Faculteit Letteren en Wijsbegeerte
Lander Sucaet
Gothic Narrators, Characters and Spaces
Rhetorical Narratology and Fiction by Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne
Masterproef voorgelegd tot het behalen van de graad van
Master in de Taal- en Letterkunde
Engels - Duits
Academiejaar 2014-2015
Promotor
Prof Dr. Guttzeit
Vakgroep Letterkunde
Acknowledgements
First of all, I would like to thank my parents for all the support they have provided me over
the years while studying at the University of Ghent. Without their help and faith in me, I
would have never been able to pass my college years and finish this dissertation.
Secondly, a big thanks goes out to my fellow students, who have made studying at this
university a surprisingly pleasant experience and have provided me with the opportunity to
share my thoughts and struggles.
Thirdly, I would like to thank my supervisor, Gero Guttzeit, for all his help and guidance that
he has given me in the process of writing this dissertation.
Finally, a special thanks goes out to my friend Benjamin, who has taught me not to take life
too seriously and has kept me company during these last weeks of finishing my
dissertation.
Table of contents
1. Introduction
1.1 The Gothic as a literary tradition with its own conventions
1-3
1.2 Methodology: a rhetorical approach to narrative analysis
3-4
2. The aspect of narration
2.1 Who speaks: towards a conception of author, narrator and implied author
5-8
2.2 Narrative unreliability
8-14
2.3 Gothic narrators: shifting narrative positions
14-18
2.4 Drunkards, madmen and murderers: an analysis of Poe’s narrators
18-22
2.5 Distant, yet authorative storytellers: an analysis of Hawthorne’s narrators
22-27
3. The aspect of character
3.1 Three functions to character: the mimetic, thematic and synthetic
28-31
3.2 A fourth function to character: the intertextual
31-32
3.3 Gothic characters: villains, innocent heroines and antropomorphic monsters
33-37
3.4 Poe’s characters: from hypochondriac villains to one-dimensional women
38-42
3.5 Hawthorne’s characters: living symbols, likeable villains and rebellious
women
42-46
4. The aspect of space
4.1 Narrative space as a character within the storyworld: the return of the four
functions
47-50
4.2 Extending the scope of the mimetic function of setting: the construction of
narrative worlds
50-52
4.3 Gothic spaces: mysterious castles, haunted houses and the sublime
wilderness
52-57
4.4 Poe’s settings: the haunted house with its enclosed spaces
57-61
4.5 Hawthorne’s settings: from external to internal spaces and the question of
wilderness
61-66
5. Conclusion
67-71
6. Bibliography
72-75
Word count: 28.208
1. Introduction
1.1 The Gothic as a literary tradition with its own conventions
“Surely no other modern literary form as influential as the Gothic novel has also
been as pervasively conventional. Once you know that a novel is of the Gothic kind
(and you can tell that from the title), you can predict its contents with an unnerving
certainty” (Sedgwick 9).
As Sedgwick makes clear in the first chapter of his The Coherence of Gothic Conventions
(1980), one can regard the Gothic novel as a literary form with own conventions. When
turning the first page of a Gothic text, you know that it will introduce you to some kind of
narrator who presents his story as the result of oral transmission, or in other cases as a lost
manuscript, thus immediately forcing the reader to reflect on its reliability. You also know
that its characters will include the presence of a male villain, whose sexual desire leads him
to chase an innocent heroine, a knightly hero, who rightful place as heir is threatened by the
appearance of the villain, and several antropomorphic creatures, such as werewolves,
vampires or ghosts. Finally, – and this may be the most typical feature of these texts – as
reader, you may also bear witness to the grandeur of a mysterious, often haunted castle,
which preferably has several dungeons, secret pathways and enclosed spaces in it, and that
is surrounded by a remote and ‘sublime’ landscape. This narrow set of conventions, which
makes it possible to distinguish Gothic texts from others, has led numerous critics to
examine the purpose behind this novels. Sedgwick, for example, bases his investigation on
the following question: “How can talents as distinctive and varied as these authors’ all find
scope within a narrow set of conventions narrowly defined?” (Sedgwick 11). The answer to
this is often linked to the historical context of the eigteenth and nineteenth century in which
these novels were written, which was characterized by social, political, religious and
economic transformations due to the emergence of industrialization, urbanization and
science. In this respect, it can be argued that Gothic Novel’s “muffled form” without “any
direct use of language” aims to represent feelings of anxiety and uncertainty, which, as a
result of the rapid changes during this period, the individual was subject to (Sedgwick 14).
However, it can be noticed that the Gothic genre didn’t limit itself to the European
continent, but was quickly adopted by American authors, such as Edgar Allan Poe and
1
Nathaniel Hawthorne, both of them finding in this literary tradition ways to portray the
struggles and issue they were dealing with in the New World. As Lloyd Smith writes:
From the earliest period of American Gothicism – and some critics have seen almost the whole of American
writing as a Gothic literature – differences in American circumstances led American Gothicists in other
directions: less toward Walpole and Radcliffe, perhaps, more toward Godwin and James Hogg’s Confessions of
a Justified Sinner (1824); or, in Poe’s case, the extravagant sensationalism of Blackwood’s Edingburh Monthly
Magazine (Lloyd-Smith 4).
These “American circumstances” can be said to include, among other things, the frontier
experience, the Puritan inheritance and the American encounter with other cultures and
religions, such as the Native American population, all of which have given raise to a
different kind of Gothic. Since, as Savoy writes, “the American scene [...] [has been]
overshadowed [...] by the genealogical tracing of British and contintal influences – having
reached a limit of conceptual or explanatory usefulness” (Savoy 5), one of the purposes of
my inquiry is to investigate in the ways the American authors Edgar Allan Poe and
Nathaniel Hawthorne have transformed the poetics of European Gothicism, and this way,
have helped to establish what is now referred to as ‘the American Gothic’.
I will do this by using a rhetorical approach to narrative and analyzing the ways in
which both Poe and Hawthorne employ narrative elements, such narrator, character and
space, in their works to achieve communicational purposes . However, since, as Phelan and
Rabinowitz write, “the actual intentions of the actual author are often – even usually –
unknowable”, this dissertation will not only seek to explore the authorial intentions, and
thus meanings, which lay behind these texts, but also the effect they have on the reader
(Phelan and Rabinowitz 32). Subsequently, I have formulated my central research question
as: How do Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne employ narrative elements, such as
narrator, character and space, in their short fiction to establish an interaction with their
audience and what does the ‘nature’ of this interaction tell us about the American Gothic
movement in general? What I expect to find out, is that all of these three narrative elements
are shaped in the service of conveying “unspeakable” or “unutterable” themes of guilt and
sin to the reader, which can be seen as “evocations of cultural anxieties” in nineteenthcentury American society (Botting 2).
2
Before discussing the methodology of my thesis in more depth, I consider it
imporant to say something more about the structure of my work. This thesis is divided in
three main chapters, each of them dealing with a core concept of narrative theory. As
already mentioned, the concepts I will be discussing here are respectively those of narrator
or narration (mainly based on the problem of narrative unreliability), character and space.
Each of these chapters will be divided in five distinct parts or sections. While the first two
sections of each chapter discuss the narrative concepts from a theoretical point of view, the
third section explores how these are represented in the works of European Gothic authors.
Finally, the fourth and fifth section analyze how Poe and Hawthorne utilize narrator,
character and space in their short fiction and to which extent their rhetorical strategies
differ from those of the European authors. Subsequently, it can be noticed that, next to the
question of rhetorical authority (which is my main focus), this dissertation also aims to
portray a comparison between the European and American Gothic.
1.2 Methodology: a rhetorical approach to narrative analysis
As mentioned in the first part of this introduction, the methodology I will be using in this
dissertation is highly based on the insights of James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz, both of
which argue in favour of a rhetorical approach to narrative analysis. This approach defines
a literary text as following: “Narrative is somebody telling somebody else, on some occasion,
and for some purposes, that something happened to someone or something” (Phelan and
Rabinowitz 3). Although its definition of narratives may suggest otherwise, this approach is
not necessarily interested in the ‘real’ (historical) author behind the text, but embraces
Booth’s concept of the ‘implied’ author, as will become clear in the first section of the
chapter on narration. As a result of this, Phelan and Rabinowitz tend to focus more on the
“system of intentionality that explains why the text has this particular shape rather than
some other one” and less on the author’s personality and historical circumstances (Phelan
and Rabinowitz 32). Another remarkable feature of this approach is that it adopts “an a
posteriori instead of an a priori stance”, thus endorsing a texts’ wide range of possibilities,
and more importantly, leaving the door open for other ideas and approaches (Phelan and
Rabinowitz 5). Therefore, during my research, I will also be taking in account the ideas of,
amongst others, David Herman, who emphasizes “the interconnections between narrative
3
and mind”, Robyn Warhol, who demonstrates a feminist approach to narrative theory, and
Brian Richardson, who can be seen as a representative of the recent Unnatural Narratology
movement and mainly focusses on the anti-mimetic and transgressive character of certain
narratives (Herman et al. 9). All of these critics’ contributions to the study of narrative
concepts have recently been collected in Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical
Debates (2012), which is the reason why I will use this work as a theoretical basis for my
dissertation. As for now, this introduction has been long enough, and I therefore suggest
that we move over to the discussion of the first concept, namely that of narration.
4
2. The aspect of narration
2.1 Who speaks: towards a conception of author, narrator and implied author
As mentioned in the introduction, this first part of the thesis will concern itself with the
problem of narrative unreliability. I will do this by giving a brief overview of the different
critics who have explored this issue and try to find out which parameters they take in
account when considering a narrator unreliable. Obviously, my approach will be a
rhetorical one, which is the reason why I will be particularly interested in the purposes
behind the author’s use of deceitful storytellers and the intended effect on the reader. After
having investigated in this matter from a rather theoretical perspective, I will try to link it
with the genre of the Gothic Novel in general, followed by a case study which analyzes the
presence of unreliable narrators in the short stories of the American authors Edgar Allan
Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. However, before going over to the discussion of narrative
unreliability, I consider it necessary to situate this concept within the larger debate on
authorial intention, which was strongly fuelled by the publication of Barthes’ “The Death of
the Author” in 1967 and went hand in hand with the emergence of the poststructuralist
movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Therefore, the first section of this chapter will be
dedicated to the role of the author in establishing the meaning of a text.
At first sight, the concepts of author and narrator might seem relatively
unproblematic. Every reader knows that there is a clear distinction to be made between ‘the
historical figure who constructed the narrative’ and ‘the fictional figure who narrates the
story’. Nevertheless, during the years of literary theory a lot has been said and written
about the role of the author in relation to the possible meaning or interpretation of a text.
Although I do not wish to sketch the exhaustive history of narrative theory here, it is
important to know that Russian Formalism (with figures like Vladimir Propp) was the first
movement to question the godlike position of the author, paving the way for New Criticism
in the 1960s. Both indeed rejected the author as the authorial agency of a narrative text,
claiming that “The design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a
standard for judging the success of a work of literary art” (Pieters et al. 191-92). Rather
than focusing on the authorial design of a text, they believed narrative theory should regard
narrative texts as autonomous entities and therefore concern itself with the formal
5
characteristics of a work. However, the harshest critique on the position of the author came
from the French poststructuralist Roland Barthes, who in his famous The Death of the
Author (1967) claimed that “a text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand
sources of culture” and therefore doesn’t release a single, “theological” meaning (Barthes 4,
translated by Richard Howard). Due to rise of the poststructuralist movement in the 1960s,
narrative theory has shifted its emphasis from author to reader. After all, it is in the latter
that the multiplicity of a text’s meanings comes together.
Despite the numerous efforts of Formalist and Poststructuralist movements, it has
become apparent that the notion of the author is more popular than ever in contemporary
literary theory. An interesting view on the speaking voice within a narrative is offered by
James Phelan, who can be seen as the main representative of a rhetorical approach to
narrative theory. This approach defines a narrative as “somebody telling somebody else, on
some occasion, and for some purposes, that something happened to someone or something”
(Phelan and Rabinowitz 3). As this definition reveals, these theorists regard narratives as
communicative processes, which require the presence of “authorial agency, textual
phenomena, and reader response” in order to function properly (Phelan and Rabinowitz
30). Although Phelan and Rabinowitz take in account the role of the reader in the process of
narrative communication, the decisive role of the authorial agency is always ascribed more
weight1. As a result, this theory states that one can identify the implied author through his
use of narrative strategies and devices, which in its turn blurs the structuralist distinction
between fabula and sujet. However, as David Herman acknowledges, it is often very hard or
even impossible to find reliable ‘traces’ of the author within the narrative itself. Whereas in
autobiographical narration these ‘traces’ are very clear, other works of fiction often contain
different “levels of narrational action”, resulting in “a nested structure of reasons within
reasons” (Herman 48). In the case of Poe’s short stories, one thus has to consider both the
narrator’s reasons for providing the reader with an unreliable account of the events and
Poe’s reasons for creating such a narrator.
1
Phelan and Rabinowitz wrote the following on the relationship between author and reader: “But to the
extent that you are considering narrative as a communicative process, then authors, and their communicative
purposes, matter: there can be no rhetoric without a rhetor”(Phelan and Rabinowitz 30).
6
Another concept which is of key importance when discussing the speaking voice in
narratives is that of the implied author, first introduced by Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric
of Fiction (1983). The implied author can be defined as the reader’s construction of the
author with respect to form and content of a work, situating itself between historical author
and narrator. Although many critics find this concept very useful in considering the possible
interpretation of a narrative, others have just as strongly argued against it. Toolan, for
example, points out that it is very difficult to pin down the implied author of a narrative,
since it is a “[…] position in narrative processing, a receptor’s construct, but […] not a real
role in narrative transmission” (qtd. in Nünning 35). In other words: the implied author for
the most part corresponds with the reader’s subjective conception of the author and
therefore is not an objective feature of a work. As a result, Nünning believes that the
concept allows “for a moralistic kind of criticism”, leading to “the potentially boundless
relativism of interpretation” (Nünning 35). Chatman also explains that “the concept of
implied authorship arose in the debate about the relevance of authorial intention to
interpretation”, making it somewhat acceptable to talk about the author’s intentions again
(qtd. in Nünning 35). The question then arises whether the concept indeed has failed to
fulfill its original goal, namely to bridge the gap between author and narrator in the process
of interpretation.
A more moderate stance on the issue is taken by the Unnatural Narratologist Brian
Richardson, who in his Unnatural Voices (2006) both encounters text in which the use of the
implied author is essential and others where it seems indispensable. He argues that “the
closer the thesis of a work of fiction is to other writings and public behavior of an
individual, the less need there is to invoke an intermediary figure to situate between the
person and the book” (Richardson 121). In autobiographical works and genres like satire,
allegory and apologue, the concept indeed is dispensable, since the historical author and the
speaking voice of the narrative are very close to each other. Moreover, most of these works
were written in order to directly express and criticize certain statements, ideas and beliefs
about society; they are less interested in using narrative techniques and devices of
manipulation and deception. Nevertheless, both Richardson and Booth are aware of the fact
that “real authors may […] create implied authors who are more admirable than
themselves”, for example in “self-serving autobiographies” or modernist fiction (Richardson
7
Unnatural Voices 116). Therefore, it is crucial to read skeptically, not only focusing on what
is said, but also how and why it is said, i.e. which purposes or goals are being accomplished
by the (implied) author. After all, as Proust said, we should keep in mind that lots of books
are “the product of a different self from the one we manifest in our habits, in society, in our
vices”(qtd. in Richardson Unnatural Voices 115). In this respect, I would like to reverse
Toolan’s statement that the implied author is “not a real role in narrative transmission” and
instead suggest that in most fictional works, the implied author is the only authorial
instance that is tangible through style, tone and textual clues, as opposed to the often
obscure historical author. This does however not mean that the category of the historical
author should be abandoned, but rather that both concepts of the implied author and real
author can be used complementary with each other, depending on the kind of narrative or
even passage within a narrative one is dealing with.
2.2 Narrative Unreliability
This second part of the chapter will explore the concept of the unreliable narrator or
narrative unreliability, which in recent years has received remarkable attention in narrative
theory. Although until this point, there is no general consensus among critics about the
exact definition of an unreliable narrator, a great number of theorists have looked at this
concept from different theoretical angles. The goal of this section is therefore not to give an
overview of these theoretical perspectives, since this would lead us too far, but to contrast
the ideas of some prominent contributors within the discussion of the unreliable narrator,
such as James Phelan, Ansgar Nünning and Monika Fludernik in order to get a grip on the
different conventions they take into account when considering a narrator unreliable. This
will hopefully leave us with some useful concepts to work with when looking at the works
of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne in the case study section. Since the works of
the former often draw attention to the deviant mental behavior of the narrator, it might also
be worth to take a closer look at the notion of the mad monologist as described by Lars
Bernaerts.
The concept of the unreliable narrator was first introduced by Wayne C. Booth in his
Rhetoric of Fiction (1983) as following: a narrator is “reliable when he or she speaks for or
8
acts in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say the implied author’s norms),
unreliable when he does not” (Booth 158-59). Although Booth’s conception has caused the
unreliable narrator to become a basic concept in narrative theory, a lot of theorists have
criticized the standard upon which he has based his definition, namely the distance
between narrator and problematic implied author. As discussed in the previous part, some
critics such as Nünning argue that the implied author “is itself a very elusive and opaque
notion” and is therefore rather an obstacle than a guidance in defining the unreliable
narrator (Nünning 34). This is especially the case in homodiegetic narration, where the
reader is left to the narrator’s unreliable account of the story. Rather than measuring the
unreliability of a narrator against the ‘norms of the work’ or ‘the implied author’s norms’,
Nünning therefore believes that one should take in account “the conceptual premises that
readers and critics bring to texts” (Nünning 45). These “conceptual premises”2 of readers
together with “literary frames of reference”3, cause them to evaluate certain structures
within those texts as ‘marked’ or ‘deviant’, a process that Fludernik refers to as
naturalization. Simply put: when a reader encounters a narrator who deviates from
behavior he or she would refer to as ‘common sense’ and/or is in contrast with literary
conventions he would consider to be the ‘norm’, then that reader tends to label that
narrator as unreliable. Nüning’s approach, although cognitive in nature, leans very close
towards the ideas of the Unnatural Narratology, who also believe that “theories of
narrational unreliability […] tend to rely on the realist and mimetic notions of literature”
(Nünning 42). Most critics indeed think of ‘reliability’ as the ‘unmarked’ standard or norm
of a literary work. However, as soon as “these practices are pushed into the realm of the
2
These conceptual premises include “general world-knowledge, historical world-model or cultural codes,
explicit theories of personality or implicit models of psychological coherence and human behaviour,
knowledge of the social, moral or linguistic norms relevant for the period in which the text was written and
published, the reader’s or critic’s psychological disposition, and system of norms and values” (Nünning 47).
