UNIVERSITEIT UTRECHT
Between the Uncanny and
the Sublime
An Investigation of the (self-)Reflective Process in
American Gothic Literature
Edivania Lopes Duarte
3658120
Master Thesis
Dr. Birgit M. Kaiser
October 29, 2014
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
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1. The Sublime and the Uncanny: A Theoretical Framework
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2. “A Grave and Dark-clad Company”: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown”
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3. “An Object of Superstitious Awe”: Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”
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4. “A Morbid Acuteness of the Senses”: Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” 35
Conclusion
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Bibliography
49
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INTRODUCTION
It seems as if each one of us has been through a phase of individual
development, corresponding to this animistic stage in primitive men, that none
of us has passed through it without preserving certain residues and traces of it
which are still capable of manifesting themselves, and that everything which
now strikes us as ‘uncanny’ fulfils the condition of touching those residues of
animistic mental activity with us and bring them to expression.
(Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny” 240)
In this way, in our aesthetic judgment, nature is judged as sublime not insofar
as it arouses fear, but rather because it calls forth our power (which is not part
of nature) to regard those things about which we are concerned (goods, health
and life) as trivial, and hence to regard its power (to which we are, to be sure,
subjected in regard to these things) as not the sort of dominion over ourselves
and our authority to which we would have to bow if it came down to our
highest principles and their affirmation or abandonment.
(Immanuel Kant, “From Critique of the Power of Judgment” 439)
This thesis is dedicated to the theories of the uncanny and the sublime. The reason for this
pairing is the fact that both are aesthetic theories which trigger a process of reflection. Departing
from this shared characteristic, however, is the fact that in the field of aesthetics a division exists
between aesthetic theories which focus on “what is beautiful, attractive and sublime – that is,
with feelings of a positive nature – and with the circumstances and the objects that call them
forth, rather than with the opposite feelings of repulsion and distress” (Freud 219), thereby
stating that the sublime pertains to the positive and the uncanny to the negative. While Freud
presents the division between these two aesthetic theories as clear cut before going into a
treatise about the uncanny, there are many more similarities to be found than one would think.
In pairing these two theories together, then, this thesis aims to show how the sublime and the
uncanny might be able to converge through the reflective processes they trigger. This will blur
the line between the positive/negative distinction and, in connecting the uncannily changed
environment and the mental state which ensues from it to its sublime counterpart, the
possibility will arise for the occurrence of a sublime experience which could be fed by the
reflective process of the uncanny. In other words: the uncanny could be able to conjure up the
sublime as long as the reflective process is executed in such a way that the negativity which is
inherent to the uncanny allows the possibility for a positive experience. Strictly speaking, this
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would mean that the process of reflection set in motion by the uncanny is able to offer the
subject insights which make it possible to turn the negative experience around and enter a
reflective process in which positivity – the sublime – has the upper hand.
The sublime is a term used in aesthetic theory to describe an overwhelming feeling with
regards to a context of uncertainty. It is seen as a device for reflection and for the elevation of the
human experience. The consequence is that the subject is able to assert his or her independence
in the eye of the immeasurable uncertainty he or she is presented with and thereby surpasses
human cognitive and intellectual limitations. In this thesis, the focus will be on the sublime as it
is defined by Immanuel Kant in “Critique of the Power of Judgment”. This allows for the
investigation of both a sensible as well as a purely reasonable effect of the sublime experience by
zooming in on the dynamically sublime and the possibility of self-reflection. For the explanation
of the uncanny, the main theoretic work will be Sigmund Freud’s highly praised “The Uncanny”,
an article which describes the uncanny as “that class of the frightening which leads back to what
is known of old and long familiar” (Freud 220). While the uncanny is mainly a theory of the
unnamable and ungraspable by virtue of the fact that that which frightens cannot be pinpointed,
its aesthetic properties are complemented by the possibility of reflection. In this case, this would
be reflection upon the newly frightening situation and what constitutes the discrepancies
between it and the familiar context it emerged from.
Although with the sublime the opportunity for reflection also arises, here it is more a
form of self-reflection as it questions the human position in the world and not the workings of
the world as such. As a counterbalance, the uncanny reflects upon the external and leaves selfreflection behind because of the urgency of “solving” the mystery which constitutes the uncanny
experience. What this thesis is interested in is therefore to show how the uncanny reflective and
the sublime self-reflective processes are merely stages in reflection. Meaning that reflection
upon the external and reflection upon the self are able to complement each other as two stages
of the same reflective process. Analyzing three American gothic stories within this framework
will allow for a further understanding of the characters as their reflective processes can be
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dissected and as the problems that the uncanny presents them with can be analyzed within the
broader framework of each character’s personal development. Diving deep into each character’s
personality, the inevitably uncanny tales in which they function will make more sense and,
ultimately, one will find out why it was precisely the uncanny which was able to have the upper
hand in their individual reflective processes.
The American gothic short stories “Young Goodman Brown”, “The Legend of Sleepy
Hollow” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” will be analyzed through the sublime and the
uncanny in order to investigate how both theories complement and, of course, derive from each
other. This will be done by looking at the interplay between the sublime, the uncanny, reason,
critical thinking and the human position in the world. Taking the application of reason and
critical thinking and reflection upon the human position in the world as the elements with which
to compare the uncanny and the sublime is very helpful for this thesis, because these elements
are what determine the reflective processes our protagonists go through. By zooming in on the
application of reason and critical thinking, one is able to determine why the protagonists react
the ways they do in various situations. Finding out these deeper motivations aids in knowing
what kind of reflective process the protagonists allow and which they exclude. The reflection
upon the human position in the world is dependent on reason and critical thinking because it is
through their application that this reflection is made possible. In order to execute self-reflection
the world has to make sense to a certain degree because else one would be unable to determine
the human position within this world. In the interplay between these elements, then, one is able
to determine what constitutes the different reflective processes we are about to analyze and find
out how these processes pertain to either the uncanny or the sublime.
The first chapter will consist of laying out this theoretical framework in more detail. The
theoretical works of Kant and Freud will be used to explain the uncanny and the sublime,
pointing out their differences and similarities. The second chapter will consist of an analysis of
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown”. The focus hereby will be on the reflective
process Brown goes through and on the (im)possibility of the sublime experience in a highly
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uncanny tale. Chapter three analyzes Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” with
the focus on truthfulness and its importance to one’s application of reason and critical thinking.
The fourth chapter will provide the last analysis and focuses on Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Fall of
the House of Usher”. Here the focus will lie on the incapacity for critical thinking through strong
denial, which is present in the nameless protagonist and narrator of the story.
Throughout the analyses, the interplay between the uncanny, the sublime, reason, critical
thinking and one’s position in the world will be foregrounded. Within this interplay, the
processes of reflection in the uncanny and the sublime depend on the application of reason and
critical thinking in order to pinpoint the human position in the world. A position which is
determined by a logical and critical approach to the world the subject inhabits, and by his or her
individual identity. The aim is to show whether the sublime and the uncanny indeed are
interchangeable or if their relationship is much more complex than their similarities hint at. The
analyses of the three stories will be rehashed in the conclusion with the focus on perception,
identity and faith in order to show the overlapping pattern of all of the stories. Consequently,
this is what will establish if the sublime and the uncanny are merely two sides of the same coin,
or if in their combination there arises a kind of third space pertaining to a new theory of
reasonable aesthetics.
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1 | THE SUBLIME AND THE UNCANNY
A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
The average person’s childhood is filled with stories of ghosts, monsters and wizards. As one
matures, the fear that is felt while listening to such stories make place for a different, more
mature kind of horror. Instead of feeling the fear one does when confronted with magical and
mythical creatures, mature ghost stories can manifest themselves as internalizations of those
primal fears known from childhood. What is meant by this is that fear of the dark and fear of evil
creatures turn into an all-encompassing fear of the unknown. As time progresses, these fears
find different ways to resurface. On the one hand fear becomes an internalization which can
manifest itself in the realm of psychology. On the other hand a manifestation in the aesthetic
realm can be found. Both will be discussed in this thesis as pertaining to, respectively, the
theories of the uncanny and the sublime.
Even though both theories differ significantly in the way in which they deal with
uncertainty, it is particularly valuable to compare the uncanny to the sublime. Both theories deal
with the process of reflection that is conjured up by the confrontation with uncertainty. In the
uncanny this is an uncertainty which sprung from a before known context or condition. With the
sublime the uncertainty stems from the fact that that which is being perceived was never known
to the self in the first place. This poses a challenge for the beholder as he or she is forced to
admit the limitations of his or her own cognitive capacities and has to accept that the
uncertainty will remain.
