American Literature: Romanticism research assignment Student Research Submissions 2013 research essay

Hannah Wells

April 6, 2013

            The age of Romanticism, roughly occurring in the late 1700s through the 1800s, is characterized by a style unlike the one before. The works of the era are set up distinctly against the over-rational, contained and restricted mimetic forms of art from the Enlightenment. They often feature the Romantic theme of the rise of individualism; a theme that presents the individual who is separate from the masses and is often quite alone. For the Romantics, imagination trumped perception and terror, the sublime and supernatural, the gothic and horror all emerged in the art and literature of the time. One genre, directly related to the rise of the imagination, and born out of Romanticism is the fantastic. In fantastic works, the reader and characters come to terms with the unknown or unseen. While it seems that German authors (like Goethe and Hoffmann) have the run of the genre, America also produced some great examples of the fantastic. Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson,” and “The Black Cat,” often considered great works in the horror genre, actually belong to the fantastic.

            For this discussion, I will be basing my analysis of both the Poe stories off of Todorov’s book, The Fantastic. Todorov defines the fantastic as “the hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting a supernatural event” (25). The fantastic occupies the uncertainty of two solutions: an imaginary option where the laws of the world remain, or a real option where the laws of reality have changed. If an answer to one of these solutions is chosen and the supernatural event is explained, the story does not qualify as fantastic. A work in this genre follows a formula consisting of the reader’s hesitation and doubt, an identifiable character or narrator, the presence of foreshadowing, attempted rational explanations and more elements that all build towards the end or “culminating point” (Todorov 87). These works fit nicely into a teaching unit about Romanticism because they also feature an awe of nature, often through sublime and gothic descriptions.  

            As Todorov notes, Poe’s “William Wilson” creates a “hesitation on the part of the reader” as we struggle to decide if we are dealing with a villainous character and his obsessive, perhaps supernatural, double, or a mad man and his multiple personalities (72). While many critics regard “William Wilson” as an allegory, Todorov was uncomfortable with this label simply because of the hesitation created by Poe and the fact that the double’s appearances seem both allegorical and “relevant on the literal level” (72). To create the doubt that we the reader (and also Wilson himself) experience, Poe characteristically sets a very gothic scene, gives us a first person narrator who is rather unreliable, includes the sublime and foreshadowing and leaves no real explanation. This last point is what separates “William Wilson” from “The Fall of the House of Usher.” In “Usher,” Poe does provide rational explanations for Madeline’s death-like sleep, as it is her habit to fall in to, and the house’s destruction in the end, as the narrator noticed a clear crack as he approached the walls. Therefore, although absolutely teeming with fantastic qualities, “Usher” is not a fantastic tale.

            On the other hand, “William Wilson,” because it fits the mold, as mentioned above, can be analyzed as fantastic. Early in the story, Poe begins to build an atmosphere in which we the reader are fully capable of believing in the supernatural. In classic Poe fashion, the beginning of the tale is set in a “large, rambling, Elizabethan house” (1), a “place of enchantment” (3). The house is surrounded by “gigantic and gnarled trees” (Poe 1) and a “prison-like rampart” (Poe 2). A reader of Poe is fully prepared to encounter a supernatural being in a place like this. Where better to encounter a man who may be a psychotic stalker, or an embodied spirit? The gate, decorated with “jagged iron spikes” (Poe 2), the “Gothic windows” and ceiling (Poe 3) all inspire awe in the character and reader. The narrator touches the sublime when describing the “spirit of wonder and perplexity” he felt towards the head master (Poe 2). Further, the house where Wilson attended school had a maze-like quality that the narrator never quite solved, and at the same time, found comforting. As is common with the gothic, the labyrinthine quality of the house reflects the complicated mind of the narrator who, as I will analyze later, is rather twisted. At this point in the tale, the boy Wilson is “living with only his mind to guide him” through the maze of life because he has overthrown his previous authority figures (Davidson 199). Poe continues to include gothic descriptions as the story progresses, especially in terms of light and dark. The reader, and narrator, is unsure of the realness of a being that continues to show up when “no light at all was admitted” (Poe 9). I will continue to discuss this gothic theme of darkness later as it relates to the unreliable reporting of the narrator.

