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.
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.
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.
Upon my entrance, Usher rose from a sofa on which he had been lying at full length, 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.
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.
In this unnerved, in this pitiable, condition 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.”
He admitted, however, 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 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.
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, through which trickled many passionate tears.
The disease of the lady Madeline had long baffled the skill of her physicians.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We partially turned aside the yet unscrewed lid of the coffin, and looked upon the face of the tenant.
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.
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.
And now, some days of bitter grief having elapsed, an observable change came over the features of the mental disorder of my friend.
The pallor of his countenance had assumed, if possible, a more ghastly hue.
On the seventh or eighth day after the placing of the lady Madeline within the tomb, a light step on an adjoining staircase arrested my attention.
I presently recognized it as that of Usher.
“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 freely open to the storm.
“You must not—you shall not behold this!” said I, shuddering, to Usher, as I led him, with a gentle violence, from the window to a seat.
"Here is one of your favorite romances. I will read, and you shall listen:—and so we will pass away this terrible night together.”
I became aware of a distinct, hollow, metallic, and clangorous, yet apparently muffled, reverberation.
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.
“Not hear it?—yes, I hear it, and have heard it. Long—long—long—many minutes, many hours, many days, have I heard it—yet I dared not—oh, pity me, miserable wretch that I am!—I dared not—I dared not speak!
We have put her living in the tomb!"
"Oh! whither shall I fly? Will she not be here anon? 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?"
Here he sprang furiously to his feet, and shrieked out his syllables, as if in the effort he were giving up his soul:
I tell you that she now stands without the door!
Then without those doors there did stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the lady Madeline of Usher.
For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon the threshold—
then, with a low moaning cry, fell heavily toward the person of her brother.
He seemed almost suffocated with terror when she put her pale hand upon his knee, and I too, stood frozen, like one transfixed by the uncoiling of the envenomed viper.
I saw that despite the wasting fatigue which lent her movements such an unsettling irregularity, there was an expression upon her face that I could not entirely reconcile with her brother's torments.
At first, I felt convinced that no maddened thing, having crawled forth from that ancient vault, could rightly harbor the expression that I fancied I saw in her eyes. What I saw must be some false hope, some perverse trick played by the dim light.
Yet all my doubtful observations, tainted as they were by Usher's hysteria, found a measured and tender relief, when the lady spoke.
"Dear brother," she said in a faltering tone, "be not so frightened; it is only me, your Madeline."
Even as she addressed him, I watched Usher return a little to himself; his posture grew easier, and he looked at his sister with better recognition.
When she began to slide to the ground in her weakness, he caught her slender form in his arms and held her close.
I could not hear what he then uttered to her, so softly did he speak, but from what small portion of his tone that I could discern, his every word seemed to convey the fondest gratitude and the most loving apology.
As soon as the lady Madeline had recovered enough to made her wishes known, she petitioned her brother to leave the house.
Usher was at first completely opposed to the suggestion.
He recalled to her the storm raging outside, his numerous frailties, his horror of noise, of light, and the strength with which the house had taken possession of his character; he could not escape the conviction that, should he attempt to go away from the premises, some dreadful cataclysm would wreck an indescribable violence upon us all.
While he spoke, a nauseating tremor rippled suddenly through the floor, lending a manifest credence to his fears. I saw his face whiten, and Madeline's eyes darted over the walls, as though, having only left one prison moments ago, she now found herself thrust into another.
"Sir," said she to me, "stay with my brother if you will, but there is a pestilence about this place that I have neither the strength, nor the patience, to endure any longer." Usher entreated her to stay-- nearly threatened to terminate his own existence if she abandoned him-- and she countered by asking him to leave, and cited her own premature burial as proof that his foundering judgement required a change in atmosphere. I watched the siblings quarrel with some astonishment, not daring to take a side myself.
In the midst of their argument, the house gave another lurch. This movement heaved the room with such force, that Usher's lamp was dashed to the floor. As I sped to smother the flames and oil with a bundle of bed clothes, a third shock hurled the three of us, and some of the lighter furniture, almost to the opposite side of the room. Appearing to be scarcely sensible of the heat, Madeline urged me to follow, implored me to assist her, and commenced to drag Usher bodily over the smoldering bed clothes, across the floor, over the very threshold.
There was a chair and a small dressing table thrown in my path, but I scrambled to pursue Usher and his sister, particularly due to the fact that the house had begun to sway and creak with all the violence of ship about to be wrecked at sea. I found the lady Madeline struggling to induce her brother to descend the stairs, while she held the rail to support herself against the rocking of the floor. For his part, Usher had attached himself to a baluster; he continued to insist that it would be a physical impossibility for him to exit the house alive. I saw that he had fallen into such a state of desperate panic, that he seemed entirely to disregard the dangers presented by the house's churning architecture.
Although I would have respected my friend's inclinations under almost any other circumstances, I could not but feel that his fears began to make him a danger to himself. My own desire was now to run from the building as soon as I could find opportunity. I had already heard the footfalls of the few remaining servants rush outside towards safety. There was a crumbling noise that troubled in my ears with an incessant grating. When Madeline saw me, she again asked me to help save her brother, and this time, I pried Usher from his baluster. He attempted to strike me for this liberty, but being ill practiced with his fists, and partially prevented by the lady Madeline, I cannot say that his blow did me much harm.
