Alvaro Rodriguez
American Romanticism
Midterm Essay
Dr. Craig White
June 11, 2002

AMERICAN GOTHIC:

Tracing the Dark Romantic

Through Irving, Hawthorne and Poe

            If we follow the stream of American romanticism through its shining era of the decades preceding the Civil War, we see a robust river of humanist thought: Emerson, Thoreau, Whittier, Longfellow, Whitman, Melville. Each sees in his own way the beauty of Man and his place in Nature, transcending it, embracing it, a restless soul in search of elusive and worthy truths. But concurrent to that stream of light runs a darker river, the roman noir, the Gothic, whose chief practitioners are Washington Irving (1783-1859), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), and Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849). These three authors defined a black thread in American literature that while not entirely original (borrowing from European Gothicism and certain American precursors) was perfected in their works and continues to show its form in subsequent literature both American and European.

            While this dark trio of writers had influences and predecessors in the supernatural goings-on at Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, the haunted old mariner of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the doomed, brooding heroes of Lord Byron, they too had American roots. Notable among these are the witchcraft writings of Cotton Mather, the dark and vengeful sermons of Jonathan Edwards, and the supernatural, pre-psychological Wieland of Charles Brockden Brown. Irving and Hawthorne would draw much inspiration from Mather; Hawthorne would take from Edwards his fire-and-brimstone menace; Poe would find much in common with the troubled mental state of Wieland.

             Irving and Hawthorne are also united in their singular sense of setting; both “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820) and “The Maypole of Merry Mount” (1835) have an Arcadian, Edenic element which bears further study.

            Irving set some of his stories (“Sleepy Hollow,” “Rip Van Winkle”) in the mythic lay-by of Tarrytown and its shadowy vales. Here we have a location of deep natural beauty and peace: “a little valley … one of the quietest places in the whole world. A small brook glides through it, with just murmur enough to lull you into repose … A drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over the land, and pervade the very atmosphere.” But, in Irving, surface appearances can be deceiving, as tragic hero Ichabod Crane soon discovers. The beauty of Sleepy Hollow is surpassed by the legends and folktales of haunted woods and ghostly apparitions; when the sun sets, the inviting valley becomes a mysterious womb filled with the unknown. As Ichabod leaves an evening party to trod the path home, he discovers: “The night grew darker and darker; the stars seemed to sink deeper in the sky … In the center of the road stood an enormous tulip tree, which towered like a giant above all the other trees … Its limbs were vast, gnarled and fantastic, twisting down almost to the earth …”

            Ichabod Crane journeys through the well-lit vales of Sleepy Hollow by daylight like a true Romantic wanderer: Irving uses words like “tarried,” “sauntering,” “wended,” “long drawn out,” “stretch,” “pass,” “perambulations,” “jogged slowly,” “journeyed,” and “lingered.” But once Ichabod Crane finds himself in the dark woods, beset by demons real or imagined, his pace quickens: “to dash briskly,” “quickened his steed,” “the eagerness of his flight,” “panic,” “dashed.” (“Fear is what quickens me.” –James Wright)

            Irving takes the wilderness and shows us its beauty only to show us in turn its menace, its unknowable, unconquerable dark power, a truly Gothic notion. Hawthorne’s wilderness is not so much Eden (although there are striking Adamite parallels to be found in “Merry Mount” with forest as garden from which the sinners, especially “Edgar” and “Edith” whose names share a root with “Eden,” are ejected by a man named “Endicott,” who “ends” the party) as it is pagan, Dionysian, Bacchanalian; the revelry of the animal-skinned men and women is not the ignorant bliss before the Fall but rather a carnal, elemental orgy, a festival of the harvest, tied to “creation and not the Creator.” “The Fauns and Nymphs, when driven from their classic groves and homes of ancient fable, had sought refuge, as all the persecuted did, in the fresh woods of the West. These were Gothic monsters, though perhaps of Grecian ancestry.”

            While the libertines in their play are set against the Puritans, Hawthorne presents not polar opposites but new, subtle gradations of shading, drawing the reader into the psychology of the work, forcing the question, “Who is hero and who antagonist?” This subtle transitioning by coded language arrests the reader at first with near archetypal characterization: the revelers are colorful, young, mirthful, blissful, joyous; the Puritans are “stern,” “grim,” “dismal wretches.” But it is through reflection, through introspective thought that the characters evolve into something beyond black and white. Surveying the scene, the Lord and Lady of the May realize the emptiness of their reign, the folly of their fancy. Similarly, when pushed into reflective thought, the Puritan leader Endicott undergoes a like moment of transcendent truth, feeling mercy for them: “The iron man was softened.”

