LITR 5431 American Romanticism 2010 Student Midterm Samples #1 long essay

midterm assignment

Helena Suess, The Unfamiliar: Epistemological Sublimity in the American Gothic Genre

          The United States has stood for centuries as a metonym for ideologies of progress and individualism, but Euro-American colonial roots to a large extent lie in the country’s capacity as a wilderness refuge for anti-secular religious communities. Even as “progress” ramped up through the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, many Americans felt a profound disconnect from traditional knowledge and valuation in the rational materialism and urban futurism of “enlightened” selfhood and society. The Romantic literature of the American Renaissance, with its thematic transcendence over quotidian life toward a nostalgic “return” to idealized nature, offered an aesthetic resolution to this ideological paradox. Very generally, American Romantic narrative relocates its “civilized” hero(es) to a setting which, because “natural” as opposed to the hero’s “artificial” environment, lacks familiar boundaries and rhythms (i.e., a priori knowledge of the physical/metaphysical world). At first this place is strange and dangerous, but the rules of nature steadily reveal themselves to the hero; if the hero absorbs these rules and thus learns to experience natural danger not with fear and repulsion but with awe and respect, Romantic space and lifestyle are revealed as not only beautiful but preferable. Offered here is a quest both rational and transcendent: the hero has the opportunity to align, by experience and experiment (i.e., a posteriori knowledge), with an ideology of naturalistic sublimity submitted as more substantially “real” than the indifferent abstractions of civilization.[1]

However, the hero is not bound by any law besides that of the text itself to successfully navigate the experiential trials through which one is to align with the sublimity of Romantic life. The opportunity to learn does not mean the hero has the capacity to integrate what is learned; what is offered as “real” may not reveal any “rules” of itself that the hero can comprehend. The experience of the unknown and unfamiliar, as it undermines the hero’s a priori, may also endanger psychological equilibrium. The hero may stumble into terrifying space both physical and mental, not only unmapped but unmappable. Through four canonical American Gothic tales—Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” and “The Minister’s Black Veil,” and Poe’s “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher”—this essay will explore the Gothic genre’s restructuring of the Romantic telos of sublime revelation. The revelatory arcs of these four stories lead, as in Romantic fiction generally, toward a scene of transcendence over the ordinary and familiar. But the Gothic mode threatens and even subverts the possibility of ideological resolution. The transcendent moment occurs when the a posteriori leads not away from but toward repulsion, horror, insanity, “whatever is in any sort terrible.”[2] The Gothic sublime thus maximizes its potential, not in simple confrontation with awful unfamiliarity, but at the site of collapse of epistemological boundaries where even the familiar becomes unfamiliar.

“Young Goodman Brown” follows this arc exactly. Like the other stories here treated, “Brown” can be recognized as of the Gothic genre by its typifying of unfamiliar space as unsettling and claustrophobic (“the gloomiest trees of the forest ... closed immediately behind”), illuminated by vivid light/dark contrasts (“the strip of bright sky” barely penetrates “the depth of gloom”), grotesque colors and figurations of the supernatural (“the fire on the rock shot redly forth and formed a glowing arch above its base”). Brown begins his story by taking leave of his (allegorical) wife Faith and his familiar home of Salem village, to follow a path into dark and haunted woods toward some “present evil purpose.” Almost immediately a quest in search of the forbidden, whose completion demands departure from the safe and familiar, lies in the narrative foreground. Allegorically, Brown’s progress toward something new and different (sin and evil), away from traditional life (faith and goodness), describes in broad strokes the pre-Twentieth Century Euro-American ideological landscape. But for now the exact nature of Brown’s purpose is obscure to the reader: this story will be one of revelation in the context of conflicting ideologies.

