A Summary and Analysis of Edgar Allan Poes The Fall of the House of Usher

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• Episode 4, "The Black Cat"
• thought on “A Summary and Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’”
• Character Names
• 'The Fall of the House of Usher' Release Date, Trailer, Plot, News - Netflix Tudum
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• Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher

So, I think it’s well past time we took a look at all of those Edgar Allan Poe references that Mike Flanagan and his creative team packed into the series. Every episode title, every character name, and countless minute details pay homage to the poet, right down to his petty squabbles. 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.

‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ Trailer: Mike Flanagan’s Latest Horror Series Is Edgar Allan Poe Meets ‘Succession’ - Variety

‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ Trailer: Mike Flanagan’s Latest Horror Series Is Edgar Allan Poe Meets ‘Succession’.

Posted: Tue, 12 Sep 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]

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Until his death, he believed that the New England literary establishment had stolen his glory and had prevented the Stylus from being published. Summoned to the House of Usher by a “wildly importunate letter,” which “gaveevidence of nervous agitation,” the first-person narrator goes to reside for atime with the writer of this letter, Roderick Usher. Although Roderick had beenone of his “boon companions in boyhood,” the narrator confesses early in thestory that “I really knew little of my friend”; yet, by the end of this gothictale, he has learned more about the occupants of the House of Usher than he isequipped to deal with. A week after Madeline’s death, the narrator lies awake with an unexplainedfeeling of fear. A storm rages outside, and despite efforts to reason withhimself, he shakes with terror.

Episode 4, "The Black Cat"

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. Contemporary readers and critics interpreted the story as a somewhat sensationalized account of Poe’s supposed madness. (As a recluse, Poe often invited such accusations.) Later scholarship pursued alternative interpretations. Some scholars speculated that Poe may have attached special importance to the fact that Roderick and Madeline are twins, noting that Poe previously investigated the phenomenon of the double in “Morella” (1835) and “William Wilson” (1839). Other scholars pointed to the work as an embodiment of Poe’s doctrine of l’art pour l’art (“art for art’s sake”), which held that art needs no moral, political, or didactic justification.

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This fact, together with Poe's technical mastery of the short story medium, helps explain why "The Fall of the House of Usher" has attained classic status, more so than any other of Poe's fiction. In a shocking development, Madeline breaks out of her coffin and enters the room, and Roderick confesses that he buried her alive. Madeline attacks her brother and kills both him and herself in the struggle, and the narrator flees the house. It is a stormy night, and as he leaves he sees the house fall down, collapsing into the lake which reflects the house’s image. Roderick grows more erratic in his behaviour, and the narrator reads to his friend to try to soothe him. 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.

A series of bizarre incidents and exotic discoveries at sea, Pym lacks the cohesive elements of plot or quest that tie together most novels and epics and is widely considered an artistic failure. Poe’s style and concerns never found their best expression in longer forms, but his short stories are considered masterpieces worldwide. After leaving the University of Virginia, Poe spent some time in the military before he used his contacts in Richmond and Baltimore to enter the magazine industry. With little experience, Poe relied on his characteristic bravado to convince Thomas Willis White, then head of the fledgling Southern Literary Messenger, to take him on as an editor in 1835. Poe ultimately fell out of favor with White, but his literary criticism made him a popular speaker on the lecture circuit. Poe never realized his most ambitious dream—the launch of his own magazine, the Stylus.

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Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” wasoriginally published in September of 1839. In the tale, the narrator visits achildhood friend who is sick and in need of company. The house is old anddecrepit, and it seems to cause the madness of the last surviving Ushersiblings, Roderick and Madeline. When Madeline succumbs to an illness, she isburied in a house vault, only to return after a premature burial. Madelineemerges from the vault the night of an intense storm and collapses on herbrother in death. Rather than convey a lesson, Poe's story explores gothic elementsof the supernatural and evil to convey this tale of horror.

