LITR 4328 American Renaissance / Model Assignments

Sample Student Research Project 2018: Journal

Timothy Doherty

28 November 2018

Poe and Gothic Literature

Introduction

This project began with a simple question: What specific writers and works of Gothic fiction inspired Edgar Allan Poe to explore the genre now so closely associated with his name? As a habitually beginning writer, I wonder about things like these. I am aware that my style and the stories I choose to tell are informed by everything I’ve read that made an impression. Mostly, those impressions are subconscious at this point; I’ve read much but studied little. Which is why I’m here. To study and grow beyond the chronic aspirations of the hopeless dream. Ignorance necessitates questioning. However, ignorance also limits the ability to ask sophisticated questions. Sometimes you cringe, embarrassed, at the foolishness of your past self. You want to forget that the question was ever asked and committed to paper. A reset seems reasonable, but this format allows a little freedom to adjust and document the learning process. So, let the question stand or fall under the weight of examination. Let the question, at least, lead to further questions. Let the question serve as a signpost on an intellectual odyssey. 

From the Course Website:

Before we explore Poe’s position within the Gothic tradition, we must understand what we mean by “Gothic.” The obvious place to begin this inquiry is the web site for this course, curated by Dr. Craig White.  Within the context of literature, Gothic is often synonymous with horror. However, gothic elements are frequently used within stories in nearly any genre. Themes and elements in Gothic writing include haunted places, contrast between light and dark, fear, literal and figurative blood, death, and decay. Many of these elements are rooted in Christian mythology. Worth noting here and expanding later in this paper is the perceived contrast between “civilized” (Christian) Europeans and the “barbaric” Germanic tribes which managed to resist Greek and Roman conquest for centuries; the Goths who eventually flooded into southern Europe and helped to seal the fate of the Roman Empire.

Though the roots of Gothicism reach deep into European history, the formally defined genre is relatively young, an offshoot of eighteenth-century Romanticism. The consensus between multiple sources date the first gothic novel to The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, published in 1764.[1] The novel contains many of the elements that would go on to define the genre. I began reading the book before doing any other research for this project. Walpole’s novel focuses on the aftermath of the supernatural death of a lord’s son on the son’s wedding day. The whole story takes place in the form of a fictionally “found story”, dating back to medieval Italy. Found stories and found footage have become staples of the Gothic genres. Walpole uses archaic language to further the illusion of an old text translated into English. The story takes place in a haunted castle. The haunting of the castle corresponds to the haunted mind of the lord of the castle. This correspondence becomes a central pillar of most Gothic fiction. Dark, subterranean passageways and spooky sounds abound in the story, as do supernatural elements like paintings come to life and the unfolding of an ancient prophecy. Blood and questions of lineage are also central to the plot.[2] Anne Radcliffe published several Gothic novels in the 1790s, including The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Radcliffe helped to popularize the archetypal Gothic villain.[3] Matthew Lewis’s The Monk was published in 1796. During this time French and German writers developed their unique versions of the Gothic.

Gothic fiction continued to gain popularity in the early nineteenth century. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and other periodicals published what Poe called “tales of effect” which were “relished by every man of genius.” By the time Poe arrived on the scene in the 1830s, critics were unimpressed by Gothicism.[4] Gothic fiction soon became popular in the United States but required a new haunted setting due to the lack of centuries old castles of crumbling stone. Some authors turned to the dark and mysterious wilderness of the new world for ghosts and ominous shadows. Others, like Poe, set their stories in unnamed lands that contained medieval manors so that they could tell Gothic tales in European settings. “The Fall of the House of Usher” is a perfect example of European Gothicism growing in American soil, tended by American hands.

“During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher...”[5]

For the sake of clarity, this paper will focus, for the most part, on one work as the exemplar for the Gothic tradition in literature. “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe was first published in 1839 and continues to be a source of inspiration, contemplation, and debate. This opening sentence sets a dark precedent for the pages to come but it may be the brightest moment. From here, the natural tendency toward entropy carries the narrator and the reader into darker and darker territory—never relenting, no contrasting moment of hope in the inescapable slide into the final decay of the “‘House of Usher’—an appellation which seemed to include... both the family and the family mansion.”[6]

 “Poe and the Gothic tradition” - Benjamin F. Fisher

In the early days of this venture, I discovered an essay by Benjamin F. Fisher in Kevin J. Hayes’s The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe which reinforced some of the basic trivia I had read from internet sources. Fisher’s essay, “Poe and the Gothic tradition,” hinted at answers to my original question while opening my eyes to the star-like multitudes of branching rhizomes which weave the organic tapestry of the Gothic tradition. Questions inspired by the essay far outnumber the satisfactory answers (to my question) found in its pages.

