#but i found the usher interest in AE so fascinating and appropriative and appropriate in its use in the story

[mxdam]

Silly little Usherposting moment but I really love Madeline's death 👉👈 I'm attached to all the characters, but going into it knowing they're all doomed helps, and I think her death was really a big attempt for a swing at the truly grotesque--the kind of grotesque that's really Gothic, very much the walled up alive, decapitated nun kind of stuff that also, imo, harks to the pulpy fascination with Ancient Egypt present in old horror and adventure stories from like the 50s and earlier, the kind of things to which e.g. Indiana Jones actually nods. Even the hateful little Howard Poward wrote an Egypt story or two. For him and I'm sure for the majority of other authors, this was was an orientalist impulse born out of disgust and unease with ancient non-Western cultures (although we have to give HP his props, he was disgusted and uneasy with ancient Western cultures too! as well as being a virulent racist), but I think Fall of the House of Usher seems to make an interesting little play out of its use of AE--whereas in HP and other works the horror of Ancient Egypt is its barbarism and decadence (ref. even the original Mummy which is orientalism-flavored Gothic involving Imhotep being buried alive), the horror in FotHoU is the barbarism and decadence of the Ushers and how they steal/appropriate from beautiful things and vulnerable peoples in the world to feed their own narcissism and control. It's so appropriate that Roderick scammed and bribed and conned his way into owning the implements that ultimately he would use to brutalize Madeline, things that were bought for her out of his destructive, evil love, gifts for a "goddess," because anything beautiful he touches becomes an implement of doom and death, and he can't, actually, honor her or anyone with such bloody, vile hands.