            The most convincing fantastic quality in “William Wilson” is the unreliableness of the first person narrator. Wilson is “the Romantic individualist for whom the world is nothing but the externalization of the self” (Davidson 201). In fantastic tales, the represented narrator is suitable because they themselves also doubt. Add to this the absolutely undependable quality of William Wilson, which is not even his real name, and we the reader truly doubt whether we are witnessing a supernatural event or the struggling of a man and his inner spirit. The story begins with a list of the narrator’s self-professed, terrible qualities. Additionally, the tale, like many other of the fantastic genre, begins at the end. This reversal of order allows the reader to wonder if perhaps the narrator has forgotten something from the past, another way to doubt. It also gels with what Todorov calls the “syntactical aspect” of fantastic tales (87). All elements in the fantastic work must build toward the end, which as we know in “William Wilson,” will lead to the narrator’s current, near death state. To return to the unreliableness of the narrator, he does not create much trust by giving himself a fake name at the start. Further, Wilson calls himself “Weak-minded,” capable of “infirmities,” “ungovernable passions” and “evil propensities” from the very beginning (Poe 1). Importantly, Wilson also describes himself as descended from a family with a most “imaginative and easily excitable temperament” which foreshadows his later reactions to his double (Poe 1). Lastly, in the introduction Wilson wonders if he has not actually “been living in a dream” (Poe 1). This is a very important statement in terms of keeping the reader hesitating and maintaining the genre.

            As the story continues, the rather unreliable narrator describes the arrival of his double whose similarities with Wilson are not even noticed by other boys due to “some unaccountable blindness” (Poe 5). In fact, the narrator reveals that their similarity had never been a “subject of comment, or even observed at all by our schoolfellows” (Poe 6). If no one in the story sees what the narrator sees, the reader begins to wonder if the double is a supernatural being or perhaps our narrator is mad. It is also at this point that Wilson foreshadows the role that his double will play in the future as the one who will run “interference with my will” (Poe 7). After this revelation comes the most important event of the first part of “William Wilson.” Here we find one of the most questionable scenes because Poe does not offer an explanation for what the untrustworthy, young narrator sees. William Wilson, in the dark of night, through a “wilderness of narrow passages,” approaches the room of his comrade to play a trick on him (Poe 8). When he reaches the boy’s bed, Wilson experiences unspeakable horror and cannot express what it is he sees before him. Wilson runs from the room, never to return to his boyhood school. What did William Wilson see? The answer to that question remains a mystery and leaves the reader to wonder if it was a monster, a mirror, an empty bed, a zombie, any number of things. At this point, “William Wilson” qualifies as a fantastic tale because we have followed an unreliable narrator through half of a story and witnessed something that cannot be explained. All that we know is “what is filtered through the subjective mind of the narrator” (Thompson 170).   

            In the second half of the story, William Wilson has aged and picked up a new set of habits that make him a narrator that we do not trust. A college student now, Wilson has new “habits of vice” like “wine” and other “more dangerous seductions,” most likely drugs (Poe 9). The addition of alcohol and other substances clouds Wilson’s mind, causing him to doubt his surroundings, and the reader hesitates to know what is real. The first time that Wilson’s double appears in his adult life, the narrator is drinking and reveling. When called out to meet a visitor, the narrator enters a “small room” where “there hung no lamp” (Poe 9). The figure whispers the words “William Wilson” into Wilson’s ear and causes him much distress. Because it was dark and the narrator has made himself even less reliable, the reader wonders if an actual meeting has occurred or Wilson has been confronted by his soul. Is it a supernatural being stalking our narrator? We cannot be sure.

