Table Of Content
Each episode is named for the Poe story that serves as its narrative spine, but none are to-the-letter adaptations. Instead, Flanagan filters this modern take on the toxicity of power and the persistence of karma through Poe’s creations, offering a sort of Sackler-esque family slaughterfest dressed up as a greatest hits homage to the master of the macabre. At Roderick’s words, the door bursts open, revealing Madeline all in white with blood on her robes.
Fall of the House of Usher: Edgar Allan Poe Easter Eggs - POPSUGAR
Fall of the House of Usher: Edgar Allan Poe Easter Eggs.
Posted: Sat, 28 Oct 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
R.U.E. is a big Poe reference and a plot clue.
It also historicizes the specific kind of unreliable narrators that Poe favors—those lacking a moral conscience or ethically informed perception—in the context of antebellum debates about slavery. As you've probably already noticed, Mike Flanagan's The Fall of the House of Usher is jam-packed full of Edgar Allen Poe references. But as well as the Usher children being named after Poe characters, each episode of the show is also largely based on one of Poe's short stories, just one of many clues that help predict exactly how each of Usher will die. Gothic literature, a genre that rose with Romanticism in Britain in the late eighteenth century, explores the dark side of human experience—death, alienation, nightmares, ghosts, and haunted landscapes. American Gothic literature dramatizes a culture plagued by poverty and slavery through characters afflicted with various forms of insanity and melancholy.
“The Fall of the House of Usher” and the Architecture of Unreliability
Poe was often dismissed by contemporary literary critics because of the unusual content and brevity of his stories. When his work was critically evaluated, it was condemned for its tendencies toward Romanticism. The writers and critics of Poe’s day rejected many of that movement’s core tenets, including its emphasis on the emotions and the experience of the sublime. Accordingly, commentaries on social injustice, morality, and utilitarianism proliferated in the mid-19th century. Poe conceived of his writing as a response to the literary conventions of this period. In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” he deliberately subverts convention by rejecting the typical practices of preaching or moralizing and instead focusing on affect and unity of atmosphere.
The Black Cat
Ateach critical moment in the story, the narrator hears noises coming fromoutside the room. Just as the hero kills the dragon, the sound of a shieldfalling—a sound which occurs in the story—disturbs both the narrator andRoderick. Roderick’sfollowing ravings reveal that he fears that he buried Madeline alive. No one mentions Madeline, and Roderick spends his time painting, playingmusic, reading, and writing.
Summary & Analysis
On the one hand, the house itself appears to be actually sentient, just as Roderick claims. Its windows are described as “eye-like,” and its interior is compared to a living body. On the other hand, there are plenty of strange things about the Usher family. For one, “the entire family lay in the direct line of descent,” meaning that only one son from each generation survived and reproduced. Poe implies incestuous relations sustained the genetic line and that Roderick and Madeline are the products of extensive intermarriage within the Usher family. An interpretation which has more potential, then, is the idea that the ‘house of Usher’ is a symbol of the mind, and it is this analysis which has probably found the most favour with critics.
Live burial and people rising from their graves is a theme in Poe's short stories. In the first, the narrator has a phobia of being buried alive (taphophobia) but recounts the tale of a woman who endures exactly that, then is resurrected. In the second, a man watches his wife deteriorate and die before ultimately finding no trace of her in her tomb. Both share parallels with Roderick and Madeline's mother, Eliza (Annabeth Gish), who climbs out of her fresh grave for a final act of vengeance. ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ is probably Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous story, and in many ways it is a quintessential Gothic horror story.
Several days later, Roderick tells the narrator that Madeline has died, and they lay her to rest in a vault. In the days that follow, the narrator starts to feel more uneasy in the house, and attributes his nervousness to the gloomy furniture in the room where he sleeps. The narrator begins to suspect that Roderick is harbouring some dark secret. The story is narrated by a childhood friend of Roderick Usher, the owner of the Usher mansion. This friend is riding to the house, having been summoned by Roderick Usher, having complained in his letter that he is suffering from some illness and expressing a hope that seeing his old friend will lift his spirits. Rodrick Usher Experimental — R.U.E. — is the name of Vic's lab, owned by Roderick Usher as a testing and development facility.
