After Pepito has been away for too long, he starts to get lonely, so his mother decides to call Miss Clavel to have Madeline and the girls visit. This is Madeline’s literal and figurative proximity to death. She has escaped death momentarily, but not for long.

Madeline Series (16 Titles)

Pepito

• The Golden Basket (1936)
• Madeline (1939)
• Madeline’s Rescue (1953)
• Madeline and the Bad Hat (1956)
• Madeline and the Gypsies (1959)
• Madeline in London (1961)
• Madeline’s Christmas (1985)
• Madeline in America (1999)

Madeline Usher dies as a result of having been entombed alive by her brother, Roderick. She frees herself from her coffin but succumbs to starvation, dehydration, and terror.

Madeline soon dies, and Roderick decides to bury her temporarily in the tombs below the house. He wants to keep her in the house because he fears that the doctors might dig up her body for scientific examination, since her disease was so strange to them.

Several elements of the short story verify this accusation: first, Roderick chooses to keep his sister’s body for a fortnight after she has been buried (presumably so that no one can save her); second, Roderick’s actions as well as the settings of the narrative expose his guilt; third, Roderick confesses that he knew …

Roderick kills Madeline by burying her alive, but his reasons for doing so are unclear. His actions bring about his own death as well, as Madeline emerges from the vault and kills Roderick in her final act.

In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Roderick and Madeline are twins to show that they are doubles or doppelgängers. In Freudian thought, doppelgängers represent the uncanny, the parts of the self that are hidden and thus strange.

According to Roderick, Madeline suffers from a cataleptic disease that has gradually limited her mobility.

Madeline Usher is the twin sister of Roderick Usher. She is deathly ill and cataleptic.

Those who approach “The Fall of the House of Usher” as a psychological tale posit that Roderick and Madeline are actually two halves of the same person: male/female, mental/physical, worldly/other-worldly, natural/supernatural.

By this interpretation, Roderick Usher mistakenly believes that his sickly sister has died, and he and the narrator place her in the family tomb. By this interpretation, Madeline is indeed dead when Roderick decides to bury her, and she returns in a ghostly form.

Madeline is thus introduced as a ghostly figure. She is described as an elusive and deeply disturbed character whose presence is always felt but very rarely seen.

In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Madeline Usher symbolizes Roderick Usher’s worst fear, which is fear itself. When she falls upon him in the final scene, fear kills Roderick Usher both literally and symbolically.

Madeline suffers from a form of seizure disorder called catalepsy. An important fact to remember is that victims of this disease could enter into a state like a coma in which they appeared to be dead. Madeline, who has been gradually growing sicker, appears to die, and is buried by Roderick and the narrator.

Madeline is a vampire — a succubus — as the family physician well knows and as her physical appearance and effect upon the narrator sufficiently demonstrate. The terrified and ineffectual Roderick, ostensibly suffering from pernicious anemia, is her final victim.

A condition characterized by lack of response to external stimuli and by muscular rigidity, so that the limbs remain in whatever position they are placed. It is known to occur in a variety of physical and psychological disorders, such as epilepsy and schizophrenia, and can be induced by hypnosis.

When catalepsy is caused by shock, extreme emotion or trauma, it usually goes away on its own. If it persists for an extended period of time, however, antipsychotic medications in conjunction with psychotherapy may help remedy the underlying cause.

vywer, noun A coastal pond or tidal trap, first used for inshore fishing by Stone Age peoples.