Brown guards himself against the moral malfeasance of his journey by appealing to what he knows of the New England as the home of “people of prayer, and good works.” On assurance of the spiritual fortitude in his community including his wife, Brown stakes his own soul: after one night of giving into temptation, he resolves, he will “cling to [Faith’s] skirts and follow her to heaven.” But almost as soon as he enters the forest Brown faces a man in the shape of his father, old Goodman Brown,” who immediately sets about dismantling Brown’s familiar beliefs. Brown first learns of the secret cruelty and sin of his ancestors, and of the man’s “very general acquaintance” with the outwardly pious New England authorities. The man laughs when Brown poses the righteousness of “that good old man, our minister.” A later interaction between “old Goodman Brown” and Goody Cloyse, “a very pious and exemplary dame, who had taught him [Brown] his catechism,” reveals that the man is in fact the devil, while Cloyse herself goes to the meeting as an infanticidal witch.

Stunned by the violence done on his beliefs by revelation, Brown arrives at a site of epistemological arrest. Since entering the woods his a priori has wrestled to absorb or reject a posteriori, and the mental strain prevents him from going further for the moment. He decides to return home, but to do so he must first sit and recover through “pleasant and praiseworthy meditations” on good conscience and respect for authority. As he rests, however, a severe irony again attacks him with knowledge of unfamiliar reality. He hears through the trees his lauded minister and “good old Deacon Gookin” themselves going to the evil meeting, as they have apparently done many times. Brown again experiences physically the epistemological assault, “ready to sink down on the ground, faint and overburdened.” As he prays to heaven and Faith (and faith) for their support he hears, from a “black mass of cloud” emanating voices of “both saints and sinners,” the “uncertain sorrow” of his own wife “entreating for some favor, which ... it would grieve her to obtain.” For Brown this prodigy describes the capitulation of Faith/faith to temptation and sin. Brown’s original ideological ground is overrun, it appears, and he renounces all “good on earth.” His epistemological progress at least seems complete: a posteriori has overcome a priori and Brown has successfully integrated into his reality the revelation that to the devil “is this world given.”

But this apparent epistemological transcendence—from old “false” knowledge to new “truth”—is yet uncertain. The reader learns that Brown, though now a “demoniac,” has not yet given up entirely the limitations of his a priori. Brown arrives at the meeting, a ceremony of sin attended by saints and criminals alike, but Faith is absent. At this realization “hope came into his heart” that Faith/faith remains somehow inviolate. Thus Brown reveals to the reader his persisting unwillingness to accept the unfamiliar “truth” of evil’s power. When Faith herself appears as Brown’s counterpart in sin, he yet remains terrified of revelation (“what polluted wretches would the next glance show them [Brown and Faith] to each the other!”). A complete transcendence to evil would have made evil familiar to Brown and so guarded him against fears of further evil, as his naïveté had once obscured moral bankruptcy. Instead Brown makes a final plea to Faith/faith, interjecting his original displaced piety into the grotesquerie as he begs his wife (and implicitly himself) to “resist the wicked one.”

Suddenly Brown is alone in the woods. In this instant occurs the story’s moment of epistemological sublimity. Here the boundaries of knowledge collapse and leave Brown a “bewildered man” unable to separate fact from fiction. Brown returns to Salem to find the town and Faith all as they were, as if his a priori had never been disturbed. But because of his experience Brown can no longer trust what presents itself as knowable. Hawthorne calls even the reader’s comprehension into question with a tease that suggests the entire narrative to this point was “a wild dream.” The inability to organize and maintain clear epistemological boundaries leaves Brown tortured by suspicion and fear until his “dying hour [of] gloom.” Both faith and sin, tradition and progress, have proven to be useless as ideologies capable of establishing truth: the one is willful ignorance, the other secretive and ephemeral.

Whereas in a typically Romantic story the hero might have achieved a surer foundation for his faith and returned to the familiar world a wiser man, “Brown” suggests the impossibility of reconciling oppositional ideologies. “The Minister’s Black Veil” is rather more optimistic about resolving a posteriori with a priori, despite its typically Gothic evocations of horror and gloom. But “Veil” is no less invested than “Brown” in denaturing epistemological boundaries, though it displaces the dialectic from the veiled Mr. Hooper, who appears on the scene having already more or less successfully negotiated his epistemological transcendence. In “Veil” it is not to Mr. Hooper but to his parishioners, and with them the reader, that the sublime truth behind the veil is to be revealed.

