NAME______
FIVE LINES: What, in your opinion, constitutes Gothic?
Literary Focus
Gothic Fictionby Leila Christenbury
- Use of haunting, eerie settings and strange, chilling events
- Romantic interest in intuition, imagination, and hidden truths
- Reaction against the optimism of the Transcendentalists
- Exploration of evil and the irrational depths of the human mind
The Dark Side of Romanticism
Not all American writers agreed with the Transcendentalist notions that the divine isimplicitin nature and that people are essentially good. Some felt that these views did not adequately take into account the darker side of human nature, the presence of suffering in the world, and the ongoing conflict between good and evil.
The Dark Romantics, as these skeptics were called, shared with the Transcendentalists and other Romantics an interest in the spiritual world. They also believed in the value of intuition and imagination over rationalism, and they wanted to explore the mysteries of human existence. Where the Transcendentalists saw goodness and hope, however, the Dark Romantics found madness, evil, and alienation.
European BeginningsDuring the Romantic period in European literature, a similar division had taken place. The result was theGothic novel,which emerged in England in the late eighteenth century. The first well-known Gothic novel was Horace Walpole’sCastle of Otranto,published in 1765. Mary Shelley’sFrankenstein,which remains popular today, is another well-known example of the genre.
These tales of terror often adopted the setting of the medieval Gothic castle and used its pointed arches and vaults, dark dungeons, and underground passages to evoke fear. The termGothicwas later expanded to describe any fiction that created a haunting atmosphere and included strange and chilling events, such as live burials, horrifying tortures, and the earthly resurrection of corpses.
American DevelopmentsIn America, the Dark Romantics furthertransformedthis genre. Writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Washington Irving led the emerging trend in American fiction: the short story. Short stories were meant to be read in one sitting; as a result, the cast of characters was small, and the plot was generally uncomplicated. The simplified story structure allowed writers to focus on the internal workings of the main character’s mind and provided an ideal setting for writers who wanted to leave behind the rational world and explore the unsettling, irrational depths of the human mind.
Incorporating Gothic elements into the developing short story genre allowed the Dark Romantics to show the madness and violence under the seemingly tranquil surface of civilization. From this natural pairing of form and content, theGothic short storywas born.
BEFORE READING WASHINGTON IRVING, IT IS IMPORTANT TO READ THIS SHORT SYNOPSIS OF THE “FAUST” STORY.
Doctor Johann Faustus
Abstracted from the Faust Chapbook of 1587
Johann Faustus was born in Roda in the province of Weimar, of God-fearing parents.
Although he often lacked common sense and understanding, at an early age he proved himself a scholar, mastering not only the Holy Scriptures, but also the sciences of medicine, mathematics, astrology, sorcery, prophesy, and necromancy.
These pursuits aroused in him a desire to commune with the Devil, so--having made the necessary evil preparations--he repaired one night to a crossroads in the Spesser Forest near Wittenberg. Between nine and ten o'clock he described certain circles with his staff and thus conjured up the Devil.
Feigning anger at having been summoned against his will, the Devil arrived in the midst of a great storm. After the winds and lightning had subsided the Devil asked Dr. Faustus to reveal his will, to which the scholar replied that he was willing to enter into a pact. The Devil, for his part, would agree:
- to serve Dr. Faustus for as long as he should live,
- to provide Dr. Faustus with whatever information he might request, and
- never to utter an untruth to Dr. Faustus.
The Devil agreed to these particulars, on the condition that Dr. Faustus would promise:
- at the expiration of twenty-four years to surrender his body and soul to the Devil,
- to confirm the pact with a signature written in his own blood, and
- to renounce his Christian faith.
Having reached an agreement, the pact was drawn up, and Dr. Faustus formalized it with his own blood.
Henceforth Dr. Faustus' life was filled with comfort and luxury, but marked by excess and perversion. Everything was within his grasp: elegant clothing, fine wines, sumptuous food, beautiful women--even Helen of Troy and the concubines from the Turkish sultan's harem. He became the most famous astrologer in the land, for his horoscopes never failed. No longer limited by earthly constraints, he traveled from the depths of hell to the most distant stars. He amazed his students and fellow scholars with his knowledge of heaven and earth.
However, for all his fame and fortune, Dr. Faustus could not revoke the twenty-four year limit to the Devil's indenture. Finally recognizing the folly of his ways, he grew ever more melancholy. He bequeathed his worldly goods to his young apprentice, a student named Christoph Wagner from the University of Wittenberg .
Shortly after midnight on the last day of the twenty-fourth year, the students who had assembled at the home of the ailing Dr. Faustus heard a great commotion. First came the sound of a ferocious storm and then the shouts--first terrifyingly loud then ever weaker--from their mentor.
At daybreak they ventured into his room. Bloodstains were everywhere. Bits of brain clung to the walls. Here they discovered an eye, and there a few teeth. Outside they found the corpse, its members still twitching, lying on a manure pile.
