“In this pitiable condition I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR”
These words spoken by Edgar Allan Poe’s memorable character Roderick Usher in “The Fall of the House of Usher” represent a deep and tragic truth which underlies every piece of fiction in history: conflict. Conflict is what drives every story; it is what curbs the protagonist’s sense of identity, and consequently his outlook on the world. Conflict is the underlying plot that gives the art its foundation. In a broad sense, conflict means difference. A well-written story will incorporate the unnatural into the natural. It will always be in direct contrast with the protagonist’s purposes, or his object of desire. It produces fear, either to lose one thing or another. In Roderick’s case, his present condition produces the fear of losing both life and reason, his physical and mental health. His identity is put in the balance. Every story has an antagonist, whether physical or psychological, that drives the protagonist to make choices and perform actions that are the groundwork of a story. Fiction written in the first half of the nineteenth century, which is loosely referred to as the “American Renaissance”, is no exception. America at the time struggled to maintain its own identity as a separate nation and its writers were driven to write plots that reflected the effort of formulating a new national identity.
Enlightenment as well as questions of how to live after war complimented the spirit of America achieving its own identity as a nation. The common term for this period is the American “renaissance” (rebirth) and it preceded the antebellum period. “Renaissance” literature was heavily influenced by difficult times in the decades preceding it, particularly “the Reign of Terror following the French Revolution and the subsequent restoration of monarchy and ongoing Napoleonic Wars” (Baym 931). American nationality was at the time conditional to the point of being fragile. Efforts to develop a distinctly American literature after the principles of the Founding Fathers found conflict in the repressive struggles of the War of 1812 and other dealings with Native Americans. The nation was thrown into a “bloody internal conflict” (942). A century before, the image that was so central to contemporary ideas was the American as “a figure of heroic innocence and vast potentialities” (Lewis 1). Historian R. W. B. Lewis, who concerned himself with the history of ideas “limited to articulate thinkers and conscious artists,” drew conclusions of this eighteenth century image as an “illusion,” and its moral posture to be “vulnerable in the extreme.”
America as a nation with its own destiny could not be overcome. From the 1820-s onward, America rejected the past and saw itself as something entirely new. This change brought about a new personality and new habits. “The hero of the new adventure,” Lewis references to literary symbolism, is “an individual emancipated from history, happily bereft of ancestry, untouched and undefiled by the usual inheritances of family and race; an individual standing alone, self-reliant and self-propelling” (Adam 5). In such a state, the image of an individual standing alone is confronted with the challenges of the unknown, the strange and the contradictory.
Writers of this time built on work that came before and pointed to future possibilities in literature. Owing to the great effort of achieving a distinct American identity, they were repeatedly called upon to, according to the Norton Anthology of American Literature, “produce literary texts worthy of a great nation” (930). Nationalism was the deepest and most underlying conflict of them all. Every culture, as it progresses toward maturity, seems to produce a single debate over its dictating ideas, which, according to Lewis, can be anything from “salvation, the order of nature, money, power, sex, to the machine” (Lewis 2). This debate, he says, “may be the culture, at least on its loftiest levels.” For a culture’s identity is not achieved through the “ascendency of one particular set of convictions,” but through “its peculiar and distinctive dialogue.” In America, during the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the spokesmen to convey such dialogue were its writers, philosophers, politicians, and preachers. The historian looks for “the coloration or discoloration of ideas received from the sometimes bruising contact of opposites.” The narrative art of nineteenth century writers dramatized as human conflict what is in the outside world a “thoughtful exchange of ideas” (Lewis 3). Historians Dinah Birch and Mark Llewellyn recognized America as “a rapidly changing culture,” and as such it called for the identification of a “holding ground for dialectical positions.” Writers of the American “renaissance” were entreated to be thinkers rather than artists. But as America in the nineteenth century was a “melting pot” in the sense that many nations settled into one emerging society, the very ideas of those diverse nations made it increasingly difficult for authors to develop one distinct literature, particularly when it came to internal conflict.
