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Family secrets haunt the main characters.

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Family secrets haunt the main characters.

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"My fear was of having to deal with the intolerable question of the grounds of his dismissal from school, for that was really but the question of the horrors gathered behind. That his uncle should arrive to treat with me of these things was a solution that, strictly speaking, I ought now to have desired to bring on." (James)

"It was the work of the rushing gust—but then without those doors 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 the person of her brother, and in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated." (Poe)

Michael Pagano

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The characters become entrapped in a supernatural curse-like environment or situation.

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The characters become entrapped in a supernatural curse-like environment or situation.

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“ The conditions of the sentience had been here, he imagined, fulfilled in the method of collocation of these stones--in the order of their arrangement, as well as in that of the many fungi which overspread them, and of the decayed trees which stood around--above all, in the long undisturbed endurance of this arrangement, and in its reduplication in the still waters of the tarn. Its evidence--the evidence of the sentience--was to be seen, he said, (and I here started as he spoke,) in the gradual yet certain condensation of an atmosphere of their own about the waters and the walls. The result was discoverable, he added, in that silent, yet importunate and terrible influence which for centuries had moulded the destinies of his family, and which made him what I now saw him--what he was. Such opinions need no comment, and I will make none.” (Poe par. 25).

“They are in my ears still, his supreme surrender of the name and his tribute to my devotion. “What does he matter now, my own?—what will he ever matter? I have you,” I launched at the beast, “but he has lost you forever!” Then, for the demonstration of my work, “There, there!” I said to Miles.

But he had already jerked straight round, stared, glared again, and seen but the quiet day. With the stroke of the loss I was so proud of he uttered the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss, and the grasp with which I recovered him might have been that of catching him in his fall. I caught him, yes, I held him—it may be imagined with what a passion; but at the end of a minute I began to feel what it truly was that I held. We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.” (James ch. 24).

-Conner Choma

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The implied sentience of the setting (in both cases the houses and their immediate surroundings): as if it orchestrates the supernatural events.

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The implied sentience of the setting (in both cases the houses and their immediate surroundings): as if it orchestrates the supernatural events.

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Poe - "The impetuous fury of the entering gust nearly lifted us from our feet. It was, indeed, a tempestuous yet sternly beautiful night, and one wildly singular in its terror and its beauty. A whirlwind had apparently collected its force in our vicinity; for there were frequent and violent alterations in the direction of the wind; and the exceeding density of the clouds (which hung so low as to press upon the turrets of the house) did not prevent our perceiving the life-like velocity with which they flew careering from all points against each other, without passing away into the distance" (Poe par. 34).

James - "The summer had turned, the summer had gone; the autumn had dropped upon Bly and had blown out half our lights. The place, with its gray sky and withered garlands, its bared spaces and scattered dead leaves, was like a theater after the performance—all strewn with crumpled playbills. There were exactly states of the air, conditions of sound and of stillness, unspeakable impressions of the kind of ministering moment, that brought back to me, long enough to catch it, the feeling of the medium in which, that June evening out of doors, I had had my first sight of Quint, and in which, too, at those other instants, I had, after seeing him through the window, looked for him in vain in the circle of shrubbery" (James ch. 13)
- Aksel Malatak

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"Shaking off my spirit what must have been a dream, I scanned more narrowly the real aspect of the building. Its principal feature seemed to be that of an excessive antiquity. The discoloration of ages had been great. Minute fungi overspread the whole exterior, hanging in a fine tangled web-work from the eaves. Yet all this was apart from any extraordinary dilapidation. No portion of masonry had fallen; and there appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of parts, and the totality of odd wood- work which has rotted for long years in some neglected vault with no disturbance from the breath of external air" (Poe par. 5).
"I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a little seesaw of the right throbs and the wrong. After rising, in days-found myself doubtful again, felt indeed sure I had made a mistake. In this state of mind I spend the long hours of bumping, swinging coach that carried me to the stopping place at which I was to be met by a vehicle from the house" (James ch. 1).
Sarah Chandler

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poe "I know not how it was—but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit”

james "Another person – this time; but a figure of quite as unmistakable horror and evil: a woman in black, pale and dreadful – with such an air also, and such a face! – on the other side of the lake. I was there with the child – quiet for the hour; and in the midst of it she came."

allie andersen

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The unnatural sexual relations between family members (or likewise) adds to the dark and evil themes.

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The unnatural sexual relations between family members (or likewise) adds to the dark and evil themes.

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"At this, with a moan of joy, I enfolded, I drew him close; and while I held him to my breast, where I could feel in the sudden fever of his little body the tremendous pulse of his little heart, I kept my eyes on the thing at the window and saw it move and shift its posture." (James Chapter 24)

"I had learned, too, the very remarkable fact, that the stem 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, and had always, with very trifling and very temporary variation, so lain. It was this deficiency, I considered, while running over i thought the perfect keeping of the character of the premises with the accredited character of the people, and while speculating upon the possible influence which the one, in the long lapse of centuries, might have exercised upon the other -- it was this deficiency, perhaps, of collateral issue, and the consequent undeviating transmission, from sire to son, of the patrimony with the name, which had, at length, so identified the two as to merge the original title of the estate in the quaint and equivocal appellation of the "House of Usher" -- an appellation which seemed to include, in the minds of the peasantry, who used it, both the family and the family mansion." (Poe para 3)
-Riley Knight

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The confusion of the feelings of fear and stupor with curiosity during a spectral event. 

