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Clark
Omo
8
December 2016
Examining the Darkness
The
mechanics and themes of the Gothic are infused into many of the texts studied
this semester. From Cooper to Davis, many authors incorporated the Gothic into
their works to draw worlds riven with dark imagery, grotesque description,
haunting events, an atmosphere of dread and despair, and underlying sense of
growing insanity. But, as also seen throughout the various texts examined in
this course, the Gothic is not limited to the strange and fantastic often
encountered in Edgar Allan Poe. It can be used to capture the feelings of a
demoralized and oppressed working class, as seen with Rebecca Harding Davis, and
so much more. Indeed, many of these depressing conventions persist in today’s
literature and other aesthetic mediums; Darth Vader from
Star Wars, Mordor in
The Lord of the Rings, and most every
horror movie ever produced. To see how these conventions have maintained their
widespread appeal, the darkness must be examined, and many of America’s earliest
authors provide the vein of origin for the Gothic’s enduring shelf-life.
One
of the first authors encountered in this class to use the Gothic mechanic was
Washington Irving, author of The Legend
of Sleepy Hollow. One does not have to read far into this story to see the
Gothic influence upon Irving’s classic tale. But the most apparent example is
after Ichabod Crane has left the Van Tassel estate. The forest suddenly becomes
a dark and terrible entity in its own right. Ichabod approaches a tulip-tree
whose “limbs were gnarled and fantastic, large enough to form trunks from
ordinary trees, twisting down almost to the earth, and rising again into the
air.” The tree is a monster. Its parts are inflated beyond normal proportions,
and with its limbs “rising again into the air”, it feels as though it’s grabbing
for something. The manifestation of the Gothic through nature is, as defined in
this class, dubbed Wilderness Gothic. Rather than using the towering gables and
dark, eyeless towers of ancient castles found in Europe (of which America has
none anyway), Irving’s Gothic description here uses the trees and the
surrounding environment to embody the Gothic narrative. And upon entering this
forest in which this gnarled tree resides, Ichabod Crane remembers all “the
stories of ghosts and goblins that he had heard”. This is incorporation of
another Romantic theme: correspondence. The character’s emotions, along with his
mental state, are linked to the world around him; as the world becomes more
grotesque and haunted, so does the mind of Ichabod Crane.
Though Irving was one of earliest authors studied in this course to use the
Gothic narrative, he certainly was not the last, and his example was later
followed by perhaps one of the most famous of America’s Gothic writers, Edgar
Allan Poe. The Gothic prevails through Poe’s with all the power of an
encroaching mental affliction. Though, like Irving, Poe applies the Gothic to
nature as seen in The Legend of Sleepy
Hollow, Poe does not leave it to rest here. Indeed, the dark and depraved
pervades just about every aspect of Poe’s style, and an excellent example of
this Gothic infestation can be found in his story
The Fall of the House of Usher. The
story begins with the following: “During the whole of a dull, dark, and
soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low
in the heavens…”. Already Poe begins the story on dreary note, firmly creating
the dark atmosphere. Here, Poe applied the Gothic to nature just as Irving did,
but Poe does not stop with nature transforming into a dark presence. The more
material world becomes just as gloomy. Soon after the speaker sees the House of
Usher, a “a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit.” Like Ichabod Crane,
the speaker falls prey to the Gothic mechanic of correspondence; his mind is
under threat of becoming just as demented as the world around him once he sees
“the bleak walls” and “the vacant eye-like windows”. Even the works of man can
become haunted, much like the Gothic castles of Europe. But for Poe, the Gothic
did not end with the environment. As seen through the use of correspondence, the
Gothic can reflect the state of one’s mind, and Poe uses this convention to its
utmost extreme. The speaker in the story even acknowledges this gradual mental
decline in Roderick Usher. The speaker observes “And now, some days of bitter
grief having elapsed, an observable change came over the features of the mental
disorder of my friend.” Roderick is becoming like the house: haunted, even
possessed, by the darkness hovering around them. And this mental degradation
even takes the form of a sound: “from some very remote portion of the mansion,
there came, indistinctly to my ears…the echo (but a stifled and dull one
certainly) of the very cracking and ripping sound”. The gathering insanity has
manifested itself into something the speaker can hear. It becomes an “unusual
screaming or grating sound” that torments the speaker. And at last, this sound
turns out to be Madeline, Roderick’s formerly assumed to be deceased sister,
slowly making her way from out of her coffin to take revenge on her brother for
burying her alive. Poe has nurtured the Gothic to its most powerful state. It
has become a vessel to explore the dark corners of man’s mind.
Besides Poe, other authors used the Gothic to effective and striking extent,
such as religious conviction and acknowledgment of man’s hidden motives.
Nathaniel Hawthorne exploits this potential of the Gothic aptly in his story,
Young Goodman Brown. Again, the
Gothic transforms the landscape in this story as it did in Poe’s and Irving’s.
