WARNING! This article contains SPOILERS for The Fall of the House of Usher!
With Roderick Usher’s wife Annabel Lee being absent from the present-day story, her mysterious fate looms over The Fall of the House of Usher’s story. While Bruce Greenwood’s Roderick Usher is married to Juno in the show’s present timeline, Mike Flanagan’s Netflix show frequently features flashbacks to 1979, at which point young Roderick is married to Annabel Lee (returning Mike Flanagan actor Katie Parker). Annabel Lee is revealed to be the mother of Roderick’s two eldest children Frederick and Tamerlane, though she and her fate are hardly mentioned by her adult kids.
The Fall of the House of Usher implies that – despite the Usher family tree including his four additional children and a second wife – Annabel Lee was Roderick’s first and only love. Roderick’s love for her is emphasized to be one of his most redeeming qualities before coming into power as Fortunato’s CEO, with the young romantic often writing love poems for her in the past timeline. However, while Auggie frequently mentions how Roderick later “lost” Annabel Lee, her tragic fate isn’t revealed until shortly before The Fall of the House of Usher’s ending.
The Fall Of The House Of Usher Suggests Annabel Lee Died Of A Broken Heart
The Fall of the House of Usher’s finale confirmed that Annabel Lee died at a young age, seemingly more than 30 years before the Mike Flanagan horror TV show’s present timeline. Roderick reveals that he saw her ghost at Frederick and Tamerlane’s funeral, with young Annabel Lee explaining that the reason he took their kids from her is that he was rich. His wealth and greed won over their children, and they had no defenses against it. Roderick himself admitted that he sucked out any goodness and light that his children had inherited from Annabel Lee, changing Frederick and Tamerlane into the money and status-oriented, emotionally detached individuals they became before their deaths with each visit.
While The Fall of the House of Usher doesn’t give an explicit cause of death for Annabel Lee, Roderick indicates that her broken heart killed her. In response to Auggie stating that Roderick lost her, Roderick quotes Edgar Allan Poe’s Annabel Lee poem, “A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling my beautiful Annabel Lee.” The poem’s line indicates that Annabel Lee was killed by an illness, but Auggie’s reply that Roderick was the “wind” suggests that he caused her death, as Annabel seemingly divorced Roderick after he lied to her and was further broken by her children’s changes. Roderick also mentions that Annabel couldn’t live without them, implying that she either died by suicide or was killed by an illness that she lost the will to fight.
What Annabel Lee’s Death Means In The Fall Of The House Of Usher
Roderick confesses at the end of The Fall of the House of Usher that he “would climb to the top of the tower on a pile of corpses,” with Annabel Lee being one of the many casualties on his rise to power. Since Annabel Lee was the most redeeming aspect of Roderick’s life before abandoning any principles in the pursuit of wealth, her death is a reminder of how truly far Roderick had fallen. Even the purest of souls are destroyed in the ruthless climb to money and power, as Roderick’s deal with the devil cast out any semblance of kindness and good.
Even when Roderick’s granddaughter Lenore exhibited Annabel Lee’s spirit and goodness, she, like her grandmother, was killed by Roderick’s greed in The Fall of the House of Usher‘s ultimate reckoning. Annabel Lee represents the rich life that Roderick could have had if he hadn’t prioritized money and power by agreeing to his deal with Carla Gugino’s character Verna. When Roderick was poor, he had a wife who loved him and two children who similarly adored him and would have been raised with their mother’s kindness, but he threw it all away by keeping his eye on the gold, killing Annabel and corrupting their children in the process.
