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

Stephanie Summar

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.

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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!

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