When the thought of today, the nineteenth-century writer Edgar Allan Poe is remembered as the master of the short story and the psychological thriller. Born in 1803 to parents who died soon afterward, Poe grew up as a foster child in the home of the Allans, neither of whom were capable of understanding his sensitive and somewhat brooding nature. Upon reaching the majority, Poe struggled to find his niche in life, publishing his first book of poems when he was only 19 and moving to short stories by the time he was 23 (Conklin, 1989). His theory regarding writing was that it should be short enough to be read through at one time. “If any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression” (Mowery, 1997). Although he wrote during what is commonly considered the Romantic period in literary circles, it is primarily through his writing that the concept of the Gothic Romantic came to life. An understanding of the various literary ideas that were floating around while Poe was writing one of his most famous works, “The Raven,” reveals how these traditions were synthesized and condensed by Poe to create a new genre in literary fiction.
The prevailing literary tradition in vogue at the time Poe was writing was the Romantic period. Largely recognized as having begun in the late 1700s and persisting well into the mid-1800s, the period is marked especially by vast changes taking place in the social landscape. As a result of such sweeping changes, the literary tradition was highly concerned with discovering liberalism in thought. “Walter Pater thought the addition of estrangement to beauty (the neoclassicists having insisted on the order in beauty) constituted the romantic temper. An interesting schematic explanation calls romanticism the predominance of imagination over reason and formal rules (classicism) and the sense of fact or the actual (realism)” (Holman & Harmon, 2001). Characteristics of the genre identified by Welleck (2003) include a “revolt against the principles of neo-classicism criticism, the rediscovery of older English literature, the turn toward subjectivity and the worship of external nature slowly prepared during the eighteenth century and stated boldly in Wordsworth and Shelley” (196). The development of nature worship was also a side effect of the social changes that were taking place as many of the idyllic country places that had once been considered common property were being fenced in, boarded up, or heavily developed as new cities and towns. The imagination was held to be the highest of human capabilities while nature was highly revered because of its creative power as well as the freedom for imagination nature represented. Within the Romantic movement, it was felt that the world abounded with omen-like symbols and signs that communicated through their similarity to ancient myths and legends.
In America especially, but throughout the world, another movement had a small undercurrent of followers who had pursued the concept of liberal thought a little further than most. The concept of transcendentalism is often difficult to describe because of its very nature. It is typically associated with concepts of spiritual rebellion from organized religion; however, its primary characteristic is an attempt by its followers to discover a more perfect world through a refocus on the true necessities of life. This necessarily required significant questioning of established social customs already being shaped by the consumerism and materialism of the industrial culture. Directly refuting this material world, the Transcendentalists worked to redefine human experience with an emphasis on spirituality and finding one’s interconnectedness with the natural world. Perhaps a natural off-shoot of this exploration was a new interest in the Eastern religions, particularly Buddhism, in which God as a central figure did not exist. Instead, this religion emphasizes many of the things that the transcendentalists revered such as the individual’s close connection with nature and concepts of perfecting oneself in keeping with the timeless rules of nature (Ford, 2007).
Moving even further into the spiritual realm, the tradition of the Gothic was also emerging as a small sub-genre in literary circles. It is widely thought to have been started by Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto published in 1764 (Hume, 1969: 282). Within this tradition, imagination and emotion take center stage, pushing the idealism and reason of the Romantic and Transcendental traditions to the side. Gothic literature particularly is characterized by its unique way of combining horror and romance to create a completely new approach to story-telling. This became even more effective following the publication of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory which demonstrated the power of the mind to terrify itself (Freud, 1966). Common elements found within Gothic literature include terror, the supernatural, ghosts, death, madness, darkness, secrets, hereditary curses, and crumbling architecture. Characters typically fall into stereotypical personas such as the flawed hero, the femme fatale, and supernatural or natural monsters of various types. Typically, three characteristics served to designate a Gothic novel. These included the concept of the presence of darkness, the element of the sublime, and the exploration of psychometry. The presence of darkness seems self-explanatory, but there is also the darkness of the soul that becomes employed particularly in Poe’s works in which the individual is incapable of escaping their situation simply because they are unable to discover their own thoughts within the darkness of their mind. The sublime refers to the presence of something intangible that is felt like a present but cannot be discovered with the human eye. This element can be used in several ways, but within the Gothic novel, it is typically used to illustrate the presence of supernatural evil either disembodied or as an element trapped within the body of a known person. Psychometry is a strange-sounding word that refers to the concept of the eternal conflict between the body and the soul. It was an often-used technique in Gothic novels because of the obvious relationship of this to the concept of madness.
