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J. Gerald Kennedy
The two novels David Punter (1980) associates with the emergence of gothic fiction in England, Tobias Smollett’s Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753) and Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), bracketed the French and Indian War in North America and the onset of heavy taxes that led to the break between Great Britain and her American colonies. That confluence of events reflects more than happenstance: the gothic mirrored the breakdown of monarchical dynasties and anticipated the spread of radical, republican nationalism in the Americas and across Europe. Like the American War of Independence that gave it ideological impetus, the French Revolution of 1789 epitomized the crumbling of aristocratic dominance and the erosion of ecclesiastical authority. The new gothic mode mirrored historical change by projecting a descent into terror that exposed both frightening perversions of power and horrifying subjection. The conventions shaped in such works as Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron (1777), William Beckford’s Vathek (1786), Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) limned a realm of radical uncertainty in which fiendish compulsion had vanquished rationality. These dark fables weirdly prefigured the national revolutions against imperial authority that changed global politics in the nineteenth century. Despite the range and diversity of gothic narratives, certain commonalities recurred: grotesque villains; ancient, convoluted structures or hidden sites; spectral effects; and gruesome deaths – all meant to appall the reader. Replete with cruelty, curses, corpses, crimes, animated objects, and other weird phenomena, this lurid version of domination and thralldom gained great popularity in an infant nation affirming the self‐evident, inalienable rights of liberty and equality.
The Declaration of Independence (1776) in fact exposed the proximate origin of the American gothic in its denunciation of the English king’s “absolute tyranny over these states.” The “long train of abuses and usurpations” that define his “absolute despotism” in effect rationalize revolution as a resistance to gothic oppression. But the same document also betrays another form of tyranny, more insidious because self‐inflicted. In the notorious paragraph on slavery in the document’s penultimate draft, Thomas Jefferson had accused George III of waging “cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation hither.” While denouncing the African slave trade as an “execrable commerce” and ascribing its “horrors” to the king, the draft acknowledged the “LIBERTIES” of African Americans while turning a blind eye to American chattel slavery (Jefferson 1984: 19, 22). This ideological dissonance likely disconcerted many slave‐owning delegates (who composed about half of the Declaration’s signers), but only the representatives from South Carolina and Georgia demanded the paragraph’s removal from the American charter. The Continental Congress acquiesced and thus compromised the parameters of liberty, perpetuating for 87 more years what Robert Kagan has called “a racial despotism.” Kagan succinctly concludes: “The United States had been born with a split personality” (Kagan 2006: 182). This unacknowledged, internalized tyranny affected not only slaves but, in different ways, the “merciless Indian savages” (as the Declaration identified Native tribes) as well as women of all races and conditions, who had been categorically denied the rights reserved for propertied Anglo‐Saxon males. The Declaration thus guaranteed the “pursuit of happiness” to privileged white men, tacitly authorizing patriarchal liberties that some planters exercised as a New World droit du seigneur.
This chapter constructs a brief genealogy of gothic fiction in antebellum America, largely through Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe. But it begins necessarily with Charles Brockden Brown, the first US author to adapt gothic conventions to post‐Revolutionary America in a significant way. Brown’s four chilling, turn‐of‐the‐century novels – Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798), Ormond; or, The Secret Witness (1799), Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the year 1793 (2 pts., 1799–1800), and Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep‐Walker (1799) – depicted Philadelphia and its environs as a locus of violence and death. Lacking castles or abbeys, dissolute dukes or mad monastics, Brown extracted horror from epidemics and discovered villains within the mercantile world. The protracted yellow fever contagion of the 1790s forms the donnée of both Ormond and Arthur Mervyn, while Edgar Huntly features caves, panthers, and bizarre sleepwalking episodes, as well as the still‐extant rural threat of Indian captivity. But another menace in Brown’s fiction derives from fanaticism: compulsive men in the grip of violent delusions. In Wieland, the title character, a religious zealot, hears voices that command him to kill his wife and children; his susceptibility to violence intensifies when he hears spectral voices produced by the “biloquist” Carwin, a strange interloper who wants to ravish Wieland’s sister. Ormond evokes a climate of political intrigue following the Reign of Terror and US disillusionment with the French Revolution. The eponymous protagonist, a schemer and a master of concealment, plays the “secret witness” on several occasions, positioning himself to seduce the virtuous Constantia Dudley.
As these observations suggest, Brown’s novels seem at best only partly gothic. His plots incorporate such fantastic phenomena as spontaneous combustion and clairvoyance, but they typically include explanatory demystification. Brown thus replicated the strategy of Radcliffe, evoking terror to probe the psychology of sensation. But his narratives show other influences, such as male feminism in his construction of gender relations – as derived from the early English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the radical political philosopher William Godwin – and sensitivity to the novel of seduction, which inspired two later epistolary narratives. As critics have discerned, Brown also used gothic devices to explore and interrogate the strange, grasping materialism of the infant nation. Carroll Smith‐Rosenberg observes of Arthur Mervyn: “Brown uses the horrors of the yellow fever epidemic as an apt metaphor for the corruption [that] self‐interested capitalism brought to the new Republic. Such horrors frame our descent into this dark morass until, at the novel’s darkest point, we come upon the specter of race” (Smith‐Rosenberg 2010: 420). Smith‐Rosenberg shows how Brown insinuates a fatal connection between yellow fever and the African slave trade, and this insight resonates suggestively with the reading of Ormond proposed by Michael J. Drexler and Ed White. They argue that Ormond’s disguise as a black chimney sweep – to spy on Constantia – puts in plain sight the more insidious strategy that defines Ormond’s figurative role: “he is the black man disguised throughout the novel as white.” His masquerade, they add, exposes the “fantasy structure” of the American republic, rooted in the historical reality that “black slavery is the fundamentally repressed problem of republicanism” (Drexler and White 2014: 69, 70, emphasis in original). That “fantasy structure” reveals a widespread tyranny concealed by its sheer banality.
