Part 3 of the Fall of the House of Usher

[which_chick]

Part 3 of The Fall of the House of Usher, by Edgar Allan Poe, explicated by Me for the benefit of Poor Bastards Who Just Need To Pass, Damn It, But Are Facing A Fucking Short Story Full Of Impenetrable Fucking Gothic Prose.

I'm probably more fun than the Wikipedia entry.

Need Index of Parts?



13. He admitted, however, although with hesitation, that much of the peculiar gloom which thus afflicted him could be traced to a more natural and far more palpable origin–to the severe and long-continued illness–indeed to the evidently approaching dissolution–of a tenderly beloved sister–his sole companion for long years–his last and only relative on earth. “Her decease,” he said, with a bitterness which I can never forget, “would leave him (him the hopeless and the frail) the last of the ancient race of the Ushers.” While he spoke, the lady Madeline (for so was she called) passed slowly through a remote portion of the apartment, and, without having noticed my presence, disappeared. I regarded her with an utter astonishment not unmingled with dread–and yet I found it impossible to account for such feelings. 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.

RFM 13: Roderick’s sister Madeline, seriously ill for a while, could die any day. I think Roderick being worried about his sister is really to blame for most of his gloomy depression. Also Madeline wafts through the far end of the room, without speaking, and this also creeps out me out but I can’t really say why.

Here our narrator looks, again, to the real world – a more natural and far more palpable origin – to explain stuff. He’s trying hard to keep to everyday explanations for things, to downplay even the idea of supernatural goings-on.

In spite of our narrator clinging to the branch of reason so that he looks rather like a stupid Hang In There, Baby! kitten poster, the Lady Madeline’s appearance weirds him out – astonishment and dread, he says, followed by a “sensation of stupor”. He finds it “impossible to account for such feelings” because of course there is no explanation for why a sick bint in a white nightie would cause him to feel that way. (Of course she’s wearing a white nightie. It doesn’t SAY that she is, but she’s an invalid female in a gothic horror tale. If she’s not barefoot in a calf-length ruffled white nightie, long hair hanging loose down her back as she wafts through the far end of the room, there is something deeply disordered in the world.) If you mentally dress her in white and note that she moves slowly through the far end of the room without speaking or, indeed, noticing our narrator, she seems kinda, I dunno, ghost-like? Given that she’s circling the drain (that’s what “evidently approaching dissolution” means in modern speak), Lady Madeline’s ghost-like appearance at this juncture isn’t even the slightest bit creepy.

Shit, I got nothin’ for why our poor narrator is so weirded out. Maybe he needs Paxil or something. There’s no other possible reason he’s getting the inexplicable willies all the time. Certainly it couldn’t be because he’s hanging out in a malignant creepy house that maliciously poisons the people in it and, indeed, the very air surrounding it with a miasmic veil of depressing creepitude. (For the literature-impaired: The preceding sentence was sarcasm.) I mean, if that were the case, it’d certainly explain our narrator’s issues, but who’d actually be dumb enough to believe that shit? Nobody, that’s who.

Hell, way back in P.4, our narrator even says straight up that the miasmic veil of depressing creepitude theory is imaginary: “I had so worked upon my imagination as really to believe that about the whole mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their immediate vicinity—an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the grey wall, and the silent tarn—a pestilent and mystic vapour, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued.” He blames the peculiar atmosphere idea on his imagination, so we know it’s not true. (Probably it’s “just the wind”) Riiiiight. No creepy miasmic veil of depressing creepitude ‘round here, no siree Bob. It’s just an old house. Houses don’t have evil intent. Houses can’t be poisoned by being lived-in for a long time by the same inbred aristocratic family. Houses can’t MAKE people insane. Not at all. That’s crazy talk, right there.

14. The disease of the lady Madeline had long baffled the skill of her physicians. A settled apathy, a gradual wasting away of the person, and frequent although transient affections of a partially cataleptical character, were the unusual diagnosis. Hitherto she had steadily borne up against the pressure of her malady, and had not betaken herself finally to bed; but, on the closing in of the evening of my arrival at the house, she succumbed (as her brother told me at night with inexpressible agitation) to the prostrating power of the destroyer; and I learned that the glimpse I had obtained of her person would thus probably be the last I should obtain–that the lady, at least while living, would be seen by me no more.

RFM 14: Lady Madeline’s mystery illness manifested in wasting away and catalepsy. On the night I arrived, shortly after I saw her, she took to her bed to die.