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The confusion of the feelings of fear and stupor with curiosity during a spectral event. 

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"Dishonored and tragic, she was all before me; but even as I fixed and, for memory, secured it, the awful image passed away. Dark as midnight in her black dress, her haggard beauty and her unutterable woe, she had looked at me long enough to appear to say that her right to sit at my table was as good as mine to sit at hers. While these instants lasted, indeed, I had the extraordinary chill of feeling that it was I who was the intruder. It was as a wild protest against it that, actually addressing her – "You terrible, miserable woman!" – I heard myself break into a sound that, by the open door, rang through the long passage and the empty house." (James 71)

"While he spoke, the lady Madeline (for so was she called) passed slowly through a remote portion of the apartment, and, without having noticed my presence, disappeared. I regarded her with an utter astonishment not unmingled with dread--and yet I found it impossible to account for such feelings. A sensation of stupor oppressed me, as my eyes followed her retreating steps." (Poe 13)
-Riley Lane

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There is often emotional distress carrying feelings of sadness, fear, and loneliness.

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There is often emotional distress carrying feelings of sadness, fear, and loneliness.

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"Not hear it?--yes, I hear it, and have heard it. Long--long--long--many minutes, many hours, many days, have I heard it--yet I dared not--oh, pity me, miserable wretch that I am!--I dared not-- I dared not speak! We have put her living in the tomb! Said I not that my senses were acute? I now tell you that I heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin. I heard them--many, many days ago--yet I dared not--I dared not speak! And now--to-night--Ethelred--ha! ha!--the breaking of the hermit's door, and the death-cry of the dragon, and the clangour of the shield!--say, rather, the rending of her coffin, and the grating of the iron hinges of her prison, and her struggles within the coppered archway of the vault!  (Poe, 45)

"They know—it's too monstrous: they know, they know!"
"And what on earth—?" I felt her incredulity as she held me.
"Why, all that we know—and heaven knows what else besides!" Then, as she released me, I made it out to her, made it out perhaps only now with full coherency even to myself. "Two hours ago, in the garden"—I could scarce articulate—"Flora saw!"
Mrs. Grose took it as she might have taken a blow in the stomach. "She has told you?" she panted.
"Not a word—that's the horror. She kept it to herself!” (James, Chapter 7)

Nicolette Carpenter

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Madness and uncertainty that calls to question whether the events are real or an illusion.

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Madness and uncertainty that calls to question whether the events are real or an illusion.

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"I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveler upon opium --the bitter lapse into everyday life--the hideous dropping off of the veil" (Poe par. 1).

"Suddenly, in these circumstances, I became aware that, on the other side of the Sea of Azof, we had an interested spectator. The way this knowledge gathered in me was the strangest thing in the world—the strangest, that is, except the very much stranger in which it quickly merged itself [...] I transferred my eyes straight to little Flora, who, at the moment, was about ten yards away. My heart had stood still for an instant with the wonder and terror of the question whether she too would see; and I held my breath while I waited for what a cry from her, what some sudden innocent sign either of interest or of alarm, would tell me" (James ch. 6).
-Bri Hazen

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The narrator gets entrapped in the saturnine environment making the reader wonder the credibility of their account of the story

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The narrator gets entrapped in the saturnine environment making the reader wonder the credibility of their account of the story

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"I shall ever bear about me a memory of the many solemn hours I thus spent alone with the master of the House of Usher. Yet I should fail in any attempt to convey an idea of the exact character of the studies, or of the occupations, in which he involved me, or led me the way. An excited and highly distempered ideality threw a sulphureous lustre over all. His long improvised dirges will ring forever in my ears. Among other things, I hold painfully in mind a certain singular perversion and amplification of the wild air of the last waltz of Von Weber." (Poe, para 16)

"It was not that I didn’t wait, on this occasion, for more, for I was rooted as deeply as I was shaken. Was there a “secret” at Bly—a mystery of Udolpho or an insane, an unmentionable relative kept in unsuspected confinement? I can’t say how long I turned it over, or how long, in a confusion of curiosity and dread, I remained where I had had my collision; I only recall that when I re-entered the house darkness had quite closed in. Agitation, in the interval, certainly had held me and driven me, for I must, in circling about the place, have walked three miles; but I was to be, later on, so much more overwhelmed that this mere dawn of alarm was a comparatively human chill. " (James, chapter 4)
-Allison Stanich

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Lack of knowledge about  characters adds to a sense of mystery behind them 

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Lack of knowledge about  characters adds to a sense of mystery behind them 