Fisher begins his essay with a brief, general history of the term “Gothic.” We will set that aside for the moment and return to it later. The closest that Fisher comes to answering the question of Poe’s specific inspiration and the point that renders the question less relevant is the revelation that Poe’s original motivation for writing in the Gothic tradition was not passion for the subject matter or a pervading darkness he needed to express but the fact that, “despite any grumblings from reviewers,” Gothic fiction sold well.

Poe adopted the genre “with an eagerness that eventually led him into some amazing pathways.”[7] According to Fisher, Poe paid credit to stories published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine when reviewing Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales at different times in his life. Poe specifically cited works by William Gilmore Simms, Washington Irving, Charles Wilkins Webber, and Hawthorne “as praiseworthy specimens of American tale writing.”[8] Without giving specific examples, Fisher discusses Poe’s first published story, “Metzengerstein,” as nearly “an encyclopedia of ‘German’ supernatural horrors.”[9] German writers at the time were infamous for taking Gothic horror to extremes that English and American readers found unpalatable. Reviewers often criticized Poe’s “Germanism,” believing that Poe’s talents deserved a better outlet than what they considered “an outmoded type of fiction.”[10] Throughout the essay, Fisher discusses many of Poe’s Gothic works of poetry and prose, culminating with “one of Poe’s greatest achievements in the short story,” “The Fall of the House of Usher.”[11]

In Fisher’s discussion of “Usher” he details many of the Gothic elements at work in the story without satisfyingly answering my original question regarding Poe’s specific sources of literary inspiration. As mentioned earlier, the original question is less relevant than the second generation of questions which this research inspired. At the forefront of Fisher’s argument are the elements of physical and mental decay which saturate the story. Poe brings the Usher mansion to life with “vacant eye-like windows,” setting up a psychological metaphor within this grotesque head-like building. Fisher argues that when the narrator views the Usher mansion reflected in the tarn, he is really seeing his own repulsively disturbed face and mind.[12] The implications of this interpretation are interesting; is everything that follows from the narrator’s gaze into the tarn metaphorically happening within his own damaged psyche? What is the significance of the “barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn.”?[13] Here Fisher brushes against the importance which borders on necessity of correspondence between a haunted space and a haunted mind in Gothic fiction before moving on to other trademarks of Gothicism.

Fisher wonders whether Roderick Usher is Poe’s version of the classic, possibly incestuous “Gothic villain,” tortured by guilt and driven to bury his sister and his secret alive.[14] Poe never explicitly declares any incest between the twins, but he does mention the lack of branches on the Usher family tree, implying inbreeding would have been necessary to keep the genealogical house of Usher alive for countless generations. Roderick Usher’s artistic tendencies imply that he “feels no bounds of ordinary human love or decency.” In Fisher’s interpretation of the story, we now see “the deranged imaginative portion” of the narrator’s self bury “the physical, earthy, sexual elements without which no self can be integrated or functional in positive ways.”[15] What does Madeline’s escape from the vault and the death of the twins mean within this psychological metaphor? Fisher does not say. At this point he seems to fall back to a more literal interpretation of the story in which the narrator escapes the house before its collapse and feels compelled to tell the story.

Whatever interpretation a reader chooses to follow, the evidence compiled in Fisher’s essay points to Poe’s use of the existing tools of the Gothic tradition to elevate the genre from pure entertainment to subtly layered literature that thrills and enlightens nearly two centuries later.

“Poe’s greatest literary achievement was his renovation of the terror tale from what had been its principal intent, to entertain by means of ‘curdling the blood,’ to use a current phrase of the times, into what have been recognized as some of the most sophisticated creations in psychological fiction in the English language.”[16]

It is at this point that we officially abandon the original question of the origin of Poe’s style, having established that what Poe created and the lasting impact of those creations is more relevant to a scholar than a list of stories he may have read. I could have gone into this project with an answered question, found a handful of sources to back up my predetermined destination, and turned in a well-crafted research paper, but the idea of asking a question I legitimately wanted answered was too appealing. So, I asked a question that I thought might be easy to answer while also providing some interesting side-quests.

