(2018 midterm assignment) Model Student Midterm answers 2018 #1: Long Essays (Index)

LITR 4328 American Renaissance

Ruth Brown

3 October 2018

Mind Games: How the Gothic Interacts within Romanticism       

          Before taking this course, I thought I had a pretty solid understanding of the term “romanticism” in the context of literature. I knew it wasn’t just a love story, but that it encompassed things like nature, a journey or quest, and perhaps an embellished way of writing. What I was surprised to discover then was that gothic fit under the category of romanticism. After learning more deeply what romanticism refers to, things like emotions and imagination taking precedence over logic and the presence of excess and intensification of feeling and experience, I can understand that the gothic would represent the darker end of the spectrum. By reading and discussing the texts from class, I have been able to learn how the gothic truly fits into the American Romantic Era, or American Renaissance.

          I started my journey by first trying to understand what the term gothic means. In the context of literature, it can include haunted spaces or minds, death and decay, interaction between light and dark, mysterious people, sounds, or spaces, and can also be described by words like horror, thriller, or psychological. In the same sense that romanticism elevates the good, beautiful, and ideal in life, the gothic elevates the dark, macabre, and mysterious.

          Poe is who I immediately think of when American gothic writing is brought up. He is a master at weaving the aforementioned attributes together into a romantic, yet dark tale. Ligeia is a wonderful example of how the gothic interacts with the romantic. There are the surface descriptions of gloom and decay, such as at the beginning of the story when the narrator first meets Ligeia in “some large, old, decaying city near the Rhine” and when the narrator in his agony and sorrow moves to “an abbey…in one of the wildest and least frequented portions of fair England.” However, a deeper aspect of gothic that I had not previously attributed to the term is the haunting of the mind. I am familiar with haunted houses and castles pertaining to the term gothic, but didn’t think of the mind as also being a place that could be haunted. In Ligeia, the narrator is so consumed with the loss of his first wife that his mind begins to spiral out of his control.  In the end, Ligeia is brought back to life through the death of his second wife. Whether or not this is a true occurrence or a matter of his mind is not fully stated, but it would seem that it exists as a hallucination of his twisted mind. This aspect of the gothic interconnects with romanticism, as it is not rational or logical thought, but rather an excess of his imagination and emotion.

          Another story I think of when American gothic writing is mentioned is The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. I had never read this story before taking this class, but was familiar with the name and the legend of the headless horseman through pop culture. Just as Poe describes the surroundings and landscape through a gothic perspective, Irving infuses the gothic into the natural surroundings. He contrasts the opposite sides of romanticism by describing Tarry Town as “one of the quietest places in the whole world” and a place of “uniform tranquility” against Sleepy Hollow, a place full of “strange sights,” “haunted spots,” and air that has a “witching influence.” Romanticism holds nature as beauty and truth, which indicates that nature possesses a power to be able to bring about these traits in the viewer. The gothic in nature is then the side of that power that can be dangerous and unveil the hard and frightening truths of life. For example, when Ichabod Crane wonders through the woods at night and hears the common sounds from nature, “the moan of the whip-poor-will from the hillside, the boding cry of the tree toad, that harbinger of storm, the dreary hooting of the screech owl, to the sudden rustling in the thicket of birds frightened from their roost,” it is not the actual sounds that frighten him, but the power of these sounds to stir up all the marvelous, fantastical, and frightening stories he has stored within his mind.

          As one can see, the mind plays quite an important aspect of the gothic and romantic and Emily Dickinson explores this very well in her poem, “I felt a funeral in my brain.” Whereas in the previous two texts discussed, the mind was a thing not fully explored, but hinted at, Dickinson goes directly into the mind to examine the process occurring within. Romanticism can often be seen as a journey to discover one’s innermost self, and while there is discovery and a journey within the self depicted in this poem, it is not a journey of beauty and life. Just as the gothic could be found in the sounds of the woods of Sleepy Hollow, the gothic can be found in this poem through the repetition of sounds within the narrator’s mind.  The “treading-treading” of the first stanza and the “beating-beating” of the second stanza give a sense of foreboding and dread, which leads in the third stanza to a box being lifted and carried across her soul. This box seems to represent a coffin bearing her dead mind and it leads to the breaking of a plank and reason in the fifth stanza. Romanticism prioritizes feeling and emotion over reason, but in this poem it is taken farther by the gothic as reason completely drops and plunges out of the mind, leaving the narrator in a cage in an unknown world where she is “Finished knowing.”

          Another work that showcases the gothic aspect of the mind as a cage is The Lamplighter by Maria Susanna Cumins. It contrasts physical captivity against mental captivity. In the first chapter, Gerty finds herself “locked up for the night in the dark garret—Gerty hated and feared the dark.” It’s not a haunted castle, but a dark garret is equally dissatisfying sounding and again one sees the extreme emotion in Gerty’s hatred and fear of the dark. This is contrasted against the captivity in her mind because she has no way of expressing or dealing with these extremes except to "stamp and scream…beat open the door, and shout.” It is only when she has exhausted her mind that she can find escape from the dark and discover a light. She looks out the window in her room, and consequently the window within her mind, and sees “one bright star. She thought she had never seen anything half so beautiful.” She redirects her mind to swing from the gothic end of the spectrum where she sees darkness and fear, to the romantic end where she notices light and a kind face within a star.

          The texts of Ligeia, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, “I felt a funeral in my brain,” and The Lamplighter showed me how the gothic can exist and intertwine within the romantic genre. Although it might seem at first glance that the gothic is in direct contrast to romanticism, it is actually working within the category as an end on a spectrum of intensity. As a pendulum swings back and forth, the texts within the American Romantic Era, or American Renaissance, swing from light to dark, beauty to terror, and truth to deception of the mind.