American Literature: Romanticism research assignment Student Research Submissions 2016

Peter Becnel

16 November 2016

A Fantasy of the Real

          As Literature changes and its familiar tropes, narrative structures, and conceptual frameworks evolve, it is easy to disregard the previous narrative conventions as old-fashioned. This certainly seemed to be part of William Dean Howells’s project in moving fiction away from the highly constructed narrative formations found in romantic and gothic texts, to a form of fiction that is more invested in exposing the function of relationships and perceptions as people actually experience them. While American Realists do not seem committed to mimesis, realist writers do seem to insist that fiction present cultural artifacts that, when interpreted, illuminate details and relationships that seem more closely representational of the function of the world. However, the movement into Realism depends on Romanticism, not only because the Romantic period preceded it, but because the presentation of the real must include perceptions that are colored by the Romantic past, kept very much alive in the minds of actual people.

Realist texts exploit and depend on Romantic frameworks to distinguish between the “real” and the fantastical. Ironically, Realism is a movement that must contain Romanticism because without the romantic, the equally artificial Realist constructs do not seem to present a more realistic construction of the function of society or the world. It is the job of the reader to acknowledge the way that characters’ fidelity to Romantic or Gothic interpretive lenses artificially color characters’ perceptions of reality. This issue is further problematized in the Gothic, when Gothic figures are used in Realist texts to expose a hidden reality, such as readers see in Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition.

 Marrow’s title suggests bones, a clear nod to the Gothic, but only presents bones indirectly, focusing instead on their very center. As its title suggests, Marrow is a Realist text that utilizes Gothic figures in order to explore a more profound, or real, truth about society in the South during Reconstruction. By analyzing the use of gothic figures, and narrative structures also seen in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher and comparing Poe’s use of these figures to Chesnutt’s use of the Gothic in Marrow, I hope to demonstrate the unique way that Chesnutt exploits the Gothic in a Realist novel in order illuminate how racial anxieties become a generative source for the fiction of black criminality.

The Fall of the House of Usher provides an especially useful model for understanding the Gothic structures that Chesnutt exploits because of its reliance on the Gothic to make manifest Roderick’s plausible psychological disturbance while resisting announcing the source of psychological decay; furthermore, The Fall of the House of Usher’s focus on the decay of an undeviating lineage provides a clear connection between gothic figures and the interpretations of their plausible sources—generational  decay or the supernatural.

Very early in The Fall of the House of Usher, familiar Gothic imagery sets the stage for the odd correspondence that the story frequently uses to connect the perception of the characters, to the physical features of the environment that surrounds them. As the short story opens, “the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens” (Poe 1). In the opening scene, the reader is treated to an environment that is physically oppressive due the gloom of the weather. As the narrator travels to the house, the setting itself seems to oppress both the story’s voice and the perspective of the narrator. The house is then personified, given “vacant eye-like windows,” beginning figures necessary to establish a psychological connection between the physical house and the characters (Poe 1). As the house is presented like a human creature, the narrator acknowledges that “there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the reason, and the analysis, of this power, lie considerations beyond our depths” (Poe 1). The narrator directly acknowledges the disturbing impact that the “decayed” scenery has upon him (Poe 1). Simultaneously, the narrator indicates a significant feature of Poe’s story. The most psychologically disturbing the arrangement of objects in his short story are a significant reason that Poe receives such popular and critical attention. While the text is rich with familiar Gothic tropes, it is also laden with irresolution.

The popular reader is troubled by the familiar dissonance invoked by Poe’s story, while the critic finds a perfect artifact to interpret and reinterpret. As John C. Gruessner notes, The Fall of the House of Usher handles the issue of “rationalism versus supernaturalism,” and endures partially because it presents a Gothic story that “straddles” the boundary between a story in which “supernatural events actually do occur and [one] in which there are rational, if at times highly improbable, explanations for occult phenomena” (2). This lack of certainty, separating the potentially real from the potentially supernatural, is never resolved for the reader. A significant intention of Poe’s work seems to be to disturbed the reader with this lack of certainty. This is a convention of the gothic, the supernatural is used to trouble the characters, rendering them unable to navigate the problematic phenomena they encounter or its effects on them, and leaving the reader unable to definitively identify a generative source for the disturbing gothic phenomena.