Brown’s radically strange Philadelphia narratives showed writers of the next generation (especially Poe and Hawthorne) how gothic conventions might embody the subversive, hidden history of the American nation. As Alan Lloyd‐Smith observes, the rude conditions of an emerging culture accentuated the extreme effects of “religious intensities, frontier immensities, isolation, and violence; above all, perhaps, the shadows cast by slavery and racial attitudes” (Lloyd‐Smith 2004: 25). Gothic revisionary history impels Samuel Woodward’s novel The Champions of Freedom; or, The Mysterious Chief (1815), where the spectral Indian who preserves the novel’s hero, George Washington Willoughby, during the War of 1812 turns out to be the ghost of his revered namesake, the first president. Washington operates in disguise in a better known historical romance, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy (1821), which features a mysterious peddler‐spy, some seemingly supernatural apparitions, and a shadowland of political ambiguity in the contested Neutral Ground above New York City. Terror likewise pervades the eccentric novels of John Neal, whose Logan (1822) shows, as Teresa A. Goddu notes, that “national identity is founded on the gothic,” on an “impure” and illusory distinction between the civilized and the savage (Goddu 1997: 53, 64).
But another, more influential exponent of the gothic mode, the expatriate Washington Irving, typically deployed dark material to humorous effect. Irving won early acclaim as the author of Knickerbocker’s History of New‐York (1811) before going abroad to spend 17 years in England, France, and Spain. His genial prose style scarcely conduced to tragic themes, but the tales and sketches he published in Europe show a recurrent fascination with the gothic and its portentous implications. Three volumes – The Sketch Book (1819–1820), Bracebridge Hall (1822), and Tales of a Traveller (1824) – offer a medley of prose pieces interspersed with weird, supernatural tales.
“The Spectre Bridegroom,” from the first volume, offers a good example. In a remote German castle, a baron’s daughter awaits an unknown count to whom her betrothal has been arranged. After much delay, a silent cavalier arrives and takes a place at the feast as the putative bridegroom. Later, however, a few after‐dinner ghost tales provoke visible remorse, and he departs, confiding to the baron that he is a dead man whose burial will occur the next day. But Irving has already related the backstory of how the count had crossed paths with his friend, Herman Von Starkenfaust, and disclosed his engagement just before a band of robbers attacked them and mortally wounded the groom‐to‐be. The “punctilious,” dying count begs Herman to explain his absence at the wedding feast, and the young man keeps that promise but also falls in love with the bride. Later, he returns as a “ghost,” woos, and elopes with the baron’s daughter, cleverly modeling gothic opportunism.
While “The Spectre Bridegroom” shows Irving’s fondness for German Romanticism, another Sketch Book tale, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” exploits American sources. Irving evokes Cotton Mather’s History of New England Witchcraft, and the comic rivalry between Ichabod Crane and Brom Bones turns on a scene in which Brom impersonates a decapitated Hessian soldier and throws his pumpkin head at Crane to secure the hand of Katrina Van Tassel. The incident occurs, significantly, in a haunted place where the British spy, Major André, had been captured – a detail that alludes obliquely to André’s controversial hanging by George Washington.
As these examples suggest, Irving’s frightful tales often incorporate wry humor, provide rational explanations, and advance romantic denouements. But among his Tales of a Traveller, “The Adventure of the German Student” unfolds during the French Revolution and tantalizes readers precisely because the narrator never explains how the forlorn young woman that Wolfgang rescues and beds could possibly be the aristocratic beauty guillotined the day before. After a night of passion (chastely elided by Irving), the student makes the horrifying discovery that his “bride” is a corpse, and when police remove the woman’s black collar, her head tumbles to the floor. The belief that “an evil spirit reanimated the dead body to ensnare him” ultimately drives the German student insane (Irving 1991: 424; all further references to Irving tales correspond to this edition). This narrative figures in an opening sequence of “Strange Stories,” and G.R. Thompson has called it the “pivotal tale” in the cluster because it is “equidistantly poised between psychological explanation and the demonic” (Thompson 1983: 27). Irving designed “The Adventure of the German Student” as cautionary in a double sense: Wolfgang develops a “diseased” imagination by foolishly immersing himself in “wild and speculative doctrines,” and the dead woman represents everything that revolted Americans about the French Revolution. The “great volcano of human passion” (421) that erupts each day in more executions shows a betrayal of reason and humanity utterly at odds with the sanitized national memory of the American Revolution.
