Gothic Undercurrents

Americans saw many reasons to be optimistic in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Philosophically, much of the nation had abandoned the bleak, deterministic theology of Calvin and had embraced either the Enlightenment faith in the power of human reason or a more gentle Protestant faith in a generous and forgiving God, or both. The election of Andrew Jackson in 1828 proved that a self-made man could rise from humble origins to the presidency. Requirements that voters own land were being relaxed or eliminated, so that democracy became a more achievable ideal. Spurred by a wide-spread belief in "Manifest Destiny," the young nation was expanding rapidly, growing well into the Midwest and eventually reaching the Pacific Ocean by the 1840s, gathering momentum and resources along the way. Industry became a powerful economic force, and cities began to bulge with immigrants eager for work. Reform and improvement (of daily life and labor by technology, and of social conditions by progressive activists) were spreading. And in the world of letters, writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were arguing that Americans were in a perfect situation to cast off the fetters of European prejudice and habit and create a culture full of self-determined, empowered, and enlightened beings.

But if this picture represents one truth about nineteenth-century America, there are others as well. Almost 15 percent of the population was legally considered property (there were about 900,000 slaves in 1800 and about 3,200,000 by 1850). Only white, male property owners could vote. Women were largely confined to the home and certainly not expected to rise to positions of social authority. Native Americans were losing most of the power‹--and virtually all of the land--that they once held. How could all of these conditions exist, many asked, in the world's one modern nation created with the explicit purpose of establishing freedom and equality for all? In addition, rapid change was causing anxiety about the future: Where was America heading? How could it both grow exponentially and retain its unity and coherence? What if it lost its agricultural self-reliance and became beholden to the whims of European trade? Were the millions of immigrants good for the country, or did they bring dangerous and contagious influences? What were the human costs of city life and urban labor conditions? Was the Mexican War justified, or was it only a base attempt to grab more land and resources for European Americans?

It is this spirit of anxiety, fear, and even despair that writers in the gothic mode tap into. The three writers of the period, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson, as well as the others represented at the time, explore the "dark side" of nineteenth-century America. Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Ward Beecher, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ambrose Bierce, and William Gilmore Simms, among others, ask probing questions of their nation, challenging its tendency toward blind faith and unremitting optimism. Although these authors do at times write in styles that are not easily called "gothic," they illuminate their mutual concerns when they compose in the gothic mode. 

It will be useful to think of gothic literature as that which plunges its characters into mystery, torment, and fear in order to pose disturbing questions to our familiar and comfortable ideas of humanity, society, and the cosmos.

Sometimes these questions are asked in explicitly sociopolitical forms: for example, Gilman portrays a woman so oppressed by the patriarchal assumptions of her husband that she is driven insane; and Hawthorne rejects the promise that science will ameliorate the human condition when he tells the story of one researcher's obsessive and destructive botanical experiment on his daughter. But at least as often, these writers unveil their dark prophecies only by indirect glimpses--in the words of Dickinson, they "tell it slant." Sometimes by couching their insights in allegories, sometimes by focusing on the uncertainties and contradictions of the psyche, and often by combining allegory with psychological investigation, gothic writers often challenge America's optimism only by implication, forcing the reader to come to his or her own ethical conclusions. Thus, Melville's Pequod becomes not only a whaling vessel but also the American ship of state as a fractious and multicultural crew is led to a terrifying fate by a dangerous and potentially insane demagogue. Similarly, Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown is both a tormented seventeenth-century Puritan and a representative of America's heritage of religious intolerance and self-righteousness. Charles Brockden Brown and Poe offer us characters who may be encountering the supernatural or may only be experiencing the projections of their own worst selves, their most base and uncontrollable prejudices and desires. In Dickinson's poems, a speaking subjectivity wonders how many of its sensations it can trust, and whether there is any comfort to be found beyond the visible world. It is best, then, not to look for direct political pamphleteering in these writers--no polemics against slavery or imperialism here. Rather, we see the cheery political assumptions of the nineteenth century challenged by the staging of characters and situations that seem impossible or out of place in an America of autonomy, optimism, and freedom. Finally, these writers urge us to ask: What is an American? What are our ideals, and to what extent does it seem within our power to realize them? What power, if any, rules us? How much are we in control of ourselves? How well do we even know ourselves? To what extent can we ever be sure of anything?

