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Usher has been reimagined as the head of a massive pharmaceutical company he runs with his twin sister, Madeline (Mary McDonnell). Every episode includes flashbacks to a young Roderick (Zach Gilford), Madeline (Willa Fitzgerald), and Annabel Lee (Katie Parker), Roderick’s first wife. These fill in how the Ushers made their fortune, but they’re kind of a narrative drag. It’s important that Roderick and Madeline are cruel, selfish creatures—less so how they got that way.
The Fall of the House of Usher (
The tone of the story “The Fall of the House of Usher” is deliberate. The narrator of the story is the center of the strange parts of the story. However, an important point should be kept in mind that the story is narrated in retrospect; that is why the deliberate tone of the story is not compromised by the frantic mania of a terrified narrator. Some scholars and critics argue that the character of Madeline does not exist at all. They have reduced her to the shared figment of the imagination of the narrator and Roderick. However, Madeline appears to be central to the claustrophobic and symmetrical logic of the story.
“The Haunted Palace”
The result was discoverable, he added, in that silent, yet importunate and terrible influence which for centuries had moulded the destinies of his family, and which made him what I now saw him — what he was. But evil things, in robes of sorrow,Assailed the monarch’s high estate;(Ah, let us mourn, for never morrowShall dawn upon him, desolate!)And, round about his home, the gloryThat blushed and bloomedIs but a dim-remembered storyOf the old time entombed. I shall ever bear about me a memory of the many solemn hours I thus spent alone with the master of the House of Usher. Yet I should fail in any attempt to convey an idea of the exact character of the studies, or of the occupations, in which he involved me, or led me the way. An excited and highly distempered ideality threw a sulphureous lustre over all.
The Fall of the House of Usher
Loosely based on various works by 19th-century author Edgar Allan Poe (most prominently the eponymous 1840 short story), the series adapts otherwise unrelated stories and characters by Poe into a single nonlinear narrative set from 1953 to 2023. It recounts both the rise to power of Roderick Usher, the powerful CEO of a corrupt pharmaceutical company and his sister Madeline Usher, the firm's genius COO, and the events leading to the deaths of all six of Roderick’s children. It stars an ensemble cast led by Carla Gugino as a mysterious woman plaguing the Ushers, Bruce Greenwood as an elderly Roderick and Mary McDonnell as an elderly Madeline. Having deposited our mournful burden upon tressels within this region of horror, we partially turned aside the yet unscrewed lid of the coffin, and looked upon the face of the tenant.
A letter, however, had lately reached me in a distant part of the country — a letter from him — which, in its wildly importunate nature, had admitted of no other than a personal reply. The writer spoke of acute bodily illness — of a mental disorder which oppressed him — and of an earnest desire to see me, as his best, and indeed his only personal friend, with a view of attempting, by the cheerfulness of my society, some alleviation of his malady. It was the manner in which all this, and much more, was said — it was the apparent heart that went with his request — which allowed me no room for hesitation; and I accordingly obeyed forthwith what I still considered a very singular summons. After Roderick gives Auguste his final confession, Madeline bursts through the door of the basement and strangles her brother to death — the same way their mother killed their father. Auguste stands outside in horror, as Verna stands atop the wreckage. After Leo (Rahul Kohli) wakes up from a bender with bloodstained hands to find his boyfriend Julius’ (Daniel Jun) cat stabbed to death in their living room, he knows he’s in trouble.
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In spite of this disadvantage, Madeline possesses the power in the story, almost superhuman at times, as when she breaks out of her tomb. She thus counteracts Roderick’s weak, nervous, and immobile disposition. Some scholars have argued that Madeline does not even exist, reducing her to a shared figment Roderick’s and the narrator’s imaginations. But Madeline proves central to the symmetrical and claustrophobic logic of the tale.
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Madeline stifles Roderick by preventing him from seeing himself as essentially different from her. She completes this attack when she kills him at the end of the story. The overarching narrative of The Fall of the House of Usher loosely follows Poe's 1839 short story of the same name, with Roderick recounting his decades-spanning tale to Auggie inside his decrepit childhood home. The short story, “The Fall of the House of Usher” is an account of a madman whose sickness is suggestive because of the sickness in the family line. His fears are apparent and manifest themselves through the sentient and supernatural family estate.
