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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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." 

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. 

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." 

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. 

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." 

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." 

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."  

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 errected 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. 
. 
(Top) 
. 

 

---