Irving’s fondness for European legends and folktales, which inspired the beloved “Rip Van Winkle,” also inspired quasi‐gothic stories such as “The Student of Salamanca” in Bracebridge Hall. Here the romance between Antonio and Inez, the daughter of an alchemist charged with necromancy and demonology, plays out in the context of the Spanish Inquisition. Cruelty, captivity, and sexual predation complicate the plot before Irving delivers a happy ending. But in this prose medley mostly devoted to traditional life in an English country manor, the volume also interpolates a pair of linked American tales, ostensibly penned by Diedrich Knickerbocker: “Dolph Heyliger” and “The Storm‐Ship.” Knickerbocker’s name assures comic innuendo, as Irving evokes the colonial era and its legends. His hero, Dolph, figures as an adventurous, self‐made man, a Dutch‐American Benjamin Franklin.
But Dolph’s way to wealth involves mystery and supernaturalism: when Dr. Knipperhausen asks him to watch a country house thought to be haunted, Dolph encounters a ghost who leads him to a well and then vanishes. The next day, as if mesmerized, the youth boards a ship and sails up the Hudson River, barely surviving a storm that almost drowns him. At the river bank, he meets a wealthy patroon named Vander Heyden, “a great friend to Indians” (334), who curiously resembles the ghost. Vander Heyden instructs Dolph in hunting and recounts a tale of the Flying Dutchman, interposed as “The Storm‐Ship.” But when the hunter invites the young man to his Albany home, Dolph discovers in his room a portrait of the very figure whose apparition had visited him. Vander Heyden explains that this ancestor, named Vander Spiegel, supposedly hid his fortune in a well before the British occupied the colony. Dolph recognizes the name, recalls his own family history, and realizes that he himself may be the heir to the treasure. But he wonders why the ghost led him to Albany to make that disclosure. Vander Heyden’s daughter Marie soon resolves his perplexity. Even though she is a distant cousin, Dolph decides to marry this “little Dutch divinity” (351) to consolidate two great estates. And when he finally recovers a silver porringer filled with gold coins, he becomes a wealthy landowner as well as “a great promoter of public institutions.” Irving’s ghost accomplishes the work of rewarding adventurous enterprise, solidifying a Dutch‐American aristocracy, and launching a “distinguished citizen” (362) in his career. Oddly, nation building hinges on gothic intervention.
Irving returned to the American gothic in the last section of Tales of a Traveller in a set of stories called “The Money Diggers.” Again he attributed these pieces, mostly set around New York, to Diedrich Knickerbocker, and he reprised the theme of hidden treasure – not to celebrate capitalist ingenuity, as in “Dolph Heyliger,” but rather to satirize American materialism. A framing sketch, “Kidd the Pirate,” links the legendary freebooter to national mythology by suggesting that Captain Kidd deposited treasure chests along the Atlantic coast. “Wolfert Webber, or Golden Dreams” portrays a Dutch cabbage farmer so unhinged by stories of buried wealth that, after dreaming of treasure, he excavates his fields and destroys his crop. In “The Adventure of the Black Fisherman,” the title character helps Webber and Dr. Knipperhausen (from “Dolph Heyliger”) locate a treasure protected, in this mock‐gothic romp, by a ghost pirate. But Irving set “The Devil and Tom Walker” in New England. The miserly Walker makes a pact with a devil described as a “great black man, […] neither negro nor Indian” (657). After Walker acquires wealth as a usurer, however, he blurts out the devil’s name and consigns himself to hell. Suggestively, Irving hints that Walker has made his unholy bargain at an old swamp fortress once “the last foothold of the Indian warriors” (663), possibly the site of the 1637 Pequot massacre by the Puritans. His get‐rich‐quick scheme as a Boston usurer exploits the “rage for speculating” in Western land – former Indian homelands – reminiscent of the early 1820s. Crushing borrowers, Walker makes money “hand over hand” (664), personifying the greed Irving saw as rampant in antebellum America.
In such works, Irving popularized the prose tale as a literary genre and showed how gothic components could articulate national themes. Of all his tales, “The Devil and Tom Walker” seems most likely to have caught the attention of Hawthorne, who a few years later began to fill his own New England tales with deviltry and forest scenes. Having devoured in youth the novels of Walpole, Lewis, and Radcliffe, as well as Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), Hawthorne tellingly identified Charles Brockden Brown as a cultural hero in “The Hall of Fantasy” (1843). The aspiring author gravitated toward gothic fables, and in his apprentice novel, Fanshawe (1828), the heroine falls prey to a seducer‐villain who hides her in a cave and then falls horribly from a cliff trying to destroy the titular hero. Afterward, Hawthorne burned every copy of the novel he could find. But his desire to write American tales persisted, and his preoccupation with the colonial past inspired fables of horror and gloom. Hawthorne brooded over the role his ancestors played in the witchcraft trials of 1692, and his reading in regional history revealed a ghastly succession of persecutions, banishments, and cruel punishments. Hawthorne used the gothic to expose the heart of darkness inherent in self‐righteous Puritan brutality. But he also evoked horror to intimate misgivings about other dubious episodes in American history.
