Episode 21: “The Fall of the House of Usher” (part 1)

Episode
Written By Stephanie Summar

Beautiful Dead Women

Virginia Clemm Poe

When we think of horror, we think of Edgar Allan Poe. His stories go hard on the eerie atmosphere, intricate plots, and unhinged characters. But it’s important to note that most of those characters are men. And among Poe’s female characters, two traits stand out prominently, appearing again and again: they’re usually beautiful, and they’re usually dead.

The motif of the beautiful dead woman is recurrent throughout Poe’s poems and stories, often serving as a catalyst for the emotional and psychological turmoil of his male protagonists. But why was he fixated on them?

To understand this, we need to talk about Poe’s tumultuous life and the experiences that shaped his dark literary themes and made the beautiful dead woman a staple of the horror genre.

 

  • Steph: Before we begin, a quick content warning: Paranormal Pajama Party is a podcast about scary stories and legends, but there’s nothing scarier than the patriarchy.

    When discussing tales in which women are often the villains, we’ll have to unpack some stories in which women are the victims.

    This episode contains the usual amount of cursing, as well as alcoholism, a little bit of blood, some bones, a lot of death, a mention of slavery, pedophilia, and terminal illness. Geez. It’s… not as bad as all that sounds, but please listen with care.

    Tonight’s episode features a woman trapped alone in a very boring place for an entire week. If you ever find yourself in a similar situation, but with internet access, you should probably call for help. But while you’re waiting for rescue, you could also visit paranormalpjparty.com, where I share images related to each week’s stories and sometimes write blog posts about the facts and stories I couldn’t fit into an episode but still thought were fascinating. See you there!

    [PAUSE]

    An abridged version of “The Fall Of The House Of Usher”, by Edgar Allan Poe, published in 1839:

    During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.

    I know not how it was—but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter depression of soul. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart. What was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher?

    It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled luster by the dwelling, and gazed down—but with a shudder even more thrilling than before—upon the remodeled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.

    Nevertheless, in this mansion of gloom I now proposed to myself a sojourn of some weeks. Its proprietor, Roderick Usher, had been one of my boon companions in boyhood; but many years had elapsed since our last meeting. A letter from him, however, had lately reached me which, in its wildly importunate nature, had admitted of no other than a personal reply.

    The MS. gave evidence of nervous agitation. The writer spoke of acute bodily illness—of a mental disorder which oppressed him, and of an earnest desire to see me, as his best, and indeed his only personal friend, with a view of attempting, by the cheerfulness of my society, some alleviation of his malady. It was the manner in which all this, and much more, was said—it was the apparent heart that went with his request—which allowed me no room for hesitation.

    Although, as boys, we had been even intimate associates, yet I really knew little of my friend. His reserve had been always excessive and habitual.

    I was aware, however, that his very ancient family had been noted, time out of mind, for a peculiar sensibility of temperament, displaying itself in many works of exalted art, unobtrusive charity, and a passionate devotion to musical science.

    I had learned, too, the very remarkable fact that the stem of the Usher race, all time-honored as it was, had put forth, at no period, any enduring branch; in other words, that the entire family lay in the direct line of descent, and had always so lain.

    When I again uplifted my eyes to the house itself, from its image in the pool, there grew in my mind a strange fancy. 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 gray wall, and the silent tarn—a pestilent and mystic vapor, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued.

    Shaking off from my spirit what must have been a dream, I scanned more narrowly the real aspect of the building. Its principal feature seemed to be that of an excessive antiquity. The discoloration of ages had been great. Minute fungi overspread the whole exterior, hanging in a fine, tangled web-work from the eaves.

    Beyond this indication of extensive decay, however, the fabric gave little token of instability. Perhaps the eye of a scrutinizing observer might have discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn.

    I rode over a short causeway to the house. A servant in waiting took my horse, and I entered the Gothic archway of the hall. A valet, of stealthy step, thence conducted me, in silence, through many dark and intricate passages in my progress to the studio of his master.

    Much that I encountered on the way contributed, I know not how, to heighten the vague sentiments of which I have already spoken. While the objects around me—while the carvings of the ceilings, the somber tapestries of the walls, the ebon blackness of the floors, and the phantasmagoric armorial trophies which rattled as I strode, were but matters to which I had been accustomed from my infancy, I still wondered to find how unfamiliar were the fancies which ordinary images were stirring up.

    On one of the staircases I met the physician of the family. His countenance, I thought, wore a mingled expression of low cunning and perplexity. He passed on.

    The valet now threw open a door and ushered me into the presence of his master.

    The room in which I found myself was very large and lofty. The windows were long, narrow, and pointed. Feeble gleams of encrimsoned light made their way through the trellised panes, and served to render sufficiently distinct the more prominent objects around; the eye, however, struggled in vain to reach the remoter angles of the chamber, or the recesses of the vaulted and fretted ceiling. Many books and musical instruments lay scattered about, but failed to give any vitality to the scene. I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all.

    Usher arose from a sofa on which he had been lying, and greeted me. We sat down; and for some moments, while he spoke not, I gazed upon him with a feeling half of pity, half of awe.

