Joyce Carol Oates

American Gothic Tales, by Joyce Carol Oates Introduction Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright. —HERMAN MELVILLE, MOBY DICK How uncanny, how mysterious, how unknowable and infinitely beyond their control must have seemed the vast wilderness of the New World, to the seventeenth- century Puritan settlers! The inscrutable silence of Nature the muteness that, not heralding God, must be a dominion of Satan's; the tragic ambiguity of human nature with its predilection for what Christians call "original sin," inherited from our first parents, Adam and Eve. When Nature is so vast, man's need for control—for "settling" the wilderness—becomes obsessive. And how powerful the temptation to project mankind's divided self onto the very silence of Nature. It was the intention of those English Protestants known as Puritans to "purify" the Church of England by eradicating everything in the Church that seemed to have no biblical justification. The most radical Puritans, "Separatists" and eventually "Pilgrims," settled Plymouth, Massachusetts, in the 1620s; others who followed, in subsequent years, were less zealous about defining themselves as "Separatists" (from the mother country England). Yet all were characterized by the intransigence of their faith; their fierce sense of moral rectitude and self-righteousness. The New England Puritans were an intolerant people whose theology could not have failed to breed paranoia, if not madness, in the sensitive among them. Consider, for instance, the curious Covenant of Grace, which taught that only those men and women upon whom God sheds His grace are saved, because this allows them to believe in Christ; those excluded from God's grace lack the power to believe in a Savior, thus are not only not saved, but damned. We never had a chance! those so excluded might cry out of the bowels of Hell. We were doomed from the start. The extreme gothic sensibility springs from such paradoxes: that the loving, paternal God and His son Jesus are nonetheless willful tyrants; "good" is inextricably bound up with the capacity to punish; one may wish to believe oneself free but in fact all human activities are determined, from the perspective of the deity, long before one's birth. It comes as no surprise, then, that the very titles of celebrated Puritan works of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries strike a chord of anxiety. The Spiritual Conflict, The Holy War, Day of Doom, Thirsty Sinner, Groans of the Damned, The Wonders of the Invisible World, Man Knows Not His Time, Repentant Sinners and Their Ministers, Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcraft and Possessions—these might be the titles of lurid works of gothic fiction, not didactic sermons, prose pieces and poetry. The great Puritan poet Edward Taylor was also a minister. Taylor's subtle, intricately wrought metaphysical verse dwells upon God's love and terror almost exclusively, and man's insignificance in the face of God's omnipotence: "my Will is your Design." Taylor's poetry suggests a man of uncommon gifts, intelligence and sensitivity trapped in a fanatic religion as in a straitjacket; here is the gothic predilection for investing all things, even the most seemingly innocuous (weather, insects) with cosmological meaning. Is there nothing in the gothic imagination that can mean simply—"nothing"? Our first American novelist of substance, Charles Brockden Brown, was born of a Philadelphia Quaker family; but his major novel Wieland, or The Transformation (1798) is suffused with the spirit of Puritan paranoia—"God is the object of my supreme passion," Wieland declares. Indeed, the very concept of rational self- determinism is challenged by this dark fantasy of domestic violence. Though Charles Brockden Brown provides a naturalistic explanation for Wieland's maniacal behavior, it is clearly not plausible; the novel is a nightmare expression of the fulfillment of repressed desire, anticipating Edgar Allan Poe's similarly claustrophobic tales of the grotesque. Wieland's deceased father was a Protestant religious fanatic who seems to have been literally immolated by guilt; Wieland Jr. is a disciple of the Enlightenment who is nonetheless driven mad by "voices" urging him to destruction. I was dazzled. My organs were bereaved of their activity. My eyelids were half- closed.... A nameless fear chilled my veins, and I stood motionless. This irradiation did not retire or lessen. It seemed as if some powerful effulgence covered me like a mantle.... It was the element of heaven that flowed around. But the "element of heaven" demands that Wieland sacrifice those he loves best—his wife and children. Such assaults upon individual autonomy and identity characterize the majority of the tales collected in this volume, by Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, H. P. Lovecraft and more recent twentieth- century writers for whom the "supernatural" and