3
These literary frames of reference include “general literary conventions, conventions and models of literary
genres, intertextual frames of reference, that is references to specific pretexts, stereotyped models of
characters such as the picaro, the miles gloriosus, the trickster, an last but not least the structure and norms
established by the respective work itself” (Nünning 48).
9
impossible”, the need for a human-like implied author, whose authorial voice we can trust,
returns (Richardson "Authors, Narrators, Narration" 53).
Nevertheless, this cognitive approach offers us very little to work with, since these
norms of unreliability (the conceptual frameworks of the reader) are different for every
reader and are yet to be thoroughly explored. Another solution to this problem is suggested
by James Phelan, who from a rhetorical point of view has developed a taxonomy of six types
of unreliability and has highlighted the distinction between restricted narration and
unreliable narration. His work is based on the belief that narrators fulfill three main tasks:
“they report (along the axis of facts, characters, and events), interpret (along the axis of
knowledge or perception), and evaluate (along the axis of ethics)” (Phelan and Rabinowitz
34). Phelan argues that when a narrator completes only one of these three functions, one
can speak of ‘restricted narration’. However, it is only when the narrator performs “any of
the three tasks inadequately (as measured against how the implied author would perform
it)”, he can be called unreliable (Phelan and Rabinowitz 34). A further distinction of
inadequate narrators is made between those who completely pervert these tree tasks (in
which case Phelan speaks of “misreporting, misinterpreting, and misevaluating”) and those
who fulfill the functions only partly (in which case Phelan speaks of “underreporting,
underreading and underevaluating”) (Phelan and Rabinowitz 34). Phelan observes that this
first instance of unreliability, which he calls “estranging reliability”, results in an “increase
[…] of ethical and interpretive distance” between narrator and reader, since the last one
recognizes that the narrator’s account of the events is untrustworthy and therefore needs
to be rejected. In the second instance of “bonding unreliability” however, “the
interpretative, affective, or ethical distance between the narrator and the authorial
audience” becomes smaller. Here, the reader realizes that the narrator’s version of the
events does not necessarily have to be rejected, but can be ‘completed’ with the help of own
insights, which results in a kind of sympathy or affection for the last one (Phelan 11).
Although Nünning’s and Phelan’s approach might at first sight seem quite
contradictory, both ascribe the reader an active role in contrasting the narrator’s behavior
and account of the events with their own frames of reference and view of the story. One
might even go further by saying that both approaches can be combined with each other,
since the reader’s construction of the implied author inevitably involves his use of
10
referential frameworks and literary frames of reference. Despite the fact that this subjective
standard of measuring the narrator’s unreliability indeed is quite unsatisfactory, Chatman
affirms that in the case of homodiegetic narration, there is no real way around this ‘reading
out between the lines’:
In unreliable narration, […] the story undermines the discourse. We conclude, by “reading out”
between the lines, that the events and existents could not have been “like that”, and so we hold
the narrator suspect. Unreliable narration is thus an ironic form (qtd. in Martens 79).
In other words: due to the fact that the narrative is only told out of the perspective of the
unreliable first person narrator, the reader is assigned an active role. He is forced to act like
a detective and question the narrator’s unreliable discourse to be able to reconstruct the
original story or fabula. However, as we have seen, this is often impossible, since “many
extreme forms of narration seem to have been invented precisely to transgress
fundamental linguistic and rhetorical categories” (Richardson Unnatural Voices 9).
Until this point, I have mainly discussed narrative unreliability in terms of irony, i.e a
gap between the narrator’s and the reader’s point of view, but have said little about the
textual cues which may trigger this dramatic irony. Altes explains that during the reading
process, readers often look for “textual incongruities of various kinds” on the basis of which
they consider a narrator suspect (Altes 119). Olsen provides examples of these textual
signals: “an accumulation of remarks relating to the self as well as linguistic signals
denoting expressiveness and subjectivity”, “an accumulation of direct addresses to the
reader and conscious attempts to direct the reader’s sympathy”, “syntactic signals denoting
the narrator’s high level of emotional involvement, including exclamations, ellipses,
repetitions, etc.” and “explicit self-referential, metanarrative discussions of the narrator’s
believability” (qtd. in Altes 119). It can be observed that these textual signals only cover one
type of unreliable narration, so called ‘axiologically unreliable narration’, in which the
narrator shows himself as “morally non-exemplary” (Kindt 132). The textual cues
mentioned above thus say something about the general ethos of a narrator and can serve as
a standard by which readers measure his moral identity.
Although it is often the case that an axiologically unreliable narrator provides a
distorted account of the events, Tom Kindt emphasizes the need for differentiation between
“morally non-exemplary” narrators on the one hand and “narrators which present the story
11
in a misleading way”, which he refers to as “mimetically unreliable narrators”, on the other
hand (Kindt 132-33). Textual cues for this second type of unreliable narrators are harder to
identify; as Chatman explains, one often has to “read out between the lines” in order to
unmask a narrator’s deceitful discourse. Nünning, however, notices that “internal
contradictions within the narrator’s discourse and discrepancies between his utterances
and actions” can serve as useful tools for identifying this kind of narrator (Nünning 54).
Fludernik softens Nünning’s claim by saying that “textual contradictions and
inconsistencies alongside semantic infelicities, or discrepancies between utterances and
action (in the case of hypocrisy), merely signal the interpretational incompatibility […]” of a
speaker (Fludernik 344). To put it in the words of Phelan: these textual cues only
correspond to the narrator’s task of interpreting (along the axis of knowledge and
perception), but say little about his ability to report or evaluate the actions and events of
the story. Moreover, this last task, which can be situated alongside the axis of ethics, highly
resembles Tom Kindt’s distinction of the axiologically unreliable narrator. How helpful
these textual cues may be in defining the narrator’s reliability, it goes without saying that
one always should take in account extratextual frames of reference4 as well as the implied
author of the story when considering a narrator unreliable.
Although Fludernik has argued against the practice of linking stereotyped models of
character to narrative unreliability5, I would like to shortly harp on the notion of the mad
monologist before moving on to the discussion of the Gothic Novel, as I believe it to be
essential when talking about Edgar Allan Poe’s narrators. Moreover, I follow Nünning in his
belief that it is necessary to have “explicit theories of personality or implicit models of
psychological coherence and human behavior” in order to grasp what readers bring to texts
when considering a narrator unreliable (Nünning 47). According to Lars Bernaerts, the
concept of the mad monologist or madman finds it origins in the ideas of Descartes and
Freud and has since then been “subject to cultural and historical developments” (Bernaerts
187). While Descartes indeed emphasized that “madness cannot affect the products of pure
reason”, explaining the intellectual capability of so called ‘mad men’, Freud introduced the
4
Such as general world-knowledge and general literary conventions.
5
“Fludernik has pointed out that this approach introduces “already semanticized” agents into the description
of narratorial agency” (Martens 79).
12
concept of psychoanalysis, providing narrative theory with a way to make sense of
disillusioned and distorted minds (i.e. a naturalization strategy for readers) (qtd. in
Bernaerts 187). Theorists like Fludernik and Nünning have linked these psychological
insights to the concept of unreliability, claiming that a mad monologist’s discourse very
often insists on rational logic in order to validate his or her pervert actions. From a
rhetorical point of view, Bernaerts ascribes calls this literary character the term “fou
raisonnant”, meaning that “it stands for his inclination to rationalize, to reason
hypercorrectly, to be explicit about his narrative intentions and to try to manipulate the
narratee” (Bernaerts 195). It is indeed exactly in these continual attempts to account for his
actions, that the fou raisonnant reveals himself as ‘mad’.
However, this notion only reveals one aspect of the narrator, namely his personal
ethos or moral identity, and thus highly resembles Tom Kindt’s distinction of “morally nonexemplary narrators” alongside the axis of ethics. In contrast, a narrator can also be called
unreliable or ‘mad’ in “what he depicts”, i.e. in presenting the story or fabula in a deceitful
way, correlating with Kindt’s concept of the “mimetically unreliable narrator” (Bernaerts
195). This type of ‘madness’, which Bernaerts refers to as “the fou imaginant”, thus says
something about the narrator’s ability to report (alongside the axis of facts, characters and
events) and “consists mainly in the narrative representation of an alternative, imagined
world as if it were the textual actual world” (Bernaerts 197). However, one should be very
careful in ascribing the term ‘madness’ to a narrator whose representations transgress
mimetic boundaries, since “fictional narrators can do virtually anything, and it is the goal of
antimimetic fiction to radically extend practices far beyond what has been expected,
imagined, or considered possible” (Richardson "Authors, Narrators, Narration" 53). It is
therefore very important to distinguish between ‘unnatural or unusual’ speakers on the one
hand, who create the world they narrate, and insane or mad narrators on the other hand,
whose narrated world and/or account of the events shows clear contradictions.
I want to conclude this section of unreliability by saying that it is mainly
homodiegetic narration, with which this section has thoroughly dealt with and that has
been subject of the study of unreliability throughout the years. The reason for this is that
heterodiegetic narration “is held to be reliable by definition, because the discourse is
primarily deemed responsible for bringing the very fictional world into being […]” (Martens
13
82). However, this does not mean that heterodiegetic narrators are per definition reliable;
Martens is right in saying that “texts with overt narrators [can] qualify for infractions on
reliability which cannot simply be reduced to the playful self-cancellation of fictionality”
(Martens 83). After all, heterodiegetic narrators often function in the same way
homodiegetic narrators do, namely as communicative tools on behalf of the implied author.
I therefore believe that both Phelan’s taxonomy and Nünning’s cognitive model can be used
for the study of unreliable heterodiegetic narration, although one has to keep in mind that
the distance between implied author and narrator in this kind of narration often is much
smaller, meaning that unreliability is less problematic in those cases.
2.3 Gothic narrators: shifting narrative positions
“The story I will tell,” I took upon myself to reply.
“Oh, I can’t wait for the story.”
“The story won’t tell,” said Douglas; “not in any literal, vulgar way.”
“More’s the pity, then. That’s the only way I ever understand.”
(James 118)
Although Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw (1898) was published after the heyday of the
literary Gothic movement roughly between 1760 until 1820, this citation above
appropriately epitomizes the narrative effect the Gothic novel produces on its readers. One
could indeed define the genre as one of ambiguity due to the presence of shifting narrative
positions and the possibility of alternative narrative accounts, often read as a reaction
against the previous ‘age of reason’. In this last part of the first chapter, I will try to link the
debate of the implied author and the concept of unreliability as discussed by theorists like
Phelan and Nünning to the genre of the Gothic Novel in order to get a thorough
understanding of its narrative techniques and estimated effect on the reader. It is important
to notice that this part of the thesis does not aim to provide an overview of the Gothic
narrative developments throughout the years, but rather to find out how concepts such as
the implied author and unreliability can help us in understanding the narrative techniques
of Gothic authors. One could read this section, which regards the Gothic as ‘a set of
conventions’, as an introduction to the case study section of the narrator. In contrast, these
14
case studies investigate the narrative peculiarities of authors such as Poe and Hawthorne in
far more depth by doing a close reading of some of their works.
Similar to Sedgwick’s conception of the Gothic, I tend to think of it as a “formula”, of
which the narrative mechanisms have been adopted by numerous authors throughout the
eighteenth and nineteenth century and thus have been conventionalized: “You know
something about the novel’s form: it is likely to be discontinuous and involuted, perhaps
incorporating tales within tales, changes of narrators, and such framing devices as found
manuscripts or interpolated histories” (Sedgwick 9). This typical ‘framing’ structure is said
to be introduced by Horace Walpole in his The Castle of Otranto (1764), which in its first
edition was presented as a translation of a manuscript printed in 1529, originally dating
back to the times of the crusades. Although Walpole acknowledged his authorship in the
preface of the book’s second edition, it seems “no more trustworthy than the first, since it
defends the tale in terms which are just as unlikely” (Watt 29). This technique of presenting
one’s text as a lost manuscript became an inspiration for later authors such as Hogg and
Maturin and clearly undermined the authorial position of the author in fixing the meaning
of a text: “Whatever his [the author’s] views were, or whatever effects the execution of them
might have, his work can only be laid before the public at present as a matter of
entertainment” (Walpole 6). Rather focusing on the historical figure of the author, whose
intentions in the case of the Gothic Novel are quite obscure, it might then be more useful “to
discern the system of intentionality that explains why the text has this particular shape
rather than some other one” (Phelan and Rabinowitz 32). A remarkable feature of Gothic
narratives is that they tend move away from a direct kind of communication between
author and reader in order to convey “unspeakable” or “unutterable” themes like shame
and guilt. Sedgwick compares them with the “Watergate transcripts”, whose “story does get
through, but in a muffled form, with a distorted time sense, and accompanied by a kind of
despair about any direct use of language” (Sedgwick 14). Paradoxically, we seem to
recognize the intentions of the Gothic (implied) author exactly by his use of deceitful
narrative devices, such as shifting narrators and alternative versions of the story. An
example of a text where this narrative technique is taken to the extreme is Melmoth the
Wanderer (1820), which due to its numerous narrators and tales-within-tales resembles
the structure of a chinese box. According to Garrett, “this basic structural feature becomes a
15
means of dramatizing the force of narrative as a social transaction, as an instrument of
domination or resistance, an affirmation or questioning of shared beliefs” (Garrett 46). It
thus becomes clear that Gothic authors wish to reflect on the misleading medium of
narrative by utilizing sophisticated narrative schemes in their works.
Although I have defined the Gothic in terms of an indirect communication between
(implied) author and reader as result of its “multivoicedness”, it might be observed that not
all Gothic texts function this way (Albright 25). In the so called ‘Supernatural explained’6,
the tension caused by the fallibility of the fabula is resolved by a moral conclusion at the
end of the story. In contrast to Gothic Novels à la Walpole, it becomes clear that the
supernatural is simply generated by the protagonist’s imagination, bringing “readers and
characters back to the eighteenth-century conventions of realism, reason and morality by
highlighting their excessive credulity”(Botting 65). In Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho
(1794) for example, Emily at the end of the novel discovers that the Gothic villain Montoni
is not a supernatural demon, but the leader of a group of banditi. Moreover, a number of
rational explanations are offered which explain “both the mysteries of the castle and those
disturbing secrets closer to home” (Botting 66). One could argue that the implied author
here explicitly addresses the audience in order to complete the ‘gaps’ created by the
unreliable narrator’s discourse. We can thus regard these passages as examples of a
communication between (implied) author and reader. Most critics argue that authors such
as Radcliffe and Reeve used this strategy to give the Gothic genre, which at that time was
controversially received, “a more acceptable face” (Botting 66). Works such as The Mysteries
of Udolpho (1794) or The Old English Baron (1778) indeed seem to have generally pleased
critics in terms of morality, as opposed to ambivalent predecessors such as The Castle of
Otranto (1764).
It is safe to say the unreliability of Gothic narrators plays a major role in evoking
feelings of uncanniness among the reader and thus supports the overall tension and
atmosphere of mystery that surrounds these novels. As we have seen, Gothic authors
deliberately offer multiple perspectives on the story in order to manipulate the reader. Van
6
This refers to Gothic texts in which the supernatural is undercut by means of rational explanations. Authors
like Clara Reeve and Anne Radcliffe very often used this strategy in their works.
16
Gorp mentions most Gothic authors use a heterodiegetic third person narrator to exploit
this function to the fullest. We can thus speak of a ‘mimetically unreliable narrator’ in the
sense of Kindt, who presents the story in a misleading way. An example is the narrator’s
description of the villain Schedoni in Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797):
[…] his spirit, as it had sometimes looked forth from under the disguise of his manners, seemed lofty;
it shewed not, however, the aspirings of a generous mind, but rather the gloomy pride of a
disappointed one. Some few persons in the convent, who had been interested by his appearance,
believed that the peculiarities of his manners, his severe reserve and unconquerable silence, his
solitary habits and frequent penances, were the effect of misfortunes preying upon a haughty and
disordered spirit; while others conjectured them the consequence of some hideous crime gnawing
upon an awakened conscience (Radcliffe 25).
Here, the narrator deliberately leaves the reader in doubt by offering him two possible
versions of Schedoni’s history. According to Phelan’s rhetoric approach, one could here
speak of ‘restricted narration’, since the narrator only fulfills the task of reporting the
events, but refuses to interpret or evaluate them. It is also very often the case that the
Gothic narrator ‘mis- or underinterprets’ certain situations in order to evoke the possibility
of the supernatural, for example when he believes Schedoni to be surrounded by
“something almost superhuman” (Radcliffe 25). As we have seen, these ‘miraculous’
expectations are overthrown at the end of the novel in the case of Radcliffe, replacing the
narrator’s fraudulent version with the implied author’s. Although the chaotic narrative form
with its multiple perspectives is said to be a hallmark of the Gothic, it can be noticed that
this does not result in a distance between text and reader: “Does this shift to the scene of
writing, to the moment of narration many years after the event of the story, suddenly
distance us just as the plot is beginning to thicken? Does it undercut the representational
claims of the narrative, exposing it as a written artifact ad so loosening its grasp on us? Few
readers are likely to respond in such ways” (Garrett 9). One might then indeed describe the
effect the Gothic Novel’s ‘multivoicedness’ produced on its readers in terms of Phelan’s
‘bonding unreliability’. Rather than resulting in an “increase of ethical and interpretive
distance” between narrator and reader (Phelan 11), the Gothic form constantly grips the
17
reader’s attention, encouraging him to act like a detective who has to assemble evidence.
The fact that Gothic Novels at the time were widely popular already affirms this7.
Nevertheless, in general, the Gothic Novel was negatively received by critics of its
time, highlighting its ‘transgressive’ and ‘immoral’ character. This reception history clearly
tells something about the “extratextual frames of reference like the reader’s worldknowledge, cultural models” that were prevalent during the rise of the Gothic Novel
(Nünning 56). Indeed, the eighteenth century was mainly dominated by the movement of
the Enlightenment, promoting virtues as rationality and morality. In this context, the
Gothic’s “writing of excess” would have been perceived by contemporary readers as
‘unconventional’ or ‘marked’ in the ways it challenged the cultural models and literary
conventions, which are all based on a mimetic model (Botting 1). One might then indeed
conclude that in the case of the Gothic Novel, “the projection of an unreliable narrator is not
only informed by textual data [cf. Phelan’s rhetorical approach] […], but also by the
conceptual models of frames previously existing in the mind of the reader or critic”
(Nünning 49).
2.4 Poe’s narrators: Drunkards, madmen and murderers
It might well be argued that Poe’s use of the unreliable first person narrator is one of the
key elements that distinguish him from previous Gothic authors. Although it was not an
entirely innovate technique – authors before him like William Godwin and Mary Shelley had
already employed it in their works – it must be said that he was the first one who used it to
thoroughly explore the most darkest sides of the human mind in a most convincing way.
