The Dark Romantics: Poe, Hawthorne, Melville

This is Unit Eight of American Literature, part one of two: the writers who answered Concord by looking at what a self conceals. Unit seven ended by sorting Romantic writing into two camps, and told you the test: where the passage puts the evil. This unit is the second camp, and its governing idea, which part two pays off, is that these writers keep everything Concord kept and reverse the verdict. Intuition, symbol, the solitary individual, the refusal of realism's ordinary surfaces, all of it stays. What goes is the optimism. Where Emerson trusts the self and blames institutions, Hawthorne and Melville examine what the self is hiding, and locate the trouble inside a person or inherited through a family. Poe belongs to the same camp by temperament rather than by argument, and he brought something else: a theory that a story is engineered toward one chosen effect, which shaped the American short story as a form. This part takes Poe entire, then Hawthorne's tales, then *The Scarlet Letter* and the romance that followed it. By the end you will be able to say how the dark Romantics differ from Concord. To account for Poe's life and his theory. To read his poems for their sound. To place his four famous tales and the genre he invented. And to account for Hawthorne's tales and his first great novel.

Four entries to begin: the camp's position, the man who ran it on instinct, and the theory of writing he left behind.

Same instruments, opposite verdict.

AML 0701 Dark Romanticism: The Answer to Concord

The dark Romantics share the Transcendentalists' methods and reject their optimism. They keep intuition, symbol and the solitary individual, and they locate evil inside human nature rather than in institutions. Where Emerson trusts the self, Hawthorne and Melville examine what the self conceals. They are Romantics arguing with Romantics, which is why the vocabulary decides nothing.

Orphaned, taken in, cut off.

AML 0702 Edgar Allan Poe: The Life and the Legend

Born in Boston to travelling actors, Poe was orphaned before he was four and taken in, though never adopted, by the tobacco merchant John Allan. Allan paid for the University of Virginia and then stopped, and gambling debts forced Poe out. The quarrel shaped a career spent short of money. A hostile obituarist built the legend that followed.

Effect chosen first, poem built after.

AML 0703 "The Philosophy of Composition"

In this essay of eighteen forty-six Poe claims to reconstruct how he wrote "The Raven", beginning with the effect he wanted and working backwards to length, refrain and subject. Whether or not the account is honest, it is the period's clearest statement that a poem is engineered rather than received. It may be performance rather than method.

One sitting, one effect, no waste.

AML 0704 The Single Effect and the Short Story's Rules

Poe argued that a tale should be readable at a single sitting and that every word in it should serve one preconceived effect. That rule shaped the American short story as a form: compression, a controlling mood, and an ending that completes the design rather than merely stopping. The rule is Poe's, and later writers broke it deliberately.

Three entries on the poems: a bird with one word, a tomb by the sea, and the machinery that makes both easy to memorize.

One word, answering everything.

AML 0705 "The Raven"

A student mourning Lenore is visited at midnight by a raven that answers every question with one word. The poem works by an insistent trochaic meter, heavy internal rhyme, and a refrain that stays fixed while the speaker's questions grow more desperate, so the same syllable turns from novelty into sentence. The refrain never changes; the questions do.

A kingdom by the sea.

AML 0706 "Annabel Lee" and the Dead Beloved

"Annabel Lee", published in eighteen forty-nine, tells of a love in a kingdom by the sea ended by the girl's death, with the speaker still lying beside her tomb. Poe called the death of a beautiful woman the most poetical subject there is. That claim about the subject is Poe's own rather than the course's.

Built for the ear, deliberately.

AML 0707 Poe's Sound: Meter, Refrain, and Internal Rhyme

Poe's verse is built for the ear: long lines with strong falling rhythms, rhymes inside the line as well as at its end, repeated words and whole repeated phrases. The technique makes the poems easy to memorize and is the reason they are so often parodied. The music is deliberate, and it costs him some readers.

Five entries on the tales: a house that falls with its family, two murderers, a quarrel with science, and a genre begun by accident.

A house and a family, collapsing together.

AML 0708 "The Fall of the House of Usher"

A visitor arrives at a decaying mansion where Roderick Usher and his twin Madeline are the last of their line. Madeline is entombed, returns, and the house splits and sinks into the tarn beside it. Building, family and bodies fail together in the same sentence. The house is the family, which is the whole design.

A confession that denies madness.

AML 0709 "The Tell-Tale Heart"

A narrator insists he is not mad, then explains how the old man's filmed eye drove him to kill and dismember and hide the body under the floorboards. Convinced he can hear the heart still beating, he confesses to the police. The story is the course's model unreliable narrator, and his proof of sanity convicts him.

A wine, a trowel, a silence.

