Episode 22: “The Fall of the House of Usher” (Part 2)

The Cult of True Womanhood

*Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination*
Illustrated by Arthur Rackham, 1935

Let's talk about Edgar Allan Poe (again), one of the OGs of horror fiction. You know him, you love him, but have you ever noticed how his female characters are often... well, kinda flat? Like, literally dead-flat in many cases? There's a reason for that, and it's not just because Poe had a thing for beautiful corpses (though, as we discussed in episode 21, he totally did).

“The Cult of True Womanhood”: Ye olde tradwife movement

Picture this: It's 19th-century America. Poe's doing his thing, writing about ravens and tell-tale hearts. Meanwhile, middle- and upper-class white women are being encouraged to join the "Cult of True Womanhood." Sounds fun, right? Wrong.

Technically, no one called it a cult until the 1960s. It was more of a societal ideal, encouraging women to be pious, pure, submissive, and domestic. Basically, it was Tradwife 1.0. Women were supposed to stick to the private sphere while men dominated public life.

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 mentions of forced captivity, pregnancy, and incest. Please be advised.
Tonight’s episode is about a woman who is prematurely entombed, and even though her good-for-nothing brother totally knows it, he does nothing to help her for an entire week. If you ever find yourself prematurely entombed, please send me an email at paranormalpajama@gmail.com. I promise to come get you much more quickly than that. You can also email me about other stuff, too. I’d love to hear from you!
“Annabel Lee”, by Edgar Allan Poe, originally published in 1849.
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea:
But we loved with a love that was more than love—
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.
And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsman came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.
The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me—
Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.
But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we—
Of many far wiser than we—
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:
For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,
In the sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.
[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.
If you’re listening in real-time, thanks for your patience with this gap between episodes. I’m in the middle of a massive work project and literally the moment that we stopped production, I got sick. It was like I spent a week being the kitten in the hang in there poster and then my body was very abruptly like, “OK, we’re letting go now. Good luck. Bye!” So I’m sorry for both the big gap and the nasally voice, but I’m back in the saddle.
Last time, we barely escaped being smooshed by “The Fall of the House of Usher." You can go back and listen to my abridged version of the story – I cut out some poetry, mostly – but just to quickly recap, this short story by Edgar Allan Poe, released in 1839, is told from the perspective of an unnamed narrator who visits his childhood friend, Roderick Usher, at his family’s decaying mansion in an extremely bleak area.
Roderick and his twin sister, Madeline, are the last of the family line, and neither is doing so hot. Roderick is suffering from mental illness and is convinced that the house and its surroundings are playing a role in it. Madeline is deathly ill with some disease that has her doctors stumped, and Roderick is worried that once she dies, they might want to steal her body for science reasons.
Madeline kicks the bucket, and Roderick and the narrator entomb her in the family crypt below the house to foil any would-be grave robbers. But over the next week, Roderick goes even farther off the rails – listening for sounds that aren’t there, staring into space, and acting super nervous. His behaviour starts to make the narrator feel pretty crazy, too.
On the night of a massive storm that has them both on edge, the narrator tries to read Roderick a book to calm him down but keeps being interrupted by spooky noises elsewhere in the mansion.
It turns out those noises are being made by Madeline, who they entombed alive. Worse, Roderick kind of knew it the whole time but didn’t do anything. She bursts into the room and collapses on her brother, killing him instantly. The narrator flees the house as it splits apart and sinks into the pond at its base, symbolising the end of the Usher family line.
Madeline is the story’s only female character, and she’s a good example of Poe’s favourite trope – the beautiful dead woman. In last week’s episode, we talked about how his tragic personal circumstances – especially the deaths of important women in his life, including his mother, foster mother, and young wife, Virginia – shaped Poe's fascination with the aesthetics of death and the idealisation of young and beautiful women starting to… well, starting to rot. Messed up, Edgar.
Anyway, we’re lucky to have Madeline Usher here with us again tonight. Hey, Maddie.
[Silence]
[Crickets chirp]
Steph: Yeah, she still hasn’t said anything. It’s getting really awkward.
In her defence, she might not be able to say anything because she’s just a reflection. “The Fall of the House of Usher” is full of ‘em.
There are obvious reflections – the house splits into two halves when it eventually collapses, but before that, it’s reflected in the pond at its base. When the narrator first shows up, he tries to see if the fungus-covered manor looks any better if he looks at it upside-down in the water. No dice – it’s still upsetting as hell.
The most obvious reflection, of course, is the twins, Madeline and Roderick. Although they’re male and female, they apparently have very similar features, because the narrator realises they’re twins when he sees Madeline up close for the first time while they’re entombing her.
Poe’s intention in writing this story was to answer the question of what would happen to the mind if the body were to die. And if you’ve listened to any other episode of this podcast, you won’t be surprised to learn that in “The Fall of the House of Usher”, Roderick, the male twin, represents the mind, and Madeline, the female twin, represents the body.
It’s another case of men being associated with reason and higher-order thoughts, and women being associated with physicality and earthiness because of the whole baby-making thing. Lame.