            Finally, the wilderness is left bereft of joy, the gates closed forever, turning it into a ghost world, a habitation of mystery, much like Daphne du Maurier’s Manderley of Rebecca or the house of Usher. So Hawthorne has taken the cathedral of trees and made it a Gothic space, much as Irving did.

            Hawthorne continues the Gothic thread with “The Minister’s Black Veil,” (1836) a startlingly effective tale in which a simple piece of dark fabric acts as both blinder and mirror, a duality that expresses the mystery of the heart that is a central Gothic theme. Where “Maypole” and “Young Goodman Brown” deal expressly in the occult in the sense of the word that indicates the supernatural, in “Minister” Hawthorne explores the word’s other meaning, the hidden, the “secret sin.” The Minister is obviously not only a man with a secret, but a man plagued by his past, a true Gothic character.

            “Black Veil” culminates in a grave scene worthy of Poe, in which Hawthorne takes the reader into the legended tomb of the Minister itself, imagines the decayed visage of the dead man rotting underneath a slip of black crape. It is a wholly morbid and fantastic image, and it makes a good transition to the work of Poe, which was often wholly morbid and utterly fantastic.

            In “Ligeia,” (1838) Poe introduces Gothic love, that doomed but pure affair that is less carnal than spiritual, brooding and almost incommunicable. The relationship between the narrator and his raven-haired, ivory-skinned goddess is birthed in the atmosphere of decay: “in some large, old decaying city near the Rhine.” Ligeia is of “remotely ancient” heritage, is compared to an Egyptian fertility deity, and in a precursor to what would be called in the 1990s “heroin chic,” is presented as “slender to the point of emaciation,” but possessed of a majestic lightness: “She came and departed like a shadow.” In continuation of his romantic theme, Poe casts Ligeia in the realm of nature; she is seen as moth, butterfly, chrysalis, a stream of running water, the ocean, falling from a meteor. Like nature, she is tempestuous under a façade of tranquility: “outwardly calm but the most violently prey to the tumultuous vultures of stern passion.” She is a woman of contrasts and hidden knowledge. Once she expires, the narrator becomes obsessed with filling the haunted space she has left behind; he purchases a tumbledown abbey and decorates its interior with the motifs of the exotic, the gothic, the pagan: “Egypt,” “Arabesques” and “bedlam patterns.” Finally, with a force of will that is stronger than death, Ligeia returns from the grave only to be revived again and again, each rebirth a step along the path to complete decay and destruction.

            In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” (1839) Poe creates a haunted space that is both mental (the mind of Roderick Usher) and physical (the title manse). Decades before Freud, Poe envisions the mind as a house whose windows are vacant eyes, a “haunted palace,” of secret sins and dark desires. Not only is the Gothic explored here in terms of subject and setting, but also in the doomed lineage of the Usher clan: porphyrigenes may signify royalty, but like the Tsars of Russia may also signal a blood disorder, a poisoning of the system that leads to brooding, depression, psychosis. Here the symbiotic, even parasitic correspondence comes into play as the sickness in Roderick is echoed in Madeline; what is sick about the house is echoed in the Ushers’ very lifeblood.

            Poe would have few champions in his lifetime, but many imitators and proponents after his demise. The inheritors of the Gothic line of Irving, Hawthorne and Poe were not immediately the Americans; instead, Gothicism returned to its European home, influencing the French symbolists and proto-Surrealists, writers like Charles Baudelaire, Mallarme and Rimbaud. In America, writers like H.P. Lovecraft would pick up on Poe’s darkness to cultivate an even darker, more pagan mythos; and authors as diverse as Sherwood Anderson, Edwin Arlington Robinson and Stephen King would find an affinity for small town romantic locales with Irving.

            Irving, Hawthorne and Poe took the Gothic to new heights (or depths) in American literature; each brought the art of storytelling a step further into complexity, nuance, tone and sheer frightful horror. They were not the first to cross the dark river of the American heart, but they left their indelible tracks along the water’s edge. We find them even today, there, where the roots of wild trees bend and gnarl, looking almost like a clawed hand, and there, where a garland of flowers like a fool’s crown has been thrown, up the overgrown path to the dark house with empty, glassless windows staring out into the quickening dusk.