So we’re going to sojourn but for a brief while into the mind of the early Victorian human person and see what their concerns were. Literature is a product of its time, and sometimes you need to understand the time to understand the literature. This is one of those times. Victorian persons were kinda death-happy. There was a lot of death back in the day, like way more death than you expect. No vaccines (news flash: they really work to save lives) or antibiotics were around back then. Rampant childhood fatalities from stuff like diptheria (a disease that killed 1 in 5 children under 5 years old before an antitoxin was developed in the late 1800’s) and whooping cough and scarlet fever and measles and mumps and so forth made for a lot of dead kiddies. (Spend some time in an old graveyard and notice how frequently slews of kiddies died in a week’s time. It’s heartbreaking.) Untreatable tuberculosis choked the life from folks before your eyes; influenza and pneumonia reaped the old and weak every winter. Victorian folks were used to death, saw a lot of it (compared to us in modern times), and saw it up close – like with Madeline in our story, most folks died at home back then. Mementos of the dead (including corpse portraits, which were a little later than the 1839 date of our story, and mourning jewelry made out of the hair of the dead) were features of the Victorian era. So, death.

With death, you have burying. Victorians were worried about being buried alive. I kid you not. This was a real thing. Not only was it a real thing, I’d also like to point out as an aside that they were ALSO worried about being dug up after they were buried, even if they were really all the way dead. The most common reason for someone to dig up a corpse, in the 1800’s, was to use the body for medical dissection. I am not making this up. The concern about bodysnatching from graves led to the development of mortsafes, lockable graves to keep overeager medical students from stealing your dead body and cutting it up.

So, with some Victorian-style perspective on death, let’s look at the word you probably don’t know and which is singularly important to this fucking story’s endgame: catalepsy. We meet this as part of what’s wrong with Madeline – she has “frequent although transient affections of a partially cataleptical character.” I get how that might be confusing, but “cataleptical” is the adjective form of “catalepsy” and you really do need to know what it is and how it works for this story to function as designed. Catalepsy is a real thing, a nervous ailment that is (wikipedia tells us) characterized by “rigid body, rigid limbs… no response, loss of muscle control, and slowing down of bodily functions, such as breathing.” Hrm. If you have a body that’s rigid (stiff) and it doesn’t respond or breathe very fast, might could be that you’d mistake that cataleptical body for a corpse even if it wasn’t really quite all the way dead. Hunh. That’s kinda interesting, innit?

I wonder why Poe is telling us that the Lady Madeline has catalepsy.

I wonder why I, your adorkable explicator, am telling you about the fear of being buried alive that led Victorian-era people to invent safety coffins.

I wonder…

15. For several days ensuing, her name was unmentioned by either Usher or myself: and during this period I was busied in earnest endeavours to alleviate the melancholy of my friend. We painted and read together; or I listened, as if in a dream, to the wild improvisations of his speaking guitar. And thus, as a closer and still closer intimacy admitted me more unreservedly into the recesses of his spirit, the more bitterly did I perceive the futility of all attempt at cheering a mind from which darkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe, in one unceasing radiation of gloom.

I tried, for several days, to cheer Roderick up. We painted and read together. He played guitar. All of it was useless – the more we hung out, the more convinced I was that it was pointless and that he was somehow permanently gloomy.

I honestly don’t have much to add, here, except that it seems odd that Roderick’s only living relative is abed waiting for death and unmentioned by either him or his houseguest for days while she’s getting on with the serious business of dying. You’d have thought they’d at least look in on her, see how she was doing with it, stuff like that. Also, Roderick’s gloom pours forth (like a fountain of darkness) from him over everything around him. Probably he could use some Paxil as well.

16. 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. His long improvised dirges will ring for ever in my ears. Among other things, I hold painfully in mind a certain singular perversion and amplification of the wild air of the last waltz of Von Weber. From the paintings over which his elaborate fancy brooded, and which grew, touch by touch, into vagueness at which I shuddered the more thrillingly, because I shuddered knowing not why;–from these paintings (vivid as their images now are before me) I would in vain endeavour to educe more than a small portion which should lie within the compass of merely written words. By the utter simplicity, by the nakedness of his designs, he arrested and overawed attention. If ever mortal painted an idea, that mortal was Roderick Usher. For me at least–in the circumstances then surrounding me–there arose out of the pure abstractions which the hypochondriac contrived to throw upon his canvas, an intensity of intolerable awe, no shadow of which felt I ever yet in the contemplation of the certainly glowing yet too concrete reveries of Fuseli.

RFM P16: I have clear memories of how Roderick and I passed the time, but I can’t tell you about the stuff he did. The art and music he produced were gilded by his madness and thus were made so otherworldly that regular words simply can’t describe them.

I admit I’m going for a bit of a stretch on the RFM for P16. Sometimes the Dense and Impenetrable Gothic Prose gets to me, too. The key sentence here is “An excited and highly distempered ideality threw a sulphureous lustre over all.” It’s not even a very big sentence for Poe, just about fits on one line and everything. But yet I got a big handful of nothin’ on the first read-through. I'mma gear down here and try again, word by word, 'til I can get some meaning out of this.