            As the story winds towards its climax, Wilson the narrator further provides us with reasons why he is not someone we cannot necessarily trust. The hesitation required for a fantastic tale builds as the narrator shakes off “the common restraints of decency in the mad infatuation of my revels” (Poe 10). Wilson becomes an obsessive gambler and tricks less talented players into losing fortunes to him. At the height of his degradation, the narrator’s double appears again. Once more, the lights go out, the darkness “was not total,” and the truth is revealed to the men whose money Wilson has dishonestly won (Poe 11). This is the moment of ruin for William Wilson. Who caused his ruin? We the reader are unsure, because we could not see, if a man, a ghost, or Wilson himself spoke the words that caused his defeat. Disgraced, the narrator flees his college and travels the world doing no good. At every turn, Wilson is thwarted by his double, but never sees “the features of his face” (Poe 13). Worse, the narrator had now “given myself up entirely to wine and its maddening influence” (Poe 13). Madness and alcoholism do not a reliable narrator make.

Before the final encounter, Wilson admits to indulging in “excesses of the wine-table” and fighting his way through “mazes” of strangers (Poe 13). While at a masquerade, Wilson finally captures his nemesis and challenges him to a duel. The narrator quickly wins the duel and plunges his sword “repeatedly through and through his bosom” (Poe 14). At this point, the narrator turns his back on the victim to make sure the door is locked and when he turns back he sees, so “it seemed to me in my confusion,” a large mirror that may not have been there before (Poe 14). In this, he sees himself bleeding and torn. Poe does not leave it at this, however. The narrator goes on to say that he thought it was his reflection, but “it appeared, I say, but was not” actually himself, but his double, whose face was “mine own” (Poe 14). Finally, before the dying condemnation, Wilson admits that his double’s voice had changed and “I could have fancied that I myself was speaking” (Poe 14). The reader is left with no solid answer as to the identity of the double. Was he a real man who was murdered and cursed Wilson with his dying breath, or did we witness a supernatural event in which a man actually dueled with his spirit double and lost?

Poe himself considered “William Wilson” to be his “best effort” and many critics have argued over the meaning of this tale (Neimeyer 212). Some feel content to leave it as a straight allegory, which, as was mentioned earlier, Todorov found wanting. Critics often point to the overall Poe universe and its lack of normal, simple morality that might exist in the non-nightmare world of Poe’s imagining. “William Wilson” is not an allegory because the main character does not adhere to society’s morals and is not punished by a societal entity in the end. At most, the narrator “willed his crime, and he wills his retribution” (Davidson 189). The strength of the story and the reason it can be classified as fantastic is the ambiguity of the double and whether he “exists as a supernatural spirit or as a construct of the mind of the narrator” (Thompson 169). This sort of split or doubling is consistent with the Romantic tradition as artists often searched for answers beyond the secular, beyond the idea of divine justice. In stories by Poe and Hoffmann (who Poe had certainly read), characters come face to face with the self in order to be judged. A tale belongs in the fantastic if the face-to-face meeting is equally viable as real or unreal and we find no definitive answer in the end.

 The only other Poe story that Todorov considers fantastic is “The Black Cat.” In one critical essay on this Poe story, the author describes “The Black Cat” as “more fantastic” than any story of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s (Forgues 48). Hoffmann, the figurehead of the fantastic movement in Germany, wrote some of the strangest and scariest stories I have read, but “The Black Cat” rivals them in darkness and its ability to leave the reader in doubt as to the reality of the situation. Unlike William Wilson, the story is not often labeled as allegory, but rather as an “objectless fantasy of pure literary whim” (Forgues 48). Without the overhanging shadow of an allegorical reading, the description of “The Black Cat” as a fantastic tale is simpler. Similar to “William Wilson,” Poe’s “Black Cat” has a first person narrator (whose story begins at the end) who is rather shaky, it features possible supernatural events, gothic and sublime descriptions and moments of foreshadowing. All of this leads us through a series of events that we the reader cannot assign as either real or imaginary. Has the narrator gone mad or are we dealing with a demon cat returned from the dead?