    Surely, man had never before so terribly altered, in so brief a period, as had Roderick Usher! It was with difficulty that I could bring myself to admit the identity of the wan being before me with the companion of my early boyhood. Yet the character of his face had been at all times remarkable. A cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid, but of a surpassingly beautiful curve; a nose of a delicate Hebrew model, but with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar formations; a finely molded chin, speaking, in its want of prominence, of a want of moral energy; hair of a more than web-like softness and tenuity; these features, with an inordinate expansion above the regions of the temple, made up altogether a countenance not easily to be forgotten. And now in the mere exaggeration of the prevailing character of these features, and of the expression they were wont to convey, lay so much of change that I doubted to whom I spoke.


    The ghastly pallor of the skin, and the miraculous lustre of the eye, above all things startled me. His silken hair, too, had been suffered to grow all unheeded, and it floated rather than fell about the face.


    In the manner of my friend I was at once struck with an incoherence—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. His action was alternately vivacious and sullen.

    He spoke of his earnest desire to see me, and of the solace he expected me to afford him. He entered, at some length, into what he conceived to be the nature of his malady. 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.

    It displayed itself in a host of unnatural sensations. Some of these, as he detailed them, interested and bewildered me. 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.

    To an anomalous species of terror I found him a bounden slave. "I shall perish," said he, "I must perish in this deplorable folly. Thus, thus, and not otherwise, shall I be lost. I dread the events of the future, not in themselves, but in their results. I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, Fear."

    I learned, moreover, at intervals, and through broken and equivocal hints, another singular feature of his mental condition. He was enchained by certain superstitious impressions in regard to the dwelling which he tenanted, and whence, for many years, he had never ventured forth.

    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.

    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 catalepsy 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.

    For several days ensuing her name was unmentioned by either Usher or myself; and during this period I was busied in earnest endeavors 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 guitar. And thus, as a closer intimacy admitted me into the recesses of his spirit, the more bitterly did I perceive the futility of all attempt at cheering a mind from which darkness poured forth in one unceasing radiation of gloom.

    I well remember an opinion of Usher's. This opinion, in its general form, was that of the sentience of all vegetable things. But, in his disordered fancy, the idea had assumed a more daring character. I lack words to express the full extent of his persuasion. The belief, however, was connected (as I have previously hinted) with the gray stones of the home of his forefathers. 

    The conditions of the sentience had been here, he imagined, fulfilled in the method of the arrangement of these stones, as well as in that of the many fungi which overspread them, and of the decayed trees which stood around—above all, in the long-undisturbed endurance of this arrangement, and in its reduplication in the still waters of the tarn.

    The evidence of the sentience was to be seen, he said in the gradual yet certain condensation of an atmosphere of their own about the waters and the walls. The result was discoverable, he added, in that silent, terrible influence which for centuries had molded the destinies of his family, and which made him what I now saw him. Such opinions need no comment, and I will make none.

    One evening, having informed me abruptly that the lady Madeline was no more, he stated his intention of preserving her corpse for a fortnight (previously to its final interment) in one of the numerous vaults within the main walls of the building. The worldly reason assigned for this singular proceeding was one I did not feel at liberty to dispute – the brother had been led to his resolution, so he told me, by consideration of the unusual character of the malady of the deceased, of certain obtrusive and eager inquiries on the part of her medical men, and of the remote and exposed situation of the burial ground of the family.

    I will not deny that when I called to mind the sinister countenance of the person whom I met upon the staircase, on the day of my arrival at the house, I had no desire to oppose what I regarded as at best but a harmless, and by no means an unnatural precaution.

    At the request of Usher, I personally aided him in the arrangements for the temporary entombment. The body having been encoffined, we two alone bore it to its rest.

    The vault in which we placed it was small, damp, and entirely without means of admission for light; lying immediately beneath that portion of the building in which was my own sleeping apartment. The door, of massive iron, had an immense weight which caused an unusually sharp grating sound, as it moved upon its hinges.

    [SHRIEKING HINGES, but quiet]

    Having deposited our mournful burden upon tressels within this region of horror, we partially turned aside the yet unscrewed lid of the coffin, and looked upon the face of the tenant. A striking similitude between the brother and sister now first arrested my attention; and Usher, divining, perhaps, my thoughts, murmured out some few words from which I learned that the deceased and himself had been twins, and that sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature had always existed between them.

    Our glances, however, rested not long upon the dead—for we could not regard her unawed. The disease which had thus entombed the lady in the maturity of youth, had left the mockery of a faint blush upon the bosom and the face, and that suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so terrible in death. We replaced and screwed down the lid, and having secured the door of iron, made our way to the scarcely less gloomy upper portion of the house.

    And now, some days of bitter grief having elapsed, an observable change came over the features of the mental disorder of my friend. He roamed from chamber to chamber with hurried, unequal, and objectless step. The pallor of his countenance had assumed, if possible, a more ghastly hue—but the luminousness of his eye had utterly gone out. A tremulous quaver, as if of extreme terror, habitually characterized his utterance. There were times, indeed, when I thought his unceasingly agitated mind was laboring with some oppressive secret, to divulge which he struggled for the necessary courage. 

    At times I was obliged to resolve all into the mere inexplicable vagaries of madness; for I beheld him gazing upon vacancy for long hours, in an attitude of the profoundest attention, as if listening to some imaginary sound. It was no wonder that his condition terrified—that it infected me. I felt creeping upon me, by slow yet certain degrees, the wild influence of his own fantastic yet impressive superstitions.

    Upon retiring to bed late in the night of the seventh or eighth day after the placing of the lady Madeline within the vault, I experienced the full power of such feelings. Sleep came not near my couch, while the hours waned and waned away. I struggled to reason off the nervousness which had dominion over me but my efforts were fruitless.