Nearly all of Hawthorne’s best‐known colonial tales incorporate gothic types, deeds, or settings. Such is the case in the 1830 tale “The Hollow of the Three Hills.” Here, in a remote forest setting a blighted lady “cut off forever” from her loved ones asks a witch to conjure their voices. But the spell of this “evil woman” provides no comfort; she evokes the sounds of the lady’s funeral and obliges her to hear “revilings and anathemas” that disclose the dire effects of her own transgressions – a revelation that leaves her lifeless (Hawthorne 1982: 8, 10, 11; all further references to Hawthorne tales correspond to this edition). That tale presaged other narratives steeped in the traditions of witchcraft, of which the best known and most frightening is “Young Goodman Brown” (1835). Here, Brown’s night‐long “errand” into the wilderness occurs three months after his marriage to the aptly named Faith and seems to fulfill an evil prior obligation. Without alluding to the notorious Salem trials, the tale hinges, as Michael J. Colacurcio notes, on the “specter evidence” (Colacurcio 1995: 285) used to convict and execute 20 people. Hawthorne repeats Cotton Mather’s denunciation of Martha Carrier as a “rampant hag” destined to be “queen of hell” (286). But during Brown’s descent into moral darkness, nothing seems definite: a “Shape of Evil” (287), apparently the devil, assumes multiple forms, brandishes a magical staff, and summons Brown’s childhood mentors to shake his faith in Puritan sanctity. The forest ritual, performed before an altar flanked by blazing pines, seems to expose the secret crimes of godly folk, but as Brown and a figure assumed to be his wife prepare for satanic baptism, he has a change of heart and implores her to “resist the Wicked One.” When the protagonist wakes from sleep, Hawthorne coyly asks, “Had Goodman Brown […] only dreamed a wild dream of a witch‐meeting?” (288). Unfortunately, Brown entertains no doubts about the truth of his perceptions and rejects his wife as well as the entire community, becoming an isolato whose “dying hour was gloom” (289). Punter identifies three qualities crucial to the gothic mode – paranoia, barbarism, and taboo (Punter 1980: 404–405) – all of which figure in the supposed unspeakable deeds and forbidden rites that incite Brown’s paranoid self‐delusion.
Published in the same year but less well known, “Alice Doane’s Appeal” describes the story his narrator reads to two female companions on Gallows Hill in Salem. The embedded tale concerns a murder committed by Leonard Doane, a young man driven by incestuous jealousy to prevent his sister’s marriage to Walter Brome, his virtual twin. But a scheming wizard has actually instigated the crime, and he later accompanies Leonard and Alice to the grave of Brome. Here, in one of Hawthorne’s weirdest scenes, the brother and sister find themselves surrounded by all the spirits of the Salem dead. Hawthorne writes that this “company of devils and condemned souls had come on a holiday to revel in the discovery of a complicated crime” (214). The Doanes thus encounter the shades of unjustly accused “witches,” including “a woman in her dotage who knew neither the crime imputed to her, nor its punishment” (215). Hawthorne saves his sternest judgment for Cotton Mather, whose “hateful” features resemble those of “the fiend himself.” In this “one blood‐thirsty man,” says the narrator, “were concentrated those vices of spirit and errors of opinion, that sufficed to madden the whole surrounding multitude” (216).
Gothic elements also figure in three brilliant depictions of early eighteenth‐century colonial life. Hawthorne probably set “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” (1832) in the 1760s, when resentment of royally appointed governors troubled Massachusetts. In this initiation tale, a poor country lad named Robin comes to Boston hoping to rise in the world thanks to his wealthy kinsman, who holds “civil and military rank” (81). But the lad finds no one willing to indicate his relative’s home, and a grotesque, satanic figure with “fiery eyes” and a “double prominence” on his forehead seems to foment rebellion. In the nightmarish, climactic scene, this devil – one side of his face glowing red, the other “black as midnight” – leads a torchlight procession followed by a cart bearing Molineux in “tar‐and‐feathery dignity” (78, 85). Chastened by horror, Robin rejects the patronage system rooted in British class distinctions and emerges as a future American patriot. But Hawthorne’s association of insurrection with demonism subverts any simplistic interpretation of proto‐Revolutionary defiance.
Another tale, “Roger Malvin’s Burial” (1832), portrays the aftermath of a bloody scalping expedition conducted by English colonists. The 1725 episode, euphemized as “Lovell’s Fight,” remains in the background, however, as Hawthorne depicts the fatality that draws Reuben Bourne and his migrating family to a remote, massive rock that resembles a “gigantic grave‐stone” (88). Years earlier, Reuben had left Roger Malvin, his wife’s father, beneath that rock to die alone, so that he could fetch help or save himself – Reuben’s motives were confused. Indeed, in leaving the site, “a sort of guilty feeling” had impelled the younger man to take a last, secret look at Malvin, a gesture he conflates with the advance of the Grim Reaper: “Death would come, like the slow approach of a corpse, stealing gradually towards him through the forest, and showing its ghastly and motionless features from behind a nearer, and yet a nearer tree” (95). Eighteen years later, a perverse instinct for self‐punishment leads Reuben back to that very spot, where tragedy ensues. Hawthorne’s nod to New England history at the outset hints that Reuben may be expiating a sin far more egregious than leaving a dying friend unburied.