“The Black Cat” begins with an appeal from the narrator in which he asks that a “more calm, more logical” person find a way to explain his story as an ordinary happening instead of the horrific “phantasm” that he believes it to be (Poe 329). This introductory paragraph is full of details that point us toward the fantastic. The narrator himself doubts the reality of his experiences and very early sets the reader up to question the validity of the story that follows. The reader’s doubt is “enforced by the narrator’s repeated assertion that he cannot understand his own story” (Gargano 172). In his first line, the narrator says, “I neither expect nor solicit belief” for the tale he means to tell since his “very senses reject their own evidence” (Poe 329). This story would fall out of the fantastic genre immediately if it were not for the next few lines. These early lines suggest that the man’s tale is not to be believed and therefore dismissed as a mere ghost story, but then he reveals that “mad am I not—and very surely do I not dream,” but the events he will detail “terrified…tortured…destroyed me” (Poe 329). The reader is now set up to wonder if the following story is real or imaginary, and if this narrator is someone worth believing. For Todorov, this introduction has “integrated” us into the world of the character where we will have our own “ambiguous perception of events” (33).

After the introduction, the reader is presented with a description of the narrator’s early disposition as a loving, tender animal lover who is so “fond of animals” that his attitude is describes as a “peculiar of character” (Poe 329). The unnamed narrator marries early and his wife is also a pet lover. When Poe introduces us to the wife, he also, as is common and vital to the fantastic, foreshadows upcoming events. The narrator’s wife is superstitious and often mentions the “ancient popular notion, which regarded all black cats as witches in disguise” (Poe 330). In Todorov’s book, he describes the characteristic structure found in a fantastic tale, which includes what he calls “the utterance” (82). The utterance, which often turns out to be foreshadowing, occurs in a fantastic tale often in the guise of a figurative or idiomatic expression, like a superstitious saying. In this case, the common belief that a black cat is evil may turn out to matter in the end. Also in the first part, the narrator reveals that the cat’s name is Pluto. Here Poe used an allusion to the Roman god of the underworld to foreshadow later events and suggest that perhaps the cat is a supernatural being associated with death.

The narrator of “The Black Cat” begins to lose some credibility with readers as the story moves on. It is important to the fantastic that the text remains uncertain and an unreliable narrator helps create the required reader hesitation. Poe’s narrator who was an animal lover and seemed stable loses his trustworthiness when he falls “through the instrumentality of the Fiend Intemperance” and experiences “a radical alteration” (330). Once the narrator admits to becoming a drunk, the reader must doubt the reality of what he describes. Not only do we doubt the reasonableness of the narrator, we the reader dislike him because he turns into an abuser of wife and animals. Here begins the real fantastic tale; a turn occurs which Poe marks with the first of several extremely gothic descriptions. A “much intoxicated” narrator returns home to find the cat in his way. “Instantly possessed” by “the fury of a demon,” the narrator pulls a knife, seizes the cat and “deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket” (Poe 330). Now, with the addition of this terrible, dark description, Poe has thrown the reader into an atmosphere where the supernatural might occur. Likewise, the narrator is no longer trustworthy as he has lost himself in “gin-nurtured,” “fiendish malevolence” (Poe 330). The next horrific step taken by the narrator is a necessary building block in this tale because it sets up the later reappearance of the cat, which will cause the reader to hesitate between the supernatural and mad reality. After the cat’s eye healed, the narrator coolly “slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree” (Poe 331). This gothic moment calls to mind the torture of Isabella Linton’s dog by Heathcliff in another, most gothic story. Unfortunately for Poe’s narrator, the cat dies and his life unravels from here.