The uncanny as well as the sublime deal with a shift that poses challenges to one’s
cognitive and imaginative capacities. This also means that both the uncanny and the sublime
encompass shifts that affect the mental state of the observer. Now what if in this changing
mental state the sublime and the uncanny are able to converge? Converge not because both
theories deal with uncertainty, but because the defamiliarization which lies at the heart of the
shift into the uncanny often falls into the spiritual or supernatural realm. This particular
characteristic is very interesting because it opens the possibility for the uncanny to transfer into
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the realm of the sublime. It is true that the sublime does not simply deal with spirituality, but the
question of magnitude which is central to the sublime and makes one question one’s position in
the world is also very well applicable within the context of a God-made universe. A universe in
which the supernatural is able to arouse more fear than just the natural alone can. Could it be,
then, that the uncanny creates the perfect environment for the sublime to occur in? That pure
fear is able to be lifted into an aesthetic experience in which one’s own limitations turn a
paralyzing fear into an empowering one? At the heart of these questions lies an intricate
interplay of reason and critical thinking in order to determine one’s position in the world.
This chapter in particular will focus on an explanation of the uncanny and the sublime.
Both theories will be discussed at length in order to investigate the above by looking into how
the aesthetic experiences of the uncanny and the sublime facilitate reflection upon man’s
position in the world and in nature. How exactly do the experiences of the sublime and the
uncanny trigger this self-reflective process and what does this tell us about the theories
themselves?
I • A Reasonable Aesthetics: The Sublime
The sublime is an aesthetic experience in which a person feels overwhelmed by the magnitude of
something, but finds pleasure in “assert[ing] [their] independence in the face of immeasurability
or irresistibility of nature” (Kirwan 56). As a concept, the sublime can be traced back to
Longinus’ On the Sublime, which was written in the first century. However, it was not until the
sixteenth century, when Boileau published a translation1 of Longinus’ original text that the
sublime as a topic was born (see Kirwan vii).
Even though the original connection of the sublime was to the overall idea of excellence
of nature, there has always been a moralistic component to the theory. Longinus himself
connected the sublime to the idea of the dignified soul – “the echo of a noble mind” (Kirwan 37),
he called it. When in the eighteenth century, then, the connection between the sublime and
1
Traité du Sublime et du marveilleux
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Christianity pervades, it is not that big of a surprise. The overwhelming feeling characteristic of
the sublime was highly associated with the religious experience that was supposed to transition
Christians into heaven. The idea behind this was that “whatever took the eighteenth-century
beholder out of this world was likely to also take them to the deity that required the kind of
morality they were used to” (Kirwan 57). The moralistic person, then, was the one who was
capable of experiencing sublimity and by virtue of that fact was also destined to go to heaven.
This idea of religious morality fits in the concept of the dynamically sublime. The
dynamically sublime deals with the potentiality of one’s own destruction, or, as James Kirwan
puts it:
The dynamically sublime is aroused by our contemplating, from a position of
safety, an object that expresses the potentially lethal power of what is outside
us: overhanging rocks, thunderclouds, lightening, vulcanoes, hurricanes, stormy
oceans, high waterfalls, war, God, and so on. (54)
What this means is that the dynamically sublime deals with moments of uncertainty in which the
potential dangers of sublime magnitude and uncertainty take center stage and lift the experience
of the sublime from merely fearing what one sees to fearing what its impact can be on one’s life.
It is in this instance of dynamic sublimity that the religious experience can most clearly be found.
Faith is what facilitates the acceptance of that uncertainty and it is because of this that the
dynamically sublime is able to become a moment in which the religious person recognizes not
only God’s magnitude, but also His power and the implications that that power has for mankind
– but only as a potential threat. This process is, consequently, a process of reflection; reflection
upon one’s own position in the world and upon the threat posed by the outside. The human
incapacity to understand the vastness of nature and – in the case of “Young Goodman Brown”, as
we will soon see – the workings of a God trigger a self-reflective process in which reason is
asked to aid in comprehension. When this fails, however, reason asserts that, yes, what one is
beholding is incomprehensible, but the only solution is to acknowledge the fact that some things
are too grand to understand and consequently to surpass human cognitive limitations by
reaching that conclusion.
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Ultimately, for an experience to be sublime, one must acknowledge the human inability
to comprehend everything that is in front of oneself and comprehend that human means of
measuring the world are puny by nature. They are puny by virtue of nature operating outside
man. Puny, because man cannot rule over nature – which would mean confining it to the limited
imagination of man. This conclusion does not only show man’s physical smallness within the
world, but shows how man is forced to reflect upon his or her own place in the world, only to
come to the realization that this position is of such low significance that the only thing to do is to
take one’s distance and acknowledge intellectual failure.
II • An Aesthetics of Unfamiliarity: The Uncanny
As explained in the introduction to this chapter, the uncanny is, much like the sublime, a theory
of reflection. Both theories evoke reflection as the result of a context of uncertainty. With the
sublime this uncertainty arose because the object perceived has unknown properties; it is
simply too big to be known in its entirety. With the uncanny, however, one departs in a vastly
different direction. One still remains within the context of self-reflection but in this case is urged
to reflect upon one’s own being and upon one’s position within a social hierarchy. Consequently,
the uncanny has tight connections to the individual’s psyche.
The uncanny is a theory formed within psychology which refers to the sensation that
occurs when something which was once familiar turns into something unfamiliar. Since the
theory originated from a German context it is most famously referred to as Das unheimliche. The
uncanny, being a theory which came from psychoanalysis, unsurprisingly manifests itself in the
mind. What is seen as uncanny is usually a change for which there exists no proof. For instance,
gothic literature is full of ghost stories in which the actual ghost is never seen. One encounters
people who have turned evil or have become possessed, but is almost never presented with
actual proof of that change (how do you prove that someone is possessed by an evil entity?). The
uncanniness of an object or situation then, is apparent only insofar as the beholder senses a
certain change. What pervades in the uncanny is intellectual uncertainty (see Freud 221).
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Self-reflection takes place because of a change in environment or setting, in other words:
a change which happens outside of the self. It is this change that triggers uncanny feelings.
Entwined in this are old sentiments, new ones, fear, incomprehension and the self. The self is
thereby the place in which this whirlwind of thoughts and sensations occurs, meaning that one
has to rely on one’s own cognitive and intellectual capacities in order to solve the psychological
chaos brought about by the transition to the uncanny.
In a way, the uncanny is harder to “detect” than the sublime because of the important
fact that the uncanny relies upon a changed condition within a certain context. The uncanny
takes place in a known space which becomes inhabited by something alien to it. The sublime, on
the other hand, relies on the aesthetic experience which arises from a given object. Without
anything to compare the sublime object to, it is much easier to pinpoint what triggers a sublime
sensation. The uncanny relies upon such minuscule changes in detail, that it is much harder to
determine what exactly has changed. Therefore it becomes increasingly difficult to determine
how to solve the psychological shift brought about by this uncannily changed condition.
As with the sublime, the uncanny arises when something surpasses what is known. In the
sublime this means something surpassing the edges of comprehension and reason, thereby
deeming the object or occurrence incomprehensible. In the uncanny this means having to put
one’s own set of known facts aside only to discover an altered – frightening – representation of
something known of old. Strikingly, one has to find a rational way to deal with something that
solely appeals to the sentiments in order to rid oneself of the uncanny feelings that occur.
The house is seen as the prime location of the uncanny. More specifically, one often
refers to the haunted house, the house which has been unaltered in feel and atmosphere since
childhood and suddenly becomes inhabited by something – usually a ghost – which changes the
makeup of the house. This sense of invasion is very strong in the uncanny. The importance of the
haunted house, however, lies in the fact that the uncertainty which inhabits this familiar space is
one which resulted from the before known context. A haunted house does not house random
phenomena, but escalations of former situations. Closely tied to this is the fact that the reflection
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triggered by the uncanny haunted house, ultimately is reflection upon an identity that has been
constituted for decades through family lineage. What the haunted house questions is not
mankind’s position in the world, but its individual identity.
The domestic is the ultimate known, therefore a context of uncertainty carries much
more weight when tied to a house: the possession and defamiliarization of the house symbolizes
a rupture between the subject and their heritage. It is therefore that the shift from familiarity
into the uncanny takes away the subject’s identity. Self-reflection therefore does not evaluate the
present self in this context, it attempts to create a new one. The haunted house is a place of selfreflection precisely because it unhinges the foundation of the self.
This “foundational self” has close ties to the natural. The idea of lineage is one which
propels mankind back into a history in which it occurs as a natural component of the world.
Even though the uncanny, most prominent in the gothic genre, seems to pertain to the
supernatural, its effects seem not only to question what exists between earth and heaven, but
also to consider the importance of a hierarchy in nature. A hierarchy which shows where one
comes from and thereby grounds one firmly in a certain family lineage. The supernatural in the
uncanny thereby also offers close ties to the natural.
I will now resume by analyzing three American gothic stories. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young
Goodman Brown”, Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and Edgar Allen Poe’s
“The Fall of the House of Usher” will be used to demonstrate the self-reflective processes
triggered by the sublime and the uncanny in order to show how both combined provide a much
more eloquent account of the personal processes our characters go through. It is even possible
that, in this combination of two reflective processes, the sublime and the uncanny might
converge into a theory of aesthetics that covers not merely the psychological but also the purely
cognitive and rational consequences of the changing of familiar environments.
