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American
Romanticism Sample Student Research Projects 2010 |
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Sarah Coronado
December 10, 2010
Human Nature in Characters and Motivation in Authors:
A Look at Hawthorne and Poe
Human nature has always fascinated scientists, researchers,
and artists. Writers, specifically, have always enjoyed experimenting with
what
people are capable of and inclined to do, and our innate abilities have been
subjects in countless novels and tales. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe
are two such authors and in their tales
The Minister’s Black Veil and
The
Fall of the House of Usher (respectively)
they chose to navigate through the
darker sides of human nature and the mind. This essay will show what avenues of
human nature the authors take readers through, highlighting how their styles
serve to draw these themes out. Further, it will attempt to show that
while
both Hawthorne and Poe venture into the obscure depths of the human condition,
each author has a different motivation for taking us there, examining not only
the inclinations and motivations of the characters in these stories, but those
of the authors as well.
Meeting under the label of “dark Romantics”, Hawthorne and Poe
find common ground in the themes of both of their short stories. In his article,
“The Light and Dark Romantic Features in Irving, Hawthorne, and Poe,” Figun
Dincer explains that dark Romantics “stress what is wrong with humanity” and
reflect individuals as “inclined to sin and self-destruction” (220). The concept
of sin is
predominant in the theme
of The Minister’s Black Veil as the
main character, Minister Hooper, is an active clergyman who self-appoints
himself to wear a black veil over his face for most of his adult life. This
veil, he believes, is a symbol of
“those
sad mysteries which we hid[e] from our nearest and dearest, and would fain
conceal from our own consciousness, even forgetting that the Omniscient can
detect them” (Hawthorne 624).
Though Hooper seems to be representing sin in his fellow human
beings,
some critics argue that ironically, Hooper’s insistence upon wearing the black
veil for the rest of his life also illustrates the sin in his own nature. “The
moral accuracy of his vision remains problematic…its consequences: isolation,
egotism, gloom, and moral pride” (Milder 181). Hooper becomes so obsessed with
wearing the veil and with human evil that the veil “ultimately prevents him from
enjoying the possibilities of human good” (Pennell 44). With this argument, we
see that Hawthorne spared no one from being afflicted with the inclination to
sin.
The story begins with Minister Hooper’s introduction of the
black veil into society and as it continues, it chronicles the hardships he
endured while forever being a symbol of humanity’s concealed sin. Hooper reveals the
pain inflicted upon him by the townspeople, merely because of a “material
emblem,” when, on his deathbed, he declares, “Why do you tremble at me alone?
[...] Tremble also at each other! Have men avoided me, and women shown no pity,
and children screamed and fled, only for my black veil?” (Hawthorne 628 & 631).
Hawthorne’s social commentary becomes two-fold not only attacking men’s hidden
sin, but also their antipathy towards anything they do not understand.
In
The Fall of the House of Usher, Poe
also refers to hidden sin, though he merely alludes to it where Hawthorne’s
story is saturated with it. Usher and his sister Madeline “feel
cursed by the guilt of some secret sin, perhaps related to a singular and
vaguely incestual bond” (Magistrale 63). While Poe hampers Usher with this guilt
he also monopolizes on our self-destructive nature. Usher’s preservation of
his bizarre and reclusive lifestyle causes one to assume that “like so many of
Poe’s heroes, Roderick revels in his pain” (65) since he does nothing to
alleviate it. Usher not only seems to accept his fate, but desires to accelerate
its culmination with self-destructive habits
such as confining himself to a
house he feels “enchained by,” delving into and cultivating dark artistic
abilities with his paintings and “wild improvisations of his speaking guitar,”
and indulging himself with books “in strict keeping with this character of
phantasm” (Poe 692-3, 696).
Usher’s entombment of his sister in her temporary vault is
also an act of self-destruction. In doing so, Usher relinquishes his fate to his
“own worst-and most fascinating-fear” (Butler 10). “For many, many days” he
hears Madeline grappling to escape her tomb, and yet, he “dared not speak”.
Realizing that she has broken free, Usher starts, “Oh whither shall I fly? Will
she not be here anon? Is she not hurrying to upbraid me for my haste?” And
shrieking, “as if in the effort he were giving up his soul,” Usher declares,
“Madman! I tell you that she now stands without the door!” (Poe 701). In this
final act, Usher tragically constructs and participates in his own downfall.
Poe also concentrates on humanity’s faults in the form of
mental illness and the loss of rational thought within the human mind. In his
letter entreating the narrator to pay him a visit, Usher “gave evidence […] of a
mental disorder which oppressed him” (Poe 689). He is also referred to several
times within the text as being a hypochondriac. Poe, who took notice of the
medical research conducting during his time, knew the “distress of the
hypochondriac leads to despair, to the wish to die, and sometimes to suicide”
(Butler 10). Despair of this nature is seen in one of Usher’s bouts of
depression when he asserts, “I feel that I must inevitably abandon life and
reason together in my struggles with some fatal demon of fear” (Poe 692).
