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(2016
midterm assignment) Model Student Midterm answers 2016 #1: Long Essays (Index) |
LITR 4328 |
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Kimberly Hall
September 28, 2016
The American Gothic Horror Story
Halloween is just around the corner, and I have a set of some of Edgar
Allan Poe’s most famous poems and short stories on tape just waiting for me. Poe
has always been a favorite of mine to read, especially in October, and to me he
was always the quintessential gothic Romantic writer. Everything he wrote
sounded like a ghost story, and I loved it. In this class, though, more of the
gothic writing we are studying is in the wilderness gothic style, which I do not
have much experience with. With that in mind, I would like to discuss the
similarities and differences between the traditional gothic style and the
developing wilderness gothic style, exemplified by the works of Washington
Irving and James Fenimore Cooper.
Edgar Allan Poe, while not the earliest American gothic writer we have
studied in class, made the most use of traditional European gothic motifs and
themes. In Ligeia, Poe even makes
direct reference to the Rhine river, and to Germany being the origin of Romantic
literature. Poe also uses the sublime and a traditional gothic color scheme,
black and white and red all being associated with both beauty and death, to make
his imagery as vivid as it is disturbing. Death and decay in one’s surroundings
is characteristic of the gothic tradition, and true to the traditional gothic
style, Poe creates psychologically unsettling scenes and feelings of both awe
and fear with his descriptions of decaying isolated buildings and shadowy
corridors. The following is an example of this from
Ligeia:
“The
gloomy and dreary grandeur of the building, the almost savage aspect of the
domain, the many melancholy and time-honored memories connected with both, had
much in unison with the feelings of utter abandonment which had driven me into
that remote and unsocial region of the country.”
The feelings that passages like this create are probably familiar to
anyone who has spent the night in an old house: isolation, awe of the history
but fear of its decay, and all together, fear of dying alone. Poe takes
time-honored history and turns it into time-honored terror. The wilderness
gothic style seeks to create similar feelings of fear and isolation, but instead
of setting psychological hauntings in a decrepit castle or mansion, as
traditional gothic writers would, wilderness gothic writers transplant these
stories into untamed forests, which were abundant in the Americas in a way that
castles were not.
While
taking more comedic cues in regard to characterization than is typical of
Romantic literature, Washington Irving exemplifies the early development of the
wilderness gothic style. In both Rip Van
Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy
Hollow, Irving takes his characters into dark forests, inside which always
lurked various unknown perils. Rip Van Winkle takes a tumble “into a broad deep
basin, black from the shadows of the surrounding forest”, only to discover upon
leaving said forest that he has been missing for thirty years; Ichabod Crane,
“in the dark shadow of the grove” outside Sleepy Hollow, “beheld something huge,
misshapen, and towering...gathered up in the gloom, like some gigantic monster
ready to spring”. Like Poe, Irving’s settings create feelings of fear and
isolation, and the fear is only heightened because of the distortion of the
senses. Like the narrator of Ligeia,
who can’t tell whether he really brought his beloved back to life or if there is
simply “a mad disorder in [his] thoughts”; like Ichabod, who may have been
chased out of town by a headless horseman, or maybe was driven out by his
romantic rival playing a nasty trick; you almost feel like you can’t trust your
own perceptions, which only serves to make the situation correspondingly more
frightening.
Unlike Poe, though, Irving plays on fears of the unknown by placing the
characters (and subsequently, the readers) in a vast unexplored wilderness. At
this period in history, vast unexplored wilderness was something that the
Americas had in abundance, so instead of setting scary scenes in haunted
castles, American writers leaned towards setting scary scenes in a dark forest.
Poe plays upon the fears of death and isolation. Irving and other wilderness
gothic writers play upon the fear of the unknown.
Though not primarily a gothic writer, James Fenimore Cooper also used
elements of the wilderness gothic in The
Last of the Mohicans, when the need for fear and tension arose. That same
fearful feeling of walking into the unknown is created with imagery like a “dark
and tangled pathway”, and “numberless trunks of trees, that rose, in dark lines,
in the intermediate space”. Instead of turning a castle or mansion into a
labyrinth, like Poe would, Cooper uses forests and caves with hidden passages to
fuel tension. As the woods get thicker, your anxiety increases. A horse neighing
becomes “a cry, that seemed neither
human nor earthly...penetrating not only the recesses of the cavern, but to the
inmost hearts of all who heard it”. Cooper also uses the gothic
color scheme that Poe would, but then turns it on its head and applies it to
race relations, which played a bigger part in the wilderness gothic style than
it did in the traditional gothic.
While it really started in the early nineteenth century, the wilderness
gothic is still developing and evolving today, and it can be easily identified
in contemporary horror fiction such as
The Blair Witch Project, Gravity
Falls, and Supernatural.
Similarly, the traditional European style of gothic horror is still very present
in contemporary horror fiction, such as Anne Rice’s
The Vampire Chronicles, and the
Hannibal Lecter series in all of its incarnations. Some authors like Stephen
King make use of both styles in their writings. I love it all.
Compared to traditional gothic Romantic works, the wilderness gothic
style is more characteristically American, simply due to the nature of the
environment. My examination of these writings, though, leads me to believe that
while the setting may change, the song remains the same–gothic horror is still
gothic horror, in all its sublime psychological glory.
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