Elements of the Gothic

•A reaction against the Age of Enlightenment and realistic literary conventions (sense of escapism)

•During the Age of Enlightenment, there was an emphasis on the classical (Greek and Roman)

The Gothic style expressed the essence of the Catholic faith, concerned with creating a sense of the presence of God, while still incorporating older Pagan (nature-worship)symbolism: gargoyles, elemental spirits whose purpose was to ward off evil; leaves (particularly in cathedrals); an architectural aesthetic based on the characteristics of the forests:

Forests were the first temples of God....The forests of the Gauls passed in their turn into the temples of our fathers, and our oak forests have thus preserved their sacred origin. These vaults incised with leaves, these socles that support the walls and end brusquely like broken tree trunks, the coolness of the vaults, the shadows of the Sanctuary, the dark aisles, the secret passages, the low doors, all of this evokes in a Gothic church the labyrinths of the forests; it all makes us conscious of religious awe, the mysteries, and the divinity." - Francois-Rene Chateaubriand (1768-1848) from Genie du Christianisme (quoted in James Snyder's Medieval Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - 4th - 14th Century)

•In Romanticism emphasis on emotion (grandeur and beauty); in gothic (sub-genre of Romantic) emphasis on fascination with the horrible, the repellent, the grotesque and the supernatural, in combination with many of the characteristics of the Romantic

•Improbable plots

•The laws of nature are represented as altered

•Fascination with the horrible and repellant

•Dangerous natural settings or large decaying houses (or castles)

• Stories often take place at night or in a sunless, claustrophobic setting

•maiden in distress

•sense of awe, terror

•ascent (up a mountain high staircase), descent (into a dungeon, cave, or underground chambers or labyrinth) 

•secret passageways and hidden doors

•images of death and physical decay

•the supernatural

•revenge, torture, madness, sexual taboos

IMPORTANT TERMS

cult of sentiment - Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cultural phenomenon in which emotions and feelings, as opposed to reason and logic, were seen as the routes to moral and social improvement. Sentimentality emphasized the ability to empathize with another's sorrow or to experience profound beauty. It was associated especially with literature written by and for women.

cult of true womanhood - Influential nineteenth-century ideal of femininity that stressed the importance of motherhood, homemaking, piety, and purity. While men were expected to work and act in the public realm of business and politics, women were to remain in the private, domestic sphere of the home (See explanation below).

Manifest Destiny - Prevalent in America from its early days through the nineteenth century, the belief that divine providence mandated America to expand throughout the continent and to stand as a social model for the rest of the world.

ship of state - A metaphor for conceiving of society and government, in which the state is seen as a ship traversing treacherous waters (i.e., social conflict) and needs the steady guiding hand of a trustworthy captain (i.e., leadership) to steer it to safe harbor (i.e., peaceful consensus) before it founders (i.e., fails as a unified society). This metaphor represents part of the American tendency toward thinking via analogy (comparing how two apparently unlike things might clarify or explain each other) and typology (seeing cosmic or national history expressed or symbolized in everyday details).

spiritualism - A more comforting and optimistic idea of the afterlife than that offered by Calvinism: the belief that the human personality or soul continues to exist after death and can be contacted through the aid of a medium. Many in the mid-nineteenth century were hopeful that science would eventually prove the existence of spirits.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY AND THE CULT OF WOMANHOOD

The nineteenth century saw an upsurge of interest in occult and supernatural phenomena, especially attempts to contact the spirits of dead loved ones. Enlightenment reason had by now taken its toll on the Calvinist faith of early America and its belief in original sin: far fewer people believed in a God who directly intervened in the affairs of the world, dispensing generous or harmful miracles as appropriate to convey his judgment. Indeed, the "invisible world," as Cotton Mather called the realm of divinity and spirits in 1693, had by the 1850s largely receded from the daily thoughts of many Americans. The Deist God was now prominent: this was the famous "clock-maker," who established the laws of the universe at the creation, but who never interfered with the mechanism after winding it up.