Inspired by authors of the continent such as Byron and Beckford (his Vathek (1786) might
even be considered a major influence), Poe knew that in order to sell to a large audience,
the Gothic legacy had to be brought to the people in such a way, that “during the hour of
perusal the soul of the reader is at the writer’s control” (Poe “Review on Twice-Told Tales”
298). Still, it was not that economic success was the main motivation behind Poe’s works –
7
T. J. Maththias writes in The Persuits of Literature (1796) that “The spirit of enquiry which he [Horace
Walpole] introduced was rather frivolous, though pleasing, and his Otranto Ghosts have propagated their
species with unequalled fecundity. The spawn is in every novel shop” (qtd. in Botting 45).
18
essays on the aesthetic form of literature such as “The rationale of verse” (1848) indeed
show that Poe was deeply in love with writing -, but it is surely an aspect that should be
taken in account when analyzing Poe’s use of narrative mode. In contrast to the relationship
between work and reader (or implied author and reader if you will), that between narrator
and reader in many of Poe’s tales can be described in terms of “estranging reliability”
(Phelan 11). Similar to “The Tell-Tale Heart”, in “The Black Cat” the narrator at the
beginning of the tale paradoxically reveals his unreliableness by proving that he is mentally
sane: “Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own
evidence. Yet, mad am I not – and very surely do I not dream” (Poe 223). These textual cues,
which Olsen considers to be “explicit self-referential, metanarrative discussions of the
narrator’s believability” (qtd. in Altes 119), indeed inform the reader that the narrator’s
account may be untrustworthy and therefore should be regarded skeptically. As we have
seen in the theoretical part, this kind of narrator can also be linked to the concept of the
mad monologist or what Lars Bernaerts refers to as the “fou raisonnant” (Bernaerts 195).
Again, the unreliability of these narrators shows itself in their constant attempts to justify
the often criminal acts they have committed in the past. As Bernaerts puts it beautifully: “an
excess of rationality brings us back to madness” (Bernaerts 194).
Nevertheless, in some of Poe’s tales, the narrator’s unreliability is unfolded gradually
over the course of the story. An example is Poe’s early “Metzengerstein”, which, in contrast
to most of his later tales, is told by a third person omniscient narrator and this way leans
closer towards the narrative mode employed in most Gothic works. Although already at the
beginning of the story, one may hold the narrator suspect for refusing to situate the story in
time8, his sincerity can seriously be questioned when the link between the death of
Berlifitzing and the appearance of “a gigantic and fiery-colored horse” is not explicitly
stated (Poe 675). As Monnet indicates, until this point in the narrative, the narrator’s
unreliability existed in leaving out certain pieces of information, which forces the reader to
read “through the narrator’s descriptions to get the implied meaning of the horse’s identity”
(Monnet 37). To say it in the words of Phelan, the narrator at this point in the story is
“underinterpreting”, since he’s not establishing a link between the death of the Berlifitzing
8
“Why then give a date to the story I have to tell?” (Poe 672)
19
and the appearance of the mysterious horse, or even “underreporting”, if you take him to be
an omniscient narrator (in which case this bit of information can be considered necessary
for the reader in order to understand the story) (Phelan 10). Whereas the relationship
between narrator and reader might so far be defined in terms of ‘bonding unreliability’ (we
might indeed suspect that the narrator’s unreliable account is caused by ignorance and thus
sympathize with him), the fragment which mentions the “insignificant and misshapen little
page, whose deformities were in everybody’s way, and whose opinions were of the least
possible importance” reveals that the narrator has known the truth all along, but
nevertheless refuses to mention it to the reader explicitly (Poe 677). Subsequently, this may
alter the relationship between narrator and reader in one of ‘estrangement’: the reader now
realizes that the inferences, which he has made in regard to the horse’s identity, were true
all along but have intentionally been kept back by the narrator, thus distancing himself from
the latter.
However, it might be observed that these and other observations can be made by
readers who are acquainted with Gothic tales or with the theory of narrative unreliability,
but do not necessarily belong to every reader’s knowledge. In other words, when
considering the concept of unreliability, one should keep in mind that “the projection of an
unreliable narrator is not only informed by textual data […], but also by the conceptual
models or frames previously existing in the mind of the reader or critic” (Nünning 49). For
example, while a reader who is familiar with Poe’s narrative strategies will immediately
question the reliability of a narrator such as in “The Black Cat”, thus distancing himself from
the deceitful discourse of the latter, the relationship between the narrator and an unskilled
reader might be a bonding one, regardless of the textual cues which are offered by the text.
Poe himself was aware of this, as in his review on Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales (1837) he
makes a distinction between a ‘popular’ audience on the one hand, to whom his tales were
mainly addressed, and a critical audience on the other, who, according to Poe, was capable
of contemplating his design “with a kindred art” (Poe “Review on Twice-Told Tales” 298).
As Garrett writes, Poe was “fascinated with the possibilities of a growing popular audience
he longs to master while attempting to establish his own elite critical authority” (Garrett
38). Subsequently, it can be argued that the frequent use of an unreliable narrator reveals
Poe’s intention of establishing total control over his readers. While the popularity of his
20
tales proves that this strategy had its desired effect on the average, unskilled reader,
literary critics of his time would have been less subject to Poe’s dominating attempts,
instead benefiting from the pleasures a deeper literary understanding in his rhetorical
strategies offered them.
Having said this, we may then consider us to be part of Poe’s ‘elite critical authority’
and further explore the narrative mode of his tales with the help of Phelan’s theory. Monnet
mentions that “narrators can be unreliable in many different ways, but Poe’s narrators tend
to be unreliable in one particular way: like Metzengerstein, they often have no conscience”
(Monnet 38). A most obvious example of this lack of morality can be found in “The Black
Cat”, where the narrator after having killed Pluto notices that “there came back into my
spirit a half-sentiment that seemed, but was not, remorse” (Poe 226). However, in most
tales, the absence of conscience is not explicitly mentioned; rather, “micro-attention to their
technical details [of the criminal acts] serves to distract from their immorality”, which is
part of the narrator’s manipulative strategies (Monnet 39). Still, like mentioned previously,
this excess of rationality paradoxically draws attention to the narrator’s cruel character.
All of these observations can be situated along Phelan’s “axis of ethics”, since they
tell us something about the narrator’s ability to evaluate or assess certain (cultural) values.
Subsequently, Poe’s narrators can be said to be unreliable in the ways they deal with ethics
or morality. Their cruel deeds and the lack of remorse after having committed them can
thus be regarded as an example of Phelan’s “misevaluating” or misregarding (Phelan 10).
Still, it can be noticed that these figures are not entirely bad, which is the main reason why
we tend to sympathize with them. Some of them, like the narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart”
for example, indeed seem to struggle with their ‘inner demons’ (“True! –nervous –very, very
dreadfully nervous I had been and am” (Poe 303)), leading us to suggest that their
psychological state is somewhat more complex than what Monnet is trying to make us
believe. Moreover, when one regards these narratives as an act of self-justification, it
becomes clear that these characters do not suffer from a total lack of conscience.
Subsequently, it could be argued that during some progression, they are not simply
‘misevaluating’ both their actions and inner self, but trying to make sense of it in some way,
while at the same time failing to do so. Therefore, I suggest to speak of “underevaluating” or
21
“underregarding”, since these terms grasp more accurately the conflicting tensions Poe’s
narrators are subject to (Phelan 10).
As we have seen in the theoretical part, narrators that are unreliable along the
Phelan’s axis of ethics’ can more or less be equated with Tom Kindt’s notion of “axiologically
unreliable narrators”, that is “narrators who are morally non-exemplary” (Kindt 132). We
also have seen that these kind of narrators often show a tendency to manipulate the
narratee and “to present the story in a misleading way”, thus being “mimetically unreliable”
(Kindt 132). However, in contrast to the heterodiegetic, omniscient narrators that appear in
most of the early Gothic works, Poe’s use of an unreliable narrator makes it almost
impossible to find out ‘what really happened’ or indeed to unveil the implied author’s ideal
perspective due to the fact that only one, subjective view is offered on the story. Although
the narrator’s moral ambiguity and the killing of his victim towards the end of the story
indeed give us reason enough to question the authenticity of his narrative account, we still
don’t know whether the narrator in the “The Tell-Tale Heart”, for example, is really
bothered by the “pale blue eye” of the old man to the extent that it would have excited him
to kill the latter, or whether he has actually made up this story in order to justify this cruel
deed (Poe 303). As Garrett notices, “[…] the success of any alternative account we may
construct also remains doubtful, allowing us to recognize the necessarily open and
dialogical nature of even the most insistently self-enclosed narrative or authoritative
reading” (Garrett 44). Subsequently, rather than judging the narrator’s unreliability on the
basis of “misreporting”, we are left with cases of “underreporting” along the “axis of facts
and events” (Phelan 10), such as the narrator’s use of the phrase “thirty-two small, white,
and ivory-looking substances” instead of the word “teeth” in “Berenice” (qtd. in Monnet 36).
These and other examples of unreliable narration in Poe’s tales indeed encourage the
reader “to make the gruesome connections in her own mind rather than being told by the
text” and both draw attention to the open character of these stories and Poe’s objective to
constantly manipulate the reader (Monnet 36).
22
2.5 Hawthorne’s narrators: distant, yet authoritative storytellers
In contrast to almost all of Poe’s short tales, most of the narrators we encounter in
Hawthorne’s short fiction are third-person, extradiegetic ones, who can be called
‘omniscient’ due to the fact that they are able to look into the mind of their protagonists.
Nevertheless, in accordance to the conventions of the Gothic tradition as discussed in
chapter 2.3, it might be more precise to speak of a ‘limited omniscient narrator’. Although
one may assume that Hawthorne’s storytellers have known the truth all along, over the
course of the story, they deliberately leave out certain pieces of information, which enables
them to constantly keep the reader’s attention and in a similar way to Poe’s fiction,
guarantees the “open and dialogical nature” of their narratives (Garrett 44). One of
Hawthorne’s solutions to the problem of narrative authority is that his narrators often
explicitly question the reliability of their own stories by claiming that they were orally
transmitted to them. This popular Gothic technique of presenting one’s text as a lost
manuscript or in this case as an orally transmitted narrative is for example used in “The
Wedding-Knell”, whose narrator starts his story by saying that his grandmother “chanced to
be a spectator of the scene, and even after made it her favorite narrative”. As a result of this,
he is “not antiquarian enough to know […] whether the edifice, now standing on the same
site, be the identical one to which she referred” (Hawthorne, Twice-Told Tales 27). These
textual elements, which can said to be examples of Olsen’s “explicit, self-referential,
metanarrative discussions of the narrator’s believability”, serve as clues on the basis of
which readers can hold the narrator suspect (qtd. in Altes 119).
However, in contrast to Poe’s murderous storytellers, the unreliability of
Hawthorne’s narrators is not to be situated along the axis of ethics, but rather along “the
axis of facts and events (where we find misreporting or underreporting)” and “the axis of
understanding/perception (where we find misreading or misinterpreting/underreading or
underinterpreting)” (Phelan 10). A clear illustration of his is to be found in Hawthorne’s
popular “Young Goodman Brown”; here, the narrator throughout the whole tale is
underreporting, since he describes the characters which Brown encounters in the forest
only in terms of “”figures” or “forms””, but “never once refers to them by their names”
(Hostetler 222), as well as “underinterpreting”, which shows itself in his refusal to further
23
elaborate upon Brown’s “present evil purpose” (Hawthorne, Selected Tales 134). As
Hostetler notices, this rather abstract and incomplete account of the events on behalf of the
narrator highly contrasts with the figure of Brown we come to recognize through his
dialogues and internal thoughts, “to whom ambiguity is impossibility” (Hostetler 222). The
intended consequence of the conflicting perspectives Hawthorne offers to his reader is that
one tends to observe the figure of Goodman Brown from an ironic point of view and this
way mock his absolute belief in Puritanism, which highly differs from his external behavior
and deeds9.
It thus becomes clear that, while the narrator’s discourse appears as a distorted and
indeed somewhat unreliable account of the events, we nevertheless tend to prefer his
version of the story over that of Goodman Brown. In contrast to what Hostetler claims in his
paper, I believe this ‘close relationship’ between narrator and reader to be a consequence of
Brown’s deceitful discourse, which, as already mentioned, is characterized by multiple
contradictions and consequently allows the reader to recognize “that adopting [Brown’s]
perspective would mean moving far away from the implied author’s, and in that sense, the
adoption would be a net loss for the author-audience relationship” (Phelan 11).
Nevertheless, it can be observed that this relationship between author and audience, which
corresponds to Phelan’s notion of “bonding unreliability” (Phelan 11), is not only
established in “Young Goodman Brown”, but is characteristic of many of Hawthorne’s tales.
Subsequently, we can assume this intimate author-reader relationship to be a direct
consequence of Hawthorne’s rhetorical strategies, which as Anastasaki mentions, are based
upon the principle of “secrecy” (Anastasaki 178). Not only do many of his narrators free
themselves from “some of the responsibilities we might expect [them] to assume” by
presenting their stories as orally transmitted material, but their frequent of use of highly
ambiguous language simply dismisses the possibility of a final narrative meaning (Dunne
35). While in “Dr. Heidegger’s experiment” the narrator leaves the reader to decide over the
magic qualities of Heidegger’s potion by offering him both natural (“intoxicating qualities”)
9
This narrative irony, which is the result of a discrepancy between the knowledge both reader and narrator
possess and the knowledge the character of Brown possesses, becomes obvious throughout following
passage: “With this excellent resolve for the future, Goodman Brown felt himself justified in making more
haste on his present evil purpose” (Hawthorne, Selected Tales 134).
24
and supernatural explanations (“its enchantment over all their prospects”) for the guests’
sudden transformation (Hawthorne, Twice-Told Tales 234-35), in “The Minister’s Black
Veil” the sense of mystery surrounding the object of the veil can be said to be the result of
both the narrator’s uncanny descriptions and Mr. Hooper’s conflicting claim that it is solely
“a type and a symbol” (Hawthorne, Collected Tales 193).
As a result of the narrator’s ambivalent stance, Hawthorne’s readers are encouraged
to fill in the story’s blank spaces and thus to draw their own (moral) conclusions. As Altes
states, readerly audiences often draw pleasure from playing these “complex games in which
traditional expectations about selves get frustrated” (Altes 118), possibly resulting in a
decrease of “the interpretive, affective, or ethical distance between the narrator” and them
(Phelan 11). Nevertheless, Hawthorne must have been aware of the fact that the use of a
‘remote’ narrator also involves the danger of losing the reader’s attention, which is why he
during certain progressions explicitly makes the former address the latter by means of
questions. A clear example of this is to be found towards the end of “Young Goodman
Brown”, where the narrator forces the reader to reflect upon what he has just witnessed:
“Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest, and only dreamed a wild dream of a witchmeeting?” (Hawthorne, Selected Tales 147). These reflective questions, which invite the
reader to actively engage in the process of storymaking, reveal the unreliability of
Hawthorne’s storytellers in a most clear way, since they demonstrate their refusal to
accurately report, interpret and evaluate the events of the story. Still, throughout certain
progressions, the narrator will reinforce his authority by addressing the audience in the
first person and this way attempt to fill in the ‘gaps’ readers may have stumbled upon while
reading his account. In the first paragraph of “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment”, for example, the
narrator communicates the following to his audience: “And, before proceeding further, I
will merely hint that Dr. Heidegger and all his four guests were sometimes thought to be a
little beside themselves--as is not unfrequently the case with old people, when worried
either by present troubles or woful recollections” (Hawthorne, Twice-Told Tales 228). As
Dunne has noticed, these comments by the narrator can be said to be metaleptical, since
they suggest an overlap between the extradiegetic level of narration, on which the narrator
can be situated, and the intradiegetic level of narration, which is occupied by the story’s
characters (Dunne 39).
25
What is even more interesting about these “frequent manifestations of narratorial
intrustion” is that they enable us examine the narrator’s ethos, or formulated differently, his
ability to ‘evaluate’ the characters and events of the story (Bridgeman 118). Although Olsen
considers “an accumulation of remarks relating to the self as well as linguistic signals
denoting the expressiveness and subjectivity” to be a clear sign of a narrator’s unreliability,
it must be said that Hawthorne’s narrators are quite discreet when it comes to conveying a
moral message to the reader (qtd. in Altes 118). The passage out of “Dr. Heidegger’s
Experiment”, which I mentioned above, proves this; by using both the qualifying adverb
“little” and the verb “thought” and triggering the reader’s framework of general worldknowledge (cf. Nünning), the narrator of this tale attempts to distance himself from the role
of moral judge and hands this task over the reader. This use of cautious language, often
called ‘hedging’, can also be found in “The Wedding-Knell”, when the narrative voice reports
that “If he [Mr. Ellenwood] were mad, it was the consequence, and not the cause, of an
aimless and abortive life” (Hawthorne, Twice-Told Tales 28). Once again, the narrator is
extremely careful in attributing moral values to the character of Mr. Ellenwood, which
shows itself in his use of the conditional sentence “If […]” and the transition from a moral
(“mad”) to a more rational discourse (“the consequence, and not the cause”).
Finally, many critics have also argued that the moral quality of Hawthorne’s tales
cannot be discovered by looking at passages that denote the narrator’s “expressiveness or
subjectivity”, but rather by focusing on his use of allegory and symbolism (qtd. in Altes
118). Boonyaprasop, for example, writes that Hawthorne’s “well-chosen symbols serve as
vehicles to convey his moral teachings to his audience” (Boonyaprasop 41). Still, although
almost all readers would associate the symbol of the veil in “The Minister’s Black Veil”, for
example, with moral virtues such as purity and faith, it can be observed that this literary
device does not always reach its intended effect. In regard to “Egotism or the Bosom
Serpent”, Weston notices that Hawthorne’s “effort to make the snake which gnawed the
chest of Roderik Elliston a symbol of egotism seems a bit forced” (Weston 36). What I’m
trying to say, then, is that the meaning of Hawthorne’s symbols heavily relies upon the
reader’s imagination or “his frames of reference”, leading us to conclude that even when
looking at the symbolic aspect of his tales, no strictly defined moral is to be found in them
(Nünning 54). Moreover, Fernie states that “the irony that we – reader and narrator both –
26
might “fail to find” the moral, suggests not only that this brief sketch’s meanings are not to
be found in explicit form, but also that they may remain obscure to the author” (Fernie
193).