AML 0710 "The Cask of Amontillado"

Montresor lures Fortunato into the family vaults with the promise of a rare sherry and walls him up alive, telling the story fifty years later without any remorse. The irony is continuous: every courtesy Montresor offers is part of the murder, and the victim's name means fortunate. The pleasantries are the method of the killing.

Science as a vulture, hunting myth.

AML 0711 "Sonnet—To Science" and Poe's Quarrel With the Age

Poe's early sonnet addresses science as a vulture whose dull realities prey on the poet's heart, driving the naiad from the flood and the elf from the grass. The complaint is Romantic in the strict sense: explanation is treated as a theft from the imagination. The quarrel is with explanation rather than with knowledge.

A reasoning amateur, an admiring friend.

AML 0712 Poe and the Invention of Detective Fiction

In "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter" Poe created the analytic detective, a brilliant amateur who solves a case by reasoning while the police blunder, narrated throughout by an admiring friend. That pattern became the template for the whole genre that followed. The narrator's slowness is what measures the detective's speed.

Four entries on Hawthorne's tales: a family history he could not put down, and four stories that decline to resolve.

A witch-trial judge in the family.

AML 0713 Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Puritan Inheritance

Hawthorne was born in Salem in eighteen-oh-four, into a family that included a judge at the witch trials. His father, a sea captain, died of yellow fever when he was four. After Bowdoin he studied Puritan history, and its guilt became his subject. Inherited guilt is his recurring theme rather than an occasional one.

One night, and a lifetime of suspicion.

AML 0714 "Young Goodman Brown"

Leaving his wife Faith for one night's errand in the forest, Brown finds the whole village at a witches' sabbath, including Faith herself, and never learns whether he dreamed it. He returns unable to trust anyone, and he lives and dies in gloom. The story refuses to say whether any of it happened.

A veil worn until death.

AML 0715 "The Minister's Black Veil"

Mr. Hooper appears one Sunday wearing a black veil and never removes it, though it costs him his betrothal and isolates him for the rest of his life. Dying, he asks why they tremble at him alone, when every face around him hides a secret sin. That final question is the story's whole argument.

Two cures, and two dead women.

AML 0716 "The Birthmark" and "Rappaccini's Daughter"

In "The Birthmark" a scientist removes the one flaw from his wife's cheek and kills her with the cure. In "Rappaccini's Daughter" a girl raised among poisonous plants is herself poison, and the antidote destroys her. Both stories punish the attempt to perfect a human being, and in each the scientist's ambition is the real flaw.

Four entries to close: a novel built on three scaffold scenes, the four people inside it, and a house carrying a curse.

A letter, a scaffold, a silence.

AML 0717 *The Scarlet Letter*: Story and Structure

In Puritan Boston, Hester Prynne bears a child while her husband is absent, refuses to name the father, and is sentenced to wear a scarlet A. The novel opens with a long introduction about a custom house and then turns on three scaffold scenes that divide it into thirds. The custom-house preface frames the whole romance.

Public shame, hidden guilt, revenge.

AML 0718 Hester, Dimmesdale, Chillingworth, Pearl

Hester endures the punishment publicly and grows into the town's healer. Dimmesdale, the minister and the father, conceals his part and is destroyed by the concealment. Chillingworth, the returned husband, becomes a tormentor. Pearl, the child, behaves as the letter made visible. The concealed sinner suffers more than the punished one.

One letter, three meanings.

AML 0719 The Scaffold Scenes and the Letter Itself

Three scaffold scenes open, centre and close the book, and the same letter changes meaning across them: adulteress at the start, able by the middle, and something like an emblem by the end. Hawthorne lets the town revise its own symbol without ever settling what it means. That shifting meaning is the novel's method.

A curse laid at the gallows.

AML 0720 *The House of the Seven Gables* and the Curse

Hawthorne's second major romance sets a family under a curse laid at the gallows by a man their ancestor helped condemn, and asks whether the wrong of one generation can be worked out in another. The house itself carries the guilt, which is the Gothic machinery put to Puritan use. Inherited guilt is his recurring structure.

That is Poe entire and Hawthorne through his first great novel. Part two takes Melville and the procedures. You can say how this camp differs from Concord: the same intuition, the same symbols, the same solitary figures, and the evil moved from institutions into human nature. You can account for Poe, orphaned and then cut off by a guardian who had paid for a university, and for his claim that a poem is engineered backwards from a chosen effect, which produced the rule that a tale should be read at one sitting with every word serving that effect. You can read "The Raven" for a refrain that stays fixed while the questions grow desperate, and "Annabel Lee" for the subject Poe himself called the most poetical. You can place the house that falls with its family, the murderer whose proof of sanity convicts him, the killer whose courtesies are the method, the sonnet that calls science a vulture, and the detective story he invented. And you can account for Hawthorne's inherited guilt, his four unresolving tales, and a letter that means three things across three scaffold scenes.