His horrible death thus taught them the lesson that had escaped their master during his lifetime: to hold fast to the ways of God, and to reject the Devil and all his temptations.
Meet the Writer
Washington Irving(1783–1859)
Many people in England and the rest of Europe thought that America would never develop a literary voice of its own. Then Washington Irving arrived on the literary scene.
Satirist and Lawyer
Irving was the youngest son of a pious hardware importer and his wife. Despite his limited education, Irving had a genius for inventing fictional comic narrators. He became well known for these characters, including Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent., a caricature of British writers who could not accept the values of a new nation; and the mysterious Diedrich Knickerbocker, the imaginary author of a fake and comical history that ridicules the entire American past. The Knickerbocker book established Irving as the foremost New York satirical writer.
All this time Irving also practiced law, though his interest in it was lukewarm. In 1815, his father sent him to England to take charge of the failing overseas branch of the family business. Irving found the business beyond repair, but he fell in love with the British literary scene and stayed abroad for seventeen years.
An American Voice
While in England, Irving was greatly influenced by the novelist Sir Walter Scott, who advised him to read the German Romantics and find inspiration in folklore and legends. This advice helped shape Irving’s future. He decided against putting further energy into business and gave himself entirely to writing. In 1817, he began to write stories based on German folk tales. His two most famous stories, “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” adapt German folk tales to American settings. Irving collected his stories under the titleThe Sketch Book,which made Irving an international success.
Although Irving borrowed openly from European writers, he brought a fresh new voice to his material. It was an American voice—at times as inflated as a politician’s, at times self-mocking. The young nation embraced this voice as its own.
Think About the WriterUntil he was over fifty years old, Irving did not sign his own name to his work. Why did he wait so long?
Literary Focus
Mood—the overall feeling or atmosphere of a story, play, or poem—can be difficult to identify. After all, mood is intangible; you can’t point to it in a text.
In order to identify a story’s mood, start with thesetting.Pay close attention to the details of time and place, and think about how the setting makes you feel. Look carefully at the writer’sdiction,orword choice.For example, in the first sentence of this story, the description of a “wooded swamp or morass” helps create a feeling of darkness and foreboding. Then, consider theplot.Does the story end happily, or does it present a bitter or tragic outlook on life? The mood of most stories can be described with one or two adjectives, such asgloomy, sentimental,and so on.
Reading Focus
Making PredictionsWhen you make aninferenceabout a text, you make an educated guess based on clues in the text and on your own knowledge and experience. Apredictionis a special type of inference—an educated guess about what will happen later. As you read, you may discover that a prediction was incorrect, or you may learn something thattransformsyour understanding of the story. Adjusting your predictions as you read is an important part of active reading.
Writing FocusThink as a Reader/Writer
Find It in Your ReadingThemoodof a story depends largely on how the author describes the setting. As you read, note words or phrases that describe the setting in a particularly evocative way, such asmorassordark grove.Write these words in yourReader/Writer Notebook,and point out how each one contributes to the story’s mood.
Build Background“The Devil and Tom Walker” is an American version of the archetypal story of Faust, the sixteenth-century German philosopher who sells his soul to the devil for knowledge and power. Anarchetype(AHR kuh typ) is an original or fundamental imaginative element or pattern that is repeated through the ages. An archetype can be a plot, an event, a character, a setting, or an object. The story of a person who sells his soul to the devil for worldly gain is an archetypal plot. The most famous and influential version of the tale is Faust, a play by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). Each retelling of the Faust legend puts a different spin on the story, and its ending varies: The Faust character, for example, may face eternal flames, find forgiveness and love, or somehow cleverly beat the devil.
Read with a PurposeRead to find out how a distinctly American writer adds his own spin to a well-known European tale.
The Devil and Tom Walker
byWashington Irving
A few miles from Boston in Massachusetts, there is a deep inlet, winding several miles into the interior of the country from Charles Bay, and terminating in a thickly wooded swamp or morass. On one side of this inlet is a beautiful dark grove; on the opposite side the land rises abruptly from the water’s edge into a high ridge, on which grow a few scattered oaks of great age and immense size. Under one of these gigantic trees, according to old stories, there was a great amount of treasure buried by Kidd the pirate.1The inlet allowed a facility to bring the money in a boat secretly and at night to the very foot of the hill; the elevation of the place permitted a good lookout to be kept that no one was at hand; while the remarkable trees formed good landmarks by which the place might easily be found again. The old stories add, moreover, that the devil presided at the hiding of the money, and took it under his guardianship; but this, it is well known, he always does with buried treasure, particularly when it has been ill-gotten. Be that as it may, Kidd never returned to recover his wealth; being shortly after seized at Boston, sent out to England, and there hanged for a pirate.