Irving Bartlett, editor of The American Mind in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, reveals how “the spirit of reform swept across the American landscape in the thirties and forties.” Both moral and social reform preoccupied the American mind, which was already declaring its faith in man through the “militant democracy” of the period. Schemes to perfect human institutions became the cause for each sect and community, and that desire “lay at the roots of all the many social reform movements of the period” (39). These schemes were, like everything else, intensely individualistic, and reform movements proved to weaken institutions by serving “less as vehicles for necessary social change than as instruments to dramatize moral issues, inflame the passions of the people, and divide the nation” (42). Writers “attempted to link the historical conflicts of their own past” to “the emerging national character” (Baym 934). Such conflicts were explored as a way of understanding their nation and building an identity that followed their singular destiny. “Reform” also became the word for their struggle. Movements such as “antislavery, temperance, the debates on women’s rights, and even the nativist attacks on Catholic immigrants and institutions” (938) contributed to their vast endeavors. These movements and others created the separate identity that writers strove for, but their sense of detachment may not have become as strong as they hoped it to become. In the course of Lewis’s American “dialogue,” the narrative introduced a new kind of hero who faced “tragedy inherent in his innocence and newness” and it structured American fiction for the next few decades.
America’s view of hopefulness grew in the decades following the War of Independence (1775-1783), which laid down the principles for a new society, and immediately after the War of 1812, expressing the sense of possibility for their new country. The conflict involved with such optimism was both impatience and hostility. Despite America’s drive for reform, they could not help but see continuations of past: “institutions, social practices, literary forms, and religious doctrines” – what Lewis terms “carry-overs” (13) from an earlier age and a remote country. These proved to be obstructions to their continued sense of hope and the creative task at hand.
Most of the nineteenth century was spent putting to practice the principles laid down by America’s forefathers, but many discrepancies of religion, philosophy, and science were raised. As Bartlett asserts, before the Civil War, these three ideologies were “inseparable,” for they “shared and expressed the common values of American democracy” (6). Religious thinkers of the period shared the attempt to combine their faith with the common conviction of democracy, a faith that “emphasized the rights and dignity of man and the self-improvement of mankind” (7). This thinking was also the major concern of American political philosophers. In science also, there was a “growing secular-mindedness, a growing tendency to look for natural causes behind the most extraordinary events” (31). French, Swedes, and Germans had hastened to America in order to be involved in its scientific enlightenment (Brooks 84). Dissonance was generated by “forces of faith and doubt and the educative powers of science and religion, the divide between men and women, the apparent competition between loyalty to nature and industry, the party-based politics, class conflicts generated by the volatile economic situation, and the military battlefields” (Birch 1-2), which were necessary for the growth of their new society. It was the current spokesperson responsible for, as writer Amanda Anderson puts in The Way We Argue Now, the “attempt to imagine the methods of modern science, critical reason, and cosmopolitan detachment in terms of exemplary or heroic characterology” (Birch 14). In proportion to The Modern Short Story by Frank Myszor, Gothic writing, which began with the novel The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole, was a response to the scientific discovery of the time, for example “in the understanding of electricity – which some people thought was the key to the creation of life” (10). Both Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe wrote to some degree in the traditions of gothic writing.
Another conflict in the American mind was in politics, between the Republican right and the Democratic left, between conservatives and liberals. In the intense propositions to root out vestiges of the culture and society of the old world, America viewed democracy itself as a course of denial and destruction (Lewis 13). The rights of man were continued from the old world and the force behind every argument against institutional continuity (15). The three recurring themes of politics at the time were “belief in the free individual” (equality), “belief in the moral law” (religion), and “belief in the American mission” (nationalism) (Bartlett 1). There were so many opposites in the “practical concerns of life…democracy/aristocracy; property/equality; etc” that the approach to correctness was hazy, and it arose countless struggles among the American people (Birch 16). There was no coming to a common understanding of truth unless it was through battling the oppositions (17).
The illusion of language alone presents a model of “the conduct and potential resolution of conflict” that may conduct and resolve “actual political and social conflict” (Birch 30). Hawthorne “seemed skeptically sympathetic toward both parties and managed to be confined by neither” (Lewis 7). His deep sense of sin and evil as a real force in the world made him conservative in politics. As an “admirer of Andrew Jackson,” he was “an active democrat, but did not share the perfectionist faith entertained by so many of his contemporaries” (Bartlett 107). Poe cared little for politics and even considered democracy a “delusion and an evil.” Likewise, to him republican government was “rascally.” He had no faith in “human perfectibility or the general notions of equality, progress and improvement” that had illustrated the convictions of Jeffersonians (Brooks 267). Washington Irving recognized the cut of political ties with England and the retaining of colonial modes of thinking and feeling. But all three contributed to the mind of the eminent American writer who reflected and represented the new world in its political-mindedness, or lack thereof, as “immediate heirs of the Revolution” (367).
