The Dark Side of the American Renaissance

The idea

The years around eighteen fifty produced, within a few miles of each other, a literature that shares Concord's methods and denies Concord's conclusions. The dark Romantics keep intuition, symbol, the solitary figure and the suspicion of crowds, and they put the flaw back inside the human being. Poe supplies the machinery and the theory: a tale should be read at one sitting and every word should serve a single preconceived effect, a rule that made the American short story what it is. His narrators are the period's great unreliable voices, the man who proves his sanity by describing a dismemberment and the murderer who tells his story fifty years later without remorse, and his poems are built for the ear with falling rhythms and refrains that stay fixed while the speaker unravels. He also invented the analytic detective and gave the genre its permanent shape. Hawthorne takes the Puritan past his own family belonged to, with a witch-trial judge among his ancestors, and turns it into a body of work about concealed guilt: a man who sees his whole village at a sabbath and can never trust anyone again, a minister who wears a veil until death and asks why they tremble at him alone, a scarlet letter whose meaning the town keeps revising, a house carrying a curse laid at the gallows. He insisted his long fictions were romances, claiming latitude from the probable. Melville, who met Hawthorne while writing Moby-Dick and named the blackness in him that no deeply thinking mind escapes, builds the largest structure of the three: a chase wrapped in an encyclopaedia, a chapter that asks why whiteness frightens and decides it may signify nothing, a copyist who prefers not to, a captain who cannot see a rebellion staged in front of him, and a sailor lawfully hanged for an act everyone knows was innocent. What unites them is a refusal to resolve, and the exam's questions about this group are usually about exactly that: what the symbol will not settle into.