Before I start, I just have to say that I was reading this story and am now writing this post, in the middle of a thunder storm (a bit spooky and ironic...).
I want to talk about the description of the house because I believe it has a lot to do with how and why Matilda is killed. Poe's description of the house immediately reminded me of Castle of Otronto. As the readers, we are immediately flooded with these images of the dark, gloomy house that evokes onto the narrator's spirit "a sense of insufferable gloom" (p 112). It was also interesting that Poe gave the house human-like characteristics like "vacant and eye-like windows". Like Castle of Otronto, we get this image of an overlaying spirit lurking in the house. There could be many reasons for this external spirit encompassing the house, but I believe that there is a family secret that haunts the house. That secret is incest, just as in Castle of Otronto.
The narrator notes that he had learned that the Usher race had at no time "any enduring branch;in other words, that the entire family lay in the direct line of descent, and had always, with very trifling and very temporary variation, so lain." (p 113). The narrator speculates that this is the reason for their "deficiency" and the character in the house.
Roderick Usher has an identical twin, Madeline in which he claims " a tenderly beloved sister; his sole companion for long years." (p.115). When I read this statement, I immediately speculated that Roderick was having sex with his twin sister. On an even weirder note, by having sex with his identicle sister, it's like having sex with a mirror image of yourself. Poe could be trying to make a statement there, although I'm not quite sure. I believe that Roderick wants to be rid of his sister for numerous reasons, the main one being his guilt for the incest. The other is that being twins and connected on a sympathetic level, Roderick shares her illness. What she feels, he feels. He knew the symptoms of her illness because he too showed similar signs of "cataliptical" character, so he knew that her temporary stiffness was just that, stiffness and not death. But he insisted on burrying her, his other half. This also made me think of Jekyll and Hyde with the split personality. Just like in Jekyll and Hyde, neither halves can live so Madeline returns to her brother and they both die.
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I like how you hinted at the thought that Madeline and Roderick where doppelganger characters of each other. In this aspect it makes sense why Roderick would try to bury her alive, symbolizing the need for one doppelganger to triumph over the other. Even beyond that to where both Roderick and Madeline die together in an embrace of sorts, symbolizes the coming together of the two doppelganger halves. It also mirrors the symbolism of Jekyll and Hyde in that one doppelganger half can't survive without the other half.
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