The Romantic manifestation of the unfamiliar vis- -vis the familiar is less protracted here than in “Brown.” In fact it occurs almost immediately: as the town of Milford prepares itself for a conventional Sunday at church, they are thrown into disturbance upon witnessing “what has good Parson Hooper got upon his face.” Through two services, a funeral and a wedding, and into the days after, the townsfolk’s “indecorous confusion” increases as Hooper persists in wearing his “horrible black veil.” Unable to articulate the meaning of the veil, the town responds by attempting to reject the “feeling of dread” brought on by incursion of the unfamiliar, making of Hooper a social pariah to be taunted by children and avoided by adults.

However, the veil’s hold on the public imagination grants it the ironic power of “making its wearer,” however much a “bugbear,” “a very efficient clergyman.” Hooper himself ambiguously explains to his fiancée Elizabeth that the veil is “a type and a symbol” of “sorrows dark enough” to “separate [him] from the world.” But Hooper also asserts a kinship with “most other mortals,” “enabled … to sympathize with all dark affections.” Contextualized by the minister’s obsession with “secret sin,” the flimsy but impermeable veil manifests the boundary between what is outwardly known and what is inwardly concealed. As a result not any specific secret (Hooper’s own is only hinted at, never revealed) but the existence of the secretive as such is foregrounded throughout the tale. Faced with the veil, pious persons from “the most innocent girl” to “the man of hardened breast” to government officials must consciously confront their own “hoarded iniquity of thought and deed.” The veil’s raison d’être is thus epistemological: it incites knowing. Milford’s a priori is characteristically repressive; its familiarity is sustained by prevention and ignorance of challenges to the conventions of its faith ideology, in which expressed piety essentializes a person as pious. But to conceptualize repression as the veil does is to defamiliarize repression, to make repression ironically revelatory, forcing the knowledge of repression as such. Milford’s a posteriori thus arises in the recognition that what is familiar is intrinsically unstable, as outward piety is revealed to be the social expression not of inward piety but of deception.

As a Gothic story that turns on the interplay of repression and revelation, “Veil” shares with “Brown” an epistemological activation of sublimity. The veil’s significance at first baffles its would-be interpreters, but as Hooper’s reputation grows and sinners come to recognize in him their own “mortal anguish,” even strangers are “made to quake” at the inference of guilt concealed by piety. Through the veil “the relation between the signifier,” expressed piety, “and signified,” essential piety, “breaks down and is replaced by an indeterminate relation” in which piety can be shown to in fact signify hidden sin.[3] Still, the sublimity of explicit revelation is deferred until the moment of Hooper’s death. Refusing to remove his veil at the last, Hooper accuses all humanity of “loathsomely treasuring up the secret of ... sin.” He declares his vision that there lies “on every visage a Black Veil!” The obscurity of the veil’s power is now unequivocal: sin is universal, and cannot be effaced except by deliberate denial. Epistemological boundaries are revealed as willful and arbitrary limitations on what is ideologically desirable, while ideology itself is shown to be intrinsically paradoxical. Recoiling with “mutual affright” at the sublimity of the revelation, the deathbed attendants overcome Reverend Clark’s appeal to decorum and bury Hooper in the veil.

