Umaymah Shahid

07 December 2016

Using the Gothic to Tap into Social and Mental Fears, Anxieties, and Shortcomings

The gothic is a literary genre that has prevailed in both European and American literature, bringing darkness, decay, and symbolic death to the Romantic narrative in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The gothic at first seems to be a horror story, serving little purpose but to intimidate, entertain, and haunt. However, the gothic genre is rooted in bringing forth fears and psychological anxiety to a more tangible realization. Light and dark, repressed fears, death and decay are elements of the gothic that are not modern notions, but take root in Christian visions of hell (contrasted to heaven), demons, and the devil (White). As people moved to more secular life-styles, gothic elements became less religious and more secular, involving haunted houses, secret passages, supernatural creatures, death and decay, but most importantly the psychological fears and social horrors that haunt us throughout time. American writers, having no access to European gothic elements such as haunted castles and dark abbeys, used what incited horror within the people: the wilderness, mansions, Indians referred to as the dark people, and social and religious norms. Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, Nathanial Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil,” and William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” use the gothic genre within their stories to bring attention to the psychological, moral and spiritual, and social darkness within individuals and society.

Edgar Allan Poe’s gothic style is usually categorized under European Gothic because of the haunted house, which also corresponds to the haunted mind. Haunted houses have locked doors, secret passages, haunting noises—similar to the mind with its own dark secrets, past failures, and fears. Poe’s gothic style, at first, seems almost comical because of the sheer exaggeration of the gothic elements: light and dark, correspondence, death and decay, voices, and insanity. The Fall of the House of Usher plays the gothic from the moment the unknown narrator begins his tale. He rides to the House of Usher “during the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the years, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens” (1). As he comes within view “of the melancholy House of Usher,” the “first glimpse of the building” causes “a sense of insufferable gloom [to] pervade[e] [his] spirit” (1). Before the narrator even gets to the building, everything around him is viewed as dark and disconsolate, which is ironic because his friend, Roderick Usher wants the “cheerfulness of [the narrator’s] society” to bring “some alleviation to his malady” (3). The mansion’s “bleak walls,” “vacant eye-like windows,” and the decaying trees and plants around it correspond with the dying young man residing inside the mansion, with his “cadaverousness of complexion…ghostly pallor of the skin, and the now miraculous luster of the eye” depicts the “wan” that was the narrator’s boyhood companion (1 and 10). Poe uses the gothic to explore the horrors and fears within the mind that haunt and shape what we perceive in front of us. Thus it is hard to separate between what is truly present and what is projected through the mind of the narrator. When the narrator scans “more narrowly the real aspect of the building” he finds it to be “that of an excessive antiquity” with “discoloration of ages,” “minute fungi overspread the whole exterior,” yet, “no portion of the masonry had fAllan; and there appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of parts, and the crumbling condition of the individual stones” (6). Roderick Usher displays the condition as his home—in tact on the outside but each individual part of him slowly dying away.

From the beginning of the story, the narrator establishes the psychological effect on how certain objects are viewed. Trying to determine why he was so unnerved by the House of Usher, the narrator concludes that “there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth” (2). He continues on to entertain the possibility that “a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression” (2). This observation allows the reader to glimpse the truth behind Poe’s gothic, taking certain natural objects and then projecting one’s fear, superstitions, secrets, etc. on the objects one has in view. Poe’s gothic style might seem painfully exaggerated, but it reveals the horrifying reality of the psychological trauma and influence one’s mind can have on what is perceived.

Hawthorne’s gothic style is primarily categorized under the moral, spiritual, or Puritan Gothic variation, where he challenges traditional spiritual and moral aspects of society and individuals than necessarily the horror of the mind. In “The Minister’s Black Veil” Hawthorne uses the gothic to expose the lack of genuine morality within society and its obsession with projecting their ideas of morality on others. In Puritan America and a lot of the Western world, a color code existed in which light or white symbolized purity and goodness, while darkness or black symbolized evil, sin, or impurity (White). The Minister drawing upon himself this black veil immediately becomes a stranger to his people and the people take the black veil to symbolize madness and evil (8 and 9). What makes Hawthorne’s Minister less supernatural and deeply disturbing, what we would probably see in Poe, is his ease and grace even if the black veil is a gothic element to his overall outfit. Hawthorne mentions that as the people looked on at him, “Mr. Hooper walked onward, at a slow and quiet pace, stooping somewhat and looking on the ground, as is customary with abstracted men, yet nodding kindly to those of his parishioners who still waited on the meeting-house steps” (6; emphasis added). Mr. Hooper keeping his usual gait defies Poe’s familiar gothic character—dying, insane, and reclusive, outside what is normal for one’s occupation. He preaches, goes to a funeral, and attends a wedding, but although he remains true to his character before taking on the veil, the black veil influences people in ways impossible for them to explain. When leaving the Church, the people are “conscious of lighter spirits the moment they lost sight of the black veil” (67) and so the veil becomes an uncomfortable reminder of sin, Judgment, their own shortcomings. Dying, Mr. Hooper finally confronts the people about their delusion of self-purity and their concern about the black veil, not the pastor himself or his efforts towards helping his people.