The characters’ names are a clue about this symbolism – according to no less an authority than thebump.com, Madeline means tower and Roderick means both “ruler” and “glory”. The mind rules the body, and is, I suppose, glorious in its own gooey, grey matter way.
But as the story shows, the glorious mind starts to go a little – uh, what’s the phrase I want? – coo-coo banana-pants when it’s trapped inside a body that’s begun to physically decline. Neither can live without the other. Madeline, the body, and Roderick, the brain, came into this world together and they have to leave it together, too.
One of the ways I abridged the story last week was by cutting a poem that offers another clue about Roderick’s and Madeline’s mind-body connection. I’ll link it in the show notes. It’s called “The Haunted Palace” and it’s a song Roderick sings to the narrator while they’re trying to distract themselves from Madeline’s slow demise.
On the surface, it’s about a happy prince in a palace full of dancing courtiers. Then some outside enemy comes and the king’s family is destroyed, becoming phantoms haunting the castle’s halls. Poe actually wrote and published “The Haunted Palace” separately before eventually including it in this story, and said about it, “I mean to imply a mind haunted by phantoms — a disordered brain.”
The palace in the poem is a human head, the phantoms are an insane mind. And there you have another reflection: the phantoms swirling around the haunted palace are a reflection of Roderick’s unhappy time pacing the halls of the House of Usher. The narrator even compares the house's windows to empty human eyes when he arrives at the mansion at the beginning of the story.
Interestingly, in Mike Flanagan’s 2023 miniseries, The House of Usher, which uses this story as a kind of bookend for the rest of the Poe-inspired stories within it, they’ve reversed the body and brain role. Madeline is a scheming super-genius and Roderick is basically her flunky.
She has to literally use his body to make her plans work early in the storyline because, as a woman in the ‘70s or whatever, she can’t get a non-secretarial job at the corporation they’re trying to take over. In the show, Roderick’s physicality is also underscored because almost all of the other characters are his children, legitimate or otherwise.
Speaking of children… was Madeline Usher pregnant in the story? Some scholars think she might have been, and that part of the horror and fascination her doctors had with her in the story, and the reason Roderick may have wanted to keep them away from her body, is that there was only one person around who could’ve been the baby daddy.
When the narrator realises, mid-corpse drop-off, that Madeline is Roderick’s twin, Roderick is kind of cagey about it. He murmurs something and tells the narrator “sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature had always existed between them.”
If that has your eyebrows raised, you’re not alone. A lot of people read an implication of incest into that line, especially after the narrator explains that the reason Madeline and Roderick are the last of their line is because the branches of their family tree kept dying, so it’s actually more of a family pole.
But the last of the Ushers are both weak. Their baby was never going to make it, and that might explain some of Roderick’s existential horror that he represents the last of the House of Usher. It would also be another indicator that Madeline represents the body – she’s the one who would’ve carried the child, which we’ve already established is one of those unrefined things we women are always doing. A cultivated male mind would never.
Using a hint of incest to make a horror story more horrific is pretty rich, by the way, coming from an author who married his 13-year-old first cousin.
But more than brains, bodies and babies, what I really want to talk about is Madeline, a woman, as a reflection of her brother, Roderick, a man.
A reflection is intangible. It's not real. It's just light bouncing off the real thing. And unfortunately, in both storytelling and life, we see women objectified as décor all the time. In stories told by men, we are often cast as figurative mirrors in particular – we’re just objects meant to echo or amplify the image of the much more important and much more real men around us.
Poe published “The Fall of the House of Usher” in 1839, at the height of popularity of something that historian Barbara Welter called, “The Cult of True Womanhood” or the “Culture of Domesticity.” And Poe and his compatriots, especially in his area of the US – the Northeast and East Coast – were all about True Womanhood.
In the popular imagination, society existed in different spheres: public and private, work and home. The job of a True Woman – as opposed to all of us fake women, I guess – was to be, quote, “the light of the home.” The True Woman knew her place in the domestic sphere and stayed home, where she kept the house, cooked the food, directed servants, and raised the children for her husband, while he was out caring for and protecting the family with his big, manly job.
Don’t get me wrong – just because she was running things doesn’t mean she was in charge of the domestic sphere. Obviously, men were in charge. God made them that way, you see. (Yeah, this is a very Christian idea, and the people who subscribed to it were very white, Christian and middle- or upper-class. Women of colour or working-class women were 100% not included in the Cult of True Womanhood, which I guess means they weren’t True Women. And we’re just getting STARTED with the problematic shit.)
True Women were defined by their personification of four cardinal qualities: Piety, Purity, Submission, and Domesticity. Men were encouraged to find pious wives who followed the many, many rules laid out in the highly patriarchal Christian Bible because the other qualities were sure to follow.
Purity won’t surprise you – women were taught that their greatest asset was an intact hymen. Nothing was more valuable than their virginity, a gift they guarded carefully – thanks to their piety – and bequeathed to their husbands only on their wedding night, at which point he became their protector, guide and superior in every way.
That’s where submission comes in. Even if they disagreed with their husbands intellectually – which was unlikely, because they were discouraged from reading anything other than religious biographies, just in case they started to have ideas about things outside their home sphere – True Women obeyed their husbands – their divinely ordained headships – and catered to their every need.
