LITR 5535: American Romanticism
  
Sample Student Research Project, fall 2003

Theresa Matthews
American Romanticism
Research Project
Dr. Craig White
November 23, 2003

The Emergence of Gothicism in the American Renaissance

            When discussing the Romantic period experienced in America, thoughts tend to turn to passionate emotional responses, heightened individualism, sentimental nostalgia, and other such similar notions.  Yet, amidst the affirmation of the imagination, there exists explorations of the darker side of human nature. Ergo, Gothic fashion illusively found its way into the writings and imaginations of American Renaissance authors before Gothicism became popular in the 19th century.  Nonetheless, Gothicism resists definition in the same way the period in which it emerges resists definition.  But tracing the shadowy rudiments of Gothic through an early writer such as Mary Rowlandson, Gothic precepts then become more defining in Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, and finally in Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Gothicism meets with perfection.

            While these dark writers are descendents from various periods of Gothic popularity, it is important to note that this literary subgenre is not endemic to America; its roots are richly steeped in European history and literature.  The term Gothic is derived from a barbarous Germanic tribe called “Goths.”  The Goths “came to be seen merely as the corrupters and destroyers of the culture of the Romans” (Punter 16).  Some Gothic literary criticism thus presents “Gothic literature as a kind of ‘revolt’ against bourgeois rationality…” (210). However, Gothicism can not be coined in such simplistic terms.  Gothicism connotes shadowy mysteries, haunted spaces, chilling suggestions of the unknown, the binary opposition of light and dark, eerie specters, and the spine-tingling suspense of the sublime (Martin 202).  Moreover, Gothic became a way for authors to express their “imagination of good and evil, and the human perilous experience” (Punter 110).  Additionally, as the popularity of the subgenre gained momentum in the 19th century, American Gothicism became a means to express troubling issues of  “class warfare,…conflicts of race and gender,” and concerns of a burgeoning nation with aspirations of a utopian society that is stricken with a darker vision of America (Martin 202). 

            Mary Rowlandson and James Fenimore Cooper are cohesive in their use of the Gothic in their version of the captivity narrative, respectively,“A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson” and The Last of the Mohicans.  Both explore the feuding relationship between the white and Indian conflict, albeit with quite diverse perspectives and agendas.  Although Rowlandson’s use of Gothic is sparse juxtaposed to Cooper’s prolific use, both are united in their perceptions of the American Indian culture as a Gothic source.

            Mary Rowlandson, a victim of Indian captivity, writes a haunting narrative recounting her terrifying ordeal.  Rowlandson describes her initial capture, “Christians lying in their blood, … like a company of sheep torn by wolves … stripped naked by a company of hell-hounds, roaring, singing, ranting, and insulting, as if they would have torn our very hearts out…” (Rowlandson 137).  The Gothic thread of good versus evil is evident through the images of Christians as the innocent sheep and the evil Indians as the fiendish wolves which also initiates an unimagined terror in the New World settlers.  Indeed, the horrific images of hell and grotesque monsters capture the audience just as surely as if they had been captured with Rowlandson, and the Indians are no longer definable as humans but as fiendish “hounds” to be hunted and killed as otherworldly beasts whose home is not earth but hell.              

            Demonizing the Indians indelibly establishes them as the Gothic “other.”  An authority on American Gothic, Robert Martin, theorizes, “…what the dominant culture cannot incorporate within itself, it must project outward onto this hated…figure (Kilgour 5).   Rowlandson’s Puritan’s conception of good and evil is not tolerant of cultural diversities.  Consequently, the evil “other” is further demonized through her descriptions of the captors, “the roaring, and singing and dancing, and yelling of those black creatures in the night, which made the place a lively resemblance of hell” (Rowlandson 138).  Consistently, a violent cultic image materializes as Rowlandson reveals her tale of terror.  The “creatures” appear to be engaged in a ritual that is at once obscene and horrific.  Then, to reinforce the chilling effect, the setting infuses images of the color “black” and the dominion of “hell” to reveal the danger and the terror of the unknown and the gothic “other.” The Gothic elements of good vs. evil and the monstrous ‘other’ are disturbing and produce a highly emotional, unreasonable, unwavering empathy for the author’s plight.  The “style overwhelms the reality” and exposes Rowlandson’s agenda (class notes).  Hence, the narrative effectively demonizes the “red” indigenous savages that cannot be incorporated into the “Christian” society of the New World.