I think in this sentence, “excited” means energetic, feverish, enthusiastic, manic. Think “Lots of energy” instead of “Wow!”. Remember, Roderick is kinda manic-depressive. We found that out back in P.9, remember? Maybe this is one of his manic times.

“Highly distempered” – archaic use of “distemper” means “derange” or “unsettle” so “highly distempered” might be “very deranged” or “extremely unsettled”. That works with our “Roderick is a nutjob.” conception of Roderick, so let’s go with that.

Then we come to “ideality”. What the fuck is that? To the dictionary! (I know there is no earthly way you are reading that like I want you to. You know how Batman says “To the Batmobile!”? Like that. THAT is the level of enthusiasm and engagement I want, here. Your mental voice should say “To the dictionary!” like Batman says “To the Batmobile!” Work on it.) Ideality is “the quality or state of being ideal”, which is not so helpful. Maybe it’s what you think of as “ideal”? So like when you’re drawing your ideal woman, the thing you are drawing is the ideality of her? I think that’ll work.

Next we get sulphureous lustre. Sulphur is a yellow element. It’s also called brimstone, like as in fire-and-brimstone, like as in Sinners In the Hands of an Angry God, like as in Hell, devils, that sort of thing. Lustre, for its part is “a glow of reflected light; sheen”. Now, here, does Poe mean that everything Roderick does (his art and music) is glowing sulphur-yellow? No. No, he does not. That would be silly and this is not a silly story. This is SRS GOTHIC HORROR with no hint of silly about it. So, it’s not a literal thing. It’s figurative speech, one a them mettyforical things. Roderick’s artworks and music practically glowed with the vaguely-demonic hellfire-yellow glow of his very deranged notion of what “ideal” was. Yeah, let’s go with that.

We also see uncertainty, again, on the part of our narrator: "vagueness at which I shuddered the more thrillingly, because I shuddered knowing not why“ By now we should all be yelling at the narrator that his so-called unexplained willies are because he’s in the creepy house and subject to the creepy house’s malignant effect. We should just yell it at him, like you do when you’re watching a horror movie and yell at the characters on screen to check the backseat of the car before they get in it.

17. One of the phantasmagoric conceptions of my friend, partaking not so rigidly of the spirit of abstraction, may be shadowed forth, although feebly, in words. A small picture presented the interior of an immensely long and rectangular vault or tunnel, with low walls, smooth, white, and without interruption or device. Certain accessory points of the design served well to convey the idea that this excavation lay at an exceeding depth below the surface of the earth. No outlet was observed in any portion of its vast extent, and no torch, or other artificial source of light was discernible; yet a flood of intense rays rolled throughout, and bathed the whole in a ghastly and inappropriate splendour.

RFM 17: Although I just told you that all the stuff Roderick did was so madness-influenced that it couldn’t be described, Imma now describe this one picture of a buried vault with no exit and no light sources that was nonetheless depicted as lit up like a neon sign by inexplicable intense rays of light.

Hrm, says I. And Hrm, should be saying you, ya Poor Bastard, regarding this one picture that gets described to us. Poe takes an entire paragraph to tell us about this one picture. Now, the paragraph doesn’t advance the plot. The paragraph doesn’t tell us a whole lot about Roderick or about Lady Madeline or about our narrator. The paragraph doesn’t even further the creepy mood regarding the house. Yeah, there’s description, but it’s not really ringing the creepy bells as well as Poe has done in paragraphs past. Look at the adjectives we get: long, regular, low walls, smooth, white… not very scary stuff, if you ask me.

So, what does this sound like… vault, below the surface of the earth, with no outlet and no sources of light. Sound like a tomb to you? Sounds like a tomb to me. I’m putting my money on tomb, with a side order of foreshadowing. You might want to bet my way, as I’ve read the story already and know how it comes out. :)

Why’s it brightly lit? Personally, I figure the bright light is the soul of the person stuck in the tomb, that eternal portion of oneself that is released upon death to live forever in heaven or hell. It’s bright because it works like an angel’s grace on the TV show Supernatural. But that’s just me. You can think what you like. Also, if the painting was not brightly lit, it’d be solid black because it’s showing us a doorless, windowless, lampless tomb underground and it wouldn’t matter at all if the walls were white – in the real, true, for certain underground dark, we wouldn’t be seeing shit no matter what color the walls were.