The selection of these particular short stories was based on the fact that they deal with a
disruption of the natural order. In Hawthorne this leads to a religious crisis, while in Irving and
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Poe the question of livelihood is brought to the front. In “Young Goodman Brown” we see how
the sublime is characteristic for Brown’s movement towards his downfall and how the theory is
very useful in pinpointing what exactly constitutes this movement. “The Legend of Sleepy
Hollow” demonstrates how the imaginative capacity (as demonstrated by Crane) and the
application of critical thinking (as with Brom Bones), when incorrectly applied undermine the
sublime experience but, even more so, fuel the uncanny and thereby show how the interplay
between the two theories solidifies in a gothic setting. In Poe the capacity for critical thinking
and the application of reason (characteristically sublime) is deliberately brought in to counter an
uncanny force that inhabits the Usher house. Interesting is what this counterbalance means to
the disruptive atmosphere in the house and the way in which the tale plays out.
In all of the selected stories the sublime is present as a counterbalance to the
uncanniness which is inherent to the gothic genre. It is this interplay between the two theories
which is particularly interesting in these cases because it gives way to the idea that the sublime
might be inherent in the uncanny and that it is the sublime that is able to both propel the
uncanny forth and foreground the experience. The outcome of this process is able to show how
the human position in the world is regarded and rationalized in the eye of the natural
environment we humans inhabit. What will be laid bare are the cognitive processes of our
characters.
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2 | “A GRAVE AND DARK-CLAD COMPANY”
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE’S ‘YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN’
This chapter will be dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Young Goodman Brown”.
The reason for this selection is the fact that something very peculiar happens to Goodman
Brown when he departs on a wicked errand. The reader is guided into the depths of Brown’s
soul through a self-reflective process with the goal of understanding the merits of religion, while
also bringing to awareness the fact that mankind is fallible by nature. Despair strikes as soon as
Brown projects his own evil urges on the people around him. Consequently, even his exemplary
wife falls victim to Brown’s dark thoughts.
Goodman Brown departs on a wicked errand through the forest, accompanied by the
devil, in order to partake in a witches sabbath. Throughout the story the two companions
regularly stop because Brown resists to go any further on account of his religion and his – until
then – pious ancestry. While Brown thinks himself the only evil person in his town, he
encounters a few of the most pious people he knows in the forest, which triggers the idea that
evil is inherent to mankind. When Brown, encumbered by guilt and worry for his beloved Faith,
runs through the forest in an attempt to save his wife and encounters the whole town – including
his wife – in the middle of an initiation rite, his religious faith is shattered. What happens next is
not clear, but one knows that when Brown leaves the forest and returns home to his wife, that he
is a changed man, a man who no longer believed in the goodness of mankind and who sees evil
as the root of everything.
What one sees in “Young Goodman Brown” is the employment of both the uncanny as
well as the sublime processes of reflection. A shift takes place which causes Brown to make a
transition not only in his faith but also in the way in which he regards himself and in the way in
which he deals with his personal troubles and doubts. In order to investigate this shift and the
way in which Brown deals with it, this chapter will focus on the natural, the devilish and the
faithful in “Young Goodman Brown”.
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I • The Natural
The natural in “Young Goodman Brown” appears in quite a striking manner. Every instance of a
natural occurrence is paired with the kind of intellectual uncertainty which turns the natural in
the story into something highly uncanny. This paragraph will focus on the devil’s serpent staff,
Brown’s ancestry and the symbolism of the forest. These three elements were selected as the
focus because their occurrences are tied to the religious uncertainty that Brown deals with
throughout the story. It is this doubt regarding his religion that triggers Brown’s self-reflective
process and opens up the possibility for a dynamically sublime experience. How this is achieved
exactly and what this means throughout the short story will be the focus of this segment.
“Young Goodman Brown” is a gothic tale and as such welcomes the forest as its primary
backdrop. In the forest Brown is met with three elements of nature which further shatter his
faith and show the reader the despair the young protagonist has fallen into. The first is the black
serpent that the devil carries around. Throughout their journey Brown constantly questions the
livelihood of the serpent, thereby drawing attention not only to an uncertainty in nature, but
also to a potential evil self. The dynamically sublime has been discussed in the previous chapter
as an occurrence which triggers a sense of self-preservation when the potential threat posed by
the outside comes in focus and confronts the observer with his or her possible destruction. The
serpent has quite the same effect on Brown as its ties to religion are most clearly found in the
story of original sin.
The serpent is thereby able to stand for Brown’s corrupted ancestry and does not merely
bring forward the sinfulness of man but also, through the self-reflective process, bears the
realization that being a sinner calls for punishment from God. The crux Brown is facing here has
him choosing between a life of sin which will call punishment upon him and between a pious life
that has been corrupted by ancestral sin.
The devil tells Brown of the sinfulness of his grandfather and father, facts that make
Brown doubt his own identity. He has always been the Goodman Brown who came from a family
of good men and is encumbered in religion by his catechism and continuing loyalty to the church
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– until now! The reference to original sin further completes this lineage of sinners because it
shows the inevitability of mankind committing sins. Tying this to the complications brought
along by the serpent, then, Brown’s self-reflective process unhinges his identity. Lineage is the
foundation of every identity and by choosing to believe a lie, to forget the original sinners and to
be blind to the sins of his fathers, Brown has based his identity upon a foundation of quicksand
which is now rapidly gliding away from under him.
The forest in “Young Goodman Brown” is not material as much as it is symbolic. It represents a
world in which Brown can be alone with his thoughts, troubles and doubts – and that is precisely
why it “closed immediately behind” (Hawthorne 33) him. Also, the forest is a space in Brown’s
head, which explains the fact that the natural, organic appearances in the forest all carry a
certain significance with them. As will soon be demonstrated, the natural only appears insofar as
it can provide a manifestation for one of Brown’s many religious doubts.
These manifestations, however, are clearly encumbered in a sense of uncanniness. The
associations that Brown has with his religion have all been steered in a gloomy direction
because he – increasingly so – starts to believe that evil is inherent to mankind. Because of this
shift from a true believer in God to someone who sees the devil as the root of everything, the
assumption can be made that the self-reflective process that Brown goes through slowly shifts
from a thinking process in which mankind’s position within religion is questioned to a process in
which an attempt at reconstructing individual identity is set in motion. This shift is,
consequently, from a process leading to a sublime recognition of mankind’s position within a
God-made world, to an uncanny experience in which unfamiliarity does not only manifest itself
in a changed environment, but in a changed idea of the self – which is triggered by the unhinging
of Brown’s family history.
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II • The Devilish
The devil in “Young Goodman Brown” is a continuous presence with immense power over the
young man. Throughout the story, however, much confusion is added around the character as
the devil is suggested to be Brown’s alter ego, his ancestor (“[T]hey might have been taken for
father and son.” 33), and not the devil at all (“In truth, all through the haunted forest there could
be nothing more frightful than the figure of Goodman Brown.” 40, emphasis mine).
The first assumption is made plausible by the fact that it appears as if the devil sprung
from Brown’s own being:
’What if the devil himself should be at my very elbow!’
His head being turned back, he passed a crook of the road, and, looking
forward again, beheld the figure of a man, in grave and decent attire, seated at
the foot of an old tree. (33)
It is hereby suggested that it is Brown who has conjured up the devil, so to speak. But with what
purpose would this be? A few pages later Hawthorne adds to the confusion by suggesting that
the words coming from the devil’s mouth were thought up by Brown himself (see Hawthorne
37). These signs point in the direction of the devil being no more than a marionette, a figure used
for projecting everything that Brown wants to accuse himself of. According to these story
elements, then, even the existence of the devil is not certain, seeing as that fact along with the
devil’s actions and discourse all rely on Goodman Brown.
The second suggestion of the devil being one of Brown’s ancestors is found at the very
beginning when the resemblance between the two is pointed out:
As nearly as could be discerned, the second traveler was about fifty years old,
apparently in the same rank of life as Goodman Brown, and bearing a
considerable resemblance to him, though perhaps more in expression than
features. Still they might have been taken for father and son. (33)
What is most prominently suggested here is that Brown and the devil could be related. The
“considerable resemblance” that is found between the two, however, can mostly be ascribed to
facial expression even though the two appear to be father and son. In the first segment of this
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chapter it was established that Brown’s ancestry was a lie because of the veil of piousness his
father and grandfather hid behind. Within the gothic genre it is even so that “the sins of the
father are visited on the offspring [and are] manifested in the representation of the illegitimacy
and brutality of paternal authority, the repetition of events, and the doublings of figures and
names in successive generations” (Botting 123). This makes it plausible that the devil is this
doubling figure with ancestral ties to our main character.
