Anuruddha Ellakkala

Revolutionary Gothic Elements: Three American Romantic Writers

 Mary Rowlandson, Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, are well renowned American Romantic writers who were heavily influenced by European Romanticism.   Yet, their writings do not contain most of the important elements associated with European Gothic fictions. Therefore, readers cannot see any mysterious castles, old manor horror and terror lurked houses, or decaying abbeys in their classic Gothic fictions. Instead, readers can see Rowlandson, Irving and Cooper choose independent, imaginative and unique American gothic elements in their fictional writings. Mary Rowlandson of A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration (1682) and Cooper of The Last of the Mohicans (1826) use American Wilderness, indigenous Red Indian and gothic color scheme in their romantic writings.  In the meantime, in his gothic short story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1819), Irving uses grotesque, supernatural and ideological concepts together with natural phenomena to generate gothic horror and terror in his readers. Rowlandson, Cooper and Irving are pre-Romantic writers. However, because of gothic elements, these three distinguished works clearly fit into American Romanticism. 

Rowlandson, one of the earliest American writers, depicts horrific gothic pictures in her writing three or four generations before American Romanticism and even a generation before British Romanticism. Therefore, in addition to our course objective 1a, Rowlandson’s composition is directly related to course objective 1b. “To observe predictive elements in “pre-Romantic” writings from earlier periods such as The Seventeenth Century and the Age of Reason. (course syllabus).  Moreover, compared to Irving and Cooper, I believe Rowlandson has no literary goal to achieve as a Romantic writer when she writes her story.   Her contribution to American Romanticism is unintentional because A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration is not a made-up story.  It is a true story of her captivity.  After freedom from indigenous people, she wrote her personal experiences about her captivity.  However, her writing is extremely gothic. Therefore, Rowlandson is fits well into Gothic Romanticism.

When Rowlandson relates her story, she is able to portray a horrific devilish world on the earth.  After Native Indians attack their colonial settlements, her descriptive words about the people, the images of the scenery and their horrific sounds generate gothic terror in the readers.  She says, “It is a solemn sight to see so many Christians lying in their blood . . . like a company of sheep torn by wolves all of them stripped naked by a company of hell-hounds (Norton 137).  Here the writer creatively adds specific gothic overtones such as light, dark and red to the scene.  She uses light or white color and the image of sheep for colonial settlers.  The color white and sheep (Rowlandson’s American lamb) are legendary images of purity and innocence.  With this image, she is able to introduce European settlers as pure, innocent and civilized human beings.  In the meantime, the writer selects imagery of darkness and wolves for Red Indians.   By doing that, the author creates a fiendish, satanic picture of Red Indians. 

Moreover, Rowlandson generates frightful gothic sounds with the strange voices of Native people.  At the beginning of her story she states, “hell-hounds, roaring, singing, ranting, and insulting, as if they would have torn our very hearts out” (137).  She compares Indians awful voices to cries of the beast.  Then, she tells; “This was the dolefulest night that ever my eyes saw.  Oh the roaring, and singing and dancing, and yelling of those black creatures in the night, which made the place a lively resemblance of hell” (138).  After Rowlandson was captured by the Native Americans, those sounds turn into devilish sound in the hell.  As a writer she is very successful because she is able to create unseen but lively and imaginative gothic pictures her readers’ mind.  Moreover, she is able to make her readers to listen hellish sound by reading her.  Theresa Matthews 2003 student of 5535 has similar notion about Rowlandson and her writing. Matthews says:

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 (2003 Midterm Essay).

Native Indians are not black skinned people. They are red skinned people and their red complexion related to the Gothic color.  However, to aggravate gothic characteristics and to deepen the grotesque terror of her readers, Rowlandson describes them as black. She likes to see them as beasts and devils creatures from hell because emotion, inspiration, and imagination are the basic literary devices of Romantic writers such as Rowlandson, Cooper, and Irving.

Similar to Rowlandson, Cooper illustrates the gothic tone of romanticism in his Romantic novel The Last of the Mohicans.  Throughout his novel, Cooper uses horrific imagery of hell or decay, spectral sound and the gothic color scheme such as black, white, red, and yellow to tie to his audience’s horror.  Similar to Rowlandson, Cooper introduces Indians as devils in the hell.  When a “hidden agent” of Hurons grabs the canoe at  the river and escapes with the canoe and Hawkeye’s gun powder, Cooper says that Huron celebrate  victory "by a yell, and a laugh from the woods, as tauntingly exulting as if fifty demons were uttering their blasphemies at the fall of some Christian soul" (76). In this moment he describes Huron as devils. In the meantime, he gives devilish and gothic attribution to their yells, laughs, and utterances.   Once he says Magua’s "guttural laugh” is as "the hellish taunt of a demon" (260).  Furthermore, Cooper generates dark and light gothic pictures of Indian and white Christian.  Here Cooper’s logic is demons are dark creatures and Indians are like demons.  Therefore, Indians are dark. In Romanticism the color dark represents evil, decay, or impurity.  However, Cooper’s gothic color not only to create horrific physical appearance of Indians but also emphasizes the inhuman nature of their souls in his readers’ mind.

