Marion Carpenter
October 4, 2006

Romantic Spirit: Externalizing the Internal

In the works of Cooper, Poe, and Irving, everything has a memory—a history—places are haunted because of their inhabitants, by the thoughts of those who pass into their dark recesses; the world is pulsing with a flow of memories and histories that rise up out of the very landscape with the ever continuous trespasses of the journeying heroes that populate the imagination.

The Romantic impulse may be as simple as a desire for anything besides “the here and now”—or “reality”; thus the quest or journey of the romance narrative involves crossing physical borders or transgressing social or psychological boundaries in order to attain or regain some transcendent goal or dream. James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans is full of momentous movement, from lake shore fortifications to the depths of Cooper's savage wilds. The complex weave of motion from place to place is captured by lush descriptions of dark waters and hidden trails in Cooper's war torn wilderness. Cooper employs an externalized correspondence between place and man that is shared by other Romantic authors. Washington Irving and Edgar Allen Poe use similar techniques to capture the darkness both within and without.

In Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow", journeys in the quaint countryside become haunted places with just a little of Ichabod Crane’s imagination kicking in to transform the wilds and woods into things fantastic and frightening. A fan of Cotton Mather's writings, Ichabod Crane finds it a delight to consume everything marvelous and frightening. He reads Mather's "History of New England Witchcraft" avidly after letting out classes, reclining in the clover beside a whimpering brook. From these direful tales, he heads home through the dusk. "... every sound of nature, at that witching hour, fluttered his excited imagination: the moan of the whippoorwill... the boding cry of the tree toad... the dreary hooting of the screech owl, or the sudden rustling in the thicket of birds...." Crane is unable to consume enough of these tales with his "capacious swallow." "Another of his sources of fearful pleasure was to pass long winter evenings with the old Dutch wives...and listen to their marvellous tales of ghosts and goblins, and haunted fields...brooks...bridges...houses...and particularly of the headless horseman..." But in story form, Ichabod can relax and take solace, while enjoying a transcendent rush of adrenaline on his tense and frightening walks back home.

This ritual of haunting himself turns against him when he leaves Van Tassel's winter party. The “enormous tulip-tree... Its limbs were gnarled, and fantastic, large enough to form trunks for ordinary trees, twisting down almost to the earth, and rising again into the air,” is just the start of the horrifying nightmares his imagination absorbs to plague him on his journey. The stories from the parties and his own haunted imagination cast spells on his fragile mind, especially when joined by another traveler.

"...mounting a rising ground, which brought the figure of his fellow traveler in relief against the sky, gigantic in height, and muffled in a cloak, Ichabod was horror-struck, on perceiving that he was headless! –but his horror was still more increased, on observing that the head which should have rested on his shoulders, was carried before him on the pommel of the saddle...."

One major difference in Poe and Irving’s style is the seriousness of Poe’s style. There’s almost an urgency to move on to the next line. Irving is a satirist, and his form flows slowly on a lazy journey of its own. The work itself is a humorist’s portrayal of life, and his horror can’t be taken seriously. Ichabod is the most unlikely hero to walk into a Romantic story, but walk he does. The horseman however is a work of pure Romantic embellishment, huge and dark looming out of the moonlight, head mounted firmly on the pommel of his saddle, the very thought resonates of majesty and at once horror. On a more subtle note, Irving’s hero Rip Van Winkle gets into a different sort of trouble by making long journeys into the wilderness. In her paper “Romanticism: Isolation and Separation” Marcia Toalson discusses Rip in detail, “…a kind and mild-mannered man… …well liked by his neighbors, loved by children and dogs. … He was always ready to attend to everyone else’s business but reticent to take care of his own. … Through his wife’s constant nagging he sometimes … began wandering daydreaming into beautiful mountain-filled scenery…” In his journeys he becomes isolated from society, but not lost. The landscape becomes fantastic and awe inspiring. After going to sleep he wakes to find the landscape changed, himself changed, and everything he knows has changed. His isolation from society in the wilderness becomes isolation from society by time. The world has transcended leaving him trapped in the past with no knowledge of the world he’s awakened into. Toalson notes, “It was a romantic story of retreating into nature and also separating oneself from day to day activities which cause stress.  This was a physical isolation and separation from his somewhat distasteful home life but he had already isolated himself years before by being a dreamer, dwelling in the myth-making gentle world which he loved.” I have to agree that this is true. Before he wandered into the woods, he was distant and isolated from other hard working farmers, even his wife. He perpetuated further isolation by going wandering into the wilderness, and was cursed with isolation after awaking in the mountains after twenty years of sleep. His life is a journey toward isolation. He finally transcends his isolation through a reconnection with his daughter, but this social solution is merely an acceptance. His story is never fully believed, in fact his story is dismissed by most of the listeners, and it takes a town historian to cause any to consider it remotely possible.