The chief monstrosity of “The Minister’s Black Veil” (1836) is the black crape that Parson Hooper hangs over his face one Sunday morning. But then he persists in wearing it throughout his life as a disconcerting emblem of guilt, secret sin, mourning, or mortality. If the veil intensifies the effect of Hooper’s preaching, however, it alienates him from his congregation. At a funeral, the corpse of a young woman is perceived to shudder when Hooper bends over her coffin. Another young lady, Hooper’s fiancée Elizabeth, tries to reason him out of his obstinacy and to let her once more look him in the face. But he refuses and thus consigns himself to celibacy, while the effect of the veil becomes more horrific year by year. Even though at his deathbed Elizabeth again implores him to shed the veil, Hooper still refuses; townspeople bury “a veiled corpse” and, a century later, Hawthorne reflects that though the minister’s face is “dust,” still more terrible is “the thought, that it mouldered beneath the Black Veil” (384). Here Hawthorne discovers in the Calvinistic blackness imputed to him by Melville the radical source of gothic dread: the ineluctable fact of human depravity.
As these examples suggest, Hawthorne often incorporated gothic tropes and types but avoided blatant supernaturalism, preferring to situate tales in what he called (in “The Custom‐House,” his introductory sketch in The Scarlet Letter) a “neutral territory” where the “Actual and the Imaginary may meet” (Hawthorne 1983: 149). While offering glimpses of ghosts, specters, or devils, the author depicted such presences ambiguously, typically problematizing human perception. In such tales as “The Grey Champion” (1835) and “Howe’s Masquerade” (1838) he thus conjures spirits from New England’s past who defy British royal authority, yet the very existence of these archaic figures remains uncertain. Hawthorne likewise complicated the conventional gothic villain, creating a succession of monomaniacs who yet betray traces of humanity: Roderick Elliston, the man consumed by vanity in “Egotism; or The Bosom Serpent” (1843); Aylmer, the self‐absorbed mad scientist in “The Birthmark” (1843); Ethan Brand, the tormented discoverer of the Unpardonable Sin in “Ethan Brand” (1850). By sacrificing “brotherhood with man and reverence for God” to a “cold and remorseless purpose,” Brand reveals his kinship with both Dr. Rappaccini of “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1851) and vengeful Dr. Roger Chillingworth, the “black man” of The Scarlet Letter (1850). But Hawthorne’s heartless monsters – a cohort that includes Jaffrey Pyncheon of The House of the Seven Gables (1851) – rarely wield occult powers; rather, they prove to be the captives of their own compulsions. A third gothic convention, the haunted house, also intrigued Hawthorne, though he suggests that “curses” on human habitations tend to be self‐imposed. A rivalry between two women drives the cryptic plot of “The White Old Maid” (1835), in which, as in Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” a seemingly deserted mansion hides a moldering corpse. The eponymous hero of “Peter Goldthwaite’s Treasure” (1838) defies an image of Satan in his obsessive quest for a hidden fortune, finally dismantling his entire house. The House of the Seven Gables marked the author’s consummate elaboration of the architecture of human self‐ruin; here the sins of the fathers fall upon the latter‐day Pyncheons, especially Jaffrey, though the Phoebe–Holgrave romance may yet lift the ancient curse. Arguably Hawthorne’s most gothic romance, The Marble Faun (1860), captures the menace of Lewis’s The Monk, hints at the painter Miriam’s dark sins, portrays her unnamed model, a Capuchin monk, as a demonic villain, stages his gruesome death, and sets the action amid vestiges of the Roman past. But Hawthorne deploys the machinery of terror to build a moral fable of innocence and experience, depicting the fall of the faun‐like Donatello. Witnessed by two expatriate American artists, Hilda and Kenyon, this transformation drives a narrative that gave Henry James a model of the international novel.
As instanced by his late, unfinished manuscripts, Hawthorne’s attraction to the gothic mode persisted to the end of his career. The repertoire of extreme images and types let him exorcise a private remorse for Puritan cruelties, but it also facilitated his characteristically probing inquiries into guilt, isolation, selfishness, intolerance, and moral perplexity. Quite different aims, however, impelled Poe’s gothic inventions. Though Poe admired Hawthorne’s originality, he evoked terror to different purpose – less to explore ethical dilemmas than to probe unconscious compulsions. Having published three obscure volumes of poetry, Poe turned to fiction in 1832 and composed for the periodical press a set of related stories, mostly satirical in tone, that he called the “Tales of the Folio Club.” His model may have been the “Strange Stories” that open Irving’s Tales of a Traveller. Poe’s preface to the “Folio Club” tales also recalls Irving’s Knickerbocker when he describes his storytellers as “a mere Junto of Dunderheadism” (Poe 1984a: 131; all further references to Poe tales correspond to this edition). Irvingesque humor, however, accompanied only a few of Poe’s gothic inventions.