One may thus conclude that Hawthorne’s narrators are unreliable along “the three
main axes of communication, that is, the axis of facts and events […], the axis of
understanding/perception […] and the axis of values […]” (Phelan 10); not only do they
tend to underreport and underinterpret, but their ‘evaluation’ or moral judgement of the
story also remains quite obscure. Finally, it is safe to say that Hawthorne utilized this kind
of unreliable narrator to provoke an interaction between text and reader, which allows the
latter the freedom to fill in the gaps of the story in his own way. This can be linked to
Hawthorne’s belief that it is only the best art which “establishes multiple points of contact
with feelings and experiences common to all men” (Jacobson 23). Nevertheless, his
narrators at times tend to reinforce their authority by explicitly addressing the reader in
the first person, which can be seen as a necessary condition for keeping the reader’s
attention and retaining the bond of sympathy that exists between them.
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3. The aspect of Character
3.1 Three functions to the notion of character: the mimetic, thematic and synthetic
The goal of this second theoretical chapter is to explore how modern narrative theory
makes sense of the concept ‘character’ in regard to fictional texts. Like the first chapter, my
main approach will be a rhetorical one, taking in account the insights of theorists like James
Phelan, Peter J. Rabinowitz, and contrasting them with the ideas of David Herman and Brian
Richardson. While the first two sections of this chapter discuss the concept of character in a
theoretical way, the third part links this notion to the Gothic Novel, providing new insights
in the way Gothic authors use characterization to achieve communicative purposes. Finally,
the fourth and fifth section seek to evaluate how ‘character’ is represented in the works of
respectively Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne by doing an in depth-analysis of
some of their tales.
One of the most powerful aspects of fiction might well be that of characterization.
More than often when reading a literary text, we tend to feel sympathy for certain
characters by recognizing certain emotions they experience and show disgust towards
others because we disapprove their actions. Most readers indeed think of fictional
characters as ‘real human beings’, having an own face, personality and character traits.
Some writers, such as J.K. Rowling, seem to be so skilled in giving their characters a human
dimension that a handful of readers threatened to commit suicide at perceiving the rumor
of Harry Potter’s death in the last book of the series. Nevertheless, most narrative theorists
problematize this view, emphasizing that literary characters must be distinguished from
real persons. It is the achievement of classical narratology, with critics like Vladimir Propp
and A.J. Greimas, to regard literary characters as ““anthropomorphic actants”, performing
“functions” in the story” (Warhol 119). Although from this perspective, literary characters
are reduced to mere functions (subject, object, helper,…), both Propp’s ‘Morphology of the
folktale’ and Greimas’ ‘actantial model’ have shown to be applicable to a wide range of texts.
Nevertheless, Phelan believes this approach to highlight only one aspect of
characterization, namely the “synthetic component”, which must be distinguished from a
“thematic” and “mimetic component”: “Our position is that we should eliminate the
competition between these positions by recognizing that character has both mimetic and
28
synthetic components – and thematic components as well” (Phelan and Rabinowitz 111). In
other words, Phelan’s rhetorical approach works towards a synthesis of different narrative
movements concerning the notion of character. These can be seen as complementary, since
they all feature different aspects of literary characters. Whereas the synthetic component is
used to refer to a character’s function within a narrative schema, the thematic component
highlights certain ideas, themes or even ideologies a literary figure (possibly) represents.
The mimetic component, then, is used to measure the extent to which a character resembles
a real human being, i.e. corresponds to our norms and conventions of realism. The
Unnatural Narratologist Brian Richardson revises this definition by saying in the chapter on
“character” that measuring a character’s mimetic potential is “a considerably more difficult
operation than is usually imagined. It is doubtless more accurate to say that realistic or
mimetic characters are based on perceived, accepted, or imagined personalities of actual
people” (Richardson 132). One may indeed notice that a literary character can never be
truly realistic, since ‘he’ or ‘she’ comes to us only through a limited set of facts and
descriptions. As Richardson points out in his definition, these character facts and
descriptions usually have been conventionalized through literary history, so that one may
regard the notion of character as an intertextual construction. I will elaborate further upon
this idea in the second section of this chapter.
Although I have stated that the different character components can be seen as
complementary, it is important to notice that at a given point in a narrative, one of the three
will be dominant. When one observes the character of Monsieur Du Pont in Radcliffe’s The
Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), for example, it can be argued that at the moment of Emily’s
escape from the castle, our interest is mainly directed toward the synthetic component of
his character, performing the role of ‘helper’. Although the mimetic component might be
visible at different points in the story10, during the escape scene, it is mainly used as a
device for Radcliffe to make her story progress and can thus be said to serve the work’s
communicative purposes. In this respect, it might also be noted that the less a character is
developed (and thus possibly corresponds with E.M. Forster’s notion of a ‘flat character’),
10
For example, when he declares his love for Emily: “Allow me to breathe another fervent sigh for your
happiness” (Radcliffe 426).
29
the more likely our interest will be drawn to the syntactic component of his or her
character. Another observation Phelan and Rabinowitz make is that “the mimetic and
synthetic components are often (though not always) on a seesaw” (Phelan and Rabinowitz
113). In other words, when the mimetic quality of a character is highlighted, we are unable
to see him or her solely as a function within the synthetic storyworld and vice versa.
The relationship between the thematic and the two other components, however,
looks different, since the former can be seen as a “congenial partner of both the mimetic and
the syntactic components” (Phelan and Rabinowitz 113). Whereas the syntactic and the
mimetic component are more or less in conflict with each other, it is almost always possible
to combine one of these two components with a thematic function. However, this does not
mean that the thematic will always be of dominant interest; one could easily link Monsieur
Du Pont to thematic interests, such as the intimate experience of love, or even the
Shakespearean sonnet tradition11, but this doesn’t prevent the syntactic component of his
character from being dominant during Anne’s escape from castle Udolpho. Next to the
syntactic component, it is also “one typical underlying constructive purpose of mimetic
characters […] to link their mimetic traits with thematic functions” (Phelan and Rabinowitz
113). One of the most obvious examples within the Gothic tradition is the characterization
of monstrous or ghostly figures, such as the main protagonist of William Beckford’s Vathek
(1786): “His figure was pleasing and majestic; but when he was angry, one of his eyes
became so terrible, that no person could bear to behold it; and the wretch upon whom it
was fixed, instantly felt backward and sometimes expired” (Beckford 1). As we will see in
the third section of this chapter, which busies itself with Gothic characterizations,
numerous critics have taken interest in these ghostly descriptions, considering them to be
“evocations of cultural anxieties”, such as “the absence of a fixed religious framework as
well as changing social and political conditions” in the nineteenth century (Botting 2).
Although these thematic interpretations are perfectly legit ones, I cannot help thinking that
Beckford here wants do direct our attention to the mimetic component of Vathek’s
character, challenging the “perceived, accepted or imagined personalities of actual people”
11
This becomes clear throughout following passage: “Allow me to breathe another fervent sigh for your
happiness […] and to applaud myself for an affection, which I cannot conquer” (Radcliffe 426).
30
by presenting him in a supernatural way (Richardson 132). Like Botting says, “Gothic
produced emotional effects on its readers rather than developing a rational or properly
cultivated response” exactly by playing with these mimetic boundaries of characterization
(Botting 4).
Before running ahead too much of the third section, we may then proceed to the
second part, which adds a fourth function to the notion of character, namely the
“intertextual”, as Richardson refers to it (Richardson 136). This function busies itself with
the idea that many literary texts do not necessarily introduce new ‘agents’ into the literary
landscape, but rather draw from existing models of character, which have their origins in
“literary history itself” (Richardson 136).
3.2 A fourth function to character: the intertextual
It has happened to almost any reader throughout his or her ‘literary career’: you start
reading a text, and suddenly one of its characters seems to come across as strikingly
familiar, almost as if you have already met them. However, the truth is that you haven’t read
a single work of this author. What may have caused this feeling is the literary phenomenon
Richardson refers to as the “intertextual” (Richardson 136). Throughout literary history,
authors seem to have constantly imitated and recreated certain character types, resulting in
the belief that it is possible to distinguish between “stereotyped models of characters such
as the picaro, the miles gloriosus, the trickster […]” and so on (Nünning 48). One might also
narrow down this view by observing that some figures are recurrent within a certain
literary genre; in fact, the appearance of similar characters in a collection of texts usually is
one of the reasons why critics tend to categorize them under one genre. David Herman
expands this idea by emphasizing the ways in which literary genres attribute particular
emotions to characters: “Narratives at once ground themselves in and help build
frameworks of this sort, as when ghost stories and romance novels link particular kinds of
emotions to recurrent narrative scenarios” (Herman 129). In the context of Gothic Fiction,
one immediately thinks of the innocent heroine, whose feelings of anxiety, usually triggered
by the discovery of a corrupt family secret or the appearance of an evil villain, enable “the
subject to move from a state of passivity to activity” and thus to escape the latter (Botting
31
74-75). It is also often the case that writers reuse and recreate literary figures they invented
themselves, so that it becomes possible to view fictional characters as motivated creations
on behalf of the author. In the case of Shakespeare, this has been particularly attractive,
even to the extent that critics like Poplavskiy V.R. have proposed a typology of
Shakespeare’s characters, “based on temperament dominating traits” (Poplavskiy). Most
readers tend to take delight in the reintroduction of an older character, since this grants
them the opportunity to explore their mimetic and thematic function even further.
I believe that these ways of thinking about fictional characters – both as ‘intertextual
constructs, finding its origins in literary history or within a certain genre, and as motivated
creations on behalf of the author – can be useful in finding out more about the author’s
communicational purposes. Like Brian Richardson explains, “authors can play with these
expectations and make readers wonder how much of the original character will be retained
and how much will be altered” (Richardson 136). It is often the case that authors imitate
literary characters for satirical or parodic purposes; one of the most ancient examples of
this is to be found in Aristophanes’ The Clouds. Here, Socrates is presented as a thief and
leader of the sophists12. At other times, authors will reuse characters in order to establish
their position within the literary canon, as is arguably the case in James Joyce’s Ulysses
(1922) with the depiction of Leopold Bloom, modeled on the characters of Homer’s
Odysseus and Polyphemous (Richardson 136). It thus becomes clear that by creating new
versions of literary personae, authors wish to draw attention to the thematic component of
their characters. Subsequently, one could argue that the intertextual component is “a
congenial partner” of the thematic component as well (Phelan and Rabinowitz 113).
12
Plato’s dialogues (The Socratic Dialogues), which are considered to be the most reliable source of Socrates’
philosophical ideas, state that Socrates rejected the relativist viewpoints of the Sophists. Moreover, he would
have charged no money for teaching, in contrast to the Sophists’ way of working. Therefore, Aristophanes’ The
Clouds can be seen as a mockery on the image of Socrates as represented in Plato’s works.
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3.3 Gothic characters: villains, innocent heroines and anthropomorphic monsters
Until this point, it has become clear that “the relationship among the components of
character in any given narrative (or at any given point in a narrative) depends on the
underlying purpose governing the progression” (Phelan and Rabinowitz 112-13).This
means that at different points in a narrative, the dominance of a component and its
relationship to other components will vary. Nevertheless, I consider it possible to render
some general tendencies concerning the character components of Gothic figures.
Similarly to the narrative mode, Sedgwick notices that the character constellation in
Gothic Fiction is much conventionalized: “You know about the trembling sensibility of the
heroine and the impetuosity of her lover. You know about the tyrannical older man with the
piercing glance who is going to imprison and try to rape or murder them” (Sedgwick 9). It
might indeed be said that the Gothic Novel’s typical characters include the presence of a
beautiful and innocent heroine, who is sexually desired and persecuted by the evil villain, a
‘knightly’ hero (cf. romance), who has to fight the villain in order to restore peace and/or
claim his rightful place as heir, unnatural creatures such as ghosts, vampires and
werewolves and several servants. This has led people, such as Van Gorp, to construct a
Greimasian actantial model of Gothic characters; in the case of Walpole’s The Castle of
Otranto (1764), which is said to have introduced the Gothic character types, Van Gorp
argues that Theodore (subject) attempts to regain both the ownership of the Castle of
Otranto, which implies a search for his true identity, and a marriage with Matilda, later with
Isabella (objects). In the progress of fulfilling this first task, Theodore is helped by the figure
of Father Jerome (helper), who reveals Theodore’s true identity twice, and hindered by the
character of Manfred (opponent), who at once claims to be the rightful owner of Otranto
(Van Gorp 29-31). Although describing characters in terms of their functionality within the
storyworld does little justice to their complexity, it might be noticed that in the case of the
Gothic Novel, this approach can be a useful one. In regard to characterization, one can
indeed argue that “the Gothic is often simplistic in its representation of character, which it
subordinates to plot, scenery and moralizing” (Kilgour 5). In most Gothic Novels, especially
the early ones following Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), we tend to get a black white
division between ‘good’ figures, such as the brave hero, the passive and innocent heroine
33
and the devoted servant on the one hand, and ‘bad or evil’ figures, such as the prototypical
villain (sometimes in the form of a witch), ghosts, demons and other anthropomorphic
creatures on the other. Some critics have considered these character types to be ‘mere’
tools of the author in order to accomplish his or her communicational purposes and to
make the plot of the story progress (which implies the belief that character is subordinate
to plot). This becomes most obvious when looking at characters such as Alfonso the Great in
The Castle, who only makes his appearance in the shape of an ‘unnatural ghost’, crushing
Conrad to death with a gigantic helmet at the beginning of the story, thus enabling Walpole
to start his narrative plot, and Anne Radcliffe’s servants in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794),
such as Annette and Dorothée, who do nothing more than aiding the main protagonists in
their mission.
Despite the arguably “simplistic” characterizations found back in Gothic Novels,
critics like Robert Keily claim that these characters enable Gothic authors to reflect on the
notion of personal identity, which increasingly was being questioned in the postEnlightenment period: “According to Robert Keily, however, the subordination of person to
place enables the Gothic to explore ‘the whole concept of individual identity’, to show
‘human personality as essentially unstable, inconsistent’” (Kilgour 5). The focus on the
synthetic component of character in Gothic Fiction thus inevitably involves a thematic
reflection or component, which “seems to suggest that the reward of modern change is the
emergence of a world made up of alienated obsessed individuals, who can relate to each
other only as enemies” (Kilgour 12). An interesting example next to the figure of the
servant, which proves this point, is the female heroine. It can be observed that in most
Gothic works, the heroine is presented as “notoriously passive and infantile”, only attaining
meaning in relation to male characters; in fact, all women in Gothic literature seem to
function in such a way (Kilgour 33). In this context, an important name can be said to be
Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote the following on this subject:
In many works of this species, the hero is allowed to be mortal, and to become wise and virtuous as
well as happy, by a train of events and circumstances. The heroines, on the contrary, are to be born
immaculate; and to act like goddesses of wisdom, just come forth highly finished Minervas from the
head of Jove (qtd. in Kilgour 77).
34
Here, Wollstonecraft draws attention to the fact that women characters in Gothic texts are
reduced to mere functions; more than often, they are nothing more than the lustful ‘object’
of the male villain. Their innocence and pureness, having resulted in the trope of the
“persecuted maiden”, are necessary conditions for their subordinate role within the story
(Van Gorp 19). It might then indeed be noticed that the focus on the synthetic component of
female characters in Gothic literature produces a “heightening of our interest in the
thematic” (Phelan and Rabinowitz 113). Wollstonecraft argues that by portraying women in
a similar way, Gothic authors have given rise to the image of the solitary woman, who is
“confined to the private domestic sphere […] [and] denied the true limits and inward
authority of reason” (Kilgour 78). In contrast to the female Gothic tradition, which exposed
the reality of women in a much more negative way, male authors, such as Lewis, have
always idealized the segregation of women, teaching them “to despise freedom and to see
their servitude as a higher form of existence” (Kilgour 76). An example of this ‘male’
ideology can be found in Lewis’ The Monk (1796). Here, Elvira prevents her daughter from
reading the bible and thus to access the ‘authority of reason’:
“That prudent Mother, while She admired the beauties of the sacred writings, was convinced, that
unrestricted no reading more improper could be permitted a young woman. Many of the narratives
can only tend to excite ideas the worst calculated for a female breast: Every thing is called plainly and
roundly by its name; and the annals of a Brothel would scarcely furnish a greater choice of indecent
expressions” (Lewis 259).
While female figures (especially in the case of the male Gothic tradition) approach
Forster’s notion of ‘flat character’, it can be observed that male characters are presented as
being more complex and developed. An example is the typical gothic villain, whose “moral
ambiguity […] forces the reader to mediate between a rational understanding of overt
actions and an intuitive sympathy for covert motivations” (Snodgrass 351). While there are
several subtypes of the gothic villain to be distinguished (Byronic hero, Satanic hero, Poe’s
murderers), all of these have in common that they are granted a clear mimetic dimension.
Although in the previous part I have stated that, on several occasions in the story, the
villain’s ‘unnaturalness’ is highlighted by means of frightening physical descriptions –
which serves the author’s purpose of provoking anxiety with the reader – at other times, we
seem to sympathize with them because of their ‘outcast’ position. Indeed, these individuals
35
are rebels, whose repeated refusals to conform to society’s norms grant them the status of
anti-heroes. This will become particularly clear when we take a look at both Poe’s and
Hawthorne’s villains in the case study section; although their often sinful actions tend to
elicit disgust in the reader, both authors cleverly employ methods of characterization to
enable readerly identification. The complex bundle of both mimetic and anti-mimetic traits,
that characterizes these villains, supports the author’s purpose of giving their texts a
‘revolutionary’ face. It may then again be noticed that, apart from the (in this case quite
complex) mimetic component of character, a thematic component is to be distinguished
here: although the villain reaches autonomy, his freedom “turns out to be incompatible with
relationships, and produces total isolation” (Kilgour 38).
A last point I want to discuss before moving on to the case studies is the
“intertextual” component of Gothic characters. One can observe that Gothic authors drew
from a wide range of texts in order to construct their characters, including (early) Gothic
Novels. Although most critics believe that Walpole was the first to introduce the character
typology, which become so typical for the Gothic form, it must be said that later authors
have constantly widened the scope of the Gothic by transforming and redefining its
characters. For example, while it is the achievement of William Beckford to have unmasked
the darker side of the human psyche in his Vathek (1786) (a work which undoubtedly
influenced authors such as Edgar Allan Poe), both Shelly and Godwin can be held
responsible for introducing “the creation of an artificial human being” into the Gothic
discourse (Hennessy 21). Moreover, Hennessy argues that Anne Radcliffe in her works
draws more attention to the mimetic component of the servant’s character (in contrast to
Walpole), “giving [him] more depth and humour” (Hennessy 23). Nevertheless, most of
these characters can be traced back to earlier traditions, and this use of intertextuality must
have been particularly important for Gothic authors considering that the genre was a
greatly contested one at the time. Kilgour mentions that by drawing on sources like
Schiller’s Robbers and Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Macbeth, “the gothic both suggests its own
‘anxiety of influence’, its fears about its own rightful place in the English literary line, and
tries to assuage it, by showing it can choose its own fathers” (Kilgour 40).