The Raven
The plot of the romance (a fictional title invented by Poe himself, called ‘Mad Trist’) concerns a hero named Ethelred who enters the house of a hermit and slays a dragon. In another little tidbit, the company Roderick Usher suggests Griswold buy in episode 3 is Landor Pharma, a reference to Poe's 1849 short story "Landor's Cottage." Tammy's husband Bill and face of BillT Nation is named for Poe's 1839 short story "William Wilson," which is about a doppelgänger — a fitting connection to Bill and Tammy's roleplaying nights. Arthur Pym, the Ushers' lead attorney, whose "particularly nasty" contracts are deemed masterpieces by the family, has been cleaning up messes for an age. He's named for the protagonist of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Poe's only published novel. Released in 1838 and inspired by a newspaper article, it follows the seafaring tale of a whaling ship, upon which a New England boy called Pym stows away.
The narrator also notes that Madeline's body has rosy cheeks, which sometimes happens after death. Over the next week, both Roderick and the narrator find themselves increasingly agitated. The narrator is impressed with Roderick's paintings and attempts to cheer him by reading with him and listening to his improvised musical compositions on the guitar.
The narrator is the only character to escape the House of Usher, which he views as it cracks and sinks into the mountain lake. Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood) attends a joint funeral for a number of his adult children, and in a montage of press coverage, we see how a series of “freak accidents” has wiped out his entire bloodline. The Usher patriarch then sits in a dilapidated mansion with Carl Lumbly’s Auguste Dupin (based on Poe’s famous recurring character who is considered the first detective in fiction) and offers him a confession. We then flash back a few weeks to when the Usher clan were on top of the world, having become Sackler-esque billionaires peddling opiates that have inflicted untold misery on the American public, and begin to watch their painful demise.
Inshort, the narrator assists his host in entombing the body temporarily in,first, a coffin with its lid screwed down, and then in a vault behind a massiveiron door of profound weight. There she remains for a week, as Roderick roamsthrough his house aimlessly, or sits and stares vacantly at nothing for longhours. His sister’s illness is only one reason for Roderick’s agitation, one reasonfor his desire to have the “solace” of the narrator’s companionship; it is notthe only—or most significant—reason. Usher himself is suffering from a “mentaldisorder,” which is “a constitutional and . One wonders, until one recallsthat, in the third paragraph of this story, even before Roderick has been seenfor the first time, the narrator mentions that the ancient “stem” of the Usherfamily never “put forth . So lain.” In other words,Roderick and Madeline Usher are the products and inheritors of an incestuousfamily lineage—one that has remained predominantly patrilineal, so that thename of the family always remained Usher.
Typically, access is provided across an institutional network to a range of IP addresses. This authentication occurs automatically, and it is not possible to sign out of an IP authenticated account. The Ushers' mega corporation, Fortunato, is actually the name of the protagonist's friend in Poe's story "The Cask of Amontillado." That's also a major clue as to the fate of its CEO, Rufus Griswold. In the tale, Fortunato is dressed as a jester for carnival, and indeed meets a sticky end, bricked up in a wall.
A television adaptation was produced by ATV for the ITV network in 1966 for the horror anthology series Mystery and Imagination. In the Roger Corman film from 1960, released in the United States as House of Usher, Vincent Price starred as Roderick Usher, Myrna Fahey as Madeline and Mark Damon as Philip Winthrop, Madeline's fiancé. The film was Corman's first in a series of eight films inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe. La Chute de la maison Usher is a 1928 silent French horror film directed by Jean Epstein starring Marguerite Gance, Jean Debucourt, and Charles Lamy.
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