Romanticism: New England Gothic

Thursday 9 October: Nathaniel Hawthorne, N 589-592, 605-622 (“Young Goodman Brown,” “May-Pole of Merry Mount,” & “Minister’s Black Veil”)

text-objective discussion leader ("Young Goodman Brown"): Christine Ford

text-objective discussion leader ("May-Pole" and/or "Black Veil"): Amy Sidle

poetry: Sylvia Plath, "Blackberrying," N 2658

poetry reader / discussion leader: Bundy Fowler

Poe: gothic as sensation / psychology

Hawthorne: past as Puritan; light / dark as innocence / guilt + shades of gray

Poe: past as loss; gothic space as unconscious mind; house as head

both "Byronic heroes" or anyway byronic

dark, handsome, haunted men of "genius"

next class: review websites on Byronic hero

How do Poe, Byron, others fit model of Byronic Hero?

What significance of the Byronic hero?

Other possible topics:

Hawthorne's style, highly identifiable--when you read a Hawthorne story or novel, how can you tell it's Hawthorne?

midterm

Leftover notes from previous classes

Last class's preview of Poe & Faulkner

Poe as "catalog of Romanticism"--His poems and stories are thick as fudge with standard Romantic attitudes and effects

passionate quests (learning, revenge, love, etc.) (quest as romance narrative)

loss (esp. "death of beautiful women")

supernatural (Romanticism doesn't have to go there, but if it's always escaping the here and now and testing boundaries, it's bound to go there sometimes)

the gothic--Poe = what most American readers think of when they think of "the gothic" and related genres

Poe & Faulkner as examples of European / Southern gothic

(contrast wilderness / Puritan gothic of Cooper, Irving, Hawthorne)

Southern USA remains strangely European in some ways: feudalism, stark divisions of rich and poor, "heritage" of past, social positions

general background on Poe

most popular writer in our course, maybe the only writer who many people would read without courses like ours

critical-scholarly status about Poe: always a little mixed.

Compare to Faulkner--probably America's greatest writer ever, at least in terms of critical respect. "America's Shakespeare" (But we don't study Faulkner as much in this course b/c he's only tangentially related to Romanticism through the gothic.)

Critical credit: 

great "musical" quality in verse and prose

very high achievement in several short stories & poems

creator of several genres (detective story, early practitioner of science fiction)

admired and influential in Europe (French symbolist poets)

Comparable to Cooper in popularity and overseas influence

Critical doubt: 

Poe concentrates on sensations and effects, therefore questionable depth

maybe just a lot of noise and horror

Poe as escapist fantasy, thrills and chills > appeal to dumb or ignorant aspects of popular mind

Questions for Poe:

What previous experiences studying / teaching Poe? Can people's reactions be connected to Romanticism?

How do you identify Poe's style? (again, connect to Romanticism)

Who thinks of Poe as an American writer? What can one learn about American Romanticism?

Poe as exemplary gothic writer--does he just re-cook gothic conventions, or does he actually develop the gothic?

Questions for Faulkner:

What kinds of continuity from Poe to Faulkner?

How does Poe turn Faulkner's "beauty as death of beautiful woman" around?

What does 20th century do with Romanticism?

Poe

Poe as “catalogue” of Romanticism

desire and loss

gothic

correspondence

romance

life / legend blurred; reality / romanticism

Poe’s style: extreme speech patterns (i. e., not everyday speech as in Realism)

desire and loss

713 return / loss

713 time after time . . . this hideous drama of revivification

romance

708 too divinely precious not to be forbidden! . . . Ligeia grew ill

724 Here is one of your favorite romances

725 knight and dragon

gothic

fair lady-dark lady

705 decaying city near Rhine

705 raven-black . . . tresses

709 an abbey, gloomy and dreary grandeur, melancholy and time-honored memories

709 arabesque

715 very ancient family (contrast Americans)

719 “The Haunted Palace”

722 vaults within building

722 donjon-keep / tomb immediately below narrator’s sleeping quarters

correspondence

1. act or state of corresponding, relation or agreement of things to each other or of one thing to another.
2. intercourse between persons by letters

+ Romantic concept concerning relation between inner and outer world, soul and nature, self and cosmos

Emerson 488 every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind

"Legend of Sleepy Hollow"

2097 every sound of nature, at that witching hour, fluttered his excited imagination

2107 sank deep in the mind of Ichabod

2108 all the stories of ghosts and goblins . . . came crowding upon his recollection. The night grew darker and darker  

Poe as unique writer

"Insane drug addict"

>unlucky, hardworking alcoholic

constant "rewriting" of Poe's life

2387 influences, contributions by Poe

loss of beautiful woman

Poe as catalogue of American Romanticism

farewell Mohicans

intermixing of European Romanticism with American subject matter ("knights of the forest," Cooper as "the American Scott")

gothic space > wilderness

gothic secret > race mixing, dispossession (Lawrence on ghosts)

sublime scale of setting, titanic characters, combination of archaic and biblical speech (i. e., not everyday speech)

Romanticism as stretching boundaries of possible: plot devices of miraculous marksmanship, disguises, but also glimpse of possible relation between Cora and Uncas

romance narrative as journey > popular cliffhanger; capture, escape, pursuit

What's different about Mohicans from later Romanticism or Transcendentalism: 

less internalized, characters as types, closed off to close identification