Again, one is pushed in the direction of the devil being a variation, alter ego, I may say, of
our young protagonist. The devil could very well be Goodman Brown’s double. The double “was
originally an insurance against the destruction of the ego, an ‘energetic denial of the power of
death’” (Freud 295). A change in the balance between ego and alter ego would very well have it
that the devil is now the harbinger of death. Brown’s conflict with the devil, then, does not
simply originate from the fact that the devil is the dark side of Brown himself, but also – and
even more so – because the separation of Brown into his (seemingly) pious self and the devil has
materialized a threat to Brown himself: the appearance of the devil forebodes Brown’s religious
destruction.
Further on in the story, however, Brown himself turns into the devil. It is when he
realizes that his “’Faith is gone!’”(39) that he takes the serpent staff from the devil and runs
through the forest, into the witches’ meeting. His transformation is complete; he has taken hold
of the one object – the serpent staff – which holds all symbolism for evil. The fact that it took the
staff to complete the transition, however, gives way to the thought that the devil one encounters
in the story is in fact no more than a convenient projection. It took only the taking of the staff for
Brown to also take his devilishness. That the devil seems to speak in words known to Brown,
then, and that Brown follows the devil so easily, points in the direction of the devil being
Brown’s counterbalance during a period of critical thinking in which Brown eventually
concludes that the evil projection he has chosen as his companion is in fact who he himself is.
Taking back the staff is thereby the symbolic acceptance of his own dark side, which fully
envelops Brown in the end.
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III • The Faithful
When Brown departs he leaves his wife of three months, Faith, alone. Not much is known about
this character and the only image one gets of the young woman is the one Brown paints. She is a
pious and delicate creature and holds, as her name already suggests, all Brown’s faith. The
relationship between Brown and his faith is thereby materialized in the being of his wife.
Thinking back to the relationship between Brown and the devil, it is very well possible that Faith
serves the same purpose: she is a blank canvas used for Brown’s projections. It is striking, then,
that Brown “replies to the devil reproach for his lateness at the appointed place saying ‘Faith
kept me back awhile’” (Levy 377).
The movement from the town into the forest is one from potential sublimity to possible
uncanniness. As the devil is Brown’s only companion and guide through the forest, so is Faith all
of the above in Brown’s religious life. The town and the forest thereby show two opposing sides
around the same axis that constitutes Brown’s being. Brown stands in the middle while deciding
to be drawn in by Faith or the devil. However, this choice does not seem to be as clear cut as
presented, for when Brown leaves his wife she gives Brown the impression that she knows what
is about to happen by asking him to “tarry with me this night, dear husband, of all the nights in
the year” (32). This makes the reader wonder if Faith is aware of what is about to happen. And if
so, how does she know? It appears, then, that his dear F(f)aith has already been corrupted, as if
the outcome of Brown’s errand is predicted at the start by the apparent tainting of his faith.
Consequently, the pink ribbons that Brown finds in the forest, seal his fate. For now it is
not only so that his faith is tainted, but by the occurrence of the ribbons in the forest Brown is
confronted with the bitter truth that his dark side has fully enveloped his faith. It is therefore
with reason that he exclaims: “[m]y Faith is gone!” (39). In a last attempt to retrieve it, Brown
seizes the serpent staff and runs through the forest in search of his dear F(f)aith. What he finds is
the epicenter of evil, the dark core of his own soul, and even though he tries to save his F(f)aith
one last time by urging her to look heavenward , “and resist the wicked one” (44) all hope is lost.
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Notable is the fact that he urges her to look heavenward but attempts no such thing himself. The
rupture between Brown and his faith is thereby proven to be persistent and irreversible; his
F(f)aith is no longer part of himself and thereby he does not control it, nor act upon it.
Confusingly enough, the ending does not offer a resolution. Brown simply returns home
with the insight that evil and sin are inherent to mankind and refuses to look his wife in the eyes
anymore. The scene in the forest lends plausibility to the fact that both Brown and Faith could
have died, but instead both leave the forest unharmed and life outside the witches’ sabbath is
presented as a corrupted reality which has its roots in the dark religious realizations Brown had
in the forest. Note that life in the town has not changed a bit even though Brown perceives it that
way.
Regarding Faith, the young wife does not seem changed to the reader at all. What has
changed is Brown’s perception of her. It is because of his experience in the forest that he
believes his F(f)aith has let him down and that evil is even inherent to her. By attributing this
essence to her, F(f)aith has turned from Brown’s salvation into the uncanny incarnation of his
own religious downfall. She has become the Eve to his Adam, the seduction that got man to bite
the apple in the Garden of Eden and for the first time recognize all that is wrong in the world.
The final transformation into Adam turns Brown into the original sinner, thereby further
thickening the ties between Brown and his ancestry of sin.
IV • Concluding
In “Young Goodman Brown” the reader is led through a self-reflective process which, at the
heart, bears the possibility of a sublime as well as an uncanny experience. The entry into the
forest had been pinpointed as a moment of transition in which a movement away from sublimity
(good) and into the uncanny (evil) is established. This shift is able to take place because of the
psychological implications of making either of those choices. That Brown projects his good and
evil self upon his wife and companion, then, is the mechanism that excludes sublimity. It is
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because Brown is not whole that he steers towards the uncanny. The unhinging of his identity
through dialogue with the devil is merely the verbal confrontation with a hidden truth.
The symbolic shift from good to evil as shown by the entrance into the forest goes to
show how the line between the sublime and the uncanny is very thin. The communal
characteristic of bearing uncertainties and posing intellectual challenges lie at the heart of each
occurrence in “Young Goodman Brown”. Brown, however, does not solve this issue by using
reason, but is swallowed whole by the undeniable doubts his wicked errand presents him with.
His inability to stand his ground in the eye of uncertainty is what robs him of a sublime
experience, but the overlap that exists between the sublime and the uncanny have it so that
when sublimity is out of the question for Brown, only uncanniness remains. This is aided by the
fact that he is robbed from his ancestry as he knows it and because religion presents him with an
insuperable truth.
Knowing his biblical ancestry of sin prepared Brown only for religious destruction and
the shattering of his family history as known to him only further distanced Brown from his inner
self. Heritage being the foundation of identity, Brown is doomed to fall apart because every
attempt at self-reflection only clarifies that Brown does not know what self to reflect upon.
Problems of heritage and identity are very often found in the gothic genre and thereby clearly
belong to the uncanny. As shown, the uncanny occurs in the story only to highlight the elements
that point to Brown’s downfall; the living/dead serpent, the devil as a ‘double’ and the ancestral
secrets are all uncanny in their own way. And it is precisely because they are, that they are lifted
out of the story and carry much more significance than the other elements. The unsublimity that
we have in this story, then, is supported by a sequence of uncanny happenings which move the
protagonist away from his sublime religious experience. The two experiences are not
interchangeable but need each other in order to bring across their significance; someone is
losing his faith because he believes that the sublime moment he has waited for will never come
and he has his own way of dealing with that realization (which constitutes the aforementioned
importance appointed to the serpent staff, Brown’s loss of faith in the piousness of his ancestors,
24
and the abduction of Faith). In this case, the sublime is undermined by the uncanniness that
demands of Brown that he attempts to position himself back into a natural (religious) and social
(family tree) order that has rejected him.
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3 | “AN OBJECT OF SUPERSTITIOUS AWE”
WASHINGTON IRVING’S ‘THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW’
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is a short story about school master Ichabod Crane who gets driven
out of the town of Sleepy Hollow by his own superstitious beliefs and incapability of critical
thinking. As a gothic tale it is obvious that the uncanny pervades throughout the story,
increasingly so because of the ever present superstitious beliefs present. These beliefs are very
important in the story and the argument of this thesis, by the fact that sublimity is undermined
in this story only because Crane’s incapability of applying reason distances him from the
possibility of a sublime experience, and makes the story increasingly uncanny. Strikingly so,
however, that even when the application of reason in the eye of uncertainty occurs, it does not
bring any of the characters closer to the sublime experience.
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” follows the life of over imaginative school master
Ichabod Crane as he tries to fit in in the town of Sleepy Hollow and tries to win the heart and
riches of Katrina van Tassel. Next to the ghost stories told by the townsfolk – frequently dealing
with the legend of the Headless Hessian –, the young man fuels his imagination with Cotton
Mather’s history of New-England Witchcraft and frightens himself more than once by attributing
the scariest apparitions to the Sleepy Hollow nights. As he tries to ward off the imaginary ghosts
that haunt him, he is thwarted by the town hero Brom Bones. Bones, also hoping to wed Katrina,
makes good use of Crane’s active imagination and is able to, through telling Crane tales about the
Headless Hessian – thereby adding credibility to the legend’s existence –, excite even more fear
in the young pedagogue. Ultimately, Bones drives Crane out of town by posing as the Headless
Hessian and is thereby able to wed Katrina. Crane is never seen again and the town makes up
ghost stories about his disappearance.
