Session 5: Dark Romanticism/ Slave Narrative/ Realism

Dark Romanticism

focuses on the negative, less celebratory sides of life (slavery, violence, the unknown in human nature)

• concerned with the complexity and the perverseness in human nature; on a larger scale, with the great “flaw in the universe.”

• Has comparatively little to do with the divine

• Is concerned with the grotesque as well as the sublime, and the battle between the two within the individual.

• Believes in an inherent darkness in human nature, as well as an inherent light

Edgar Allan Poe

• 1809(Boston, MA) -1849 (Baltimore)

• One of the most influential short story writers, part of the American Renaissance

• Challenged both Transcendentalist thought and

Romanticist notions regarding the purity and

goodness of (human) nature

Elements of a Short Story

• a narrative to be read “at one sitting” within 1-2 hours

• a narrative creating “a certain unique or single effect” in readers to move them

• usually explores one incident and only a few

protagonists to create the unity of effect

Common Gothic Features

• irrationality versus rationality,

• Guilt and the uncanny

• ab-humans, ghosts, and monsters.

• themes of Puritanism and its tainted legacy

• psychological impact of struggle with Puritan

legacy

• Doubling/Doppelganger motif: duality of the

self; often the subject has a simultaneous consciousness of being both his present self

and the external other observing himself →

horrific effect

Gothic Elements in Usher

• a haunted house, rotting and desolate

landscape

• strange illness sickness

• doubled personality: e.g. Roderick/Madeline resemblance; mirroring of the crumbling house in

Roderick’s deteriorating condition

Atmosphere and Setting in Usher

• oppressive, gloomy, unsettling, a sense of dread, melancholy, heaviness → lots of adjectives to create this atmosphere

• a haunted house, rotting and desolate landscape

• house and nature described as decaying, haunted, mysterious, dreary, cold

Unreliable Narration

• term coined by Wayne C. Booth in 1961; has undergone numerous revisions and expansions since

• in its most basic definition, often a first-person narrator that states something objectively false/lies; or, in some cases, falsehood is not as obvious, but a feeling of distrust is created

• “Usher”: unnamed first-person narrator, who hints at his own unreliability → what can we believe?

Symbolism of the house

• double meaning of the title: house and family

• Cracks and fissures in the structure symbolize cracks and fissures in family history/legacy

• The house splits in two at the end – just as the Ushers come to an end → from glorious past to decay

What does Poe explode in his short stories?

• Poe explores the dark and unknown side of the human and human psyche

• mirrored in surroundings, influence one another

Nathaniel Hawthorne

• 1804 (Salem, MA) -1864 (Plymouth, NH)

• celebrated writer of the American Renaissance: The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, “The Birth-Mark”

• The Hawthorne (Hathorne) family were important

members of Puritan society in the 17th century →

Nathaniel Hawthorne wrestled with their complicated legacy

Young Goodman Brown

• setting: Salem, late 17th century – in the village and in the woods; at night and the next morning

• characters: Young Goodman Brown, Faith, minister, catechism teacher, deacon, and the Devil

binary opposites in Young Goodman Brown

• village vs. forest

• civilisation vs. wilderness

• day vs. night

• pious Puritans vs. Sinners

• blur into one another and lose their distinction: good and evil in everyone

• darkness of mankind reflected in darkness of the forest; forest as symbol of the unknown, shadows

Allegory

a literary work in which characters, settings and actions are all devised to represent or symbolize abstractions such as good, evil and wisdom

examples of allegory in Young Goodman Brown

• Goodman Brown is tempted by evil, like Adam and Eve

• Wife’s name Faith = allegory for Faith

→ hypocrisy of American religion and origins: temptation and the sins of humanity are within everyone, recognizes that no one is innocent

Context of Young Goodman Brown

coming to terms with the violent side of Puritan legacy and his own family’s entanglement: Salem Witch Trials, 1692/93, twenty people murdered in the mass hysteria/religious overzealousness; his great-great-grandfather John Hathorne was a judge in the trials, never repented

• Warning against religious revivals

• The First Great Awakening: Christian revival movements in the 1730 and ‘40s, spiritual conviction of personal sin and need for redemption, and by encouraging introspection and a commitment to personal morality

• The Second Great Awakening: first half of the 19thcentury: hellfire-and-damnation preaching, prominent in the Northeast, included ordinary folks, new denominations, communal societies, and reform

→ hypocrisy of American Christianity/religion and origins

Features of Realist Literature

• focus on the everyday/mundane, including graphic details

• ordinary people of the middle- and working classes: “showing life accurately”

• verisimilitude (plausibility): appearance of being true, resemblance of truth (≠

reality/truth)

• Depiction of regional differences in America (dialects, customs, e.g. Twain and Chesnutt

