| Chapter 1: | Romantic Antiquarian Literature |
The gothic mode focuses upon decay, dissipation, perversion, guilt, the supernatural, the archaic, and the hallucinatory. Inherently, it distorts the conventions of realist fiction. The essential gothic toolbox of imagery and tonality contains darkness, shadows, mists, and decay as a perception of the world, which color and inform other story elements, including characters and settings. Diverging from European influences, the American gothic mode developed its own image systems and idiosyncrasies, which are apparent in Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland; or the Transformation: An American Tale (1798); Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1839); George Lippard’s The Quaker City, or, The Monks of Monk Hall: A Romance of Philadelphia Life, Mystery & Crime (1844); and Herman Melville’s Pierre, or the Ambiguities (1852).
Antiquarian writing’s ascension occurred in the same era in which the first wave of American gothic fiction appeared. These two kinds of writing, seldom compared, share many of the same preoccupations and employ similar literary devices. Even the narrative pattern of pursuit found in gothic fiction has a parallel in antiquarian texts: answers to the mysteries of the past are pursued through dark forests, ruined earthworks, tombs, and burial grounds. The bloodier and more violent elements in gothic novels were distilled by writers to produce horror fiction. Stories of grizzly axe murders and chainsaw massacres are traditionally associated with male authors who wrote for a male audience; similarly, the antiquarian project and its offshoots, such as the hobby of collecting Indian artifacts, have been traditionally considered male pursuits. In the horror genre, carnage and death supersede romantic love and sensuality.
In their descriptions of the Indian hordes that they claimed to have destroyed the ancient American colonies, Romantic Antiquarians drew from horror fiction and skillfully made subtle allusions to it. They were preoccupied with death and its attendant consequences such as burial and decay and the perversion of native grave disinterment. Romantic Antiquarian descriptions of dreary, nearly impenetrable forests that obscure vast graveyards, fields of battle, and temples where human sacrifice was alleged to have been practiced draw the gothic veil across the American landscape.