            Unlike Rowlandson, Cooper’s novel, The Last of the Mohicans, is a fictional history of captivity. And, although Cooper portrays the Indian as the demonic “other,” he dichotomizes his representation of the Iroquois, or the Mingoes, “as demonic—ferocious, cunning, and rapacious” and the Delawares, or the Mohicans, as the “noble savage” possessing the qualities of honor, courage, and loyalty (Railton 2). 

            Cooper’s decision to blend these divergent portrayals is a Gothic expression of the “…ambiguity of our relationship with Indians” and the subconscious of society’s conflicting cultural issues of “authority and guilt” (Martin 130).  In the one instance, Magua, a Mingoes, is a demonic villain who lusts after white maidens, viciously scalps his victims, and plans subversive betrayals.  The other Mingoes are described as, “fifty demons …uttering their blasphemies at the fall of some Christian soul” (Cooper 76).  This reinforces the Christian authority to extinguish heathen devils from the newly found land of Puritan utopia.  Once again, like Rowlandson, Cooper is identifying white Americans on the side of virtue and the red man on the side of vice.  Thus, Cooper’s countrymen feel justified in the extermination of the barbaric culture. 

            Conversely, Cooper also uses Gothic to express the guilt towards the repressed “other,” the “noble savage.” Chingachgook, a Delaware and lifelong companion of Hawkeye, along with his son, Uncas, embody the heroic traits admired by the young America.  Chingachgook never takes a white man’s scalp, never has rapacious thoughts against a white woman, remains loyal to his tribe, to Hawk-eye, and to the pale-faced daughters.  In the same manner, Uncas dies chivalrously trying to save the life of the beautiful Alice, sister to the woman he loves.  So, just as Cooper’s countrymen identified with feelings of malice towards the Mingoes, with the death of Uncas, now they identify with the guilt of having abetted the extinction of a great warrior, a great man, the last of the Mohicans. 

            “Cooper complained in 1828 that there were no suitable materials for writers to be found in the new country, ‘no annals for the historian…no obscure fictions for the writer of romance’” (Punter 109).  Thus, a variant of Gothic emerges in America; Cooper creates mystery and gloom through the wild and desolate wilderness as a precursor to his successors, Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne. 

            Cooper shrouds the young American landscape in shadows and gloom to manifest a realm of terror.  The wilderness becomes the “haunted castle” of Europe, “the gloom … was thickening beneath the leafy arches of the forest” (Cooper 45).  “Gloom” and “leafy arches” define a daunting space in nature that resembles the “flamboyant, mysterious, or even frightening” Gothic buildings of France (Murfin 191). The vast wilderness takes on a new persona that is strange and full of danger. 

Cooper then artfully blends the frightening wilderness with the monstrous “other,” “[in the] topmost leaves…a savage was nestled, scantily concealed [in] the gnarled and stunted limbs…” (73).  The “gnarled” and “stunted limbs” express the Gothic grotesque and deformity that elucidate the dominion of hell.  Then, with the placement of the fiendish “savage” “nestled” within the gross arms of infernal nature, the young settlers of America recognize the paradox of their plight.

  Cooper then heightens the nervous sensation with Gothic correspondence when Hawk-eye and his companions escape the savage “devils” to find sanctuary “in the grave of the dead Mohawks” (126).  In this atmosphere of death, the sisters could not “entirely suppress an emotion of natural horror,” and “[the] gray light, the gloomy little area of dark grass…and the death like stillness of the vast forest, were all in unison to deepen such a sensation” (126).  The Gothic correspondence with nature intimates a gruesome space that reinforces the near death experience of the sisters and Heywood.  Thus, nature reflects the appalling “sensation” of death.  Also, the gradation of color to “gray” underscores the lushness usually associated with a vast forest, and the “gloom” corresponds with the terrifying emotions of the sisters and Heywood. Once again, nature underscores the idea of death.