Poe was also likely aware of the common notion amongst
researchers who believed that “insanity could increase artistic ability”. As was
mentioned previously, Usher thought himself an artist, spending much of his time
employing his imagination for the tasks of painting and writing music. “Roderick
is a madman whose imaginative powers may actually increase as his mind sickens”
(Butler 5). One painting described by the narrator illustrated a “long
rectangular vault or tunnel…at an exceeding depth below the surface of the
earth…no torch, or other artificial source of light was discernable” (Poe 694).
While in another outburst of mad creativity, Usher sings a song for the narrator
depicting the serene scene of “a fair and stately palace” which is assaulted by
“evil things, in robes of sorrow”. The once fair palace “is but a dim-remembered
story, of the old time entombed” (694-5).
In both Usher’s painting and his song the concept of
entombment is mentioned, possibly alluding to Usher’s imprisonment within his
own mind and home, in addition to the future fate of Madeline. His song,
however, ends on a note of true insanity with the line “and laugh – but smile no
more” which brings to mind one who has completely giving in to fancy and
disregarded reason completely (Poe 695). For Poe, the seed of iniquitousness
festered in one’s mind and led to guilt, destruction, and mental illness.
In order to intensify their themes of wicked and destructive
humanity both Hawthorne and Poe utilize gothic elements in their writing style
and gloom is the
predominant feeling
in both stories. Hawthorne seems to manufacture Minister Hooper’s black veil
solely from gothic materials. Consisting “of two folds of crape which entirely
concealed his features,” the veil gives “a darkened aspect to all living and
inanimate things” (Hawthorne 623). Minister Hooper even begins to believe “that
a preternatural horror was interwoven with the threads of the black crape”
(628). Ironically, however, the very nature of the black veil is precisely what
makes Minister Hooper “a man of awful power over souls that were in agony for
sin…its gloom, indeed, enabled him to sympathize with all dark affections”
(629). Sinners on their deathbed, though they “shuddered at the veiled face so
near their own” felt they could, as sinners, relate to the despair and darkness
associated with the veil (629). And even on Minister Hooper’s own deathbed, the
black veil remains, “as if to deepen the gloom of his darksome chamber, and
shade him from the sunshine of eternity” (630). Hawthorne’s gothic and darkened
illusions of the black veil strengthen the concept and feeling of dark sin.
Poe also uses gothic elements as he
fortifies the illusion of despair in Usher’s mind. Stationing the whole of the
action in the House of Usher, Poe places his characters in a “mansion of gloom,”
with “an atmosphere
of sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and
irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all” (Poe 689, 691). In an environment
such as this, it is no surprise that as the
narrator attempts to assess his friend’s state of mind, he perceives, “a mind
from which darkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured forth upon all
objects of the moral and physical universe, in one unceasing radiation of gloom”
(693). In portraying Usher as a man with an infected mind, the gothic
stylization of despair adds an additional dimension to the character.
To aid in their depictions of humanity, both writers also rely
on symbolism. Symbols become “the most striking element in their works” (Dincer
222). Minister Hooper’s black veil serves as the symbol in Hawthorne’s story and
is referred to as such throughout the tale. Hooper himself declares to his
fiancée, Elizabeth, the veil to be “a type and a symbol” (Hawthorne 627). The
townspeople see it as such also when they seek to investigate his wearing it.
They felt “to their imagination [the black veil] seemed to hang down before his
heart, the symbol of a fearful secret between him and them” (627). As stated
previously in this essay, the symbol is employed by Minister Hooper to be the
symbol of hidden sin, which people hide even from themselves.
Likewise, the House of Usher serves as a symbol. In
Poe’s
story, the symbolism associates the house with the deterioration of its owner’s
mind. Through his reclusive lifestyle, Usher never stepped forth from his
dwelling and this caused the peasantry, when referring to the house, to use the
“appellation of the ‘House of Usher’…to include…both the family and the family
mansion” (Poe 690). The connection is further made with the gloomy and bleak
exterior of the house symbolizing the “terribly altered…wan being” the narrator
finds inside whose features seem expressionless and incapable of corresponding
“with any idea of simple humanity”
(691-2).
The symbolism goes deeper than the exterior, however. “Just as
the decadent physique of the house mirrors Usher’s deteriorating physiognomy, so
Roderick’s discussion of the dwelling’s oppressive sentence affords parallels to
the melancholic qualities of his own mind” (Butler 9). The house begins a
“gradual yet certain condensation of an atmosphere of [its] own about the waters
and the walls” (Poe 696). Similarly, and stated previously in this essay, Usher
developed “a mind from which darkness…poured forth upon all objects of the moral
and physical world” (693). When this connection is made that both the house and
Usher’s mind seem to be radiating with excessive gloom, it is sure that the
narrator’s attempts to uplifting a mind from this darkness will be in vain.