In “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” all the elements for the sublime are present, but the
tale never seems able to make the crossover from the uncanny into the sublime. This poses
questions not only about the conditions in which the sublime is said to occur, but also about the
demands the subject must meet in order to be able to have that experience. This relationship
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between the sublime and its subject will be investigated in this chapter by having a closer look at
the roles that storytelling, gluttony and fear play in the short story. The focus will be on how
these three elements facilitate a character-induced undermining of the sublime experience.
I • A History in the Making
The townsfolk of Sleepy Hollow pass the time by telling each other stories. Striking about this
practice of storytelling is the fact that the stories told are all ghost stories that are supposed to
have roots in the history of the little town. However, as the reader soon finds out, most of the
stories are made up. Connecting them to history, then, is quite a peculiar practice that raises
questions about the reliability of the history that Sleepy Hollow claims to have. Terence Martin
provides an explanation for the discrepancies between history and storytelling by stating that
“Irving’s America (…) was a nation which saw itself, fresh and innocent, as emancipated from
history’ (137). Extracting themselves from history, then, the town of Sleepy Hollow was
presented with the task of constructing their own (cultural) history. Through ghost stories this
goal is reached by not only creating a historical backdrop – i.e. the origin of the specters – but
also, and more specifically, the practice of telling ghost stories creates the illusion of an ancient
history, thereby forging a very long existence through made up hauntings.
Crane listens to the stories with pleasurable fear and even adds to them with Cotton
Mather’s history of New-England Witchcraft. This book feeds Crane’s already overactive
imagination and is what will eventually lead to his downfall. The town of Sleepy Hollow adds to
his superstitious beliefs and makes it so that Crane no longer perceives reality as such. One of
the most famous passages in the story, when Crane reaches the Van Tassel farm and sees a feast
instead of the cattle present, highlights this perfectly as the perception of reality is distorted in
order for it to pertain to Crane’s expectations and longings:
The pedagogue’s mouth watered, as he looked upon this sumptuous promise of
luxurious winter fare. In his devouring mind’s eye, he pictured to himself every
roasting-pig running about with a pudding in his belly, and an apple in his
mouth; the pigeons were snugly put to bed in a comfortable pie, and tucked in
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with a coverlet of crust; the geese were swimming in their own gravy; and the
ducks pairing cosily in dishes, like snug married couples, with a decent
competency of onion sauce. In the porkers he saw carved out the future sleek
side of bacon, and juicy relishing ham; not a turkey but he beheld daintily
trussed up, with its gizzard under its wing, and, peradventure, a necklace of
savory sausages; and even bright chanticleer himself lay sprawling on his back,
in a side-dish, with uplifted claws, as if craving that quarter which his
chivalrous spirit disdained to ask while living. (10)
It is Crane’s as well as the town’s inability and unwillingness to apply critical thinking which
makes the tale uncanny. There is no real history or familiarity to be estranged from, but the
creation of a present haunting suggests a past void from said haunting and consequently turns
the present situation uncanny. The refusal of applying reason and holding on to the selfconstructed history is made strikingly clear when, at the end of the story, the town suspects
Bones to know more about Crane’s disappearance, but still holds on to the explanation that
Crane was carried away by the Headless Hessian. The road was even altered so that one did not
have to pass the place where Ichabod’s hat and a mysterious pumpkin were found, for the town
was now absolutely positive that that stretch of road was haunted (see Irving 30).
When presented with intellectual uncertainty, it is at this point clear that the town
refuses to apply reason – even though a reasonable explanation is presented – and holds on to
the self-constructed history as a way of holding on to the town’s identity. Crane, on the other
hand, seems unable to apply reason. His problem is one of capability; his imaginative power is so
great that it simply leaves no room for reason. Crane residing in Sleepy Hollow, then, the place
where even strangers fall victim to a state of continuous reverie, where they “begin to grow
imaginative – to dream dreams and see apparitions” (3) only strengthens his imaginative
capacity and turns it into his biggest weakness. This holding on to a fictional self is ultimately
what makes it impossible to engage in self-reflection because the historical background of the
town and its inhabitants is uncertain and mostly made up.
Concerning the fearful awe one is supposed to feel when experiencing the sublime, this is
exactly what Ichabod feels concerning witchcraft and ghost stories. Though he is clearly
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presented as a gullible fool, no doubt is possible that he feels respect for all that has to do with
witchcraft. The pure fear he feels in the dark forest is merely an intensification of the fearful awe
he feels for witchcraft, brought about by the ghost stories that feed his imagination. An attempt
at constructing a history is in this case precisely what strips the town from its history and
thereby leaves no past or present self to reflect upon. The aforementioned emancipation from
history created a need for a new history, which could only be constructed through imaginative
endeavors on account of the fact that it is evermore a construction. Ultimately, it is the
imaginative power of the townsfolk and Ichabod Crane that makes sublimity impossible and
facilitates the uncanny – creates it out of thin air, even – that pervades throughout the story.
II • A Deadly Sin
Even though Crane is quite a lank fellow, the reader is often confronted with the protagonist’s
insatiable hunger. His capacity for “feeding” (5) is enormous, and, as the previously mentioned
scene of the pictured feast on Van Tassel’s property shows, Crane’s hunger is only trumped by
his capacity for imagining various consumptions. It is this imaginative capacity combined with
Ichabod’s “capacious swallow” (7) that leaves us with a gullibility that is fed by this gluttony:
In a manifold sense [Ichabod] yearns to swallow the world and thereby realize
an oral heaven. By fitting the notion of gullibility into the dominant metaphor of
Ichabod’s oral preoccupation, Irving emphasizes the childlike quality of his
protagonist Ichabod can swallow anything; therefore he is always and
increasingly gullible. (Martin 143)
As this quote aptly points out, Ichabod’s capability for swallowing everything does not merely
apply to good. The gullibility mentioned in the first segment is another symptom of this
insatiable hunger – With Crane being a “huge feeder” (5), the fact that he does not seem to gain
weight signifies the value of his consumptions; he feeds on the imaginative and thereby merely
swallows hot air:
He was, in fact, an odd mixture of small shrewdness and simple credulity. His
appetite for the marvelous, and his powers of digesting it, were equally
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extraordinary; and both had been increased by his residence in this spellbound
region. No tale was too gross or monstrous for his capacious swallow. (7)
Crane is so thin because his gluttony is an extension of his overactive imagination and therefore
does not really provide him with anything nutritious, anything of substance. In a sense, Crane’s
disappearance from Sleepy Hollow – which makes the town think he is dead – is a death by
starvation. Being as gluttonous as Crane is, but feeding merely on air, leaves his body weak and
much more prone to elements from the outside. When Bones tells thr story about him racing the
Hessian, then, it is the final empty spoon that brings Crane to his downfall. It proves impossible
for him to continue to feed off his imagination anymore, because Bones’ “groundwork”, so to
speak – strengthening Crane’s belief in the Hessian – breaks with Crane’s illusions and exposes
them for what they are. Disillusioned, our protagonist leaves Sleepy Hollow with his tail between
his legs.
The fact that Crane’s ‘capacious swallow’ is unable to actually feed him shows how
invaluable the things he holds on to really are. He is unable to see the true and important things
in life because his imagination gives the illusion of fulfillment. It is because he feels fearful awe
for an object of illusion that the uncanny overrides the sublime. Crane is unable to detect the
hollowness he is creating because he is incapable of critical thinking. The further undermining of
this capacity by his gluttonous character turns the possibility of a sublime experience into a
hollow objective. Hollow because the fearful awe with which Crane regards the supernatural and
witchcraft is based upon lies. His inability for critical thinking is thereby not what directly
shatters his sublime experience, it is the fact that he is able to “firmly and most potently” (7)
believe something everyone around him knows is bogus that predicts his downfall and shatters
his chances of enrichment.
III • A Pleasurable Fear
It is the fact that Crane only feels fearful awe with regards to witchcraft, which makes it
impossible for him to have a sublime experience and which makes the uncanny pervade
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throughout the story. The application of an overactive imagination is what lies at the heart of
this. In Critique of the Power of Judgment, Immanuel Kant says that “it is impossible to find
satisfaction in a terror that is seriously intended” (438). Crane contradicts this, however, by
feeling pleasure in the fear he arouses in himself which is based upon the ghost stories he so
firmly believes in. Believing in witchcraft and the ghost stories his imagination is fed with, Crane
should not feel pleasure in knowing the dangers that lurk around him. Somehow he is possible of
separating the stories he hears from their appointed backdrop in Sleepy Hollow and thereby
finds pleasure in listening to the frightful stories, in the way in which he startles when
something exciting and scary happens.
As soon as Crane finds himself at a place in which one of the ghost stories was said to
have happened, however, all he seems to feel is actual fear, pleasure is now out of the question.
The pure terror is thereby connected to the ghost story only when its existence and truthfulness
is anchored in a specific place. What Crane fears is the potential threat that the very soil on
which something was said to have happened presents. It is therefore because this potential is
made increasingly probable that fear really strikes. Again, Ichabod Crane appears to be close to
sublimity by tying an ungraspable occurrence to the idea of a potential threat – as is the case in
the dynamically sublime –, however, his failure of applying reason and the fact that he almost
becomes possessed by fear (the very fear he digests through the consumption of the ghost
stories) makes his story inevitably uncanny.
