Welcome to the Jungle: Enter at Your Own Risk

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Welcome to the Jungle: Enter at Your Own Risk

The Gothic treatment of natural environments in Edgar Huntly and

In the Lake of the Woods

Seth Thayer Pidot

VillanovaUniversity: English 9530-030

The American Gothic Novel

Dr. Hicks and Dr. Berthold

August 1, 2005

Location is paramount. To borrow from this contemporary adage of savvy real estate brokers looking to assess the value of a property is perhaps the most critical practice for an author of the macabre looking to develop an effective and authentic Gothic tale. The value of Gothic literaturerests arguably in its setting; it must not be neglected. A reader’s sense of physical space, whether that space isnarrowly and oppressively confined or overwhelmingly infinite, remains a necessary target of a Gothic writer’s manipulation and imagination. A setting becomes insufficient if, in addition to an established place, it does not also communicate a framework for time. Timing, too, plays an important role as it affects yet another convention of Gothic literature: memory. The Gothic prescription for a character to be haunted by either the inescapability of past traumas or the pessimistic fear of a dismal future relies heavily upon the story’s established timeframe. These two components of setting – space and time – are literary ingredients for the Gothic that manifest themselves in diverse ways.

The most conventional of Gothic stories works within the restrictions of a terrible space, one that is enclosed, remote, confining, and affords little, if any, opportunity for escape. Examples of such terrible spaces can be found in the castellated abbeys and claustrophobic catacombs of most early, quintessentially Gothic novels like Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. Other incarnations of horror fiction exist, however, that deal with man’s own mind as the most frightening, complex, and captivating of metaphorical dungeons. Here, the setting exists as an extension of an exploration of madness. Gothic tales such as Hannibal, by Thomas Harris, or “The Pit and the Pendulum” by Edgar Allan Poe exhibit how the authors map out the twisted recesses of man’s psyche as effective places for what critic Mark Edmundson would call the “internal Gothic.” Whereas these aforementioned locations – and others such as the post-Apocalyptic Asian city centers of William Gibson’s Neuromancer – are either synthetic, representative of civilized society, or reflections of urban decay, the locations of interest in this essay are not. Rather, this essayanalyzes the more problematic use of nature – wilderness and the organic to be more specific – as successful means of achieving the goals of Gothic fiction: to awaken a heightened sensitivity, on one hand, and to stimulate debilitating fear, on the other. The wilderness functions as a Gothic landscape in so far as it elevates the sensesto a state of hyperawareness, thus engendering an experience of the sublime, and it, like the more stereotypical settings of extreme enclosure, creates room for panic. This latter function of the wilderness seems ironic; one might argue that a natural environment that allows for freedom of movement liberates. Following such an argument, the setting would be rejuvenating and enlightening, the antithesis of the Gothic. The ability to move about, the lack of spatial constraints, however, does not necessarily correlate with transcendence or a release of tension. On the contrary, the wilderness can be an equally effective and terrifying environment for the very reason that it embodies the unpredictability of nature, the absence of man’s civilizing influence, and the unknown. In short, it can be the agoraphobic’s nightmare. The wilderness (be it a pastoral environment or an untamed jungle) is treated in particularly compelling ways by two American authors: 18th century writer Charles Brockton Brown and modern-day novelist Tim O’Brien. Their respective novels, Edgar Huntly and In the Lake of the Woods, illustrate how natural environments in Gothic novelsfashion experiences of the sublime, the double, the supernatural, haunting, and memory.

Nature, consequently, in all its rawness, power, beauty, emptiness and chaos emblemizes the terrible place in Gothic literature. The natural world is most justifiably Gothic for two reasons: it both terrifies and horrifies. In her enduringly relevant piece “On the Supernatural in Poetry” 19th century author and critic Ann Radcliffe identifies an important functional difference between the two ends. “Terror and horror,” says Radcliffe, “are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them” (Radcliffe, 1). Radcliffe’s working definition of “terror” underscores the sublime as it exists in art and literature; Edgar Huntly,it will be shown, exemplifies, in part, this sublime facet of Gothic landscape. Meanwhile, according to Radcliffe’s semantic framework, the “horror” dimensionis less optimistic. The petrifying of human faculties can be entertaining (such is often the case with graphic, pop-culture films filled with cheap shocks and visceral gore), however, these examples of horror offer little room for spiritual elevation or social redemption. It should be noted that, overtime, the Gothic, in all its different forms, does not necessarily subscribe exclusively to one agenda or the other: either terror or horror. The wilderness, as it manifests itself in Brown and O’Brien’s novels, servesequally to terrifyand to horrify.