    I uplifted myself upon the pillows, and peering earnestly within the intense darkness of the chamber, hearkened—I know not why—to certain low and indefinite sounds which came, through the pauses of the storm, at long intervals, I knew not whence. Overpowered by an intense sentiment of horror, unaccountable yet unendurable, I threw on my clothes with haste (for I felt that I should sleep no more during the night), and endeavored to arouse myself from the pitiable condition into which I had fallen, by pacing rapidly to and fro through the apartment.

    I had taken but few turns in this manner, when a gentle rap at my door arrested my attention and Usher entered, bearing a lamp. His countenance was, as usual, cadaverously wan—but, moreover, there was a species of mad hilarity in his eyes—and evidently restrained hysteria in his whole demeanor. His air appalled me—but anything was preferable to the solitude which I had so long endured, and I welcomed his presence as a relief.

    "And you have not seen it?" he said abruptly, after having stared about him for some moments in silence—"You have not then seen it?—but stay! you shall." Thus speaking, and having carefully shaded his lamp, he hurried to one of the casements, and threw it open to the storm.

    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. An exceeding density of clouds hung so low as to press upon the turrets of the house. 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 vapor, 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.

    "You must not behold this!" said I to Usher, as I led him from the window to a seat. "These appearances, which bewilder you, are merely electrical phenomena not uncommon—or it may be that they have their ghastly origin in the rank miasma of the tarn. Let us close this casement—the air is chilling. Here is one of your favorite romances. I will read and you shall listen;—and so we will pass away this terrible night together."

    The antique volume which I had taken up was the "Mad Trist" of Sir Launcelot Canning. It was the only book immediately at hand.

    I had arrived at that well-known portion of the story where Ethelred, the hero of the Trist, having sought in vain for peaceable admission into the dwelling of the hermit, proceeds to make good an entrance by force. The words of the narrative run thus:

    "Ethelred, feeling the rain upon his shoulders, and fearing the rising of the tempest, uplifted his mace, and, with blows, made quickly room in the plankings of the door for his gauntleted hand; and now pulling therewith sturdily, he so cracked, and ripped, and tore all asunder, that the noise of the dry and hollow-sounding wood reverberated throughout the forest."

    [CRACKING NOISE]

    At the termination of this sentence I started, and for a moment paused. Although I at once concluded that my excited fancy had deceived me, it appeared to me that, from some very remote portion of the mansion, there came, indistinctly, the stifled and dull echo of the very cracking and ripping sound which Sir Launcelot had so particularly described.

    It was, beyond doubt, the coincidence alone which had arrested my attention; for, amid the ordinary noises of the still increasing storm, the sound itself, had nothing, surely, which should have interested or disturbed me. I continued the story:

    "But the good champion Ethelred, now entering within the door, was sore enraged and amazed to perceive a dragon of a scaly and prodigious demeanor, and of a fiery tongue, which guraded a palace of gold, with a floor of silver. And upon the wall there hung a shield of shining brass with this legend enwritten, ‘Who entereth herein, a conqueror hath bin/ Who slayeth the dragon, the shield he shall win.’

    And Ethelred uplifted his mace, and struck upon the head of the dragon, which fell before him with a shriek so horrid, harsh, and piercing, that the like whereof was never before heard."

    Here again I paused abruptly, and now with a feeling of wild amazement—for there could be no doubt whatever that, in this instance, I did actually hear a low and apparently distant, but harsh, protracted, and most unusual screaming or grating sound—the exact counterpart of what my fancy had already conjured up for the dragon's unnatural shriek.

    [SAME SHRIEKING HINGES]

    I still retained sufficient presence of mind to avoid exciting the sensitive nervousness of my companion. I was by no means certain that he had noticed the sounds in question; although a strange alteration had, during the last few minutes, taken place in his demeanour.

    He had gradually brought round his chair so as to sit with his face to the door of the chamber; and thus I could but partially perceive his features, although I saw that his lips trembled as if he were murmuring inaudibly. His head had dropped upon his breast—yet I knew that he was not asleep, from the wide and rigid opening of the eye as I caught a glance of it in profile. The motion of his body, too, was at variance with this idea—for he rocked from side to side with a gentle yet constant and uniform sway.

    Having rapidly taken notice of all this, I resumed the narrative of Sir Launcelot:

    "And now the champion, having escaped from the terrible fury of the dragon, approached valorously to where the shield was upon the wall; which fell down at his feet upon the silver floor, with a great and terrible ringing sound."

    No sooner had these syllables passed my lips, than—as if a shield of brass had indeed, at the moment, fallen heavily upon a floor of silver—I became aware of a distinct, hollow, metallic and clangorous, yet apparently muffled reverberation.

    [REVERBERATION]

    Completely unnerved, I leaped to my feet; but the measured rocking movement of Usher was undisturbed. I rushed to the chair in which he sat. His eyes were bent fixedly before him, and throughout his whole countenance there reigned a stony rigidity. But, as I placed my hand upon his shoulder, there came a strong shudder over his whole person; a sickly smile quivered about his lips; and I saw that he spoke in a low, hurried, and gibbering murmur, as if unconscious of my presence. Bending closely over him, I at length drank in the hideous import of his words.

    "Not hear it?—yes, I hear it, and have heard it. Long—long—long—many minutes, many hours, many days, have I heard it!

    We have put her living in the tomb! Said I not that my senses were acute? I now tell you that I heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin. I heard them—many, many days ago—yet I dared not—I dared not speak!

