Doctor Heidegger's experiment, The masque of the Red death, and The fall of The House of "Usher are all of Gothic fiction. All three stories show how Gothic writers critiqued the human race by writing about qualities such as greed and cowardice. The Fall of the house of Usher shows focuses on Usher's fear and weakness, the result of his sister being undead.
Throughout The Fall of the House of Usher, Usher Explains at one point, that the reason for his sadness is his sister's death. But, after telling his freind of this, she is seen walking through the room. "Her disease...would leave him the last of the ancient line of Ushers. While he spoke, the Madeline passed silently through a remote portion of the apartment." This might be seen as way to say that she is a ghost, or other undead, and Usher's later explanation is a cover up. And, on the final night Usher relates that he and his friend had buried his sister alive, and that he had known of this the whole time since. He exclaims" We have put her in living 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 days ago. Yet I dared not speak....O, Wither shall I fly? Is she not hurrying to upbraid me for my haste?" Usher knew that his sister was alive when they buried her, and since then he has feared what she would do when she escaped, because he knew she was undead.
Usher's character is also a way in which Poe criticizes the human race. Usher is a coward, who was afraid to speak up when he knew his mistake of burying his sister, and in the end his fate is sealed by his sister's vengeance and in the fall of his house. Other stories use the same technique to show flaws in human nature, such as "Doctor Heidegger's experiment", by Nathaniel Hawthorne. In this story, the Doctor's friends were all fools in their younger lives, and now that they are old, are suffering the consequences. It is stated that" Mr. Medbourne , in the vigor of his age, had been a prosperous merchant, but had lost his all by frantic speculation... Colonel Killigrew had wasted his best years...Mr. Gascoigne was a ruined politician, a man of evil fame...Widow Wycherly, she had been a great beauty in her day,... certain scandalous stories had prejudiced the gentry of the town against her..." The Doctor's experiment is to see what would happen of they were given a second chance, if they had learned from their mistakes, so he give them water from the fountain of youth. In the end they make the same mistakes, and Doctor learns that" If the fountain gushed at my doorstep, I would not stoop to bath my lips in it...such is the lesson ye have taught me." Hawthorne is criticizing those who don't learn from their misery. And, in The Masque of the Red Death, Poe criticizes those who try to hide from the world's problems. He does this by showing us the Prince Prospero, who takes his friends and hides in a palace from the plague. In the end, the sickness breached his walls in the form of one of his own guests, showing us that no one is untouchable, no matter where they hide.
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