The House of Usher and the cardinal virtues
I thought to myself it's no good to whine about slotting characters into boring reductive categories without a good rebutal, so here's a dose of slightly more interesting archetypes.
Prospero reflects the cardinal virtue of Diligence and its mirror the sin of Sloth ("But he has an orgy so it has to be lust," by god you're so boring) He is the only Usher who tries to make anything of value. When Camille goes on her little spiel about how Ushers don't make stuff, she's not wrong. Perry got pretty ruthlessly shot down when he was presenting his ideas for trying to make value and start a night club chain, rather than just taking credit for someone else's work like all of his siblings and his dad. But he was at least trying. His drive to prove himself and gain respect is how he gets himself into the whole mess. However, it is the act of not doing his due diligence that kills him.
Camille has an interesting one because while breaking into a lab facility to expose mistreatment of animals would seem like the cardinal virtue of kindness, she's only there to get one over on her sister. The inverse of Kindness is Envy, and for as important as her role is as the family spin doctor, Camille is valued the least. Everyone suspects Perry when they hear about an informant, but that's because he's an idiot baby. Victurine is useful with her heart mesh implant, Napoleon took the role of the "chill fun sibling", and the other two are original Ushers, so Camille is left as the unfavored child.
Napoleon tried to buy his way out of his problem with Charity. He could have come home with a different cat entirely and told his boyfriend he was looking in shelters for Pluto and accidentally fell in love. Name it Mars, let the boyfriend chalk it up to a weird grief response. Bummer Pluto never came home. Verna would have had him trip over the thing on the stairs in the middle of the night and that would have been that. Instead, everything was transactional as he maximized what he could get out of his relationships for the least amount of effort. The boyfriend can live with him, the boyfriends cat can move in too, but as soon as that becomes even the slightest bit more effort (like when boyfriend wants to meet the family, or curb the drug use, or the cat brings home a dead thing) Napoleon wants it gone from his life.
Victurine likewise could have had a painless clean death had she mustered up the Humility to say that the device didn't work. Her demise, unlike her younger siblings, was a compilation of smaller shitty decisions and white lies. She could even recognize that each choice was morally wrong, but it was little choices that were easier to brush off. A dead monkey, a foraged signature, a rightfully concerned patient reassured with platitudes. Even before she was scrubbing blood off the floor to Bonnie Tyler, her inability to admit her choices were flawed was getting her in trouble.
Tamralane with her perfectly manicured curated life, is the one to take Temperance to its furthest extreme. I think it was Atwood who wrote about women and the internal voyeur to preform for, but I'm not going to Google it for a post about horror characters losing their minds and dying horribly. She lives under a personal panopticon of her own expectations and can never allow herself to experience her own life lest she fall short. Her wealth rather than mitigating this exacerbates the issue, giving her access to any and every distance she could possibly want. Death by mirrors isn't so much her going insane as it is the culmination of the life shes built for herself.
(Plus, I know her lonely evening was meant to be ~spooky~ but babe, that is literally just ADHD. Can't remember where you put the thing? Can't remember doing the thing? CAN'T SLEEP?! DOES EVERYONE HATE YOU AND THINK YOU'RE AN INSANE BITCH FOR PERFECTLY VALID REASONS?! Looks like Adderall for you).
Fraudrick. You dickwad. No Patience to allow your very injured and traumatized wife explain herself. The inverse of Patience is Wrath. Demonstrated that one in spades. I'm on Verna's side on this one. Pliers, really?
(His wife's name is fucking Mori. As in momento mori.)
Which leaves Madeline and Rodrick. What's a Gothic horror story without some really fucking weird and unsettling sibling dynamic? Dull, that's what. Anyway, never letting anything touch them or impede them in their lust for power and wealth offers a strange sort of Chastity. There's no love, not for the kids or Annabelle Lee that could touch them, no moral they wouldn't overturn, no value they wouldn't abandon. Madeline values her freedom above all else but she spent her life bound to her brother. They wouldn't even spare each other in ruthless pursuit of just a little more power.
So yeah, bummer for August Dupain that he wound up against the most supernaturally fucked up family that ever lived.
