Gothic Landscapes

Changing Eras, Changing Cultures, Changing Anxieties

Sharon Rose Yang, Kathleen Healey, Sharon Rose Yang, Kathleen Healey

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9783319331652
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book is about the ways that Gothic literature has been transformed since the 18th century across cultures and across genres. In a series of essays written by scholars in the field, the book focuses on landscape in the Gothic and the ways landscape both reflects and reveals the dark elements of culture and humanity. It goes beyond traditional approaches to the Gothic by pushing the limits of the definition of the genre. From landscape painting to movies and video games, from memoir to fiction, and from works of different cultural origins and perspectives, this volume traverses the geography of the Gothic revealing the anxieties that still haunt humanity into the twenty-first century.

Part I
Cross-Genre: Hideous Hybrids/Hybrids of Horror

© The Author(s) 2016

Sharon Rose Yang and Kathleen Healey (eds.)Gothic Landscapes10.1007/978-3-319-33165-2_2

Begin Abstract

Dark Shadows in the Promised Land: Landscapes of Terror and the Visual Arts in Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly

Kathleen Healey¹

(1)

Department of English, Worcester State University, Worcester, MA, USA

End Abstract

Charles Brockden Brown is widely known as America’s first writer in the Gothic genre. From the horrors of yellow fever to disembodied voices, murder, and Indian captivity, Brown’s works lead the reader through the twists and turns of the dark side of human nature. While working within what was, in the late eighteenth century, a mainly European mode of writing, Brown depicted a uniquely American experience. In his Preface to his novel Edgar Huntly (1799), Brown wrote that he would replace the “[p]uerile superstition and exploded manners,” the “Gothic castles and chimeras” of Europe with “[t]he incidents of Indian hostility, and the perils of the western wilderness,” which are far more suitable “to create his American tale.” ¹

While Brown’s novels are uniquely American, the American landscape itself, for the most part, plays a minor role in the unfolding drama. Indeed, with the exception of Edgar Huntly, his novels contain little description of terrain. When scholars discuss Brown’s landscapes at all, they usually interpret them in terms of their psychological or mythic elements. ² A few scholars, such as Ezra Tawil, Kenneth Bernard, Beth Lueck, Dennis Berthold, and Robert Lawson-Peebles, have recognized the aesthetic qualities of landscape in Edgar Huntly, offering a fresh look at the work and artistry of Charles Brockden Brown. ³ In this chapter, I argue that the landscape in Edgar Huntly is central to his novel, but not just on mythic or psychological levels; the American landscape plays a vital role in the development of political meaning in his work. ⁴ Brown examines what James Goho states as central to the American Gothic—he “gives voice, often in a disfigured and threatening fashion, to those displaced by the nation, to the anxieties of the nation, and to the fears of the nation” (Goho 17). Utilizing the imagery of the American landscape popular in American paintings of the late eighteenth century, Brown, in his novel, critiques the social and political ideology inherent in those images. In this way, Brown reveals his vision of the condition of the new nation and demonstrates that America’s utopian expectations for the future cannot be achieved.

Born in Philadelphia in 1771, Charles Brockden Brown could not help being affected by the political climate of the newly born country. ⁵ During the years following the Revolution, the new American nation was busy constructing a government, society, and culture. This was a time of great political strife and fear, and also of great hope. As many historians have noted, the decade of the 1790s was a period of turbulence in which Federalists and Republicans clashed over the nature of the American government and the future of the nation. ⁶ Republicans believed in the idea of humankind’s natural goodness and advocated little government interference, and many desired that America become an agrarian nation. Federalists, on the other hand, were not idealistic about human nature. They believed that humankind and society needed laws and strong government; otherwise, humankind, with its base passions, would run amuck, anarchy would reign, and society would crumble. As Jay Fliegelman notes, while Jefferson believed in the power of education, Federalist Adams feared that “human reason and human conscience are not a match for human passion, human imagination, and human enthusiasm” (Fliegelman 237). Federalists feared that the forces unleashed during the Revolution would cause the destruction of the new American Republic. The split between Federalists and Republicans widened as these fears were compounded after the French Revolution. Once supported and celebrated by America, the French Revolution turned especially violent and bloody, filling many Americans with the fear that this type of Revolution would occur in America. Federalists spoke out against liberal, revolutionary French ideology; and some Americans voiced fears that the French were infiltrating America in order to subvert the new nation. Political figures friendly toward the French government, including Thomas Jefferson, were suspect.

Yet at the same time, this era was a time of hope and idealism about America’s future. While Americans struggled with their national birth pangs, many believed that America, now politically free from the decadence, oppression, and decay of Europe, might create an ideal society. A sense of pride devolved upon the American landscape, and it became the means by which Americans defined their nation and themselves against Europe. Not only was the American landscape uniquely American, seemingly virgin and innocent, it also offered enormous potential for economic exploitation no longer viable in Europe. Furthermore, many saw it as the means by which America might attain a utopian society. As Thomas Jefferson argued in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), if America would become a nation of farmers, it would attain political and social felicity. He notes “[c]orruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phaenomenon [sic] of which no age nor nation has furnished an example … It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigour” (Jefferson 165). Underlying Jefferson’s ideology is the concept of American independence and individualism. Owning their own land and working for themselves, he reasoned, farmers are independent, happy, and virtuous, and thus make the best citizens. In turn, the American nation itself would thrive because its citizens were virtuous and content. The domesticated landscape reflected the order and control America had achieved over the wilderness and, to some extent, the darker forces in humankind. This ideology of the virtuous farmer shaped America’s development of the frontier. Inherent in this belief was a faith in the enlightenment ideals and the principles of the American Revolution (Cohen 88). Rational, enlightened people would transform the wilderness and insure a rational, enlightened frontier community. And at the heart of this utopia was a Republican government, which helped ensure the development of civilization.

