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"Sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature": the brother-sister bond in Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher." (Edgar Allan Poe)

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From: Studies in Short Fiction
Date: 19930622
Author:May, Leila S.

An analysis of the brother-sister relationship of the Usher twins in Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Fall of the House of Usher' reveals a microcosmic example of familial relations in the mid-nineteenth century patriarchal system. The sister served as the ideological justification for the family system by providing a representative of pure home life that the men of the house worked to sustain and protect. Poe's story reveals the fallacy of such a system as the sister falls with the house, symbolizing the destruction of the myth of purity that ran through patriarchal beliefs of the day.

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