Anti-Slavery Literature Styles

sentimental tradition: emotional appeal to readers

classical slave narrative/early realism: descrpitive, showing life accurately

genre conventions of the classical slave narrative

• autobiographical writing (author = protagonist = narrator); “autobiographical pact” between author and reader (Lejeune)

• formerly enslaved person recalls their life story: life as an enslaved person in all its physical and psychological violence, detailed accounts of the institution, their escape from slavery,life as a ‘free’ person up North

• Abolitionist cause: demonstrating the cruelty and evil of slavery and demanding its abolition

• often appeals to Christianity and compassion of their predominantly white readership

• usually fronted by a preface by a white abolitionist to vouch for and authenticate the truthfulness of the narrative

Historical Context of Slavery

• 1619: arrival of enslaved Africans in what would later become the United States, Jamestown, Virginia (cf. Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project); triangular slave trade, Middle Passage

• The Compromise of 1808: illegal to import enslaved people, but slavery remains legal in the US

• 1820, Missouri Compromise: maintaining a balance of slaveholding and free states as the US expands westwards; legal south of/ illegal north of the Mason-Dixon Line

• 1861-1865: Civil War over slavery; 1863: Emancipation Proclamation signed by President Abraham Lincoln; slavery prohibited nationwide after the end of the Civil War

• 1870: right to vote for African American men

Frederick Douglass

• ~1818 (plantation in Maryland) – 1895 (Washington D.C.)

• formerly enslaved, escaped from slavery in 1838 and became one of the leading African American

intellectuals and activists until his death

• Published several life narratives, most famously

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. Written by Himself (1845) and My Bondage, My Freedom (1855), Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881)

The Prefaces

written by William Lloyd Garrison – a famous white abolitionist (someone who fought for the abolition of slavery); head of the American Anti-Slavery Society, editor of the newspaper Liberator

• function: authentication of account for readers; asserts that Douglass and the Narrative that follows can be trusted

• contextualizes the narrative, explains how they know each other

• praises Douglass – “fortunate” repeated numerous times

• “SLAVERY AS IT IS” (1166)

Part II: Letter from a friend and abolitionist, Wendell Phillips, also a testament to Douglass’ character

• Asserts that slavery entails horrors both in slave-holding and in free states

Condescension amidst praise? (Unconscious) racist paternalism? → Douglass and
Garrison later had a falling out and never reconciled

Douglass Narrative

• Abolitionist cause - written for a primarily white readership

• reflects on religion and Christianity, cruelty of slavery

• language relatively neutral and matter-of-factly, reporting on the institution of slavery, how it operates, and his experiences of certain events

• slavery corrupts everyone – Black and white

• spiritual freedom → physical freedom

Chattel Slavery

• status of slave was inheritable in the Colonies and later in the US

• partus sequitur ventrem (“the offspring follows the womb”): maternal heritable slavery, passed in colonial Virginia in 1662 → created lineages of enslavement that enriched enslavers

• breaks with English common law tradition of partus sequitur partem, which favored paternal lineage → denial of paternity to enslaved children

Harriet Jacobs

• 1813 (North Carolina) – 1897 (Washington D.C.)

• Enslaved woman in Edenton, NC; hid from her enslaver for seven years in an attic before escaping in 1842

• first woman in the US to author a slave narrative:

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, (1861), published under the pseudonym of Linda Brent

• Falls into obscurity after the Civil War; not rediscovered and republished until 1973 in the wake of the Civil Rights and Women's Movements

Preface to Incidents in the life of a slave girl

• authored by Lydia Maria Child, a white antislavery activits

• adresses some doubts readers might have (e.g. explaining why Harriet Jacobs can write) , calls upon (female) readers to act

Childhood and Awakening into Slavery Jacobs

• “I was born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away” (910).

• Brought up relatively “kind” – when her mistress passes away, she is given to her sister’s five-year-old daughter and lives with Dr. Flint

• For years, Dr. Flint attempts to coerce her into sexual relations: constant threat of violation of the body and the psyche

Black Women and Enslavement

• Following rules of gender ideal of “True Womanhood” impossible – yet striving for those “address to readers”

• hardships of enslaved women: pregnancy, children, nursing children who are not yours → resistance only possible in a very gendered capacity

• agency looks different here than it does for Douglass in the fight with Covey:Jacobs decides to have children out of wedlock with another man to scorn Flint → in violation of the purity entailed in “True Womanhood” ideal, but an assertive act of self, she ‘decides’ to have children with someone other than Flint: can only protect herself by giving herself to someone else

Addressing the White (female) reader

• gender ideal: cult of true womanhood: piouty, pure, domesticate

• standards are not available for enslaved women

• appeals to the white female reader who might judge her, is ashamed

• asks for their understanding and compassion