the malevolent "unconscious" have fused. Even in the more benign "enchanted region" of Washington Irving's Sleepy Hollow (of The Sketch Book, 1820), an ordinary, decent man like Ichabod Crane is subjected to an ordeal of psychic breakdown; Irving's imagination is essentially comic, but of that cruel, mordant comedy tinctured by sadism. Descendant of one of the judges of the notorious Salem witch trials of 1692-93, Nathaniel Hawthorne became a historian-fantasist of his own Puritan forbears in such symbolist romances as The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables and in the parable-like stories gathered in Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), of which "Young Goodman Brown" is the most frequently reprinted and "The Man of Adamant," included here, is exemplary, though relatively little-known. Here is a chilling tale of a developing psychosis in the guise of religious piety: a radical Puritan preacher adopts "a plan of salvation . so narrow, that, like a plank in a tempestuous sea, it could avail no sinner but himself." In true gothic fashion, the man of adamant suffers a physical transformation commensurate with his spiritual condition: he becomes a calcified, embalmed corpse. (The gothic-grotesque sensibility, graphically expressed by such artists as Hieronymus Bosch, Goya, Francis Bacon, insists upon the physicality of such spiritual transformations.) Unusual for any gothic tale, Herman Melville's surreal, dream-like allegory "The Tartarus of Maids" is informed by a political vision, the writer's appalled sympathy with the fates of girls and women condemned to factory work in New England mills—and condemned to being female in a wholly patriarchal society. Usually paired with the cheery, jocose "The Paradise of Bachelors," which is set in an affluent gentlemen lawyers' club in London, "The Tartarus of Maids" is a remarkable work for its time (the 1850s) in its equation of sexual/biological and social determinism: "At rows of blank-looking counters sat rows of blank-looking girls, with blank, white folders in their blank hands, all blankly folding blank paper." Yet somehow the paper-mill to which the girls are condemned to work like slaves is also the female body. The narrator is led through it by an affable guide named Cupid and learns that to be female, to be male chattel, to be condemned by impregnation by male seed, is for the virginal females their Tartarus, that region of Hades reserved for punishment of the wicked. Of what are these girls and women guilty except having been born of a debased female sex?—into a body "that is a mere machine, the essence of which is unvarying punctuality and precision." "The Tartarus of Maids" is notable for exhibiting a rare feat of sexual identification, for virtually no male writers of Melville's era, or any other, have made the imaginative effort of trying to see from the perspective of the "other sex," let alone trying to see in a way highly critical of the advantages of masculinity. A more psychologically realistic portrayal of the trapped female, in this case a wife and mother of an economically comfortable class (her husband is a physician), is Charlotte Perkins Gilman's classic "The Yellow Wallpaper" whose inspired manic voice derives from Poe but whose vision of raging female despair is the author's own. In the work of our premier American gothicist, Edgar Allan Poe, from whose Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), so much of twentieth-century horror and detective fiction springs, there are no fully realized female characters, indeed no fully realized characters at all; but the female is likely to be the obsessive object of desire, and her premature death, as in "The Fall of the House of Usher," "Ligeia," and the story anthologized here, "The Black Cat," is likely to be the precipitating factor. "The Black Cat" demonstrates Poe at his most brilliant, presenting a madman's voice with such mounting plausibility that the reader almost—almost—identifies with his unmotivated and seemingly unresisted acts of insane violence against the affectionate black cat Pluto, and eventually his own wife. Like "The Tell-Tale Heart," with which it bears an obvious kinship, "The Black Cat" explores from within a burgeoning, blossoming evil; an evil exacerbated by alcohol, yet clearly a congenital evil unprovoked by the behavior of others. Ironically, the nameless narrator is one who has enjoyed since childhood the company of animals, and he and his wife live amid a Peaceable Kingdom of pets—"birds, a gold-fish, a dog, rabbits, a small monkey, and a cat." The narrator, drawn by degrees to escalating acts of cruelty, gouges out Pluto's eye with a pen-knife, and later hangs the mutilated creature: "And then came, as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of PERVERSENESS." In Poe's gothic cosmology, not the "I" but the "imp of the perverse" rules.

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