    And now—tonight—Ethelred—ha! ha!—the breaking of the hermit's door, and the death-cry of the dragon, and the clangor of the shield!—say, rather, the rending of her coffin, and the grating of the iron hinges of her prison, and her struggles within the coppered archway of the vault!

    Is she not hurrying to upbraid me for my haste? Have I not heard her footstep on the stair? Do I not distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of her heart?

    Madman!"—here he sprang furiously to his feet, and shrieked out his syllables, as if in the effort he were giving up his soul—"Madman! I tell you that she now stands without the door!"

    As if in the energy of his utterance there had a spell, the huge antique doors threw slowly back in the rushing gust. 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.

    From that chamber, and from that mansion, I fled aghast. The storm was still abroad in all its wrath as I found myself crossing the old causeway. Suddenly there shot along the path a wild light, and I turned to see whence a gleam so unusual could have issued; for the vast house and its shadows were alone behind me.

    The radiance was that of the full and blood-red moon, which now shone vividly through that once barely discernible fissure that zigzagged from the roof of the building to the base. While I gazed, this fissure rapidly widened. My brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder. There was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters—and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the "House of Usher."

    [MUSIC]

    Steph: Hi! I’m Steph, and this is Paranormal Pajama Party, the podcast that brings you classic ghost stories and legends featuring female phantoms and femme fatales. Together, we’ll brush the cobwebs off these terrifying tales to shed some light on their origins and learn what they can tell us about the deep-rooted fears society projects onto women.

    I’d like to extend a special welcome to tonight’s pyjama party guest of honour, the not-actually-dead-and-then-definitely-very-dead Madeline Usher. Madeline, would you like to say a few words to kick us off?

    [Silence]

    Steph: Sorry, I didn’t mean to spring this on you! I don’t normally open episodes this way, Madeline.

    It’s just that… Well, you didn’t actually get to say anything in the super-famous story about you, or be anything except gothic set dressing, really. And your brother’s friend even used your death as a mechanism for telling Roderick’s story. I wanted to give you this opportunity to tell us a little about yourself. You know, get to know the woman behind the shroud.

    [A pause, then crickets]

    Steph: OK, yeah, no worries. We’re not all talkers, that’s fine.

    So, what I think we know about you, Madeline – and please, feel free to interrupt because, again, I’d love to hear your side of things – is that in this story, The Fall of the House of Usher, you are a reflection. I mean… everything in the story is, right? The house is reflected in the lake at its base, it cracks right down the middle so it’s very symmetrical. And, as the narrator discovers during your untimely entombing, you and Roderick are twins. So you’re literally his double, but you’re also figuratively his reflection, but I’d like to talk about that more later.

    We also know that you are a beautiful dead woman. Well. Poe doesn’t describe you, but we can assume you’re beautiful because you look like Roderick and Roderick is an ethereal Romantic-era Edward Scissorhands, minus the scissor-hands. And we know you’re dead because you managed to die twice in one story, although the first time is just a really awful misunderstanding.

    All this makes total sense because if there’s one thing Edgar Allan Poe loved, it was a beautiful dead woman. Women like you, Madeline, crop up in all his stories. And to explain why that is, we need to talk about the beautiful dead women in Poe’s life.

    I almost regret researching this episode, because I had this mental image of Poe as an adorably sadsack, morose, timid little goth. Also, in my head, his voice sounded like this: “Hi, I’m Edgar Allan Poe.” I can’t explain it, it’s just how it was in my brain.

    Nope. Turns out in real life, Poe was painfully self-conscious and somehow also obnoxiously critical of others, very insecure about what it meant to be a man, unable to function without female attention and completely impossible to work with or for. I don’t think the alcoholism helped, but he was incredibly dramatic, selfish, and thin-skinned. Oh, and it very much seems like he was a pedophile, or, at best, a groomer.

    So long, cute little cartoon Poe in my brain! And good riddance.

    Poe was born in 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts. He was the second child of three born to two actors – Eliza and David Poe.

    David and Eliza were an odd couple. She was a child star who grew up to become a very talented actress. David was her second husband – her first left her a widow at just 18. The Poes met when David, a law student at the time, saw her travelling theatre troupe perform and decided on the spot that he, too, was meant for the stage. So he announced to his parents that he was giving up their ambition of him becoming a lawyer and running away to join the troupe.

    Honestly, I have no idea what Eliza saw in him. When he abandoned his career plans to become an actor, he neglected to take into account his terrible stage fright. Reviews would often make special mention of Eliza’s talent and beauty. It sounds like she was everything, and David was… just Ken.

    But instead of discovering that just being David could be Ken-ough, he became a bad-tempered alcoholic. David ran out on his young family in 1810, when Edgar was still a baby and Eliza was pregnant with their third child. He drops out of history from there, although it seems like he may have died in England only a year later.

    Meanwhile, the acting troupe had travelled to Richmond, Virginia, where Eliza was busy also dying. The single, 24-year-old mother of three small children developed tuberculosis. She tried to continue supporting her family with her craft but her condition quickly devolved, leaving her unable to perform.

    The people of Richmond were extremely sympathetic to the Poes’ plight. Several local families stepped up to help care for the children, and theatre-goers took up at least one collection to help Eliza make ends meet until she met her end.

    And now, a quick word about tuberculosis. The thing about TB, then called consumption, is that… I’m not sure how to phrase this… If you’re gonna be slowly murdered by an infection that causes your lung tissue to necrotise and is accompanied by relentless diarrhoea, you want it to be TB because, girl, you’ll look so hot.

