31 Days of Gothic Romance | The Fall of the House of Usher

Arthur Rackham

Edgar Allan Poe's work in general was heavily influenced by gothic romance in terms of mood and just the general theme of decay. We can see this really clearly in "The Oval Portrait," in which he mentions Ann Radcliffe by name and sets the story in the same mountains as her Castle Udolpho. "The Fall of the House of Usher" is another case where Poe's gone beyond influence and has written an actual entry in the canon.

It begins of course with the crumbling castle of a once-great family, with both edifice and inhabitants being the eponymous, falling "house." The last members are a brother and sister, Roderick and Madeline, both of whom are in poor health, physically and psychologically. Because of their specific illnesses, Roderick lives in fear of harming Madeline and unwillingly becoming the gothic nobleman who oppresses a young woman.

"Usher" isn't one of my favorite Poe stories, mostly because of how fantastical it is. I'm all for supernatural elements like ghosts and witches, but those are at least grounded in reality and I understand the rules about them. Poe goes too far when he mystically ties the siblings' well-being to their home, with no real attempt to explain why the house might be alive and sharing the fate of the family. It's great symbolism; I just have trouble accepting it as a plot point.

I've never seen Roger Corman's 1960 movie adaptation, but I understand that it fixes some of my problems. It disconnects the family's supernatural relationship with the castle while having their dysfunction bring about the destruction of the building in other ways. It also grounds their relationship with each other by giving Madeline a fiancé and having Roderick (Vincent Price) disapprove enough that he's willing to do horrible things to his sister in order to prevent her marriage.

31 Days of Gothic Romance | The Monk

I want to make it clear that my focusing on gothic romance for 31 days isn't because I'm some kind of expert on it. I love the genre, but I'm way under-read in it and one my reasons for doing this is to build a list of books and other things that I want to experience. Matthew Lewis' The Monk falls into that category.

The innovation that Lewis brought to the genre was luridness. It had been relatively chaste up to that point, with horrors mostly being threatened or suggested. Lewis' titular character doesn't just threaten and menace an innocent young woman; he does terrible things to her. And to other characters in order to get to her. And the novel spends a great deal of time chronicling the monk Ambrosio's fall into depravity. He's already not a nice guy as the novel opens - he's proud and he lusts after the Virgin Mary, to start with - and he sinks deeper from there, encouraged by supernatural forces.



The Monk ticks all the boxes expected of a gothic romance, but cranks them up to 11 in a way that made it as popular as it was condemned. People loved to talk about how blasphemous and immoral it was almost as much as they loved to read it.

One of the people it bothered was Anne Radcliffe, from yesterday, who liked to evoke chills by suggesting things unseen. Like Alfred Hitchcock, she believed that what the audience imagined was always more powerful than what was explicitly seen or described. Keeping the analogy of movie directors, Matthew Lewis was more like Wes Craven, wanting to horrify audiences with the gory details. It's probably not a coincidence then that Radcliffe published The Italian - her own story of a depraved clergyman who terrorizes a young woman - shortly after the release of The Monk. Even though I once swore off any more Radcliffe, I'm curious now to read and compare The Monk and The Italian.



I haven't read The Monk, but I have seen the 2011 film adaptation by director Dominik Moll, starring Vincent Cassel as Ambrosio. It's been a few years since I've seen it, but my memory is that it's a fairly faithful, if heavily abridged version of the novel's plot. I found it challenging, both in terms of artistic style and content, but I also loved it as a cautionary tale against giving in to selfish passions. I'm hoping to have the same reaction to Lewis' novel.

31 Days of Gothic Romance | The Mysteries of Udolpho

Horace Walpole may have officially started the gothic romance genre with The Castle of Otranto, but it was Ann Radcliffe who popularized it 30 years later with The Mysteries of Udolpho. It wasn't her first gothic romance, nor her last, but it was her most famous. And with her other books, Udolpho turned gothic romance into a genre that people could take seriously.

Part of how she did that was Scooby Dooing the supernatural elements. Her novels are full of supposedly haunted castles and cottages and abbeys, but there's always some kind of rational explanation for the spookiness. That gives her stories the thrill of genre books, but with the deniability that they're not really genre books. Literature Snobs are not a new phenomenon.

The other thing she did was include large sections of poetry and travelogue-like descriptions of landscapes. This was really well-received and Radcliffe inspired other writers as diverse and important as Walter Scott and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. However, it does make her kind of slog for modern readers. At least, it did for this modern reader.

Hanging out. Talking about nature.

Udolpho is the story a young woman named Emily St Aubert, whose father passes away and leaves her in the care of her aunt. Before this happens, she takes trips with Dad and they look at a lot of nature and talk about nature and at some point meet a handsome, nature-loving man who'll become important later. Oh, and Emily's mom also died and Emily lost a locket. There's a lot of setup in this thing.

Unfortunately, Emily's Aunt Cheron doesn't really like nature or looking at nature or talking about nature, so she and Emily don't get along. Worse than that, Madame Cheron is a gold-digger and marries a mysterious guy named Montoni who claims to be Italian nobility. But Montoni is actually broke and also looking for a way to make a quick buck. He's got his eye on marrying Emily to a different nobleman to hook into that money, but when Montoni learns that there's no fortune to be had there either, he retreats with the women to his remote castle of Udolpho to figure out a new plan.

What he comes up with is to try to force Madame Cheron in signing over some property to him. And while he's working on that (by imprisoning her in a tower of the castle), Emily has time to investigate various Mysteries of Udolpho. It gets more complicated from there, with Emily's discovering another prisoner in the castle and eventually escaping with him. I'm skipping a lot of stuff about secret portraits and locked doors, but that's to keep from having to also talk about Italian politics and extended trips to the countryside that also take place around that same time.

Emily meets some forest bandits.

And we're not done once she leaves either. After that, she meets some friends of her fellow escapee and uncovers a whole other set of mysteries at their house. Except that they're actually tied into Udolpho and this convent that Emily and her dad stayed at one time and whatever happened to that handsome, nature-loving guy from earlier?

Udolpho is the only Radcliffe novel I've read, and for years I claimed that it would be my last. I had to force myself through its 700 pages, enjoying the parts where the plot actually moves, but hating the long passages of unnecessary backstory and details about scenery. I think I might need to give it another chance, though. From a different point of view, what I thought was endlessly dull could also be described as luxuriously immersive. Radcliffe invites requires you to spend a lot of time in her story with her characters and you can either begrudge that or give in to it. I made my choice at the time. I wonder if it's possible to go back and do it the other way.

I don't know that I'll revisit Udolpho soon, but I'm easing back from my decision to not read any more of Radcliffe's stuff. I'll talk a little about The Italian tomorrow, a book of hers that I put on my To Read list at the same time as Udolpho and have since taken off. I might need to give that one a shot, with the foreknowledge that it won't be as face-paced or thrill-filled as The Castle of Otranto.

Whaaaat?!