We then carried Usher out of the house. He went raving, then sobbing, then half-fainting, but for all his anguish, out of the house he went, and not for a single moment did his sister cease to offer him some gentle comfort or assurance.
The storm was still abroad in all its wrath as we found ourselves 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 us.
The radiance was that of the full, setting, and blood-red moon which now shone vividly through that once barely-discernible fissure of which I have before spoken as extending from the roof of the building. Seeing my attention directed toward the house, Usher and the lady Madeline also turned to see the illuminated fissure.
While we gazed, this fissure rapidly widened—there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind—we 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 our feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the “House of Usher.”
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The End
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Notes: Thanks so much for reading this photostory!
The first part of these notes will concern itself mainly with Edgar Allan Poe's story, while the second part will touch on the ball-jointed doll related side of this photoshoot.
But first things first: for those of you who might be scratching your heads, wondering how I dared to write a Poe fanfiction and change his perfect ending to The Fall of the House of Usher-- I did make a special picture of the canonical end, with Roderick and Madeline lying together. Presumably, this would be the last that the narrator saw of them.
It makes me all depressed and stuff to see them like that.
I'll just pretend they are only napping on the floor.
1.
So, whatever one might say about Roderick Usher's rather extravagent flaws (his narcissism, his contagious solipsism, or even his incestuous, and quite possibly necrophiliac, tendencies)-- as a literary character, he remains rather sympathetic. Whenever I re-read Usher, Roderick seems to me like someone so buried in himself that he is practically entombed there, and, like his sister, he finds himself awake and self-aware while he is trapped in that morbid place.
Many sad things happen in The Fall of the House of Usher. What befalls all three central characters (or maybe all four, if we include the house) is tragic, but not inherently frightening. The fear in Usher comes from the interiority of Roderick Usher and the Narrator. There is always a lurking horror of one's own self, of losing control, and of losing one's mind. This is the frightening center of the tale: that sanity can be so frail, so uncertain, and that to encounter one's self in true, unmediated isolation is a mad and infectious experience.
In a conventional interpretation, Madeline Usher might be read as a reflection of Roderick; her sleeping sickness resembles a literalization of his compulsive introspection; both twins disappear into themselves. As a reflection, she then becomes a dark double (other and uncanny) when, despite Roderick's efforts to contain her body, she begins to rebel against his expectations.
It has also been suggested that The Fall of the House of Usher expresses a deep skepticism about the 19th century's notions of an ideal family. As the snarky cousin of the Sentimental, the Gothic thrives on sending up notions of perfect sympathy, protective patriarchs, moral religion, and conventional gender roles. The Gothic invites the reader to wallow in the abject and the forbidden, and do so by following certain social norms to a potential extreme.
In my alternate ending, I took most of my inspiration from another one of Poe's stories, The Premature Burial. This story features a Narrator who, like Madeline Usher, also suffers from a sleeping sickness. He is haunted by the fear that he will be buried alive, and so puts a great deal of energy into make his final resting place as easy to escape from as possible. Then, after being in a situation where he falsely thinks he has been buried alive, and wakes his neighbours with unnecessary screams, he realizes that he has been so afraid of being buried alive, that he has neglected to live a life worth living.
It then occurred to me, in the midst of working on this photostory, that rather than losing her mind and possibly seeking revenge on Roderick, perhaps the experience of finding herself trapped in the tomb gave Madeline clarity. Her strength and determination to leave the tomb, though apparently appalling in the story, actually seems very admirable to me. Roderick says that he and Madeline understand each other very well (probably too well). I suppose here, the horror is that she understands him so well, that she knows he can hear her in the tomb and is not helping her to leave. That is indeed an awful thought. Yet, in this fanfiction, at least, I would like to think that Madeline's clarity permits her to be more forgiving to a deluded, mentally ill brother. Instead of clinging to a diseased interiority, embodied by the decaying house, she wants to leave, and sees that they do so alive.
2.
With Halloween being very close, and someone's birthday quickly attacking thereafter, I've been revisiting Poe in my spare time. This reminded me that although I named two of my dolls after Roderick and Madeline Usher, not only had I neglected to mention their namesakes (ever, anywhere), I had also failed to make any worthy photostories featuring them.
Part of this problem is that Roderick, my Buddydoll Mars, is a floating head (so I can never have him in the same scene as Marlowe)-- and the other problem is that photostories with Huge casts are quite difficult to manage. I think that might be part of the reason why I have not made a decent photostory in such a long time.
Madeline, as I have probably mentioned before, is a Raurencio Adonis head on a Iplehouse EID body. Although she (the doll) is usually blonde, Madeline Usher (the character) is almost always represented as dark-haired, even though Poe does not actually mention her hair colour. I, too, prefer a raven-haired Madeline Usher, hence the dark wig. Her blue dress and white slip were made by the lovely
AyuAna, and her black waist cincher is from Dollheart. Roderick is wearing most of an outfit made by Popomini on DoA along time ago.
I made all of the textures myself, with one exception: a rust texture made by
Princess-of-Shadows on DeviantArt.
Thank-you again for looking at my photostory!
Edited: 13 Feb, 2013
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