"The Fall of the House of Usher" is a beautiful example of externalizing the internal. Poe creates a haunted space with an overzealous supply of encrusted black tarnish and jaundiced discoloration. The narrator is of course on a journey, summoned by Roderick Usher, when he first introduces himself. His destination is not the most fortuitous of locales however, and hardly transcendent. The house itself is shrouded in gloom and decay. "Minute fungi" cover its exterior and hang in web-like tangles from the eaves. The stonework is porous from years of stagnation and isolation while rot and decay have removed its strength and integrity, but fortunately the lack of interaction has left the structure in tact. The very imagery of the home’s exterior is an expression of the people within, isolated from society the Ushers have withered and decayed in solitude.

The inside of the house is filled with dark intricate passages, carved ceilings, somber tapestry-hung walls, ebon floors, fantastic armor, and lofty rooms with long, thin, pointed windows (too high to be reached from the floor) that cast reddened moonlight through their cage-like trellised panes. The narrator further expands this beyond even what is perceived to a permeating darkness that seems to invade the space, "...the eye, however, struggled in vain to reach the remoter angles of the chamber, or the recesses of the vaulted and fretted ceiling." The narrator in this instance is fighting to perceive the utmost reaches, desiring to see the distant vaults above, only to be thwarted by some lack of clarity or weakness in himself. This attempt to transcend the gloom around him indicates a desire to rise above the reality, only to be lost among the rest of the scenery and be dragged into the whirlpool of tragedy to follow. The surroundings saturate his senses, "I felt that I had breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. ...irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all." As if being swallowed, the narrator is weighed upon by the gloom. The acknowledgement of the dismal atmosphere is an awareness his senses cannot conquer. He cannot escape and is welcomed into the collapse of the house as it transpires.

In essence the narrator facilitates the fall of Usher, a negative transcendence, but that is what the narrator was summoned to accomplish. "It was thus that he spoke of the object of my visit, of his earnest desire to see me, and of the solace he expected me to afford him." If the narrator fails to give Usher the peace he seeks, he prompts it to advance more speedily. The haunted nature of the house gets stronger the longer the narrator remains with the Ushers. This perception is nothing of the Ushers doing, but of the building despair within the narrator. Roderick, as depicted from the narrator's memory in grotesque perfection, is likely the most disturbing man alive or the most beautiful walking corpse to ever stalk the earth, "a cadaverousness of complexion; an eye, large, luminous beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid, but of surpassingly beautiful curve... hair of more than web-like softness...", but his deterioration is worse yet more beautiful as the narrator relates it to us face to face, "...now ghastly pallor of the skin ...now miraculous lustre of the eye.... The silken hair, too, had been suffered to grow all unheeded, and...floated rather than fell about the face, I could not, even with effort, connect its arabesque expression with any idea of simple humanity." Roderick is like a ghost or a vampire, his physical confines are lighter than air, and his embodiment is ethereal in nature. His lack of care is typical of someone long out of societies grasp. He is feral looking with all the embellishments of a pale spider sitting in a mass of silken web, and all this is merely the senses of the narrator at work once more. The lady Madeline is identical to her brother in appearance, and they share "sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature" which inevitably alerts Roderick to the tragic end of his sister, like a tug on a spider’s thread. It is this sympathetic bond that continues to haunt Roderick to his untimely demise, though some might argue the timeliness of his end from his description. The house physically sinks into the swamp when the fall occurs, taking with it every last remnant of the Usher family. The narrator remains, his senses freed of the gloom, but still haunted by the memory.