The concept of conflict is as old as stories are. Aristotle provides the earliest known explanation of plot concerning its individual parts in his work Poetics. He explains how the conflict in protagonist’s life arises by a “reversal” of the original situation in which he is accustomed. In this reversal, “the action veers round to its opposite,” from ordinary conditions to some method or type of antagonism. It produces “recognition” – “a change from ignorance to knowledge, producing love or hate between the persons destined by the poet [or author] for good or bad fortune.” In turn this recognition produces “either pity or fear.” On such situations do “the issues of good or bad fortune depend” (21). The change of fortune should come about “as the result not of vice, but of some great error or frailty” (25). With a well constructed plot, the reader will “thrill with horror” and “melt to pity” at what takes place. By the end there should be a completed process of change in the protagonist which evokes in the reader such a sequence of emotions.
C.S. Lewis expounds on this idea with his own concept of conflict. As he writes in On Stories, and Other Essays, stories rely on the degree of excitement they arouse in the reader. Because of this he admits kinds of danger to be “irrelevant.” Danger depends on its degree rather than its form. He says, “The greater the danger and the narrower the hero’s escape from it, the more exciting the story will be.” As in real life, the “different kinds of danger produce different kinds of fear.” Though unlike real life, fiction will strike the imagination alone, and in that the types of danger will make a difference (7-8). For Lewis, the functions of art are “to present what the narrow and desperately practical perspectives of real life exclude” (10).
All this speaks to the point that American authors of the American “renaissance” era expressed through their characters the conflicts of their own personal experiences and those of their nation.
Hawthorne, one of the century’s more influential authors, was concerned with that “neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary” meet. The outside world provides material for fantasy and fantasy exposes “the hidden truth lurking in actual experience” (Porte 95). Joel Porte has drawn from recent critics the conviction that American literature differs from the “Romance” of England. Whereas English fiction stuck either to strictly fantasy or strictly actual, American authors tended to blend the two.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s father died before he was born. His mother Elizabeth “took the veil of widowhood” (Conway 17) and carried her sadness all her life. The author was born in Salem, Massachusetts on July 4, 1804. In his youth and for some time after college, he spent his time in his old family mansion. They were “lonely” and “wasted” times (29). In his “Note Book” under the date of October 4, 1840, he wrote: “Here I sat a long, long time, waiting patiently for the world to know me, and sometimes wondering why it did not know me sooner, or whether it would ever know me at all, – at least, till I were in my grave. And sometimes it seemed as if I were already in the grave, with only life enough to be chilled and benumbed.” (29) Descriptions of Hawthorne’s life express a man who was “coldly rational and appraising,” with a tendency to study himself and others with “cold objectivity.” He was so much a detached observer that he was able to write such cold characters with authority (Unger 227).
In a letter to the poet Longfellow later in life, he said this: “I have been carried apart from the main current of life and find it impossible to get back again.” (Conway 57) Hawthorne’s own identity crisis is played out in his writing.
Under these conditions he wrote the beloved short story “Young Goodman Brown”. The religious and societal tale connects a diversity of conflict. Young Goodman Brown is faced with the dilemma of leaving his new wife Faith for the journey he must take when night falls. The journey at first is ambiguous, but in the first paragraphs there is a conflict already brewing. Brown is to separate from his wife. Hawthorne gathered from the American mind the idea of the “individual divorced from his racial or family past” and becoming at once liberated and lost, like an orphan as he had also been (Lewis 124).
Young Brown’s ambition, or purpose, is to return after that first night and stay with Faith forever – to “cling to her skirts and follow her to heaven” (1289). Here is a juxtaposition of two purposes at odds. For in one, which the author calls an “evil purpose,” Brown has work to be done that night. But his second and more definitive purpose is to return home and never go out again.