At this point, we reach what Todorov calls the point of “imaginary causality.” One constant of the fantastic genre is the “existence of beings more powerful than men” that are held responsible for events in a story (110). The night after murdering the cat, the narrator’s home and all of his possessions burn to the ground. Although the narrator does not try to connect the events, the “disaster and the atrocity,” he admits that the link may be possible (Poe 331). If the reader is led to believe that events in a tale are caused by a supernatural being and not the “intervention of chance,” then the reader is found to be hesitating in a place where “the laws of this same familiar world” do not apply (Todorov 25, 110). What caused the narrator’s home to burn? The words “luck or chance are excluded” from this part of the story and Poe sets us to hesitating between reality and imagination (Todorov 110). The image left behind on the charred walls is the real clue that leads us to this imaginary causality. The “figure of a gigantic cat” with “a rope about” its neck is “graven in bas relief” on the narrator’s bedroom wall, which amazingly still stands (Poe 332). On beholding this vision, the narrator falls into a sublime moment in which his “wonder” and “terror were extreme” (Poe 332). Next, as is very common in fantastic tales, the narrator attempts to rationally explain this strange happening. He asserts that the cat’s body was most likely thrown into his bedroom window to alert him of the fire and was subsequently “compressed” into the “freshly-spread plaster” by the falling walls and heat of the fire (Poe 332). The narrator is eager to present any kind of explanation that will “eliminate the onus of responsibility and guilt” (Gargano 176). While the narrator, whose character has been found wanting, presents this outlandish explanation, any reader of Poe is leaning towards the supernatural. This point of hesitation is spot on for the fantastic.

While the narrator, who does not admit to feeling guilt, falls deeper into drunkenness and his “vile haunts,” Poe returns us to the story of “William Wilson” and doubles. Impelled by a “half-sentiment” to find a new pet, the narrator perceives a large, black cat sitting on a keg at the bar where he is drinking (Poe 332). One must question the believability of this moment as again, we find the narrator partaking “in a den of more than infamy,” which sounds suspiciously like an opium den (Poe 332). The unnamed narrator approaches and befriends a cat “closely resembling” Pluto in every way (including the lack of one eye) but one; the new cat has an “indefinite splotch of white” on his chest” (Poe 332). Here, like in “William Wilson,” the reader is presented with an apparent double whose purpose and existence is possibly supernatural. This possibility is furthered as the new cat clearly haunts the narrator. The speaker’s hatred of the cat grows every day, but the animal’s “partiality” for the man grows and he follows the narrator at all times (Poe 333). The narrator begins to feel an “absolute dread” of the new cat and the reader wonders if this fear is only in the man’s mind, or if the cat is perhaps a demon returned from the dead. Importantly, at this time the narrator reveals that he is in jail and his tale is being told from a “felon’s cell” (Poe 333). This detail further harms the credibility of the narrator and foreshadows the following awful incident. Related to this, the new cat’s splotch has shaped itself into an image of “the gallows” (Poe 334). Is this image only in the mind of a guilt-ridden madman, or can we believe that a ghostly cat is torturing the narrator?

The final blow for the narrator comes in most dramatic and gothic fashion. In this ending the reader will find evidence for both a rational and supernatural explanation and therefore the story remains in the genre of the fantastic. On descending into the basement with his wife, the narrator is tripped by the cat and flies into “madness.” He tries to murder the cat with an axe, but instead turns his “rage more than demoniacal” on to his interfering wife and “buried the axe in her brain” (Poe 334). This horrible moment, in my opinion one of Poe’s darkest, is followed by the narrator’s frank description of deciding what to do with the body. He runs through the idea of cutting the body into “minute fragments” or digging a grave in the cellar, but settles on walling his wife’s body in the cellar (a practice seen again in “The Cask of Amontillado”). After completing this task, the narrator rests easy for several days because the cat has also disappeared, apparently run off in fear. No guilt is wasted on the death of his wife since the speaker is supremely relieved to be rid of the cat. In a final display of moral loss, the narrator taunts police officers that are searching his home and taps his cane on the very wall that holds his wife’s body. A “long, loud and continuous scream, utterly anomalous and inhuman…such as might have arisen only out of hell” erupts from the wall and causes the discovery of the corpse and cat (Poe 336). Was the cat truly the “Arch-Fiend,” “the monster” returned from the dead to exact revenge on the narrator? Or had the mad, drug-crazed speaker committed murder and unknowingly also buried a cat? Poe does not provide us with an answer, which is why critics like Todorov claim “The Black Cat” as a fantastic tale.

