(2018 midterm assignment) Sample Student Midterm Answers 2018 #3: Web Highlights (Index)

LITR 4328 American Renaissance

Kristina Koontz

Embrace the Dark: The Haunting Romanticism of the Gothic

As a writer and poet before ever entering this course, I have experienced the peculiar moment of not knowing I knew something while using it extensively in my own work, thus realizing I am a romantic writer without being intently romantic as a person. One of those things that I repeatedly used was a weaving of light and dark and a lingering sense of dread and horror which is quintessential of the gothic style of literature. Through lecture I learned the general gist of it, but after reviewing Kimberly Hall’s “The American Gothic Horror Story”, Teresa Edeen’s “Aesthetic of the Macabre”, and Rebecca Dyda’s “Intensifying the Romantic through the gothic and the sublime” I think I have a more specialized view of the gothic, its seemingly weird, contradictory tie to Romanticism, and why it is often woven in with the sublime.

Rebecca Dyda states that the gothic is a Romantic concept and style that takes “normal things, such as castles, woods, etc. and makes them into dark and unsettling forces.” While this may not seem inherently “romantic” it is – you are giving life and meaning, albeit the scary, foreboding kind, to something that doesn’t always portray that. If you look at a forest objectively, in the style of the Enlightenment, it is just that – a forest. A bunch of trees. That’s not inherently scary. The romantic gothic writer endeavors to make that simple, ordinary thing into something that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end or suck in a breath of horror or anticipation. It finds a way to make something “not quite right.” Poe, she points out, focuses mostly on the fear and isolation aspects of the gothic style, best portrayed in his story “Ligeia” that Virginia talked about in our class. That story uses the ideas of loss, isolation, morbidity, and a bit of psychological horror at its conclusion. Is he dead? Is that how he can see Ligeia? Or is he just hallucinating from all the opium he’s been on? Poe’s gothic likes to leave that sort of thing up to the reader to decide, and that is also in the style of romanticism – not everything is going to have an answer, and maybe shouldn’t have an answer. That’s what the gothic loves: the unknown. Rebecca also points out that “American gothic” and “English gothic” (she refers to this as “traditional gothic”) are very different breeds. European gothic has the advantage of having lots of history and old buildings to turn into creepy, haunted venues, and while Poe is an American writer, he tends to use English gothic ideas, something she misses out on exploring – the Rhine river the narrator of “Ligeia” mentions is a European river, not American, for example. America does not have much “history”, so the American gothic focuses on “haunted nature,” seen best through Washington Irving’s “Sleepy Hollow.” Haunted bridges. Haunted forests. Gothic skews a generally pretty thing like a forest or a quaint bridge and turns it scary.

Gothic isn’t always about the fear though. Kimberly reminds her readers that gothic is capable of some humor – that’s not usually a standard for romantics, but Irving does this well in both “Rip Van Winkle” and “Sleepy Hollow” while arguing for the haunted nature part of gothic. Kimberly astutely continues Rebecca’s idea of fear and says that this gothic habit of letting your fears run wild – Ichabod being chased out by a headless horseman, or the “Ligeia” narrator not really knowing if he brought his lady love back or if he’s just gone mad (the “psychological horror” Rebecca mentions – it makes it so you “feel you can’t trust your own senses.” Gothic likes to mess with your head, which thus makes the fear more acute. That’s part of the aesthetic, Teresa posits, as gothic can get “philosophical” at times – it’s not all about scary ghost stories. “Ligeia” does this. “Rip Van Winkle” does this. It’s an interesting train of thought she has going in her essay at that point. Sure, Ichabod could have been chased out by the Headless Horseman in “Sleepy Hollow” Kimberly argues…or it could have been his “romantic rival playing a nasty trick” to get him out of the picture. I actually had to stop at that point in her essay and go “Oh my God. How the heck did I miss that interpretation?!” I’d never thought about Sleepy Hollow that way before even though I love crime dramas; I’d gotten so absorbed in the horror of the Headless Horseman and the creepy nature I’d neglected to look at the tale objectively. It is a romance narrative. It kind of makes sense. Brom is the sort of guy who would do that. Her little supposition would turn “Sleepy Hollow” from gothic to crime drama, since Ichabod’s body was never found. Brom Bones always laughing whenever the shattered pumpkin was mentioned in the story’s retelling is a weird light-dark weaving. It leaves open the idea Ichabod might have run off in abject terror, and Brom’s just amused he scared him so well, but there’s still I think the chance that Ichabod’s body might have been disposed of skillfully. There’s never a concrete answer given. I think gothic does kind of play with the mystery genre in more ways than one that way. It leaves things open. It forces the reader to ask themselves “What really happened?” Mystery is about looking for the answer just as much as not finding it. Gothic just makes it “scary or supernatural mystery” instead of the classic “whodunnit” kind of mystery I’m used to.

But I think that’s the point of gothic and that interwoven mystery: you don’t look at stuff objectively when you’re running scared from something, and that’s the romantic encapsulation of the gothic. It’s supposed to scare you, it’s supposed to make your emotions run high, it’s supposed to make you question your senses and your interpretation of things. Gothic plays with human fears. You’re not supposed to look at it through the lens of objective analysis. Like Rebecca argues: “Why do you go see a scary movie?” Answer: it’s thrilling. That adrenaline rush as your brain forces you to scream and shiver at a movie jump scare or someone leaping out at you in a haunted house is exciting to some people (just admittedly not someone with chronic anxiety issues like me) For normal people anyway, it’s fun to be afraid sometimes – so long as you want to be.