However, while Poe’s use of the gothic seems intended to defy reason and resist definitive interpretation, it seems necessary that in order for his Gothic portrayals to disturb his readers, Poe must rely upon social issues as, in many cases, they offer the potentially reasonable interpretation. In the case of The Fall of the House of Usher, Poe relies on the “transmission, from sire to son, of the patrimony with 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” (Poe 2). The doubling of the mansion and the family, and the combination of the identifier “House of Usher” for either, further advances the physical manifestation of Roderick’s interior both through the plot of the story and the language in the story. The signifier “House of Usher” is presented with ambiguity throughout the story, and the reader is unable to resolve the cognitive dissonance that is generated through its double function.

This sets in place one potentially rational explanation for the family’s degeneration, that a family bloodline, when left to advance uninterrupted for too long, degenerates into the grotesque.  The narrator clearly indicates this possibility, as Roderick has “a cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid, surpassingly beautiful curve; a nose of a delicate Hebrew model, but with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar formations; a finely moulded chin, speaking in its want of prominence, of want of moral energy; hair of a more than web-like softness and tenuity” (Poe 4). In the narrator’s description, we can see the beautiful that has begun to decay. The hair is “more than web-like,” so fine and thin—typically associated with the beautiful—but here reduced to a state more similar to a spider’s web, indicating that its delicacy has become so refined that it has become grotesque. His nose is almost “a delicate Hebrew model,” but is rendered grotesque by “a breadth of nostril [that is] unusual in similar formations” (Poe 4).

Roderick’s condition develops the notion upon this theme of the over-refinement of features due to the undeviating bloodline, as “he suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses” (Poe 5). Similarly, Roderick’s perception of the world is overly refined. Roderick’s perception is that of a man who experiences the world in all of its forms in too extreme a degree to be tolerable. His family lineage has so purified his sense perception that he is no longer able to interact with the world and only feels a degree of tolerance for the world when he is kept entirely within the walls of his home. That is, as his senses become grotesque from over-refinement, he perceives the world around him as inherently grotesque as well. When the narrator sees Roderick’s sister, lady Madeline, the issue of identity presented in the doubling of Roderick and the House is further problematized.

When the narrator initially perceives Madeline, he “regarded her with an utter astonishment not unmingled with dread. Her figure, her air, her features—all, in their very minutest development were those—were identically, (I can use no other sufficient term,) were identically those of Roderick Usher who sat beside me” (Poe 5). Here, the narrator experiences the uncanny when he looks at Madeline, and he is so overwhelmed by her resemblance to her brother, that his is unable to reason through the experience, he “can use no other sufficient term” other than “identically” (Poe 5). What the narrator seems to indicate here, is that they are identical, copies, without individual identities, and are therefore both somehow united with the house. The merging of the siblings’ identities, defies the narrator’s attempts at reasonable expression. He acknowledges that he is unable to accurately depict the troubling experience of the merging identities—again the reader is left in the space between the reasonable and the supernatural. Is some sort of doubling occurring between Roderick and his sister? Or, are they nearly identical because of the lack of deviation in the bloodline?

The cracking and division of the house, which our narrator seems narrowly to escape, does not offer the reader a resolution of the tale that satisfies his desire to differentiate the reasonable from the supernatural. As Gruessner notes, “The narrator would have us believe that he is documenting the mental decline of Roderick . . . Prior to the climactic moment, however, the narrator has admitted that, in spite of his rationalist pose, both the gloomy mansion and Roderick’s mental state have unsettled him” (84). The narrator’s unreliability could be caused by the influence of Roderick’s decay. The origin of the contamination possibly coming from Roderick’s grotesque perception of the house, his troubled, mixed identity, the possibility that the house may split due to the influence of the supernatural, the system of doubling that is impossible to reason through, is never given a source.

 As David Roche convincingly argues in his essay The ‘Unhealthy’ in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’: Poe’s Aesthetics of Contamination, “the ‘unhealthy’ work of art is considered to be produced by an ‘unhealthy’ subject and is believed to have the capacity to contaminate the recipient” (30). What Roche identifies in his analysis of the contaminating quality of Poe’s story, is the notion that the effect on the reader, which I call a state of cognitive dissonance, and he calls “the aesthetic response,” “can be identifiable and articulated; its origin cannot” (30).  The reader is unable to assign a source to the production of the cognitive dissonance because he cannot use reason to move past the possibility of the supernatural. The story disturbs all involved including the reader, and as such, it does not provide the reader with easy answers. This story’s force is derived from its ability to generate the cognitive dissonance that occurs as a result of the indeterminacy between potentially reasonable or supernatural forces. The generated cognitive dissonance, the psychological suggestions remain just that, and without a satisfactory resolution, the reader, like the narrator, is left to inhabit the uncertain space that seems to make up much of the Gothic narrative’s designed effect. When a gothic text presents the potentially supernatural, it presents the potentially supernatural as a plausible interpretation. A reasonable person can argue that the House of Usher divides because of a supernatural force that has come to inhabit the house and the family. However, in order to create cognitive dissonance, Poe offers readers an equally plausible interpretation that can be based on reason. The Ushers are insane due to their undeviating bloodlines; the house is split by a lightning bolt during the storm.