While on the other hand, Roderick possesses intellectual powers. However, when Madeline comes out from the tomb, she possesses more power in the story and counteracts the weak, immobile, and nervous disposition of her brother. The short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” is regarded as the best example of the totality of Poe as every detail and element in the short story is relevant and related. The story is narrated by a childhood friend of Roderick Usher, the owner of the Usher mansion.
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The song Roderick sings, “The Haunted Palace,” is an extended metaphor that compares the mind of a mad person to a haunted house or a palace under siege. This metaphor is representative of Roderick’s own mental deterioration. In the first stanza of the song, Roderick names the monarch Thought (“In the monarch Thought’s dominion”), suggesting that reason rules over this mind. The physical elements of the palace additionally map onto the features of a human face.
A valet, of stealthy step, thence conducted me, in silence, through many dark and intricate passages in my progress to the studio of his master. Much that I encountered on the way contributed, I know not how, to heighten the vague sentiments of which I have already spoken. His countenance, I thought, wore a mingled expression of low cunning and perplexity. The valet now threw open a door and ushered me into the presence of his master.
He bought the home back in 1999 for $1.2 million located in a gated golf community known as Country Club of the South. The 10,823-square-foot home built in 1988 features an open floor plan and has been fully remodeled. I had taken but few turns in this manner, when a light step on an adjoining staircase arrested my attention. In an instant afterward he rapped, with a gentle touch, at my door, and entered, bearing a lamp.
Roderick discloses that he has been hearing such noises for days and thinks that they have buried Madeline alive. The door opens with the wind blowing, and Madeline was standing behind it in a white bloodied robe. As soon as he escapes, the house of Usher cracks and crumbles to the ground.
It was, however, the only book immediately at hand; and I indulged a vague hope that the excitement which now agitated the hypochondriac, might find relief (for the history of mental disorder is full of similar anomalies) even in the extremeness of the folly which I should read. Could I have judged, indeed, by the wild overstrained air of vivacity with which he harkened, or apparently harkened, to the words of the tale, I might well have congratulated myself upon the success of my design. It was, especially, upon retiring to bed late in the night of the seventh or eighth day after the placing of the lady Madeline within the donjon, that I experienced the full power of such feelings. Sleep came not near my couch — while the hours waned and waned away. I struggled to reason off the nervousness which had dominion over me.
Surely, man had never before so terribly altered, in so brief a period, as had Roderick Usher! It was with difficulty that I could bring myself to admit the identity of the wan being before me with the companion of my early boyhood. And now in the mere exaggeration of the prevailing character of these features, and of the expression they were wont to convey, lay so much of change that I doubted to whom I spoke.
With this foreboding introduction, we enter the interior through a Gothic portal with the narrator. With him we encounter Roderick Usher, who has changed drastically since last the narrator saw him. His cadaverous appearance, his nervousness, his mood swings, his almost extrahuman sensitivity to touch, sound, taste, smell, and light, along with the narrator’s report that he seems lacking in moral sense, portrays a deeply troubled soul. We learn, too, that his twin sister, Madeline, a neurasthenic woman like her brother, is subject to catatonic trances. These two characters, like the house, are woefully, irretrievably flawed. The suspense continues to climb as we go deeper into the dark house and, with the narrator, attempt to fathom Roderick’s malady.
The story centers on Usher family patriarch and Fortunato CEO Roderick (Bruce Greenwood), who, as the show begins, calls up his longtime rival, assistant U.S. attorney C. From the start of the first episode of The Fall of the House of Usher, we know that all of Roderick Usher's children are dead. It's the how and the why of their deaths that plays out over the course of Mike Flanagan's new horror anthology series, now streaming on Netflix. The setting of the novel is several dark and stormy nights and the haunted mansion. Any particular geographic location of the story or the time of occurrence is completely unknown to the readers.
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