Enlightenment Romanticism and Gothic Literature

The supernatural is defining feature of gothic genres of gothic and horror. Supernatural motifs are also integral to Romanticism, especially as the supernatural is counterpoint to the natural. Romanticism reveals an uneasy relationship between science and nature. Science reveals nature and demystifies it, essentially taking God out of the question and leading to a “crisis of religious faith,” (Sanders 1). Focusing on the supernatural in literature, authors in both Old World and New externalized their anxieties about losing faith and losing connection with the predictability of organized religion. Science might yield absolute and measurable truths about nature but fails utterly to assuage the deeper anxieties in the human experience. Romantic and gothic literatures unearth those anxieties and clothe them in supernatural and disturbing imagery. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” and Edgar Allen Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher,” the natural and the supernatural are inextricably entwined. The supernatural elements anchor these stories firmly within the gothic genre, and also show how Romanticism represents existential angst.
Geography and culture also impact the evolution of Romantic and gothic literature. Gothic literature emerged in the United States and Britain relatively concurrently, but “British writers did not have far to go to seek sites for their meditations,” (Puntner 165). Poe and Irving both use European characters and/or settings in their work. Rip van Winkle is a Dutch settler in colonial America, and the House of Usher exists as if in an eerie parallel universe that is neither here nor there, effectively bridging the gap between the New and Old Worlds. These three texts demonstrate the similarities and differences between British and American gothic motifs and themes. As Puntner points out, the features of American Gothic include “darkness...tendency towards obsession...absorption with powerful and evil Europeans,” (165). Shelley’s novel shows that the British Gothic likewise features symbolic and visual darkness, obsessive tendencies in human nature, and warnings related to the consequences of power. However, the American Gothic is more overtly gloomy, especially the works of Poe. Irving, Poe, and Shelley all link psychological terror with the supernatural too, showing that the origins of evil are not necessarily external or even in some supernatural being like the Devil. The Age of Enlightenment and the dawn of the science of psychology revealed the uncomfortable truth: evil originates in human beings. The only devil is the “fatal demon of fear,” in Poe’s terms (1538).
Each of these three stories treats the supernatural as a borderland, the realm of the unknown, symbolizing science’s inability to conquer the deeper mysteries of life and death. In Shelley’s Frankenstein, the titular doctor creates a lonely, motherless monster: a creature that is neither natural nor supernatural. A man has created life from where there was once only dead tissue, but the life he creates is not human. Shelley therefore draws attention to the life force itself, that which animates the body but which science cannot measure. Of these three stories, Shelley’s is perhaps the only one that foreshadows the dawn of science fiction.
In Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Madeline Usher is also on the brink between the natural and the supernatural. Madeline is neither alive nor dead, but rather, occupies a liminal space between the two otherwise absolute domains. When the men bury Madeline, she seems alive, and when she arises, she seems dead. Madeline’s illness also has a supernatural element to it. Just as science is unable to provide the key to immortality, medicine is incapable of curing all disease. “The disease of Lady Madeline had long baffled the skill of her physicians,” leading Madeline to linger on the brink of life and death (Poe 1539). In fact, Madeline’s illness causes Roderick to slip rapidly into a state of depression and despair, also a liminal state between sanity and insanity. Unlike Dr. Frankenstein, Roderick Usher gives up on life and succumbs to death, no longer trying to control life or its outcomes. Poe portrays the supernatural as having a deadly but irresistible allure, one which perfectly parallels the mystique of horror writing itself.
Rip van Winkle is also in a liminal and therefore supernatural state, a dream world in which he remains comatose for twenty years. The scientific mind would read van Winkle’s story as one of an old man who drank too much or perhaps took psychedelic drugs, but Irving introduces the supernatural element of ghosts to add the gothic dimension to the Romantic tale. The most lighthearted and innocent of the three stories, “Rip van Winkle” does have a darker and more sinister undercurrent due to its being set during a time of war. Rip van Winkle does evoke the fear of insanity that permeates Poe’s writing too. Upon beholding his countenance, Rip van Winkle exclaims, “I’m not myself—I’m somebody else,” (Irving 50). The loss of self is a theme common to gothic fiction, linked to existential angst. Supernatural motifs like the “strange beings” that haunted the Kaatskills (sic) offer meaning and a pseudoscientific explanation for what happened to van Winkle (Irving 52). The supernatural beings in “Rip van Winkle” seem more mischievous than nefarious, too, connecting Irving’s story nostalgically with Old World folklore. Nostalgia is, incidentally, a hallmark of Romanticism.
In these three stories, the supernatural lures people away from the safety and stability of family and community, towards the abyss of the unknown. Being lured into the unknown symbolizes the conflict between religion and science, both of which claim access to absolute truth. Knowing that neither religion nor science can provide the answers to pressing existential questions, Romantic and gothic writers offer a third alternative: the supernatural. Because the Enlightenment worldview affirms supernatural definitely does not exist, there is an ironic level of comfort in the use of ghosts, monsters, and the undead in these three stories. Gothic fiction poses the question, “What if?” What if a man can animate a corpse? What if a woman is buried alive by her brother? What if ghosts lure a man into the woods and put him under a spell for twenty years?
