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

Table Of Content

• ‘How Disney Built America’: Unpacking the Magic of Every Episode in History Docuseries
• ‘Mary & George’: Tony Curran Explains That Embalmed Heart & Why He Buried It With George
• Discover more from Interesting Literature
• Episode 5, "The Tell-Tale Heart"
• Every episode is based on a short Poe story.
• Text: Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher”
• Episode 8, "The Raven"

With a moan, she falls on her brother, and, by the time they hit the floor, both Roderick and Madeline are dead. Outside, he looks back just in time to see the house split in two and collapse. The Fall of the House of Usher, supernatural horror story by Edgar Allan Poe, published in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine in 1839 and issued in Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840).

The Fall of the House of Usher review: Mike Flanagan’s Poe Cinematic Universe - Vox.com

The Fall of the House of Usher review: Mike Flanagan’s Poe Cinematic Universe.

Posted: Fri, 13 Oct 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]

‘How Disney Built America’: Unpacking the Magic of Every Episode in History Docuseries

Roderick sings "The Haunted Palace", then tells the narrator that he believes the house he lives in to be alive, and that this sentience arises from the arrangement of the masonry and vegetation surrounding it. Further, Roderick believes that his fate is connected to the family mansion. Flanagan has form with making tributes to some of horror’s most beloved oeuvres. He took on Shirley Jackson in The Haunting of Hill House (which was fabulous), Henry James in The Haunting of Bly Manor (spooky but saccharine) and Christopher Pike in The Midnight Club (meh). Thankfully, Flanagan and Poe’s sensibilities prove a winning pairing, staying on the edge of terror without cascading into jump scares and sentimentality.

‘Mary & George’: Tony Curran Explains That Embalmed Heart & Why He Buried It With George

Poe’s longest work, the 1838 novel Arthur Gordon Pym, described in diary form a series of episodes on a journey to Antarctica. 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.

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The Fall of the House of Usher: Netflix horror is Edgar Allan Poe meets the Sacklers..

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Discover more from Interesting Literature

We have a mysterious secret afflicting the house and eating away at its owner, the Gothic ‘castle’ (here, refigured as a mansion), premature burial (about which Poe wrote a whole other story), the mad owner of the house, and numerous other trappings of the Gothic novel. Poe condenses these into a short story and plays around with them, locating new psychological depths within these features. 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. This chapter examines what many scholars consider the most accomplished and representative of Poe’s tales, “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839). After a brief overview of the main axes of interpretation in the story’s reception history, it proposes an analysis of the tale’s main narrative strategy, the unreliable narrator, which is typical of Poe’s short fiction in general. Linking this device to the unstable architectonics of the house in the story, the chapter shows how the unreliability of the narrator lies at the heart of the text’s ability to choreograph active reader participation.

Episode 5, "The Tell-Tale Heart"

The story has a tantalizingly horrific appeal, and since its publication in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, scholars, critics, and general readers continue to grapple with the myriad possible reasons for the story’s hold on the human psyche. These explanations range from the pre-Freudian to the pre–Waste Land and pre-Kafka-cum-nihilist to the biographical and the cultural. Indeed, despite Poe’s distaste for Allegory, some critics view the house as a Metaphor for the human psyche (Strandberg 705). Whatever conclusion a reader reaches, none finds the story an easy one to forget.

Roderick decides to keep his sister preserved in ahouse vault before moving her to the isolated family cemetery. He soon abandonshis former hobbies, and the narrator observes that Roderick is beginning tolose his mind. While watching his friend’s condition deteriorate, the narratorfeels himself slip into madness as well. In Romances like the novels of Hawthorne, conflicts occur among characters within the context of society and are resolved in accordance with society’s rules. Poe’s Gothic tales are brief flashes of chaos that flare up within lonely narrators living at the fringes of society.

Text: Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher”

There’s no question that The Fall of the House of Usher ranks among Flanagan’s finest works. For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription. A personal account can be used to get email alerts, save searches, purchase content, and activate subscriptions. Feast your eyes on a new clip above and learn more about the limited series below. Mike Flanagan never met a haunted house he didn’t want to peel back the wallpaper on and see what horrors lurk beneath. In the spectrum of American literature, the Gothic remains in the shadow of the dominant genre of the American Renaissance—the Romance.

Episode 8, "The Raven"

Some of the CGI, particularly one scene involving bodies falling from the sky, is unintentionally funny. Problematically, Flanagan tends to conflate queerness with depravity and sexual fluidity is punished here with an unnerving flourish. But the show remembers to be actually scary, with truly inspired uses of chimps, mirrors and sprinkler systems.

Episode 4, "The Black Cat"

A storm rages outside, and despite efforts to reason withhimself, he shakes with terror. He paces around the room, and Roderick entersin a state of restrained hysteria. The storm intensifies, and objects in theroom glow with unnatural light from the mist that surrounds the mansion. Usher moves hischair to face the door, murmuring under his breath while the narrator reads tohim. The narrator comes to the scene in which the hero forces his way into thehome of a hermit and finds a dragon that he eventually slays with a mace.

Usher states thathe and his sister, Madeline, are the last of the line of Usher, and thatMadeline is sick with a disease the doctors cannot diagnose. The Martian Chronicles, a 1950 collection of stories by Ray Bradbury, contains a novella called "Usher II," a homage to Poe. Its main character, William Stendahl, builds a house based on the specifications from Poe's story to murder his enemies. The narrator and Roderick place her in a tomb despite her flushed, lively appearance.

Guilt permeates every frame of Flanagan’s Poe universe, and buys into not so much the horror as the terror. Although it borrows its title directly from one of the Poe's most famous stories, Episode 7 really has a couple of different sources. The death of Frederick Usher (Henry Thomas), which is caused by a pendulous piece of building material swinging slowly down to cut him open, is almost straight out of Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum".

The acronym is a reference to Poe's story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." As Camille explains in episode 2, she says the family used to call it the "R.U.E. Zoo" in reference to the animal testing happening within it. Later, "they knew better" as to the real fate of the chimpanzees, and began calling it the "R.U.E. Morgue." Shecries out and falls on her brother, and both die as she drags him to the floorwith her. The narrator flees the house with the storm still raging around him.He looks back to see the crack in the house widen and the tarn swallow theHouse of Usher. When Roderick speaks, he states that his illness is hereditary and withoutcure, which causes him to have highly reactive senses. He admits that he is superstitious aboutthe house, and that its continual gloom has broken him down.

A storm begins, and Roderick comes to the narrator's bedroom (which is situated directly above the house's vault) in an almost hysterical state. Throwing the windows open to the storm, Roderick points out that the lake surrounding the house seems to glow in the dark, just as Roderick depicted in his paintings, but there is no lightning or other explainable source of the glow. For librarians and administrators, your personal account also provides access to institutional account management. Here you will find options to view and activate subscriptions, manage institutional settings and access options, access usage statistics, and more. Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members.

The suspense continues to climb as we go deeper into the dark house and, with the narrator, attempt to fathom Roderick’s malady. 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.