Hawthorne and “Young Goodman Brown” …show more content…
Based on his symptoms, today he would probably be diagnosed with Sensory Processing Disorder, a condition where someone “may over-respond to sensation and find clothing, physical contact, light, sound, food, or other sensory input to be unbearable” (SPD Foundation). Roderick himself confessed that his ailments were physical manifestations of his own mental disorder. He believed the house was draining the life out of him and his sister, who puzzled doctors with an unknown disease that caused her to waste away. Fear played a major role in “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Roderick was scared of the future because he knew his sister was dying, and with his death the bloodline would perish. He was scared of losing his mind, of abandoning “life and reason together,” possibly a side effect of living a solitary lifestyle for many years. The relationship between mind and body, the “interconnectedness, between the physical world and the mental/psychological world” was a dominant theme in Poe’s writings (Timmerman