Theme of Fear in The Fall Of The House Of Usher and Where Is Here

Fear. A natural, powerful, and primitive human emotion. Involving a universal biochemical response as well as a high individual emotional response, alerting one’s conscience of the threats that may lie ahead. Nonetheless, the birth of fear seems to originate from the loss of control, which is presented through different series of changes that allow one to feel distressed. Within Gothic literature, transformations contribute to stories meant to scare us by creating an atmosphere of discomfort and uncertainty due to characters inability to control the situation around them, the use of unsettling imagery, reveal the greater implication that one’s fear most directly emerges from lack of knowledge in the situation.

Many authors are able to show this alluring human phenomenon of fear arising from scarcity of control through ominous imagery as portrayed in The Fall Of The House Of Usher. Edgar Allan Poe offers insight to strange incidents occurring in Roderick Usher’s house to parade on the narrator’s concerned conscience as he seeks to find understanding in the matter of the uneasy task of burying Roderick’s twin, Madeline. Through the midst of the story, the narrator expresses, “An irrepressible tremor gradually pervaded my frame… sat upon my very heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm.”(Poe 48) conveying his ambivalent behavior towards the frightening scenes that drew into his mind at the thought of Lady Madeline’s entombment.  The narrator, having little to no real threat against him, felt distressed, remembering illustrations of the day's events led to this spiraling tension through the worry of being uncertain of the woman’s current state that drew his mind. This coincides with the same images portrayed in Where Is Here by Joyce Carol Oates, as a happy family regrettably allows a stranger- who claimed he’s lived in their house before- asks to roam around the house. While he collects old memories, his behavior seems strange to the family. The stranger reaches the basement and suggests with a calm tone, “Just to sit on the stairs?...close the door and forget me…”(Oates 39). Whether or not the stranger is metally stable, it doesn't cover the fact that his peculiar nature would have frightened anyone.  Paranoid due to his demeanor, the father sternly ordered him out of his home. The family was distinctly timid from the start due to the stranger’s recollection of old memories, visions of a life much different than the one being lived now. This conclusively shows the feeling of dismay that derives from a sense of little knowledge within the situation. I myself have been in a certain situation in which I allowed unreasonable visions to consume my mind, making me unsettled, not knowing what to expect, whether this was the reality or not. Spring 2022. I woke up realizing I had been laying in the same stiff-necked position for the past 2 hours. It was now 1:30 in the morning and I couldn’t go back to sleep. The events of the past day- the man I had seen while on my midday walk who had petrified me had been haunting my dreams all night. I turned in my rigid position slightly when I heard a tumultuous noise right outside the door to my dark room. Shivering vaguely I tried to brush off my own exaggerated alarm and attempted to fall back asleep. The noise came back moments later and I could've sworn I saw a tenebrous figure slide across the hallway through the ajar crack in my doorway. I sat up abruptly clutching my blanket when finally, as expected, my overthinking intellect started and the great measure of “what-if’s” initiated through my head as If my brain was an appliance that has been waiting to be fed bucketfuls of anxiety. “It's him” I thought, the same man I had seen wearing a hospital gown, playing with toys outside of a random house two streets away from my current position.I knew how crazy that seemed since my parents had invested tons of money in security precautions and my dog was so protective she wouldn’t  let a scorpion in the house but still, the image I had created in my mind told me I was wrong and caused panic to intensify within me. Timidly, I got up and opened my door to find everything exactly as I left it, cold and empty. Though my own uncertainty, in this situation, had originated from a place of paranoia, it still ultimately led to my growing fear, wishing I could have understood the truth in it all. The lack of clarity over unusual circumstances are what lead to intensifying fear and growing pressure in one’s psyche.

Overall, the use of troubling imagery in The Fall Of The House Of Usher and Where Is Here, accurately portrays the sense that humans often feel most vulnerable when they are unable to detect information in a case. Imagery centeralizing strange acts or structure that don’t fully represent the situation in its entirety tend to release terror among people, or in this case readers waiting for the thrilling sense of being afraid as they stroll through the tale. The use of these techniques in short stories correlate to my own personal episode, both directly outlining the true essence of incorporating such details and creating a larger moral; the true incentive of fear is the panic that comes from loss of control.