The House of Usher and A Rose for Emily - Essay Example

The House of Usher and A Rose for Emily Alan Poe’s short story “The House of Ushers” is considered one of the best examples in Gothic genre. “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner astonishes the reader with the dreadful truth reveled in the twist ending. There are several common features uniting these two works of literature belonging to different ages. These similarities have emerged due to the author’s similar purpose – to create an effect of horror. “The House of Ushers” and “A Rose for Emily” acquire their effect due to the claustrophobic atmosphere around the protagonists, the atmosphere characteristic with Gothic tales. The first striking similarity lies in the description of the two houses, those of the Ushers and Griersons. “The melancholy House of Ushers” stands amid “a singularly dreary tract of country,” its “bleak” walls looking at the world with “the vacant eye-like windows.” Surrounded by “a few white trunks of decayed trees” – “the gray sedge and the ghastly tree-stems” – “this mansion of gloom” produces an impression of “an utter depression of soul”. Featured with “an excessive antiquity”, the house has sunk into decay, its discoloration being great and “pestilent and mystic vapour, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible and leaden-hued” hanging over it. The house of the Griersons is described as “a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies”. Once set in the most selected street, it is now a scene of decay. Surrounded by garages and cotton gins, being the only house left here, it lifts “its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps - an eyesore among eyesores.” As we can see the atmosphere of decay replacing the former greatness is characteristic with both houses. The inferiors of the houses are also marked by the decline. The room in which Poe’s narrators finds himself is “very large and lofty,” with long and narrow windows, “inaccessible from within” and only “feeble gleams of encrimsoned light” making their way through the trellised panes. The furniture is “profuse, comfortless, antique, and tattered.” Books and musical instruments scattered all around fails “to give any vitality to the scene,” filled with “an atmosphere of sorrow,” “an air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom.” The committee having come to Miss Emily on tax issue are shown into “a dim hall from which a stairway mounted into still more shadow.” The room smells of “dust and disuse,” “a close, dank smell”. The parlor is furnished “in heavy, leather covered furniture”. The leather is cracked and the room is full of dust. The house is filled with dust and shadows. The binds of the window are closed, but even as they are open there is only a single sunray penetrating the room. Everything is tarnished. Interestingly, both houses have a silent servant – a valet in the House of Ushers and an old Negro serving Miss Grierson. The masters of the houses are very alike to their dwellings, wearing the same touch of death on them. Roderick Usher has “ghastly pallor of the skin” and “miraculous luster of the eye”, while the tarn near the house is mentioned to “lay in unruffled luster by the dwelling.” Emily Grierson looks “bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue”. The similarity of the House of Ushers is underlined by the fact that the peasantry uses the same name for both the family and the mansion. “A fallen monument” may be referred to both Emily and her house, which is intruded aggressively as soon as Emily has been buried. As Emily’s father died, “the house was all that was left to her”. There are several points of similarity between the protagonists. Both of them have something inhuman about them. Roderick’s face with its Arabesque expression cannot be connected “with any idea of simple humanity”. Emily after having lost her father has “a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows--sort of tragic and serene”. Both protagonists come from ancient and honorable families, the family trees ending with them. “The stem of the Ushers race, all time-honored as it was, had put forth, at no period, any enduring branch”, so that “the entire family lay in the direct line of descent”. The Griersons held themselves “a little too high for what they really were”. Miss Emily remains unmarried because “none of the young men were quite good enough”. The townsfolk thinks of the Griersons as a tableau” “Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the backflung front door”. Both of the families lead a very lonely life, little being known about them by others. Neither Roderick, nor Emily has any really close friends and the outsiders only harm them. The remark about Roderick’s reserve having been “always excessive and habitual”, concerns Miss Emily as well. Both of them are monuments, “a tradition, a duty, and a care”, “a sort of hereditary obligation” upon the narrators. Both protagonists cling to those which had robbed them: Miss Emily to her father and then to Homer Barron, Roderick to his twin-sister Madeline. Finally, both Roderick Usher and Emily Grierson dread of the future. They hide away from changes, trying to acquire control over their lives. Both of them do it through death, though in a bit different manners. Roderick resorts to a self-prophecy fulfillment, burying his sick sister alive just as he has always thought of it. Emily treats dead as ever living. She refuses to accept the death of her father, Colonel Sartoris and sleeps with her dead lover. Both Roderick and Emily actually kill their beloved with their own hands, while they are unable to have relations with living and ever changing human beings. They seem to feel more comfortable with the dead. “The House of Ushers” and “A Rose for Emily” are the stories built on the same devices of characterization and description. The common features characteristic with the stories refer to the genre of Gothic tale, including the isolation and decay of the setting having mysterious impact on people, inhuman features in the character’s appearance and behavior, ancient and noble origin of the protagonists, death. These features contribute to the atmosphere of horror created in both of the stories. Read More