The job of the True Woman was to lose her virginity in a good, American marriage to a good, American man, take care of his good, American house, and ensure that she created a sanctuary away from the chaos of the outside world for that man and his good, American sons – the ones who would grow up to run the country someday.
Their whole purpose was to create a peaceful oasis for their husbands, tell them how worthwhile and important they were, and create more future brides and grooms who would do the same thing.
If you’re like, “Holy Harrison Butker, this sounds like tradwives!”, you’re 1,000% correct – this is exactly the same stuff that TikTok and YouTube tradwife influencers believe.
Let me be clear: In my view, feminism means supporting women to be able to make whatever choices they want for their lives. That’s the whole point – I want you to have a choice. You don’t have to be a CEO or on the frontlines of the military or be the President. You can ABSOLUTELY become a stay-at-home mom, homeschool your children, start an off-grid homestead, and worship any god you want. You are free to make that choice. That’s the fucking point.
But I will say this to modern tradwives, who believe it shouldn’t be a choice and that all of us should be popping out babies and pies with equal frequency: There’s a lesson to be learned from the Cult of True Womanhood, and you’re not gonna like it.
But first, back to Poe. In the context of the time, where women were meant to reflect their husband’s greatness and not presume any of their own, it makes sense that he would fall in love with his beautiful, groomed cousin, Virginia, who idolised him. And it makes sense that the women in his stories would be two-dimensional set pieces, whose existence really only serves to further the male leads’ storylines.
In Madeline Usher’s case, we never learn anything about her life, and we barely learn about her death. We don’t know what she went through for the seven-plus days that she was trapped.
She woke up from a cataleptic episode entombed prematurely in a tight coffin, and she stayed there until she gathered the strength, finally, to rip off the lid and escape from the horrible, dark tomb where she’d been trapped, alone, without food, water, company or care.
We know that somehow, through spooky twin communication or his sensitive hearing, Roderick knew they had jumped the gun. He knew she was in there, alive, and still didn’t bother to mention it because of his own neuroses.
And if she was also aware that the siblings’ inevitable deaths meant the end of a long line, and had lost a child fathered by her twin brother, and also suspected that perhaps the house itself – an archaic mother whose empty, crumbling halls reflect her own empty, crumbling body – was to blame for her physical decline and the mental decline of the only person she loved, perversely but still truly, doesn’t that add another layer of horror to everything?
“The Fall of the House of Usher” is an incredible story, of course, and I’m not arguing that point. All I’m saying is that Madeline’s side of the story is worth telling in its own right. She doesn’t have to be an amplifier for Roderick, who is, incidentally, a man coded feminine and therefore even wackier because he is apparently unable to get it together and leave the female domestic sphere of his home.
But the story Poe chose to tell is the male one, and perhaps that’s because Madeline, as a woman created by a male brain in this particular era, doesn’t matter. She’s only there as a supporting character to the men’s real lives, just as the women bound by the ideals of True Womanhood were only there to make men’s lives easier and richer like fancy appliances.
I would say that sweet little Virginia Poe seems to have conducted herself as a so-called True Woman ought – that is, she was definitely pure and submissive, although I would guess, based on the way I feel this week, that her debilitating and fatal illness may have gotten in the way of her domestic abilities. But the other women in Edgar Allan Poe’s life were decidedly not Ideal True Women.
The thing about True Womanhood was that it fucked women over if their husbands left them or died young. The True Woman wouldn’t take a working job. In fact, she often couldn’t – one side-effect of the popularity of this idea and women losing power in the public sphere was that women were legally prohibited from working, or had their working hours severely limited, which also limited the professions they could have. Women without husbands were screwed – they literally couldn’t earn a living.
But remember, single mom Eliza Poe continued to act for as long as she could to take care of her family, and his aunt Maria, Virginia’s mother, took in sewing work and boarders when her husband died early. Poe was surrounded by – and idealised – women who were not sterling examples of True Womanhood. In fact, he actively pursued them.
I mentioned this briefly in the last episode, but even while married, Poe was regularly falling in love with other women. He seems to have especially been a sucker for a fellow poet. He was always writing poems for these women – or claiming to, anyway. It actually seems like he would recycle old poems and tell each new woman, “I wrote this for you, baby.”
But none of these women, from the prominent poet Frances Sargent Osgood to the successful editor Sarah J. Hale (who, incidentally, wrote “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and invented Thanksgiving), were submissive, domestic types. They were publishing under their own names and working outside the home.
Madeline Usher may be one of many Poe women whose own story goes untold, but in real life, Edgar was attracted to strong women who made a mark on society. It’s baffling to think that he had all these amazing, three-dimensional examples that he could’ve modelled his female characters on, and he… opted not to. There are no well-rounded Poe women. The fucking bird gets more lines than most of his female characters. It’s infuriating.
Sometimes writers or artists impose weird, arbitrary limits on themselves. By forcing themselves to work within strict boundaries, they often come up with incredibly creative solutions. In a way, True Womanhood tried to set strict boundaries on women’s minds, freedom, and power. And wouldn’t you know it? They found a way to work within the boundaries and still get away with exactly what the patriarchy was worried about.
