sleeping around: the secret gay history of roderick usher
by Douglas Messerli
If you haven’t recently reread your Edgar
Allen Poe, let me remind you of the plot of tale The Fall of the House of
Usher. It begins with the unnamed narrator arriving at the mansion house of
his old friend Roderick Usher. Roderick has written a letter to his “one and
only friend,” asking him to visit him at his home as soon as possible. He has
been suffering from an undescribed illness and his twin sister Madeline seems
to be encountering cataleptic seizures, falling into a deathlike trance from
which it is increasingly difficult to awaken her.
Brother and sister are the last heirs of the Usher estate, whose home,
as the narrator has noted, is in sad repair, a thin crack descending from the
roof down across the center of the house and into the nearby tarn itself.
Roderick greets him warmly and serves him supper, although there is no
sign of Madeline. And after supper he plays improvised songs on his guitar. The
friend is impressed by Roderick’s paintings and library, and attempts to cheer
his friend by reading to him aloud.
One of the songs which Roderick performs is Poe’s “The Haunted Palace,”
a song which evokes its singer to express that he believes the very house in
which he lives to be alive, connected to living by its very masonry and the
surrounding vegetation. His fate, he asserts, lies with the survival of the
family mansion.
Although the friend never actually encounters Madeline, one morning
Roderick announces that she has died. He fears her body, if buried, might be
exhumed for medical purposes, a common practice, as he note in the film Frankenstein,
of the day. Accordingly, he insists his twin be entombed for two weeks in the
family tomb, located in the house itself, before being permanently buried. The
narrator helps Roderick put her in the tomb, noting that she still has rosy
cheeks, but explains it as a common occurrence after death.
Over the next weeks, both Roderick and his friend grow quite sensitive
to sound and suffer a great deal of mental agitation.
As a large storm rises, Roderick enters the narrator’s bedroom in a
highly disturbed state of mind, throwing open the widows to point out that the
lake nearby is almost glowing in the dark, just as Roderick had painted it in
his artworks. Yet there is no lightning or other source of its incredible
luminosity.
His friend attempts to calm down Roderick by reading aloud a medieval
romance, The Mad Trist, involving Ethelred, a knight who attempting to
escape a storm breaks into a hermit’s dwelling, only to find there a palace of
gold which is guarded by a dragon. Upon the wall hangs a shield upon which is
inscribed:
Who entereth herein, a
conqueror hath bin;
Who slayeth the dragon, the
shield he shall win....
The knight swings his mace at the dragon,
killing it, the beast dying with a shrill shriek. When he attempts to take down
the shield it falls to the floor with an incredible rumbling sound.
At the very same moment, he and Roderick hear loud cracking and ripping
sounds from somewhere in the house, and as the dragon’s cries are read, a real
shriek is heard within the house.
Horrified by the sounds, Roderick admits that he has been hearing the
sounds for days, and he realizes that they are coming from the tomb of his
sister, knowing that she has been buried alive.
At that very moment, the bedroom door blows open revealing a bloodied
Madeline, having escaped her tomb. In a rage she attacks her brother, the two
of them dying in the terror of the event.
As
the narrator runs from the house, he perceives a flash of moonlight behind him,
and turning back toward the house he realizes that the crack in the house as
widened, soon after the mansion splitting in two and sinking into the
surrounding lake.
*
As I have noted in other essays throughout
these volumes on LGBTQ film, Poe appears to be a central source for several of
the cinematic narratives that embrace the 19th century US author’s concerns
with the double and the twin, standard metaphors for the dual life lived by
numerous closeted gay figures and other LGBTQ individuals who feel that they
are of another sexuality from the body in which they are trapped. Poe’s
presentation of outsider figures who for their peculiar obsessions and
deviations do not fit into normative society also appeal to LGBTQ filmmakers,
and I have cited works such as “William Wilson” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” as
being sources for some movies.
