Caryn Livingston

Gothic and Racial Anxieties in American Romanticism

The gothic as an element of Romantic literature is generally an external manifestation of an internally haunted mind. In early American literature, the most common manifestation of the gothic was the American wilderness where, for example, Mrs. Mary Rowlandson’s several removes into the wilderness in the Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson were an external manifestation of the internal desolation she experienced at her captivity. Rowlandson wrote, “I must turn my back upon the town, and travel with them into the vast and desolate wilderness, I knew not whither.” This anxiety surrounding leaving the remnants of European society embodied by the new American towns and journeying into the wilderness is a fairly direct representation of American anxieties brought to light by the gothic in literature, as writers who were first European colonists and then eventually American citizens struggled to understand their new homeland and their new identity as Americans. Eventually, the gothic became more internalized in American literature, and a primary expression of the gothic’s reflection of psychological fears transitioned to the color codes—with light skin and complexions representing goodness and purity, and darker skin and complexions representing moral failing or badness—and emerging American fears of miscegenation.

In her final essay “The Unconquerable Darkness,” Roslynn Kelley argued that while gothic tales generally require light to balance out the darkness to retain their Romantic qualities, several American gothic stories are able to forego the balancing act so long as the stories are able to continue. Especially early in American Romantic literature, this proves true for the color codes when there can be no other satisfactory resolution to the story. In James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, in addition to the villainous Iroquois in the novel, the character Cora Munro is an invocation of the dark side of the color code.

While the Iroquois and the antagonist Magua are straightforward villains in association with their dark complexions, Cora is described by her father and several other characters and the narrator as “lovely and virtuous.” However, she is also “descended, remotely, from that unfortunate class who are so basely enslaved to administer to the wants of a luxurious people.” Of the Munro sisters, Cora is the dark lady to her sister Alice’s fair lady, and despite Cora’s virtues, Alice is depicted as almost angelic and is the woman of choice for the white hero Major Heyward, while Cora attracts both Magua and Uncas. However, neither of Cora’s potential suitors could marry her without introducing anxieties surrounding race-mixing, as Cora embodies the “Tragic Mulatto” myth. Much as Kelley argues in her essay, there is no resolution of Cora’s conflict with the color code with light, and the novel ends with her death to allay fears of mingling the races.

The color code is again invoked in the dark and fair ladies of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “Ligeia,” where it is the dark lady Ligeia whom the narrator longs for. However, while the narrator longs for her, his longing is part of the gothic horror invoked. The narrator’s unwholesomeness is invoked as an aspect of the gothic when his hatred for his second wife is described as belonging “more to demon than to man,” and his reason is shattered by his opium addiction—as the narrator tells the reader, “I was habitually fettered in the shackles of the drug.” The narrator’s second wife, “the fair-haired and blue-eyed Lady Rowena Trevanion, of Tremaine,” is the fair lady of the tale and is too wholesome to survive the overpowering gothic influences invoked by the tomb-like bridal chamber the narrator creates for her. She rapidly falls into an illness which, the narrator concludes, “had no origin save in the distemper of her fancy, or perhaps in the phantasmagoric influences of the chamber itself.”

Much like Cooper’s novel where light failed to balance the darkness of the gothic, the fair lady in Poe’s tale is entirely subsumed by the dark lady Ligeia and by the narrator’s own imaginings as he becomes an extension of the darkness. Following Lady Rowena’s death, either the narrator imagines or witnesses the corpse come back to life as his first wife Ligeia, in a gothic twinning of the psychological and physical world in which it is not crucial to know whether the narrator’s experience is real or psychological. The racial anxieties are less apparent in Ligeia than in Cooper’s novel, but there are still echoes of the ethnic “other” that appear in both Ligeia, with her mysterious family background that the narrator cannot recall. Ethnic fears are further emphasized in the description of the bridal chamber for Lady Rowena that calls to mind Orientalism through its eastern furnishings that Poe uses to invoke supernatural fears surrounding eastern mysticism with, for example, the “gigantic sarcophagus of black granite, from the tombs of the kings over against Luxor” that stands in the chamber. The fact that the influences of the chamber may be enough to overpower the health and life of Lady Rowena gives free reign to racial fears of the color code and darkness overcoming light.

Following early Romanticism’s extreme anxiety surrounding the color code and miscegenation, the later emergence of Black writers in the canon is refreshing for their ability to reimagine the color code. This is apparent in the poetry of Langston Hughes, who explicitly references it in his “Dream Variations” poem. Within the poem, the day is white and a time for dancing, while the night is “Dark like me.” The crucial change between Hughes’s envisioning of the color code and earlier writers’ explorations of it is that Hughes dreams of a duality between dark and light that lets go of the old gothic fears. Interestingly, while early writers combined the fears of the dark-skinned “other” and the forest as unknowable wilderness, Hughes also combines a possible forest setting with the darkness in his poem. In his dream, he will “rest at cool evening / Beneath a tall tree / While night comes on gently.” Hughes’s reclamation of nature as a potential place of rest after a day’s activity in the social world embraces those early Romantic ideas of Thoreau, where nature becomes a refuge from society. In Hughes’s poem, light and dark are in balance, but it is a balancing of the color code that at last rejects the concept of darkness as a time of fear and of moral decay, because he is a Black writer. The darkness is no longer the other and night can be a time of tenderness in the world Hughes dreams of because, he writes, it is “Black like me.”