While everyone tries to conjecture the reason Mr. Hooper wears his veil, none stop to consider his actions. As the narrator in The Fall of the House of Usher points out, often times the mind takes simple objects and creates something more sinister or awful. Thus, the black veil plays with the minds of the people making them think a dead corpse moved out of awe of the Minister’s black veil, a gloom descends upon the marriage ceremony, some fancy “that the minister and the maiden’s spirit” walk hand in hand as they go towards the grave, (24), his sermons seem more powerful, and some entertain the notion that the black veil lies not only over his face but over his heart. Ostracized from his own community, Mr. Hooper’s black veil brings to light the hypocrisy of a religious community; obsessed with a piece of cloth and assuming gothic characteristics to the pastor, who has shown nothing but love, kindness, and guidance to his people. Hawthorne uses the gothic style to illustrate the absurdity of color codes—the color black is automatically assumed to denote sin, insanity, fear, death, ill fortune, and demonic communication. However, over and over again Hawthorne emphasizes the absurdity of such conjectures because the black veil is a piece of cloth that carries some symbolic meaning to Mr. Hooper, but at the end of the day, Mr. Hooper is still the same pastor he was before the veil was taken up. Thus, to the community, the black veil is not simply a cloth that covers his face, but “throws its influence over his whole person, and makes him ghostlike from head to foot” (18) despite anything he might do to dismiss such an impression.

Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” shows the continuing effect of the gothic in Modernist Romanticism with an almost transcendent yet grotesque style, combining Poe and Hawthorne’s gothic styles. Emily’s body and home show signs of decay as the House of Usher. The smell of decay, unbeknownst to the town officials is humorously taken care of by sprinkling lime at night, and like “The Minster’s Black Veil,” the community is obsessed with Emily and her home, making assumptions about every instance in her life. Emily is described as a “small, fat woman in black,” with a skeleton “small and spare”. “She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue. Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough” (1.6). The gothic depiction of Emily makes one shudder because it almost portrays her as otherworldly—nonhuman. Her house is described to smell “of dust and disuse—a close, dank smell” which foreshadows the scene that the neighbors would encounter in the long locked room. Although the scene in the locked room is mortifying, it speaks of a tragically gothic romantic ending. In an effort to keep her lover, a man who “himself had remarked—he liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elks’ Club—that he was not a marrying man” (4.1), Emily ensures of her possession of him forever through death. By poisoning Homer, he becomes forever her lover, but the Romantic aspect of such a transcendent love is almost nauseating when dust seems to pervade the room upon entrance and “[a] thin, acrid pall as of the tomb seemed to lie everywhere upon this room decked and furnished as for a bridal” (5.4). The once rose-colored marriage room becomes tarnished and dust just accumulates, and a once living, viable man is decaying and fleshless. A mixture of transcendence and gothic overpower the image of Homer “lain in the attitude of embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him” and he lay “rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt” (5.6). Besides him, on the second pillow was an indentation and on it the people found a strand of Emily’s iron-gray hair. This deeply disturbing show of affection and manner of death hits home because it takes place in a small town, in the midst of people, and it goes unnoticed for forty years. The location and incident is not isolated like the House of Usher and neither is it almost a century removed as “The Minister’s Black Veil”. As Melissa Hodgkins states in her final essay entitled “Sin, Decay and The Old South: The American Gothic,” “Faulkner’s terror is a more lasting terror, as it could happen in the world readers are familiar with” (paragraph 7). Thus the gothic in Modernist Realism becomes much less otherworldly and more familiar to the audience reading the text. Through the gothic genre, Faulkner demonstrates the threat darkness and insanity presents to the common man and woman. “A Rose for Emily” also shows that the gothic is not an isolated genre, but as the literary movement moves towards Modernism and Realism, the gothic becomes infused with a convoluted, yet beautiful, transcendence.

          The gothic genre has permeated the entire Romantic literary movement, serving different purposes pertaining to the time period it is written in and the audience it is written for. The gothic is appealing because it opens a window into the darker side of society and humanity (which modern society, at least, has been obsessed with) and it can be adapted to various styles of writing because the elements are not confined to a certain time or space, rather to any story line as each author discussed in this paper demonstrated. Aside from being adaptable to any style of writing, gothic is also appealing because it challenges readers and scholars to understand the complexities of the mind, the individual, and the society, and Poe, Hawthorne, and Faulkner entertain those complexities beautifully. Poe reaches into the far recesses of the mind to show the impact of psychological terror and undisclosed fears and repressions; Hawthorne brings to light human weakness to condemn others for fear of their own shortcomings; and Faulkner portrays the human vulnerability to elements of death, decay, and repressed fears and desires in dictating aspects of our lives we wish to hold on to. The world is a complicated place, with both good and bad, love and hate, happiness and sadness coexisting. The gothic coexists with Romantic notions of beauty, truth, and desire, and as long a those elements remain within literature and popular culture, the gothic will too.