A character that is often mentioned in this context is that of the tyrannical villain,
who is said to have been modeled upon the figure of Satan John Milton depicted in his
36
Paradise Lost (1667). It is indeed little surprising that the theme of “the individual who
fights against an oppressive tradition” (which can also be linked to Schiller’s Robbers)
appealed to authors like Byron and Lewis, as this perfectly applied to the struggles they,
and arguably numerous Gothic authors, faced at the time. As I have shortly mentioned
above, the Gothic movement must be read in the light of the historical movements
surrounding the 18th and 19th century. These include the dominance of “a modern
enlightened secular world which denies the existence of supernatural forces” and the
boundless belief in ‘cold’ reason (Kilgour 3). In this context, the thematic component of the
villain’s character can be understood as a rebellion against these dominant forces at work,
but at the same time signifies the isolation that goes together with their rejection. The
passive and innocent heroine, then, can be compared to Milton’s character of Eve, who falls
victim to the snake’s temptations by eating the forbidden fruit, but arguably finds its origins
in medieval chivalries such as Beowulf or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The gothic
obsession with the physical appearance of women, functioning as a symbol of pureness and
virginity, probably even dates back to ancient Greek Mythology with its representations of
Helena of Troy.
Other characters such as the knightly hero (cf. Manfred in The Castle of Otranto) and
‘unnatural’ creatures such as ghosts, werewolves and vampires (which in Gothic Novels are
always pushed to extremes) can directly be linked to the chivalric romance, which of course
was one of the most influential sources for the Gothic genre. I conclude this section by
saying that the intertextual component of Gothic characters can best be understood in
terms of a return to the past. By constructing texts “out of […] bits and pieces ”, the Gothic
authors shows past and present to be intertwined; although certain historical characters
might already have been ‘buried’, numerous Gothic authors have illustrated their relevance
to problems of identity and modernization they were facing back in the 18th and 19th
century (Kilgour 39). Moreover, this strategy of reusing certain literary characters enabled
them to establish their own place within the English literary tradition.
37
3. 4 Poe’s characters: from hypochondriac villains to one-dimensional women
Surely, no other character in Poe’s tales has received more scholarly attention than that of
the male villain, or if you will, the cold-blooded murderer. This is no remarkable fact,
considering that this figure appears in almost all of the ‘mystery tales’ and is the principle
medium through which the story is narrated to the reader. As we have seen in the part on
the narrator, the consequence of Poe’s use of a first person narrator is that narrative
elements such as character and space are subject to this subjective voice; in other words,
there is no clear distinction to be made between fabula and sujet. However, from a
rhetorical perspective, the impossibility of this distinction is less problematic, since “such
analytical precision comes at the cost of explanatory power” (Phelan and Rabinowitz 37).
Simply put, the way in which a narrator articulates his story, already tells us something
about the intentions of an author – and after all, that is what a rhetorical approach is largely
interested in. Moreover, Poe’s use of a first person narrator grants us access to the thoughts
and motivations of his murderers, extending the possibilities of their characterization
significantly. As a consequence of this, our attention is immediately drawn to the mimetic
component of Poe’s villains. While at the beginning, we have the impression that these
figures might be perfectly normal human beings, our perception of them gradually changes
towards the end of each tale, when their violent behavior and sense of perverseness is
revealed. Thus, over the course of the tales, Poe gradually builds up the anti-mimetic
component of these characters; they are anti-mimetic, not in a supernatural sense, but
rather in the way their behavior contrasts with that what most readers would consider to
be the ‘standard’ or ‘normal’, thus deviating from “what is usually referred to as ‘common
sense’” (Nünning 47). Like we have seen in the first part, these narrators can be linked to
Lars Bernaerts’s notion of the “Fou raisonnant”, which “stands for […] [the] inclination to
rationalise, to reason hypercorrectly, to be explicit about […] narrative intentions and to try
to manipulate the narratee” (Bernaerts 195). Both the narrator’s claim in “The Black Cat”
“Yet, mad am I not – and very surely do I not dream” (Poe 223) and that of the narrator in
“The Tell-Tale Heart” “[…] but why will you say that I am mad?” (Poe 303) indeed point
towards this urge of justifying one’s actions. One could even go on asking why the narrator
is telling us this story at all; the most obvious answer to that question would then indeed be
38
that the narrator somewhat regrets what he’s done and subsequently wishes to account for
it.
Nevertheless, at some points in the story, we also tend to feel sorry for these villains
and even sympathize with them. Many of these figures (such as the narrators in “The Black
Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” or the character of Usher in “The Fall of the House of Usher”)
indeed seem to suffer from some kind of mental illness or obsession, which make us suspect
that the violent and cruel deeds they commit are beyond their own control. While Usher’s
“acute bodily illness – of a mental disorder which oppressed him […]” indeed points
towards this direction (Poe 232), “the thousand injuries of Fortunato I had born as best as I
could” in The Cask of Amontillado (1846) might seem a plausible motivation for Montresor’s
revenge (Poe 274). Still, we have to keep in mind that these narrators are not necessarily to
be trusted and that the confession of a serial killer might indeed look something like an
Edgar Allan Poe tale. What is important for my argument, then, is that by highlighting the
human aspect of his villains in some progressions, and by playing it down in others, Poe is
intentionally confusing the reader in his attempt to get a grasp of this character. In this
respect, it might be noted that some of these progressions are rather ambiguous, which
again shows the complexity of the mimetic component of Poe’s villains. Critics such as
Magistrale and Poger have also drawn attention to the thematic component of these
characters, pointing out that they are “isolatoes [who] are in rebellion against some
restrictive moral or physical law that denies them their poetic place in the universe”
(Magistrale and Poger 7). They are indeed outlaws, who due to their morally ambiguous
nature and violent impulses are rejected from society and subsequently “cannot and do not
subsist outside the physical spheres in which they dwell” (Magistrale and Poger 6). As
Fisher notices, Poe’s villains are highly influenced by “the Faust-like characters from
Renaissance revenge tragedy and classical mythology”, which he most likely had
encountered in the works of Romantic authors such as Lord Byron and Mary Shelly (Fisher
80). However, when paying close attention to the intertextual component of these
characters, it can be observed that in contrast to the earlier Romantic villains, more
attention is devoted to the inner workings of their mind and psyche. James B. Twitchell
even claims that “Poe’s art was the first to make the teller of tale into an invading monster”,
39
emphasizing Poe’s use of a first person narrator to direct our attention to the villain’s
interiority (Magistrale and Poger 5).
Next to the recurring murderers, other characters that often appear in Poe’s tales are
animals, such as the cat in “The Black Cat”, the supernatural horse in “Metzengerstein” or
the golden beetle in “The Gold-Bug”. All of these animals have in common that they possess
supernatural qualities, which is the main reason our attention immediately is drawn to the
mimetic component of their character. While the narrator in this first tale is struck by the
appearance of similar cat to the one he killed days before, the arrival of “a gigantic and
fiery-colored horse” in “Metzengerstein” goes together with the disappearance of an
identical-looking horse, represented in a tapestry of the Frederik’s palace (Poe 675). In “The
Gold-Bug” then, William Legrand claims to be bitten by a golden scarab-like bug, which, as it
seems, has injected him with an enthusiastic desire of going on some kind of expedition,
ultimately leading to the discovery of “a treasure of incalculable value” (Poe 56). What is
remarkable about all of these animals next to their supernatural character is the fact that
they seem more rational and thus ‘human-like’ than their ‘human’ counterparts. The latter
indeed are subject to brutal and irrational behavior, which suggests a reversal of roles.
Benjamin Franklin Fisher shares this view, as he mentions that “In the former [“The Black
Cat”], as in “Metzengerstein”, animal and human characteristics are reversed as the
narrator, who, whatever his disclaimers, reveals, bit by bit (to create a buildup of suspense),
that he is indeed quite sadistic and maniacal – or animalistic – while the cats seem to
become quite human” (Fisher 86). As a consequence of the anthropomorphic nature of
Poe’s animals, our attention is also directed towards their thematic function or purpose
within the story. In this respect, one can regard them as a personification of “a modern
enlightened secular world which denies the existence of supernatural forces” and attempts
to contain irrational behavior, to which most of Poe’s madmen are subject (Kilgour 3). This
can be linked with Magistrale and Poger’s belief that these animals symbolize “icons of
property, [which] must be destroyed if the narrator is to attain the sort of freedom he
craves” (Magistrale and Poger 7).
In contrast to the mimetic and thematic, the synthetic function of Poe’s characters
becomes most obvious when looking at his representation of women. Weekes mentions
that “Poe never truly wrote about women at all, writing instead about a female object and
40
ignoring dimensions of character that add depth or believability to these repeated
stereotypes of the beautiful damsel” (Weekes 150). Here, the two main functions of Poe’s
female characters our attention in almost all progressions is drawn to, are pointed out: on
the one hand, Weekes notices the dominance of the synthetic function, based on the fact
that the women in Poe’s tales are almost always described out of the perspective of the
male narrator and can thus be seen as their ‘object of desire’; on the other, a tendency to
adopt the classic image of the innocent and persecuted damsel is observed, which reveals
the intertextual component of these characters13. In this respect, Poe follows the
conventions of Gothic tradition, since, as I have discussed in the previous part, authors like
Walpole and Lewis offered an idealized view of women in their works and had little or no
attention for their individuality, granting them the status of flat characters. An example of
this in Poe’s tales is the representation of the lady Madeline in “The Fall of the House of
Usher”. Apart from her seemingly supernatural resurrection at the end of the tale, over the
course of the story she is only seen once14 and at no point is she given a voice. Rather, she
only attains meaning in relation to her brother, through whom she is described. Moreover,
the fact that “the entire family [of Usher] lay in the direct line of descent, and had always,
with very trifling and very temporary variation, so lain” suggest that Usher was in an
incestuous relationship with his sister, and thus possibly regarded her as ‘his object’ (Poe
232).
Another of Poe’s tales that has been often researched for its representation of
women is “Ligeia”. Although Elien Martens defends the statement that “Ligeia” “is a
successful feminist tale” due to its representation of “a strong, powerful “new woman””
(Martens 61), I believe it is fairly similar to “The Fall of the House of Usher” in the way it
deals with women. As Johanyak has pointed out, the narrator’s idealized descriptions of
Ligeia “suggest [that she is] more a ghost than a woman” (qtd. in Martens 59); the same is
true for his next woman, Rowena, who is even less extensively described, and this way,
according to Kennedy, “remains a nonentity” (qtd. in Martens, 61). It thus becomes clear
13
The image of the ‘damsel in distress’ or ‘persecuted heroine’ already appeared in classic texts and was part
of the Greek mythology. Later, it appeared in the works of medieval, Victorian and Gothic authors.
14
“While he spoke, the lady Madeline (for so was she called) passed slowly through a remote portion of the
apartment, and, without having noticed my presence, disappeared” (Poe 236).
41
that by presenting women as the object of his narrators, Poe puts the emphasis on the
synthetic component of their character, which results in a decrease of their mimetic
qualities. Consequently, Poe’s women cannot be regarded as fictional characters with an
own identity, but always attain meaning in relation to their male counterparts.
3.5 Hawthorne’s characters: Living symbols, likeable villains and rebellious women
Similar to Poe’s short fiction, the literary figures that appear in Hawthorne’s tales rarely are
one or two-dimensional ‘constructs’; rather, most of them are given a complex personality
and several mimetic traits, which allows the reader to sympathize with them. An example of
this is the scientist Rappaccini in “Rappaccini’s daughter”, who, although most readers
would hold him responsible for the death of Beatrice, at the end of the tale reveals his
human side by saying that he only wanted the best for his daughter and protect her from
“the condition of a weak women, exposed to all evil” (Hawthorne, Collected Tales 420).
However, it can be observed that this mixture of positive and negative traits, which grants
most of Hawthorne’s characters their clear mimetic dimension, is not be found in all of his
tales. A text that has been often discussed for its allegorical and symbolic representations of
both character and space is “Young Goodman Brown”, which immediately draws attention
to the synthetic component of both “Faith” and “Goodman Brown” by associating their
character as such with a single emotion or virtue. At the beginning of the tale, the
interaction between the couple, which is strongly influenced by a Puritan discourse, indeed
seems to point towards the direction that both figures embody exactly what their name
refers to. Not only does Faith address her man with the divine words “Then God bless you
!”, but she herself appears to represent the Puritan ideal of femininity by confining herself
to the domestic sphere obediently saying her prayers before going to sleep (“say thy
Prayers […] and go to bed at dusk, and no harm will come to thee”) (Hawthorne, Collected
Tales 133). In Hawthorne’s depiction of these one-sided characters, skilled readers will
immediately recognize the influence of chivalric romances, such as Spenser’s The Fairie
Queene (1590), whose portrayal of allegorical figures such as ‘Temperance’ and ‘Chastity’
are assumed to have intentionally fashioned early modern culture. However, when paying
further attention to the intertextual function of these characters, it can be noticed that
42
Hawthorne’s text questions the validity of these religious values. While Goodman Brown
towards the end of the tale discovers his Faith to be part of the “grave and dark-clad
company”, whose aim it is “to penetrate, in every bosom, the deep mystery of sin, the
fountain of all wicked arts” (Hawthorne, Collected Tales 143-45), Goodman Brown himself
at a certain point seems to resemble the devil, “brandishing his staff with frenzied gestures,
now giving vent to an inspiration of horrid blasphemy […]” (Hawthorne, Collected Tales
142). Subsequently, it can be said that by emphasizing their negative traits, Hawthorne
during certain progressions intentionally draws attention to the mimetic function of his
allegorical characters in order to criticize the religious and/or Puritan ideal they originally
stood for.
Nevertheless, it might be noticed that when looking at Hawthorne’s villains, complex
and three dimensional characterizations are more than often absent, at least of course,
when one shares Luecke’s belief that “the distinction from villainy is in that the evil to
others is an indirect result of the personal sin, not the intended result” (Luecke 553). Simply
put, Luecke regards villains as those who intentionally inflect harm or damage to others and
thus can be seen as evil in nature. However, it must be said that characters which
correspond to this definition only rarely appear in Hawthorne’s tales. This can be explained
by the fact that the author himself did not belief in the existence of such human beings.
Subsequently, when encountering these ‘creatures’ in his tales, our attention is always
directed to the anti-mimetic component of their character. While the title character of
“Ethan Brand”, for example, is described as having “a tin, rugged, thoughtful visage, with the
grizzled hair hanging wildly about it, and those deeply-sunken eyes, which gleamed like
fires within the entrance of a mysterious cavern” (Hawthorne, Collected Tales 424),
Goodman Brown’s guide into the forest seems to carry a “staff, which bore the likeness of a
great black snake, so curiously wrought, that it might almost be seen to twist and wriggle
itself like a living serpent” (Hawthorne, Collected Tales 135). These symbolic and allegorical
descriptions, through which both Ethan Brand and the guide are described, lead us to
suggest that these ‘characters’ are not to be equated with human beings, but rather
represent pure evil or “the unpardonable sin” as such (cf. Ethan Brand). The fact that their
43
appearance cannot be separated from the character’s sensory perception15 also encourages
a psychoanalytic interpretation of these texts, which states that “through the dream
metaphor the many hints of Brown’s unconscious fascination with evil are communicated
[…]” (Levy 376). Apart from the heightening of our interest in the thematic function of these
characters, the absence of a mimetic component also forces us to consider their synthetic
function within the story. Due to the fact that these characters embody ‘pure evil’, it could
be argued that they hinder the subject’s (Goodman Brown) pursuit of the object (Faith),
thus performing the role of opponent.
Nevertheless, as mentioned before, most of the characters Hawthorne presents in his
tales are three-dimensional; although they clearly are subject to guilt and sin, this is often
an unintended result of their actions, which allows the reader to sympathize with them.
However, I again want to draw attention to the fact that not all readers will judge these
characters in the same way and that our projection of mimetic qualities onto literary
characters is highly informed “by the conceptual models or frames previously existing in
the mind of reader or critic” (Nünning 49). Nevertheless, we may believe Luecke’s
statement “Hawthorne doubtless found human nature also an artistic problem when he
wanted to portray sin and its consequences in realistically human persons and situations”
and consequently assume that the depiction of ‘mixed’ characters was part of Hawthorne’s
artistic intentions (Luecke 558).
A recurrent example of such a ‘mixed’ character in Hawthorne’s tales is that of the
doctor or scientist, who, after having watched the fatal outcome of his experiment, becomes
a sinner. However, when following Lueke’s definition, these characters can be said to be
‘non-villains’ due to the fact that their sin was unintended and appears as a consequence of
the, nevertheless, ‘dangerous’ science. An example of such a character is Aylmer, who in
“The Birth-mark” proposes to remove the birthmark on the face of his wife Georgiana
because it would it would highlight her “earthly imperfection” (Hawthorne, Collected Tales
260). Although Aylmer, as the story progresses, becomes increasingly hesitant about
following through with his plans, Georgiana insists upon trying the experiment, which
15
“Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest, and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting?”
(Hawthorne, Collected Tales 147).
44
ultimately causes her to die: “Remove it! Remove it! - whatever be the cost - or we shall
both go mad!" (Hawthorne, Collected Tales 274). It can be noticed that the figure of Aylmer
has a lot in common with Shelly’s Dr. Watson or Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll, all of them who can
be linked to “the Faust-like characters from Renaissance revenge tragedy and classical
mythology”(Fisher 80)16. What these figures have in common is their desire to correct
“what Nature left imperfect, in her fairest work!” by means of science in order to achieve a
divine-like status (Hawthorne, Collected Tales 264).
However, over the course of the text, Hawthorne numerously draws attention to the
mimetic component of Aylmer’s character by means of character dialogue17, which allows
us to “clear him of a villainous nature of intention” (Luecke 554). The same is true for
characters such as Dr. Heidegger, or even Dr. Rappaccini, whose seemingly evil nature is
always counteracted by illuminating both sides of the story. Subsequently, it becomes
possible to link Hawthorne’s sinful, nevertheless human characters to the larger Gothic idea
that the self is no longer in total control of itself, but rather subject to “the uncertain bounds
of imaginative freedom and human knowledge” (Botting 10). This belief must be regarded
in the context of the rapid social, political, cultural and scientific changes that took place
throughout the 19th century. By granting his sinful characters a clear human dimension,
Hawthorne shows that evil and corruption are persuasive forces that can absorb anyone,
and especially those (scientists) who transgress the boundaries set by human institutions
such as religion.