The setting of his walk to the work site is presented as “dreary” with the “gloomiest trees in the forest,” which were dense all around and “closed immediately behind” (1289). They shut him out from what he left behind him. The result is a deep sense of solitude. Fear of Indians and even “the devil himself” hiding behind the trees crept into him. This also reflects American culture, for in the nineteenth century situations seemed to darken: as Lewis identifies, “qualities of evil and fear and destructiveness have entered; self-sufficiency is questioned through terrible trials; and the stage is set for tragedy” (111). Bartlett as well notes that Hawthorne, as a Puritan, was “inclined to see the darker aspects of life,” and he felt there could be “no wisdom without a knowledge of evil” (109).
The mysterious man with the serpent staff appears and walks with him further down the forest path, guiding him onward against his will. By now Brown has discovered that the strange man is none other than the devil himself. Being a strong Christian in a line of good Christian men “since the days of the martyrs” (1290), he is conflicted to keep such company as this man. He will “abide no such wickedness” (1291). But when the devil allows him finally to return, another obstacle takes place. A Christian woman who Brown knew from childhood comes along the path. The devil stops her, and she, knowing his true character accepts his staff and disappears. Brown’s world is thrown upside-down, for Goody Cloyse who he thought “was going to heaven,” was in league with the devil. Two others, the respected and pious Deacon Gookin and the minister of his village, come along heading also for the devil’s ceremony. Brown now doubts that there is even “a heaven above him” (1293), for everyone he knew who were pious people of his village were with the devil. The real conflict lies in the beckoning of the devil in tearing him from his Faith. Through a revelation of voices and screams in the skies, and from his wife’s pink ribbon falling from them, he finds out that Faith has also been taken. The forest, for Hawthorne, was a place of endless possibility, but because of that, evil was inclined to dwell and flourish there. The forest was, according to Lewis, the “ambiguous setting of moral choice, the scene of reversal and discovery in his characteristic tragic drama.” It was the place Hawthorne used for his “grand recurring pattern of escape and return” (114). The same was of the American mind at the time, that the individual faced a crucial choice: whether “to accept the world he had fallen into, or whether to flee it, taking chances in the allegedly free wilderness of the west.” Along with this thought comes the disparity, or conflict, between the village and the forest, the city and the country. These are “the symbols between which the choice must be made and the means by which moral inference is converted into dramatic action” (113).
Hawthorne knew all too well the religious conflict of fin de siècle. Birch and Llewellyn explain it as: the idea that “the tortures awaiting the damned in hell are literally everlasting became, to a growing number of liberal theologians in the Anglican Church, representative of everything that they were trying to purge from Christian thought and worship” (Birch 228). Also in 1880, Benjamin Jowett reported in a written letter how men thirty and forty years before “thought they had to receive as a revelation from God that which conflicted with their sense of justice, and puzzled themselves with trying to reconcile God’s goodness with the doctrine of eternal punishment” (Birch 229). Eternal punishment was viewed as an “eschatological doctrine” revealing what is by what will be and used as the starting point for “defining God and the order of the universe.” Liberals were particularly outraged at this type of God that eternal punishment claimed to reveal. The doctrine candidly renounced God’s interest in man’s “amelioration” and the forgiveness of his sins in the afterlife (230).
In his despair, young Brown gives himself up to the devil, admitting that “to thee is this world given” (1294). Taking the devil’s staff, he runs through the wilderness. Though the forest is frightening, the real horror is himself. Thus Goodman Brown joins the “grave and dark-clad company” (1295) of the forest. Whether he has dreamt the affair or it was real, he is never the same after. His life is gloomy, and while all the people that he knows are like how he left them that one night, he could never take them seriously nor bend his will to accept his faith or the faith of others. The story ends with no happy resolution.
The main conflict of the story is this: should Goodman Brown follow the devil, or stay with Faith? He is obviously lured by the devil and loses his relationship with Faith and the people of his village. The conflict here is a combination of religious crisis and societal seclusion. In the end, Goodman Brown is to be forever separated from those he loves. The story clearly defines the sinfulness of man which was so prevalent in American religion. As “the hopeful expressed their mounting contempt of inherited sin,” there remained an ironic temperament characterized by a sense that the optimistic, innocent, and hopeful were liable to tragedy (Lewis 7-8). In his time, the ideas of innocence and originality were almost “perilously misleading.” These misconceptions stimulated a sense of tragedy instead (9). Hawthorne managed very accurately to capture the “prevailing impulse to escape from every existing mode of organizing and explaining experience, in order to confront life in entirely original terms” (14). As America strove toward perfection, there was a pervading mindset of coming to a realization of the entire self only by losing one’s self to find. Only the lost could find this “fulfillment of the spirit…on their return journey, though a soul might shrivel, like young Brown’s, in the process” (116). As Campbell notes, literature of the time “celebrated the mystery of dismemberment”, where “the happy ending is justly scorned as a misrepresentation.” The world yields one ending: “death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of the heart” (24). Hawthorne felt that substance of narrative consisted in the “imaginable brushes” between the “solitary individual and the society or world awaiting him” (Lewis 112).