Because the landscape was central to the developing myths and idealism America had of itself, it is not surprising that the hopes and anxieties about America’s future came to be embodied in representations of the American landscape in the years following the Revolution. In both landscape painting and written descriptions of American landscape during this period, images of neat farms, villages, and peaceful rural retreats are celebrated; houses, barns, roads, mills, fences, bridges, and grazing livestock are the focal points, demonstrating the virtue and productivity of the inhabitants and the righteous, and the wholesome progress of America’s efforts to tame the landscape. Wilderness scenes were rarely painted before the nineteenth century and, if they appeared in written works, they were shown as an evil to be conquered. These descriptions or paintings of pacific rural villages and prosperous farms demonstrate the virtue, industry, and tranquility of America. This sight of beneficence, of peace and plenty, is based upon the belief that the moral, social, and economic successes of society arise from hard working citizens (Clarke 149). In this sense, as Angela Miller notes, images of the American landscape in painting and writing were fraught with meaning, for Americans were taught to “translate visual elements into social and moral values” (Miller 80). These images of fenced land, farms, and villages, became icons representing the height of the moral, social, and political condition of America.

Paintings such as Ralph Earl’s Daniel Boardman (1789) (Fig. 1) and Oliver Ellsworth and Abigail Wolcott Ellsworth (1792) (Fig. 2), convey images of prosperous America, a land of social harmony, endless opportunities, and little poverty (Nygren 25). In many of these paintings the message of America’s progress and civilization is evident in the images of houses and estates that revealed the success of the American experiment (Nygren 25).

The paintings of Ralph Earl are especially representative of the idealism embodied in the American landscape. Primarily a portrait painter, Earl both included regional landscape features in his portraits and painted landscapes alone. Earl was, in fact, “[o]ne of the first native-born American artists to focus on regional landscape subjects” (Kornhauser 57). His Looking East from Denny Hill exemplifies the idea of American progress. The painting of the town (Leicester, Massachusetts) is a representation of the eighteenth-century pastoral ideal, with pastures, workers harvesting hay, and a church steeple in the distance. There is no wilderness to disrupt the rural scene (Kornhauser et al. 236). The sky is pink and blue, which, as in his Houses Fronting New Milford Green (1796), conveys a sense of well-being (Kornhauser et al. 217).

Like his Looking East from Denny Hill, Earl’s painting, Daniel Boardman (1789) (Fig. 1), exemplifies the values of American democracy, hard work, and progress. Daniel Boardman, along with his brother, Elijah, had a partnership in a dry goods store in New Milford, Connecticut, and also jointly owned a considerable amount of land and real estate in the town (Kornhauser et al. 152). This portrait, along with one of his brother, represents, among other things, the prosperity of the brothers’ business partnership. Daniel stands in the foreground while a view of the town of New Milford is laid out behind him (Kornhauser 47). The predominant landscape setting of the portrait may symbolize the various properties Daniel owned at the time his portrait was painted.

Fig. 1

Daniel Boardman, 1789 Ralph Earl National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

The painting also represents America as a prosperous, ordered land, a pastoral ideal. Earl depicts New Milford as a thriving village, with a meeting house and colonial home with fenced yard as focal points in the painting (Kornhauser et al. 152). The meeting house at the center of the town seems to represent the heart of a virtuous and thriving community, and the rightness of democracy. A closer examination of the elements of the painting further reveals social and political meaning in Earl’s other paintings that I discussed earlier. The landscapes in the paintings are extensively fenced. According to Graham Clarke, “[t]he fence was not so much to keep individuals out as to keep wilderness—and chaos—at bay” (Clarke 158). In a sense, these images of the virtue and progress brought to America through settlement and farming sanctioned westward expansion; they reinforced America’s belief in the civilizing power of the pastoral and promised that utopia could be achieved in the new Republic.

Fig. 2

Oliver Ellsworth and Abigail Wolcott Ellsworth, 1792 Ralph Earl Courtesy of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT

At the same time, these paintings celebrate American democracy, for it is democracy that is at the very base of the values inherent in the paintings. This point is especially borne out by Earl’s Oliver Ellsworth and Abigail Wolcott Ellsworth (Fig. 2). The painting depicts the lawyer, politician, and Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth and his wife. Through the window is the Ellsworth home, Elmwood, in Windsor, Connecticut (Kornhauser et al. 181). Ellsworth sits at a table holding a copy of the Constitution. Behind Ellsworth are shelves of books denoting his extensive library, which contained numerous books dealing with law and political philosophy (Kornhauser et al. 181). The house itself is central to the painting and, therefore, framed as a portrait. Significantly, Ellsworth holds the Constitution upon which the house itself seems to rest. The painting conveys the message that the Constitution, Justice Ellsworth, and the law, symbolized by the books, uphold the values of land ownership (Clarke 159). The iconology in this painting is clear: the virtue, prosperity, and order of American society rests upon democracy, law, and the enlightened ideals of the Revolution. This iconology sanctioned westward expansion and American frontier policy, while also defining America as distinct and unique from the poverty, decadence, and political despotism of the “Old World.”

The relationship between visual and written landscapes is one that Brown and many of his contemporaries would have understood. An educated writer, especially one who traveled, Brown would have known the vogue for the picturesque way of seeing the landscape. ⁷ The picturesque traveler is one who has learned—by exa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• Introduction: Haunted Landscapes and Fearful Spaces—Expanding Views on the Geography of the Gothic
• 1. Cross-Genre: Hideous Hybrids/Hybrids of Horror
• 2. Darkness in Unexpected Places: Not Your Grandmother’s Haunted Castle
• 3. Gothic Social Landscapes
• Backmatter