Another example of a more physical kind of transcendence is Poe’s “Ligeia.” The narrator suffers with the loss of his beloved wife, Ligeia who cannot be described in any certain terms. His second wife, who is but a shadow of the wife the narrator adores ad idolizes dies, and is transformed as she lay being grieved over by the narrator. Ligeia transcends death in this tale, returning to life before the very eyes of her worshiping former husband. Lynda Williams went into detail about this story in her paper, “Desire and Loss: The American Experience.” Lynda says, “Poe’s description of Rowena’s deaths and revivals certainly plays out the theme of desire and loss, condensing what most people will experience in a lifetime into one night of horror.” I would agree the concept is one of horrific degrees of desire and loss, but would argue that it is not Rowena’s deaths and revivals being played out. In the end, nothing of Rowena remains. The slow, agonizing revivification and fading of the spirit within the body of Rowena culminate not in Rowena rising from the grave, but in Ligeia returning to her true love from beyond the veil of death. Her spirit not only revitalizes the freshly deceased form of Rowena, but also inhabits it, giving her new life. The entirety of the episode is horrifying, keying into man’s deepest fears and mysteries. Is death the end? Is there anything beyond? Can we come back? If we could, would we be the same? If it’s so great beyond this life, why would we come back? The implications of the answers to these more questions makes Rowena’s passing and Ligeia’s return that much more horrific. Rowena is going to learn those answers now that she has passed; Ligeia has returned from death with these answers already. The narrator cannot divulge her knowledge to us though, only the horror of her standing before him. Lynda also says, “Poe leaves the reader with no reassuring image of hope,” but I disagree. Poe leaves the reader with a very mixed sense of hope through horror, rather than provide a secure fuzziness that we ascend this world to a new heavenly realm, Poe provides a horrid immersion into the twisted hope that the spirit can not only live on among us, but can take the life of another and rise again, transcending death. I do fear this tale has a weak ending, as there is no sense from the narrator if his last statement is on of jubilation or horror, although Ligeia returning to life from beyond the grave (and returning to him, her most idolizing husband) I would think would be for him the ultimate mixed signal. Yes, his truest love has returned to him again, but she’s dead, she’s been dead, she may still be dead though the descriptions lead you to believe she is dead no longer, and she’s there for him. The thought alone is more frightening that not having any hope at all. Poe leaves a glimmer of hope, but that hope is such a horrifying concept that to embrace it would be madness.

Cooper begins his tale with movement. There is no other way to describe it. The descriptions, though lavish and detailed, only serve as a backdrop for what is a journey already underway. Likewise he makes these travels fraught with dark and haunted pasts and supernatural presences. For all their travels the most memorable for me are the times when the darkness seeps into their security and weakens them. Hawkeye is a very superstitious man and at many times in the course of the narrative he points out the dark fearful things that the others have missed, or increases the fear by piling on his own superstition. At once, holed away in a cavern at the start of their journeys "a cry, that seemed neither human nor earthly, rose in the outward air, penetrating not only the recesses of the cavern, but to the inmost hearts of all who heard it." Hawkeye and the Mohawks cannot immediately ascertain the creature that made the noise. Hawkeye goes so far as to despoil any hopes he'll have the answer with his forthcoming reply, "I did believe there was no cry that Indians or beast could make, that my ears had not heard; but that has proved that I was only a vain and conceited mortal!" The sound repeats and Hawkeye starts to feel the uncertainty growing stronger, "...I have heard that when such shrieks are atween heaven and 'arth, it betokens another sort of warfare!" Duncan manages to assure them, once in the open air, that the sound in question is that of a horse screaming in fear for its life. Later, memories haunt the mind of Hawkeye as he leads the group back from captivity at the hands of Le Renard Subtil.