Growing up, Hawthorne watched the decline of Salem, the village that once underwent the Witch Trials of 1692. It is the same village he uses in his story, and even a couple of the characters (Goody Cloyse and Martha Carrier) were accused witches and killed in Salem. The war, more than a hundred years later, “struck the town a heavy blow” (Unger 223), which occurred while Hawthorne was in school. War affected both his life and his writing. Even in this story, he alludes to King Philip’s War against Native Americans which took place between 1675 and 1678. The devil explains to Brown how he had helped his ancestors in the endeavors of war, and so entices Brown to do the same. Hawthorne’s first work, Fanshawe, portrays a character who “thinks of himself as nobility in decline,” anticipating and experiencing an early death. Hawthorne tried to write a romance later in life about an American claimant to a lost great English estate (Unger 223). With all of his characters, there is a little of Hawthorne’s own conflict in himself.
Hawthorne’s other uncompleted romance manuscripts express a condition in his life when he had lost the convictions of “clarity and meaning in a dark and ambiguous world.” They show how Hawthorne was “a naïve young man who needed to be guided into an understanding of life’s complexities.” He was imprisoned in his solitude, suffering often from a “deep gloom” surrounding his reflections on death (Unger 226).
Conflict can inform the author’s purposes. There is a connection between the author’s psychological convictions and those of his characters. It is the author’s ability and sensibility that recognizes and represents “the complexities of the human situations.” According to his narrative technique, he represents both sides, “putting opposites into some kind of working and harmonious relationship” (Friedman 147). The conflicts of Hawthorne’s stories are wrought by his skepticism and faith. His hopes and fears are brought out in the distinct form of his art and choice of themes. The theme he uses most is isolation, or what he called “insulation.” He pulls his characters outside the “chain of humanity, where there is neither love nor reality” (Unger 228). Professor Bernard J Paris elucidates the primary companions of fear that arise under adverse conditions as “helplessness, hostility, and isolation” (19). Hawthorne’s characters, including Goodman Brown, are full of “feelings that have personal and social causes.” (Unger 229). He treats matters in a way that makes both the psychological and the moral or religious perspectives on them relevant (244).
Washington Irving’s style of plot is similar to Hawthorne’s, but much more ambiguous. In fact he does not seem to settle on any one style. “His love of ancient lore, his feeling for scenery, his sentiment for people as simple, tranquilly suffering, but well-meaning and ultimately good” (Unger 308) played out in the delicate conflicts of his plots. He has been regarded as a “genial and comic writer,” but at the same time he addressed “darker and more complex themes of historical transformation and personal dislocation” (Baym 951). After returning from two-years in Europe from 1817-1819, he was eager to survey the country, observe its changes and gather impressions. He found it to be very different from Europe in many ways. To him America was unique, but not without its challenges.
In 1819 he wrote “Rip Van Winkle”. Unlike “Young Goodman Brown”, “Rip” begins with a long descriptive setting, and the conflict does not come in until a few pages in. It is valuable, still, to build up to a conflict with an extensive setting. Rip Van Winkle, a “thrice blessed” man who is against “all kinds of profitable labor” (955), is shunned by his neighbors for being lazy. The inconsistency in Rip’s story begins with his distress over not being appreciated. His alternative, then, is to escape the farm and the “clamor of his wife” by taking gun in hand and strolling into the woods. As with many stories of the period, “Rip” echoed the spirit of Romanticism by speaking for the “isolated individual, the outcast, the little man cast against the wildness and lawlessness of society” (Myszor 11). The struggle with common humanity, which was also a nationwide “vocabulary of feeling,” was the alienation and loss of the lonely figures separated from their communities (Birch 2).