18. I have just spoken of that morbid condition of the auditory nerve which rendered all music intolerable to the sufferer, with the exception of certain effects of stringed instruments. It was, perhaps, the narrow limits to which he thus confined himself upon the guitar, which gave birth, in great measure, to the fantastic character of the performances. But the fervid facility of his impromptus could not be so accounted for. They must have been, and were, in the notes, as well as in the words of his wild fantasias (for he not unfrequently accompanied himself with rhymed verbal improvisations), the result of that intense mental collectedness and concentration to which I have previously alluded as observable only in particular moments of the highest artificial excitement. The words of one of these rhapsodies I have easily remembered. I was, perhaps, the more forcibly impressed with it, as he gave it, because, in the under or mystic current of its meaning, I fancied that I perceived, and for the first time, a full consciousness on the part of Usher, of the tottering of his lofty reason upon her throne. The verses, which were entitled "The Haunted Palace,” ran very nearly, if not accurately, thus:

RFM P.18: I said about how Roderick could only listen to some stringed instrument music and limiting his guitar work to only the sounds he could tolerate maybe accounted for how weird that music was. But his freeform jams were clearly more than that – they could only have come from his overly focused manic mindset. Let me tell you about one of these freeform improv jams that I remember clearly – it marked the first time I really got a handle on how much Roderick was aware of his own nutjobbery.

The RFM summary, here, covers the important plot points. We get some mood stuff (fantastic character, fervid facility, wild fantasias, artificial excitement, mystic current, blah blah) but mostly that’s to help us imagine Roderick’s state of nutjobbery.

Poe also tips his hand on the importance of the upcoming Stupid Poetic Interlude because he says “I was, perhaps, the more forcibly impressed with it, as he gave it, because, in the under or mystic current of its meaning, I fancied that I perceived, and for the first time, a full consciousness on the part of Usher, of the tottering of his lofty reason upon her throne.” Our narrator says that the Stupid Poetic Interlude helped show HIM the extent that Roderick Usher knows that he, himself, is a nutjob.

And too, Poe has named the Stupid Poetic Interlude “The Haunted Palace” but I’m sure that’s just a coinkydink and has nothing at all to do with the creepy malignant house in which the story’s action is taking place. Probably it’s just the wind, there.

And now we’re to the STUPID POETIC INTERLUDE, SPI for short.

I. In the greenest of our valleys,
By good angels tenanted,
Once a fair and stately palace–
Radiant palace–reared its head.
In the monarch Thought’s dominion–
It stood there!
Never seraph spread a pinion
Over fabric half so fair.

II. Banners yellow, glorious, golden,
On its roof did float and flow;
(This–all this–was in the olden Time long ago)
And every gentle air that dallied,
In that sweet day,
Along the ramparts plumed and pallid,
A winged odour went away.

III. Wanderers in that happy valley
Through two luminous windows saw
Spirits moving musically
To a lute’s well tuned law,
Round about a throne, where sitting
(Porphyrogene!)
In state his glory well befitting,

IV.And all with pearl and ruby glowing
Was the fair palace door,
Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing
And sparkling evermore,
A troop of Echoes whose sweet duty
Was but to sing,
In voices of surpassing beauty,
The wit and wisdom of their king.

V. But evil things, in robes of sorrow,
Assailed the monarch’s high estate;
(Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow
Shall dawn upon him, desolate!)
And, round about his home, the glory
That blushed and bloomed
Is but a dim-remembered story,
Of the old time entombed.

VI. And travellers now within that valley,
Through the red-litten windows, see
Vast forms that move fantastically
To a discordant melody;
While, like a rapid ghastly river,
Through the pale door,
A hideous throng rush out forever,
And laugh–but smile no more.

Just an aside to the folks at home: Formatting poetry on Tumblr is a fucking bitch. You should all be grateful for what I do for you.

SPI, RFM: Once upon a time there was a posh king with a fancy palace and hotties who sang his praises and it was awesome. However, evil came and brought all that down – now the house is inhabited by disturbed spirits and everything has gone to shit.

Reading more deeply, let’s see what our (by now) good friend Extended Metaphor has to say about the SPI. Extended Metaphor, the floor is yours.

EM: This hyar poetical bullshit relates because Roderick (Wewease Wodewick!) and his family oncet was highfalutin posh folks but now the whole famdamily is down to just two eccentric twigs, all that’s left on a sickly dying fambly tree what don’t even have any other branches, aforesaidmentioned eccentric twigs are living in a dark creepy house and creepin’ them ownselfs out whilest going slowly mad, their glorious and happy past nothing but a mem'ry, like as what happened to the king in the poem.

Thank you, EM, for that helpful, if somewhat colorful summary of the purpose of the SPI. Also, you sound unexpectedly like Early Cuyler. Who’d have thought? I’d like to also mention that the SPI, while “allegedly” composed extempore (on the fly) by Roderick, was previously written by Poe and published by itself at an earlier date. This is a RECYCLED poem of Poe’s that he is quoting in his own short story. Authorially, this is an act so masturbatory that it’s a wonder Poe didn’t die of blindness and hairy palms.