To better understand how Edgar Huntly, wandering the American frontier in states of consciousness and dreams, has encounters with Radcliffe’s notions of terror and horror, one must first recognize the three Gothic threats that the character faces. In Edgar Huntly the conflict established by the wilderness is three-fold. First, there is a struggle of man versus man. The “otherness”– the Gothic alternate or alien – in Brown’s novel rests with the presence of the Native American Indians who inhabit and aggressively try to defend the frontier. Huntly, himself, does battle with the savage natives, an essentially unknown, misunderstood group who seem to kill indiscriminately, and who live off the land to their advantage against the settlers. He admits his naïveté when he says, “[We white man] imagined ourselves at an inaccessible distance from the danger”; presumably Huntly is referring to the false solace he feels in the vastness of the woods (Brown, 166). Symbolically, the Earth-worshipping Indian figure and the frontier become one and the same.

Thus, Brown introduces a second conflict, an internal one of man versus self – more aptly put, man versus his own past. The slaughter of his own parents by the Indians still haunts Huntly, and he connects that memory of their murder with the savages. “Most men are haunted by some species of terror or antipathy, which they are, for the most part, able to trace to some incident which befell them in their early years” (Brown, 166). After the “injuries and encroachments” that had exasperated the landscape belonging to the natives, hostility reigned; destruction of nature wrought revenge upon the assailant (Brown, 166). Therein, Brown includes yet another Gothic convention: the interplay between victim (i.e. the landscape and its Indian master) and victimizer (i.e. the invading white man).

Third, there is a struggle between man and his environment. Huntly confronts the wild terrain itself, inclusive of voracious panthers and dark, unforgiving caverns filled with unseen pitfalls. In fighting and trailblazing his way back home Huntly arguably becomes the desperate savage that the reader sees mirrored (doubled) in the humanity of the Indians. The white people and the natives alike exercise their primitive human instincts; for Huntly, being stranded in the woods forces him shamefully but necessarily to discover his innate brutality, will to live, and resourcefulness. His physical journey, meanwhile, is a struggle to escape wilderness. It is interesting to note, however, that Huntly spends the majority of his tale retracing the steps that he subconsciously took while asleep; ironically, he is running away to his home. Huntly associates his fear with the panic of being lost, and he is in flight. Given the historical context of the novel, the wild forest exists everywhere; it surrounds the white man’s settlements. Moreover, it defines the new frontier to be conquered. That aspect of the natural world – the idea that it envelopes the white man’s world – acts not to invite the characters on adventures abroad, but rather to confine them in a conventionally Gothic way to their small, rustic, isolated homesteads. In avoiding death by exposure to the elements, Huntly is seeking to return back to civilization – back to the confines and comforts of home as it exists in the form of cabins, farms, and orderly roads. Therein lies the irony in his situation; Brown’s character finds security in enclosed, man-made spaces – only, that is, when the spaces are not being attacked by Indian representatives of the wilderness. When Huntly does find himself lost among the feral, unpredictable Pennsylvanian landscape, he realizes that Mother Nature provides her own spaces that, while not synthetic, are just as deadly, bleak, and claustrophobic as a dungeon of the Victorian imagination.

Given the context of these three aforementioned threats, the natural world in Edgar Huntly is panic-inducing as well as sublime; again, nature is horrific and terrific. With regard to the former, Brown does justice to thefatal powers of the wild. Those moments of his novel in which Huntly awakes for the first time, disoriented, lost, and at the mercy of the wilderness are prime examples of horror. It is in these specific scenes that the author, through Huntly’s narration, freezes his reader’s nerves with fear – in other words, he renders the reader overwhelmed, inoperative, and unable to cope. Before any blood is shed between Huntly and his “Red-man” foes, Huntly must survive in the Gothic, unforgiving, subterranean world of the wilderness. In the following quote, he describes his sensations upon waking in the caves and trying to manage his predicament: “The utter darkness disabled me…overpowered by my fears and my agonies I desisted from my fruitless search…methought I was the victim of some tyrant who had thrust me into a dungeon of his fortress, and left me no power to determine whether he intended I should perish with famine or…in hopeless imprisonment” (Brown, 154). Echoes of this horrifying environment (and its annihilating effects upon the psyche) ripple through the settings of other Gothic works like those of Stoker, Shelley, and Poe. Huntly’s habitat, however, has another salient feature.

In contrast to the horror – to the pitch-black caverns, deep echoes of apparent crevasses, and jagged crags – Edgar Huntly’s story is also sensually invigorating in a terrifying way. 18th century philosopher and writer Edmund Burke, on whose ruminations Radcliffe based some of her own thoughts, claims, “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible…or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling” (Radcliffe, 1). This notion of the sublime permeates Edgar Huntly as strongly as does the element of horror. At certain distances, according to Burke, and with certain modifications, pleasure and painare delightful, as we experience every day (Burke, 1). Gothic sublimity – exotic and alluring – is a fundamental component of terror fiction. Much like an artist of the Romantic movement in Victorian art, Brown creates landscapes that connect the beauty and dangers of the natural world with human emotions. This effect weaves its way into the following excerpt:

A stream, rushing from above, fell into a cavity…The noise and the motion equally attracted my attention. There was a desolate and solitary grandeur in the scene, enhanced…by the perils through which I had recently passed…A sort of sanctity and awe environed it, owing to the consciousness of absolute and utter loneliness. It was probably that human feet had never before gained this recess, that human eyes had never been fixed upon these gushing waters(Brown, 99).