Furthermore, the massive American virgin forest and its inhabitants are perfect objects for Cooper to enhance gothic atmosphere in the novel. Similar to Heyward, Cora, Alice, and David, readers of The Last of the Mohican are unfamiliar with foreign its mass wilderness.  As these foreign people were lost in the forest, we readers are also lost in this unknown thick forest while we are reading it.  For these visitors all the horrific images, all four legged and two legged creatures, shadows, water falls, rivers, brooks, mountains, boulders, light, darkness, trees, and even a single leaf of a tree in the jungle are lurking with horror and terror.  When readers read the novel, Cooper is able give the same gothic emotions to his readers that Heyward, David, and the two sisters experience in the real forest.  Frequently, Cooper represents the forest as “…appear[ing] to swallow up the living mass” (15).  The writer personifies the massive forest into a giant ghost.  Cora and Alice constantly stare at the unimaginable body of this giant ghost.  Cooper says: 

The gray light, the gloomy little area of dark grass, surrounded by its border of brush, beyond which the pines rose, in breathing silence, apparently, into the very clouds, and the death-like stillness of the vast forest, were all in unison to deepen the sensation. (126)

According to the writer’s depiction, the girls’ eyes blurred by gothic “gray light,” and vaguely visible “dark grass” is the hairy coat of giant goblin; the gothic deadly silence they are experiencing in the forest is like the ghost looking for a chance to grab and swallow them up.

Cooper takes tremendous effort to warn his audience about the untouched American wilderness.  Even a beautiful word and an impressive moment in the poetry world he is able adapt into a gothic notion.  He says, “The moon had risen, and its light was already glancing here and there on the waters above them” (p 63).  The writer likes to think the moon is the eye of this giant ghost forest; the giant opens his big eye and mysteriously searches for something over body of water. When the Hurons “left the soft light of the moon, to bury themselves in the gloom of the woods” (133), Heyward, David, and the two sisters sees that scene as the giant forest greedily swallowing them up in a second.  Furthermore, all the sounds in the wilderness are related to a fearful spirit. Cooper tells:  

"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. It was followed by a stillness apparently as deep as if the waters had been checked in their furious progress at such a horrid and unusual interruption" (59).

Whether a breaking sound of a dead branch in the wilderness and its falling on “the leafy arches of the forest” (45), or into a massive body of the water, the writer artfully gives gothic supernatural voice to it.  Further, author’s depictions of mysterious, unimaginable, echoing caverns are not earthly places for Heyward, David, the two sisters, and the readers. Therefore, Cooper’s gothic development is very similar to Rowlandson and Irving.

            Irving uses most of the common romantic tactics that his predecessors have used in their writings.  He limits his story to a horror lurked rural village near a thick forest at the bank of the Hudson River. Irving portrays the gothic picture of the surrounding village:              

On one side of the church extends a wide woody dell, along which raves a large brook among broken rocks and trunks of fallen trees.  Over a deep black part of the stream, not far from the church, was formerly thrown a wooden bridge; the road that led to it, and the bridge itself, were thickly shaded by overhanging trees, which cast a gloom about it, even in the daytime, but occasioned a fearful darkness at night. (Irving)

This small country town is a place gifted with natural beauty; but compared to the other neighboring villages, it is unusually gothic city.  Irving states that even the sun cannot eliminate dark gothic horror from Sleepy Hollow.  Undoubtedly, nights are the worst time for the villages.  The writer shows evil danger is not only the atmosphere of village but also in the people. Irving describes, “long winter evenings with the old Dutch wives . . . listen[ing] to their marvelous tales of ghosts and goblins, and haunted fields, and haunted brooks, and haunted bridges, and haunted houses, and particularly of the headless horseman” (Irving).  Ghosts and goblins are part of their lives.  The headless horseman especially is a legend of the people of Sleepy Hollow. Even though villagers are believers the God, they are ruled by satanic agents.

Irving places his massive gothic elements in the forest.  The writer describes fearful "dark shadow of the grove, on the margin of the brook” (Irving).  His gothic hero Ichabod Crane, the young school master, is coming through this mysterious wilderness in the midnight from Van Tassel’s party.  There he finds “an enormous tulip-tree, which towered like a giant above all the other tress…Its limbs were gnarled, and fantastic” (Irving).    Ichabod is shaking with fear of the appearance and the nature of the giant tree.  Meantime, he “suddenly he heard a groan” (Irving).    Ichabod understands “something huge, misshapen towering” before him (Irving).  After having several horrific gothic experiences, Crane meets    an overwhelming picture of a “horseman of large dimensions, and mounted on a black horse” (Irving). Horror-struck Ichabod tries to escape from the danger, but he fails.  Finally, the goblin takes Ichabod’s body “away over his horse’s head.” Neighbor could not find him again. Instead, they found a shattered pumpkin.  Young Ichabod Crane disappears from Sleepy Hollow leaving another gothic story for the old Dutch wife.

Clearly, Rowlandson, Cooper and Irving are classic romantic writers of American literature. They have established independent and imaginative romantic revolution in world literature. Although Rowlandson’s of A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration, Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, and Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow have three distinguish characteristics, the gothic elements and the setting of the three fictions are the most important common things.