    Part of that will be the constant, low-grade fever. But more than that – while the disease was sweeping the globe, it was also making a mark on contemporary beauty standards. 

    All four of Charlotte Brontë’s sisters died from it and she still called it “a flattering malady”. Tuberculosis sufferers are ghostly pale and thin, with bright eyes. And that fever I mentioned makes their cheeks rosy and their lips red just like Madeline Usher when she’s presumed dead and entombed.

    I watched a fascinating video about this by a YouTuber and fashion historian named Nicole Rudolph that I’ll link in the show notes. It debunks some of the myths that tuberculosis was the only reason certain fashion trends arose, and that fashion itself was to blame for as many people contracting the disease.

    I think there’s a long and problematic history of society placing value on pale skin and thin bodies, not to mention red lips and cheeks, and pretty eyes, so I’m not going to claim that TB was entirely to blame for some of what was trendy at the time.

    It says something about our beauty standards that we look at emaciated people dying of a horrible consumptive disease and go, “Damn, girl. I wanna make art about you.”

    And cultural images and messages obviously shape our thinking. So again, even though I don’t think that healthy women powdered their skin to look paler, rouged their cheeks, and wore dresses that emphasised their collarbones just because of the way tuberculosis was glamorised, I think it probably was a factor.

    TB was also associated with creative genius. This was in part because artists tended to catch it – both bacteria and bohemians tend to thrive in conditions associated with poverty, and possibly because blood poisoning can change your vision and behaviour. 

    It’s been so romanticised that even now, today, in 2024, having JUST READ about necrotic tissue and blood poisoning and, again, relentless diarrhoea, a very unwell part of me is like, “...Pale, thin and dramatic, you say? Maybe I could just have a little TB. Like… recreationally.”

    The point of all of this is that death by tuberculosis was long, drawn-out, surprisingly beautiful, and very glamorous. And if you are toddler-aged Edgar Poe watching your famously beautiful mom die of it, it’s gonna do something to your brain. And boy howdy, it did.

    After Eliza’s death, the Poe children were split up. The oldest son went to David’s family in Baltimore, Maryland, while Edgar and his little sister were taken in by two different Richmond families. Edgar was raised by a wealthy merchant, John Allan, and his wife, Frances.

    Frances Allan was a socialite, and she’d seen Eliza Poe perform onstage and had taken an interest in her situation. After the couple took Edgar in, she encouraged his interest in poetry and developing his artistic talent. John, on the other hand, was much less supportive.

    This was Virginia in 1812, so you won’t be surprised to learn that part of John Allan’s wealth came from selling dry goods, wheat, and ENSLAVED PEOPLE. But he was problematic in more than that one major way. While he and Frances never had any children, he was absolutely fooling around on the side and had some kids from extramarital affairs.

    And at home, he and Edgar had a really difficult relationship. Little Ed was put in boarding schools for a big chunk of his childhood, and when he was with the Allans, John would flip-flop between spoiling and punishing him, which must have made him feel really insecure. Worse, even though the Allans raised him from age three, John never formally adopted him.

    So I can see why, when Poe left for college, he fell into gambling and drinking in a big way and started accruing debts. Poe said John Allan hadn’t given him enough money to register for classes and buy textbooks, but when Allan sent more money, Poe’s gambling debts only increased… almost like he wasn’t using the money for classes and textbooks. This pissed Allan off, and they became estranged. Poe had also been engaged to a girl before he entered college, but in the midst of all this drama, he also cut contact with her.

    Poe dropped out after a year, discovered that his former fiancee had gone and married another man, and tried to make it on his own in Boston for a while. Broke, he soon gave up and joined the Army, lying about his name and his age to get in.

    Two years into his five-year enlistment, he decided he wanted out. But even though he came clean to his commanding officer, the other man would only let him out if he made up with John Allan. Poe wrote to Allan, who ignored him. He also didn’t bother to tell Edgar that his foster mother, Frances, was fatally ill. She died the day before Poe finally visited the family.

    For those of you keeping score at home, that’s two tragic losses of important women in Poe’s life so far. And we’re not done!

    John Allan eventually relented and helped Poe leave the army. Oddly, Poe wanted to leave his position as a non-commissioned officer in the Army so that he could… go to West Point and become an officer in the Army. I think some of it is tied up in Poe’s idea of masculinity, but I WOULD think that, right?

    He had a lot of big feelings about what it meant to be a man. This is partially due to his unstable relationship with his foster father; and partially due to being raised in Virginia, where the cultural norms about what it is to be a Southern gentleman are strong; and partially due to his uncomfortable social position. He was an outsider in his own family – a destitute foster child raised by people with immense wealth but never actually formally accepted as their own.

    On top of that, he was a sensitive, artsy poet trying to act manly enough to be accepted by his shitty foster father. It would’ve been confusing, and impossible to navigate, and it probably would’ve made me drink too much and gamble, too.

    So maybe his plan was to enter an esteemed, masculine institution like West Point, complete his education there, and then graduate as a higher-ranking, refined commissioned officer. That would have gone pretty far towards satisfying some of those difficult demands, even if they were mostly in his head.

    Gender norms, people – they suck for everyone. But we’re about to get to the part where Poe loses all my empathy.