True Women lost power in the public sphere, but at home, they gained a powerful symbolic power – the moral authority of their families. Men were sent out into the working world guided by the wisdom and morals modelled to them by their wives, and young people grew up following the standards set by their mothers – their primary teachers and caretakers. It’s basically Inception – women may not have been actively working, but by golly, they were often pulling the strings behind the scenes.
And the next generation of women… well. You know what happens to kids raised in strict households once they get a little bit of freedom, right? The next generation of gals cut their hair short! They rode bicycles, even if it meant their uteruses might fall out! They demanded further education! And they demanded the vote. True Women birthed New Women, and New Women became first-wave feminists – the suffragettes.
The patriarchy didn’t let go of True Womanhood, though. It tried to make it work again in the US after World War II, when women were forced to leave the jobs they’d taken while men were fighting overseas and return to the home. They were meant to be pious, pure, submissive, and domestic. They were meant to grow the nuclear family. And they did, for a while.
And then Betty Friedan showed up and wrote “The Feminine Mystique” and kicked the whole thing off all over again – blam! Here comes feminism’s second wave. Following the ideals of True womanhood is the best way to create and raise a generation of rebels. The pattern repeats. And so it goes.
In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf wrote, “Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size…
“Whatever may be their use in civilised societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action. That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge.
That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism; how impossible it is for her to say to them this book is bad, this picture is feeble, or whatever it may be, without giving far more pain and rousing far more anger than a man would do who gave the same criticism.
“For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on giving judgement, civilising natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is?”
Woolf wrote that in 1929, and the New Woman – exemplified by the flappers of the Roaring ‘20s – had well and truly shown up by then. But clearly women were still being used to reflect men, and I’m not sure much has changed 100 years later. In film, TV and literature – especially in the horror genre – it’s not hard to find contemporary examples of women used the same way Madeline Usher was used: to further the storylines of male protagonists.
Take, for example, Supernatural, the TV show about two hunky, ghost-bustin’ brothers. Their mother? Murdered by a demon, causing her husband to go on a demon-hunting rampage and raise his sons to become demon hunters themselves. I stopped watching around season 3, I think, but the internet tells me they continued to meet babes, and those babes continued to either be evil and die eventually, or be good and die immediately.
[Sigh]
Remember season one of True Detective? That was a good one. Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey are detectives and partners investigating a bunch of occult murders in Louisiana. The women in the show, including Woody’s character’s wife, are either love interests, victims, or sources of personal conflict for the male leads. Time really is a flat circle, baby.
Let’s hop over into literature, shall we? I read The Fisherman a month or so ago. I was so excited to read it because the Horror Lit subreddit recommends it all the time and I love me some cosmic, eldritch horror… but goddammit.
Without spoiling anything, it’s a story about a man whose beautiful wife dies young, who befriends a man whose beautiful wife dies young, and there’s a story within a story about heroic men that also features a few beautiful wives who go on to – you guessed it – end up dead. I’m trying to remember and I’m not positive that it even passed the Bechdel test, where two named female characters talk to each other about something other than a man, but if it did, it was maybe only if you count wordless possessed groaning at someone as conversation.
Then there are movies. David Fincher’s “Se7en”, which came out in 1995, stars Kevin Spacy, Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman, and Gwyneth Paltrow, and despite being jam-packed with some of the most problematic people in Hollywood, it’s a pretty good serial killer movie.
Unless, of course, you’re looking at it from a female representation perspective. The entire point of Gwyneth Paltrow’s character is to be a peacekeeping motherly figure. And then her character loses much more than half a day of skiing, all so alleged real-life abuser Brad Pitt could prove that he had the acting chops to be more than just a pretty face.
I made a couple of Tim Burton references in my last episode, and I suspect those parallels are not accidental – Edgar Allan Poe’s aesthetic and influence are still prominent in goth and horror media. Of course, I’m not saying that his treatment of female characters is responsible for the underrepresentation of women in horror, or for the trend towards giving us gruesome and often eroticised deaths that only serve to inspire male characters when we do show up, but I don’t think it helped, either.
Women are generally underrepresented across media (although anecdotally it does seem like things are becoming more diverse, which is fab), so this isn’t a horror issue alone. I also don’t want it to seem like I’m shitting on these TV shows, books or movies. Some of them are great!
I just think it’s important to consider how women are represented, both in storytelling and in the real world. Are we given fleshed-out, three-dimensional roles? Or are we only there to advance male characters’ development or story arcs? Are we included as individuals with inner worlds and motivations? Or, as Virginia Woolf said, are we just mirrors?
[Music]
Steph: It’s time for lights out at the Paranormal Pajama Party. Thank you so much, Madeline, for –
Madeline?
Madeline?
She’s just… she’s just lying there looking very pale and still. Oh my god, could she be – Madeline?
[Gasps, laughs in relief.]
Steph: Oh, you faker. You got me.
[Whispers]
Steph: Yikes.
[Normal volume resumes]
Steph: To learn more about True Womanhood and to read “The Haunted Palace”, 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.
[Music fades out]