Yet “The Fall of the House of Usher,” a seemingly heterosexual family
tale seems to be one of the most influential of all Poe’s works on LGBTQ
cinema. The question we must ask before proceeding to discuss the films
concerning this tale—by the homosexual French filmmaker Jean Epstein, whose
great surrealist-influence La Chute de la maison Usher was released in 1928; the gay-friendly directors James Sibley Watson
and Melville Webber who shot their own experimental version to the story, The
Fall of the House of Usher the same year; and gay moviemaker Curtis
Harrington who remade his high school cinema project of 1942 into Usher
in 2000—why Poe’s tale so attracted them and what might it have to do with the
LGBTQ experience.
If Roderick appears to be a heterosexual with regard to his love of and obsession with Madeline, it is really or at least equally a love and obsession with his own self, his own multiple feelings of sexuality. Poe makes it quite apparent that, just as Roderick is one with the house of Usher, he is similarly “one” with the Ushers, Madeline as well. What she suffers so does he in hypersensitive-related matters, and when he dies so does she. They are inseparable. In short, we have to presume that in some mysterious manner Roderick and Madeline are one and the same, an easy slip into transvestite and transgender issues.
His identification with the place in which he lives, moreover, ties in with the general sense of many LGBTQ individuals before sexual liberation who felt their real essence was only able to be expressed “inside,” within the walls of their own home, while the outside world required them to be someone else in order fit within the normative societal patterns.
And then, of course, there is Roderick’s mysterious male friend who has
been summoned as witness to this hidden universe. Who is he and what is his
relationships with Roderick, we must ask?
The story makes clear that he is not a close friend and that, in fact,
Roderick has never been able to develop close friendships. Yet obviously he is
someone trusted enough that he will not recoil at the very oddity of Roderick’s
lifestyle and obsessions. As witness, he serves the extremely important role,
moreover, of being able to explain the seemingly inexplicable to the rest of
the world. His intelligence, empathy, and equanimity, accordingly, are extremely
important. Without any one of these elements, he will be unable to return the
hermit Roderick to his place in the society, the world outside of his virtual
entombment. The fact that the narrator takes pleasure in both his music and his
art is almost a test of his abilities, and a crucial matter in Poe’s narrative.
If Roderick is indeed queer, it is important that he and his sister are not
represented as freaks or grotesques abhorrent to normative society. Their
histories may be described as frightening, terrifying, and ultimately, even
edifying, but must not be perceived as dreadful, horrifying, or an abysmal
example of human life.
If
the narrator may not have been the young Roderick’s lover, he was at least a
trusted early companion, someone beloved and admired and certainly respected.
And for his part, the narrator does become an active figure in the last days of
the Ushers’ lives, serving as someone who soothes Roderick’s nerves, hears out
his woes, and helps him to bury Madeline, or the feminine aspect of himself—even
while that has horrible consequences. And in that sense, the stranger is also a
co-conspirator of the story’s hero. It is he who allows the central figure to
survive through the last days of his life, who consoles him for his actions,
and eventually, through telling his story, turns him into a romantic hero. The
friend is Roderick’s only link to the outer, “other” world.
In
the end, accordingly, what Roderick is asking his friend to do is to narrate a
life generally unknown to the outside world: the world of an incestuous couple
perhaps—but more importantly the experiences of someone normative society has
difficulty in comprehending, someone who, like any LGBTQ individual, is queer
and needs to have his or her life explained to others when he or she failed to
successfully communicate it. Whether his friend is gay or straight, he is being
asked to do something similar to what any LGBTQ historian, cultural critic, or
even a cinema commentator like myself, tries to do.
Finally, particularly in Epstein’s film, there is, in fact, a deep
homoerotic tension between Roderick and his invited friend, of not a closeted
homosexual relationship that is sublimated and, at other points, even coded
with both Epstein’s and Watson and Webber’s films.
Los Angeles, September 6, 2021
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September
2021).
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