To end with this section with, we may take a brief look at the representation of
women in the short fiction of Hawthorne. Although characters such as Faith, Beatrice and
Georgiana at first sight seem to affirm the Gothic image of the damsel in distress – it may
indeed be argued that all of these women are in some way subject to the desires of their
male counterparts -, when taking a closer look at these texts, a humble shift towards more
female autonomy can be noticed. This changing attitude towards gender can be said to both
16
Gothic authors often transformed the character of Faust into a morally ambiguous scientist in order to
address the status of religion, which throughout the nineteenth century increasingly was being questioned
due to the emergence of science.
17
Aylmer at a certain point acknowledges the fallibility of his science: "Because, Georgiana," said Aylmer, in a
low voice, "there is danger" (Hawthorne, Collected Tales 274).
45
reflect Hawthorne’s personal experiences with women18 and the social transitions that took
place in American society throughout the nineteenth century, which allowed women to
gradually move into the ‘masculine’ public realm. As discussed previously, the character of
Faith in “Young Goodman Brown”, for example, rebelliously rejects her confinement within
the domestic sphere, as she leaves home without the permission of her husband and joins
the “grave and dark-clad company”, which under the command of powerful women such as
Goody Cloyse and Martha Carier proposes “to penetrate, in every bossom, the deep mystery
of sin” (Hawthorne, Collected Tales 143-45). A similar revolt against a patriarchal structure
of society be found in “The Birth-mark”, which presents the character of Georgiana as a selfdetermined women who can decide her own destiny19, or in “Rappaccini’s Daughter”, in
which the destruction of the beautiful, yet deadly poisonous Beatrice can be read as “a
critique of the diseased masculinity of the nineteenth century” (Stefanovici 432).
In all of these texts, Hawthorne attempts to break away from the idealized image of
‘the persecuted maiden’ by drawing attention to the mimetic component of their character
and refusing to portray them as a mere ‘function’ (as the ‘object’ of male desire) within the
story. By doing this, he distances himself from the male Gothic tradition, to which Edgar
Allan Poe can also be said to belong. Nevertheless, as Easton writes, Hawthorne’s “fiction
does not speak from any unambiguously feminist position even while it poses many of that
feminism’s key questions” (Easton 97). In other words, while Hawthorne increasingly tries
to move away from prototypical presentations of women as passive and subordinate
creatures in his tales, at the same time, he is still subject to the in the nineteenth-century
dominant concept of ‘true womanhood’, which defined the role of women in terms of “piety,
purity, submissiveness and domesticity” (Welter 152).
18
Alison Easton in “Hawthorne and the question of women” writes that Hawthorne was raised “in an
extended family that included several generations of women, in a town with powerful women and a state that
included many independent minded, unmarried women, including his sister, Ebe, and his sister-in-law, the
educationalist and associate of the Transcendentalists, Elizabeth Palmer Pebody” (Easton 81).
19
This becomes clear throughout the following passage: "Nay, Aylmer," said Georgiana with the firmness of
which she possessed no stinted endowment, "it is not you that have a right to complain. You mistrust your
wife; you have concealed the anxiety with which you watch the development of this experiment. Think not so
unworthily of me, my husband. Tell me all the risk we run, and fear not that I shall shrink; for my share in it is
far less than your own" (Hawthorne, Collected Tales 273).
46
4. The aspect of space
4.1 Narrative space as a character within the story world: the return of the four
functions
As James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz point out in the beginning of their essay on
‘narrative worlds’, when discussing the setting of narratives in an educational environment
(say for example in high-school), educators oftentimes tend to focus on the thematic aspect
of it; that is, to view setting as a symbol within the narrative, carrying certain ideological
and political meanings (Phelan and Rabinowitz 84). From a rhetorical point of view, this
way of teaching pupils about narrative setting is short-sighted. After all, when paying
attention solely to the symbolical value of narrative setting, one tends to lose sight of the
complexity of this phenomenon. Critics such as Phelan indeed argue that, next to a thematic
dimension, narrative spaces also contain synthetic and mimetic elements, which, depending
on the progression within the narrative, can be highlighted by the author in order to
achieve certain communicational purposes. Literary settings are thus, in a similar way to
characters, regarded as communicational tools, which the author uses to fulfill the above
mentioned communicative functions. In this first section of the chapter, I will further
explain the ways in which authors make use of these functions when providing their
narratives with a setting by drawing mainly on the ideas of James Phelan and Peter J.
Rabinowitz. Similar to what Brian Richardson did in the discussion of character, I will
expand Phelan’s theory by adding a fourth category to it, namely the ‘intertextual’. In a
second part of this chapter then, the emphasis is put on the ‘mimetic function’ of narrative
setting, which can be broadened by drawing on the insights of critics like Brian Richardson,
highlighting the anti-mimetic nature of certain literary spaces, and David Herman, taking in
account the cognitive frames readers use to make sense of setting. In harmony with the
overall structure of my thesis, a third section will concern itself with the setting of the
Gothic Novel, illustrating how a rhetorical approach can deepen our understanding of how
Gothic authors use space to achieve communicational purposes. Finally, the fourth and fifth
parts of this chapter explore how space is given shape in American Gothic Fiction by looking
at the tales of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
47
A first function that can be ascribed to the literary setting of a narrative is that of the
synthetic or the formal. Evelyn May Albright explains that this “function of the setting is to
furnish, in the best possible way for any given story, the conditions of time and place and
characters which shall make that story possible and actual” (qtd. in Phelan and Rabinowitz
85). It can be observed that this function of setting is the most prominent throughout a
narrative, since in most progressions, literary space is simply used to make the narrative
plot and its characters ‘function’. To put it in another way, most narratives are primarily
concerned with the representation of human behavior, so that literary space is often a
necessary condition for these representations to actually ‘work’. For example, when one
assumes that Horace Walpole in his The Castle of Otranto (1764) aimed to represent the
complex cultural fears and anxieties which haunted the eighteenth century, it becomes
obvious that his decision to use a “decaying, bleak […]” castle “full of hidden passageways”
as the setting for his work was not a random one; it clearly served to magnify and/or
provoke feelings of uncanniness (Botting 2). Similar to the synthetic function of character,
the formal component of setting also functions by means of opposition. Phelan and
Rabinowitz explain that “At their most schematic, these distinctions are only loosely
connected to the content of the setting; that is, it may be the contrast itself, rather than the
inherent qualities of the settings, that’s crucial […]” (Phelan and Rabinowitz 85). In other
words, when one is interested in the synthetic component of setting, it is irrelevant to focus
on its semantic characteristics; rather, one should regard it as an oppositional entity within
a schematic model.
It might then again be noticed that the relationship between the synthetic and
mimetic component of setting is a conflicting one: “when a progression increases our
interest in one, it tends to decrease our interest in the other” (Phelan and Rabinowitz 113).
In other words: the more one regards setting as a ‘functional entity’, the less one tends to
think of it as “independent of any authorial construction” (Phelan and Rabinowitz 87).
Nevertheless, it is important to realize that between these ‘extremes’, there exists a grey
zone and that depending on the progression of the narrative, our interest may shift from
one function to another. In this context, one may observe that the mimetic function of
setting in realist fiction, whose logic assumes the illusion of an autonomous world, is not
always of dominant interest. Although we may during the course of the narrative consider
48
its setting to be realistic – this is like Phelan says “the consequence of the double logic of
realism, both in terms of its construction and in terms of its reception” – this doesn’t mean
that the mimetic character of setting (by offering realistically accurate descriptions) is
highlighted or even thematized at all times (Phelan and Rabinowitz 86). This allows the
setting’s other functions (the synthetic and the thematic) to be dominant during other
progressions in the narrative. Obviously, the same is true for texts who “move beyond realworld notions of time and space, thus taking us to the most remote territories of conceptual
possibilities”, as we will see in the second and third section of this chapter, as well as in the
case studies on Poe and Hawthorne (Alber and Heinze 6). During certain progressions, the
author will focus on the anti-mimetic or unnatural character of his setting (in which case
the mimetic or if you will the ‘anti-mimetic’ function of setting is dominant), while at other
times the location will simply serve to reinforce the story’s plot and characters.
Nevertheless, Phelan and Rabinowitz mention that critics like Brooks and Warren
show themselves skeptical towards the idea of granting the mimetic aspect of setting a
separate function. The latter believe that “description of setting is not to be judged simply in
terms of realistic accuracy; it is to be judged in terms of what it accomplishes for a story”
(qtd. in Phelan and Rabinowitz 87). Against this hierarchal idea of placing the thematic
‘above’ the mimetic function of a story stands Phelan’s belief that the synthetic, mimetic and
thematic components should be considered equally important. As a consequence of this, he
concludes that “readerly pleasure in the purely mimetic aspects of setting and description
[is possible]: pleasure in its function as a window on what the reader views as the ‘real
world’” (Phelan and Rabinowitz 87). This ‘readerly pleasure’ obviously also accounts for the
thematic function of a novel’s setting; in fact, as we discussed previously, both readers and
critics seem to be particularly interested in the symbolical and allegorical meanings of
literary places. While in some cases, the thematic aspect of setting is quite obvious (an
example can be said to be Hawthorne’s depiction of nature in “Young Goodman Brown”),
other works lend themselves less to such interpretations. Due to the fact that the synthetic
function allows for oppositions within the literary space, it also has been attractive for
critics to associate this with a thematic component. A recurrent example in the Gothic genre
is that of the opposition between “the domestic sphere of the heroine” on the one hand and
“the castle as the villain’s symbol of power” on the other (Majlingová 11-12). This links to
49
the feminist idea “that nineteenth-century upper- and middle-class British spaces were
strongly gendered […]”, which I will discuss in more detail in the third section of this
chapter (Warhol 92).
In this last part of this section I would briefly like to draw attention to the
intertextual aspect of setting, which can be – similarly to what Brian Richardson suggested
in the case of character – seen as an additional function. It might indeed be observed that
throughout the years, literary and narratological studies have focused little on literary
interspatiality and authors’ reasons for implementing existing literary spaces within their
works. Although scholars such as Robert Tally and Bertrand Westphal, who can be situated
within the discipline of Geocriticism, have been very successful in revealing more about the
nature of fictional spaces, their works mainly focus on the relationship between real and
fictional spaces and pay little attention to the practice of reusing and/or transforming
existing literary geographies. One can for example ask the question why Dante decided to
implement several of Vergil’s settings (such as the underworld) in his Divina Commedia and
how this interspatiality alters the relationship between the different (synthetic, mimetic,
thematic) components of this setting. Other examples of such popular ‘topoi’ are the locus
amoenus, often seen as a synonym with Eden’s Paradise, and its antonym, locus terribilis,
both used by authors throughout western literary history. How interesting these examples
may be, I will obviously be concentrating on the intertextuality of Gothic settings in the
third section of this chapter. Next to the literary ‘traces’ out of which these spaces were
constructed, attention will be given to the different motives or communicational purposes
that lay behind this use of intertextuality.
4.2 Extending the scope of the mimetic function of setting: the construction of
narrative worlds
In his contribution to the aspect of setting in Narrative Theory: core concepts and critical
debates (2012), David Herman calls attention to the cognitive parameters readers take into
account when making sense of fictional worlds. He claims that while interpreting a
narrative, readers make “deictic shifts” to its setting, “which is in turn part of an
autonomous, stand-alone world that contrasts with storyworlds evoked by accounts of the
50
past that make a claim to fact” (Herman 99). This idea of “spatialization” is part of the larger
theory of narrative worldmaking and builds on cognitive approaches like deictic shift
theory and contextual frame theory. What I take from Herman’s ideas is the belief that not
only readers, but also authors do not “build the storyworld from scratch” and that their
“narrative worlds can be cross-referenced with the world(s)” in which they are written
(Herman 99). Subsequently, by looking at the ways in which authors construct fictional
spaces with the help of real-world elements, one can reveal something about the ‘cognitive
structures’ which are at work here, or – formulated in a rhetorical way – about the
communicational intentions of a work. It could indeed be argued that the Gothic blending of
“different elements […] [and] often inappropriate materials”, resulting in highly ‘unnatural
settings’, tells us something about the conscious attempts of these authors to express their
‘romantic sensibilities’ (Majlingová 6). Moreover, this technique draws attention to the
mimetic function of setting and its ontological status within the storyworld. Brian
Richardson mentions that “the space of the fiction is also the site where mimetic and
antimimetic impulses are often engaged in a dialectical interaction” (Richardson 103). It
might indeed be noticed that many authors like to play with the setting of their narratives
by ‘decorating’ them with both mimetic and fantastic elements. One can again bring up the
Gothic castle that, with its speaking portraits and different architectural styles, contains
features of both. Although Richardson’s example of the space in Beckett’s Endgame (1957)
might be an extreme one in terms of convention, both the Gothic Novel and Beckett’s play
can be called “denarrated”: they contain “indeterminate, contradictory” elements, which
make them indeed “ambiguous” in nature (Richardson 104). A work which can be said to be
closer to ‘reality’ is Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), which “refers to a number of actual spaces
in the real world, such as Paris and New York” (Richardson 103). Nevertheless, its mimetic
potential is not to be judged in relation to the ‘real state’ of these cities at the time the novel
situates them, since it is subject to the mimetic laws within Nabokov’s fictional story. More
generally, when considering the mimetic function of setting, one should always take into
account the “canon of probability that governs events in this world” (Richardson 107). The
question then obviously arises which (authorial) intentions lie behind this depiction of
unnatural and anti-mimetic spaces. As Richardson himself acknowledges, “the answer is as
multiform as the spaces themselves” (Richardson 106); while postmodern authors often
51
work towards challenging existing narrative forms (and subsequently also the mimetic
aspect of setting), others like Daniel Defoe saw in the depiction of a fantastic space the
opportunity to publicly address political issues. As I will further discuss in the next section,
I believe the general dissatisfaction with ‘cold reason’ in the eighteenth century to be one of
the driving forces behind the Gothic construction of unnatural spaces.
Before turning to the final part of this chapter, I consider it important to mention
that the mode of representation or discourse can influence a narrative setting and therefore
its mimetic function: “Modes of perspective taking likewise bear crucially on narrative
worldmaking, suggesting the need to reorient accounts of focalization around the key
question of how storywords are spatialized” (Herman 100). Although Phelan and
Rabinowitz argue that “among other things, blurring setting with description can turn
setting (one element within narrative) into a discursive mode that is, from certain
philosophical perspectives, in opposition to narrative”, I believe that one should regard the
discursive mode as the author’s tool to give shape and form to his setting; in fact, it is
almost impossible not to blur setting with description in the process of reading and
interpreting (Phelan and Rabinowitz 85). In the section that deals with the Gothic Novel, we
shall see that the authors’ use of sublime descriptions heightens the ‘unnatural’ or ‘antimimetic’ character of their setting and clearly alters the ontological nature of their
storyworld.
4.3 Gothic spaces: Mysterious castles, haunted houses and the sublime wilderness
Although I have said that the Gothic Novel is quite conventional in the way it deals with
narrative mode and character, it can be observed that its use of space is one of the most
recognizable features of the genre. When turning the first page of a Gothic work, you know
that almost immediately it will introduce you to some kind of mysterious place, preferably a
dark castle with numerous dungeons, a haunted house or a monastic institution. You also
know that at some point in the story, the narrator will encounter a wild landscape, which
will subsequently evoke feelings of the sublime within him/her and thus provide the reader
with romantic descriptions of the place. As Brendan Hennessy notices, during most scenes
in the novel, our attention is not drawn by the synthetic function of setting; rather, Gothic
52
landscapes seem to be presented as living creatures, surrounding and even prevailing over
the story’s characters. In the case of Anne Radcliffe’s novels, the characters “are for the most
part ‘figures in a landscape’; they are in love with it, see divine order in it (as Wordsworth
did), are manoeuvred by it (like some of Shakespeare’s characters) and are dominated by it”
(Hennessy 22).
As a result, our attention is often directed toward the mimetic aspect of setting
exactly because they “move beyond real-world notions of time and space, thus taking us to
the most remote territories of conceptual possibilities”. Subsequently, it might be more
appropriate to speak of the ‘anti-mimetic’ aspect of setting, which Gothic authors over the
course of the story tend to heighten by associating their settings with feelings of anxiety. An
example is Isabella’s description of the castle in Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764):
As these thoughts passed rapidly through her mind, she recollected a subterraneous passage which
led from the vaults of the castle to the church of St. Nicholas. Could she reach the altar before she was
overtaken, she knew even Manfred’s violence would not dare to profane the sacredness of the place;
and she determined, if no other means of deliverance offered, to shut herself up for ever among the
holy virgins whose convent was contiguous to the cathedral. In this resolution, she seized a lamp that
burned at the foot of the staircase, and hurried towards the secret passage.
(Walpole 22)
From this passage, it becomes clear that it in the context of the Gothic Novel it is hard not to
conflate setting with description (Phelan and Rabinowitz 85). From a rhetorical point of
view, not regarding the discursive mode as a necessary condition for the study of setting
would indeed be a pitfall, since it is exactly through descriptions as the ones above that one
comes closer to discovering the communicational purposes that lay behind the work. I will
come back to this point when we get to the discussion of Burke’s concept of the sublime.
Although, as stated above, the anti-mimetic aspect of Gothic places is often magnified by
describing them through the lens of a character, readers who haven’t studied the Gothic in
detail would probably accept the existence of castles like that of Otranto. In other words,
the tension of these novels is partly a consequence of the ‘probability’ of its setting. This
means that by constructing a literary space out of both mimetic and anti-mimetic elements,
Gothic authors play with the reader’s mimetic expectations and thus wish to thematize the
mimetic function of setting.
Nevertheless, when taking a closer look at these architectural designs, it becomes
clear that they are highly improbable constructs. Majlingová in The Use of Space in Gothic
53
Fiction (2011) emphasizes that Gothic settings make no claims to authenticity, since they
are composed out of different historical architectural styles (Majlingová 6). Lang explains
more about this technique:
They looked through prints and books more than at actual buildings, and helped themselves freely
whatever took their fancy and what they thought would fit in well. Tombs were turned into fireplaces,
facades of cathedrals become wall decorations, the vault of the Henry VII Chapel was echoed in the
Gallery (of Strawberry Hill.)” (qtd. in Majlingová 6-7)
Next to the anti-mimetic aspect of setting, this way of constructing space draws attention to
its intertextual function. Majlingová further mentions that Gothic authors, such as Walpole,
were not only writers, but also architects, and that they would “build fake medieval ruins as
garden decorations” (Majlingová 7). Although the technical correctness of their buildings
(both the ‘garden decorations’ and those found back in their works) would often be
criticized by professionals, they served as “expression of romantic sensibilities and the
nationalist need for continuous history even if it has to be imagined and the ruins bought”
(Majlingová 7). In other words, the focus on both the mimetic and intertextual function of
setting clearly carries a thematic component with it, namely the Gothic desire to part of the
English cultural heritage, accompanied by the distress of failing to do so (which Harold
Bloom refers to as ‘the anxiety of influence’). Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, for example, is said
to contain not only medieval and Christian, but also “Romanesque” and “Neoclassical”
elements (Reeve 416), which show both the author’s “need for continuous history” and his
conflicting desire to do something totally new and innovative. In this respect, the artificial
nature of Gothic structures can be read as an intentional attack against the “modern
enlightened secular world which denies the existence of supernatural forces” (Kilgour 3).
