“I suggest you leave, Mr. Winthrop. No? Then perish with us.”
Roger Corman’s House of Usher (1960), starring the campily macabre Vincent Price - who was almost definitely bisexual, but was also at least at one point an anti-Semite and backer of the Hollywood blacklist - is about the grave horror of being trapped in a home with your family. Imitating the then ascendent gothic styling of the British Hammer Films for an American audience, Corman via Poe introduces us to the Usher family - the dominating but hypersensitive Roderick (played by Price), the wilting but gorgeous Madeline (Myrna Fahey), and their servant Bristol (Harry Ellerbe) - through the eyes of an outsider, the gallant Philip Winthrop (Mark Damon), who pushes his way into their hermetic home in pursuit of Madeline’s hand in marriage.
Quickly, Mr. Winthrop is to discover just how diseased the family unit has become - and it is through this infectious outsider that the house and its denizens are finally and irrevocably swallowed up by the “deep and dark tarn,” as Poe put it.
This week scrolling through Facebook, a post in our local queer housing group came up. A young lesbian was searching for immediate housing, and I took a moment to marvel at the idea of trying to move during a pandemic. Somedays in this plague I can hardly summon the emotional resilience to go to the Sainburys, let alone attempting to find and secure housing in the Greater London Area. For me, as for many but not all of us, life has ground to a halt. We’re in a holding pattern - everybody freeze and (maybe) nobody dies. Taken aback by the very idea of moving at a time like this, I lingered over the post, wanting to know what might motivate a person to not just move but move rapidly.
As she detailed further down in the post, this woman has been isolating at her family home with her parents and siblings. This cloistered family time had, one way or another, resulted in her being outed to her father, who flew into a rage and kicked her out onto the streets. It’s a story that I think we so often locate in the ‘bad old times’ of the ‘90s, something we rarely consider happening to gay and lesbian people today and can more easily imagine happening to trans young people now. Despite it’s familiarity, having in my life known dozens of queers thrown out by parents and spent most of my teen years living under the constant dull but terrorizing threat of becoming a throw-away myself, I was still aghast - how can you toss someone, let alone your own child, out in the street during a fucking pandemic?
The family home is widely romanticized as the ultimate bastion of safety, a shelter from the chaotic and threatening outside world. To be home is to be safe. Gothic horror pulls this dustcover off the home, revealing the corrupting and sinister influences that can often exist within. In gothic fiction, we so often find ourselves in the ancestral mansions and crumbling castles of of strange and sometimes villainous characters, like Roderick Usher.
To the gothic, the family home does not shelter, it looms. Within its walls we find not sustenance, but rather hauntings and madness. Most importantly, in the gothic we are trapped within its walls, unable to escape. Often the terror within is as threatening as what lies outside.
It is sadly no surprise that the UK’s primary anti-violence charity, Refuge, saw a 700% increase in calls during the first few weeks of lockdown. Confinement mixed with ever-heightening anxiety and uncertainty make for a dangerous combination. Like the doomed characters of gothic horror, the genuine risk of outside contagion has trapped many people in domestic spaces that are just as threatening and deadly. We must Stay at Home, but home may itself be lethal.
Though the handsome Mr. Winthrop tries his best to save Madeline from the debased and corrupted family home, her brother Roderick - trapped in a fatal self-narration about the accursed nature of the family - thwarts his efforts by burying her alive. He’d rather see her dead than face the reality that his apocalyptic prophecy is self-fulfilling. When she finally rises from this dank basement tomb, Madeline has been transformed from a swooning beauty into an unrecognizable banshee, blood pouring from ragged fingers that clawed their way out of the grave, who do nothing but lash out and kill.
As queer and trans people have been writing about for decades, alongside incest survivors and feminists of all varieties, the heterosexual family unit can be a site of profound, life-altering violence. Like Madeline, abuse by the family can change and warp us, producing long-term harms that may cause us to lash out even at those who truly love us - as the terrifying banshee does to her would-be saviour Mr. Winthrop in House of Usher. Though in real life it is possible to heal and repair, in the heightened universe of the gothic, the family’s malediction leads only to annihilation.
For weeks I’ve been wondering how we can simultaneously hold the truth that we all must stay home, perhaps for months or even years, in order for us all to survive, with the insidious threats this will confine many people to within those very homes. Homophobia and domestic violence, like so many other things, do not stop simply because the world has ground to a halt - in fact, isolation may often work as a pressure cooker.
These problems in this specific environment may be ultimately impossible to reconcile. Certainly, the gothic script with which I feel so much resonance in our plague world offers little hope. But it does bring into garish clarity how absurd it is to portray the family home as a place of refuge for all - revealing what many of us have long known was true: that, for some, threats inside the family are as volatile as the very plague itself.
Donate to SWARM’s hardship relief fund for UK sex workers - many of whom are disproportionately affected by domestic and family violence.
xx
M