His first published tale, “Metzengerstein” (1932), ascribed to “Mr. Horribile Dictû” from Gottingen, traces the blood feud between two noble families and hinges on metempsychosis – the migration of a soul from one entity to another. After a suspicious fire destroys the stables at the Castle Berlifitizing, fiendish Baron Metzengerstein recognizes the mysterious “fiery‐colored” (137) horse that arrives at the Palace Metzengerstein as the counterpart of an image in a family tapestry – a steed once owned by a “Saracen” Berlifitizing. Perceived to cast a menacing glare at the baron, the horse in the tapestry disappears from the design just as the “unnaturally colored horse” (136) appears. The utterly dissolute baron nevertheless develops a “perverse attachment” (140) to the horse, on which he rides away just as a fire consumes the Metzengerstein estate. At the height of the inferno, the terrified Baron returns, clutching the reins of this uncontrollable beast, which carries him straight into “the whirlwind of chaotic fire” (142). A horse‐shaped cloud of smoke underscores the supernaturalism.
If many of Poe’s “Folio Club” tales flaunted their silliness, “Metzengerstein” heralded a profusion of dark, gothic tales set in the Old World, a pattern that continued through the publication of his collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840). In the preface to that book, Poe (refuting the charge of “Germanism”) claimed that he had produced only one tale exhibiting that “species of pseudo‐horror which we are taught to call Germanic” – probably “Metzengerstein.” The rest of his gothic tales, he insisted, derived their horror not from Germany but from “the soul” – from “legitimate sources” of terror reflecting his “matured purpose” as well as his “very careful elaboration” (129–130). Excepting the 1839 American satire, “The Man That Was Used Up,” he consistently set these “grotesque” and “arabesque” tales in foreign places or in weird, unlocatable settings. Three narratives project unconscious urges with particular brilliance.
Extending a theme broached in “Berenice” (1835) and complicated in “Morella” (1835), Poe in “Ligeia” (1838) elaborated on the death of a beloved woman to portray the disorientation and melancholy provoked by her loss. The tale opens in a city near the Rhine and confirms the narrator’s utter dependency on Ligeia, a fated woman of huge intellect and volcanic passion. Her demise impels his move to England, where “in a moment of mental alienation” (270) he marries Lady Rowena Trevanion, of Tremaine. The contrast between the two women has provoked much critical speculation. Colin Dayan claims provocatively that Ligeia’s raven hair and black eyes signify a racial otherness (Dayan 1995: 131), adding a subversive twist to the narrator’s loathing for his Anglo‐Saxon second wife. To alleviate his grief for Ligeia, the narrator furnishes a gothic abbey with funereal objects and fantastic draperies – precisely, it seems, to terrify Rowena and hasten her decline. He apparently yearns for Ligeia’s spirit to inhabit her body. The “hideous drama of revivification” (276) staged late in the story indeed hints at Rowena’s struggle with an invisible presence. The ruby‐colored drops that fall into her drink trigger a rapid decline, though their origin remains a mystery. The metempsychosis theme hints that undying will can overcome death itself, though Ligeia’s poem, “The Conqueror Worm,” allegorizes life as a gory tragedy. Whoever she may be, the enshrouded woman who arises at the conclusion also “shrinks” from the narrator’s touch, leaving uncertain the nature of her weird metamorphosis.
Poe’s greatest tale, “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), exploits the quintessential gothic trope of the haunted castle or mansion, and it portrays the demise of an ancient family in the linked deaths of Roderick Usher and his sister, Madeline. An embedded poem ascribed to Roderick, “The Haunted Palace,” figuratively ties the crumbling of the physical house with the disintegration of Roderick’s sanity. Summoned to help Usher resist his fear of fear, the narrator becomes an accomplice to what may be the premature burial of Madeline when she appears to succumb to catalepsy. Here Poe anticipates Freudian repression, for if (as the poem also suggests) the house is a metaphor for the human mind, placing Madeline’s body in an underground vault represents the sublimation of fearful material. Despite uncertainties about whether the lady has really died (a suspicious blush lingers), Roderick and the narrator screw down the coffin lid to prevent her resurrection: whatever her condition, neither wishes to witness her return from the tomb. She excites horror because (as Usher’s twin) she reminds him of his own mortality and perhaps of their scandalous incest as well. Although Roderick hears her subterranean struggles, he confesses that he “dared not speak” (334), and Madeline’s final, bloody reappearance, which coincides with her “violent and now‐final death agonies” (335), produces the consummate terror that Roderick feared would destroy “life and reason together” (322). In this realm of the symbolic imaginary, their deaths magically precipitate the architectural collapse from which the narrator escapes to tell his tale.