The need for romantic sensibility becomes most obvious in passages that describe
the environment in terms of the sublime. However, this rhetorical device, which aims to
present an object in an idealized way, was not introduced by Gothic authors; rather, the
concept of the sublime has its origins in Roman times. Longinus in his “On the Sublime”
mentions that the technique could only be mastered by the best rhetors, since “the Sublime,
wherever it occurs, consists in a certain loftiness and excellence of language” and “illumines
an entire subject with the vividness of a lightning-flash” (Longinus I). In the 18th century
then, it was mainly studied by Edmund Burke in “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of
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our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful” (1757), who emphasized that “sublimity
presented an excess that could not be processed by a rational mind” and thus involves both
feelings “of delight and horror, tranquillity and terror” (Botting 39). An example of this
Gothic sublimity can be found in Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), in which
the narrator offers the reader a glimpse of the landscape she encounters while traveling to
castle Otranto:
The snow was not yet melted on the summit of Mount Cenis, over which the travellers passed; but
Emily, as she looked upon its clear lake and extended plain, surrounded by broken cliffs, saw, in
imagination, the verdant beauty it would exhibit when the snows should be gone, and the shepherds,
leading up the midsummer flocks from Piedmont, to pasture on its flowery summit, should add
Arcadian figures to Arcadian landscape. (Radcliffe 297-98)
In passages like the one above, Radcliffe clearly draws attention to the mimetic and
thematic function of her setting. The protagonist, in this case Emily, seems to be
overwhelmed by the immensity of Mount Cenis (and thus arguably is reduced to a mere
object or function), which can be explained by “the divine nature of the landscape” that is
foregrounded in this fragment. In the same way rhetors in ancient Rome used to persuade
their public by means of ornamented language, the sublime in this context “does not
convince the reason of the reader, but takes him out of himself” (Longinus I). By referring to
an idealized past (here the “Arciadian figures” and “Arcadian landscapes”), Gothic authors
both want to emphasize the continuity of past and present as well as to criticize modern
society, which no longer shows interest in individual originality. When looking at the Gothic
setting from a macro perspective, then, it can be observed that the choice of distant,
nevertheless somewhat recognizable places supports the author’s double purpose of both
provoking anxiety with the reader and presenting the idealized past as a preferable
alternative to modern society. Van Gorp explains that most Gothic Novels are set in ‘exotic’
places such as Southern-Europe (Italy, Spain, the South of France, the South of Germany) or
the mysterious East. These places, which are on the one hand quite ‘alien’ to the reader, but
on the other hand still quite recognizable due to the often quite accurate geographical
details, would indeed be perfect to give the Gothic Novel its sense of uncanniness (Van Gorp
21-22). This links to the already discussed blending of both mimetic and anti-mimetic
elements that grants the setting its typical tension.
A last point I want to discuss is the synthetic aspect of setting, which, although it is
55
less relevant in certain progressions of the novel, serves the overall purpose of the plot and
its characters in others. From this perspective, the castle with its several dungeons, secret
pathways and hidden rooms enabled authors to develop the Gothic plot thoroughly and to
let their characters move from one space to another. This ‘moving between spaces’ indeed
grants the setting a dynamic character and can be seen as a typical characteristic of the
Gothic genre, as van Gorp notices (Van Gorp 21). Subsequently, it becomes possible to
express the relationship between different characters in terms of distance: the heroine,
whose default space is the domestic sphere, can be contrasted with the villain, who in most
cases is associated with the castle. This has led critics such as Aguerre to view the Gothic
literary space as a structure marked by divisions and oppositions:
Gothic can be said to postulate two zones: on the one hand, the human domain of rationality
and intelligible events; on the other hand, the world of the sublime, terrifying, chaotic Numinous
which transcends human reason (but which need not be the supernatural). These are separated by
some manner of threshold, and plots invariably involve movement from one site to the other – a
movement which, most often, is presented as a transgression, a violation of boundaries.
(qtd. in Majlingová 13)
From a rhetorical perspective, this view on space is particularly interesting, since it allows
one to see the oppositional structure of the Gothic space as a motivated decision on behalf
of the author to make the narrative plot progress. It is indeed often the case that the heroine
leaves her safely home (which Aguerre refers to as “the humain domain of rationality and
intelligible events”) in order to enter the unknown, mysterious castle (which Aguerre
regards as “the world of the sublime, terrifying…[…]”). This movement from the home to the
castle can be seen as a transgression, since it implies moving away from the ‘familiar’ into
the ‘unknown’. Moreover, in this “world of the sublime”, the mimetic laws governing ‘our’
world are not valid, which explains the fact that when entering this zone, our attention is
often directed towards the mimetic (or rather anti-mimetic) function of both character and
setting.
In conclusion, one can say that, although the oppositional nature of Gothic spaces
enables the reader to view them as synthetic structures, in most progressions of Gothic
romances, our attention is drawn to the anti-mimetic and accompanying thematic function
of their settings. Not only do these ‘unnatural spaces’ express the Gothic desire for an
idealized past, but the mysterious atmosphere that surrounds them can be said to represent
56
the cultural anxieties British society in the eighteenth and nineteenth century was subject
to20. In the following case studies on Poe and Hawthorne, we will see that American society
at that time was facing own struggles, which is the reason why a number of American
authors decided to adopt, but most importantly transform the Gothic space to fit to their
own ‘needs’.
4.4 Poe’s settings: the haunted house with its enclosed spaces
When reading Poe’s tales of terror, it might be noticed that a lot of attention is devoted to
the depiction of space. While in “The Masque of the Red Death”, each room of Prospero’s
castellated abbey is described in great detail, the narrator in “The Fall of the House of
Usher” dedicates no less than five pages of the tale to the description of Usher’s house. As
Poe himself wrote in “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846), the setting of his tales must
indeed be regarded as one of its most crucial narrative elements: “[…] it has always
appeared to me that a close circumspection of space is absolutely necessary to the effect of
insulated incident: - it has the force of a frame to a picture. It has an indisputable moral
power in keeping concentrated the attention, and, of course, must not be confounded with
mere unity of place” (Poe The Philosophy of Composition 147). As a consequence of these
detailed descriptions, which are usually offered at the beginning of each tale, our readerly
attention immediately is directed towards the mimetic function of setting. Poe, like many
other Gothic authors, cleverly employs setting to grant his tales their typical atmosphere of
uncanniness and to bring about feelings of anxiety with the reader. His use of an unreliable
first person narrator obviously plays a big role in this; by letting his narrator describe the
environment around him in subjective terms, a ‘blurring’ of setting with description (in the
20
Factors that may have contributed to these cultural anxieties are “the absence of a fixed religious
framework”, which caused society to become “increasingly secular” and the “changing social and political
conditions”, such as “political revolution, industrialization, urbanization, shifts in sexual and domestic
organization, and scientific discovery” (Botting 2-3).
57
sense of Phelan21) takes place, which heightens the location’s anti-mimetic character.
However, in Poe’s stories, the effect of the surroundings on its characters more than often is
not to be described in terms of sublimity. Rather, feelings of terror, possibly resulting in
those of horror (cf. Botting 71-80) are reportedly experienced by Poe’s characters. In “The
Fall of the House of Usher”, for example, the narrator reflects upon the effect the House of
Usher has on his mental state: “It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different
arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient
to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression […]” (Poe 231).
Together with frequent use of light22 and color23, this use of narrative mode adds to the
mysterious and uncanny character of his settings.
It can be noticed that Poe was greatly influenced by the Gothic novelists from Europe
and borrowed from them the archetypical image of the haunted castle, which he chose as
the setting for both “The Masque of the Red Death” and “Metzengerstein”. Another
characteristic that draws attention to the intertextual component of Poe’s space is their
indefiniteness. Similar to the English authors, his choice for “some remote or secluded
space: frowning among the Apennines, hidden in a dense forest, situated in a ‘dim city’ or in
‘one of the wildest and least frequented portions of fair England’” contributes to the
mysterious atmosphere of his setting (they are ‘alien’, but it is still somewhat possible to
situate them on a map) and reveals his Romantic desire to find comfort in the quiet past
(Kane 151). Nevertheless, it must be noted that “without a feudal past, or those relics so
important to the English or European Gothicists, castles and monasteries and legends”,
American authors like Poe transformed these settings in order to fit their own conditions
and needs (Lloyd-Smith 26). Poe’s frequent use of the domestic spaces such as the ‘haunted
21
Phelan and Rabinowitz write that “among other things, blurring setting with description can turn setting
(one element within narrative) into a discursive mode that is, from certain philosophical perspectives, in
opposition to narrative” (Phelan and Rabinowitz 85). However, as argued in the previous section, in the case of
the Gothic Novel, it is often impossible to make a clear distinction between both elements.
22
In “The Gold-Bug”, the beetle “glistened, like a globe of burnished gold, in the last rays of the setting sun
[…]” (Poe, Mystery Tales 53).
23
In “The Masque of the Red Death”, the rooms are “vividly blue”, “purple”, “green throughout”, “furnished and
lighted with orange”, and so on (Poe, Mystery Tales 105).
58
house’, which Fisher regards as an “adroit modification of the haunted castle from earlier
Gothicism”, must then indeed be understood within the American context of the frontier
experience, that, although it offered peace and silence, also involved dealing with potential
violence (Fisher 83). In contrast to continental authors such as Walpole, Poe seems to show
little interest in the architectural qualities of his settings. As Kane mentions, “he did not go
back to the Middle Ages for the scenes of his stories; nor would the medieval builders have
recognized their work from his allusions to it” (Kane 150). Rather than concerning himself
with the creation of spectacular, yet highly unrealistic castles by combining different
architectural styles, Poe’s spaces seem to be much simpler in nature, having both the aspect
of “antiquity” and “decay” in them (Kane 151). It might then indeed be little surprising that
Poe’ representation of domestic spaces24, which might easily be replaced by some of the
mansions on the American countryside, appealed to a considerable audience at that time
due to their mimetic acceptability.
Another remarkable feature of Poe’s stories is that the setting in which the main
action and plot take place usually is limited to a single room, dungeon or cellar within a
country mansion. Poe’s obsession with enclosed spaces becomes most obvious in “The Fall
of the House of Usher”, in which both the protagonist and Usher spend all of their time in
the “very large and lofty” room, whose windows are “altogether inaccessible from within”
(Poe 233-34). When at a distinct moment, the outside world with its “huge masses of
agitated vapour, as well as all terrestrial objects” is revealed to them, the owner of the
house immediately after is again condemned to entombment by the narrator: “Let us close
this casement; the air is chilling and dangerous to your frame” (Poe 242). Next to the tomb
in which Usher buries his sister Madeline alive, other examples of such narrow spaces are
to be found in “The Black Cat”, in which the narrator walls the corpse of his woman “in the
cellar – as the monks of the Middle Ages are recorded to have walled up their victims” (Poe
228) or in “The Tell-Tale Heart”, which presents the space under the floor of a room as an
ideal spot to hide the body parts of your victim. It is obvious that numerous critics have
drawn attention to the thematic component of Poe’s spaces, viewing them in an allegorical
24
Such as “the melancholy House of Usher” (Poe, Mystery Tales 15) or Ligeia’s “abbey […], in one of the wildest
and least frequented portions of fair England” (Poe, Mystery Tales 95).
59
and/or symbolic way and emphasizing their deeper (often psychological) implications.
While Michael Cook believes that “to encounter the enclosed space in Poe is to evoke the
spectre of death” (Cook 111), Magistrale and Poger claim that “Poe intensified the Gothic's
configuration that linked personality and place, supplying examples of confined and
subterraneous imagery with a psychodynamic correspondence to his male characters; their
wills, their behavior, their very lives are both contained and symbolically represented
within the terrain of their living quarters” (Magistrale and Poger 15). Simply put, the setting
of Poe’s tales can be seen as a symbolic representation of the characters that inhabit it.
Whereas the confined spaces are considered to be synonymous with the awaiting death of
the victims who are buried in it, the mansions or houses as a whole often come to signify
the distorted mental state of the offender of this crime. In “The Black Cat”, for example, it
could be argued that the burning house “on the night of the day on which this cruel deed
was done” symbolizes the “the fury of a demon” which possesses the narrator (Poe 224-25);
the crumbling of the wall at the end of the story would then indeed refer to the murderer’s
state of misery after being unmasked. Another clear example of this can be found in “The
Fall of the House of Usher”. Here, the “mansion of gloom” can easily be linked to the mental
illness of its owner (Poe 232); the “barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the
roof of the building in front” at its time could tell us something about the collapsing
relationship between Usher and his sister, which critics have argued to be an incestuous
one (Poe 233). Finally, it could be argued that the house does not solely symbolize its
owner’s mental state, but Usher as a whole. Its “vacant eye-like windows” together with the
“appellation of the “House of Usher” – an appellation which seemed to include, in the minds
of the peasantry who used it, both the family and the family mansion” indeed suggest that
the house is a living human being (Poe 231-32). Moreover, at the end the story, the house
seems to ‘die’ together with its owners.
A last point I want to briefly accentuate is the synthetic function of setting, which due
the dominance of the anti-mimetic aspect of setting in almost all of Poe’s stories is less
obvious, but can nevertheless be explored. In accordance with Aguerre’s insights
concerning the Gothic space, it possible to view Poe’s setting as a structure divided into two
separate zones: “one the one hand, the human domain of rationality and intelligible events;
on the other hand, the world of the sublime, terrifying, chaotic Numinous which transcends
60
human reason (but which need not be the supernatural)” (qtd. in Majlingová 13). Like
mentioned before, in Poe’s tales, very often no movement from one space to another is
involved, since at the beginning of the story we are already introduced to the zone of the
“terrifying”. This is for example the case in “The Masque of the Red Death”, “The Pit and the
Pendulum”, “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”. At other times, Poe will allow his
characters to make a movement from the external, familiar world to that of the mysterious,
but more than often, they are unable to return to the “domain of rationality and intelligible
events”. Thus, one can conclude that Poe’s main focus is always on “the world of the
sublime, terrifying, chaotic Numinous”, which detach the protagonists from reality and the
domain of the familiar. However, in contrast to Hawthorne’s spaces, as we will see in the
next section, Poe’s settings nearly always come to symbolize the distorted mental states of
its owners, which, in its turn, can be linked to the larger Gothic idea that human identity is
unstable.
4.5 Hawthorne’s settings: from external to internal spaces and the question of
wilderness
It can be noticed that, as opposed to Poe’s tales, Hawthorne’s short stories most of the time
are given a definite setting, which like Van Gorp mentions, enables the reader to situate the
story more concretely in the real world and thus draws attention to the mimetic component
of setting (Van Gorp 21). Not surprisingly, almost all of them take place in the colonial
region of 17th century Puritan New England, which was the birthplace of the writer himself
and the area he spent most of his lifetime. This already marks a clear move away from the
conventions of traditional Gothic tales, which, as I have discussed previously, were mostly
set in distant, exotic places, such as Southern-Europe or the Orient. In contrast to this, it
becomes clear that, when paying attention to the intertextual component of his settings,
Hawthorne like many other early American writers endorsed “the “broad and simple daylight” and “common-place prosperity” of his country, so different from the shadow and
mystery and sense of gloomy wrong that the ruins of Italy suggested” (Lloyd-Smith 26). His
preference for local places, such as the town of Salem, Massachussets, used in “Young
Goodman Brown”, “Main-Street” and “The Custom House”, indeed already draws attention
61
to the culturally specific issues and struggles25 these texts deal with and which would
become so typical for the American Gothic movement. Nancy Lusignan Schultz
acknowledges that Hawthorne’s depiction of the city of Salem inevitably carries larger
thematic consequences by saying that it “embodies the Puritan vision and religious
foundations of America, a place where those seeking religious freedom developed an iron
intolerance of others, and whose grandchildren succumbed to a deadly mass hysteria”
(Schultz 164).
Nevertheless, it can be observed that in the course of most of Hawthorne’s tales, the
setting "moves from reality to dream-world, from a landscape that is firmly rooted in
historical detail to a realm that is largely symbolic and psychological” (Bendixen 135). This
is for example very obvious in “The Wedding-Knell”, which starts off with the naturalistic
description of “a certain church in the city of New-York” and ends up describing ‘the holy
gates of eternal life’ both lovers enter at the end of the tale (Hawthorne, Twice-Told Tales
27). This gradual transition to a more symbolic space in Hawthorne’s tales is not
remarkable, considering the fact that he was greatly influenced by continental Romanticists
such as Coleridge and this way got acquainted with the concept of Gothic sublimity
(Jacobson 4-5). As Jacobson mentions, Hawthorne in his works depicts “a more expressive
art”, which “strives beyond ‘the classic coldness which is as repellent as the touch of
marble’” (Jacobson 6). He achieves this by presenting his spaces through the perspective of
an unreliable (most of the time third person) narrator, whose sensory perception and
emphasis on effects of light and shadow ‘color’ the setting’s description. In accordance with
the Gothic tradition, these sublime feelings are often evoked when encountering something
“vast, magnificent and obscure” (Botting 39), like “the beneighted wilderness” with its
“deepening twilight” in “The May-Pole of Merry Mount” (Hawthorne, Twice-Told Tales 66)
or the cathedral with “its massy walls, and its dim emptiness” in “Sunday at Home”
(Hawthorne, Twice-Told Tales 19). However, to experience the sublime also means to
undergo feelings of anxiety and terror, which add to the overall atmosphere of uncanniness
and gloom that is so typical for Gothic literature. This is very prominent in Hawthorne’s
texts, since throughout passages that deal with the description of setting, emotions of
25
Examples of these are the Puritan inheritance and the frontier experience.
62
pleasure and delight are often overshadowed by the proximity of death. An example of this
uncanniness can be found in “The wedding-knell”, in which the dreadful tolling of the
“death-bell” causes uproar “among the wedding party” and thus provides the text with an
atmosphere of mystery (Hawthorne, Twice-Told Tales 32). This “exploration of negative
Romanticism” has led critics such as Allan Lloyd-Smith to link the work of Hawthorne with
that of Poe and Melville and to distinguish American Gothic from the works of European
authors due its use of darker themes (Lloyd-Smith 34).