As mentioned earlier, Bones is the only character in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” that
applies reason, and it is because of this fact that he is also fearless. His judgment is not clouded
by an (over)active imagination and thereby he is able to distance himself from the ghost stories
and acknowledge that they are simply made up and therefore pose no threat. It is because of this
faculty of critical thinking that Bones falls outside of the uncanniness that is Sleepy Hollow, only
to embody it in the end in order to get what he wants: Katrina van Tassel. The state of reverie
that is ascribed to every inhabitant of Sleepy Hollow is not applicable to him, he is the only one
who is awake.
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Is it so, then, that Bones’ capacity for applying reason facilitates the possibility of a
sublime experience? No, this does not seem to be the case. Bones’ reason, for all its merits, is one
void of respect. His apparent inability to feel fear takes away the possibility of a feeling of fearful
awe which would require the application of his critical thinking. The perfect subject for the
sublime, then, would encompass Crane’s superstition and Bones’ reason. I say superstition
because it is in witchcraft and ghost stories that Crane feels a sensation of fearful awe. The
connection between those things is what lays the groundwork for the sublime experience. The
transference of that sensation to natural occurrences would, therefore, indeed facilitate a
sublime experience if it was combined with critical thinking. Crane, however, is unable to
complete the experience by virtue of his actual fear of ghosts being too deep to allow him to
reflect upon what this means for his position in the world.
IV • Concluding
The imaginative endeavor is what undermines the sublime experience as well as what facilitates
the uncanny. In a way Sleepy Hollow is, because of its rejection of formal history, a blank canvas.
The townsfolk are the ones who make the ground a haunted place. The constant state of reverie
in which the townsfolk are said to walk, then, is merely an extension of the tradition of ghost
stories that the town lives by.
For the overly imaginative outsider, this is a fatal characteristic of the town. It is not the
town of Sleepy Hollow that enchants Ichabod Crane, it is the stories of the townsfolk that
brainwash him until he, at last, sees how foolish he has been and decides to leave the place.
Ironically enough, his leaving is what sparks the ghost stories even more and even causes the
town to change a road so that it did not go by the bridge on which Crane disappeared and which
had “more than ever [become] an object of superstitious awe” (30). In the end Crane has become
one of his favorite ghost stories and embodies what the town was after all along: he is the first
real legend of Sleepy Hollow.
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In terms of the uncanny and the sublime, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is very
interesting because all the criteria – fearful awe, reason, uncertainty and the (super)natural – of
the sublime can be found in the story. The barrier that stands between Crane and his sublime
experience is the fact that he does not apply reason and therefore is not able to bring his
sensation of fearful awe to the next level. Bones’ application of reason, however, is nothing
without the respect that Crane is able to feel. The fact that both are unable to reach sublimity is
what keeps the uncanny intact. It is because the uncanny misses a sense of sobriety that it can
never transfer into the sublime. Consequently, it is so that this sobriety needs to be tempered by
the kind of fearful awe that causes self-reflection to take place. When speaking of a third space
between the sublime and the uncanny, then, I am talking about the area between gullibility and
sobriety, between fear and respect where the uncanny as well as the sublime remain a
potentiality. In “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” this third space is found in the combination of
Crane and Bones because they stand on opposite sides of the same legend. Unfortunately, in the
end, Bones shatters the last hope for sublimity by assuming the identity of the Hessian and
thereby turning himself into an uncanny occurrence. He has applied the main criteria (the
application of reason and critical thinking) of the sublime to his own favor but, in doing so,
distanced himself from the experience by using his critical ability to fuel the air of uncanniness
with which Sleepy Hollow is filled. Inhabiting the constructed uncanniness of the town, then,
Bones turns into the fiction he attempts to rebel against – but only as long as it serves his own
selfish purposes. This is an important fact which shows that both theories can be applicable to
the same situation, but that the intention which lies behind it is able to covert the experience
into something altogether different: even though all the criteria for the sublime are present,
sublimity is never reached by any of the characters because their intentions and character traits
go against the path of sublimity. Interchangeability within our two theories, then, is a possibility
which has proven to be mainly fueled by the moral and intellectual compasses of the ones
working towards either an uncanny or a sublime experience.
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4 | “A MORBID ACUTENESS OF THE SENSES”
EDGAR ALLEN POE’S ‘THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER’
The last story subjected to analysis is Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”. The
relevance of this short story lies in the fact that it works toward a dynamically sublime moment
that is influenced by the atmosphere in the house and the intentions of its master, Roderick
Usher. This because Roderick seems to know that inviting the narrator will provide him with a
countering force that might restore the balance in the house. He is always aware of the fact that
his end is near, but with the arrival of his old friend he seems hopeful – deliberately instilling
hope even – that he might be saved after all, that the House of Usher will not fall with him. The
narrator, however, proves unable to provide the resistance needed to break the curse and the
ensuing storm is determinative for the tragic events that end the story and make the reader a
witness to the fall of the House of Usher.
The story deals with Roderick Usher who, because of an old curse laid on his family, is ill
and is quickly nearing his end. Along with his sister he inhabits the House of Usher as the last
remaining members of the family. In order to relieve his malady, Roderick Usher invites an old
friend of his to come and keep him company in the house. The nameless narrator accepts the
invitation and reaches the House of Usher just a few days before Madeline, Roderick’s sister,
passes away. Fulfilling the last Usher’s wishes, the narrator helps Roderick to entomb his sister
inside of the house. The following days Roderick appears to be haunted, talking to himself and
staring out into the distance for hours at time. The narrator tries to relieve his spirits by reading
with him and keeping his old friend company as much as he can. In the end it is revealed that
Madeline was accidentally buried alive and that Roderick, having figured this fact out earlier,
had been struggling with the guilt ever since. Eventually Madeline enters the chamber in which
Roderick and the narrator have taken shelter from a storm which overhangs the house, and
collapses on top of Roderick. Dead ensues for both. The narrator, filled with horror, flees the
chamber and is able to get out of the house right before it collapses and swallows its last
inhabitants.
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I • A Reasonable Companion
As soon as the narrator sets foot on the property, the narrator proves to be a man of reason, for,
when feeling an “utter depression of the soul” (46) upon laying eyes on the house and its
surroundings, he explains away this feeling by attributing it to the inapt “arrangement of the
particulars of the scene” (46). This highly rational way of dealing with a matter of sensibility
immediately tells the reader that one is dealing with a man of reason, but also shows how the
narrator is someone who avoids the incomprehensible, and by virtue of that habit refuses to
sufficiently acknowledge it. This fact is highly important for the rest of this segment because, for
one, it poses the question of the consequences of that refusal.
The importance of reason with regards to the sublime is that it is the faculty that is able
to practice dominion over sensibility and turns the immeasurable and fearful into the sublime
(see Kant 435). This means that the embodiment of reason presented by the narrator has to be
more powerful than the sensibility of Roderick Usher in order to prevent a tragic ending. But is
it? If the narrator is the embodiment of reason, Roderick Usher is that of the sensible – the
supersensible even. This is made strikingly clear by the fact that his malady is partly
characterized by a “morbid acuteness of the senses” (51). This antithesis posed by the two
gentlemen would have it so, then, that Roderick, by virtue of his sensible state, is evermore
unreasonable. It is Roderick, however, who is able to see what is in front of him and name it as
such. When, at the end, he panics and starts yelling “Madman!” (64), he even proves to be the
sanest of the two. His heightened senses make him the one who is able to perceive everything in
and around the house and therefore make him the one who knows the truth.
When it comes to reason, the ultimate goal is to get to the truth and decipher it by seeing
through the veils thrown up by external influences. What we see in “The Fall of the House of
Usher” is that it is in the successful perception of those so-called veils – meaning everything the
narrator characterizes as superstition or a dream – that the explanation of the mysterious
atmosphere that hangs around the house lies. The house is merely an extension of Usher’s
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psyche and, as such, is the home of Usher’s own haunting. This also means, however, that Usher
is the only one who is actually able to perceive them. This is not to say that nothing peculiar
happens in the house, it simply points to the fact that the peculiarities are more so a
manifestation of Usher’s illness and therefore are less perceptible to the narrator.
