The Gothic Catharsis

The American mythos does a pretty good job of telling us how to be American. It tells us that we’re hardworking, and that what we get we’ve earned. It tells us that we know what freedom is when we see it, and that we’re willing to do quite a bit to help other people see it too. It tells us what sports to watch, and what we should be eating while we’re watching them. I wonder though, what else it’s telling us. I wonder if it captures and reproduces our feelings. This week I’ve been wondering if it shows us how to be guilty.


A sketch of guilt (or remorse) through what we’ve read so far: For the Puritans, it was everywhere, in the open – they reveled in it. This doesn’t last long, however, once trade picks up and the isolation of the colonies is less severe. Franklin walks away from that tradition when he introduces the trope of the self-made man. Now, man had power over himself; through reason, he had taken on the project of determining his own fate, projecting his views of himself out into the world.
By the time Poe and Hawthorne start writing, something’s gone wrong. The feelings that came with a tradition of total depravity had been swept aside to make room for progress, but now they’re coming up through the floorboards. We can see these seeping through in Poe’s “The Black Cat” and Hawthorne’s “The Burial of Malvin.” In each story, the protagonist acts against some internalized moral code – Poe’s protagonist in a deliberate attempt to “sin” and Reuben in an act he feels he’ll be shamed for committing. Both then try to cover up what they have done, but something strange happens – they can’t cope with their perceived innocence, and they give themselves away.
I think one conclusion we can draw is that although the Puritan influence had been eclipsed by an increased sense of independence and human empowerment, the doctrine of total depravity hadn’t been defeated. Instead, it had been pushed under the surface, and would return to haunt, literally, American authors for generations to follow.