Heart vs. Head: "The Fall of the House of Usher"

Warning: I’m going to spoil the “twist” of this story in the first paragraph.  The rest of the entry isn’t much better, either.
 

Apart from evoking images of Tim Burton’s cinematography, I admit I didn’t initially get much out of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, The Fall of the House of Usher.  It didn’t make sense that Roderick would bury his sister alive without any apparent reason. 

And so, Sparknotes to the rescue! (Sure, reading Sparknotes is no substitute for reading the real thing, but once you've read the real thing I've found it's a good source for helping you think more about the themes and connections in a piece of literature.) 

A common theme of Poe is the idea of doubles, of two people being two sides to the same coin: the same, yet also opposite. It makes sense in the context of Poe’s writing that he was using a sort of Doppelganger mythos in his stories.

A Doppelgänger (DOP-el-GANG-er; German for “double-walker”) is a being with no shadow or reflection, who follows or is usually seen only by the person they resemble. In at least one case I’ve heard that if a person sees a Doppelgänger, it portends their impending death. Once the main person dies, their Doppelgänger replaces them. In almost all cases a Doppelgänger is a bad omen.

Many of Poe’s characters either have Doppelganger counterparts, or are unreliable enough in their narrations to be suspected as being one themselves. According to folklore Doppelgangers are malicious and try to lead their doubles into peril, so arguably the narrator of The Tell-Tale Heart is a Doppelganger to the old man, and Roderick from The Fall of the House of Usher is a double to his sister Madeline.

In the case of this short story, the theme of doubles could be interpreted as symbolizing the dichotomy between body and mind. Roderick symbolizes the mind—artistic, intellectual, philosophic, whereas his sister (playing straight the Victorian stereotype of women) is the emotional, physical, and seemingly weaker component. Thus in killing his sister, Roderick is like the mind attempting to be independent from the corporeal needs of the body.  Yet ultimately his efforts to separate himself from that weaker half are in vain since she comes back to life and strangles him.*

This interpretation of The Fall of the House of Usher relates to such philosophers as Heraclitus or René Descartes, both of whom developed their philosophic theories according to the idea that the intellect is stronger and therefore capable of living independent from the material.

Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” and disbelief in any perception of physical existence is pretty well-known.  Heraclitus, while not going quite so far as Descartes, DID eat grass in his “mind over matter” belief that he would survive if he was mentally disciplined enough. 

If I remember correctly, he died shortly afterward.

  

Verdict: Heart wins.

  

* What, did she secretly practice voodoo and her whole death was a case of suspended animation via pufferfish venom, cryogenics and meditation?...ugh I've been watching too much Murdoch Mysteries.