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(2017
midterm assignment) Sample Student Midterm Answers 2017 #3: Web Highlights (Index) |
LITR 4328 |
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Christa Van Allen
Web Highlights: Danse Macabre in the
Haunted Woods
1.)
“Opposite
of the bright, rich portrayal of nature and heroism in Romanticism, the gothic
capitalizes on tropes and devices such as the interplay of light and dark,
extreme highs and lows, and the duality of Gothicism and Romance” (Eric Howell,
Long Essay 2016 Midterm).
2.) “American poets or authors have used
the woods as a representation of the gothic. In Washington Irving’s The
Legend of Sleepy Hollow, we see the Americanized concept of gothic unfold
beautifully. We see the themes of gothic reveal in the wilderness,
“What fearful shapes and shadows beset
his path, amidst the dim and ghastly glare of a snowy night! With what wistful
look did he eye every trembling ray of light streaming across the waste fields
from some distant window! How often was he appalled by some shrub covered with
snow, which, like a sheeted specter, beset his very path!”(18). It
is the forest in Irving’s tale that is the most haunted and mysterious to all
the people. It is the woods that are forbidden because evil is lurking there.”
(Vaneza M. Cervantes, Long Essay 2016 Midterm).
3.)
“Irving’s
settings create feelings of fear and isolation, and the fear is only heightened
because of the distortion of the senses” (Kimberly Hall, Long Essay 2016
Midterm).
The first submission by Eric Howell,
“American
Romanticism: As Deep and Complex as Love”,
splits hairs with me. Whilst I personally agree with and enjoy his commentary on
light and dark interplay in gothic writing, I feel he is never the less mistaken
in seeing duality between Romanticism and Gothicism. The gothic is ultimately a
sub-genre of Romanticism, a piece of the whole, and not a subversion. Romantic
techniques feed into the gothic and thus they cannot be in complete contrast.
They both take you on a sensual experience, because the descriptions are so
detailed that you can imagine the moments as though your senses perceive them
before you. The gothic approaches the grotesque but it does so with the same use
of symbols, metaphors, and the sublime that Romanticism does.
I took what I read within Eric’s essay and applied it to Vaneza’s
revelations of the wilderness as Americanized gothic in
“The Core of Romance found in Nature, and
the Americanized theme of Gothic”. Miss Cervantes followed her note with a
quote from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
which showed the use of shadowy night at ends with the snow covered, moonlit
landscape. The way they distorted sensory information makes everything look
threatening and evil, and directly parallels Howell’s observations on light and
dark extremes.
Vaneza’s description of sensory manipulation by the environment is
further elaborated by Kimberly Hall in her essay,
“The American Gothic Horror Story”.
Though the atmosphere is admittedly intimidating in Americanized gothic horror,
the mind does not typically begin filling in the blanks with perceived threats
unless it first feels vulnerable. To be specific, Irving’s settings are so
effective because they develop an air of isolation. Being alone for a human in a
hostile environment is always a threat to the human mind. Your brain begins to
see danger everywhere regardless of its actual presence, and if you overtax the
mind on what could be, then you are not likely to be effective when the real
danger shows its face.
The Gothic can be effective regardless of the setting it exists in
because it act in equal measure to entice your curiosity and then expose you to
the worst possible thing your mind can imagine once you are isolated. If it is
effectively described in written word, it can even pull the reader into the
illusion of unease it presents. Up until I read into these assignments, I could
not accurately understand what made the American woods such an unsettling place
to begin with. When I read stories like Irving’s, my thoughts were always on the
‘real’ and present monster. If the atmosphere affected me in any way I rarely
took notice of it once the Headless Hessian made his appearance.
However, now I can see facets of setting I was passively ignoring before.
It really does help to build up on the paranoia Ichabod shows before the monster
because it adds an extra dimension of doubt. Was he ever really being chased or
did his mind finally demand action after too much stationary panic? Much like
the ending which questions his disappearance, it is fun to speculate on what may
have really happened.
And finally, though this class is primarily in literature, I found that
the gothic can be gauged equally as well in other media such as music.
Throughout most of my paper I besieged my ears with Camille Saint-Saëns
Danse Macabre and discovered to my
delight that just as I could picture the tones falling over a crumbling old
castle, I could feel its presence in the dark and dappled woods of the American
Renaissance.