Finally, Cooper threads the gothic element of spine tingling sublimity to intensify suspense.  The Mingoes are once again on the brink of discovering the evasive Hawk-eye and his companions when the thrilling tension builds, “Duncan, brave as he was in the combat, could not, in such a moment of painful suspense, make a reply…” (Cooper 131).  Inherently, sublimity involves “the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling [that] is terror” (Burke 310).  Cooper incorporates the immediacy of danger and terror through Duncan’s emotional reaction to their perilous situation.  Duncan realizes that the tiniest of sound or movement will divulge their hiding spot, and the blood-thirsty Mingoes’ proximity is dreadfully close to discovery.  Nervous anticipation through Duncan’s “pain” renders the audience chillingly helpless.  Gothic sublimity taps into the psyche of the settlers, indelibly creating a phenomenal frightening encounter with their own reality.

Washington Irving, a dark humorous precursor to Cooper, likewise uses the landscape as a Gothic setting for the backdrop of his satirical fiction, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”  As the story begins, the land (Tarry Town) is a mystic, idyllic Dutch community that, “is one of the quietest places in the whole world [and is] uniform tranquility” (Irving 2094).  The land is sequestered from the rest of the world which suggests the Gothic element of mystery and secrecy.  Irving intensifies the Gothic with witch tales and folklore imbedded in the secretive town, “…the place was bewitched by a high German doctor…that holds a spell over the minds of the good people…” (2094). Irving imbues nature with Gothic strands as a contrasting backdrop to the tragic hero, Ichabod Crane, a traveling Connecticut pedagogue who decides to “tarry” in Tarrytown. Ichabod represents the industrialized society of New England (Clark 3). Thus, Gothicism exposes the educated, greedy, and materialistic element of society that can not “know” the secrets of nature.         

Moreover, the pedagogical Ichabod departs with a heavy heart from a local gathering and travels into the lonely night, and a Gothic correspondence transpires with Ichabod and his surroundings.  The gothic scene surfaces with terrifying suspense as “[a]ll the stories of ghosts and goblins that he had heard, now came crowding upon his recollection…[and] [t]he night grew darker and darker; …he thought he saw something white, …perceived that it was a place where …the white wood laid bare” (Irving 2108).  Ichabod’s emotions, whether self-induced or authentic, feed into the frenzy of fear, and as he looks upon nature, it grows dark.  Notice too the startling contrast of dark and white.   As Ichabod’s thoughts turn to the darker side of fearful emotions, his surroundings reflect his deep, dark mood.  The bleakness of color, black and white, connote the eerie, the phantasmic, the gloom of certain dread. Add to this, the image of an “enormous tulip-tree, which towered like a giant…its limbs were gnarled, and fantastic…twisting down almost to the earth…” furthers the transformation of nature into eerie specter (Irving  2112).  Ichobod’s fearful encounter with the legendary galloping Hessian goblin is his last, a “…huge, misshapen, black, and towering” phantom appears and pursues the quivering Ichabod.  These gothic elements of the supernatural and the unknown converge and thrill the reader to nervous anticipation of Ichabod’s dreadful demise. In keeping with Gothic fashion, the morning reveals Ichabod’s horse, but Ichabod is never found, revealing that industrialized society cannot exist with the secret mysteries nature offers.

Similar to Irving and Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe’s fictitious tales are layered with Gothic correspondence, gripping sublimity, and fear of the unknown.  Yet, Gothic culminates in Poe’s works, and deviates from his predecessors by fleeing “meaning…[and traversing] into a quest for sensation” (Kilgour 10).  Poe imparts another Gothic variant that is the relinquishing of the wilderness for a setting resembling the more traditional European Gothic architecture.  He also explores the psychological terrors of the mind, the bone chilling supernatural, and the sickening perversity of humanity that fashions Gothic sensationalism. 