Our current notions of a clear distinction between science and religion did not exist much before the twentieth century. At least until the eighteenth century, science was called "natural philosophy" and was only one way of deepening one's understanding of self, nature, and divinity. Cotton Mather had also been a scientist, fascinated by God's creation as a way of reading the attitudes of the Creator, and Sir Isaac Newton wrote a lengthy treatise on the Book of Revelation. As Ann Braude argues in her book Radical Spirits, it should not be surprising, then, that many nineteenth-century Americans saw no less reason to believe in ghosts and mediums than they did to believe in what seemed like the equally improbable idea of the telegraph: both involved communication that crossed apparently insuperable barriers. Spiritualism, as the spirit-contacting movement was called, allowed Americans who were becoming more inclined to trust science than miracles to retain a belief in the afterlife based on what appeared to be repeatable, objective evidence and experiment.

It is not accidental that women were the main agents of nineteenth-century spiritualism. A science/religion that allowed direct contact with the invisible world without institutional hierarchy, it carved a place for women to provide religious leadership. In 1848, the Fox sisters, Margaret, Leah, and Catherine, reported hearing spirit rappings in their Arcadia, New York, home and went on to be the driving force in American spiritualism. They organized "performances" in which they demonstrated their abilities as mediums and drew condemnation from some male clergy. Women interfering with established religious structures had been an American anxiety at least since Anne Hutchinson in the seventeenth century--an anxiety especially apparent in the heavily gendered accusations of the Salem witch trials. Perhaps in response to the women who attempted to cross patriarchal boundaries, a social phenomenon sometimes called the cult of true womanhood developed and began to have widespread influence in nineteenth-century America. This ideology, or set of assumptions and beliefs, solidly relegated women to the home and explicitly rejected the possibility of women engaging in public leadership. Scholar Barbara Welter suggests that, through such vehicles as women's magazines and religious literature, the cult of true womanhood prescribed four cardinal virtues for women: piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. Women, it was thought, had as their proper roles nurturer, comforter, and homemaker. In the public realm--whether political or religious--women, like children, were meant to be seen and not heard. "True" women in this sense were patriotic and God-fearing; anyone who opposed this ideology was seen as an enemy of God, civilization, and America itself. One of the most famous women to challenge this idea of womanhood was Victoria Woodhull, who combined a belief in spiritualism with crusades for women's suffrage and free love. She was also the first woman to address a joint session of Congress and ran for president in 1871 (an attempt that ended in failure when her past as a prostitute was exposed).

For all these reasons, we should not be surprised to see gothic writers reveal concerns about how gender relates to the spirit world. The narrator of Edgar Allan Poe's "Ligeia" imputes a witchlike, supernatural willpower to his beloved. He imagines that she is able to transcend the boundary between life and death and is therefore both exciting and threatening. Henry Ward Beecher, in his sermon "The Strange Woman," displays a similar fear as he warns against the almost supernatural power women's sexuality can wield over impressionable young men. He comes close to suggesting that prostitutes, devil-like, are capable of mesmerizing and entrapping otherwise rational males. Arguably, Emily Dickinson exploits the association of the female with the mystical as she interrogates the assumptions of the largely patriarchal nineteenth-century worldview: although one must tell the truth "slant," Dickinson implies that she has access to it. Ironically, perhaps, given Beecher's social moralizing, spiritualism, whose proponents also critiqued marriage and advocated alternative medical treatments, became closely associated with the antebellum social reform ethos in general. The reform movements had always attracted many women who had a particular interest in creating a more equitable culture. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry's sister, was the most famous nineteenth-century literary woman to argue, through Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), for social reform. It is useful to compare her reform ethos with the spiritualist one: for Stowe, it is the mystery of Christianity that shows the way to truth and justice.

EMILY DICKINSON

Dickinson's poetry is very sparse, so every single word carries great weight emotionally and psychologically.

Some critics say her words were used as a substitue, not a supplement, for another sort of life, "one for which she yearned even as she protected herself from it: that of personal closeness, literal intimacy.

This was her way of defining herself in a world that favored male power and authority (think Anne Bradstreet and Phyllis Wheatley).

By creating her own identity on her own terms, we can also say that she is "self-made". Like Bradstreet and Wheatley she had a quality education that would rival any male of the period. She lived her life own her own terms (never traditionally "male" or "female"). She never marries or bears children (the traditional role of the female at the time). Instead she creates herself, in private, through her poetry (self-made like Ben Franklin).

She is consdiered the first modern poet because of her deft focus on the meaning of single words (characteristic of multiple meanings). She also does not use traditional punctuation (the use of the dash simultaneously liks ideas and words in comlpex ways).