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

Roslynn Kelley

The Unconquerable Darkness: An Examination of Adaptations
 from European Gothic Romance Narratives into a New American Gothic.

          It would be impossible to discuss Romanticism without discussing the Gothic because the two terms feel as though they are synonymous.  Gothic elements in romantic literature began in the European tradition of Romanticism. Ann Radcliffe’s, The Mysteries of Udolopho and the novel that started it all, Horace Walpole’s, Castle of Ontranto (White, course website).  The features of these novels are how correspondences between the characters and the decaying or haunted spaces they inhabit function and are resolved.  The Gothic is an appealing form of the romantic narrative because it encompasses the unknown and terrible; additionally, it possesses the ability to stretch the imagination and surprise the plot with unexpected ideas.  It is limited, however, by an overabundance of darkness and terror because without a proper balance of light, Gothic tales lose their romantic qualities.  Despite a Gothic tale requiring a light to balance to the dark, there does exist—because of its flexibility—an ability to leave Gothic stories open ended; there does not need to be light to balance the dark provided the story is able to continue. A few burgeoning American Romantic authors are able to stretch the Gothic to fit this new kind of Romantic narrative.
            A separation from reality and the “here and now” occurs in the minds of characters in romance narratives; in this separation, a journey towards transcendence or transformation takes place.  In the European model, the typical Gothic settings are ruined and old castles—the titles of the two aforementioned novels specifically refer to castles--, but in American Romanticism, the Gothic extends far beyond the walls of a haunted castle.  This adaptation of the Romantic form of the Gothic is important because it transforms it into something that is purely American. 
          American Romantic literature incorporates the Gothic in many different ways.  The Gothic background of haunted castles and haunted minds gives way to an unconfined wilderness that stretches the American imagination. Unlike the European model, the American form of the Gothic does not always feature a counterbalance; that is, evil may exist but there is little or no representation of the good.  In Washington Irving’s short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” there is this lack of balance. Additionally, “Sleepy Hollow” has the Gothic element of the supernatural: “His [Ichabod Crane] appetite for the marvelous, and his powers of digesting it [gullibility], were equally extraordinary; and both had been increased by his residence in this spell-bound region…There was a contagion in the very air that blew from that haunted region; it breathed forth an atmosphere of dreams and fancies infecting all the land” (Irving).   The town is mysterious and this enchants Crane’s already vivid imagination; however, he does not represent the light to counterbalance to the area’s enigmatic “dark” character.  Instead, the town of Sleepy Hollow absorbs him into its Gothic mythology.  The tale of the headless Hessian and his connection to Crane maintains the supernatural quality of the town, but there is nothing to explain the mystery of Crane’s disappearance, save for a few rumors told by travelling townspeople.  Crane does not undergo a transform nor does he transcend beyond the town’s supernatural story, and he does not succeed in explaining it away.  The darkness of the headless Hessian remains, with no light to counter its presence.  This story, as a Gothic tale, is appealing because it does not follow the traditional routine; that is, Crane does not “save the day” or become a hero.  Instead, it leaves the story open with a lingering air of mystery and terror.
          The European tradition of romance narratives featuring the Gothic usually focus on the psychological aspect of the exterior’s influence on a character’s interior.  In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Edgar Allan Poe uses the traditional model to explore the correspondence between a haunted space and a haunted mind.  This particular tale by Poe does not initially seem to stretch the Gothic beyond its original context; however, in the story there is no counterbalance to the darkness.  The narrator does not offer any kind of light into the darkness he initially sees: “I know not how it was—but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit…an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime” (Poe).  The light of his imagination fails at rectifying the darkness; it is, essentially, absorbed by the “bleak walls---upon the vacant eye-like windows” (Poe).     This is an appealing aspect of the Gothic because it does not offer a resolution, nor does it offer any desire to find the lost light of the place. 
          Nathanial Hawthorne’s story, “The Minister’s Black Veil, A Parable,” encompasses several sub-categories of the Gothic.  It is a puritan moral tale in a suburban setting, which is a combination that does not appear in the traditional European models.  As in most romance narratives, there is the illusion that the situation is not happening in reality because of the extreme measures taken by the central character in the story.  Although the minister dons the veil in “the here and now,” he does not live within the reality of the setting.  His behavior also demonstrates that he feels a disconnect from the group: “At that instant, catching a glimpse of his figure in the looking-glass, the black veil involved his own spirit in the horror with which it overwhelmed the others.  His frame shuddered, his lips grew white, he split the untasted wine upon the carpet and rushed forth into the darkness” (Hawthorne).  The minister is on a journey of transformation, but his goal is in transforming those around him.  He casts a “deeper gloom” onto “the whole village…talked little else than Parson Hooper’s black veil” (Hawthorne).  The Gothic is evident in this tale by maintaining the mystery of the minster’s choice to wear the veil.  He casts himself as “the other” voluntarily; he becomes the feature of the unexplored wilderness that early American Romantic literature examines.  By placing a human in the role of nature, Hawthorne isolates the source of the Gothic; that is, he creates and redefines what it means to place a boundary on the unfamiliar.  The origin of the Gothic is internal, psychological and Hawthorne takes the connection between the haunted place and the haunted mind to a new level.  The minister himself is a haunted place in which his haunted mind resides; the two are interchangeable.  
          Irving, Poe, and Hawthorne use the themes of the Gothic in these tales to demonstrate the European tradition’s adaptability.  Each author takes varieties of the Gothic to different extremes: none of them offers a resolution to the unreality of the tales’ settings nor do they use the traditional balance of dark and light.  Instead, they reconfigure what it means for a tale to be Gothic.  By placing the stories in different settings, these authors further show that the Gothic does not need to reside within the walls of ruined castles, but it lives within the minds of the characters that need to rectify their place in the “here and now.”