Poe’s disturbing tale of a lost love transcends beyond the natural conception of desire and loss. In “Ligeia,” Poe writes in first person narration which allows for the immediate frightening response of the reader.  From the onset, the tale is shrouded in mystery as the narrator tries to recount the meeting of his soul mate, “I cannot, for my soul, remember how, when, and even precisely where I first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia” (Poe 704).  Poe immediately surrounds the audience in the shadowy perceptions of the narrator’s mind.  He also cloaks Ligeia in mystic secrecy.  To further the aura of supernatural, Poe describes Ligeia as “peculiar,” “black eyes,” “strangeness,” “skin the purest ivory,” and “raven black tresses” (Poe 704).  Not only does Ligeia’s appearance suggest the Egyptian East, but she worships the narrator with “idolatry.” Thus, Ligeia’s identity alludes to the ancient Hebrew mysticism, the occult of spirituality.  Then too, the narrator’s unfathomable love for the strange Ligeia is other worldly, ancient, and mystic.

Moreover, Poe explores the supernatural quality of the power of the human will over ubiquitous death.  When Ligeia fell victim to an unexplained illness, the grieved narrator laments the “terrors” her death would bring.  He states, “The will therein lieth, which dieth not.  Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigor?” (Poe 709). Gothic does not offer answers to the question , but allows the exploration of possibilities, which Poe wholly embraces through the narrator. 

            After the death of Ligeia, the narrator leaves his home and marries Rowena, the complete opposite of her mystical, passionate predecessor.  The Gothic setting of his new home is as grotesque and bizarre as his loveless marriage with the hated Rowena.  He brings Rowena to the fearsome dwelling that rests in the “wildest and least frequented portions” of England.  In his grief, the narrator remodels the bizarre “decaying” abbey with “carvings of Egypt,” and decorates with “Arabesque” furniture and carpeting.  The narrator creates an atmosphere that is reminiscent of Ligeia’s identity and ensconces the beautiful albeit unloved Rowena into the ghastly shrine.  The phantasmagoric environment coupled with the immediacy of narration psychologically prepares the audience for the supernatural to occur with fearful dread.

Subsequently, and without cause, the narrator belabors his unending hatred and loathing for Rowena, while he habitually succumbs to his raging drug induced fantasies for the “ethereal nature” of Ligeia.  Oddly enough, the lady Rowena becomes deathly ill.  A Gothic correspondence occurs between the narrator’s mind and what might be happening to Rowena, “Then rushed upon me a thousand memories of Ligeia…when a sob, low, gentle, but very distinct, startled me from my revery” (Poe 712).  The sob had come from the near dead Rowena, and as the night converges, the spirit of Ligeia possesses the body of her successor.  The terrifying amazement encapsulates the reader, and Poe presses the suspense with exquisite sublimity, “(what marvel that I shudder while I write?)…[I was] a helpless prey to a whirl of violent emotions, of which extreme awe was perhaps the least terrible…[t]he corpse…stirred, and now more vigorously than before” (713).  At the apex of terror, the unimaginable has occurred.  The uncanny Ligeia shatters the shackles of death owing to the fervent will power of her ardent lover.  Poe fashions Gothic to inundate the reader with horrific sensations, not for meaning, but to “place them in a state of thrilling suspense and uncertainty”(Kilgour 6). 

In keeping with Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne also explores the strictures of Gothic in “The Minister’s Black Veil.”  The Gothic “other” in this tale is the “horror within the self” (Martin 117).  The dark Puritan religion creates ambiguity through unresolved moral conflicts.  Hence Rev. Hooper ca not abide his sinful nature that is common to humanity and determines to wear a “black veil” as a symbol of sin; whether it is simply the sin of all mankind or some secret sin is never revealed.  The ambiguity of the black crape is intentional, and Rev. Hooper’s parishioners are abhorred by the “gloomy shade” upon his face.  One even cries out, “Our parson has gone mad!”  The black veil is a reminder that they are all united in sin, and though they may hide it from their “nearest and dearest” and from their “own consciousness,” the “Omniscient can detect them.”  Judgment, therefore, is inescapable, just as the sight of their good Reverend’s veiled face. 

