American Literature: Romanticism Sample Final Exam Essays 2015 final exam assignment #4: Variations on the Gothic

Melissa Hodgkins

Sin, Decay and The Old South: The American Gothic

          The gothic narrative has weaved its way into the American lexicon, tangling its dark themes and tragic anti-heroes into the Romantic bent of nineteenth and twentieth century American writers. The gothic is a genre that was adopted, for lack of a better word, into the American Romantic arsenal by way of European writers including: Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Mary Shelley, and Bram Stoker. The term Gothic refers to the revival of using medieval buildings (re-creations, often times, as this was a period of renewed interest in gothic architecture) in which stories of tragedy and/or horror often take place. It is important to note, that the gothic tale is more nuanced than simply typing it as gothic based upon its setting. While the original inspiration for the gothic may have come from Ann Radcliffe’s Castle Udolpho or Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, the genre supersedes the limitations of its origin. These types of stories were enormously popular in Germany and England and found their way across the Atlantic, influencing American fictive imagination and transforming the gothic into something uniquely “American”.

          As I will examine in this essay, while the European gothic was inspired largely by castles, mysterious abbeys, turrets of darkness and sublime terror, the American Romantic saw an opportunity to address themes central to the American psyche as a means of transforming what was once a distinctly European mode of storytelling into a way of expressing concerns and anxieties faced in a newer world. Among these American writers was Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne’s most famous work is The Scarlet Letter, a novel in which the American gothic takes shape from sin and guilt that is born out of the bleak and oppressive Puritan faith in which a young woman, under the false assumption of widowhood, engages in a secret affair with the town’s minister. When she is revealed to be pregnant, Hester refuses to name the father of her child. She is imprisoned and publicly shamed on a scaffold, forced to wear a scarlet letter A emblazoned on her clothing for the rest of her life. Her husband returns from life with natives but does not reveal his true identity, instead tormenting Hester’s lover the Rev. Dimmesdale, with the knowledge of his transgression. He begins to physically change and take on the look of evil. Ultimately, Hester’s lover is so completely torn by the guilt of his sin that he dies plagued by the torment of his sin and the choice he made to allow Hester to bear the burden of their relationship for so many years. Along the same plane of gothic storytelling, Hawthorne also wrote another tale about a Reverend with a secret. In “The Minister’s Black Veil” the young minister Mr. Hooper set his congregation into a fuss over his appearance in church wearing a black veil over his face. “Such was the effect of this simple piece of crape, that more than one woman of delicate nerves was forced to leave the meeting-house. Yet perhaps the pale-faced congregation was almost as fearful a sight to the minister, as his black veil to them”. The question then becomes why is he wearing this veil? What does he have to hide? For the reader of Hawthorne who is familiar with such work as The Scarlet Letter, one cannot help but wonder what secret he is concealing under that veil.

          But Hawthorne does not initially give in to the expectation of the reader. Instead we learn that “The subject [of the minister’s sermon] had reference to secret sin, and those sad mysteries which we hide from our nearest and dearest, and would fain conceal from our own consciousness”. Now we are left wondering who among these church-goers are hiding sin and inequity behind their “veils”. The whole town is subject to suspicion and potential condemnation. The day proceeds and evening service is attended, with the minister still wearing his black veil. In the most gothic moment of sin, secrets and suspicion there is a funeral service of a young woman following the evening church service. Hawthorne tells us “the clergyman stepped into the room where the corpse was laid, and bent over the coffin, to take a last farewell of his deceased parishioner. As he stooped, the veil hung straight down from his forehead, so that, if her eye-lids had not been closed forever, the dead maiden might have seen his face. Could Mr. Hooper be fearful of her glance, that he so hastily caught back the black veil?” Hawthorne builds upon suspense and fear in this moment. And in the a moment of superstitious fear we learn that “A person who watched the interview between the dead and living, scrupled not to affirm, that, at the instant when the clergyman's features were disclosed, the corpse had slightly shuddered, rustling the shroud and muslin cap, though the countenance retained the composure of death…” implying that the body reacted to the sight of the minister’s face as he was the one who was responsible for her death. While Hawthorne raises suspicion and mixes Puritan religious piety with old-world superstition (like the flinching dead maiden alerting the onlooker to the identity of her murderer) there is never a confirmation that he is harboring sin beneath his veil. For Hawthorne, the Puritanical rigidity of life and faith are the perfect background for religious gothic.

