The Dark Romantics: Gothicism 1840-1860

THE DARK ROMANTICS opposed the optimism of the Transcendentalists

Subject Matter The conflict between good and evil

Subject Matter The psychological effects of guilt and sin, madness and derangement in the human psyche

Influence Puritanism—original sin, the innate depravity of human beings, and predestination (elect and damned)

Gothicism Used to describe a scary novel from the Romantic Period

Gothicism Setting— Bleak remote places, often medieval Gothic castle or cathedral with its sliding doors, and subterranean passages (Scooby Doo).

GOTHIC SETTINGS Used to evoke fear Places of sinister or supernatural events

Gothicism Uses death and decay as topics Plots involve macabre or violent events

GOTHIC TRAITS Includes any fiction that creates a haunting atmosphere, strange macabre events, such as live burials, horrifying tortures, mesmerism (hypnotism), and resurrection of human corpses

Gothicism Poe used them as symbolic device—the workings of the human mind.

The Authors Nathaniel Hawthorne Herman Melville Edgar Allan Poe

Additional Thoughts for Analyzing Poe

Europe vs. America Poe depicted Europe and Europeans, especially wealthy or noble Europeans, as decadent, twisted, evil, exhausted, weak, and immoral. Americans–at least those who don’t emulate European models–are fresh, strong, vigorous and new. There are many exceptions to this generalization, but careful readers of Poe should not ignore his role and creating an American identity in literature.

Detective Fiction Poe invented the modern American detective story when he wrote “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Here again, Poe organizes his ideas using an opposition, this time between crime (which is not just immoral but also passionate, illogical, careless) and punishment (which is dispassionate, logical, and scrupulous). - from discussion by Dr. Giroux

Faculty Psychology Views the mind as a collection of separate modules or faculties assigned to various mental tasks. The view is explicit in the psychological writings of the medieval scholastic theologians

Empiricism Is a theory of knowledge that asserts that knowledge comes only or primarily via sensory experience. One of several views of human knowledge, along with rationalism, idealism, and historicism, empiricism emphasizes the role of experience and evidence, especially sensory perception, in the formation of ideas, over the notion of innate ideas or traditions

Grotesque Stories These are the horror stories. They are often bloody and gory. Readers are frightened by the brutality of man.

Arabesque Style These are the tales of terror. They forego the blood and gore of the grotesque and instead focus on the complexities of the human mind. * Poe did not separate his stories into categories, and scholars have struggled to do so