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 addition to these highly credible responses, scholars have also noted various resemblances between Usher and his creator. Usher's physical appearance, featuring "a cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid, and luminous … lips somewhat thin and very pallid … [and] an inordinate expansion above the regions of the temple," could pass as a portrait of the author. Depending on which biographer one consults, Usher's characterization also recalls other similarities with Poe. Little wonder that in Usher's library his "chief delight … was found in the perusal of… the Vigiliae Mortuorum " (Services for the Dead) in an ancient church manual. One could easily see this story, like many others, as effecting the psychotherapy of art for the grief-haunted, anxiety-ridden writer.

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As the narrator reads of the knight's forcible entry into the dwelling, he and Roderick hear cracking and ripping sounds from somewhere in the house. When the dragon's death cries are described, a real shriek is heard, again within the house. As he relates the shield falling from off the wall, a hollow metallic reverberation can be heard throughout the house. At first, the narrator ignores the noises, but Roderick becomes increasingly hysterical. Roderick eventually declares that he has been hearing these sounds for days, and that they are being made by his sister, who was in fact alive when she was entombed. Although it borrows its title directly from one of the Poe's most famous stories, Episode 7 really has a couple of different sources.

Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher

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. His behavior becomes even more erratic and distracted, and it begins to affect the narrator’s own mental state. One stormy night, the narrator cannot sleep and begins to have inexplicable feelings of terror.

Roderick Usher is a gifted poet and artist, whose talents the narrator praises before sharing a poem Usher wrote, titled ‘The Haunted Palace’. The ballad concerns a royal palace which was once filled with joy and song, until ‘evil things’ attacked the king’s palace and made it a desolate shadow of what it once was. Poe was often dismissed by contemporary literary critics because of the unusual content and brevity of his stories.

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. The narrator and Roderick place her in a tomb despite her flushed, lively appearance. In the tale's conclusion, Madeline escapes from the tomb and returns to Roderick, scaring him to death.

Roderick Usher was tottering on the brink of mental collapse just as the ancestral House of Usher tottered on the brink of physical collapse, as though man and mansion shared a common spirit and common state. From both, an eerie environmental gloom exuded, tainting all within their sphere and rendering everything cheerless, comfortless, and careworn. Sensing and shrinking from his inevitable fall into madness, Roderick Usher summons an old schoolmate to stay with him and divert him from his disturbing phantasms and disconsolate meditations. Upon the wary guest’s arrival, Usher apprises him of the character of his mysterious, mentally-induced malady of soul and body—as well as with the intelligence that his twin sister, the Lady Madeline, resides also within the crumbling walls succumbing to diseases of her own. These are his terrors, and yet he embraces them as he obsessively paints images of crypts and writes dirges of shattered joys and haunted palaces. There can hardly be a starker image of the self-propagating distress of the subconscious.

He describes a childhood friendship with the owner, Roderick Usher.Roderick had requested the narrator’s company during his convalescence from anillness. The narrator reflects on the once-great Usher family and that theyhave only one surviving direct line of descendants, comparing the beautiful butcrumbling house to the family living inside. Fearing that her body will be exhumed for medical study, Roderick insists that she be entombed for two weeks in the family tomb located in the house before being permanently buried. The narrator helps Roderick put Madeline's body in the tomb, whereupon the narrator realizes that Madeline and Roderick are twins. The narrator also notes that Madeline's body has rosy cheeks, which sometimes happens after death.

Whether the reader is trapped by the house or by its inhabitants is unclear. Poe uses the term house to describe both the physical structure and the family. 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.

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. Several days later, Roderick tells the narrator that Madeline has died, and they lay her to rest in a vault.

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. A mere glimpse of the Usher mansion inspires in the narrator “an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart.” Upon entering the house, the reader as the narrator navigates through a series of dark passages lined with carvings, tapestries, and armorial trophies. Poe draws heavily on Gothic conventions, using omens and portents, heavy storms, hidden passageways, and shadows to set the reader on edge. Just like in the episode, Poe's short story of the same name features a party thrown by a character called Prospero (played in the series by Sauriyan Sapkota) which is crashed by a mysterious masked figure. Instead of contending with acid falling through overhead sprinklers, the politically influential revellers in Poe's story are the aristocracy trying to escape a plague within the privileged confines of the prince's palace — but in the end, it comes for them all.