Continuously, the hideous veil’s gloom permeates the very environment with its judgment, “[it] throws its influence over his whole person,…Do you not feel it?...I would not be alone with him for the world”  (Hawthorne 629).  The Gothic correspondence is surface at first, and then reveals the individual inner self.  Similarly, the veil is a simple whisper of black material, but it is the unknown, the mystery behind it that generates the nervous dread.  Furthermore, the idea of secrecy intensifies the suspenseful anticipation of Rev. Hooper’s possible sin.   Likewise, the veil interrupts and corrupts a marriage performed by the Reverend, “…the horrible black veil…could portend nothing but evil to the wedding.  Such was its immediate effect on the guests, that a cloud seemed to have rolled duskily from beneath the black crape, and dimmed the light of the candles” (630).  The correspondence focuses on the effect the black crape has upon the parishioners.  It appears to have effected a sinister and evil identity of its own, eliciting horror and contempt from society.

Moreover, Rev. Hooper gives the impression that he is unaffected by the veil until he sees his reflection in a mirror, “…the black veil involved his own spirit in the horror with which it overwhelmed all others.  His face shuddered—he spilt the untasted wine upon the carpet—and rushed into the darkness.  For the Earth, too, had on her Black Veil” (Hawthorne 630).  The Gothic “other” looks back at Rev. Hooper through the mirror to reveal a grotesque visage that scares even him.  The reflection is a reminder of the darkness in all human souls.  Consequently, the horrid veil works to isolate Rev. Hooper from society, but endows his abilities to preach with strength and conviction.  The psychological horror is that he dies a lonely man because of his self-imposed austerity, “that piece of crape had hung between him and the world:  it had separated him from cheerful brotherhood and woman’s love, and kept him in that saddest of all prisons, his own heart…” (634). Hawthorne’s Gothic style leaves the reader to ponder the frightful ambiguities of sin in Rev. Hooper’s life and in their own . 

Rowlandson, Cooper, Irving, Poe, and Hawthorne all participates in creating the emerging Gothic subgenre in the American Renaissance.  Each left an indelible literary mark that transforms Romantic literature unendingly, and still their influence is felt in the Post-Modern society through literature and films.  Avid thrill seekers owe their bone-chilling fear, nervous anticipation, and heart stopping dread to these early American authors. 

 

Works Cited

Burke, Edmund.  A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. (1759).  In Hazard Adams, ed.  Critical Theory Since Plato.  San Diego:  Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971. 310-11. (Handout).

Clark, William Bedford.  “Washington Irving.”  Dictionary of Literary

Biography, Vol. 11:  American Humorists, 1800 – 1950.  Ed. Stanley Trachtenberg.  Texas Christian U, 1982.  224-237.  11 Nov. 2003 <http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet>.

Cooper, James Fenimore.  The Last of the Mohicans.  New York:  Penguin, 1986.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel.  “The Minister’s Black Veil.”  The Norton Anthology of American Literature.   Ed. Nina Baym.  Shorter 6th ed.  New York: Norton, 2002.

Irving, Washington.  “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”  The Heath Anthology of American Literature.  4th ed., v. 1. (Handout).

Kilgour, Maggie.  The Rise of the Gothic Novel.  London:  Routledge, 1995.

Martin, Robert K. and Eric Savoy, eds.  American Gothic:  New Interventions in a National Narrative.  Iowa:  U of Iowa P, 1998.

Murfin, Ross and Supryia M. Ray, eds.  The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms.  2nd ed.  Boston:  Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003.

Poe, Edgar Allan.  “Ligeia.”  The Norton Anthology of American Literature.   Ed. Nina Baym.  Shorter 6th ed.  New York:  Norton, 2002.

Punter, David, ed.  A Companion to the Gothic.  New York:  Blackwell, 2000.

Railton, Stephen.   “James Fenimore Cooper.”  Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 250:  Antebellum Writers in New York, Second Series. Ed. Kent P. Ljungquist.  Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 97-124.  11 Nov. 2003  <http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet>.

Rowlandson, Mary.  “A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson.”  The Norton Anthology of American Literature.   Ed. Nina Baym.  Shorter 6th ed.  New York:  Norton, 2002.