          Unlike Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe’s name is often uttered alongside the names of European gothic writers as his style tends to align closely with the more European approaches to the gothic tale, especially in regard to setting. While Hawthorne was concerned with what was subliminal terror within the American social setting, Poe was more concerned with otherworldly terror. As Hanna Mak noted in her essay entitled “The Constructed Reality of Correspondence” Poe’s ability to cast setting immediately invokes the gothic. Poe writes in “The Fall of the House of Usher”: “I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was—but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit”. Mak explains that for Poe’s narrator “Mere contact with the environment establishes a discourse between the setting and the emotional state of the character, casting both in a decidedly otherworldly light”. Immediately the reader recognizes the world of the House of Usher as a space of potential gothic terror. In tune with the European tradition Poe describes in the greatest details the look and state of the House of Usher. “Shaking off from my spirit what must have been a dream, I scanned more narrowly the real aspect [appearance] of the building. Its principal feature seemed to be that of an excessive antiquity. The discoloration of ages had been great. Minute fungi overspread the whole exterior, hanging in a fine tangled web-work from the eaves. Yet all this was apart from any extraordinary dilapidation”.

The awaiting horrors of tombs and doubles come only after the intense and exhaustive descriptions of the state of the maze-like home. Roderick Usher and his dead twin Madeline are described as male to female mirrors. “Having deposited our mournful burden upon tressels within this region of horror, we partially turned aside the yet unscrewed lid of the coffin, and looked upon the face of the tenant. A striking similitude between the brother and sister now first arrested my attention; and Usher, divining, perhaps, my thoughts, murmured out some few words from which I learned that the deceased and himself had been twins, and that sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature had always existed between them”. The result of Poe’s descriptions and his conflations of selfhood with the other as exemplified by Roderick and Madeline begin to permeate the reader’s grasp of what is real and what is imagined. The terror is almost pervasive. What distinguishes Poe’s use of the gothic is his emphasis on physical and moral decay. The two ideas are continually placed side by side— the decaying house and the decaying moral fiber of the House of Usher (meaning the familial line). Poe’s use of the gothic is so emblematic and respected by European scholars, that in the past his work was often dismissed as something almost “un-American”. Since being reinstated to his place amongst American writers, his name is the most synonymous with the gothic genre.

Proving that the American gothic permeates time and place, William Faulkner joins our discussion. Faulkner’s use of race and class and the death of the Old South distinguish his use of gothic as truly American. Unlike Poe, Faulkner’s gothic does not seem surreal, but more in the fashion of Hawthorne as it is centered in critique and observation of a fading way of life. While Faulkner avoids the typical gothic architecture expected of a setting in gothic tradition, there is something rather mysterious about Miss Emily’s house. Faulkner shows the reader that Miss Emily’s home is not only a site of dilapidation, but it is also the last of its kind: “only Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps—an eyesore among eyesores”. What’s worse than the appearance of the house is the foul smell that plagues the structure. “They broke open the cellar door and sprinkled lime there, and in all the outbuildings… They crept quietly across the lawn and into the shadow of the locusts that lined the street. After a week or two the smell went away”.

In the end, we learn that the foul smell came from the corpse of Homer Baron. The horror takes a minute to sink in as you realize what Miss Emily was guilty of with her poison and her refusal to let Homer go. In this way, Faulkner’s terror is a more lasting terror, as it could happen in the world readers are familiar with. His gothic is centered in decaying life and in criminal secrets, secrets kept by a lifelong servant whose paycheck most likely revolved around his mouth staying shut as to what he knew. Likely, Tobe was aware of Miss Emily’s secret, but kept it out of loyalty or job security in a time and place that was difficult for black individuals to make a living. Faulkner’s treatment of the gothic, shows the terror of death in and of small southern towns.

          It is my impression that the gothic as an American literary expression is here to stay. It works because first it is entertaining, but on a more scholarly level it also works because it challenges readers to question the world around them. Hawthorne warns of the dangers of hidden sin and manifested guilt. Poe paints a world so far outside of the “reality” readers know that it can be difficult to trust the reliability of his narrators or the truths presented in his subliminal terror. And Faulkner illustrates the truth that the world never stays the same and that the desire to stop time from progressing and the desire to stop people from leaving can often lead to terrible outcomes. As long as the world is filled with the unknown, the unexplained, and the undesired the gothic has purpose.