Dark Romanticism And Transcendentalism
Visions of psychological, emotional, spiritual paralysis and despair run rampant throughout dark romantic literature. Dark Romanticism can be seen as the antithesis of the Romantic ideals that reached their ultimate form in Transcendentalism. Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, two dark Romantics, were concerned with the human condition and human nature in a way that few other writers of the time period were. Although strikingly different from the Transcendentalists, Hawthorne and Poe emphasize individualism and imagination based on their passions, intuition, and emotions in their stories much like the mainstream Romantics. However, Poe and Hawthorne do not come up with the same optimism nor do they delve into the beauty of nature
…show more content…
Terror, even in the extreme case in “The Fall of the House of Usher”, results in madness and death. Poe’s characters, Roderick and Madeline, are not just brother and sister but twins who share "sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature" which connect his mental disintegration to her physical decline (662). Poe’s characters experience guilt, which is represented by Roderick Usher’s conscious premature burial of his sister, whose return from the grave leads to the literal fall of the house of Usher. Throughout the tale, Poe blurs the line between sanity and madness which is essentially correlated to life and death. Poe uses traditional Gothic elements such as inclement weather and a barren landscape within his story to set an atmosphere that is dark and foreboding. The reader is alone with the narrator in this haunted space, and neither really knows why. Although the narrator is Roderick’s most intimate boyhood friend, he apparently does not know much about him. The narrator tries to comfort and rescue Roderick from an illness in which the exterior self has been lost to the interior world of the imagination. Roderick's fantasy world is like that of an artist: his music; his literature which deals with extremes of the human imagination; and his art that portrays a vault which is illuminated from no visible
Terror, even in the extreme case in “The Fall of the House of Usher”, results in madness and death. Poe’s characters, Roderick and Madeline, are not just brother and sister but twins who share "sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature" which connect his mental disintegration to her physical decline (662). Poe’s characters experience guilt, which is represented by Roderick Usher’s conscious premature burial of his sister, whose return from the grave leads to the literal fall of the house of Usher. Throughout the tale, Poe blurs the line between sanity and madness which is essentially correlated to life and death. Poe uses traditional Gothic elements such as inclement weather and a barren landscape within his story to set an atmosphere that is dark and foreboding. The reader is alone with the narrator in this haunted space, and neither really knows why. Although the narrator is Roderick’s most intimate boyhood friend, he apparently does not know much about him. The narrator tries to comfort and rescue Roderick from an illness in which the exterior self has been lost to the interior world of the imagination. Roderick's fantasy world is like that of an artist: his music; his literature which deals with extremes of the human imagination; and his art that portrays a vault which is illuminated from no visible