Emily Lloyd-Jones
Eng 254
Dr. Hughes
Paper
The Rebellious Romantic Children: Hawthorne and Poe’s Misanthropy
In the 1800s, a group of artists called the transcendentalists swelled. This group
included writers such as Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, people who were
firmly convinced of humanity’s innate goodness. These optimistic writers were
determined to return to nature, to give up ideas such as wealth and material possessions.
But just like every family has a rebellious child, so did the romantic era. Several writers
scoffed at the romantic optimism and delved into the darkness of the human mind. Edgar
Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne gave the genre new life by removing cheap thrills.
By cutting out the supernatural component of the gothic, their stories were scarier. The
monstrous deeds of the characters could not be blamed on ghosts or curses — instead,
they had to face the fact that humanity as a whole was capable of committing great
crimes.
Known as the first of the gothic genre, The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Novel
was written by Horace Walpole. Interestingly enough, Walpole’s intentions by calling
his novel gothic was to indicate that it was medieval. Instead, the term ‘gothic’ went on
to mean fiction that dealt with certain themes brought up in that first novel.
The Castle of Otranto includes many of the motifs that were to
became staples of the genre it founds: the castle, subterranean vaults, the
supernatural, the persecuted heroine, the villainous father, […] forbidden
passion; the oedipal rivalry between father and son; the uncanny return of
the past in the present; the rupture of the everyday by acts of violence, and
the subsequent revelation of what has been hidden or repressed; the tomb
as a liminal space between life and death or between rational and
irrational/demonic aspects of the psyche (Otto).
If the romantic movement sought out the best traits of humanity, gothic picked the
worst. Among those included were guilt, transgression and violence. But by Victorian
times, gothic literature had deteriorated over the years into cheap ‘penny dreadfuls’—
guilty and mindless pleasure. Poe and Hawthorne gave the genre new life by removing
the overstated elements, such as vampires, haunted castles and other cheap thrills,
replacing them with a deep look at the human psyche. They removed the obvious scares
and replaced them with greater, more real ones: humanity’s capability for violence,
religion’s power, and society as a whole. “The conflicted positions of central Gothic
characters can reveal them as haunted by a second ‘unconscious’ of deep-seated social
and historical dilemmas […] that become more fearsome the more characters and readers
attempt to cover them up or reconcile them symbolically without resolving them
fundamentally” (Hogle).
Out of all the gothic writers, Nathanial Hawthorne was one of the most
knowledgeable when it came to guilt. He was heavily affected by his ancestor’s
puritanical views and tried to come to grips with his own family’s history through his
writing. Young Goodman Brown is one prime example: a puritan man is faced with the
supernatural and temptation, and although he survives, he remains scarred by the
experience.
Hawthorne also delved into society’s weaknesses, mulling over taboos and the
reason they were put into place. Although his most famous example was The Scarlet
Letter, he also examined them in The Minister’s Black Veil. Both stories feature main
characters that are cast out of society and how they deal with the rejection. Neither story
features the typical supernatural element of most gothic literature, but that fact makes it
more frightening. Hawthorne reveals how scary the way humans treat each other can be.
Poe revolutionized gothic literature by making it accessible to the growing middle
class. Only The Fall of the House of Usher and The Masque of the Red Death were set in
castles, and even those demonstrated the collapse of the aristocracy. His obvious distaste
for old family wealth might have stemmed from the fact that he was the first American
writer to try and make a living solely off his work. Needless to say, he remained poor his
entire life. Like Hawthorne, a lot of his work dealt with guilt. Poe examined the extent
to which humanity would go to hurt one another. In one of his stories, a man walls up his
partying ‘friend’ in a wine cellar. The protagonist carefully plans the murder and goes
through with it all in the name of revenge for a supposed insult. Both Young Goodman
Brown and the Tell-tale Heart used the very gothic theme of the unreliable narrator.
Since the narrator is human, the fact that the audience cannot trust them adds yet another
level to the sinister atmosphere. Both Hawthorne and Poe realized that mistrusting one’s
own race can be a scary thing, so they eagerly tapped into that subject.
There were differences between Hawthorne and Poe. Hawthorne used the puritan
colonies as the setting for most of his stories, forcing his readers to have certain
knowledge of the time period. Poe’s stories drifted across continents, free from the
restrictions of a certain setting. He wrote about different societal problems, too. Poe
condemned everything from the ruling class that ran away from a plague, to the Spanish
Inquisition that imprisoned and tortured innocents. Hawthorne instead limited himself to
the puritanical colonies, aiming his sharp pen at the damage that religious fervor and the
shunning of those who are different can cause.
Regardless of whomever or whatever was their subject, Hawthorne and Poe
revived gothic literature. They removed the genre from the cheap penny dreadful
publications by cutting out the paranormal. Without some supernatural way to excuse
character’s behavior, readers had to face the fact that humanity was much scarier than
any mythological creature out there. While other writers spent their time trying to find
the goodness in humanity, Hawthorne was off researching exactly what happened at the
Salem Witch Trials, and Poe was wondering what it would feel like to bury someone
alive.
Works Cited
Hogle, Jerrold. The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002.
Otto, Peter. "Gothic Fiction." Adam Matthew Publications. 2007. 18 Mar 2008
<http://www.adam-matthewpublications.co.uk/digital_guides/gothic_fiction/Introduction3.aspx>.