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A sensation of stupor oppressed me, as my eyes followed her retreating steps. When a door, at length, closed upon her, my glance sought instinctively and eagerly the countenance of the brother—but he had buried his face in his hands, and I could only perceive that a far more than ordinary wanness had overspread the emaciated fingers through which trickled many passionate tears. In the manner of my friend I was at once struck with an incoherence—an inconsistency; and I soon found this to arise from a series of feeble and futile struggles to overcome an habitual trepidancy—an excessive nervous agitation. For something of this nature I had indeed been prepared, no less by his letter, than by reminiscences of certain boyish traits, and by conclusions deduced from his peculiar physical conformation and temperament. Camille (Kate Siegel) couldn’t let her animosity toward her half-sister, Victorine LaFourcade (T’Nia Miller), rest, so she goes to Vic’s research facility to dig up more dirt on her unethical experiments. Roderick and Madeline’s trauma begins when their devout mother, Eliza (Annabeth Gish), dies at home, and the twins bury her in a homemade coffin in the backyard.
“The Fall of the House of Usher” takes Poe to another level - The Trinitonian
“The Fall of the House of Usher” takes Poe to another level.
Posted: Fri, 20 Oct 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
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The impetuous fury of the entering gust nearly lifted us from our feet. It was, indeed, a tempestuous yet sternly beautiful night, and one wildly singular in its terror and its beauty. I say that even their exceeding density did not prevent our perceiving this—yet we had no glimpse of the moon or stars—nor was there any flashing forth of the lightning. But the under surfaces of the huge masses of agitated vapour, as well as all terrestrial objects immediately around us, were glowing in the unnatural light of a faintly luminous and distinctly visible gaseous exhalation which hung about and enshrouded the mansion. At the request of Usher, I personally aided him in the arrangements for the temporary entombment.
The Fall of the House of Usher is the best show on Netflix right now - Tom's Guide
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It was, he said, a constitutional and a family evil, and one for which he despaired to find a remedy—a mere nervous affection, he immediately added, which would undoubtedly soon pass off. Some of these, as he detailed them, interested and bewildered me; although, perhaps, the terms, and the general manner of the narration had their weight. He suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses; the most insipid food was alone endurable; he could wear only garments of certain texture; the odours of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a faint light; and there were but peculiar sounds, and these from stringed instruments, which did not inspire him with horror.
The Fall of the House of Usher — Limited Series
Over the next week, both Roderick and the narrator find themselves increasingly agitated. It is revealed that Roderick's sister, Madeline, is also ill and falls into cataleptic, deathlike trances. Roderick and Madeline are the only remaining members of the Usher family.
Carl Lumbly
It had been used, apparently, in remote feudal times, for the worst purposes of a donjon-keep, and, in later days, as a place of deposit for powder, or some other highly combustible substance, as a portion of its floor, and the whole interior of a long archway through which we reached it, were carefully sheathed with copper. Its immense weight caused an unusually sharp grating sound, as it moved upon its hinges. 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.
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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. Poe’s contemporaries favoured a more realistic approach to writing. 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.
He witnesses Madeline's reemergence and the subsequent, simultaneous death of the twins. The narrator is the only character to escape the House of Usher, which he views as it cracks and sinks into the mountain lake. 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.
Mary McDonnell
It’s important that Roderick and Madeline are cruel, selfish creatures—less so how they got that way. What’s more interesting is to watch how the fallout of their decisions fell on Roderick’s many children, all torn apart by some of Poe’s most memorable creations. Inspired by the work of Edgar Allan Poe, House of Usher traces the downfall of the uber-wealthy Usher family and their corrupt drug company, Fortunato Pharmaceuticals. 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. Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly), to come hear his confession following the deaths of all six of his adult children (by five different mothers)—Frederick (Henry Thomas), Tamerlane (Samantha Sloyan), Victorine (T'Nia Miller), Napoleon (Rahul Kohli), Camille (Kate Siegel), and Prospero (Sauriyan Sapkota)—in the span of a week. ‘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.
Frederick Usher
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. His countenance was, as usual, cadaverously wan—but, moreover, there was a species of mad hilarity in his eyes—an evidently restrained hysteria in his whole demeanour. His air appalled me—but anything was preferable to the solitude which I had so long endured, and I even welcomed his presence as a relief. Our books—the books which, for years, had formed no small portion of the mental existence of the invalid—were, as might be supposed, in strict keeping with this character of phantasm. We pored together over such works as the Ververt et Chartreuse of Gresset; the Belphegor of Machiavelli; the Heaven and Hell of Swedenborg; the Subterranean Voyage of Nicholas Klimm by Holberg; the Chiromancy of Robert Flud, of Jean D'Indaginé, and of De la Chambre; the Journey into the Blue Distance of Tieck; and the City of the Sun of Campanella.
I like it, especially the white and dark living room with green furniture. As if in the superhuman energy of his utterance there had been found the potency of a spell—the huge antique panels to which the speaker pointed, threw slowly back, upon the instant, ponderous and ebony jaws. It was the work of the rushing gust—but then without those doors there did stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the lady Madeline of Usher. There was blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame. For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon the threshold, then, with a low moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated.
As the series draws to a close, Verna—whose name is an anagram of the titular bird in Poe's classic 1845 poem "The Raven"—is shown placing an item on each of the Usher's graves that represents their respective downfalls, closing the loop of her karmic retribution. Decades later, once it became clear that Verna was the one killing off the Usher children, Madeline tried to sidestep the deal by convincing Roderick to kill himself. But Verna wasn't willing to let him get off that easy and brought him back to face the full extent of his reckoning, the death of his granddaughter Lenore (Kyliegh Curran), the only morally good Usher. ‘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.
Her death brings Verna no joy, but she does tell Lenore about all the good her mother does in the future thanks to Lenore’s heroic choice to save her — before allowing the youngest and kindest Usher to die peacefully. Roderick and Madeline sold their souls the night they killed Fortunato CEO Rufus Griswold (Michael Trucco) — the same night they met Verna, on New Year’s Eve 1979. Using Griswold as a fall guy to begin Roderick’s takeover, the twins drugged him on the night of the company holiday party. When Griswold woke, he found that they’re sealing him behind a brick wall in the basement of the new Fortunato building he’s constructing. His cries for help were useless, because the holidays meant no one would be back in the building for days. But he wouldn’t last the night anyway — Madeline poisoned him with cyanide.
According to Roderick, Madeline suffers from a cataleptic disease that has gradually limited her mobility. As Roderick talks about his sister’s illness, the narrator sees her pass through a distant part of the house. 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.