If we read the Gothic text, as Michael Brown suggests, as “thought experiments that test the limits not just of human endurance, but more specifically of human reason,” we are able to perceive the differences in the usefulness of Gothic figures to both the Gothic and Realist texts (280). In his work, Brown indicates that “the imagination . . . of a gothic novelist is haunted at its edges by a mysterious world beyond the limitations of understanding” (281). While we see many similar Gothic features in Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, because Marrow aspires to be a Realist text, the texts awareness of the Gothic figures and their function in the story is quite different. While the gothic text may suggest the possibility of the supernatural and offer it as a plausible interpretation alongside the reasonable, the realist text may utilize the seemingly supernatural, but only contained within a reasonable generative source. In a realist text, gothic figures service the real—that which can be confirmed and validated using reason.

Qualifying the distinction between the European Gothic and American Gothic, Gerald Ianovici claims that “the representation of slavery as entrapment in extremis . . . [is] a generative condition for the American gothic,” and that in The Marrow of Tradition, “Chesnutt replaces an alien ‘Gothic psychology’ inherited from Europe with a ‘Gothic sociology’ that is distinctly American;” I will argue that this is characteristic of realism. Based on this qualification, The Fall of the House of Usher is clearly a gothic text that is written in the European tradition. In addition to the haunted mansion, the plausible, reasonable interpretation of the story requires the acknowledgement of mental decay, or, the psychological. The change that Ianovici indicates from psychology to sociology implies the movement from a focus on the deterioration of the individual to the deterioration of a social structure, which can be coded, through gothic figures. Furthermore, this qualification implies that gothic figures, which are used in Poe to create dissonance between the reasonable and supernatural, are also used by American realist texts to create a division between the real and the fictional, the actual and the fantasy.

Like The Fall of the House of Usher, Marrow presents the degeneracy of a family line through generations of Southern nobility. Lee Ellis, a local editor at the newspaper run by Major Carteret, a prominent Southern businessman and white supremacist, is described as “an excellent judge of character” who “had formed a very decided opinion on Tom Delamere,” the grandson of a prominent southern aristocrat in the town of Wellington. Lee Ellis is an important figure in Marrow in that he is uniquely positioned to be a narrator whose reason is not affected by nostalgia for the Antebellum south (Chesnutt 103). “To Ellis, unbiased by ancestral traditions, biased perhaps by jealousy, Tom Delamere was a type of the degenerate aristocrat. If as he often heard, it took three or four generations to make a gentleman, and as many more to complete the curve and return to the base from which it started, Tom Delamere belonged somewhere on the downward slant, with large possibilities of further decline” (Chesnutt 104). Ellis sees a similar degenerate quality in Tom Delamere as the one exhibited by Roderick in The Fall of the House of Usher. However, Tom’s degeneracy is not caused so much by the constant proliferation of a pure bloodline without deviation or the supernatural influence of a haunted mansion; Tom’s degeneracy is caused by the removal of the system of Southern slave-holding aristocracy in the Antebellum South.

 Unlike his father, Old Mr. Delamere, Tom was not raised in an environment that allowed him to cultivate the sensibilities of a gentleman. Old Mr. Delamere, inhabited a world in which his enormous social power, including that over the lives of his slaves, enabled him to develop relatively virtuous inclinations; however, without the Antebellum South’s plantation system, a system in which in its most ideal form, slaves were treated as if they were members of the owners’ family (Old Mr. Delamere’s trusted servant Sandy, a former slave, fits into this category), Tom begins to mirror the environment of the new social system in which he inhabits. According to Ianovici, “Tom Delamere represents the dissolution of the idealized southern gentleman. Heir to one of Wellington’s most distinguished families, Tom embodies the decline of the local white establishment” (Ianovici 43).