Though Hawthorne and Poe both employ concepts of sinful and
destructive human beings and highlight this theme with their stylistic use of
gothic elements and symbols, their individual
motivations behind writing the
stories
differ. “The purpose of
literature is to entertain or inform” and our authors here each take the
opposite view of the other (White). Hawthorne’s story seeks to inform the
audience while Poe’s story is pure entertainment (though this essay by no way
means to imply that Hawthorne’s story is not entertaining--but that his
primary
goal is to inform). The approach and handling of each author towards his tale
illustrates either his motivation to inform or entertain.
From the very beginning, Hawthorne
stages his story to take the tone of instruction. Subtitling his tale, ‘A
Parable’, he “guide[s] the reader toward interpretation that will reveal a
lesson or general concept about human experience” (Pennell 41). In order to
create a “vicarious
learning experience” (White) for the reader, Hawthorne creates a feeling of the
“individual in society” (McElroy 122) with a recognizable and realistic setting
and characters that engage in social interactions. Hawthorne sets his parable in
Milford Village, “a town southwest of Boston” (Hawthorne 622) with the main
character, Hooper, as the minister within this town. Hooper’s involvement as a
central figure in Sunday services, funerals, and marriage lays the ground for
countless social interactions.
For
the Individual in Society “the unbreakable force of
history and society must be acknowledged and tragically experienced” (McElroy
122). Minister Hooper behind his black veil suffers many losses and heartbreaks:
he loses his fiancée because he refuses to let her see his face: “He could not
walk the street with any peace of mind” because people would either flee his
approach or “make a point of hardihood to throw themselves in his way,” and he
even had to “give up his customary walk at sunset to the burial ground; for when
he leaned pensively over the gate, there would always be faces behind the
gravestones, peeping at his black veil”. “It grieved him, to the very depth of
his kind heart, to observe how the children fled from his approach” (Hawthorne
628). “All through life that piece of crape had hung between him and the world;
it had separated him from cheerful brotherhood and woman’s love, and kept him in
that saddest of all prisons, his own heart; and sill it lay upon his face”
(630). By creating a relatable feeling of grief, readers can cling on to the
story and relate to it, thus making them perceptive to the lessons that are
latent beneath the surface.
These lessons are not floating above the surface particularly
because of Hawthorne’s personal style: “his way of barely asserting anything was
itself Hawthorne’s most important subject and his greatest care as a writer”
(McElroy 118). By not openly disclosing the specific lesson he had in mind for
his readers, he leaves it open for them to study over. Understood this way, one
realizes why it is so important for Hawthorne to draw the readers in with people
and places they could so easily identify with. Pulling the reader into a story
they could become familiar with allows them to take an active role in the
instruction.
In some cases, it is Hawthorne’s ambiguity “that allows him to
give an almost transcendental turn to stories” (Stoehr 369). Though enduring the
plights of the black veil it did have “one desirable effect, of making its
wearer a very efficient clergyman…he became a man of awful power over souls that
were in agony for sin” (Hawthorne 629). Sinners on their deathbeds cried out for
him, strangers came from far distances to attend his church, and Hooper even had
the opportunity of giving a Governor’s election sermon. Despite all of the pain
Hooper endured from the isolation, the black veil enabled him to transcend the
normal effectiveness of clergymen and to better console those souls “in mortal
anguish” (629). However, this revelation is still given to the reader to make of
it what they will while interpreting their own lesson.
Poe, on the other hand, not only
disregards the attempt at instruction in favor of mere entertainment, when it
comes to the aspects of his entertainment, he leaves nothing ambiguous. His
writing has been described as a “inexorable march into the abyss” (Stoehr 369).
The goal of the entertainment writer is to sweep the reader away to a world
more exciting than
their own (White). To achieve this end, rather than Hawthorne’s sense of the
Individual in Society, Poe relies on a feeling of the Individual vs. Society, or
rather “freedom from society for the individual” (McElroy 122). Breaking from
society, the story is able to take the reader away to a new and mysterious place
for a while.
One of the ways Poe creates
this break from society is by setting his stories in a time “not contained in
history” and a “society not locatable geographically…his sense of place is vivid
but abstract” (McElroy 122). Very few details are given as to the whereabouts of
the Usher Mansion other than it is along a “singularly dreary tract of country”
(Poe 689). Additionally, the reader does not even know where the narrator has
come from. His location when he received the letter from Usher is only described
as “a distant part of the country” (689). Though the specific details of the
location of the story are ambiguous, the isolated feeling it creates is not.