The physical changes in Roderick, the excessiveness present in his emotional state and
the acuteness of senses, point into the direction of a highly uncanny transformation, of the
occurrence of a monstrosity – a vampire, is the common consensus (“To observe how and what
he refined, I propose that we examine whether the phenomena of "Usher" are explained by items
common in the lore and literature of vampire.” Bailey 449). By virtue of this change, then,
Roderick should be perceived as threatening, but even when he roams the halls during the storm
and his appearance fills the narrator with dread, the reasonable friend does not flee but
welcomes his ghastly companion:
His countenance was, as usual, cadaverously wan – but, moreover, there was a
species of mad hilarity in his eyes – an evidently restrained hysteria in his
whole demeanor. His air appalled me – but anything was preferable to the
solitude which I had so long endured, and I even welcomed his presence as a
relief.” (60)
The narrator even acknowledges at the very start of the story that he does not recognize his
friend (“Surely man had never before so terribly altered, in so brief a period, as had Roderick
Usher! It was with difficulty that I could bring myself to admit the identity of the wan being
before me with the companion of my early boyhood.” 50), but fails to add to these physical
changes the illness Usher is said to suffer from. The fact that the narrator, however, seems
unable – or rather, unwilling – to perceive those changes and to be ever aware of the
atmosphere of the house, is what saves him in the end. Allowing all the unfamiliarities and
sensibilities to have an effect upon him, then, would have robbed him from his reason by virtue
of the present monstrous state of Usher and eventually would have led to his downfall because
monsters, in addition to being physically threatening, are cognitively threatening (see Beville
67). The narrator survives but fails to fulfill his purpose as he is unable to stand his ground
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against the destructive and all-encompassing sensibility that possesses not only Roderick Usher,
but also the house.
The narrator believes that the incessant denial of anything, in this case the unreasonable,
has absolute reason as a result: “I have said that the sole effect of my somewhat childish
experiment, that of looking down within the tarn, had been to deepen the first singular
impression. There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase of my
superstition – for why should I not so term it? – served mainly to accelerate the increase itself.”
(48). This seems to be the goal of Usher, who keeps his newly found companion around but does
not seem to force upon him the things he himself hears and sees. Instead, he processes his
demons through art and produces, most remarkably, a painting of a vault and a lengthy poem
about a haunted house (54-56). These works of art, however, should have shaken the narrator
awake, just as the “faint flush upon the bosom and the face” (58) should have made him question
the livelihood of Madeline Usher. The narrator’s reason is therefore one of compliance. Reason is
not used as way of making sense of events, but as a way of denying the morbid truths behind
them. The narrator’s practice, then, is not the application of reason, it is wishing for a reasonable
explanation that has the power to eliminate the horrible. It is also therefore that when Madeline
breaks free from her entombment and it becomes clear that that particular event is paired with
the story of Ethelred (see Poe 62), the narrator does not stop his reading but continues after a
pause and in doing so summons Madeline to the door. It is a form of denial grounded in
oppressed fear that has the narrator wandering around the house without once fearing for his
life even though almost all signs point into the direction of fatality.
II • A Supersensible Faculty
Roderick is very much aware of the fact that he is under influence of what is called the
atmosphere of the house. He also knows, however, that his old friend is a man of reason. It is
therefore that, when explaining his illness, he hastily adds that it “will undoubtedly soon pass
off” (51), fully aware of the fact that his newfound companion is the antithesis to himself and
everything he and the house stand for. Strikingly so, on the very same page, Roderick is
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momentarily filled with despair when realizing that his condition will be the end of him: “’I shall
perish,’ said he, I must perish in this deplorable folly. Thus, thus, and not otherwise, I shall be
lost.” (51). Throughout the story, however, he is unable to persuade the narrator of that fact. It is
even so that the narrator does not speak about his own expectations regarding the life of his old
friend. This failure in persuasion is a great advantage for Usher and it is therefore highly likely
that he deliberately tries to keep his friend on the opposite side of the matter, thereby ensuring a
counterbalance to his own state of body and mind.
The role of the senses in the sublime is that it detects the immeasurability and forms a
sensory reaction based upon that perception. With Usher it is so, then, that his heightened
sensibility perceives not only what is immeasurable, it perceives everything. This causes his
eventual hysteria because he has no means of processing the sensatory prompts the house
throws at him. He tries to make sense of them by losing himself in art and literature, but by the
very contents of his library he feeds his sensibility even more, up to the point where he is no
more than a sum of his perceptions. I say a sum of his perceptions, because in the days prior to
his death he is often found wondering through the halls of staring blankly into nothing (“(…)for I
beheld [Roderick] gazing upon vacancy for long hours, in an attitude of the profoundest
attention, as if listening to some imaginary sound.” 59) . He has become fully enveloped by the
external stimuli of the house.
It is this acuteness of the senses that makes Usher that he has buried his own sister alive.
This goes to show that a heightened sense of perception does not simply make one “see things”
but is also able to make them see the truth. Usher’s deteriorating state may not have saved him
from death, but did make him see the truth before it was presented to him. It is this power of
sensibility that is able to trump the reasonable in “The Fall of the House of Usher” because of
Usher’s profound belief in his own newfound capacities. The narrator’s reason is simply based
upon the unwillingness to subject oneself to the superstitious and the supernatural and thereby
is not a reason firmly grounded in the person, it is a coping mechanism which suffices to save
him in the end, but is not enough to also save the last of the Ushers.
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III • A Last Resort
Roderick’s state of mind is made worse by his trying to break the Usher curse. Through reading
about the supernatural and superstitious, he tries to resist his own death and thereby the
ceasing of his blood line:
“We pored together over such Works as the Ververt and Chartreuse of Gresset;
the Belphlegor of Machiavelli; the Heaven and Hell of Swenborg; the
Subterranean Voyage of Nicholas Klimm by Holberg; the Chiromancy of Robert
Flud, of Jean D’Ingaginé, and of De la Chambre; the Journey into the Blue
Distance of Tieck; and the City of the Sun of Campanella. One favorite volume
was a small octavo edition of the Directorium Inquisitorium by the Dominican
Eymeric de Gironne; and there were passages in Pompinus Mela, about the old
African Satyrs and Egyptians, over which Usher would sit dreaming for hours.
(57)
Usher, however, does not find an answer in the superstitious and therefore resorts to the
reasonable which is found in his old nameless friend. The narrator is his last resort because he
falls outside of the world of the supernatural which forebodes his death – the narrator is the only
thing in the house that does not bear the possibility of Roderick’s destruction.
It is this crippling – for his state deteriorates throughout the story – fear that causes
Usher to accidentally bury his sister alive:
And it is this fear that makes him see, in the figure immobilized by catalepsy, his
sister dead – whom he then buries with hysterical haste. ‘Is she not hurrying to
upbraid me for my haste?’ he says when he hears her come back from the vault;
fear has made him both anticipate and precipitate her death. (Spitzer 355)
The burial of Madeline is what causes Usher’s death; he is crushed by her body and is scared to
death because his premonition came true. Fear is thereby the agency that propels the story
forward, as mentioned earlier (“There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid
increase of my superstition – for why should I not so term it? – served mainly to accelerate the
increase itself. Such, I have long known, is the paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as
a basis.” 48). The increase of reason that saves the narrator is thereby mirrored in the increase
of fear that kills Roderick Usher. The sight of his sister – when having known for days that she
40
was still alive – could not have had the power to kill Roderick. It was through the everaugmenting fear he felt after her entombment that Roderick is eventually scared to death.
Usher’s death is, therefore, a psychological process which eventually amounts to a physical
shutdown – i.e. death.
In addition, fear in “The Fall of the House of Usher” is void of awe. While the narrator
oftentimes tells the reader that he perceived something with awe, fear is never part of the
equation. We had already established that the narrator oppresses fear by reason, and it is
because of this that he is also unable to feel fearful awe. The importance of fear in the story,
however, remains, even though it is not directly linked to the kind of fearful awe that facilitates a
sublime experience but pertains more to the idea of psychological fear which is found in the
uncanny.
The frail balance between the sensible and the reasonable is one of the main themes of the story
and highlights the fact that the storm that appears at the end envelops the Ushers and causes the
house to crumble down because this balance is off. It is off because the narrator is not purely
reasonable, he seems to reason out of an oppressed fear and is thereby able to preserve only
himself. It is by virtue of this fact that he is able to look into the storm and not be enveloped by it,
while he does feel that the storm would have negative consequences for his friend because of the
singularity in its terror and beauty (see Poe 60). This terror and beauty are the components
which turn the storm into a potential lethal occurrence, but only for the one whose judgment is
clouded and whose reason is not able to create a distance between the subject and the
occurrence.
In the end the storm forebodes Roderick – and Madeline’s – death by being an
accumulation of the atmosphere that hangs around the house. An atmosphere that finds its equal
in the stubbornly reasonable narrator who acknowledges its danger while assuming himself safe
in the House of Usher and in doing so distances himself from the event. He escapes because he is
41
unattached enough to see through the veil of superstition with which Usher regards the storm,
but is sensible enough to connect its occurrence to the destruction of the Ushers.
IV • Concluding
The elements highlighted in this chapter – reason, sensibility and fear – all amount to the storm
that in the end predicts the downfall of the House of Usher. The storm symbolizes the effects of
the atmosphere in the house. A whirlwind of emotions and sensibilities causes Roderick Usher to
cling to a sense of fear which facilitates his self-predicted death and it is this prediction that is
made almost-tangible in the appearance of the storm. As a storm on itself it does not amount to
much. Taking into consideration, however, the fact that there is a clear lack of balance in the
house which turns it into an uncanny not-yet-haunted house, and that the bringing in of a
counterbalance does not seem to soothe the last one of the Ushers, the storm is able to show
how an instability in the mind is able to inhabit a living space and eventually facilitate the
destruction of the space as well as the people inhabiting it.
