American Gothic is the darker side of American Romanticism. Although the Gothic is thoroughly romantically preoccupied with the self, the human mind and interior mental processes, its vision of us is altogether bleaker, hence the Gothic's usefully apt synonym 'dark romanticism.' The critic Leslie Fiedler once complained that American fiction in the 19th- century became 'bewilderingly and embarrassingly, a gothic fiction, non-realistic, sadist and melodramatic--a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation." Notably, while the Transcendentalists celebrated human perfection, the Dark Romantics explored sin, self-destruction, and the psychological effects of guilt and madness. While the Transcendentalists celebrated the natural world, for Dark Romantics nature was dark, sinister and often unknowable. While the Transcendentalists expressed Emersonian faith in the ideal and in a cosmic oversoul, American Gothic writers left the reader only with contradictions and paradoxes, with moral and emotional ambiguity. For the American Gothic writer, America's Puritan heritage was a lingering consciousness of the coexistence of good and evil, a prevailing sense of Calvinist guilt, and the remnants of apocalyptic terror. In many regards also, it might be argued that the apparently un-American elements of Gothic fiction actually have their origin in U.S. history, in particular with an unconscious of the "American dream" that was ever fearful of the undisciplined rule of majority, mob rule democracy and eruptions of social disorder. Notably, American Gothic in the 19th-century is also quite distinct from the British Gothic tradition. While both explore the uncanny, and the nature of fear and terror, American Gothic is more philosophical in nature, with an emphasis on mystery, symbol and allegory, and often with, as we shall now see, an uncanny exploration of questions of gender and sexuality.
- Teacher: Rob Smith