Anne Hviid-Pilgaard Master Thesis 31/05 2012 Table of Contents

Gothic Enlightenment

Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764) is widely regarded as the first Gothic novel, and embodies the Gothic tradition with its medieval setting, old castles, and ruins. The novel’s subtitle emphasises how one of the key elements in the gothic genre is the use of a medieval or Gothic setting and references, such as monasteries, castles, dungeons, etc (Abrams, 2005; 117). The setting creates a contrast to the Enlightenment’s rational worldview, because it represents an era of irrationality where superstitions thrived. This was combined with supernatural and sensational elements, and the Gothic novel is therefore regarded as an embodiment of everything which the Enlightenment wished to move away from. Poe’s Gothic writing is a part of the American Gothic tradition, which differ from the European tradition due to the fact that America is a relatively young country and therefore lacks the medieval buildings which much European literature revolves around. However, the medieval elements are not imperative for a novel to be regarded as Gothic, and ‘a brooding atmosphere of gloom and terror, (…) events that are uncanny or macabre or melodramatically violent, and (…) aberrant psychological states’ (Abrams, 2005; 118) also constitutes what is now referred to as a Gothic tale. Poe excels within this latter form of Gothic fiction, which is seen in his short stories “The Tell-Tale-Heart” (1843) and “The Black Cat” (1843) in which the reader follows the decline of the narrators, both socially and psychologically. As we shall see in my later analysis, these two short stories operate in the land between reality and fantasy, which emphasise their place in the Gothic genre, because they include elements of the supernatural as well as depicting ‘aberrant psychological states’.

Vincent Buranelli, author of Edgar Allan Poe (1977) notes that Poe ‘stepped into the swirling current of the romantic movement’ (Buranelli, 1977; 22) and the fact that many of his works operates within the Gothic genre, should therefore not be thought of as random, but as a conscious decision made by Poe, to use this genre and its poetic devices in order to support his narratives (Buranelli, 1977; 22-34). This argument is backed up by Margaret Alterton in her book Origins of Poe’s Critical Theory (1925) in which she writes, that Poe studied British periodicals such as Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in which articles discussing the Gothic genre and Gothic short stories were printed (Alterton, 1925; 7). Blackwood gave Poe an insight into the genre through the publication of European horror stories, such as E.T.A Hoffmann’s “The Devil’s Elexir” (1815), and whose short story “The Sandman” (1817) will be discussed in the chapter “The Uncanny”, and the articles in Blackwood also provided Poe with inspiration and material for his own works (Buranelli, 1977; 25). Burnanelli writes that because Poe was heavily inspired by the stories and articles in Blackwood he was often accused of plagiarism, however, Poe dismissed this accusation by claiming that he added ‘something fundamental to his borrowings by giving old themes an urgency they could not have had on merely literary grounds – an urgency derived, as we shall see, from his personal history’ (Buranelli, 1977; 25). Buranelli advocates for Bonaparte’s psycho-biographical interpretation of Poe’s works, however, again I believe, that it would be more appropriate to regard Poe’s additions to ‘his borrowings’ as observations he made of society rather than interpreting them as ‘personal history’. We have seen how Poe does this in “Rue Morgue” where he discusses Monboddo’s orang-utan, and later we shall see how he found inspiration in other scientific discourses as well.

Poe’s use of Gothic settings and elements should therefore not be viewed as mere entertainment, but as deliberate poetic devices used to explore and emphasise his observations and attitudes towards society. Because Gothic literature often is played out on the frontier between reality and fantasy, it is easy to discard the genre as pure entertainment, written without any real message or deeper meaning in mind. This attitude is presented by Allan Lloyd-Smith, author of American Gothic Fiction: an Introduction (2004), who avidly stresses the importance of regarding gothic fiction as entertainment.

‘Writers of Gothic aim to entertain – themselves and their audience – rather than covertly instruct. The shadows that we see: of class anxieties, racial conflicts and genocidal guilts, domestic oppressions, the persistence of the past in the present; these are not the reason for the writing, they are “what happens” in the process of writing, the more or less conscious conditions of its being, and sometimes even, perhaps, the effect of the unconsciousness of the writer. There is then, a risk of over-coherent interpretation, as though the Gothic writer set out to express a specific concern and then thoughtfully chose the Gothic form to present it best.’ (Smith, 2004; 35)

This view on Gothic writing as pure entertainment, may indeed, apply to some Gothic writers and works, however, as we have seen in my interpretation of Poe’s “Rue Morgue”, Poe used his short story to examine Monboddo’s evolutionary thoughts, and to shed light on the importance of language. It is therefore not farfetched to believe that he used his Gothic writing in the same manner to discuss various aspects of society and mankind. My view on Gothic literature as a possible widening of the Enlightenment is shared by James P. Carson, who ‘question[s] the claim that there is a sharp break between the Enlightenment and Romanticism’ (Carson, 1996; 256-57) in his article “Enlightenment, Popular Culture and Gothic Fiction” (1996). Carson writes that ‘Gothic novelists frequently claim to have undertaken a quasi-scientific investigation into natural human responses when characters are confronted with situations of apparently supernatural stress’ (Carson, 1996; 257). I will refer to the outcome of this confrontation ‘with apparently supernatural stress’ as Gothic Enlightenment, in order to emphasise the connection between the Enlightenment elements, or the ‘quasi-scientific investigation’, and the Gothic genre.