Throughout “The Fall of the House of Usher” Edgar Allan Poe builds an ever-increasing sense that the literal house itself is a sentient entity. He begins to hint at this possibility with small phrases, such as when the narrator approaches the home of his friend for the first time. Upon nearing the building, the narrator takes note of “the vacant and eye-like windows,” personifying the House of Usher with a statement that, somewhat paradoxically, brings a feeling of both life and death to the home. With this one phrase, the building becomes humanized, but its human-like features are cold and unfeeling.
This state of being cleverly reflects the human counterparts who occupy the home. Poe’s personification of the House of Usher is especially apparent in the passage below:
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.
Poe personifies the physical House of Usher as a way to reflect the downfall of the Usher family, as its decay stands in for the decline of the people who inhabit its halls.
The personification of death in “The Masque of the Red Death” is striking and terrifying:
[...] the figure in question had out-Heroded Herod, and gone beyond the bounds of even the prince’s indefinite decorum. There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion. [...] The figure was tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave. The mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny must have had difficulty in detecting the cheat. [...] But the mummer had gone so far as to assume the type of the Red Death. His vesture was dabbled in blood—and his broad brow, with all the features of the face, was besprinkled with the scarlet horror.
Death’s arrival in the imperial suite of Prince Prospero shocks the prince and all of his guests, who flaunt their wealth and excess in the midst of the devastating plague sweeping the nation. The phrase “out-Heroded Herod” in the passage above alludes to King Herod, a figure who appears in the Christian New Testament. Appointed King of Judea by the Romans, he is known for his brutality and massacres of innocents. Thus, the phrase “to out-Herod Herod” means “to exceed in violence or extravagance.” The fact that the personification of Death appears to have “out Heroded Herod” therefore indicates the total devastating effect of his presence in the imperial suite. The inescapability of death and its imposing, all-encompassing dominion over humanity is made uncomfortably clear with his literal manifestation in the passage above.
