LITR 4232 American
Renaissance
LITR 4232 2008 final exam
Essay Answers to Question 1: Characteristics, variations and meaning of the Gothic
Alicia Atwood
The Dead with a Pulse: A Look into the Gothic Minds of Poe and Hawthorne
Essay Question 1, Course Objective 2
Perhaps nothing is more identifiable with the American Romantic authors than the themes of the gothic and sublime. Irving gave us a thrill a minute with his story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” with headless horsemen and crazy dark, knobby trees all over the place. The black setting and the wilderness gave sense of danger and intensity. James Fenimore Cooper took us into an untamed forest with good Indians and bad Indians to see if we could come out on the other side along with his characters. The Romantics in their later years continued with a strong theme of writing gothic images and symbols into their prose and poetry. They took what Irving had given them, with his dark forests and scary headless horsemen, and refined it to make it less of a tangible gothic and more of a mental or spiritual gothic. Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne especially wrote into their work some strong and deeply gothic elements. Poe’s dark abysses always seem to be in the soul and one’s mind instead of the outside world, like in the loss the poet feels for the young and beautiful Annabel Lee. Hawthorne’s darkness is in the spiritual sense and in the feelings of his character Goodman Brown, especially towards the end of the story.
Poe’s darkness is not limited to his character’s souls. Poe often manifests his character’s emotions and projects them onto the scenery, like the dark and horrid house from “The Fall of the House of Usher” or the graveyard in “Annabel Lee”. Since I’m focusing on “Annabel Lee”, the graveyard will be explored deeper. This nasty graveyard is the manifestation of his character’s soul; while Annabel Lee is the one physically dead and the narrator the one physically alive, in spirit it is reversed. The narrator perhaps is the one more suited to be in the graveyard, for his heart is still beating but his soul is dead without his beautiful Annabel Lee. A graveyard is where one puts the ruins of a person’s body after their soul leaves, and his soul has left, but his body cannot yet be buried. It reminds me of the quote from Chapter Sixteen of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, “Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!...I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!” This narrator, like Heathcliff, has lost his true love and now must go on with some odd form of life that is devoid of a true happy soul, for it is in the grave with Annabel Lee. The narrator even uses some of the same language as Heathcliff: “And so…I lie down by the side / of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride” [emphasis added]. In this way, the main gothic element in Poe’s work “Annabel Lee” is not the death, graveyard, or loss, but it is the despair of soul in the narrator that is the true horror—we don’t fear graveyards as much as we fear losing the one that was meant for us and it affecting us so much we cannot get on with our life.
Nathaniel Hawthorne does a similar thing in “Young Goodman Brown”. The physically gothic elements are certainly present throughout the story, including a deep forest, a scary companion, and a mystery to what exactly they are going in the woods to do. But the scariest, saddest, most gothic element of the story is Goodman Brown’s loss of his wife and the loss of his faith afterwards. It is treated with shortness—the rest of his life only takes up the final three or four paragraphs of the story, but it is the most depressing part. He has lost both of his wonderful faiths—his good wife with the pink ribbons, a symbol of femininity and purity, and his spiritual Christian faith. His emptiness and harshness that he feels after he is emptied of both of his Faiths is also likened to that of Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights. Even his “dying hour was gloom” and he never recovered from this terrible night in the woods. Hawthorne’s gothic is much more in the spiritual realm of Goodman Brown, but it produces much the same results as Poe’s “Annabel Lee” narrator. While the events of that sublime night may be thrilling, the aftermath is one that instills dread. The change was immediate, as well. He went from being a goodly, honest, happy fellow with a wonderful wife to being a “stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man”. The gothic experience has made him into a gothic soul, which is much more terrifying that just a simple night in the woods. Hawthorne is refining Irving’s gothic style to make it more horrifying intellectually; instead of having the character die, which is like a horror movie, the character lives many, many years with a loss that is like death, which would be a psychological thriller movie.
Poe and Hawthorne took the grounds laid by writers like Cooper and Irving and turned the gothic into an internal terror in addition to external forces. In a truly Romantic style, they mapped out another gothic landscape inside the mind, and where Cooper or Irving would have simply killed a character, Poe and Hawthorne kept him alive and had him die on the inside. No matter what plane it appears on, the “gothic” continued to thrive in Romantic literature thanks to these authors who wrote for us thrills, chills, and a lifetime of despair.
Natalie Walker
. . . In Washington Irving’s story of Sleepy Hollow, he is able to make the reader turn that sharp corner in the story, when Ichabod is riding home. Throughout the entire story the mood has been festive and light. However, all of a sudden when Ichabod rides home after the party the mood abruptly changes. “It was the very witching time of night that Ichabod, heavyhearted and bedrooped, pursued his travel homewards…” (980). This quote shows the sharp turn Irving makes in the overall mood of the story. At this point in the story the reader knows that some kind of change is happening. The mysteriousness of the time of night gives the reader a sense that the journey ahead contains an unknown and unseen danger. The outcome may not be clear but the reader now has an uncomfortable feeling and is afraid, before the character is afraid, of what is about to happen.
Similarly in Cooper’s tale of Last of the Mohicans, he uses the gothic to foreshadow events that will happen later on in the story. Cooper uses gothic techniques in his story to account for the tension that exists between the Indians and the colonists. He describes the forest in a way to give the reader a false sense of security. His descriptions make the forest familiar, and yet within that familiarity there is something unfamiliar, and that is what adds to the mystery of the setting. “ …- yes, yes, there is a tramping that I mistook for the falls- and – but here they come themselves; God keep them from the Iroquois!” (1009). This comment changes the preceding mood of a calm and relaxed environment. The very environment that the reader was comfortable in has become a dangerous place with hidden traps and enemies. . . .
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