Published soon after “Usher,” “William Wilson” (1839) depicts another mysterious structure: the “large, rambling Elizabethan house” (338) associated with the Reverend Dr. Bransby’s boarding school near London, which Poe once actually attended. In this gothic version of the doppelgänger motif, the narrator’s double and nemesis also has the same name. Whether the other Wilson is actual or imagined forms a key interpretive enigma. At the outset, this second youth seems vexingly real as he mimics the narrator and ruins his jokes. In a riveting scene, the narrator one night steals through the intricate passageways of the “huge old house” to the hidden “closet” (346) of his counterpart. There, by lamplight, he gazes on the unrecognizable features of the sleeping boy. Horrified by this stranger, the narrator withdraws from school, continues his education at Eton and Oxford, and becomes a dissolute villain. But the weird antagonism continues: at Oxford one night, a stranger in a cloak interrupts a game of cards and in an audible whisper exposes Wilson’s cheating. “In a perfect agony of horror and shame” (353), Wilson departs for the continent, extending a career of crime that leads finally to Rome; there, at a masquerade, he plans to seduce a duke’s wife. Hearing a familiar whisper, he confronts a figure identically attired, draws his sword, and tries to slay his adversary. But Wilson also perceives that he stands before a large mirror and questions whether he has been attacking his own image. He even fancies himself speaking the words by which his enemy bids farewell by revealing that Wilson has murdered himself. The cryptic ending resonates with the opening inscription and hints that the tale portrays a battle with “conscience.” But Poe is not Hawthorne, and this tale finally proves more psychological than ethical. Wilson struggles with what Poe later called the “imp of the perverse,” a radical, irresistible impulse toward self‐ruin.
During the next three years Poe crafted more gothic narratives set in Europe. In “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), he transformed nocturnal London into a lurid spectacle in which the narrator follows a solitary old man through darkened streets to fathom the secret of his craving for crowds – never suspecting that his stalking may alarm the stranger. Poe invented the detective story in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), exploiting the pornography of violence to portray two mutilated female bodies at the core of a grotesque Parisian mystery. Perhaps inspired by the great cholera epidemic of 1832, “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842) evokes a consummate gothic fantasy involving a castellated abbey, a haughty prince, and a lavish masquerade staged behind bolted doors. As an ebony clock tolls the midnight hour, the arrival of a mummer “shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave” (489) signals the presence of the Red Death as well as the doom of the revelers. That same year, Poe also published “The Pit and the Pendulum,” a concatenation of gothic horrors tied to the late Spanish Inquisition and the ecclesiastical terrorism epitomized by the torture devices named in the title.
Despite his fondness for “the foreign subject” (Poe 1984a: 1027), Poe began around 1842 to devise tales laced with gothic effects but set in the United States. He prefigured the shift with the aforementioned parody, “The Man That Was Used Up,” which reveals a military hero consumed by his own genocidal hatred for Indians: he is little more than a grotesque lump of flesh, held together by prosthetic devices. Poe then made a concerted turn toward American subjects with “The Gold‐Bug” (1843), depicting a search for buried treasure that makes use of a human skull. Another weird story from the same period, “The Black Cat” (1843), resists precise geolocation but may allude to slavery, the anti‐gallows movement, and American temperance reform in tracing the narrator’s twisted relationship with two one‐eyed cats and his kind‐hearted wife. As Lloyd‐Smith observes, the story also anticipates the Freudian uncanny, incorporating “a strangeness within the familiar, the emergence of ‘what ought to have remained secret and hidden’; repetition, coincidence, animism, and archaic beliefs; […] fear of the ‘double’; and also the fear of castration, associated for Freud with the fear of losing one’s eyes” (Lloyd‐Smith 2004: 76).
The next year, “The Oblong Box” (1844) heralded a string of domestic gothic tales, presenting a shipboard mystery that turns on the contents of a suspicious box, thought to contain a painting the narrator’s artist‐friend is transporting from Charleston to New York. But the storm off the North Carolina coast that wrecks the Independence also resolves the puzzle: the artist lashes himself to the box, choosing to drown rather than to abandon its contents – his wife’s corpse preserved in salt. Another bizarre piece, “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” (1844), unfolds around Charlottesville, Virginia, and constructs an analogy between Jacksonian Indian removal and British colonialism in India. During “Indian Summer,” Bedloe’s 1827 ramble in an area once “tenanted” by Native Americans magically reveals an exotic, eastern city and pitches him into a 1780 battle with the “swarming rabble” (658, 661). The story thus seems to hinge on metempsychosis or reincarnation. “The Premature Burial” (1844) begins as a documentary report on burial alive, explores the terrors of entombment, and turns into a parody when the narrator awakens in the hold of a ship on the James River and vows to read “no bugaboo tales – such as this” (679). But another American hoax, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1846), investigates the subjectivity of dying. This gothic tale of experimentation, set near New York, tests whether mesmerism can arrest human decomposition. Poe’s association of Valdemar with the anti‐nationalist John Randolph of Roanoke (Kennedy 2016: 388–394) hints at the American subtext of this and other tales of the mid‐1840s: his ongoing belief, made explicit in the mock‐gothic “Some Words with a Mummy” (1845), that, despite the jingoism fueling notions of Anglo‐Saxon supremacy and “manifest destiny,” the prospect of war with Mexico left Poe (like his narrator) feeling that “everything is going wrong” (821) in the United States.
In such quasi‐gothic tales as “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” (1845) and “Hop‐Frog” (1848), Poe indeed confronts the southern nightmare of John Randolph in the spectacle of an all‐out slave rebellion. Both tales stage revolts involving figures that resemble orangutans, and both depict an uprising of captive, oppressed figures claiming freedom in an act of violence. In contrast to the mostly comic “Tarr and Fether,” where mental patients turn the tables on keepers who then stage a counter‐revolution, “Hop‐Frog” seems especially troubling: Poe invites sympathy for the dwarf and his beloved Tripetta, compelled to entertain a heartless king, before he depicts the gruesome scheme by which Hop‐Frog enchains and incinerates his captors. Here Poe portends bloody resistance to the tyranny preserved by the Declaration’s failure to condemn slavery.
