Basic Concept: The American Gothic
Tradition
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The European fascination with death and
its motifs dates in part to the Middle Ages' "Dance of the Macabre," to
the celebration and veneration of the Christian martyrs, as well as the
common beliefs regarding witchcraft and the horrific threats of the nether
world. In the 18th century, however, a popular fascination emerged
in England, giving rise to the "literature of lament" and the Gothic romance.
The tomb and everything about it took on a popular enchantment, and writers
were quick to pander to the enthusiasm with works like Edward Young's "Night
Thoughts" and Robert Blair's "The Grave."
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An American Gothic
The thrill for "things that go bump in
the night" quickly spread to late eighteenth- century America. Novelists
like William Hill Brown and Charles Brockden Brown churned out spooky tales
laced with social criticism. In Wieland, for example, Charles
Brockden Brown features the spontaneous combustion of the old patriarch
of the family who, too given to drink, literally ignites while sitting
at the dinner table before his horrified children when the crash of a nearby
lightening bolt sets off the besotted old man, a supersaturated object
lesson on temperance for the captivated readers.
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In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885),
Mark Twain satirized the whole Gothic flutter abounding in the "literature
of lament." Emmeline Grangerford, the sickly teenage daughter, is
absorbed in every death that befalls the town, often arriving at the scene
of a reported demise even before the undertaker so that she might be the
first to rip off a verse to properly memorialize the occasion. After
she herself succumbs, the family keeps her unfinished portrait under a
black drapery, opened only on the anniversary of her death. The portrait
reveals the image of a young girl standing at the railing of bridge contemplating
suicide with "two arms folded across her breast, and two arms stretched
out in front, and two more reaching up towards the moon -- and the idea
was to see which pair would look best, and then scratch out all the other
arms." Poor Emmeline passed on before
deciding which pair of arms to keep, so
the family kept the picture as she had left it, the suicide posture still
unresolved. Her "Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec'd" is a parody
of Presbyterian Observer's penchant for such insipid verse.
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The purpose of most gothic works was to
provide the reader, page after page, one ghastly thrill after another.
Selected works of Philip Freneau and William Cullen Bryant, however, point
to something else going on, something more sophisticated--an inquiry about
the nature of the mind. This inquiry would preoccupy the reflections
of the leaders of the whole American Romantic
Movement.
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Online Connections
For a bibliography devoted to the American
gothic tradition in literature, see the PAL
(Perspectives in American Literature) website. See "The
Gothic Literature Page" for a webliography of English literary sites.
Still another fine literary history of the genre in British letters is
to be found in "Gothic Fiction."
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Our Course Connections
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Philip Freneau
A close friend of Washington's and writing
in the Revolutionary War period, Freneau was a transitional author.
His works cross the line from the Neo-classical Period to the Romantic.
His poem, "On Mr. Paine's Rights of Man," is conventionally neo-classical
behind all its thunder supporting the revolution. "The Indian Burying
Ground," however, abandons the power of
reason and declares the imagination, or
"fancy," the seat of a reality far richer than the limitations of reason
alone.
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William Cullen Bryant
After a perfunctory catalog of the gothic
conventions--the "stern agony, and shroud, and pall, and breathless darkness,
and the narrow house"--William Cullen Bryant slips beyond the conventional
Christian themes and apostrophes to nature in "Thanatopsis" (a study of
death), claiming no hope beyond the grave and inviting his readers to accept
the inevitability of death. If anything, nature is the "great tomb
of man."
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Edgar Allan Poe
For all the scurrilous criticism inflicted
on the reputation of Poe immediately after his death, the literature of
this interesting writer represents some of the most innovative creation
to come from all of American letters. Creator of the "ideal short"
story, Poe was also the inventor of the detective story. His poetry
anticipates the international Symbolist Movement by three decades and
surrealism
by a half century.
In the popular view, Poe's works are always
associated with death and horror, and at that superficial level, Poe finds
a place among the gothic writers. In fact, Poe's use of death as
a central motif finds service only in his pursuit of the "effect" which
Poe suggests should be the motivation behind the creation and development
of any short story. According to this "ideal," spelled out
in his essay, "The Philosophy of Composition,"
Poe fashions every element of his stories to promote within the reader
this predetermined, emotional effect, and for Poe, that effect was the
experience of either melancholy or terror, what he suggests are the two
most "novel" and "vivid" emotions. In the orchestration of either,
Poe chose the unanticipated and undeserved death of
young maidens--soulmates either as wives
or sisters--as the subject most likely to inspire his effect. All
other elements--setting, incident, characters, even the length of the work
itself--should be fashioned in such a way as to achieve this effect as
the proper climax and end to the story.