Madeline Usher, refrigerator woman

As you may recall from part one of this series, poor Madeline Usher – one of the three characters in Poe’s "The Fall of the House of Usher" – is barely in the story at all, and when she is, she's either too sick to say anything, too dead to tell us about herself, or coming back from the dead to kill her brother.

Madeline's whole purpose is to make her brother Roderick's story more interesting. She's a spooky prop, not a real character. And sadly, she's not alone. Poe's stories are full of women who exist just to further the male characters' plotlines.

Poe-etic irony (see what I did there?)

As we discussed in the last episode, though, Poe had very intense and generally tragic relationships with women throughout his life.

Except for his wife/13-year-old first cousin, who almost immediately started dying as soon as they married, he was surrounded by strong women who didn’t align with the ideals of True Womanhood at all. Even though his female characters are two-dimensional at best, he was attracted to creative and clever ladies who worked outside the home, sometimes as their family’s sole provider. Make it make sense, Edgar.

Raising little rebels

A warning for all you tradwives out there (whose male headships are definitely not allowing them to listen to this blasphemous podcast): The whole True Womanhood thing? It backfired. Big time. All those constraints on women paradoxically led to the rise of the “New Woman” and first-wave feminism.

And when the patriarchy tried to bring a similar version back post-World War II… it happened again, kicking off second-wave feminism. Oops!

Time to break the mirror

You might be thinking, “But surely things have changed since Poe's time, right?” Well... *awkward silence*

Hate to break it to you, but women are still often used as plot devices or mirrors for male characters in contemporary horror and other genres. If you think that's not happening, you might want to rewatch your favourite TV show or movie or re-read your favourite book, with a critical eye.

Poe was a product of his time, but that doesn't mean we can't side-eye his treatment of female characters. And while we've come a long way since the days of True Womanhood, we've still got work to do.

Next time you're enjoying some horror fiction (or any fiction, really), ask yourself: Are the women in this story actual characters, or are they just there to make the men look good? Women can be so much more than beautiful corpses or reflections of male greatness. They can be the ones telling the story, solving the mystery, or even – gasp – being the villain!