    Before heading to West Point, he swung by Baltimore to visit his brother, Henry, and his father’s side of the family. We’ll get back to this visit in a moment, but first, let’s close out John Allan’s role in this story

    Shortly after Poe started at West Point, John Allan got remarried to a woman named Louisa who did not like Poe. The two men were also having massive fights over those extramarital affair kids and John’s will. Poe was really counting on an inheritance, which he felt extremely, and kind of obnoxiously, entitled to. This attitude did not work out in his favour, and John finally cut him off completely.

    And in true Edgar Allan Poe style, once he was in West Point, he immediately decided he wanted out. He accomplished this by purposely getting himself court-martialed by not attending classes, training, or church. It worked, and he was dismissed from West Point and headed to New York to try to make it as a full-time writer.

    But back in Baltimore, his brother was on his deathbed. You’ll never guess what killed him. That’s right, it was tuberculosis, made worse by his ongoing alcohol abuse. Poe returned in time to visit his dying brother in the houe where he lived with their bedridden grandmother; their aunt, Maria Clemm; and Maria’s young children, Henry and Virginia.

    Poor Virginia was basically a VC Andrews character in real life. She was named after her older sister who died at the age of two just 10 days before she was born, which isn’t uncomfortable at all. 

    Her father died just four years after the first Virginia’s death and the second Virginia’s birth, leaving Maria, her surviving children, and her paralysed mother – Poe’s grandmother – completely destitute. Maria supported the family by doing piecework, taking in boarders, and relying on a pension granted to Poe’s grandma.

    Poe first met Virginia during that visit between his Army days and his brief West Point stint. She was seven, and he was 20. By 1833, when he was 24 and she was a much more mature 11, he moved into the Clemms’ home. This will become horrifyingly relevant in a moment.

    Always a bit of a playboy, he quickly developed the hots for a neighbour lady, and the two of them would get little Virginia to pass notes back and forth between their houses. And after this adorable and appropriate interaction, he launched his successful new career as a talented author and poet, found his own place, and the two cousins never saw each other again except at wholesome family functions.

    Nope, this is a horror podcast about women in history, you guys. That’s not what happened at all.

    Poe did move out after a couple of years to go back to Richmond for a job at a magazine. He’d had a couple of stories published that brought him a little bit of attention but not much money, and he tried to turn that into a full-time job. But he was also drunk all. the. time. Within weeks of taking the magazine job, he was fired for being drunk at work.

    “No worries,” said the 26-year-old Edgar Allan Poe. “I was already planning to go back to Baltimore and marry my 13-year-old cousin.”

    I hate this part. I hate it so much.

    Another cousin, Neilson Poe, learned about Edgar’s plan to marry little Virginia. Horrified, he offered to take her in, educate her, and keep her from being married so young. Neilson owned a newspaper in Baltimore, and he probably would’ve been a good contact for Edgar to have. Instead, Edgar called him his bitterest enemy, took his attempt to help Virginia completely personally, and wrote an incredibly dramatic letter to Maria begging her to let Virginia make her own decision.

    There’s a lot of controversy about the nature of Edgar and Virginia’s relationship among scholars today. But even if Maria did let Virginia choose, we know that he’d had access to her and had been developing a relationship with her since she was seven years old. Even if she chose Edgar of her own free will, how much of that was really her own free will, and how much of that was the result of years of grooming, even if it was inadvertent?

    But I’m also not convinced that it was Virginia’s choice alone, even if she thought it was. By this point, Poe’s grandmother (who was, remember, also Virginia’s grandmother) had died and the family was no longer receiving a pension. Virginia’s teenage brother had also died, and Maria and Virginia were worse off than ever before.

    Poe’s new job in Richmond probably convinced Maria to go along with the marriage because it might bring them both a little more stability and financial security. Not much more stability or security, because Poe was a drunk wannabe lothario who couldn’t hold down a job or stick to one course of action to save his life. But a) I don’t think Maria knew all of that yet, and b) it might speak to how precarious their social situation was without a man in their lives.

    So at any rate Poe filed for a marriage licence and managed to talk the magazine editor into giving him his job back. He, Virginia and Maria returned to Richmond, and the couple were publicly married there in May of 1836. A witness lied about the bride’s age and said she was 21. I say they publicly married because there’s a lot of speculation that they were secretly married the previous September. She’d only turned 13 in August. Poe was now 27.

    We don’t know if they ever consummated their marriage, or if their relationship was more like siblings for a while. His friends at the time suggested that they began sharing a bed when she was 16, though, and their love letters to each other are… well, they’re not what I would write to my brother or cousin.

    They do really seem like they loved each other if you can get past the ickiness of the entire thing. Virginia idolised him, and he was enchanted by her beauty. She was very pale with dark hair and big, dark eyes – basically, she looked like a Tim Burton heroine. Other people commented on her looks, and most people noted her childlike appearance. Probably because she was a child.

    Personally, I think she also looked a lot like his mother. Unfortunately, this resemblance became even stronger when she developed tuberculosis at the age of 19.

    They first discovered it while she was singing and playing the piano, and started bleeding from her mouth. She would occasionally seem to get better, but then her health would sharply decline again. It became clear that she was going to die very soon. Poe started drinking even more.

    In the meantime, Poe was still trying to make it work as a writer and editor, hopping between publishing jobs and moving his family around each time he switched, or whenever they thought a change of climate might help Virginia recover.