However, it can be argued that some of the descriptions of space we encounter in
Hawthorne’s work are not simply the result of an interaction between object and observer,
but do solely exist in the mind of the narrator or protagonist. Still, like so many other Gothic
authors, Hawthorne leaves this possibility of the ‘supernatural’ open. While at the end of
“Young Goodman Brown”, for example, the narrator directly addresses to the reader the
question “Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest, and only dreamed a wild dream
of a witch-meeting?” (Hawthorne, Collected Tales 147), in “Rappaccini’s Daughter” the
deceptive nature of the human senses, in this case of sight, is reflected upon as Giovanni
after having witnessed the miraculous effects of Rappaccini’s plants asks Beatrice whether
he should “believe all that I have seen with my own eyes?” (Hawthorne, Collected Tales
405). The clear focus on the mimetic component of these settings has led critics to seriously
consider their thematic purposes and to view them as allegorical or symbolic entities within
the story. The fact that Hawthorne during his life was greatly influenced by the throughout
the nineteenth century widely discussed pseudoscience of Mesmerism (“the process in
which a practitioner hypnotized his subject and put her into a trance”) has further
encouraged scholars to investigate in the psychoanalytic and dream-like qualities of his
spaces (Coale 49). According to Coale, Hawthorne “saw himself as a kind of spiritual villain”,
who in his tales “penetrates their [of his characters] subconscious minds and grapples with
the secrets and compulsions he finds there” (Coale 50). Subsequently, Hawthorne’s
imaginary spaces can be said to represent both the religious and political struggles not only
his protagonists as individuals, but American society as a whole had to deal with at that
time.
A widely discussed example of such a space is that of the wilderness or forest, which
appears in tales such as “The Gentle Boy”, “Young Goodman Brown” and “The Great
63
Carbuncle”. In all of these texts, the wilderness is the place where the irrational and the
unconscious are acted out and where repressed and moral desires are given a place. In
“Young Goodman Brown”, for example, the main protagonist in the middle of the forest
encounters “a grave and dark-clad company”, among which the city’s high intellectuals and
priests, who are under the leadership of the devil himself performing Satanic rituals
(Hawthorne, Collected Tales 143). What is remarkable about this passage, is that this
congregation does not solely exist of “the council-board of Province” together with “Good
old Deacon Gookin”, but also of “the Indian priests, or powows, who had often scared their
native forest with more hideous incantations than any known to English witchcraft”
(Hawthorne, Collected Tales 144). Thus, Hawthorne presents the forest as a symbol of
human immorality, which does not limit itself to the ‘uncivilized’ Native American culture,
but to which the entire American society, including the prominent Puritan leaders, is
subject. However, this conception of wilderness does not necessarily have to be negative
one; when looking at the representation of nature in Hawthorne’s work from another
perspective, it could be argued that it embodies the ‘untouched human nature’, which
according to the Transcendentalist movement (with which Hawthorne usually is
associated), is characterized by inherent goodness and purity of soul. In “The Gentle Boy”,
the uninhabited wilderness is indeed both the place where the innocent young Ilbrahim is
found (and arguably born) and goes to when he dies, leading us to suggest that nature here
stands for childlike innocence. What separates the Puritans from other religions or cultures,
then, is their sense of superiority over them, which in Hawthorne’s work indeed appears as
quite hypocrite. Nevertheless, Graham mentions that, “while condemning the hypocrisy of
characters within his tales, Hawthorne is committing a similar ‘crime’ in the very recounting
of these tales” due to his frequent use of allegorical forms, which is indeed a characteristic
of Puritan writing (Graham 23).
Before turning over to the final part of this section, I would like to briefly draw
attention to the fact some of Hawthorne’s spaces, such as those presented in “The Haunted
Mind” or “Foot-prints on the Sea-shore”, are even more anti-mimetic in the sense they
contain no features of the external world and solely exist in the imagination of the narrator.
In contrast to Hawthorne’s symbolic depictions of nature, the fictionality of these
“intermediate spaces” is explicitly acknowledged, which is why critics such as Kristie
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Hamilton have regarded Hawthorne as a predecessor of Modernism (Hamilton 112).
However, for now this discussion will lead us too far astray from the purpose of this paper,
and I believe it to apply better to the domain of Unnatural Narratology, whose aim it is to
investigate in narratives that “move beyond real-world notions of time and space, thus
taking us to the most remote territories of conceptual possibilities” (Alber and Heinze 6).
The last point I want to briefly direct attention to is the fact that Hawthorne’s
settings can also be regarded from a schematic point of view by paying attention to their
functional and oppositional dimension. Like Graham states, “In contrast to Poe’s Fiction in
which the description of the setting is used to merely “heighten tension and to reflect
various states of mind”, the setting (nature) in Hawthorne’s works transcends its capacity
as passive backdrop and initiates a kind of intercourse with the characters” (Graham 25). It
might indeed be assumed that Hawthorne’s settings, such as his depiction of the wilderness,
upon which Graham in his text mainly elaborates, or that of the cathedral, are given a clear
function within his short stories, allowing them to both act upon and influence the
characters in several ways. In this respect, one may indeed ascribe them “human
characteristics”; In “Rappaccini’s Daughter”, for example, the “fierce, passionate and even
unnatural” character of Rappaccini’s plants is highlighted (Graham 25-26). However, what
is more relevant to a structuralist approach to setting is the function (within the actiantal
model if you will) these spaces perform within the storyworld. Very often, nature in
Hawthorne’s tales will fulfill the function of opponent and thus work towards leading the
main character or narrator to his downfall. While in “Rappaccini’s Daughter”, the poisonous
extract of Rappaccini’s plants ultimately results in Beatrice’s dead and thus separates
Giovanni from his lover, the forest in “Young Goodman Brown” seems to induce the whole
society, including Goodman Brown and his Faith, to engage in immoral conduct.
Nevertheless, depending on your interpretation of the story, the function of these settings
may vary; in this respect, nature in the first text could be said to assist Baglioni in his
attempt to defeat Rappaccini. It may also be noted that not only natural settings are given a
function within Hawthorne’s tales, but also domestic spaces, such as the cathedral, which
“speaks a moral to the few that think, it reminds thousands of busy individuals of their
separate and most secret affairs” in “Sunday at Home”. Thus, in this case, the cathedral
clearly exercises influence over the text’s characters (Hawthorne, Twice-Told Tales 20).
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Given the fact that, in almost all of Hawthorne’s stories, the wilderness is the place where
the ‘unnatural’ or ‘irrational’ appears in its most pure form, it seems quite self-evident to
link it with Aguerre’s “world of the sublime, terrifying, chaotic Numinous”. Subsequently, a
division of space between the latter and Hawthorne’s urban settings can be suggested,
which would in its turn represent Aguerre’s “human domain of rationality and intelligible
events” (qtd. in Majlingová 13). However, as we have already discussed, these spaces, of
which the cathedral in “Sunday at Home” or the small village in “The Minister’s Black Veil”
are clear examples, seem not to entirely free from such mysterious forces, so that a division
of space on the basis of the setting’s mimetic qualities cannot be easily made in
Hawthorne’s work. Moreover, it might be noticed that in some of his tales (such as
“Rappaccini’s Daughter” and “The Gentle Boy”), a blend between city and nature is
presented, so that Hawthorne’s depiction of space in those tales might be linked to his belief
that there “must be a balance between head and heart, between civilization and nature”, as
Bell mentions (qtd. in Van Wyck 7). Bell further argues that “Hawthorne was rejecting not
simply the belief in nature or in the liberation of the heart, but also the notion that history,
and especially American history, were to be comprehended as the glorious triumph of
nature and the heart over the past.” (qtd. in Van Wyck 7). Finally, it might be disputed that
the gradual change from an external to a more internal and indeed psychological or
symbolic space, which appears in almost all of Hawthorne’s tales, fits better into a
schematic way of thinking about space, and draws attention to both the oppositional and
synthetic dimensions of some of his settings.
In conclusion, one can say that Hawthorne’s spaces are largely symbolic in the way
they represent and/or criticize certain political, social and religious ideas that were
dominant in American society throughout the nineteenth century. A major theme in this
tales is, for example, the American Puritan movement (which is represented through the
city of ‘Salem’) and its intolerance towards other cultures and or religions (which the
wilderness arguably stands symbol for). While at the beginning of his tales, attention is
drawn to the mimetic aspect of his settings, which explicitly links his work with the history
of America, and more specifically, with the colonial region of New England, the transition
towards more symbolic and psychological spaces enable Hawthorne to explore
“unspeakable” and “unutterable” themes, such as the ones mentioned above.
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5. Conclusion
As made clear in the introduction, this dissertation aimed to explore which kind of
‘communication’ or ‘interaction’ Gothic authors wish to establish with their readers by
looking at the ways in which they employ narrative elements such as narrator, character
and space in their texts. Moreover, I was particularly interested in how this specific use of
rhetorical strategies fits into the cultural climate of the eighteenth and nineteenth century
in which these texts were written, and to which extent this differs from the rhetorical
situation found back in the short fiction of the American authors Edgar Allan Poe and
Nathaniel Hawthorne. In order to answer questions, I based the methodology of my work
on the ideas of James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz, who both suggest a rhetorical
approach to narrative, and contrasted and/or completed their theory by taking in account
the insights of critics such as David Herman, Robyn Warhol, Brian Richardson and Ansgar
Nünning.
In regard to the element of narration, I found out that Gothic authors often establish
an ‘indirect’ kind of communication’ with their readers. Most of the third-person narrators
we encounter in Gothic texts indeed do not live up to their omniscient status due to the fact
that are guilty to ‘underreporting’, ‘underpreting’ and ‘underevaluating’, and this way leave
their narrative authority in the hands of the reader. As a result of the narrator’s
unreliability, our attention is drawn to the ‘open’ character of these narratives, which forces
the reader to fill in the gaps he encountered in the narrator’s account of the events. Most
readers find pleasure in playing this role of detective, which is the reason why they tend to
reduce the affective and ethical distance between them and the narrator, resulting in
bonding unreliability. This ‘open’ character of the Gothic Novel, which appears as a
consequence of the narrator’s refusal to claim authority over his narrative account, can be
read as a reflexion on the eighteenth and nineteenth-century “crisis of authority” due to the
absence of a clear religious framework and the changing social and political circumstances
in British society (Garrett 47).
It can be observed that Hawthorne’s narrators highly resemble those of Europan
Gothic authors, and that in this respect, he leans very close toward the British Gothic
tradition. Not only do many of his narrators free themselves from narrative authority by
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presenting their story as the result of oral transmission or as a lost manuscript, but they
also tend to neglect their narrative tasks by underreporting, underinterpreting and
underevaluating during certain progressions in the story. However, what seperates them
from the narrators found in European Gothic Novels is their recurrent use of symbolic
and/or allegorical descriptions (which can also be found in Poe’s tales). Still, these symbols
are always represented in an ambiguous way, which prevent the reader from attaching any
moral conclusion to his stories. Subsequently, Hawthorne’ use of the unreliable narrator
can be regarded as a way of conveying to his audience the uncertainties and struggles the
newly founded American society was subject to, such as the problem of Puritan inheritance
and the encounter with the Native American population, or indeed the American project as
such. Hawthorne’s narrators are indeed unable to formulate answers to these questions
themselves, which is the reason why they often explicitly adress the reader to do so.
Whereas Hawthorne’s tales can be said to be rooted in American history, Poe’s
narrative strategies offer a reflection on the larger question of personal identity and the
human ability to obtain absolute knowledge or control. By exploiting the first-person
narrator to its fullest potential, he manages to gradually over the course of his stories build
up a bonding relationship with his readers, and at the end to abrubtly break it off, when the
latter realizes he has been reading the account of a madman or murderer all along. As I have
discussed, Poe’s narrators can be said to be unreliable in the ways they deal with ethics
(and thus correspond to Bernaert’s notion of the “axiologically unreliable narrator”
(Bernaerts 132-33), but this obviously also implies that one can question their
trustworthiness along the axis of “facts” and/or “understanding/perception” (Phelan 10).
However, the question whether their narrative account is ‘truthful’ does not get resolved in
any of Poe’s tales, which guarantees “the necessarily open and dialogical character of even
te most insistently self-enclosed narrative or authoritative reading” (Garrett 44). Simply
put, by luring his readers into the deceitful discourse of his narrators, and at the end the
revealing its falsifiable character, Poe shows the impossiblity of obtaining total control over
things, and in addition, to resolve the uncertainties and anxieties American society faced at
the time.
When looking at the use of character in the Gothic Novel, it can be noticed that the
depiction of the innocent heroine, the hero, villain, servants, and so on is not only
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influenced by the medieval genre of the chivalric romance, but by a wide range of sources,
such as the works of Shakespeare, Milton, Schiller and so on. This shows the Gothic Novel’s
desire to be part of the English literary tradition, but at the same its ‘anxiety of influence’,
i.e. the desire to do something totally innovative. Nevertheless, in most of these novels, we
tend to get a black white divison between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ figures, which draws attention to
the synthetic function of these characters. As I have discussed, these arguably ‘simplistic’
characterizations – and thus the fact that character in the Gothic Novel is subordinated to
space and plot – must again be read in the light of the post-Enlightenment period, in which
the notion of identity was regarded as something ‘unstable’. An exception to these ‘simple’
characters can be said to be the figure of the villain, who is, despite his evil character, also
given mimetic traits, which allows us to sympathize with him. Therefore, it can be said that
the villain most clearly embodies this ‘crisis of personal identity’, since he is subject to both
‘good’ and ‘evil forces’. Moreover, these ‘evil forces’ are often presented as being beyond his
own control, which draws even more attention to the unstable nature of personal identity.
In contrast to these villains, female characters in most Gothic Novels – especially those
belonging to the male tradition, such as Lewis’ The Monk (1796) – are given less personality
traits, which is the reason our attention during most progressions is drawn to their
synthetic function (they appear as the object of male desire). Subsequently, I argued that
this one-sided portrayal of women does not necessarily reflect the actual situation of
women at the time, since women were increasingly moving into the male ‘public sphere’,
but rather strengthed the in the eighteenth-century dominant concept of the ‘ideal woman’,
who is confined to the domestic sphere and is denied the ‘authority of reason’.
Hawthorne’s view on human nature can be said to be a more positive one, since
almost all of his characters, including women, are given a more complex personality. This
can be linked to the Transcendentalist belief that human nature is inherently good, but can
get corrupted by society and its institutions. His representation of villains (or non-villains?),
such the scientist Almyar, most clearly proves this; indeed, their sin appears as the
unintended consequence of social institutions, such as science. Nevertheless, Hawthorne
also shares the Gothic idea that human identity is essentially unstable by exploring the
unconscious mind of his characters, as done in “Young Goodman Brown”. In these cases, it
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becomes clear that all humans, and especially the leaders of social institutions, such as
Goody Cloyse, are subject to corruption.
Poe goes a step further in revealing the unstable sense of personal identity in his
tales by exploring the darkest sides of the human mind. Here, the perverseness of his
murderers and madmen appears as an inherent charateristic of the self. However, by
constantly drawing attention to the mimetic function of his characters, these madmen
initially seem to come across as quite ‘normal’, which allows the reader to sympathize with
them. As a result of this, it is only toward the end of each tale that the reader realizes he has
been reading the account of a murderer all along. One can thus say that, by playing with
different possibilities of characterization in his tales, Poe illustrates the limits of human
knowledge and the deceitfulness of human nature. Finally, it may also be noted that Poe
participates in establishing the Gothic image of ‘the damsel in distress’ by presenting his
female characters as one-dimensional.
The last narrative aspect I discussed in relation to the Gothic Novel is that of space,
which may the may the most conventional feature of the genre. Although it may be noticed
that our attention is often drawn to the synthetic function of Gothic settings (cf. Aguerre’s
distinction between ‘the domain of the rational’ and that of ‘the supernatural), the dominant
focus on the anti-mimetic aspect of setting (such as the divine wilderness) betrays the
Gothic desire for an idealized past, which liberates the individual from the restrictions of
society. Nevertheless, some of these ‘unnatural spaces’, such as the mysterious castle with
its enclosed spaces and dungeons, may be seen as direct expressions of the cultural
anxieties in the eighteenth century.
It can be noticed that Hawthorne’s use of space is one of the most important
elements that seperate his work from that of the European Gothicists. By situating most of
his tales in the postcolonial region of New England (and thus drawing attention to the
mimetic aspect of his settings), Hawthorne firmly roots his work within the history of
America. Nevertheless, over the course of his tales, the historically accurate settings
develop into largely psychological and symbolic ones, enabling it to criticize and/or
represent certain political, religious and social ideas (such as the problem of Puritanism)
that were dominant in American society throughout the nineteenth century. Thus,
Hawthorne’s psychological spaces, which are rarely to be found in British Gothic works,
70
allow the author to express the “unspeakable” and “unutterable”. In contrast to Hawthorne,
Poe’s settings are rarely given a historical description and are quite simple a nature, which
heightens their symbolic and psychological character. As we have seen, his settings indeed
most of the time come to symbolize the distorted mind of its owners, as is clearly the case in
“The Fall of the House of Usher”. Moreover, the setting in which the main action of his tales
takes place usually is limited to a single room or ‘enclosed space’, symbolizing the isolated
mental state of the protagonist and his approaching death.
In conclusion, I consider it safe to say Gothic authors shaped the narrative elements
(narrator, character and space) of their texts in the service of conveying themes that deal
with anxiety and guilt to their readers. These sentiments can be said to be the result of the
rapid changes that took place in both British and American society throughout the
eighteenth and nineteenth century. While the use of an unreliable narrator enabled Gothic
authors to touch upon these issues in an ‘indirect’ way (and thus forces the reader to
further complete the ‘narrative puzzle’), the depiction of anti-mimetic characters and
settings further reveals the Gothic desire to explore ‘the Other’ and ‘the Unknown’. Apart
from the obvious differences in setting, which must be regarded as a consequence of the
absence of “a fedual past, or those relics so important to the English or European Gothicist”
(Lloyd-Smith 26), this investigation has shown that the American Gothic, as based on the
tales of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, mainly deviates from the European
Gothic in the way it exploits the genre’s psychological possibilities. Both in Poe’s and
Hawthorne’s work, a clear move from the external to the internal is to be noticed, which
allows these authors to explore the darkest sides of the human mind in more depth.
Consequently, the ‘evil’, ‘irrational’ and ‘immoral’ is not to be found in the external world or
in the form of a monster, but rather within the self. This obsession with the self can be seen
as a consequence of the social and political pressures American society faced throughout
the eighteenth and nineteenth century. As Jean Baudrilland has noticed, America is “a
utopia which has behaved from the beginning as though it were already achieved” (qtd. in
Lloyd-Smith 38). Subsequently, if the American “utopian” project were to fail, the fault could
only lie within the American population itself.
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