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The same effect, in the service of beauty,
is the point of his poetry, as well. Poe transports the metrical
patterns and the refrains of musical composition into the craft of writing
poetry. Read with these two elements in mind such works as "The Bells,"
"The Raven," and "Ulalume."
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Nathaniel Hawthorne
Poe found in the short stories of Hawthorne's
little volume of Twice Told Tales everything he expected in a well-crafted
story and published his glowing accolades in "Twice Told Tales: A Review"
(1842). Hawthorne's short stories explore the dark side of the human
soul in conflict with itself. The gothic machinery of witches and
deviltry are metaphors for the turmoil all people experience in the quest
for sanctuary in the comfort of some absolute virtue or "Truth."
Set frequently against the dour backdrop of New England Puritanism and
religious piety, Hawthorne's characters reside in the cloudy communities
of ambiguity and dualistic thinking. His stories expose the limitations
of narrow mindedness, zealotry, and absolutism in human relations.
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In the telling of his stories, Nathaniel
Hawthorne distinguished the territories of his "romances" from the much
narrower, more rigorous corridors of novels. A novel, says Hawthorne,
must conform itself to the "minute fidelity, not merely to the possible,
but to the probable and ordinary course of man's experience." In
short, novels were to be "realistic." But his works were not novels;
as such, he was free to explore the "possibilities." In "Preface
to The House of the Seven Gables," Hawthorne justifies the liberties in
tone and incident open to the writer of the "romance." The writer
of the romance, he observes, "may so manage his atmospherical medium [use
of the supernatural] as to bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and
enrich the shadows of the picture. He will be wise, no doubt, to
make a very moderate use of the Privileges here stated, and, especially,
to mingle the
Marvelous rather as a slight, delicate,
and evanescent flavor, than as any portion of actual substance of the dish
offered to the public."
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The presence of the "Marvelous" in Nathaniel
Hawthorne's stories open his exploration of essentially spiritual and psychological
issues. What is the nature of mankind? Is it the evil articulated
in the cool, sagacious logic of Calvinism, or is it the innocent goodness
of the "Noble Savage"? Wherein lie the roots of human sin?
Is it a mistake in judgment or some tragic flaw that marks a character
as strangely unique? Or is it an innate attribute that mars the character
of everyone? Is there a supernatural malevolence out there that tempts
us to err? For that matter, is there a benevolent creator out there
powerful enough and interested enough to protect us? Historically,
answers to such questions have derived through "fancy," the imagination,
myth,
reasoning, our beliefs, and even dreams--each,
the seedbeds of the "Marvelous," and that's why Hawthorne's use of the
supernatural makes useful metaphors for exploring what he called the "human
heart."
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In "Young Goodman Brown," Hawthorne's
young protagonist by the same name leaves Faith, his bride of three months,
and steps out into the wilderness to keep some vague "rendevous" in the
forest. Interpreted as a Christian allegory of the journey of life
and the confrontation of sin, a historical work, or a bit of psychological
symbolism, the story is Hawthorne's attempt, as he
once told an inquirer, to "open an intercourse
with the world," as the volume of criticism the story has elicted would
certainly suggest. Through the ambiguity of the "dream" motif, Young
Goodman Brown may have entertained a coven of witches before Satan, or
maybe not. In either case, it was his own decision to reject both
Faith and his neighbors of Salem Village afterwards that separated him
from the community of mankind and condemned him to a "dying hour . . .
of gloom."
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Implications
The dream shares the same character of
reality as the shapes and expressions of our beliefs; that is, both are
constructs
of the mind. They are organized sets of ideas that psychologists
today have called "paradigms" or mental frames of reference that constitute
our world views. The point that Hawthorne makes is that individuals
may choose to act on the basis of these very subjective world views or
"realities," but the effects of those decisions are enacted in the physical
arenas of other people's realities where the impact is difficult to predict
and where the spiritual or psychological trauma can be severe. And
sometimes, people even die--millions of people in the twentieth century
alone, each a target in someone else's world view. Interestingly,
three hundred years after the witch trials, citizens of Danvers, Massachusetts,
have erected a monument in memory of those who perished at the end of
the executioner's rope. Apparently, witches no longer haunt the neighborhoods
of the original Salem Village. Why not?
From the simplistic temperance lesson in
Wieland
to Hawthorne's symbolic matrix of the "marvelous" throughout his "romances,"
the gothic tradition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries both entertained
and challenged the easy assumptions of a growing audience of American letters.
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This page was last modified
on August 27, 2004,
and is maintained by
Dr. Geoffrey A. Grimes.
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