On his trek to “one of the highest parts in the Kaatskill Mountains” (957), Rip is approached by a stranger and without a word spoken they trail on together into unknown regions of the mountain. Irving stresses the “strange and incomprehensible” about the “unknown,” that “inspired awe and checked familiarity” (958). They come to a ravine in which is a small ampitheatre where strange and wonderful personages playing at nine-pins. The peculiar is a sure sign of a change in the ordinary.
The keg of liquor that Rip decides to taste at the site puts him into “a deep sleep” (959). When he wakes, it is morning. The stranger and the party playing nine-pins, his dog and his gun, are all gone. He fears his wife would be mad at him for staying away all night. After venturing off to find Wolf and having no success, he returns to the spot where the ampitheatre was and finds it replaced by “a high impenetrable wall, over which the torrent came tumbling in a sheet of feathery foam, and fell into a broad deep basin.” Upon returning to his village, the strangest thing of all comes to pass. Everything has changed in his absence. The village is “larger and more populous” (960); there are “rows of houses which he had never seen before, and those which had been his familiar haunts had disappeared.” Everything was strange, from the “names over the doors” to the “faces at the windows.” Even the peoples’ dress was “of a different fashion from that to which he was accustomed.” And of himself, he notices that his beard has grown a foot long. His own house has “gone to decay.” Its “desolateness” fuels his growing fears – that he has lost everything that was his. After a momentous encounter with his son and daughter, Rip discovers he has been gone for twenty years up in the mountain, though to him it has been only a night. In this the deepest conflict in the story is identified: upon hearing of the “sad changes in his home and friends,” he finds himself thus “alone in the world” (962).
When Rip tells the village people his story, they initially do not believe him, and he is worried he might be rejected as he was before. But another man attests to the strange things in the mountains, and it gives Rip a certain amount of comfort. The story ends happily, unlike “Young Goodman Brown”, with Rip adjusting to the lifestyle of the village and gaining “great favor” with the younger generation.
“Rip Van Winkle” is a work of dreamy, fantastic symbolism. Campbell identifies the hero as the “dreamer of a dream” who “discovers and assimilates his opposite (his own unsuspected self) either by swallowing it or by being swallowed.” He must “put aside his pride, his virtue, beauty, and life, and bow or submit to the absolutely intolerable. Then he finds that he and his opposite are not of differing species, but one flesh” (Hero 97). Irving’s own tension begins between imagination and culture. His works along with those of William Cullen Bryant and James Fenimore Cooper, unlike other literature of the time, tended to be critical of “early national culture” (Baym 932). Rip’s venture away from the village is a picture of distance from any civilization, a man escaping his village and lifestyle and finding peace in the woods, which touches upon the spirit of the Romantic mind. In civilization there is all manner of distrust, hatred, and rejection in humanity; but up in the mountains is a magical place wherein lies the supernatural, where sprite-like characters play their sports and strange miraculous things happen. Rip finds the supernatural or sublime in the mountains transcend conventional life, and even time, in the village. The consequence of Rip’s actions is the feeling of being “alone in the world.” Almost all of Irving’s stories “celebrate victory for the practical man, defeat for the dreamer” (Unger 307). According to the Norton Anthology, many readers have identified with Rip as “a counterhero, an anti-Franklinian who made a success of failure” (960).
The story does end happily, however. Irving’s intentions were not to write a work depicting the downfall of either individual or society. Rather, the symbolism shows that radical changes are sometimes necessary to move society forward. Such changes do not get rid of old ways and traditions entirely; real, lasting change is a mixture of the old and new. Rip’s adventure brings out a positive change in his life, or at least, he begins to cope with the change. He chooses to acquiesce the change of society. Representational values in literature lies either in the area of social portraiture or in the psychological, but these values “must be seen both psychologically and sociologically.” In Irving’s case, the representational meaning of his story is a product of his concern for “the identity of the individual and the welfare of society” (Scholes 379). He wrestles with immutability – the “bewildering rapidity of change” (Baym 953). Irving, Bryant, and Cooper believed in furthering the spiritual growth of the nation rather than producing a distinct literature.
