Enlightenment Romanticism and Gothic Literature Essay

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The supernatural is defining feature of gothic genres of gothic and horror. Supernatural motifs are also integral to Romanticism, especially as the supernatural is counterpoint to the natural. Romanticism reveals an uneasy relationship between science and nature. Science reveals nature and demystifies it, essentially taking God out of the question and leading to a “crisis of religious faith,” (Sanders 1). Focusing on the supernatural in literature, authors in both Old World and New externalized their anxieties about losing faith and losing connection with the predictability of organized religion. Science might yield absolute and measurable truths about nature but fails utterly to assuage the deeper anxieties in the human experience. Romantic and gothic literatures unearth those anxieties and clothe them in supernatural and disturbing imagery. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” and Edgar Allen Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher,” the natural and the supernatural are inextricably entwined. The supernatural elements anchor these stories firmly within the gothic genre, and also show how Romanticism represents existential angst.

Geography and culture also impact the evolution of Romantic and gothic literature. Gothic literature emerged in the United States and Britain relatively concurrently, but “British writers did not have far to go to seek sites for their meditations,” (Puntner 165). Poe and Irving both use European characters and/or settings in their work. Rip van Winkle is a Dutch settler in colonial America, and the House of Usher exists as if in an eerie parallel universe that is neither here nor there, effectively bridging the gap between the New and Old Worlds. These three texts demonstrate the similarities and differences between British and American gothic motifs and themes. As Puntner points out, the features of American Gothic include “darkness...tendency towards obsession...absorption with powerful and evil Europeans,” (165). Shelley’s novel shows that the British Gothic likewise features symbolic and visual darkness, obsessive tendencies in human nature, and warnings related to the consequences of power. However, the American Gothic is more overtly gloomy, especially the works of Poe. Irving, Poe, and Shelley all link psychological terror with the supernatural too, showing that the origins of evil are not necessarily external or even in some supernatural being like the Devil. The Age of Enlightenment and the dawn of the science of psychology revealed the uncomfortable truth: evil originates in human beings. The only devil is the “fatal demon of fear,” in Poe’s terms (1538).

Each of these three stories treats the supernatural as a borderland, the realm of the unknown, symbolizing science’s inability to conquer the deeper mysteries of life and death. In Shelley’s Frankenstein, the titular doctor creates a lonely, motherless monster: a creature that is neither natural nor supernatural. A man has created life from where there was once only dead tissue, but the life he creates is not human. Shelley therefore draws attention to the life force itself, that which animates the body but which science cannot measure. Of these three stories, Shelley’s is perhaps the only one that foreshadows the dawn of science fiction.
In Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Madeline Usher is also on the brink between the natural and the supernatural.

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Madeline is neither alive nor dead, but rather, occupies a liminal space between the two otherwise absolute domains. When the men bury Madeline, she seems alive, and when she arises, she seems dead. Madeline’s illness also has a supernatural element to it. Just as science is unable to provide the key to immortality, medicine is incapable of curing all disease. “The disease of Lady Madeline had long baffled the skill of her physicians,” leading Madeline to linger on the brink of life and death (Poe 1539). In fact, Madeline’s illness causes Roderick to slip rapidly into a state of depression and despair, also a liminal state between sanity and insanity. Unlike Dr. Frankenstein, Roderick Usher gives up on life and succumbs to death, no longer trying to control life or its outcomes. Poe portrays the supernatural as having a deadly but irresistible allure, one which perfectly parallels the mystique of horror writing itself.

Rip van Winkle is also in a liminal and therefore supernatural state, a dream world in which he remains comatose for twenty years. The scientific mind would read van Winkle’s story as one of an old man who drank too much or perhaps took psychedelic drugs, but Irving introduces the supernatural element of ghosts to add the gothic dimension to the Romantic tale. The most lighthearted and innocent of the three stories, “Rip van Winkle” does have a darker and more sinister undercurrent due to its being set during a time of war. Rip van Winkle does evoke the fear of insanity that permeates Poe’s writing too. Upon beholding his countenance, Rip van Winkle exclaims, “I’m not myself—I’m somebody else,” (Irving 50). The loss of self is a theme common to gothic fiction, linked to existential angst. Supernatural motifs like the “strange beings” that haunted the Kaatskills (sic) offer meaning and a pseudoscientific explanation for what happened to van Winkle (Irving 52). The supernatural beings in “Rip van Winkle” seem more mischievous than nefarious, too, connecting Irving’s story nostalgically with Old World folklore. Nostalgia is, incidentally, a hallmark of Romanticism.

In these three stories, the supernatural lures people away from the safety and stability of family and community, towards the abyss of the unknown. Being lured into the unknown symbolizes the conflict between religion and science, both of which claim access to absolute truth. Knowing that neither religion nor science can provide the answers to pressing existential questions, Romantic and gothic writers offer a third alternative: the supernatural. Because the Enlightenment worldview affirms supernatural definitely does not exist, there is an ironic level of comfort….....

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