The Great Dead Womb

We may now enter the "Great Dead Womb" that is the melancholy House of Usher.

There's a marvelous cunt-like crack across the surface of the melancholy House of Usher. Our Narrator (who shall always and forevermore remain nameless), approaches it "on the whole of a dark, dull and soulless evening in the autumn of the year." The leaves are falling, birds do not sing. There is a wicked tarn throwing up a miasmal funk, a vaginal odor of a great dead, stone thing.

The "House of Usher" (both the house itself, and the family which shares its weird, brooding appellation) has born "no significant branches": thus, its progeny lies in the pathway of "lineal descent, "having ushered forth" no enduring branches. Incest and death and the weakness of a family line that does not fork.

Inside, in the sepulchral gloom of the sitting room, Roderick Usher, neurotic, whispy-haired, with long, bony, clawlike fingers and craggy stick-like limbs, sits alone, composing weird tunes on his guitar, eating bland food, painting distorted art, sinking deeper into his madness. This was the boyhood "chum" of our humble narrator, and he is shocked at the rawboned visage of the man so rapidly sinking into a degeneracy of soul and a malignancy of mind that will usher him into oblivion--his grave.

Flitting about the edges of the shadowy gloom we have the wraith-like revenant of the still-living sacred sister, Madeline, who never makes an appearance but that she shrinks into the shadows, a living ghost. But not quite.

What is she hiding from? Of what should she be ashamed? One wonders.

Cursed blood broods, pumping through the heart and beating the funereal drums as the "last of their line" sink toward oblivion. We have the foretaste of this in the versified horror of "The Haunted Palace."

In the greenest of our valleys

By good angels tenanted,

Once a fair and stately palace—

Radiant palace—reared its head.

In the monarch Thought’s dominion,

It stood there!

Never seraph spread a pinion

Over fabric half so fair!

Banners yellow, glorious, golden,

On its roof did float and flow

(This—all this—was in the olden

Time long ago)

And every gentle air that dallied,

In that sweet day,

Along the ramparts plumed and pallid,

A wingèd odor went away.

Wanderers in that happy valley,

Through two luminous windows, saw

Spirits moving musically

To a lute’s well-tunèd law,

Round about a throne where, sitting,

Porphyrogene!

In state his glory well befitting,

The ruler of the realm was seen.

And all with pearl and ruby glowing

Was the fair palace door,

Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing

And sparkling evermore,

A troop of Echoes, whose sweet duty

Was but to sing,

In voices of surpassing beauty,

The wit and wisdom of their king.

But evil things, in robes of sorrow,

Assailed the monarch’s high estate;

(Ah, let us mourn!—for never morrow

Shall dawn upon him, desolate!)

And round about his home the glory

That blushed and bloomed

Is but a dim-remembered story

Of the old time entombed.

And travelers, now, within that valley,

Through the red-litten windows see

Vast forms that move fantastically

To a discordant melody;

While, like a ghastly rapid river,

Through the pale door

A hideous throng rush out forever,

And laugh—but smile no more.

***

They laugh, "but smile no more." Madness has been visited upon them. Death has swooped down, they've lost their bearings in this world, so that the ghosts of the ghosts revel onward, through time, lost in a hell of enchantment, forced gaiety, and, strained mirth. But for what is their punishment? The King, long ago, began to look back upon the cursed line of his forbears, in remorse and disquiet. What sin has been visited upon his head, and the heads of his children, that he must suffer so, in his interminable aloneness, the ghost kept prisoner in his castle keep, to leave it...nevermore?

Insipid uninspired novels, as well as bland food, placate the nerves of Roderick Usher. A story from one such book is recounted. It seems to be the tale of a night who confronts a seething dragon:

“And Ethelred, who was by nature of a doughty heart, and who was now mighty withal, on account of the powerfulness of the wine which he had drunken, waited no longer to hold parley with the hermit, who, in sooth, was of an obstinate and maliceful turn, but, feeling the rain upon his shoulders, and fearing the rising of the tempest, uplifted his mace outright, 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 alarumed and reverberated throughout the forest.”

[...]

“But the good champion Ethelred, now entering within the door, was sore enraged and amazed to perceive no signal of the maliceful hermit; but, in the stead thereof, a dragon of a scaly and prodigious demeanor, and of a fiery tongue, which sat in guard before 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, and gave up his pesty breath, with a shriek so horrid and harsh, and withal so piercing, that Ethelred had fain to close his ears with his hands against the dreadful noise of it, the like whereof was never before heard.”

The fictional piece (identified as The Mad Trist of Sir Ethelred by Lancelot Canning) is held up as a mirror to us. What dragon does Roderick Usher wish to slay> When the Nameless Narrator comes to the sound of the cracking of the door, he hears, or thinks he does, in the burial vault below him, a similar ripping or cracking sound.

Madeline Usher is given to fits in which she passes into a death-like swoon. Roderick must like her better this way for, in such a state, can he not possess her, body and soul? His more than a sister? The only other being that could hope to pass on the tainted blood of the Usher line, the cursed blood that shall be avenged, if not by Man, than by God? It would take an act of immoral blasphemy to conceive another progenitor. Fainted, or dead, she is of no more allure to him; the temptation to breed more damned is averted, the possibility ended.

She dies. Below, in the vault, she sleeps the sleep of ages in her tomb. Formerly, she has been a vision emerging from the light of a darkened hall, the "Great Dead Womb," once again. Roderick rushes to the vault, fearing they have, "Walled her up alive!"

To him, her rosy-cheeked, vampiric visage is still redolent of erotic fascination. Like the consumptive vampires of Victorian New England, like Mercy Brown, she is draining his sustenance, his mind, and has been battening upon him, even before she died. Did he visit her in the tomb? Did he feel her body, touch her breasts, kiss her face, mount her in hopes of making love to the cold, stiff, maggot-infested form? Dead, she is no sin to have, to take; dead, he can want her as no other woman he has ever wanted before. His more than sister; his vampire lover. His erotic ideal.

She bursts through the door, and the dragon of his desire come through the threshold, holding out an accusing finger to her More Than Brother. Acknowledging their sin. Is she seeking expiation from beyond the grave? Has she become the avenging revenant of the Most High God? Reanimated, because violated by her brother. His sick obsession with her carrying over into the fetid crevices of her dark, eternal sleep.

The entire edifice, one death-loving, incestuous soul, begins to crumble and fall into the earth, as the Narrator escapes. Previously, Usher has commented upon the glow upon the surface of the nearby water, and now that glow is the sinister red (because of blood, cursed and tainted forever), that is washing away, like a salvational tide, the sins of the House of Usher, sins that brought madness and melancholy, destruction, death, and the love of the demoniac and vile, to accurse an ancient race and render it, and its crumbling, rotting stone edifice, a pile of sunken rubble, forever and for all of time.