American Literature: Romanticism  Student Midterm Submissions 2016 midterm assignment 1b. Long Essay Describe, analyze, and illustrate a term, objective, or combinations . . .

Peter Becnel

11 October 2016

          The American Romantics’ commitment to correspondence as a means of linking characters’ interiors to the external world seems in part a project to demonstrate the connectedness of the interior person to the external reality. It is well known that the field of Psychology does not exist when the American Romantics wrote. It is frequently argued, that the work of Sigmund Freud, among others, the invention of the subconscious, was one of the things that framed and created a modernist perspective that would help us move in art, as in Literature, away from earlier narrative genres and their constructions. But invention, I think, is a misidentification. Freud no more invented the subconscious than Darwin invented evolution. Freud discovers the subconscious and gives people the means, a system of terms and concepts, that allow them to recognize, rationalize, evaluate and consciously think about a part of them that was already present. In gothic writing, the American Romantics use correspondence to create cognitive dissonance that unsettles and disturbs characters, the reader, and, at times, threatens the narrative itself. In the writing of Transcendentalist American Romantics, correspondence is used to reassure, establish harmony between the interior and external world, and resolve conflicts and cognitive dissonance; however, in either case, American Romanticism uses correspondence to make the human psyche manifest in the exterior world, exposing it to examination in a form that predates the field of Psychology.

          The use of correspondence in Gothic Literature to create cognitive dissonance is quite apparent in the work of Edgar Allan Poe, perhaps most clearly illustrated in The Fall of the House of Usher. The connection between “House of Usher” as a physical home that is profoundly connected to the family itself, is given early in the story when the narrator explains that the “undeviating transmission the patrimony of the name, which had, at length, so identified the two as to merge the original title of the estate in the quaint and equivocal appellation of the ‘House of Usher’—an appellation which seemed to include, in the minds of the peasantry who used it, both the family and the family mansion.” This exposition goes beyond a mere connection by introducing a double meaning to “House of Usher.” The language makes the doubling inextricable. Whenever mentioned for the remainder of the story, the reader has to ask to which “House of Usher” the narrator refers. Every mention of the house, leads to cognitive dissonance because the duality of the name presents an inherent doubling that cannot be resolved.

In paragraph two, when the narrator says “I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher?” He goes on to notice that “combinations of very simple natural objects which have to power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth (emphasis added).” He could either be discussing the physical house, or the psychological make up of its inhabitants. In either case, however, he recognizes that the discomfort he feels is beyond the reach of a purely rational mind. The unsettled feeling is deeper, “beyond our depth,” and cannot be dealt with in a purely rational way. Because this is never settled, the reader is left in a vulnerable state of irresolution. The uncertain, uncomfortable state of the narrator is conveyed through this use of double meanings and ambiguity. Like the narrator, the reader, too, is forced into a state of cognitive dissonance. Ultimately the dissonance, the conflict created in meaning, and the divide that has resulted from the undeviating patriarchal structure, leads to the spectacle under “blood red moon . . . the once barely-discernible fissure” which is “rapidly widened.” Our narrator’s “brain reeled as [he] saw the mighty walls rush asunder,” he hears a “shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters—and the deep and dank tarn at [his] feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the ‘House of Usher.’”

The description of the breaking and sinking of the house hearkens back to gothic figures borrowed from European Romanticism, but the cause and notions presented are uniquely American. The doubling of the name “House of Usher” is caused by the “undeviating transmission the patrimony of the name.” In many respects, “The House of Usher” is a victim of too much success. The transfer of property from father to son, and the consistent accumulation of wealth is very much the goal in England. This is how families establish themselves as very wealthy, and in earlier European gothic works like Wuthering Heights the successful families, such as the Linton’s are able to remain successful due to this strict transmission from father to son. In European Gothic Literature, problems typically arise when outsiders enter the family and create imbalances in the transfer of property, or the strict social system is disrupted due to the intervention of nature through, for example, love or passion, wildness that cannot—for whatever reason—be controlled or contained within the patriarchal system.

Poe’s work demonstrates the latent anxiety about the application of the European system of inheritance to a new world. In his case the successful transmission of property leads to the fissure in the house, and it comes from within the family itself. The doubling of the physical home and the family within ensures that it is a ruin so complete that no property is left to be inherited. All property, and the family itself sinks into the ground in a spectacle of sublime descent that the narrator cannot comprehend or fathom. This representation, coded with red, black, and white and presenting the supernatural, borrows from the European gothic tradition in order to present an American anxiety. If the patristic exchange of property goes on without the impediments present in the European system, grown there for millennia, will the family descend into illness and ruin? In this case, by making the house correspond with the family’s psychological deterioration, the family’s psychological issues are made manifest in a physical form. Lacking a language to express psychological issues, correspondence becomes a useful way to describe the decay that results from a too strict following of patristic inheritance.

Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow also uses correspondence to create cognitive dissonance, but to slightly different effect. Traveling during “the very witching time of night” “all the stories of ghosts and goblins that he had heard in the afternoon . . . came crowding upon [Ichabod’s] recollection.” As he continues to travel in the night, it “grew darker and darker; the stars seemed to sink deeper in the sky, and driving clouds occasionally hid them from sight. [Ichabod] never felt so lonely or dismal.” Unlike Poe, the correspondence of the night forest’s lonely darkness to Ichabod’s existential loneliness is not made ambiguous by doubling. It is not as if the name Ichabod can simultaneously refer to the man and the forest itself, as is the case in “The Fall of The House of Usher.” Instead, the question of whether the sense of loneliness that Ichabod feels is created by his being in the forest that makes him feel lonely, or if his perspective of the forest is colored by the loneliness he feels as a result of the frightening stories he has heard throughout the day. This cognitive dissonance is enhanced by the ultimate question regarding Ichabod’s fate. Was he really killed by the headless horseman? Or, did Brom Bones scare him away so that he could lead “the blooming Katrina in triumph to the altar?”

In working through some of these issues, it is helpful to remember that Irving is writing a ghost story, based apparently on a folk legend, that suggests a commentary regarding the effect of such legends. It is correspondence between the interior of Ichabod, and his predilection for “stories of ghosts and goblins,” and the forest during the “witching time of night” that create the story’s gothic effect and the cognitive dissonance on which it depends. Ichabod’s fearfulness of the potential “ghosts and goblins” in the forest, cause him to wish to reject them, whether they are manifest in his physical surroundings, or simply a part of him projected onto the landscape. What Irving succeeds in doing, and one of the main reasons I think his stories survive and are seen as uniquely American, is capture the isolated existential estrangement of the early Dutch colonies, while relocating the gothic force from the domestic sphere, as we see in much European gothic literature and Poe’s work, to surrounding nature.

 This notion of the strangeness and potentially supernatural aspects of the American wilderness runs throughout early romantic literature as a useful way to express the strangeness of the American experience of living within the wildness of nature. We see this in works throughout the period, including Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans which uses gothic figures to explore the strangeness of the wilderness and its inhabitants. By offering the plausible, realist’s reading of the ghost story—that Brom Bones scares off Ichabod—Irving appeals simultaneously to the appetite for gothic sensationalism that Americans feel as a result of their isolation and estrangement in a new world while offering an interpretation that appeals to the Enlightenment rationalism with which his readership may scrutinize gothic representation. Also, by offering two irreconcilable interpretations, he creates cognitive dissonance that unsettles the reader, denying him an ultimate conclusion—something that can be seen to run throughout gothic literature in Europe and America.

This is not to say that the only purpose for correspondence in American Romantic literature is the creation of cognitive dissonance that is used to unsettle the characters and the reader. Like Irving, the Transcendentalist American writers locate correspondence between man and nature, but unlike Irving, the transcendental writers offer the potential of harmonious correspondence that leads to a communion with nature that is empowering and reassuring rather than unsettling and isolating. In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature, Emerson claims that “we must trust the perfection of creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy.” Rather than the American wilderness’ ability to influence people to fears of isolation and estrangement, as we see in the case of Ichabod Crane, Emerson advocates for a communion with nature that can reassure and satisfy a person in terms of emotion and reason. He also advocates that the “perfection of creation” can “satisfy” the “things [it] has awakened in our minds.” Emerson indicates that understanding, and communing with the order of nature may give man a way of understanding himself.

 Again similar to Ichabod’s experience in the dark forest, Emerson argues that man can be influence by nature, but he has the potential to color nature with his own subjective perspective as well. He claims that “every hour and season yields its tribute of delight; for every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of mind.” Here we see that every hour in nature can potentially influence a person’s subjective experience due to his sensitivity to his natural surroundings; however, he also indicates that “nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of nymphs, is overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.” Man’s subjective perspective can influence his perspective of nature, and nature can influence the perspective of man. Just as the forest isolated and scared Ichabod, and hearing the ghost stories may have transformed the forest into a frightening place.

The relocation of correspondence to nature in American Literature, as distinct from a domestic building such as in the European Romantics, or the work of Poe, seems to explore a part of the early American consciousness that is simultaneously anxious about the large, strange wilderness, and excited to be in communion with such a vast and great natural setting. In the works of Irving and Poe, we see how correspondence can create cognitive dissonance, by forcing characters to see physical manifestations of internal psychology that are startling, and frightening, but denying readers the satisfaction of fully understanding why or whether these manifestations actually exist. These characters reject these external manifestations as different, strange and frightening. However, Emerson, offers the possibility of a communion with nature that is empowering because it presents a possible harmony with nature which could mean enhancement and empowerment through a uniquely American resource, the untamed wilderness. In either case, correspondence becomes a way of making manifest the psychological dilemmas and desires of a new emerging society in an unfamiliar place.