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"It was with difficulty that I could bring myself to admit the identity of the wan being before me with the companion of my early boyhood. Yet the character of his face had been at all times remarkable. A cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid, but of a surpassingly beautiful curve; a nose of a delicate Hebrew model, but with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar formations; a finely moulded chin, speaking, in its want of prominence, of a want of moral energy; hair of a more than web-like softness and tenuity; these features, with an inordinate expansion above the regions of the temple, made up altogether a countenance not easily to be forgotten. And now in the mere exaggeration of the prevailing character of these features, and of the expression they were wont to convey, lay so much of change that I doubted to whom I spoke. The now ghastly pallor of the skin, and the now miraculous lustre of the eye, above all things startled and even awed me. The silken hair, too, had been suffered to grow all unheeded, and as, in its wild gossamer texture, it floated rather than fell about the face, I could not, even with effort, connect its >Arabesque expression with any idea of simple humanity. (Poe, par. 8).

“ 'Why, of the very things that have delighted, fascinated, and yet, at bottom, as I now so strangely see, mystified and troubled me. Their more than earthly beauty, their absolutely unnatural goodness. It’s a game,' I went on; 'it’s a policy and a fraud!'

'On the part of little darlings—?'

'As yet mere lovely babies? Yes, mad as that seems!” The very act of bringing it out really helped me to trace it—follow it all up and piece it all together. “They haven’t been good—they’ve only been absent. It has been easy to live with them, because they’re simply leading a life of their own. They’re not mine—they’re not ours. They’re his and they’re hers!' " (James, ch.12).
- L. Payne

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Supernatural entities and concepts add to the unnerving tone

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Supernatural entities and concepts add to the unnerving tone

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"But under the surfaces of the huge masses of agitated vapour, as well as all terrestrial objects immediately around us, were glowing in the unnatural light of a faintly luminous and distinctly visible gaseous exhalation which hung about and enshrouded the mansion." (Poe)

"Miss Jessel stood before us on the opposite bank exactly as she had stood the other time, and I remember, strangely, as the first feeling now produced in me, my thrill of joy at having brought on a proof. She was there, and I was justified; she was there, and I was neither cruel nor mad. She was there for poor scared Mrs. Grose, but she was there most for Flora; and no moment of my monstrous time was perhaps so extraordinary as that in which I consciously threw out to her-with the sense that, pale and ravenous demon as she was, she would catch and understand it-an inarticulate message of gratitude. (James 100)
-Jess Brigante

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There is a constant state of emotional instability that results in a potentially skewed perception of reality.                            

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There is a constant state of emotional instability that results in a potentially skewed perception of reality.                            

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“I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect - in terror. In this unnerved -in this pitiable condition- I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR (Poe, par 11).

“I can’t say how long I turned it over, or how long, in a confusion of curiosity and dread, I remained where I had had my collision [...] Agitation, in the interval, certainly had held me and driven me, for I must, in circling about the place, have walked three miles, but I was to be, later on, so much more overwhelmed that this mere dawn of alarm was a comparatively human chill” (James, chapter 4).
-H. Callamari

# data[].attributes.headline
The setting establishes an atmosphere of melancholy and decay. 

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The setting establishes an atmosphere of melancholy and decay. 

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Poe: "I know not how it was--but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit.:" {paragraph 1}
James: "The terrace and the whole place, the lawn and the garden beyond it, all I could see of the park, were empty with a great emptiness." (James)- Rory

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The exuding of emotion or unnamed feelings throughout the piece.

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The exuding of emotion or unnamed feelings throughout the piece.

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Poe:"a fancy so ridiculous, indeed, that I but mention it to show the vivid force of the sensations which oppressed me. I had so worked upon my imagination as really to believe that about the whole mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their immediate vicinity--an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn--a pestilent and mystic vapour, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued" {paragraph. 4}

James:
“I quite understand your feeling,” I hastened to reply; but I thought it, after an instant, not opposed to this concession to pursue: “Did she die here?” “No—she went off.” I don’t know what there was in this brevity of Mrs. Grose’s that struck me as ambiguous. “Went off to die?” Mrs. Grose looked straight out of the window, but I felt that, hypothetically, I had a right to know what young persons engaged for Bly were expected to do. “She was taken ill, you mean, and went home?' 'She was not taken ill, so far as appeared, in this house. She left it, at the end of the year, to go home, as she said, for a short holiday, to which the time she had put in had certainly given her a right. We had then a young woman—a nursemaid who had stayed on and who was a good girl and clever; and she took the children altogether for the interval. But our young lady never came back, and at the very moment I was expecting her I heard from the master that she was dead.” I turned this over. “But of what?” “He never told me! But please, miss,” said Mrs. Grose, “I must get to my work.” {Henry James}

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Insanity of characters creates unstable contexts.

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Insanity of characters creates unstable contexts.

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" " (Poe)
" " (James). -- L.DeSena

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The setting establishes an atmosphere of melancholy and decay. 

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The setting establishes an atmosphere of melancholy and decay. 

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Poe:  I know not how it was--but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible." (paragraph 1)- Rory 2