As it turns out, the question fails, on several levels, to deserve much further attention. First, my assumption about Poe’s reason for writing Gothic fiction was wrong. Second, the bits of answer I found were unmoving; who cares what specific list Poe read before writing? This was in a gray area dangerously close to falling for the biographical fallacy. Not exactly the same thing, but not as relevant a topic as I would like to spend my time exploring, either. Third was the dual discovery of the haunted house as a necessary component of Gothic fiction, and the fascinating background of the adjective “gothic.” It is to these topics we turn in the final pages of this paper.

A Brief History of the word “Gothic”

The term “gothic” was born during the Renaissance (15^th century) as a derogatory word for the perceived destruction of classical art forms by architects designing cathedrals In the 12^th century that were radically different from the Roman tradition.[17] This perceived attack on art perfected by Romans drew comparison to the literal destruction of the Roman empire which was partially catalyzed by the Goths, a collection of Germanic tribes long considered primitive compared to the ”civilized“ Christian world. If Gothic culture, language and people survived to this day, the common usages of the word “gothic” would probably be considered insensitive. However, the language and culture of the Goths was left behind as the people assimilated into the Christian religion. There is simply nobody left to be offended by the word.

Benjamin Fisher offered some insight into the evolution of the term “gothic.” In the sixteenth century, King Henry VIII of England untethered the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church. Following this break, many Gothic building fell into disrepair. This physical decay corresponded to feelings of animosity toward Roman Catholicism encouraged by the Church of England which added a layer of negativity to what the abandoned churches symbolized. This abundance of dark ruins in the English countryside provided moody settings for stories of the grotesque and supernatural which became the Gothic tradition.

“The Fall of the House, from Poe to Percy: The Evolution of an Enduring Gothic Convention” - William Moss

The haunted house should be a tired trope by now. Literature, movies, and local lore overflow with countless iterations of the simple premise of a building which, due to supernatural or historical influence, has the power to terrify. Haunted spaces grow like weeds in the minds of writers both inside and outside of the Gothic tradition. We should be tired of the motif, ready for something new, but readers and moviegoers seem as happy as ever to spread the seeds of this fascinating specter. William Moss’s essay examines the flourishing of the haunted house as the most definitive element in Gothic literature. According to Moss, Poe used the established concept of a decaying, haunted building and its violent end to build the foundation for American Gothicism.

By the time Poe wrote “The Fall of the House of Usher,” he was intimately familiar with Gothic horror stories. In “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” Poe parodied Gothic conventions. Poe had the ability to balance parody of and reverence to Gothicism. As Moss puts it, “Poe directly confronts the tendencies of this genre toward the sublime on the one hand and the ridiculous on the other.”[18] Within the story of the Usher twins Poe parodies the Romantic narrative with the story of “Sir Lancelot Canning” which the narrator reads to Roderick Usher in an effort to calm him. The story has the opposite effect, of course. Roderick Usher’s song within the story, “The Haunted Palace,” is a stylized version of a haunted place as a metaphor for a haunted mind. In this case, the haunted palace is Roderick’s mind.[19] In this case, it is not a completely original invention, but the expert use of a traditional tool that casts an unavoidable shadow on Poe’s successors. This fact is more remarkable for the lack of real ruins in antebellum America for Poe to use as a setting. “Poe had no choice but to set his house on foreign soil...” America would not have its own haunted castles until after the Civil War, when the plantations of the South and their brutal histories would stoke the fire of American Gothicism.[20] Despite Poe’s foreign setting, his work stands as a firm declaration of American Gothic fiction’s legitimacy and durability. As Moss’s essay focuses on Southern Gothic literature, he sums up Poe’s contribution eloquently:

“On the ruins of the house of Usher, Poe lays the foundation of a Southern Gothic.”[21]

Conclusion

Gothic literature as we now know it did not begin with Edgar Allan Poe. The word itself references a people and culture long dead when Poe was born. He was not even the first American to harvest that fallow field, but Poe is the name we remember. In his day he wrote to live. Poe embraced the Gothic for its marketability and might have been forgotten in the seasonal plowing and sowing of popular trends. He might have been content to earn a living and then fade into obscurity. What benefit does fame hold for a corpse? But Poe is not forgotten. Edgar Allan Poe adopted a critically despised form of popular art, practiced that art prolifically, and earned a place in the literary canon.

"Great Star" flag of pre-Civil War USA