About the year 1727, just at the time that earthquakes wereprevalentin New England, and shook many tall sinners down upon their knees, there lived near this place a meager,2miserly fellow, of the name of Tom Walker. He had a wife as miserly as himself: They were so miserly that they even conspired to cheat each other. Whatever the woman could lay hands on, she hid away; a hen could not cackle but she was on the alert to secure the new-laid egg. Her husband was continually prying about to detect her secret hoards, and many and fierce were the conflicts that took place about what ought to have been common property. They lived in a forlorn-looking house that stood alone, and had an air of starvation. A few straggling savin trees,3emblems of sterility, grew near it; no smoke ever curled from its chimney; no traveler stopped at its door. A miserable horse, whose ribs were as articulate as the bars of a gridiron, stalked about a field, where a thin carpet of moss, scarcely covering the ragged beds of puddingstone,4tantalized and balked his hunger; and sometimes he would lean his head over the fence, look piteously at the passerby, and seem to petition deliverance from this land of famine.
The house and its inmates had altogether a bad name. Tom’s wife was a tall termagant,5fierce of temper, loud of tongue, and strong of arm. Her voice was often heard in wordy warfare with her husband; and his face sometimes showed signs that their conflicts were not confined to words. No one ventured, however, to interfere between them. The lonely wayfarer shrunk within himself at the horrid clamor and clapperclawing;6eyed the den of discord askance;7and hurried on his way, rejoicing, if a bachelor, in his celibacy.
Reading Focus
Making PredictionsWhat possible plot developments does the mention of buried pirate treasure invite?
Literary Focus
MoodHow would you describe the mood as the story opens? Which words from the first paragraph help create it?
One day that Tom Walker had been to a distant part of the neighborhood, he took what he considered a shortcut homeward, through the swamp. Like most shortcuts, it was an ill-chosen route. The swamp was thickly grown with great gloomy pines and hemlocks, some of them ninety feet high, which made it dark at noonday, and a retreat for all the owls of the neighborhood. It was full of pits and quagmires,8partly covered with weeds and mosses, where the green surface often betrayed the traveler into a gulf of black, smothering mud: There were also dark andstagnantpools, the abodes of the tadpole, the bullfrog, and the watersnake, where the trunks of pines and hemlocks lay half drowned, half rotting, looking like alligators sleeping in the mire.
Tom had long been picking his way cautiously through this treacherous forest; stepping from tuft to tuft of rushes and roots, which affordedprecariousfootholds among deep sloughs;9or pacing carefully, like a cat, along the prostrate trunks of trees; startled now and then by the sudden screaming of the bittern, or the quacking of wild duck rising on the wing from some solitary pool. At length he arrived at a firm piece of ground, which ran out like a peninsula into the deep bosom of the swamp. It had been one of the strongholds of the Indians during their wars with the first colonists. Here they had thrown up a kind of fort, which they had looked upon as almost impregnable and had used as a place of refuge for their squaws and children. Nothing remained of the old Indian fort but a few embankments, gradually sinking to the level of the surrounding earth, and already overgrown in part by oaks and other forest trees, the foliage of which formed a contrast to the dark pines and hemlocks of the swamp.
It was late in the dusk of evening when Tom Walker reached the old fort, and he paused there awhile to rest himself. Anyone but he would have felt unwilling to linger in this lonely, melancholy place, for the common people had a bad opinion of it, from the stories handed down from the time of the Indian wars, when it was asserted that the savages held incantations here, and made sacrifices to the evil spirit.
Tom Walker, however, was not a man to be troubled with any fears of the kind. He reposed himself for some time on the trunk of a fallen hemlock, listening to the boding cry of the treetoad, and delving with his walking staff into a mound of black mold at his feet. As he turned up the soil unconsciously, his staff struck against something hard. He raked it out of the vegetable mold, and lo! a cloven10skull, with an Indian tomahawk buried deep in it, lay before him. The rust on the weapon showed the time that had elapsed since this deathblow had been given. It was a dreary memento of the fierce struggle that had taken place in this last foothold of the Indian warriors.
“Humph!” said Tom Walker, as he gave it a kick to shake the dirt from it.
“Let that skull alone!” said a gruff voice. Tom lifted up his eyes, and beheld a great black man seated directly opposite him, on the stump of a tree. He was exceedingly surprised, having neither heard nor seen anyone approach; and he was still more perplexed on observing, as well as the gathering gloom would permit, that the stranger was neither Negro nor Indian. It is true he was dressed in a rude half-Indian garb, and had a red belt or sash swathed round his body; but his face was neither black nor copper color, but swarthy and dingy, and begrimed with soot, as if he had been accustomed to toil among fires and forges. He had a shock of coarse black hair, that stood out from his head in all directions, and bore an ax on his shoulder.
He scowled for a moment at Tom with a pair of great red eyes.
“What are you doing on my grounds?” said the black man, with a hoarse, growling voice.
“Your grounds!” said Tom, with a sneer, “no more your grounds than mine; they belong to Deacon Peabody.”
“Deacon Peabody be d—d,” said the stranger, “as I flatter myself he will be, if he does not look more to his own sins and less to those of his neighbors. Look yonder, and see how Deacon Peabody is faring.”