To
further this feeling of isolation Poe utilizes first person narration and the
story he tells is of “a private experience” (McElroy 122).
The reader meets the narrator and quickly learns that he is
the only witness to the fall of Usher as he recites incidents that take place
solely within the walls of the Usher mansion. Even Usher’s lifestyle maintains
the isolation theme as the narrator reflects that in childhood, “his reserve had
been always excessive and habitual” (Poe 690).
Within the Usher mansion he had essentially become a prisoner “…from
which, for many years, he had never ventured forth” (692). In terms of family
within that house, it was only Usher and his sister, who dies soon after the
story begins, “the stem of the Usher race…had put forth, at no period, any
enduring branch; in other words, that the entire family lay in the direct line
of descent, and had always, with very trifling and very temporary variation, so
lain” (690). The extreme isolation of Usher’s life coupled with the isolation of
the setting allows the reader to steal away with the author to this strange and
mysterious place completely removed from anything they know in their daily life.
The next sensation Poe hopes to create is one of inescapable
gloom. His story is drenched in “insufferable gloom,” “unredeemed dreariness of
thought,” “utter depression of soul” (Poe 689), “irredeemable gloom” (691), and
an “oppressive atmosphere” (697). Following some of the main action of the
story, we can see how Poe adds layer upon layer of despair throughout the tale
creating a dreadful, albeit exciting, experience for the reader. From the
opening of the story outside the House of Usher our first glimpse of the
building is coupled with “insufferable gloom”, the walls are “bleak”, the
windows like “vacant” eyes, surrounded by “a few rank sedges”, “a few white
trunks of decayed trees” and a “black and lurid tarn” (Poe 689).
Entering the “Gothic archway of the hall”, the narrator leads
the reader to Usher’s study with a “black oaken floor” and the allowance of only
“feeble gleams” of light entering through the windows.
The effect of the dark draperies joining with the “comfortless, antique,
and tattered” furniture carries the reader further into the dark atmosphere of
the House of Usher (Poe 691).
When Usher tells the narrator that Madeline has died, he asks
for help carrying her to a temporary entombment. The tomb advances the gloomy
sentiments of the story with a suffocating atmosphere which “half smothered” the
torches they carry into the vault. Previously used “for the worst purposes of a
donjon” [sic], the vault is “small,
damp, and utterly without means of admission of light” (Poe 697).
The final magnificent scene, the night of the great storm, Poe
creates an utterly sublime moment for the reader. As Usher throws open the
window, the narrator declares that it is “a tempestuous yet sternly beautiful
night, and one wildly singular in its terror and its beauty” (Poe 689). As the
winds gust with “impetuous fury,” the mysterious atmosphere surrounding the
exterior of the house begins glowing with “unnatural light” (689-90). The
despair and gloom throughout the tale has been culminating to this truly
disastrous point, the fall of the house of Usher.
With great cunning and persistence Poe compiles layers of
gloom and despair, dark and lurid details, and despondent characters in
unbearable settings for the sole purpose of exciting the imagination of his
readers. Though no social or moral commentary mingles into the scenes as they do
in Hawthorne’s tale, readers can not deny that Poe takes them for a wild ride.
Finding both authors in the category of dark romantics,
readers of Hawthorne and Poe find in each author’s works common themes that
delve into the human condition and styles that draw from
the same inkstand at times, etching forward gothic elements and symbols. Both
authors do this elegantly. Even when their paths divide and each relies on a
different motivation for their works, readers find something worthwhile: in
Hawthorne, and open forum of social and moral debate, and in Poe, a satisfyingly
horrendous slide into the dark depths of the human mind. The
ongoing interest in
both of these areas ensures that the works by these great authors will continue
to be read long into the future.
Works Cited
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and Romantic Idealism in Poe’s Gothic Tales.”
American Literature 48.1 (1976):
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Dincer, Figun. “The Light and Dark Romantic Features in
Irving, Hawthorne and Poe.”
The Journal
of International Social Research 3.10 (2010): 218-224.
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Magistrale, Tony.
Student Companion to Edgar Allan Poe. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001.
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McElroy, John. “The Hawthorne Style of American Fiction.”
ESQ:
A Journal of the American Renaissance
19.2 (1973): 117-123. Print.
Milder, Robert. “Hawthorne’s Winter Dreams.”
Nineteenth-Century Literature
54.2
(1999): 165-201.
JSTOR. Web. 15
November 2010.
Pennell, Melissa McFarland.
Student Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999. Print
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The Norton Anthology of American
Literature: Shorter Seventh Edition. Ed. Nina Baym. New York: W. W. Norton &
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Stoehr, Taylor. “Physiognomy and Phrenology in Hawthorne.”
Huntington Library Quarterly
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(1974): 355-400.
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