LITR 4232: American Renaissance
UHCL, spring 2001
Sample Student Paper

Thomas Parker
American Renaissance
Dr. White
April 22, 2001

American Gothic:

"Sleepy Hollow," "Ligeia," and "You Know They Got a Hell of a Band"

America is haunted, by headless horsemen and bloody battles, by addiction and a self gratifying obsession with immortality. America has a long-standing tradition with the gothic, and some of our most widely recognized authors, such as Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, and Stephen King, a more recent author borrowed from popular literature, utilize it frequently if not wholly in their writing. The gothic is an intrinsic part of our national identity, inhabiting our folklore, our literature, and influencing the way in which we view our celebrities and ultimately, ourselves.

In his commentary on the gothic, Nightmare on Main Street, Mark Edmunson offers his take on the relationship between national identity and the form:

Unsentimental, enraged by gentility and high-mindedness, skeptical about progress in any form, the Gothic mind is antithetical to all smiling American faiths. A nation of ideals, America has also been, not surprisingly, a nation of hard disillusionment, with a fiercely reactive Gothic Imagination. (4-5)

There is much to American Gothicism. It lies deeply in the conscious awareness of the culture. Its roots are as diverse as the witch trials and the knowledge that one race of people committed genocide against another in order to obtain the land where our most illustrious universities and homogenous strip malls now sit. The character of America is in itself a gothic one. We hold aloft one set of ideas about freedom and equality, while graciously looking the other way when the savage hypocrisy that keeps the daily functions of life on an even keel rears its ugly head to swallow one, or even a thousand, victims. We take our most gothic figures, such as Poe, and further gothicize them by turning them into lunatics and drug fiends (Lecture White 03/06/2001). Out of the ivory towers of the arts and sciences and down under the plebeian belly of society where our culture is most often expressed and consumed, the gothic finds its sacred home, its sanctuary, where the light of reason and acceptance are less likely to shine. In this way, America is likened to the standard hero-villain of the gothic novel, possessed of an indecent and un-redeemable past, but struggling blindly against his own darkness. Just as the narrator of Poe's "Ligeia" who fervently holds on to the image of his beloved, and is incapable of feeling anything but loss after her death, is repulsed at her return, our nation thoroughly hopes for and embraces its set of the aforementioned ideals, but secretly dreads and is horrified by, their actualization.

In Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" Ichabod Crane's weakness, his flaw, is not listening to the voices of the Age of Reason that Irving embraces, but rather the foolish superstitions of the simple women folk who inhabit the quaint hamlet of Sleepy Hollow. Under the fevered influence of regional tales of a headless horseman whose apparition rides through the night, and inflamed by the accounts of witchcraft in Salem by Cotton Matter, Ichabod tosses logic and reason aside and instead abandons himself to the sensuality of abject horror. "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" is perhaps the most widely knows pieces of American fiction. The tale has survived the generations, often passed between them in the form of oral storytelling. However, it would seem that the tale has lost something in its translation from the printed word into the realm of folklore. Like others I have discussed the subject with, I was told a variation of the "Legend of Sleepy Hollow" as a child. The version passed on to me included the horseman riding down a deserted country lane in the pitch black of night (something incomprehensible to the modern city dweller whose night is a diffused version that attains at best a dusty rose and cold gray/blue hue) looking for his missing head and willing to take someone else's in exchange. The thrilling sense of terror was more acute for me having been raised in deep wooded country and driven down crude roads that mimic the sounds of a galloping horse as rubber tires struck crevices and undulating pavement poured hurriedly over restless black clay. The gothic elements of Irving's tale have survived and made their way into seemingly national folklore that translates with equal fluency from New England to Central Texas.

What is missing from this story is Irving's social critique and his sense of wit. With the "Legend of Sleepy Hollow" the monster has triumphed over the man as irrational fear triumphs over Ichabod Crane. That the gothic aspects of Irving's tale have most firmly embedded themselves in the cultural bedrock of the nation, seems to speak to something larger than coincidence. It would seem that such a transformation stems from the culture which produced the tale, buried it, and resurrected it to life, albeit somewhat changed, like Ligeia herself.

Our culture's tendency toward the Gothic is borne out by moviegoers who pack the theaters to be terrified by films such as "Psycho," "Halloween," and "Hannibal". The same proof can be found in the avid horror readers who stock their bookshelves with the latest novels by Anne Rice involving vampires and witches. That Stephen King is one of the best known literary figures of our era may also be attributed to our love affair with fear. In light of America's tendency towards the gothic, it is not surprising that a writer as submerged in the logic of the Age of Reason as Irving could produce a piece as gothic as "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow's," appears in its vernacular form. Also given our nation's historical connections to the gothic, it is not surprising that this same nation might give birth to the popular phenomenon of Stephen King's novels and short stories.