John Campbell’s studies on plot and character can help to better understand Irving’s stories. In his novel The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the story’s plot, although not limited to these, can be “some high historical undertaking” or “the dawn of religious illumination.” Whatever the plot may be and to whatever situations it brings the protagonist, a common theme of literature in all of history is “the awakening of the self” (47). Campbell’s hero (protagonist) is tested by “crises of realization by means of which his consciousness came to be amplified” (111). Like a child growing up, the anxieties, fantasies, and requirement for protection against the forces from within and without shape the character’s developing psyche (160). From these yearnings comes the character’s object of desire. The protagonist confronts the most powerful forces of antagonism and must make a decision to take one action or another to achieve his object of desire. The character is known by his choices. They reveal his deep character and, typically, the story’s most important value as well. The forces the protagonist must face test his willpower most severely, and the decisions he makes are weightier than his actions.
Another famed dark romantic was Edgar Allan Poe. He tended toward dark imagism, the supernatural, mystery and horror. He held his own views on what a distinct American literature should be, rejecting its specifically “national” character, and he “severely criticized contemporary authors when they failed to meet his standards.” He was “quarrelsome, temperamental, alcoholic, and unreliable,” making “few friends and many enemies” (Baym 1528). The Norton Anthology says of him:
“Poe, more than most, understood his audience – its distractedness, its fascination with the new and short-lived, its anomie and confusion – and sought ways to gain its attention for stories that, aside from their shock value, regularly addressed compelling philosophical, cultural, and psychological issues: the place of irrationality, violence, and repression in human consciousness and social institutions; the alienation and dislocations attending democratic mass culture and the modernizing forces of the time; the tug and pull of the material and corporeal; the absolutely terrifying dimensions of one’s own mind.” (1532)
Poe wanted more than anything to publish a magazine of his own. His habit of creating this magazine brought him in ever closer touch with current events and tendencies in the world of thought. He had a “nose for news” (Brooks 348). He addressed in his reflected materials “that nationality which defends our own literature, sustains our own men of letters, upholds our own dignity and depends upon our own resources” (351).
One of his most acclaimed works is “The Fall of the House of Usher”, which he wrote in 1839. In it the conflict begins at the very start. The narrator sees the House of Usher for the first time, and there are long descriptions of the “insufferable” sentiment, an “utter depression of the soul” (1553), that the house provides him with. In these descriptions there is already an underlying psychological connection between the narrator and the house.
The narrator is summoned to the house by its owner, Roderick Usher, who suffers from an unknown mental illness. The house has been decaying and has been discolored by age, and inside the house the narrator detects a more psychosomatic decay, as he “breathes an atmosphere of sorrow…an air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom” (1555). He finds that the interior is morbidly depressing, with its “vaulted and fretted” ceilings, “comfortless, antique, and tattered” furniture, and “dark draperies hung upon the walls.” The narrator reacts to the master of the house with much the same sentiment: “with a feeling half of pity, half of awe.” For Roderick bears the same physical decay in his countenance. He suffers from “a family evil,” what the narrator calls “a morbid acuteness of the senses” (1556). This is when Roderick discloses his “pitiable condition” and the looming abandoning of “life and reason.” Roderick’s condition is in some way linked to the dwelling in which he is “enchained.” The house conveys a decaying of his spirit and physique, to the downfall of “the morale of his existence” (1557). His condition can also be traced to his sister Madeline. Her death would ruin him, leaving him demoralized as “the last of the ancient race of the Ushers.” She is sick with an incurable disease, and it devastates Roderick. It was typical of Poe to write about individuals isolated in time and space from the rest of the world, usually by “some monstrous predicament.” They were in situations that were physically enclosed and intensely focused on one man’s crisis. In this style he was able to implement what he called “unity of impression” – “stories in which every element contributes to some overall atmosphere or idea” (Myszor 14-15).
Roderick’s condition continues to worsen. He sings of a palace that was once “fair and stately” (1558) which could indicate his own house. The palace and its ruler are assailed by evil things, and it becomes a desolate, haunted palace. The song represents Usher’s fate as a romantic artist: beginning in joy and gladness, but inevitably moving to despondency and madness as his vision darkens and he becomes aware of the “evil things” in himself and others. To Joel Porte, these are truths that the author addresses as he “descends into the human depths” (66).