Goodman Brown is walking a path where he meets Goody Cloyse “so far in the
wilderness at nightfall.” Christian references follow soon after, adding to
atmosphere of devilishly concocted horror. The old woman screams “The devil!”
after the traveler touches her neck with his staff, which resembles a serpent’s
tail. And, as Goodman Brown continues deeper into the forest, which is called
“the heathen wilderness”, he looks up to the sky, “doubting whether there really
was a heaven above him. Yet there was the blue arch, and the stars brightening
in it.” Hawthorne has used the Gothic to transmit feelings of devilish evil, and
therefore sinful evil. By using the Gothic in this manner and context, Hawthorne
reveals the inner evils of man, much like Poe utilized the Gothic to
characterize man’s mental instability. But Hawthorne draws it back to the
Christian themes. As Goodman Brown continues deeper into the forest he comes
across “A grave and dark-clad company” that consists of many of the town’s most
pious characters, including “Good old Deacon Gookin” who “waited at the skirts
of that venerable saint, his revered pastor”. Quickly, the sinister reasons for
this gathering are revealed to Brown. The gathering sings a hymn that “expressed
all our nature can conceive of sin, and darkly hinted at far more.” And the
scene becomes increasingly hellish as the story continues. With “the peal of
that dreadful anthem there came a sound, as if the roaring wind, the rushing
streams, the howling beasts, and every other voice of the unconcerted wilderness
were mingling and according”. Fire enters the scene, as the “four blazing pines
threw up a loftier flame”. And the grotesque enters the congregation as well in
the form of “shapes and visages of horror on the smoke wreaths above the impious
assembly.” Hawthorne mixed the Gothic with religious conviction and heathenistic
devilry, adding another dimension to the Gothic form that allowed it not only to
analyze a man’s mind, but also his soul.
Following the implementations of the Gothic by Hawthorne, Rebecca Harding Davis
also used the Gothic to characterize the abhorrent working conditions of the New
England working class in her novel, The
Iron Mills. She describes the working men of the mills in a typical Gothic
form: “Masses
of men, with dull, besotted faces bent to the ground, sharpened here and there
by pain or cunning; skin and muscle and flesh begrimed with smoke and ashes…”
The working conditions of the iron mills have mutilated the workers into forms
that seem less than human. Furthermore, the smoke itself from the mills piles
the dark, Gothic dirt even higher: “The idiosyncrasy of this town is smoke. It
rolls sullenly in slow folds from the great chimneys of the iron-foundries, and
settles down in black, slimy pools on the muddy streets…” The world is covered
in this dark smoke which even bears a touchable substance in the form of “slimy
pools”. Through this more industrial incarnation of the Gothic, Davis has made
this world of hers dark, but also dirty and suffocating. And, like in
Goodman Brown, fire makes its
signature hellish appearance. As Deborah, one of the story’s characters, looks
over the city, she sees “a city of fires, that burned hot and fiercely in the
night. Fire in every horrible form: pits of flame waving in the wind; liquid
metal-flames writhing in tortuous streams through the sand.” And, again like the
grotesque shapes revealed by the towering flames in Hawthorne’s work, the fire
reveals the grotesque in this story, for over the “wide cauldrons filled with
boiling fire” are “bent ghastly wretches stirring the strange brewing.” Fire,
like in Hawthorne, is used to reveal the horridness and depravity of the
environment, and in this case, the environment is an industrial center. Davis
has taken the Gothic and used it to criticize these terrible conditions. And, in
classical use of the Gothic, these conditions render the people that inhabit
them into grotesque and horrifying visages.
The Gothic, as traced from the works of Irving to Davis, clearly has a lasting
appeal to the tastes of the audience, or else it would have expired long ago
rather than being constantly reiterated and reincarnated into many works of art
even today. One of the reasons that I have concluded for its constant use and
modification is that the Gothic serves as an excellent scalpel for dissecting
the darker parts of human existence. Poe, Hawthorne, and Davis took advantage of
this ability greatly, for they used it to examine insanity, spiritual evil and
hypocrisy, and the abuses and detriments of an industrial society, all of which
are themes that persist today. Furthermore, another aspect of the Gothic that
contributes to its endurance is its effect. Besides the dark and gloomy
atmosphere, the Gothic plays on one of mankind’s more innate fears: isolation.
By creating a dark atmosphere that surrounds the characters, and therefore the
audience, from every direction and in every possible way (emotional, physical,
and mental) the character becomes isolated and cut off any sort of haven. This
situation forces the character to think for his or herself, and therefore makes
the audience reflect on how they might act if placed in a similar scenario. And
another reason I have surmised for the Gothic’s existence is that, in a Romantic
way, it is an acknowledgement of the existence of the terrible. To simplify a
well-known truth of life, the evil and bad exist. Terrible things happen to good
and often unsuspecting people. And the Gothic, with its Romantic language and
grotesquely wonderful imagery, reminds us of the black recesses that fester in
the earth by having us, just for a moment, peer into them, so that, if we ever
dare to journey into their depths, we will be prepared.
The Gothic cannot be restrained to a single method. As the art of literature has
shown us through the workings of Irving, Poe, Hawthorne, and Davis, the Gothic
realm possesses an immense range of versatile capabilities in regards to
examining the darkness. And it is this enduring versatility, along with the
ability to inspire isolation and reveal the ugliness of human life, that proves
that the Gothic will continue to creep its way into all forms of art and
literature. The Gothic is a dark and gloomy method to tell a story, but it is
through this very darkness and gloominess that a Gothic tales urges the audience
to seek the light.