Stephen King's short story, "You Know They Got a Hell of a Band" is a uniquely American piece of gothicism and utilizes much of the same haunted forest imagery as Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," but shifts the scene west to Oregon. King uses the probable scenario of a middle class road trip vacation in which the male driver takes a short cut resulting in the couple becoming horribly lost in a gothic wilderness:

The balsam smell of the trees was heavenly, and she thought there was something beautiful about the silence, unbroken as it was by the sound of any motor (even the far off drone of an airplane) or human voice. . .but there was something spooky about it as well. Even the sounds she could hear - - the tu-whit! of a bird in the shadowy firs, the sough of the wind, the rough rumble of the Princess's diesel engine - - served to emphasize the wall of quiet encircling them. (King 291)

In this passage King begins to illustrate how, to an unaccustomed urbanite, an expansive wilderness may become imbued with terror by the psyche that perceives its "otherness". The couple travel further and further into the wilderness on a road that is quickly disintegrating and becoming narrower with each passing mile. Now the "scruffy furs" on each side of them look to Mary "not like hungry guests at a banquet", as she had previously seen them, "but morbidly curious spectators at the site of a nasty accident" and she begins to imagine that "if the path got any narrower, they would begin to hear the squall of branches along the side of the car" (King 291-293). Meanwhile, as the forest itself becomes more threatening with the realization that the crashing sounds that are coming from deep within it are being made by large wild animals, all hope of turning around has disintegrated: "The ground under the trees. . . , had gone from mucky to swampy. . ." (King 292). As the suburban American couple journey deeper into the nation's great wooded wilderness, they realize that they are cut off from the world which they are accustomed to relying upon and find themselves in a world more terrifying than that of wild animals and no electricity. At the end of their journey through the wilderness, they come upon the salvation of civilization in the form of an idyllic town with the improbable name of Rock 'N Roll Heaven.

For Mary, this new scenario is much worse than the one from which they had just emerged: "It was a perfect jewel of a town nestled in a small, shallow valley like a dimple. Its resemblance to the paintings of Norman Rockwell and the small-town illustrations of Currier & Ives was, to Mary at least, inescapable" (King 295). In this story, King utilizes a familiar gothic device, one that is used also in Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," and is personified in Poe's "Ligeia," by Rowena, who is consumed at her death by the soul of Ligiea, that of taking the familiar and showing its ability, or rather its obligation, to be terrifying: "Gothic is the art of haunting, and in two senses. Gothic shows us time and again that life, even at its most ostensibly innocent, is possessed, that the present is in thrall to the past" (Edmonson 5). That the present is indeed in thrall to the past becomes clear to Mary, the protagonist of King's story, when she discovers that Rock 'N Roll Heaven is people by the gothic hero-villains of twentieth century America; Janis Joplin, the "whiskey voiced . . .dead girl form Texas," Buddy Holly and Elvis Presely (King 304). Rock 'N Roll Heaven is really more of a Rock 'N Roll Hell and where unwitting tourists can "check out any time they like," but "can never ever leave." King takes these long dead idols of mass culture, and what is generally conceived to be their personalities, and makes of them fitting hero-villains for his story.

That King's "You Know They Got a Hell of a Band" is an allegory for pop culture's fascination with its gothic icons, whom we refuse to allow the peace of undisturbed slumber, is inescapable. By using allegory, according to Eric Savoy in his article "The Face of the Tenant: A Theory of American Gothic," King is following in an established tradition of the American gothic, "the gothic is most powerful, and most distinctly American, when it strains toward allegorical translucency" (Savoy 6). With this story, King explores the link between our nation's gothic literary figures such as Poe, and our more recent variations on the theme, as embodied in the story, in the figure of Janis and company. When mythologized by our culture, such artists fit perfectly into the gothic mold of a hero who is both haunted, and consequently, haunts our collective consciences and vice versa. Just as in Poe's "Ligeia," where the combination of the personality of Ligiea herself and the narrator's fixation on her revival to life, both the force of the personalities evoked by such names as Buddy Holly and our culture's obsession with them, combine in King's short story to resurrect them from the dead into ghouls who inhabit a nightmare of our own making. Donald A. Ringe emphasizes this aspect of the miraculous reappearance of Ligeia in his essay on the story from the text, American Gothic:

If our first understanding is that Lady Ligeia returns by the force of her own will, a close look at the details of the story suggests that it may be the narrator's will which is decisive. He calls aloud for Ligiea long before there is any hint that she might return, and once Rowena dies, the corpse revivifies only when the narrator gives himself over to memories of Ligeia. . .We are free to believe, therefore, that Ligeia's will, or the narrator's, or perhaps some combination of both is responsible for her temporary triumph over death. (Ringe 135).

The American Gothic is as story that will not die. Like the Headless Horseman and King's take on Janis Joplin, the gothic survives, Legiea like, within the experiences of a new age. Though the haunted castle of the Nineteenth century novel may have given way to terrible renditions of Norman Rockwell's Americana in Post Modern culture, there is still something horrifying in those dark woods, and something unnamed, something sinister, lurks just beneath the surface of our every day realities.

Works Cited

Edmunson, Mark. Nightmare on Main Street. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.

Lauter, Paul, et al., eds. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. 3rd ed. Vol 1. New York: Haughton Mifflin Co., 1997.

Irving, Washington. "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." Lauter et al. 1354-1373.

Poe, Edgar Allan. "Ligeia." Lauter et al. 1450-1461.

Ringe, Donald A. American Gothic: Imagination and Reason in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Lexington KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1982.

Savoy, Eric. "The Face of the Tenant: A Theory of American Gothic." American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative. Ed. Robert K. Martin et al. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1998. 3-19.

White, Craig. Lecture. University of Houston-Clear Lake. Clear Lake, TX, 6 March. 2001