There's no shortage of Edgar Allan Poe references in Mike Flanagan's new series The Fall of the House of Usher. Each episode adapts a different story of his (often with a modern twist), and there are heaps of direct quotations from his assorted works throughout.
One of the more subtle Poe allusions comes in the form of Verna (Carla Gugino), a shape-shifting demonic figure who once made a deal with the Ushers. She's a character crafted exclusively for The Fall of the House of Usher, with her collection of the Ushers' debt to her tying the entire series together. But despite being a new creation, Verna — and more specifically, her name — is still a veiled Poe reference. "Verna" is an anagram for "Raven," as in "The Raven," Poe's most famous poem.
Verna isn't the first time The Fall of the House of Usher uses names to allude to Poe. All of the Usher children's names come from different short stories. Attorney C. Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly) takes his name from a character in Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," while characters like Rufus Griswold (Michael Trucco) and William Longfellow (Robert Longstreet) are named after real-life writers and critics Poe had adversarial relationships with.
But while these names are fairly transparent in their references, the significance of "Verna" takes a tad more time to unravel.
What does Verna have to do with "The Raven" in The Fall of the House of Usher?
Verna is paired with raven imagery throughout The Fall of the House of Usher. There's a stuffed raven in the bar where she meets a young Roderick and Madeline Usher (Zach Gilford and Willa Fitzgerald). When the siblings leave the bar and find it has vanished behind them, all that's left is a graffitied painting of a raven on the wall. These images are all leading up to the finale, titled "The Raven," when we see Verna transform into a raven.
"The Raven" also adapts elements of Poe's 1845 poem, which sees the speaker mourning the loss of his love Lenore. A raven visits him and croaks the word "Nevermore" in response to all the speaker's questions, driving him into a spiral of grief at Lenore's memory.
The Fall of the House of Usher's finale follows similar beats. We learn that Roderick's (Bruce Greenwood) granddaughter Lenore (Kyliegh Curran) passed away peacefully as part of Roderick's bargain with Verna that his entire bloodline would die along with him. As Roderick reckons with what he's done, he comes face to face with Verna in raven form — perched on a bust of the Pallas Athena, just like in the poem.
This isn't to say that Verna is a manifestation of the raven in Poe's work. Rather, she's a twisted version of it. In the poem, the raven serves as a reminder of the dead: The speaker is reading in the hopes that he can forget Lenore and his grief even for a moment. However, the raven's appearance forces him to confront his despair head-on, even as he slips into madness.
Roderick is falling into madness, too. His children are all dead, Lenore is gone, and he knows he's next. But Verna's raven isn't just a reminder of his family's deaths — she's foretelling Roderick's own death as well. There's also an added element of taunting here. If Roderick hadn't made that deal with Verna, none of this misery would have befallen him. Despite his great success, he is responsible for his family's fall, as well as the deaths of the millions who became addicted to Fortunato Pharmaceuticals' opioid Ligodone.
As different as Poe's raven and Verna are, there is some connection between the two in the original poem. As Poe writes, "[the raven's] eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming," a line that links to Verna's own demonic nature. Perhaps it was her own dream to bring this brutal reckoning to the Ushers after their bloody deal all those years ago. As for Roderick, he finds himself in a nightmare of his own making.
How to watch: The Fall of the House of Usher is now streaming on Netflix.
