American Gothic

If we follow the stream of American romanticism through its shining era of the decades preceding the Civil War, we see a robust river of humanist thought: Emerson, Thoreau, Whittier, Longfellow, Whitman, Melville. Each sees in his own way the beauty of Man and his place in Nature, transcending it, embracing it, a restless soul in search of elusive and worthy truths. But concurrent to that stream of light runs a darker river, the roman noir, the Gothic, whose chief practitioners are Washington Irving (1783-1859), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), and Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849). These three authors defined a black thread in American literature that while not entirely original (borrowing from European Gothicism and certain American precursors) was perfected in their works and continues to show its form in subsequent literature both American and European.

While this dark trio of writers had influences and predecessors in the supernatural goings-on at Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, the haunted old mariner of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the doomed, brooding heroes of Lord Byron, they too had America

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Once she expires, the narrator becomes obsessed with filling the haunted space she has left behind; he purchases a tumbledown abbey and decorates its interior with the motifs of the exotic, the gothic, the pagan: “Egypt,” “Arabesques” and “bedlam patterns. Like nature, she is tempestuous under a façade of tranquility: “outwardly calm but the most violently prey to the tumultuous vultures of stern passion.

In “Ligeia,” (1838) Poe introduces Gothic love, that doomed but pure affair that is less carnal than spiritual, brooding and almost incommunicable. ” But once Ichabod Crane finds himself in the dark woods, beset by demons real or imagined, his pace quickens: “to dash briskly,” “quickened his steed,” “the eagerness of his flight,” “panic,” “dashed.

Irving set some of his stories (“Sleepy Hollow,” “Rip Van Winkle”) in the mythic lay-by of Tarrytown and its shadowy vales. ”

While the libertines in their play are set against the Puritans, Hawthorne presents not polar opposites but new, subtle gradations of shading, drawing the reader into the psychology of the work, forcing the question, “Who is hero and who antagonist?” This subtle transitioning by coded language arrests the reader at first with near archetypal characterization: the revelers are colorful, young, mirthful, blissful, joyous; the Puritans are “stern,” “grim,” “dismal wretches. Where “Maypole” and “Young Goodman Brown” deal expressly in the occult in the sense of the word that indicates the supernatural, in “Minister” Hawthorne explores the word’s other meaning, the hidden, the “secret sin. ”

Finally, the wilderness is left bereft of joy, the gates closed forever, turning it into a ghost world, a habitation of mystery, much like Daphne du Maurier’s Manderley of Rebecca or the house of Usher. Here we have a location of deep natural beauty and peace: “a little valley … one of the quietest places in the whole world. We find them even today, there, where the roots of wild trees bend and gnarl, looking almost like a clawed hand, and there, where a garland of flowers like a fool’s crown has been thrown, up the overgrown path to the dark house with empty, glassless windows staring out into the quickening dusk

. ” “The Fauns and Nymphs, when driven from their classic groves and homes of ancient fable, had sought refuge, as all the persecuted did, in the fresh woods of the West. Similarly, when pushed into reflective thought, the Puritan leader Endicott undergoes a like moment of transcendent truth, feeling mercy for them: “The iron man was softened.

In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” (1839) Poe creates a haunted space that is both mental (the mind of Roderick Usher) and physical (the title manse).

Common topics in this essay:
Sleepy Hollow, Rhine Ligeia, Poe Hawthorne, Poe Gothic, Puritans Hawthorne, Van Winkle, Lord Lady, Tsars Russia, Ichabod Crane, Freud Poe, irving hawthorne, sleepy hollow, irving hawthorne poe, ichabod crane, hawthorne poe, black veil, house usher, merry mount, wholly morbid, haunted space, american literature,

Approximate Word count = 1782
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)

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