PLEASE HELP! I NEED TO WRITE AN ESSAY ON COMPARING AND CONTRASTING THE STORES "THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER" AND "THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH" IF ANYONE COULD HELP ME OUT IN THE LEAST BIT POSSIBLE THAT WOULD BE GREATLY APPRECIATED!!!!!!!! THANKKKKKKK YOUUUUUUUU!

-- Anonymous, March 26, 2002

Answers

A comparison in the two stories would have to be the isolation motif. Also,in the two stories the men both sought to make themselves their own microcosm(sort of going back to the isolation). That's all I can think of for now- sorry, my brains a little fried!

-- Anonymous, March 26, 2002

The setting as symbol of the world, the mind, the onset of doom. The theory of art as an evasion of death but eventually drawn in horrid fascination(Usher reading the story while Madeleine emerges from the tomb, the intrusion of the masked Red Death into the ball rooms and the progression to the climax). Usher and the narrator as well as Prospero and his party people work hard to pass the time with artifices, lurid, phantasm like exagerrated colors and devices. Wildness and defiance.

The difference is that Usher knows his doom always. Only the striking clock freezes the good times of Prospero's party. His doom(deserved, not ingerited like Usher's)is external while Usher's is from within his own "house". The Usher setting is more realistic and modern while the red Death reads like a medieval morality tale without a participating first person narrator. The House collapses along with the house(family) of Usher while prospero's palace merely goes silent(another type of ultimate horror situstion for Poe.) Premature burial is a theme in Usher not the finality of the Red Death.

But that brings us to what they have most in common. A "red" death, the color of blood that has been hinted as important to Poe because of the incidences of tuberculosis(bloody cough) that killed his mother, aunt and how their doom smothers the man who would escape their memory.

-- Anonymous, March 27, 2002