"After penetrating through the brush, matted... with briers... he entered an open space, that surrounded a low, green hillock, which was crowned by the decaying block-house.... ...one of those deserted works, which, having been thrown up on an emergency, had been abandoned with the disappearance of danger, and was now quietly crumbling in the solitude of the forest, neglected, and nearly forgotten...."

The dead lie there, and the enemy will not disturb the dead when they come seeking Hawkeye and the others. Thus history serves as a haunting defense against the enemies of the present. And moreover, the shores of a pond, stained with the blood of the enemies of the past bring back yet more haunted memories to the scout. He recalls the events and shares them openly with the group,

"If death can be a surprise to men who are thinking only of the cravings of their appetites. We gave them but little breathing time, for they had borne hard upon us in the fight... there were few in our party who had not lost friend or relative by their hands. When all was over, the dead, and some say the dying, were cast into that little pond. These eyes have seen its waters colored with blood, as natural water never yet flowed from the bowels of the 'arth.... Hist! see you nothing walking on the shore of the pond?"

Duncan objects that no one could be as misfortunate as them to be on the pond, when Hawkeye retorts, "Such as he may care but little for house or shelter, and night dew can never wet a body that passes its days in the water." This signals how deeply superstitious, and presently frightened, Hawkeye is, fortunately the form he sees is a French sentry watching the path, and Heyward converses their way on with his fluency in the language, only to have the sentry join his compatriots in the waters of the little pond at Chingachgook's hand, thus adding another spirit to those still, stained waters. The scene changes between these are a continual urging onward. This transfer of location from one place to the next in such vast rushes of momentum makes it difficult to follow any sort of direction. This isolates the characters from their sense of direction. More often than liked, the characters find themselves lost, only to have Hawkeye or one of the Mohawks figure out where they are in due course. Moreover, the entire world is in flux as a land ravaged by war, adding one more layer of danger to the transcending ladder.  Each of the characters is isolated in some way from that which they consider society. Alice is alone in the woods with none but her sister and her protectors. Cora is not only cut off from other people, she’s isolated from them even among them being of mixed parentage. Duncan is out of regimentation and forced to act both as leader and as follower on his travels; a man of duty he also has dreams and mental wanderings involving his role as errant knight and servant to his damsel, Alice. David is at home until nature casts back his psalms and violently rejects him in his travels. His singing at once is the downfall of the group as often as it is the uplifting glue that gives them hope to strive onward. An Ichabod in his own right, David is isolated from his music, his faith is tested, his hope dashed on occasions and ultimately his persona is stripped from him and he’s forced to function as a savage. When driven to his basest level, he finally finds acceptance in his surroundings and can function within nature, but David cannot allow this natural acceptance. It is society he fits in with and he must abandon the savage and regain the humanity of a social living at whatever expense. Hawkeye is isolated by choice from society, but he is part of a different society and he fits in well with both sides. Both Chingachgook and Uncas are together, but will never be accepted by the white man. They are eternally to be left outside of white society. They too are the last of their tribe in the book, which makes Uncas’ death such a great tragedy. While they are together, they strive to grasp some transcendence to forge a society among themselves. They establish a fair social structure that keeps them moving from place to place smoothly, but when entering society again, their bonds are tested, falter, are lost, and once again they find themselves cast to the winds. The whirlwind social movements, loyalties, and travels of this party of friends are a tribute to the Romantic spirit. It welcomes change—is open to flux. Change is almost accomplished with the romance of Cora and Uncas, but the affair is doomed from the start, as in Ligeia.

These travels through memory, history, and the haunted spaces of the mind generate a surging current that traverses the boundaries of the mind and the world beyond. Desire to achieve something beyond, something out of reach, something lost to isolation or a collapse into despair at the loss of such an object of desire both signal a change from the mundane into the Romantic. Irving, Poe, and Cooper sweep you up in the tumult of achieving these dreams or avoiding these horrors. Their works are tools to guide you away from dark temptations and toward a loftier goal. Irving satirizes the folly of indulgence. Poe exemplifies the darkest desires or fears come to life. Cooper takes you deep into a captivating world of natural isolation full of danger and fear, a slightly more realistic (but no less Romantic) endeavor to strive for a goal.