All of these traditions are seen in Poe’s poem “The Raven.” The Romantic is evident even in the title of the poem as the raven is nothing if not an element of nature. The story of the poem is not possible without the symbolism and messages that nature has to bring the speaker of the poem in the form of the raven as well as in the mood set by the timeof the poem, “in bleak December” (7) and evening, thus following the Romantic tradition. The poem is written in longing for a woman, which is a common topic within Romantic literature, while the speaker’s described activity at the opening of the poem, pondering “over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore” (2), fulfills another element of the Romantic genre. It is recalled that one of the characteristics of this genre identified by Wellek (2003) was the rediscovery of old English literature. The excess of imagination that characterizes the Romantic is also found in the speaker’s exaggerated reaction to the knocking at his door, taking an entire stanza to bring himself to address the knock. It is also evident in the way in which the man plays with the bird for a while as a means of amusing himself, until the amusement turns haunting. The Transcendental rejection of religion may be discovered in the raven’s choice to perch upon the bust of Pallas just above the speaker’s chamber door. According to Hallqvist (1998), Pallas is the Greek goddess of wisdom. The speaker’s ability to communicate with the raven, although imperfectly, is also an element of the Transcendental tradition. This communication eventually becomes a sort of blending of the man and the raven toward the end of the poem as the man indicates “my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor / Shall be lifted – nevermore!” (107-108).
However, with this dark blending of dark bird, shadow, time off, and man’s haunted soul, it is easy to distinguish Poe’s development of the Gothic within his stories. Every element of nature pulled into the story as a part of the Romantic tradition is also presented from its darkest or most frightening side. December is bleak rather than cheerful with holiday greetings; the evening is dark, cold, and full of death as “each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor” (8). The raven itself is a traditional symbol of death and decay (Hallqvist, 1998) and it’s entering the house is a sign of darkly supernatural elements, brought more into focus as it lands on the head of wisdom. The speaker tells his listeners “his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming” (106) while the raven’s entrance is also marked by other darkly sublime elements: “Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer / Swung by Seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor” (79-80). Already haunted in his mind by the ghost of his wife, the speaker becomes further divided, body and soul, by the presence of the raven by the end of the poem, leaving his soul forevermore trapped by the raven’s shadow on his chamber floor.
While the elements of Poe’s poem snugly fit within the same traditional characteristics of the Romantic period, his approach to the subject, flavored slightly with a touch of Transcendentalism and a deeply depressed mindset helped spur the genre of Gothic Romantic literature. Linking the concepts of the Romantic with the concepts of the psychological thriller inextricably in his short but powerful text, Poe helped shape and define this genre of literature, pulling it into the popular realm and giving it life in its consideration of the blending of the real and the unreal. His careful blending of the elements and full concentration on bringing out the dark side of his stories builds up the supernatural element slowly so that, by the end of the story or poem, the reader finds himself completely believing the story despite elements that would ordinarily cause skepticism. Romanticism in its focus on nature and emotion is certainly present, as is Transcendentalism in its focus on spirituality and interconnectivity, but Poe brings the Gothic to the forefront in his focus on the sublime, darkness at various levels, and the psychometry, or division, of the individual.
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