The ancestral home of the Usher’s could be considered by some as an early tomb because it successfully separates them from the rest of society and thus they are dead to the world. Roderick Usher, when faced with an “acute bodily illness”, called up a childhood friend to come and try to give him some alleviation which could be considered unusual because he contacted someone, who presumably, he hadn’t spoken to in years. This shows that Roderick has no friends and that he hasn’t been in much contact with people since his childhood, the narrator remarks “…as his best, and indeed his only personal friend…”
“… the steam of the Usher race, all time-honoured as it was, had put forth, at no period, any enduring branch; in other words that the entire family lay in the direct line of descent…” One of the main issues of the story is the incestuous relationships which had taken place by the House of Usher in order to keep the family wealth in the family. Roderick and Madeline are the last remaining family members and have suffered from the mistakes of their family. Roderick is plagued by “a constitutional and a family evil” which means that all the inbreeding that had taken place over time had created some deficiency with him and his twin sister, Madeline. I think that this is an important matter to consider because the narrator says that he learns of the family’s history which implies that people had been talking about it and therefore ostracising the Ushers from society.
Trapped in the house with reminders from the curse of his family would be a very difficult experience to go through which could be accountable to Roderick’s eccentric personality. The fact that Roderick Usher’s only companions are his sister and his childhood friend shows how much of an isolated man he is.
Roderick Usher can be described as a villain because of his actions concerning his sister. Knowing she was cataleptic, which makes the person unconscious whilst the muscles become rigid and remain in any position they were placed, he put her into a tomb without letting any physicians see her because of the “…unusual character of the malady…”. I think this shows just how “evil” he can be but I think I can understand why he thought she was dead because if she had had a cataleptic seizure when she was in bed she would look dead because her muscles would still be in the same position as when she was sleeping, also because it is said that she “finally succumbed… to the prostrating power of her destroyer” which shows that he was in the mindset for her to suddenly die. This does not; however, justify putting her in a tomb without using the skills of a physician to determine the exact cause of death. It can be suggested that the only reason that he invited the narrator to stay with him because he knew he might try and do something like this and he genuinely wanted someone to stop him, however the narrator did nothing to stop him and helped bury Madeline. Roderick Usher used underhand, Machiavellian techniques to entice the narrator to come, firstly he used a form of emotional blackmail by saying he was suffering from an illness and he made the narrator draw the conclusions that this was because he had no-one else to contact, which is probably true but it also made the narrator compelled to go. Maybe by inviting the narrator it gave him a witness to the fissure splitting and destroying the House of Usher (in both senses of the term)
However, as in the case of many gothic characters, Roderick Usher is not just a one-dimensional “evil” bad-guy. He is as much victim as villain because he has suffered for probably his entire life the stigma of being an Usher. The isolation and the responsibility to carry on the Usher-line is enough on its own to pity him but added to that the madness which is obviously the repercussions of coming from an incestuous family makes him a victim of something he had no choice in. He also shares a soul with his twin sister Madeline and can feel exactly what she feels. When she was locked up in a tomb with no way out he would have felt exactly the same which explains his strange behaviour after she had died. The narrator says that he believes in a “sentience of all vegetable things” which means that he believes that everything is alive, more specifically, his house. He believes that his house has some sort of power over him that controls him, this is important because he feels that he is connected to the house and when the last of the Ushers fall, so too does the house.
Roderick Usher seems to have all the characteristics that define the gothic protagonist. He is a male, an outcast, a villain and a victim all rolled into one character which makes it interesting to read and analyse his motives and justifications for behaving the way he did.
