The American Gothic Tradition

What was haunting the American nation in the 1850s?

Guiding Questions

• American gothic writing tends to question and analyze rather than offer helpful answers. How do these texts critique the common nineteenth-century assumption that America stands as the unique moral and social guiding light for the world (that it is, as John Winthrop said in 1630, “a City on a Hill”)?

• If the gothic explores what we might call the “dark side” of American life, what cultural fears and anxieties do we find expressed here? How does the form of this literature (especially narrative voice and point of view) help convey these anxieties?

• Gothic writers addressed key nineteenth-century cultural trends, such as westward expansion, technological and scientific progress, romantic individualism, the cult of true womanhood, and the debate over slavery and abolition. How can you see some of these trends reflected in the texts this week?

• How do these writers explore and critique the ideas of self-reliance, free will, and the self-made man that you saw expressed by Franklin, Emerson, and Thoreau?

Overview

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 gentler 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. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe explore the “dark side” of nineteenth-century America. Along with Herman Melville, these writers 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. For the purposes of our study, it will be useful to think of 

gothic literature
 (also called 

Dark RomanticismLinks to an external site.
) 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. 

Mostly these authors unveil their dark prophecies only by indirect glimpses–in the words of Emily Dickinson (who we’ll read next week), 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

Links to an external site.
 as a fractious and multicultural crew is led to a terrifying fate by a dangerous and potentially insane demagogue. Similarly, Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil” teases us with the unanswerable question of what “really” happened in Hooper’s past to cause such a permanent transformation in his character. 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. 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?

Video Questions to Consider

What is an American? How does American literature create conceptions of the American experience and identity?

· How did America’s Puritan heritage influence Hawthorne’s “The May-Pole of Merry Mount”? In what sense is the 
Pequod a microcosm of American society? 

· How did the Civil War and the tensions that precipitated it influence Hawthorne and Melville?

What is American literature? What are its distinctive voices and styles? How do social and political issues influence the American canon?

· How is gothic literature different from other kinds of writing that are contemporaneous with it? What were some nineteenth-century social conditions that contributed to the critical outlook of gothic literature? In what sense are these texts “pessimistic” compared to others of the nineteenth century?

Nathaniel Hawthorne

1. Are we supposed to figure out, or really care, about what “really” happened in Hooper’s past to cause the permanent transformation in his character?

2. Think about self-knowledge as a theme in “The Minister’s Black Veil.” What character or characters truly come to know something about human nature and to know him or herself in the process? Do any of them end up supposing that they “know” more about life or the human condition that they really do?

Edgar Allan Poe

1. In an essay about composing literature, Poe wrote the following: “the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world–and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.” What do you think he meant by this? 

2. You will undoubtedly be quick to pick up on the “unnatural relations” between Usher and his sister in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and it is helpful to point out that incest is a common theme in early national literature (Melville’s Pierre is another famous example). Why would early national writers in general, and Poe in particular, be interested in incest as a theme?

3. Poe works very well for spatial analysis and analyses of setting– that is, for considering the importance of the stories’ spaces (e.g., houses, prisons) and the locations (e.g., “exotic” or medieval places and times). Draw a quick sketch of Poe’s settings and label each aspect of what the settings symbolize.

Herman Melville

1. Note the description of the 
Pequod in Chapter 16. How does Ishmael characterize the ship and its crew? What does he mean when he says that the 
Pequod is “a cannibal of a craft”? How is this related to the idea of the “ship of state”?

2. How would you describe the relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg in Chapter 10, “A Bosom Friend”? Why should the two of them be “a cosy, loving pair”? How does Ishmael seem to feel about Queequeg’s religious beliefs?

3. Why might Melville have chosen to tell the story of Ahab and the white whale from Ishmael’s point of view? How do Ishmael’s judgments and perspectives affect your understanding of Ahab’s quest? And why begin the novel with the line “Call me Ishmael,” as if the reader is not privy to the narrator’s true name?

4. Read carefully Ahab’s diatribe against Moby-Dick in “The Quarter-Deck.” He says that “all visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks,” that the whale is like “the wall” that hems in a prisoner, and that “that inscrutable thing [in the whale] is chiefly what I hate.” In the midst of a whale-hunt, why bring up pasteboard masks and prison walls? What does Ahab mean by “inscrutable”? What is the relationship between Ahab’s speech and Ishmael’s later assertion that Ahab identifies Moby-Dick with “all [Ahab’s] intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them”?

5. In “The Whiteness of the Whale,” Ishmael continues his assessment of Moby-Dick. He concludes that the whiteness presents “a dumb blankness, full of meaning.” According to Ishmael, what is the significance of the whiteness of the whale?

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