line at the door, embodied in blood from scratching her way out of the coffin. The narrator realizes they buried her alive and looks to Roderick for answers. Roderick, terrified, is unable to look at Madeline, realizing that death has come for him. Madeline proceeds to walk towards Roderick and falls on him, the reader assumes that she begins to eat him but the narrator flees in fear of death. “…. there did stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the lady Madeline of Usher. There was blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame. For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon the threshold- then, with a low moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon…her brother, and in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse…”(Jacobs and Roberts, pg. 473). Suddenly the wrath of the storm increased, and the mansion began to shake and crumble. The narrator frantically fled from the mansion in terror. Only once did he glance back at the mansion, when a wild light arrested his attention. “The radiance was that of the full, setting, and blood red moon, which now shone vividly through that once barely-discernible fissure…” There was a loud explosion, and the walls of the mansion came crashing down. Deep and dank tarn closed sullenly and silently of over the fragments of the “House of Usher.” Poe introduces three characters: Lady Madeline, Roderick Usher, and the narrator, whose name is never given. Lady Madeline, twin sister of Roderick Usher, does not utter a single word throughout the story. In fact, she is absent from most of the story. At the narrator’s arrival, she takes to her bed and galls into a catatonic state. He helps bury her in a vault, but when she reappears, he flees. Poe seems to present her as a ghostlike figure. Before she was buried, she roamed around the hous...