Hooper’s final words deconstruct ideological axia, like “Brown” submitting ideology as both reifying and arbitrary; his words beg the question of how one is to cope with an unstable epistemology. The proffered solutions in “Veil” are moralistic yet ironic, keeping in line with the paradoxical nature of the problematic. (Hooper exposes and lives with/as the contradiction, while his congregants continue to sublimate, with the severe traditional piety of their “earliest ancestral sway,” the guilt obscured by their original piety.) In the Poe stories concerning this essay, the narrator-protagonists also experience sublimity as a moment of epistemological breakdown; these narratives too demonstrate the destabilizing potential of unfamiliar a posteriori. But Poe’s tales differ in that their narrators, unlike Hawthorne’s seekers of knowledge, are passive rather than active agents in their epistemological progress. Brown sought new experience and made efforts to absorb it however dangerous, while Milford’s citizens internalized the veil’s significance however paradoxical. But Poe’s narrators pathologically resist a posteriori, acquiring experience only accidentally or obliquely and never willingly. They insist on the essentiality of a priori against all contrary evidence, their deliberate experiential inertia forcing epistemological crises in which their narratives erupt in psychotic breaks from reality. Perhaps it is for this reason as much as aesthetic effect that these stories end at the transcendent moment itself without even as minimal and ambiguous a dénouement as Goodman Brown’s. As repressive cases who lack even names to sustain their existence (for convenience I shall call them “Poe”), the narrators have nowhere to go once repression becomes untenable.

In “The Fall of the House of Usher” Poe appears on the scene experientially blank. His arrival at the House is predicated on a summons whose purpose he does not understand. He faces the House itself with “a sense of insufferable gloom” the source of which he does not comprehend and can only articulate with vague rationalistic suggestions of unpleasant “combinations of very simple natural objects.” The reader learns nothing of Poe’s origins and history except as concerns his relationship to Roderick Usher, which Poe ironically describes as “intimate” in the same breath he admits to knowing “very little of my friend.” Moreover the story’s reality, however frightening and ugly, at this point lacks epistemological significance. The House itself is mundane however off-putting: Poe is explicit about its lack of sublimity (“no goading of the imagination could torture [the House] into aught of the sublime”). Both reader and Poe begin with a priori empty save for the assumption of materially limited reality.[4] As such, progress through the story must be like Brown’s epistemological: a posteriori must expand the limits of knowledge for any action to commence or resolution to be effected.

The expansion of knowledge occurs for Poe almost as passively as for the reader of his story. Poe learns “at intervals, and through broken and equivocal hints” the secrets of Usher and the House. The purpose of the summons is revealed to be nothing more than to comfort Roderick, who is obsessed with “family evil” and his sister Madeline’s deadly illness, both of which Roderick obscurely attributes to the House’s malign “sentience.” This comfort Poe provides by distracting Roderick with books, music, painting, and other aesthetic pursuits. In such activities Roderick provides sensory clues (“perversions and amplifications” of music, paintings of “phantasmagoric conceptions”) that he is in “full consciousness ... of the tottering of his lofty reason.” Poe himself feels “creeping upon me ... [Roderick’s] wild influences.” A posteriori here undermines knowledge of rational reality.

Like Goodman Brown, Poe is unable or unwilling to accept the expansion of his familiar schema of knowledge to include supernatural irrationalities like living houses and family curses. His rejection of a posteriori anti-rationality is most apparent in his single moment of attempted agency when, as Roderick (following Madeline’s death) points to the “unnatural light” of the House’s sapience, Poe responds by recourse to anxious repression. He tries to find a rational explanation (“merely electrical phenomena”) for the “gaseous exhalation.”  Though he knows that Roderick is by now so deteriorated that “ordinary occupations were neglected or forgotten,” Poe yet tries to soothe Roderick by reading a book as if his friend was still disposed to rational thought. But Roderick has “brought round his chair” so as to be looking away toward the door. Poe is reading to himself as much as Roderick, to distract himself from the imminent disruption of his familiar, non-sublime, rationally ordered reality. Such an epistemology becomes ultimately indefensible once Poe is faced with Madeline’s resurrection. Forced to accept as real an event anathema to his a priori, Poe becomes “aghast” and flees, turning only to watch the House explode into light, fragment, and crumble into the tarn. Symbolically, this final scene describes the breakdown of precariously ordered reality, accomplished by traumatic defamiliarization of the limits of knowledge: an epistemological sublime.