Instead of making Huntly feel powerless (or fearfully immobile) such descriptions of the wilderness inspire his character to act in response to an experience of terror and sublimity.

As a point of comparison, 19th century author Nathaniel Hawthorne also advocates the use of forest imagery and wild landscapes in his workThe Scarlet Letter. Uniquely American in its exposition of a colonial, Puritanical society preoccupied with morality and social ills, the novel explorers the importance of setting as a Gothic device. Hawthorne seems to be intimately aware of how, during the pre-Revolutionary days in American history, there existed a sharp delineation between civilization (settlements and town-centers, in other words) and the native forests. Moreover, this distinction between spaces exposed the duality of humanity and the separation between good and evil. With regard to the duality of humanity, the forest in The Scarlet Letter (that vast frontier beyond which lay the undiscovered and unknown from the perspective of the Europeans) represents a place where characters like Hester Prynne and her lover, the wayward minister Arthur Dimmesdale, can meet surreptitiously to orchestrate their forbidden, sinful, clandestine affair. In the forest they can shed their public roles and assume roles that are driven by their private, repressed desires and passions. Hawthorne strategically crafts his story; he places Hester’s solitary cottage on the edge of the wilderness. This location straddles the boundaries between the two settings: forest and town. In the latter, the mores of Puritan life wield authority; it is a civilized space of law and order, established, ostensibly, for the public good and protection of all souls. The forest, in contrast, offers a space of freedom, strangeness, and fantasy – a raw place of dreams and beauty only understood as being oneof temptation and evil by those who remain confined by the church property and its gallows. Wilderness, therefore, represents the Gothic “other.” It enchants Hester as a supernatural realm, one that is unrealistic and romantic. Romance, here, stresses not the conventions of courting, but rather the elements of magic. Magic, it will be shown, is a theme that also intrigues Tim O’Brien in his own work. For Hester to embrace the forest as a means of realizing her full human potential she must escape there; it offers liberation. In The Scarlet Letter, the forest approximates, therefore, an antidote for the Gothic that permeates the rest of the story’s chilling action. This element of transcendentalism does not invalidate Hawthorne’s text from its placement in the cannon of Gothic literature, but it does represent an alternate treatment of nature. Although O’Brien also flirts in his own writing with similar ideas about the supernatural, his manipulation of landscape, it will be shown, is more akin to his predecessor Brown’s.

Tim O’Brien’s Gothic methods include several executions of the natural environment in his book In the Lake of the Woods. Chronologically and thematically, O’Brien divides his story between two wild locales: that of jungle-lush Vietnam in the late 1960’s and that of rural, wooded Minnesota (the land of 10,000 lakes) in the ten to twenty years following John Wade’s return from war. The ruthless, lethal landscape of the former is intimately tied to the threat of the Vietnam War. O’Brien shows that the country – its uncharted topography and harsh lessons – was at the heart of the military conflict. Misunderstanding and underestimating this territory was perhaps the greatest disadvantage, the most miserable source of horror, for Wade and his American compatriots. In a world where the enemy combatants move unseen, booby traps lie perilously in wait for their victims, and exposure to wildlife and tropical temperatures complicates one’s health, O’Brien’s characters come face to face with the Gothic. Vietnam is an organic setting that captures all of the sinister, isolating, ruinous conventions of a terrible space. The jungle is an area, like Wade’s cabin basement back home or the caves in Edgar Huntly, replete with the hazards of premature burial and subterranean horrors such as the foxhole (a man-made tunnel employed by the ghostly Viet Cong for hiding, spying, traveling, and surprising their enemies during combat.) What is perhaps most distressing for the reader is that, despite O’Brien’s own dubious claims about his autobiography, this landscape is real, as were the struggles it engendered for soldiers during the war. “[Vietnam] was a place with secret trapdoors and tunnels and underground chambers populated by various spooks and goblins, a place where magic was everyone’s hobby…you could fly here, you could make other people fly” (O’Brien, 72). It was a place of reality and illusion where decency mixed intimately with savagery (O’Brien, 72). O’Brien alludes here to the idea that the Vietnamese landscape is not one-dimensional. On the contrary, the wilderness is equally optimistic as it is deadly and scary. The savagery and reality of bloodshed find balance with beauty and escapism. O’Brien delves into this theme with his integration of magic into the lives of his characters.