Analysis of Edgar Allan Poes The Fall of the House of Usher Literary Theory and Criticism

Table Of Content

• “The Fall of the House of Usher” and the Architecture of Unreliability
• thought on “A Summary and Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’”
• The Raven
• Is The Fall of the House of Usher based on a true story?
• ‘How Disney Built America’: Unpacking the Magic of Every Episode in History Docuseries
• Verna's named aliases are also Poe characters.

Rufus Wilmot Griswold, the founder and CEO of Fortunato who really screws over Roderick Usher, has a name fittingly taken from Poe’s real life rival, the literary critic and editor who pissed off the author with mediocre reviews. Victorine's girlfriend, Dr. Allessandra Ruiz, is named for Poe's 1835 unpublished play Politan, in which a suicide pact is made — a clue as to Allessandra's murder by Vic. In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the narrator visits his childhood friend, Roderick Usher. Roderick and Madeline are twins and the two share an incommunicable connection that critics conclude may be either incestuous or metaphysical,[7] as two individuals in an extra-sensory relationship embodying a single entity. To that end, Roderick's deteriorating condition speeds his own torment and eventual death.

“The Fall of the House of Usher” and the Architecture of Unreliability

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.

thought on “A Summary and Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’”

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 Raven

Then $75 per month.Complete digital access to quality FT journalism on any device. Flanagan’s latest house of horrors is a work of fiction, one that’s deeply inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe. The stories all weave together to form the Usher family’s downfall, but some members of the show’s cast have individual chillers they’re partial to.

Is The Fall of the House of Usher based on a true story?

Poe never realized his most ambitious dream—the launch of his own magazine, the Stylus. Until his death, he believed that the New England literary establishment had stolen his glory and had prevented the Stylus from being published. On a stormy autumn (with an implied pun on the word fall?) evening, a traveler—an outsider, like the reader—rides up to the Usher mansion. This traveler, also the first-person narrator and boyhood friend of Roderick Usher, the owner of the house, has arrived in response to a summons from Usher.

Verna may be a demon created specifically by Flanagan for the show, making debaucherous deals with the world's worst, but some of her aliases are references to Poe. Roderick and Madeline's father, CEO of Fortunato Pharmaceuticals, and Eliza's boss, William Longfellow is named for the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who had a longstanding beef with Poe. In a little extra in one episode, Pym mentions he's having dinner with Richard Parker, which is the name of a cabin boy from the story. After looking at the reflection of the mansion in the tarn, or small lake,in front of the estate, the narrator believes he sees a heavy mist and vaporrising from the trees and house. He then takes a closer look at the ancientmansion and sees a crack zigzagging from the roof to the foundation, where itdisappears into the tarn’s shore.

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.

‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ can also be analysed as a deeply telling autobiographical portrait, in which Roderick Usher represents, or reflects, Poe himself. After all, Roderick Usher is a poet and artist, well-read (witness the assortment of books which he and the narrator read together), sensitive and indeed overly sensitive (to every sound, taste, sight, touch, and so on). Many critics have interpreted the story as, in part, an autobiographical portrait of Poe himself, although we should be wary, perhaps, of speculating too much about any parallels.

The narrator then runs from the house, and, as he does, he notices a flash of moonlight behind him. He turns back in time to see the Moon shining through the suddenly widened crack in the house. As he watches, the House of Usher splits in two and the fragments sink away into the lake. It is revealed that Roderick's sister, Madeline, is also ill and falls into cataleptic, deathlike trances. Complete digital access to quality FT journalism with expert analysis from industry leaders.

A tendency to cast blame on others, without admitting his own faults, characterized Poe’s relationship with many people, most significantly Allan. Poe struggled with a view of Allan as a false father, generous enough to take him in at age three, but never dedicated enough to adopt him as a true son. There are echoes of Poe’s upbringing in his works, as sick mothers and guilty fathers appear in many of his tales. Long considered Edgar Allan Poe‘s masterpiece, “The Fall of the House of Usher” continues to intrigue new generations of readers.

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.

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.

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.

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.

But as we know from the start, there’s no point in getting overly attached to them, as grisly fates are assured for all. It’s not so much the “what” as the “why” that the audience and Dupin need to be answered. Poe may have a short story called "The Gold-Bug", but it's his story "William Wilson" that the "Goldbug" episode most resembles. This episode follows Tamerlane Usher (Samantha Sloyan) as she's haunted by an almost identical version of herself, which is exactly what happens to the main character in Poe's story. When Poe began writing short stories, the short story was not generally regarded as serious literature.

The Fall of the House of Usher Ending Explained - TIME

The Fall of the House of Usher Ending Explained.

Posted: Thu, 12 Oct 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]

The title comes from Poe’s 1839 short story of the same name — but each of the eight episodes is jam-packed with adaptations and references to stories and poems from Poe’s entire body of work. It’s clear that the minds behind The Fall of the House of Usher brushed up on 19th-century literature. The series brings to Poe’s work a modern twist, as the feuding members of the Usher family get killed off one by one. So, class, cue up your streaming devices and let’s take a dive into this list of the chilling Poe references in The Fall of the House of Usher. In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the setting, diction, and imagery combine to create an overall atmosphere of gloom. The story opens on a “dull, dark, and soundless day” in a “singularly dreary tract of country.” As the narrator notes, it is autumn, the time of year when life begins to give way to old age and death.