Other writers, to be sure, responded to the cultural fears of antebellum America by adopting the gothic idiom. In the 1830s, well before Poe published “The Tell‐Tale Heart,” William Gilmore Simms produced many short stories and novels exploring the criminal mind. In Martin Faber (1833/1837) Simms devised and then expanded a riveting first‐person novella from the perspective of a twisted, violent seducer who murders his mistress and nearly kills his wife; in a tale lauded by Poe, Faber rationalizes his perverse impulses in a chilling, death‐house confession. In Guy Rivers (1834), as Donald Ringe has observed, Simms’s protagonist “is haunted by the ghost of men he has murdered” (Ringe 1982: 105), and in Richard Hurdis (1838), a rivalry between brothers instigates an attempted murder that entangles John Hurdis in a vast criminal network. In a novel replete with gothic scenes – including the suicide of a young woman who eats glass – Richard Hurdis undertakes a dangerous quest to infiltrate the mystical brotherhood and bring it down in a ghostly raid that claims his brother’s life.
Another author of the 1830s who influenced Poe, Robert Montgomery Bird, produced in Sheppard Lee a stunning narrative built around serial metempsychosis. The successive transmigrations of Lee’s spirit produce many gothic glimpses of crimes, corpses, and burials. The novel’s most sensational transformation, in book VI, finds the hero leaving the body of Zachariah Longstraw – a Quaker about to be hung in Virginia as an abolitionist – and inhabiting the recently vacated corpse of a slave named Tom, who has died in a fall. Samuel Otter observes that as Tom, Lee undergoes a second stunning change: he is “first the happy slave and then the murderous slave, following the anxious trajectory represented in popular and political culture in the wake of Nat Turner’s 1831 revolt” (Otter 2010: 103). Far more somber and horrific in its overall effect, Bird’s subsequent novel, Nick of the Woods (1837), features a maniacal Indian killer with a split personality, and it unfolds in the deep, primeval wilderness of Kentucky, which Bird transforms into a terrifying space of impending violence.
Many popular writers of the period also incorporated gothic elements. Another novelist Poe praised, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, opens The Linwoods (1835) with a scene at Gallows Hill in New York, recalling the mass execution of those involved in the “negro‐plot” – a supposed conspiracy by slaves and poor white settlers to set fire to New York City in 1741 – and hints that “their ghosts walk about here” (Sedgwick 2002: 9). This novel of the Revolution incorporates a few mildly gothic flourishes – madness, brutality, and suspense – in tracing the heroine’s conversion from loyalty to patriotism. In the next decade, an admirer of Poe, George Lippard, produced several Revolutionary‐era narratives spiked with gothic effects, but his best‐known novel, The Quaker City (1844), constructed a sensational, “city mysteries” exposé around a huge gothic mansion that becomes a scene of seduction, torture, and death. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), the best‐selling novel of its time, also invests several key scenes with gothic intensity, especially those associated with Simon Legree’s Louisiana plantation and his deathly fear of ghosts. Doubtless the most prolific American female novelist to exploit the gothic, E.D.E.N. Southworth produced in The Hidden Hand (1859) a wild narrative set in a “haunted” Virginia mansion full of secret passages and trapdoors. Her androgynous heroine, Capitola, curbs her fears, flaunts her courage, and outsmarts the villain to thwart a scheme to steal her inheritance.
Meanwhile, despite a social and political urgency that militated against literary supernaturalism, writers of slave narratives sometimes evoked gothic terror to illustrate the nature of bondage. The Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper (1837) exerts a perverse fascination thanks to the bizarre modes of torture Roper survives before escaping to freedom; these include being suspended from a revolving cotton screw, having warm tar poured on his head and ignited, and then having his fingers crushed in a vice. Roper also describes the infamous tactic of a master who rolled disobedient slaves downhill in a barrel perforated with spikes. The famous Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) begins with an initiation scene in which young Frederick watches Captain Anthony lashing Aunt Hester – an experience that marked the author’s passage through “the blood‐stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery” (Douglass 2000: 284). Slavery in the United States (1836), the narrative ascribed to Charles Ball, contains several gothic scenes perhaps reflecting the literary tastes of Isaac Fisher, the white lawyer who put Ball’s story into print. None seems more riveting than Ball’s discovery in the moonlight of the decaying, eyeless corpses – still pinned to the ground – of the black men accused of abducting and raping a white girl. Repeatedly, as Teresa Goddu writes, “the gothic has served as a useful mode in which to resurrect and resist America’s racial history” (Goddu 1997: 153). The dark history of the outrages committed, sometimes in the name of the nation, against people of color, women, and ethnic or religious minorities – acts of tyranny inflicted in the face of US founding principles – continue to elucidate the strange attraction to the gothic that Irving, Poe, and Hawthorne helped to popularize in antebellum America.
References
Further Reading
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 3 (THE HISTORICAL ROMANCE).