In the night that Roderick informs the narrator of Madeline’s death, his mental disorder worsens all the more, and the small amount of luminosity in his countenance disappears. The narrator seeks to “explain Roderick’s nervousness and anxiety as grounded in his mental anguish,” but it becomes increasingly difficult as he “begins to doubt his own perceptions” (Sova 69). He himself feels the influence of Roderick’s condition and it terrifies him. The narrator constantly attempts to prevent Roderick’s surrender to decay by shielding him from the sight of the whirlwind outside and reading him positive stories. One interpretation of this scene is the way Americans sheltered themselves from despair by their overwhelming sense of hope. The storm causes the house to crack, and simultaneously Roderick acts out of the ordinary, as though he has lost his senses.
Roderick admits to having heard Madeline moving in her tomb ever since they put her there. Then Madeline appears to them and falls on Roderick, “bearing him to the floor a corpse” (1565). The narrator flees the house, and sees the large fissure of its exterior rapidly expand until the entire house collapses. The events and characters show the decline of “the human mind on the brink of insanity.” Madeline represents the unconscious and Roderick the conscious. When Roderick denies the existence of Madeline, it is like the conscious is rejecting the unconscious, and the house encompasses both. This brings the human mind to destruction (Sova 68). Poe puts the focus of the narrator’s perceptions and observations on the “disintegrating intellect” of Roderick, rather than on the crumbling house itself. The source of terror therefore is not physical but psychological. The reader is brought to enter Roderick’s mind so that he also fears “the onslaught of insanity.” The story explores themes of isolation and self-destruction, similar to “Young Goodman Brown”. But unlike Hawthorne’s story, Poe focuses more on the psyche. His setting, symbolism, and imagery present “evil, madness, and insanity” (Sova 69). These things afflict the Usher family, and Roderick is overwhelmed by fear and anxiety. Whereas Poe presents a striking portrait of the victims of supernatural forces, Roderick’s behavior and his downfall is doubtless the result of “psychological disturbance” (72). The underlying conflict is to resist mental breakdown or give in to corruption.
According to Aristotle, a well-written plot will include the protagonist “who is not eminently good and just,” yet his misfortune “is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty” (24). Protagonists provoke the reader’s hopes, sympathies, and even loathing (when they make the wrong choices). They are the life of the story, embodying the whole moral image of its world. Inner conflict may inflict a character so much that it becomes difficult for the reader to establish that he is still the protagonist. Sometimes the choices of the protagonist might cause the reader to question the character’s loyalty to his original object of desire. The ones rooted for become victims of a conflict of morality and invoke a change of perspective and emotion from the reader. That was Poe’s area of expertise.
Under the influence of the ideas of Edgar Allan Poe, critics in the mid-19th century began to reject stories that were just plot and nothing else. Poe introduced the idea that “stories should concentrate on creating a single impression in the reader,” and brought to the world “a more economic style of writing” (Myszor 11-12).
With science as a major influence of society, opening up vast possibilities for the unknown, Poe’s morbid and pseudo-scientific imaginings took strong hold (Myszor 14). Conflict for Poe could never come to an end, or if it did, it would continue in another form. His tale of an American Pilgrim’s Progress also leads “not to eternal salvation but to eternal terror.” He takes the American theme of exploration in the wilderness and alters it with the “stalking of the darkest aspects of the self.” He was convicted that the American experience may ultimately prove to be fatal (Porte 85). Poe may have been critical of the American mind, but his criticism was welcomed into the American spirit and influential to American literature.
It was not so much the unities of the culture that America’s most imaginative writers illustrated, but its “discontinuities and contradictions.” How could they dramatize the opposing views of the free individual with that of moral law and Providence? How could the American mission be accomplished, and American society be perfected, where individual self-interest was prominent? (Bartlett 117). Birch and Llewellen assert: “Conflicts in understanding, belief and interpretation cannot be resolved through literature but the literary can provide a space in which differences in relationships, worldview, politics, aesthetics and ethics can be made meaningful through the very assertion of difference as fundamentally an empowering action” (3). It is no doubt that humanity can “gain greater insight into human behavior because of the richness of artistic presentation” (Paris 8). Literary art connects two worlds: the fictional and the real, and for this fundamental design it is so highly regarded, criticized, and employed. The spokesperson of America may use literature to bring to light the truths of its inconsistencies. America’s prejudices and fears were realized in its literature. The conflict of identity in the characters drawn by these authors inform very clearly the cultural, psychological, and literary struggle for a distinct, national American identity.
References
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