American Gothic
Through Irving, Hawthorne and Poe by Justin Cooper 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
Like nature, she is tempestuous under a facade of tranquility: "outwardly calm but the most violently prey to the tumultuous vultures of stern passion. "Black Veil" culminates in a grave scene worthy of Poe, in which Hawthorne takes the reader into the legended tomb of the Minister itself, imagines the decayed visage of the dead man rotting underneath a slip of black crape. It is a wholly morbid and fantastic image, and it makes a good transition to the work of Poe, which was often wholly morbid and utterly fantastic. Its limbs were vast, gnarled and fantastic, twisting down almost to the earth . " 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. 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. Notable among these are the witchcraft writings of Cotton Mather, the dark and vengeful sermons of Jonathan Edwards, and the supernatural, pre-psychological Wieland of Charles Brockden Brown. Not only is the Gothic explored here in terms of subject and setting, but also in the doomed lineage of the Usher clan: porphyrigenes may signify royalty, but like the Tsars of Russia may also signal a blood disorder, a poisoning of the system that leads to brooding, depression, psychosis. " 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. As Ichabod leaves an evening party to trod the path home, he discovers: "The night grew darker and darker; the stars seemed to sink deeper in the sky .
Common topics in this essay:
Rhine Ligeia,
Sleepy Hollow,
Poe Hawthorne,
Poe Gothic,
Puritans Hawthorne,
Lord Lady,
Van Winkle,
Tsars Russia,
Ichabod Crane,
Freud Poe,
irving hawthorne,
sleepy hollow,
irving hawthorne poe,
ichabod crane,
hawthorne poe,
black veil,
haunted space,
house usher,
american literature,
merry mount,
wholly morbid,
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Acceptance Essays