Other criticism of “The Black Cat” centers on the tale as one of a set of Poe’s that do not quite reach allegorical meaning, but feature the theme that punishment “comes from some inner compulsion of the evil-doer himself…what Poe otherwise terms ‘perversity’” (Davidson 189). “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “William Wilson” and “The Black Cat” all concern characters who knowingly abandon common morals and find themselves greatly divided within. As a Romantic author, Poe featured the idea that if divine justice is gone, then in instances like this, guilt leads to self-punishment. The narrator in “The Black Cat” stands apart from these others in that he “not only acknowledges his criminality but accepts this ‘spirit of perverseness’ as the instrument of ‘my final irrevocable overthrow’” (Reilly 94). I find this assessment particularly helpful in terms of the unreliableness of the speaker in this tale. The reader is instructed to disbelieve from the beginning and is presented with many reasons to doubt the word of a fractured man who deliberately throws away his morality. When confronted with what appears to be the supernatural, the reader of “The Black Cat” hesitates to assign the narrator’s experience as either real or unreal, and we are left with the fantastic.

In terms of teaching, analyzing Poe’s stories as examples of the fantastic is immensely valuable. Romanticism units, while popular, can be much more effective with the addition of Poe. Students adore Poe partly because they feel accomplished if they understand his language and partly because he is shocking. Poe is taught heavily in the junior high schools, but he is analyzed strictly in terms of his biography and how it affected his work. One of the best ways to teach analysis of literature, in my opinion, is through genre and era studies. If students have a checklist that they can consult during reading, they will understand a piece more thoroughly. For example, the characteristics of Romanticism like awe of nature, individualism, the presence of a quest and emotional, rather than logical feelings can all exist on a checklist for students to work through as they read. In fact, the tenets of Romanticism can be found in a neat chart that goes with each story or poem and can literally be checked off! To this end, students, who love the dark side of literature anyway, could be introduced to the fantastic and look for the corresponding characteristics in assigned works. By teaching students how to analyze by genre or era, we automatically give them a way to discuss a work in a deeper sense than, “well, I like Poe because he was a drunk and people die in his stories.”

Davidson, Edward H. Poe: A Critical Study. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1957. Print.

Forgues, E.D. “The Tales of Edgar A. Poe.” Critical Essays on Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Eric W. Carlson. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co.,1987. Print.

Gargano, James W. “The Black Cat: Perverseness Reconsidered.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language , Vol. 2, No. 2 (Summer 1960), pp. 172-178. Online.

Neimeyer, Mark. “Poe and Popular Culture.” Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Kevin J. Hayes. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp.205-224. Online.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Black Cat.” Tales of Mystery and Imagination: Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Fall River Press, 2009, pp. 329-336. Print.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “William Wilson.” Online Texts for Craig White’s Literature Courses. http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/texts/AmClassics/RomFiction/Poe/poewmwil.htm. 6 April 2013.

Reilly, John E. “ A Source for the Immuration in ‘The Black Cat.’” Nineteenth-Century Literature , Vol. 48, No. 1 (Jun., 1993), pp. 93-95 . Online.

Thompson, G. R. Poe’s Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1973. Print.

Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. New York: Cornell Paperbacks, 1995. Print.