SOURCE: "Malady and Motive: Medical History and The Fall of the House of Usher'," in South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 85, No. 1, Winter, 1986, pp. 10-22.

In the following essay, Uba diagnoses the cause of the Ushers ' strange maladies by relating them to medical and psychological knowledge current at the time Poe wrote "The Fall of the House of Usher. "

When the narrator of Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" first glimpses the Ushers' manor and demesne, he suffers a marked depression, which he likens to a "bitter lapse into everyday life—the hideous dropping off of the veil" of the opium eater. This description is surprising in light of the tale's subsequent developments, with their stark removal from the "everyday" and the hallucinatory quality of their description, but it points to Poe's own clear perception of how his tale's dramatic tension is to be maintained. For if...