Like Roderick usher, Tom’s interior begins to mirror the exterior world in a form of Gothic correspondence; however, unlike Roderick, Tom shows few symptoms of physical deterioration; in fact, he is able to so control his exterior appearance that he exploits his physical appearance in order to manipulate the morally bankrupt system in which he inhabits. Unlike the morally developed sensibilities of his grandfather, Old Mr. Delamere, Tom’s lack of a moral system allows for horrible degeneration as he sinks deeper into lying, drinking to excess, and gambling with money that he does not have.

Tom’s moral degeneration concludes in his use of the Delamere’s humble and faithful servant Sandy’s clothing in order to rob and kill      ` Mrs. Ochiltree. Tom is pushed to these extremes by his own morally bankrupt behavior. As Tom returns home from robbing and killing Mrs. Ochiltree, Sandy, who is walking home himself, sees “himself hurrying along in front of him. Possibly the muddled condition of Sandy’s intellect had so affected his judgement as to vitiate any conclusion he might draw, but Sandy was quite sober enough to perceive that the figure ahead of him wore his best clothes” (Chesnutt 147).

Both the notion that Sandy’s intellect was “muddled” by drink, and the fact that he cannot trust himself with what he sees, borrows from the gothic trope of the uncanny, and exploits the common Gothic narrative feature of the character experiencing the “supernatural” while in a state of altered consciousness. Furthermore, Sandy “maintain[s] as nearly as possible an equal distance between himself and his double. The situation was certainly an incomprehensible one, and savored of the supernatural” (Chesnutt 147). Sandy’s attribution of the supernatural to Tom’s minstrel performance, indicates Sandy’s willingness to believe that Tom is actually a double of himself. Like the uncanny recognition throughout Gothic Literature, seen in the troubling encounter of the narrator of The Fall of the House of Usher through Roderick’s sister Madeline, Sandy wonders “Ef dat’s me gwine ‘long in front . . . den who is dis bein’ here” (Chesnutt 148). Sandy’s identity is so disturbed by the encounter with Tom Delamere’s performance, that he is uncertain of his own identity. This troubling scenario contributes to Marrow’s theme regarding the social alienation of black people living in a society that at once rejects them and forces fictional identities upon them. That is, Sandy believes that an offensive performance of black criminality may be him.

 It is the responsibility of the reader to unravel what happened in this scene with Sandy and his double. Tom Delamere chooses the very disguise that he uses to impersonate a black man during the “cakewalk” scene (Chesnutt 118). When Ellis observes Delamere performing in black face, dressed as Sandy in the “cakewalk,” yet another Gothic trope is revealed as “the grotesque contortions of one participant had struck him as somewhat overdone, even for the comical type of negro” (Chesnutt 118). Ellis is looking at Delamere’s performance, and as he acts like the minstrel-show stereotype of a black performer, his external appearance matches his internal moral grotesqueness. Ianovici indicates that this moment “demonstrates how the racist construction of black inferiority contaminates the fiction of white purity” (46). That the white figure, Tom Delamere, the descendant of the true, honorable, Southern aristocrat, Old Mr. Delamere, performs so convincingly in blackface indicates that the true souce of the fiction of black degeneracy and subsequently, criminality, is actually generated by the formerly white aristocracy. That is, Chesnutt uses the gothic trope of the uncanny to demonstrate that white criminality is the generative force producing fictions of black criminality so pervasive, that they are believed by the black people that they mock and misrepresent.

This is the same outfit that Delamere uses to rob Polly Ochiltree. Dressed in the garb that fits society’s perception of a black man, a perception that reinforces a comforting nostalgia for the Antebellum South’s plantation system, a nostalgic fiction that is no longer relevant to the Southern Reconstruction world, Tom is rendered externally grotesque. White society is only able to perceive him as such when he is dressed as a black man because society’s generative gothic fiction only allows a category of moral degeneracy for black people.

Sandy’s troubled identity suggests that he is no longer able to distinguish the fictional character of a burly black burglar, from his own identity. As he was taught to inhabit his identity, as he inhabited his role on the plantation with Old Mr. Delamere, he now attempts to inhabit the role assigned to him by society, even in the face of his own identity. Sandy is unable to resolve the misidentification. The reader, however, can immediately identify this as a fiction. And the reader must act as a spectator, as the town plans to lynch innocent Sandy for Tom Delamere’s crime. Only Ellis, who saw Tom Delamere’s performance as one “unbiased by ancestral traditions, biased perhaps by jealousy,” is able to unravel the mystery, and successfully plead with Old Mr. Delamere to save Sandy’s life. Sandy is spared, and so too, is Tom Delamere. The town reacts quite differently when the murderous burglar is revealed to be a white man.

