the fact that his sister appears to be dying slowly of an unknown disease. After Madeline died, Roderick appears even more distracted and disconnected; he loses all interest in his artistic endeavors and spends his waking hours wandering through the mansion aimlessly. On a particularly stormy night, the narrator tries to alleviate Roderick’s condition by reading to him. The story is interrupted by Madeline’s sudden appearance, as Roderick announces, “We have put her living in the tomb!”
When analyzed carefully, readers could delineate that Roderick and Madeline are not separate individuals, but they are one. Roderick represents the “mental” senses and Madeline represents the “physical” senses. This is why Roderick is extremely affected when Madeline is debilitated physically by her illness. Roderick cannot concentrate on his endeavors and suffers greatly after her death. In the end, his Roderick falls into madness precipitated by his guilt over the premature burial of his sister Madeline, and equally as significant, his refusal to aid in releasing her, despite his knowledge of her struggles within the coffin.
Works Cited
Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Fall of the House of Usher”.