The narrator does not fall victim to the atmosphere of the house because he is unable to
connect the so-called superstitions he encounters to any ideas of the supernatural he himself
has. Because he is void of knowledge, perception and opinion of this matter, it is not able to
manifest itself in him; he escapes. Usher, however, feeds his own insanity and seals his own fate
by being enveloped by his fear and from that point on acting only upon that.
Within the discussion of the uncanny and the sublime, The Fall of The House of Usher
shows how sublimity relies on a frail balance, while the uncanny relies on the distortion of that
same balance. As the other two analyses have shown, the line between the uncanny and the
sublime is a thin one and a fine balance has to be kept in order to let the one not flow into the
other. Sigmund Freud claims in “The Uncanny” that “(…)comprehensive treatises on aesthetics,
(…)in general prefer to concern themselves with what is beautiful, attractive and sublime – that
is, with feelings of a positive nature” (219, emphasis mine). Focusing here on the fact that the
sublime is named as an experience dealing with feelings of a positive nature, I have to disagree
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with Freud and say that it is not the positive or negative outcome of the experience that
determines whether an experience is sublime or uncanny, it is the road towards the experience
and the way in which the balance shifts during that journey which determines if an experience is
to be sublime or uncanny. In regards to the case of Usher, sublimity was always an option as long
as an attempt was done at restoring the balance. Had the balance been restored, then the storm
would have appeared not as an enveloping power, but as a potential threat that could have been
warded off by, indeed, asserting one’s independence. The dangerous shifting of the balance
between the reasonable and the sensible – which eventually rapidly shifted to the sensible
because of the fear Roderick Usher acted upon – is what fulfills the potentiality and turns the
storm into a real threat with fatal consequences: the House of Usher falls.
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44
CONCLUSION
In the way in which they deal with their uncanny reality, the protagonists in the three stories are
able to show the importance of perception, identity and faith for the outcome of the reflective
process. Taking the sublime and the uncanny together, one ends up with a theory of reflection in
which aesthetics and reason collide and may even converge. They are not, however,
interchangeable. Both theories depend on the same factors for their experiences to arise and
thereby both exist as potential reflective mechanisms which rely on a certain mental state of the
subject. As the analyses have shown, at the heart of the protagonists’ reflective incapability lies
the fact that none of them are grounded in reality as such. Goodman Brown, for example,
perceives the world to be filled with sinners because his ancestry and the foundation of his
religion are based on the sinfulness of mankind. In a sense, then, for Brown there is no truth left
because it resided with a religion which unhinged his identity by tying his ancestry to the
biblical original sin. In addition, the devil reveals that even Brown’s closer ancestors (his father
and grandfather) are not the pious men he thought them to be. That Brown’s idea of self is
closely tied to faith and truthfulness makes it so that the unhinging of his identity did not only
mean that he was too unstable to reflect upon his position in the world – which would have been
done through religion – but also, and even more so, Brown is now unable to reflect upon his own
self by virtue of the fact that he has no real (grounded) self to reflect upon. His reflection is
limited to the external and it is because of this that his reflection can only be uncanny – moves
closer towards the uncanny even. Brown is only able to reflect upon the world and without
placing himself in it, he will not be able to gain real truth. It is therefore that when he leaves the
forest, Brown is lost.
Crane, on the other hand, is very aware of his own identity and of his position in the
world. He firmly believes in witchcraft and his imaginative capacity has it so that he is thereby
able to construct a world order in which the supernatural stands above him and, therefore,
should be regarded with fear – fear he feels pleasure in, sure, but only as long as he does not
have to be confronted with the presumed truthfulness of the ghost stories accounting for that
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fear. As soon as Crane reaches a place in which a supernatural event is said to have occurred, he
is overcome by fear. That he is firmly grounded in his identity, then, means nothing. It means
nothing because his identity is grounded in illusions fed by his own as well as the town of Sleepy
Hollow’s (Bones’ in particular) stories. Crane’s distorted perception is unable to ground him in
reality and thereby in the end it is revealed that his identity was based upon lies. Self-reflection
is in this case impossible because Crane’s stability and mental capacity are insufficient for
reaching a sublime conclusion. Therefore, he is forever trapped in an uncanny experience of his
own making.
The narrator in “The Fall of the House of Usher” refuses to adequately acknowledge what
is in front of him. In this case it is not so much a situation in which lies are projected upon truth,
as we saw with our two other protagonists, but of a denial of the truthfulness of out of the
ordinary events. The narrator’s is not a quest for truth but a practice of self-preservation that
solidifies into a denial of the abnormal. In addition to this, very little is known of him and what
the reader gets is a figure who is constantly in denial and through that denial never reaches the
inner self. The narrator’s attempts at warding off the outside have merely turned him into a
shield against “superstitions” and a stranger to his own identity.
Goodman Brown, Ichabod Crane and the narrator of “The Fall of the House of Usher”
show, then, how self-reflection can only be successfully carried out within a context of certainty
– not absolute certainty, for that is impossible, but at least the certainty that one is grounded in
one’s identity and that the world is as it presents itself. The rationalization of the human position
in the world can therefore only be carried out with a strong sense of self and within a context in
which the truth is accepted upon its own merits, no matter what its claims and forms are.
The connection between the sublime, the uncanny, reason, critical thinking and one’s
position in the world, is a helpful and crucial one because it dissects the processes of the sublime
and the uncanny by discussing their parts (reason, critical thinking and one’s position in the
world) and their workings. This interplay in particular was very helpful in finding out what
exactly constituted the gap in the application of reason and critical thinking which thwarted the
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reflection on one’s position in the world – a reflective process none of the protagonists is able to
go through. If one is firmly grounded in one’s identity and perceives and accepts the world as is,
sublimity will arise as the experience which aids in pinpointing the human position in the world.
Vice versa, a subject with an uncertain identity and with the urge to project upon the world what
he or she wishes to see or is afraid of encountering (in the case of Ichabod Crane), the uncanny
arises and destroys the possibility of self-reflection by making the ever-changing globe the focal
point. Within this “worldly” reflection, the own position is not so much debated as it is
established. With the uncanny, identity has to be constructed in order to weather the
uncertainties thrown at the subject. One could even go as far as to argue that the uncanny has
the potential for being an effective device in constructing the identity needed in order to move
away from questioning the universe and focusing on the own significance within that universe.
Sublimity could very well be an unknown goal in the search for a self which is facilitated by the
identity crisis one encounters in the uncanny. The uncanny thereby unhinges in order to prompt
the subject to face reality and acknowledge their true identity.
Claiming that the uncanny is negative aesthetics is a grave mistake. The uncanny is not
negative and destructive as much as it is constructive and opens up the possibility for selfreflection. In doing so it does not only become a mechanism that estranges the subject from the
world, it becomes that which brings the subject closer to him or herself by allowing the gradual
transition from the uncanny to the sublime. Referring back to Freud’s statement that the sublime
is a form of positive aesthetics while the uncanny is the negative form (see Freud 219), it must
be pointed out that the outcome of the negative experience characterized as the uncanny, has a
strong potential for positivity by questioning the foundations of identity and thereby laying the
groundwork for determining one’s position in the world.
I sought out to investigate if the uncanny and the sublime were somehow able to converge into
an aesthetics of reasonable sensitivity, a kind of intellectual feeling. What this research has
shown is that, even though the uncanny and the sublime are not two sides of the same coin, both
47
experiences are able to complement each other and thereby turn into a gradual understanding
and positioning of mankind in the world. It is true that none of the protagonists were able to
reach sublimity, but in dissecting the mental processes they go through within the uncanny
experience, one was able to pinpoint which decisions and character traits thwarted the sublime
experience and made the uncanny the victor. Gothic stories were deliberately chosen as the
focus of this research because the uncanny is inherent to these stories. By looking precisely at
this “first stage” in a reflective process which can eventually lead to sublimity through the
solving of uncanny mysteries, a development in the reflective process was made apparent. What
was therefore shown is not that the sublime fails in all cases, but that the characters fail in
breaking free from their uncanny reflective processes.
Separate, the sublime and the uncanny are able to instill only fear – whether it is paired
with awe or not –, combined one sees that the theories facilitate the firm grounding of individual
identity in a natural, uncontrollable environment. Combined, the sublime and the uncanny
(which are triggered by a sense of uncertainty, nonetheless!) are able to offer certainty.
Certainty with regards to identity, certainty with regards to the incomprehensibility of the
natural (i.e. acknowledging and accepting that incomprehensibility) and certainty with regards
to the human place within that natural order. Even within the uncanny, then, self-reflection is a
possibility.
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