Episode 66 The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allen Poe

The Fall of The House of Usher- Classic Ghost Stories Podcast has done a Poe story before: [https://player.captivate.fm/episode/08a6766c-18ad-4ec7-9c1c-a6918e7306a6 (The Tell-Tale Heart (Episode 12))] and that was fine, but the Fall of the House of Usher is, in my humble opinion, finer. Poe was an American writer born in 1809 in Boston who died aged only forty in Baltimore in 1849. He is one of the best-known American writers of his generation and famed all over the world for his Gothic and macabre tales. It was long overdue that we did another of his stories The Fall of the House of Usher was published in 1839, when grave-robbing was still a thing. He makes a play on the word 'house' which can mean both a lineage and a building. This is a rhetorical usage known as a syllepsis. The story is a fine Gothic thing. We have dismal setting with the rotting trees and the stagnant tarn (which is a small lake) the gloomy castle, the sickly and neurotic hero, the storm and generally dreadful weather, the mysterious and sinister chatelaine, Madeline. It is quasi-Medieval also, though not set in Medieval times, it might as well be and at the end they read from some Arthurian legend to make even more Medieval. The remoteness of the house, the lack of modern communications (even for the 1830s), the terrible weather and the vague dream time of no specific location and no specific time trap us in the legend. The house haunts the characters as much as their wraith-like dream forms haunt its halls. Roderick never leaves the house and I doubt Madeline of Usher was much of a gad-about either. Poe never says anything clearly in a few words when he can draw it out over several obscure sentences with multiple clauses and hints rather than statements. We love him for it, indeed that's why we read him. Old Roderick decides to entomb Madeline in the deep dungeon, because it is hinted that the medical men would seek to dig her up and use her for research, given the obscurity of her illness. This was a thing in Poe's days or just