    He wrote a novel that flopped and released some horror stories, including The Fall of the House of Usher, that also didn’t do very well. He briefly tried to join John Tyler’s presidential administration but got drunk and missed the interview. Then he decided he wanted to start a journal of his own, which never came into being. He got in a bunch of very public fights, he drove a newspaper that he briefly owned into the ground, and he accused Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of plagiarism.

    In 1845, though, he finally had a hit. He published “The Raven” and… well, pardon the pun, but it took wing. It finally made him a recognised name, although unfortunately, it also only made him $9. (I just looked that up, though, and $9 US in 1845 has the purchasing power of more than $370 US today, which is more than $550 here in Australia, so now I kind of want to die.)

    To be fair to Poe, he was also a fairly well-respected, if mean critic. And I will give him credit for this: He critiqued both female and male writers at a time when women were mostly only getting published if they wrote under male pen names.

    I do legitimately think this was about critiquing the value of work for the work’s sake, but it also, conveniently, introduced him to some very clever and talented literary ladies and he was always falling mildly in love with them.

    I sort of find literary scandals boring, so I’m going to skip over a lot of the details here, but he had a number of close relationships with poets that got tongues a-wagging, and one blew up in such a high-profile way that on her deathbed, Virginia Poe accused one of the gossips involved of being her murderer.

    She seems to have been pretty comfortable with Poe’s relationships with other women and even encouraged his friendship with the poet Frances Sargent Osgood because it seemed to get him to drink a little less.

    Virginia Poe finally died, still completely in love with her talented mess of a husband, on January 30, 1847. She was only 25, a year older than Poe’s mother when she died of the same disease. The only confirmed picture of her that still exists today was painted using her corpse as the model. She was buried in a vault in the Bronx, where they were living at the time.

    I’m telling you all this so that I can try to explain why Madeline Usher and her sorority of ethereally beautiful dead women keep popping up in the works of Poe. Dead, beautiful women show up in seven of his poems and 11 of his short stories.

    Quoting Poe himself, scholar Karen Weekes wrote, “Scenic images in Poe's work fall more into the realm of the sublime than the beautiful, so instead, the inspiration for the experience of Beauty in all its melancholy extremity is ‘the death . . . of a beautiful woman’ and, appropriately, ‘equally it is beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover’.” Weekes wrote, “The woman must die in order to enlarge the experience of the narrator, her viewer.”


    Poe’s female characters tend to become their most beautiful, in fact, in the moment of their deaths. Only by dying can they, to him, achieve their physical peak. But that’s also the horror, right? Because we know, and he definitely doesn’t shy away from telling us, that even as they’ve reached this pinnacle of beauty, they’re beginning to decay into something unspeakable.


    That’s the monstrous feminine, baby. Everyone and everything is going to decompose someday, but only women are subject to these impossible and fatal beauty standards, and that means only women can bring that level of horror just by succumbing to the natural process of death. So cool for us!


    The other tragedy of a beautiful dead woman is that she has to die young so that she’s still, you know, hot. We talked about this a little in the Rusalka episode last season: The death of a young person is especially tragic because it often feels like the death of hope – an entire promising future has been extinguished.


    When it happens to Poe’s female characters, who are almost always as one-dimensional and symbolic as Madeline Usher (although sometimes they actually get to speak!), they represent the death of hope for the male characters. They only exist to make things sadder for the boys, amping up the atmosphere of the rest of the story. Their deaths aren’t about them at all.


    The Fall of the House of Usher was published three years before Virginia even showed signs of tuberculosis. Most critics believe that Poe’s obsession with beautiful dead women stems from seeing his mother die during such a formative time, but he’d also lost his brother to TB, and his foster mother, Frances, to sickness.


    Virginia’s long illness would’ve intensified things, too. She was sick for a long time and he published some of his most famous works during those years, including The Raven, in which the main character is thinking about the loss of a rare and radiant maiden.


    And her death – the latest in a long, long line of tragic losses – broke Edgar Allan Poe. He was never, ever the same. Already unstable, he started to become even more unpredictable, began to experience hallucinations and ill health, and drank even more heavily.

    He tried to court a couple of women, including his first fiancee whose husband had since died. His attempted engagement to the first woman ended before it began when her mother put a stop to it. I assume she was like, “Sweetheart, do you know what a red flag looks like? Now imagine there were one thousand red flags all bundled up in a person's shape. Oh wow, that looks just like your boyfriend!”

    Unbelievably, however, his original fiancee agreed to marry him for a second time. He promptly left her behind in Richmond to explore a job opportunity in Baltimore.

    One early October day, he reappeared in Baltimore after dropping off the map for about a week. He was in great distress, unwashed and out of it, and more bizarrely, he was wearing what appeared to be someone else’s dirty, stained clothes. He was taken to the hospital’s equivalent of a drunk tank where he died four days later.

    The weird thing is that we don’t know why he died. A literary rival made a nasty attempt to discredit him immediately after his death, and a few of the witnesses to his final days had their own agendas – the attending doctor’s story kept changing, and the acquaintance who’d sent him to the hospital was a temperance snob who assured everyone it was the alcohol that had killed Poe. But it’s also possible that Poe’s alcoholism has been exaggerated over time, and that wasn’t what was going on.

    Scholars have mostly ruled out suicide, although he was certainly incredibly depressed. Forensics has ruled out lead or mercury poisoning. There’s been speculation that he was a victim of “cooping”, which is when people working for a political party would kidnap voters and beat them up or get them drunk or drug them to make them vote for their candidate. It could have been cholera since it was going around and Poe himself wrote to Maria that he might have contracted it. The latest popular theory is that it was rabies since it can be dormant for a year before you show symptoms, and those symptoms align with some of his behaviours in his final hours. Rabies! Insane.