The epistemological orders of “Usher,” “Veil,” and “Brown,” in which an organized and limited worldview is threatened by one expansive and potentially chaotic, are reversed in “Ligeia,” though the sublime still plays out at the boundary between known and unknown. This story begins with Poe fixed in a hallucinatory and unreliable past. His first paragraph takes the reader back through “long years” to reminisce on a love the object of which he by his admission remembers with difficulty, save for hyperbolic abstractions of a “beauty [that] passed into my spirit, there dwelling as in a shrine.” Poe’s a priori here, rather than the mundanity in “Usher,” is a Gothic dreamscape of fantasy and desire centered on an otherworldly paramour described as “the triumph of all things heavenly.” Throughout the story’s first half, the reader is offered nothing definitive of Poe’s world besides Ligeia herself and the impossible desires he shares with her: to attain “wisdom too divinely precious not to be forbidden,” and for will to triumph over death. Ligeia embodies a priori epistemology whose limits reach beyond natural reality.

Thus Ligeia’s death effects a posteriori in which the familiarly fantastic must submit to unfamiliar experience of natural reality: the realization of Poe’s desires is blocked by traumatic experience of mundanity. The story is suddenly relocated to a more material world where realist details can penetrate the text, for instance the surname and birthplace of Poe’s second wife Rowena, as contrasted with Ligeia’s obscure origins. Whereas early in the story Gothicism arises in the context of Ligeia’s Byronic ethereality, the style later is perpetuated through a lurid but materialistic catalogue of the grotesque architecture and ornaments filling “the gloomy and dreary grandeur” of the “castellated abbey.” A banal economic detail even arises in Poe’s admission that the abbey was purchased with Ligeia’s money. Mundane reality, however stylized, opposes the fantastic idealism of the story’s first half. Poe’s desire to conform this reality to his ideal, to subvert experience to desire, forces a sublime collapse of mundane possibility by the story’s end.[5]

          There are at least two ways of reading the resurrection of Ligeia, but both point toward sublime epistemological collapse, not only each reading on its own terms but as one of several valid interpretations of the text. The first option is tragicomic: Ligeia—with or without Poe’s psychic assistance—accomplishes her resurrection through her will to live (i.e., her desire for life), murdering Rowena from beyond the grave and inhabiting her body. Here reunion is effected through chthonic manipulation of reality. The other reading is ironic. “Ligeia’s” Poe is more substantially characterized than “Usher’s,” sufficiently that the reader knows of his heavy opium usage and fragmentary memory. These details, combined with Poe’s intense desire for Ligeia’s return and his indifferent cruelty toward Rowena, may indicate that Poe himself murdered his second wife and hallucinated Ligeia’s resurrection.[6] Either reading, supernatural or criminal, reaches its climax where the fantasy of desire intersects the reality of loss, where in a moment of sublimity the delight of reunion commingles with horror at physical impossibility. This moment is only possible when epistemology is shattered, when what is known to be false becomes indistinguishable from truth—not only for the narrator but for the reader, who experiences the sublime of “Ligeia” as the final parameter of an interpretive riddle.

          All four of these stories indicate a preoccupation in the Gothic genre with the instability of certain knowing, and with the contradictions demanded of ideological alignment. To accept (or be born into) an ideology is to accept (or be born into) its epistemology, as a result to impose arbitrary limitations, powerful but inessential, on what one can know about reality. American Gothicism thus declines the teleology of American Romanticism generally, locating sublimity not in reconciliation or triumph one over the other of the powerful but oppositional American co-ideologies of tradition and progress, but in the anxiety of being caught in the defamiliarizing space between contradictory epistemologies. In this way the Gothic may anticipate by a half-century the Modernist aesthetic, which will eventually emerge in a complexified and socially destabilized West as the particular genre of self-conscious “unknowing.”[7] At the least, the Gothic establishes the epistemological criteria for modern horror, whose significant artists like Lovecraft and King will depend for their work’s effect on sublime fear of the spectacularly unfamiliar.