Taking a journey is also a meaningful motif linking the natural with the supernatural in gothic fiction. The monster in Frankenstein travels through the icy landscape, running from his cruel and neglectful master as well as the suspicious townsfolk. His journey never leads to salvation or fulfillment, and neither do the journeys of Rip van Winkle or that of the narrator of “The House of Usher.” Journeys bridge the gap between the real and unreal, the natural and the supernatural, the godly and the demonic. Frankenstein seeks humanity and humanitarianism in his journey, self-recognition and belonging. Paradoxically, it is the human world that rejects him and becomes the force of evil in his life. The natural has become the supernatural. In “The House of Usher” the narrator seeks reunion with his friend and arrives with the earnest attempt to help the Ushers. His journey leads to a contemplation of inhuman darkness and despair. Rip van Winkle journeys to escape the burdens of home life, and finds himself in the grips of gin-drinking ghosts. All of these supernatural journeys symbolize the loss of self and the regaining of a new form of consciousness. The gothic journey is darkly symbolic: “a journey downward to a total loss of control and a destruction of the self rather than an affirmation of the individual intellect over natural forces,” (McGhee 55). Unlike the optimism inherent in Enlightenment philosophy, gothic fiction brims with pessimism.
Gothic fiction presents a paradox in that the supernatural promises enlightenment or transcendence through death. The supernatural fails to provide any sense of salvation, let alone truth or enlightenment. Instead, the supernatural is aligned with death. Frankenstein causes death and destruction. Rip van Winkle literally lost twenty years of his life to his supernatural encounters. When he returns from the woods, he is an old man who is not far from death. Roderick and Madeline Usher die, and with them their entire family legacy, represented by the fading grandeur of the old house. The realm of death may “speak to the anxieties and frustrations that many Victorians felt, caught between a staunchly traditional religious faith and an emerging agnostic or atheistic perspective,” (Sanders 1). Religion is dying, God is dying, and nothing is sacred anymore.
Nature is not the opposite of the supernatural in the gothic mindset. On the contrary, the natural and the supernatural are practically one and the same. At the very least, the supernatural is located within the natural world. Both Shelley and Poe describe the cold and gloomy conditions that precipitate supernatural encounters. Poe, Shelley, and Irving all locate the supernatural as far from civilization as possible: in the woods, to be exact. Nature has become the enemy, the darkness that threatens to undermine human technological progress. Illness is a function of nature; medicine is the conquering of illness through science. Death is a function of nature; Dr. Frankenstein believes he has found a solution to death and yet nature ultimately prevails as it does in “The House of Usher.” Gothic writers do seem to imply that science is technically incapable of truly conquering nature, even though conquering the natural world, including human instincts, had become one of the definitive goals of modernity. As Jones points out, “Shelley’s allusion to these topics,” such as the juxtaposition of science and the supernatural, or the natural and the unnatural, “result from her own historical standpoint, as she identifies the Age of Enlightenment within Romantic Era,” (1). Romanticism is both backlash against Enlightenment and resignation to its core themes. The gothic genre reckons with the supremacy of science over the idiocy of organized religion, which plays no role in Shelley, Poe, or Irving. Yet at the same time, gothic fiction taunts the Enlightenment thinker, calling into question the efficacy of scientific methods.
The metanarratives of gothic fiction also show how the supernatural governs the human psyche and even gender identity. After all, Frankenstein’s monster is a motherless child born of a modern-era immaculate conception. Madeline is the literal embodiment of death, as Poe connects the female figure with fear and unnatural horrors. Rip van Winkle would never have fell asleep were it not for the “tart temper” of his wife (Irving 41). All three of these texts are psychological thrillers on some level. Their central characters grapple with madness, despair, depression, and loss of personal identity. Likewise, all of the main characters feel drawn to the supernatural domain, just as readers are transfixed by the mystique of the gothic text. The supernatural dwells within the realm of the collective unconscious, and even though it would be decades before Freud formulated his theories of the unconscious and Jung’s his, undoubtedly gothic fiction planted the seeds for modern psychoanalysis. Given the generally pseudoscientific nature of psychoanalysis, it only seems appropriate that Freud and Jung would fixate on dreams and their symbols when attempting to address psychological problems.
Like Shelley’s Frankenstein, Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” all use the supernatural to convey existential angst. The supernatural is a liminal space between life and death, the realm of the unknown. As such, the supernatural possesses an irresistible allure. Perhaps the only hint of the theme of hope in gothic fiction is that the supernatural is a reminder that awe and wonder can still remain part of a scientific worldview.





Works Cited

Irving, Washington. “Rip Van Winkle.”
Jones, Grace Nicole . Romantic Literature and Contemporary Philosophy, Science, and Medicine: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Undergraduate Research Scholars Program, 2017. Available electronically from http : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /164479.
McGhee, J. Alexandra. “Morbid Conditions: Poe and the Sublimity of Disease.” The Edgar Allen Poe Review, Vol. 14, No. 1, Spring 2013, pp. 55-70
Poe, Edgar Allen. “The Fall of the House of Usher.”
Puntner, David. “Early American Gothic.” In The Literature of Terror. Second Edition. New York: Routledge, 2013.
Sanders, Elizabeth Mildred. “Enchanting Belief: Religion and Secularism in the Victorian Supernatural Novel.” PhD Thesis, University of Iowa, 2017. Available: http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/5186/
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Digital version available: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/84/84-h/84-h.htm