    Anyway, he was buried in Baltimore after a three-minute ceremony that hardly anyone attended. His cousin and former mortal enemy Neilson Poe paid for a big marble headstone that was destroyed in a train crash before it even got to the graveyard. Instead, he just received a little stone block that read “Number 80”.

    But interest in Poe’s work grew after his death, and 24 years later, a schoolteacher named Sara Sigourney Rice organised fundraisers that brought in money from fans across the country to pay for a better monument and a better plot for the poor guy.

    And how’s this for a perfect Poe moment featuring a beautiful dead woman? In 1875, the cemetery where Virginia Poe was buried was destroyed. Because there were no family members left to claim her remains, she was almost entirely forgotten.

    But as the story goes, a Poe biographer named William Gill was visiting the cemetery at exactly the moment that the sexton had her unclaimed bones in his shovel, ready to throw them away. He gathered them into a box and then stored the box under his bed until he and Neilson arranged for them to be buried next to her husband in his new plot. She was finally laid to rest next to Edgar in 1885.

    [MUSIC]

    Steph: It’s time for lights out at the Paranormal Pajama Party. This has been the longest episode so far, and I didn’t even get to the thing I really wanted to talk about, which makes this – you guessed it – another two-parter. I’ll be back next week to talk more about the role of Madeline Usher and other women of horror as nothing more than a reflection of men. Whee.

    Ironically, I was complaining to my husband before writing this episode that I didn’t have anything to say about Madeline because Madeline doesn’t have anything to say about herself. I’ll be gosh-darned if I didn’t underestimate my own ability to get really pissed about the historical treatment of women.

    [Sigh]

    Steph: To learn more about Virginia Poe and the other women in this story, and why you should definitely do your best not to contract tuberculosis, no matter how good you think you could look, check out my sources in the show notes.

    Follow @ParanormalPJParty on Instagram to see visuals from today’s episode.

    I’ll be back next week with more spine-tingling tales and critical discussion. In the meantime, don’t forget: Ghosts have stories. Women have voices. Dare to listen.

Poe’s tragic losses

Edgar Allan Poe was born in 1809 to actors Eliza and David Poe. His father abandoned the family when Poe was just two years old, and his mother succumbed to tuberculosis a year later. These early experiences of abandonment and loss left an indelible mark on Poe’s psyche.

He was split up from his siblings and taken in by John Allan, a wealthy merchant, and his wife, Frances, in Richmond, Virginia. Although Frances nurtured Poe’s artistic talents, his relationship with John was strained and turbulent.

Poe’s foster mother, Frances, also died at a young age, further cementing his association of beauty with untimely death. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t be the last time he lost a beloved woman to illness and death.

His life was marked by continuous personal and financial struggles, exacerbated by his alcoholism and erratic behaviour.

When he was 27, he married his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia, a move that was very not OK even by the standards of the time (yeah, this episode is going to make you feel weird about Edgar). Unfortunately, Virginia, too, developed tuberculosis and died after a long struggle with it when she was only 24. Her illness and death, along with his mother’s from the same disease, profoundly affected Poe.

The allure and horror of tuberculosis

Tuberculosis, or consumption as it was then known, had a peculiar cultural impact in Poe’s time. The disease often left its victims emaciated, with pale skin, rosy cheeks, and bright eyes—a look that aligned with the beauty standards of the time and sparked artistic inspiration.

A “flattering malady,” as Charlotte Brontë once called it, that enhanced its victim’s appearance as it killed them slowly, it was a highly romanticised disease. Poe’s frequent depiction of beautiful dead women, who only become more beautiful as they approach the end, can be partly attributed to this macabre glamorisation of tuberculosis victims.

beautiful dead woman in Poe’s works

Poe’s short story, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, was published in 1839.

⚠️ Spoilers ahead for a 185-year-old story ⚠️: Madeline Usher is accidentally entombed alive by her unstable twin brother Roderick, only to return from the grave with a vengeance.

Madeline is a reflection of Roderick—literally, as his twin, and symbolically, but we’ll talk more about that next week in Part 2 of this series. She’s also yet another beautiful dead woman, and in fact, her symptoms line up with some of the classic symptoms of tuberculosis.

Poe’s fixation on beautiful dead women also appears in his poem “The Raven,” where the narrator mourns the loss of his beloved Lenore, a “rare and radiant maiden.” In total, Poe included a beautiful dead woman in seven of his poems and 11 of his short stories.

The monstrous-feminine and society’s fears

Poe’s beautiful dead women tap into the concept of the monstrous feminine (you knew I was going to say that, didn’t you?), embodying society’s subconscious fears about female beauty, sexuality, and close associations with life and death. To Poe and his male characters, these women represent the peak of beauty, as well as the horror of decay and death.

In many of his works, the death of a beautiful woman also symbolises the loss of hope and the inevitable decline into madness and despair for the male protagonists. These women exist primarily to enhance the tragic atmosphere and emotional depth of the stories, rather than as fully fleshed-out characters in their own right – something we’ll explore more in next week’s episode.

Poe’s fascination with beautiful dead women is a reflection of his own life experiences and the broader societal attitudes towards beauty, illness, and death. Although the ladies of Poe’s stories are never allowed to say much, they invite us to confront our deepest fears about the inevitable decay that awaits us all.

Stephanie Summar
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