In The Fall of the House of Usher, the reader, the narrator, and the characters of the story are introduced to an irresolute, contagious dissonance that destroys two of the characters, troubles the narrator, and leaves the reader in a disturbed state of indetermination; however, Marrow too leaves the reader in a disturbed state. The difference, and the usefulness of the Gothic in Realist texts, I think, is illuminated by this distinction. The Fall of the House of Usher troubles the reader because it is at once strange, indeterminate, and psychologically familiar. The disturbance one experiences after reading Usher is the same disturbance that one experiences when grasping at interpretations to explain the troubling events of one’s life. Like many critics, readers may settle on an interpretation and argue to support an interpretation despite the inability to satisfactorily resolve the tensions created by the story. They originate from an indeterminate source, something inside the narrator, perhaps the supernatural; however, in Marrow, the reader is given a definite source and purpose for the use of Gothic tropes.

          The generative source of the Gothic in the marrow of tradition is a fictional racist construction that colors the perception of all of the people of the story. To the characters who have abandoned the racist Antebellum past, the Romanticized notion of slavery as an institution of slave-holding families, the notion of the happy slave—the Gothic appears as the Gothic should, a strange contortion, a distortion of reality. A recognizable mutation, a version of the real through a constructed fictional lens that changes the perception of men into monsters. When Old Mr. Delamere discovers the truth regarding Sandy’s crime and condemns Tom, he renounces him saying “Tom is no longer a member of my family, I disown him. He has covered the family name—my name, sir—with infamy” (Chesnutt 184). In renouncing his grandson, Old Mr. Delamere renounces his fantasy of the Antebellum past, the notion that a similar rule of honor and order can be passed into the next generation. In that moment, he recognizes the current construction, the fictional construction of society as Gothic. He disowns his own lineage, recognizing it as hideous and grotesque, and dies, this old beacon of the Antebellum South, the closest the novel can present to an “honorable” former slave owner and gentleman. 

          But to the racist, the racially insecure, the Major Carterets, and Captain McBane’s, the grotesque, the caricature, the constructed categories of identification, appear just as they should must be upheld at all costs. It is no coincidence that the fictional town of Wellington is divided based on a constructed barrier of black and white. Following Sandy’s vindication, “all over the United States had flashed the report of another dastardly outrage by a burly black brute” (Chesnutt 187).

I do not suggest that Chesnutt goes so far as to indicate that the Gothic can be something reasonable; what Chesnutt succeeds in doing, is relocating the generative source of the Gothic coding that pervades race relations to the unreasonable racial anxieties that appear during Reconstruction. It is the degeneration of the Antebellum gentleman’s lineage, that of Tom Delamere and the fictional construction of a white supremacy based on a notion of superiority that does not exist, that leads to the construction of the black brute and the gothic fictions that pervade the real in Wellington.

Works Cited

Brown, Marshall. "A Philosophical View of the Gothic Novel." Studies in Romanticism 26.2 (1987): 275-301. JSTOR [JSTOR]. Web. 27 Oct. 2016.

Chesnutt, Charles W., Nancy Bentley, and Sandra Gunning. The Marrow of Tradition. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2002. Print.

Gruesser, John C. "Madmen and Moonbeams: The Narrator in "The Fall of the House of Usher"" The Edgar Allan Poe Review 5.1 (2004): 80-90. JSTOR. Web. 15 Nov. 2016.

Holland, Norman N., and Leona F. Sherman. "Gothic Possibilities." New Literary History 8.2 (1977): 279-94. JSTOR [JSTOR]. Web. 27 Oct. 2016.

Ianovici, G. ""A Living Death": Gothic Signification and the Nadir in The Marrow of Tradition." MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 27.4 (2002): 33-58. JSTOR [JSTOR]. Web. 27 Oct. 2016.

Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Fall of the House of Usher." Texts for Craig White's Literature Courses. Craig White, n.d. Web. 15 Nov. 2016.

Roche, David. "The "Unhealthy" in "The Fall of the House of Usher": Poe's Aesthetics of Contamination." The Edgar Allan Poe Review 10.1 (2009): 20-35. JSTOR. Web. Oct.-Nov. 2016.