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American
Romanticism Sample Student Final Exam Answers 2010 |
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Danielle Maldonado
Varieties of Gothic Literature
Gothicism is a mode that’s used in order to elicit fear, apprehension and
anxiety within the reader. Within the Romantic period, American literature is
full of gothic elements but as you move into the Realist and Modernist periods,
however, The Gothic was often times represented in a new way: The Grotesque.
Moving even further into the Harlem Renaissance, the gothic nature of literature
was turned on its head with a variation of the gothic color code. Though
Gothicism has changed slightly over the years, many elements remain and the
adaptations of it from contemporary writers offer an interesting take on one of
the most compelling aspects of American literature.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown
contains one of the most Romantic uses of The Gothic because it focuses on The
Puritan Gothic, which places moral emphasis on the fear it conjures.
The man he meets is representative of the devil, carrying a “staff, which bore
the likeness of a great black snake, so
curiously wrought that it might almost be seen to twist and wriggle itself like
a living serpent.”
William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily
is probably his most read work. As a short story, it’s represented in many
anthologies and textbooks and contains the first example of Gothicism that
strays into the arena of The Grotesque. As a late Realist/early Modernist piece,
the elements in this story differ from more Romantic pieces such as
Young Goodman Brown. Written in the
early 1930s, there are representations of both the original gothic and the
Grotesque in this story. The Grierson’s home, for example, is described as
gothic. For one, industrialization has swept across the town. The only thing the
remains as it was is Miss Emily’s home, described as having “stubborn and
coquettish decay.” This idea of decay or the death of what was once beautiful
and new is gothic. The contents of the home are also described as decaying. When
The Alderman go to collect taxes from The Grierson estate and Tobe answers the
door, the furniture inside is seen as “cracked” with “a faint dust.” An easel
containing a portrait of Miss Emily’s father is noted as “tarnished,” which all
represent the original gothic.
The way the townspeople see Miss Emily herself during this time is also gothic
in nature and, in fact, offers it’s first variation of The Grotesque in the
story. Carrying a cane with a “tarnished gold head,” Emily’s skeleton was “small
and spare” and it is noted that she seemed “bloated, like a body long submerged
in motionless water.” This imagery of a drowned woman with eyes that “looked
like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough” is Grotesque in that
it is ugly, disgusting and leaves the audience feeling uneasy, as a woman is
described as death.
Perhaps the most well known moment of The Grotesque in the story comes at the
end when we learn that after killing her lover, Homer Barron, that she remained
close to him by continuing their relationship, even after his death. When the
townspeople search Miss Emily’s home after her death, and venture into the
locked room upstairs where Homer’s corpse is discovered, 40 years after his
death, it is noted as “in the second pillow was the indentation of a head,” and
that on it was discovered “a long strand of iron-gray hair.” This hair, known to
be Emily’s indicates that Emily continued to sleep in the bed with Homer long
after his death. His body — or “what was left of him” — is described as
“inextricable from the bed in which he lay. Summoning visuals mixed with a sort
of necrophilia, this is the definition of gothic and in fact, the description of
his body, now rotting and distorted is grotesque. The room Homer is kept in 40
years past his expiration is also gothic in nature. Referred to as a “tomb,” it
was kept by Miss Emily as somewhat of a shrine to her relationship with Homer,
“furnished for a bridal” complete with a suit for Homer to wear and a (now
“tarnished”) silver toiletry set she purchased for him so many years ago.
During the Harlem Renaissance, many African American writers experimented with
the gothic color code, which is a symbolic system that aligns distinct colors
with values. Typically, the light or white is associated with purity, goodness
and innocence and darkness or black is associated with the unknown, the gothic
and fear. During the time of slavery, however, this color code was turned upside
down because for slaves, the night or darkness was the time where they weren’t
just slaves. Rather, they could spend time with their families or learning to do
things they wanted to do, like learning to read while during the light, they
were imprisoned and treated like animals. Representing African American culture,
the writers during the Harlem Renaissance did something unique with the typical
color code: they inverted it to represent their own race.
In Langston Hughes’ Dream Variations,
we see this inversion of the gothic color code take place. Hughes associated the
night as “dark like [him],” giving the dark or night a nostalgic quality rather
than associating it with fear. He says the day or light is a whirlwind in which
he must “whirl and dance” until the “quick day is done” so that he may “rest at
pale evening.” In Countee Cullen’s poem,
From the Dark Tower, we see further inversion of the gothic color code.
Referring to the rights of African Americans, Cullen says that there are “buds
that cannot bloom at all in light” and that they must be attended to in the dark
where the “agonizing seeds” can be tended to. In Zora Neale Hurston’s
How It Feels to be Colored Me, we see
the most unconventional variation of the gothic color code. Hurston says she
feels like a “brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall” in “company with
other bags, white, red and yellow.” Hurston does note herself as the bag dark in
color but goes on to say that each bag contains things are both priceless but of
little value to anyone, just like all of the other colored bags against the
wall. She says that all of the bags could be dumped into a single pile and
refilled without “altering the content of any greatly.” This, she says is how
the “Great Stuffer of Bags” intended it. We are all made up of equal parts and
color, she notes, doesn’t matter.
The various forms of The Gothic recur so frequently in American literature
because of the fear of the unknown built in to The Gothic. At one time,
