The American Romantics and Isolation

Spring 1974

The works of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville are called romantic. Some critics speak of “the opposing claims of novelistic ‘good sense’ and romance ‘wildness’.” ¹ It is perhaps no so much that the novel is more realistic, but that a romantic work has in it more of the supernatural and purely imaginative spun around real objects, events, and people. It is a blend of the sensible and wild. All three of our authors wrote with powerful imagination, fantasy, and wonder. Above all, they were concentratedly and specifically concerned with psychology, and one of their common ties is focus on the individual. No man lives totally alone of course (not many a one, anyway), but in these tales, the conflicts are always contention among divergent mental processes all within the confines of individual psyches. In the outward action, the people with whom the principal characters interact are embodiments of their internal forces.

That preoccupation can be labelled. It can be called “Search for Self”; “What Makes Man Tick?; or, as Poe suggested, “My Heart Laid Bare.” ² They all question and search. What Melville said of Hawthorne could be said of them all: that he is “a seeker, not a finder yet.” ³ That expression means to me that Hawthorne sought continuously, and the finding was simply the writing. The work of art is the answer, each time. He knew there were many answers, and that the moral, if one emerged, was not the thing. There was no use in trying to pin it down “as by sticking a pin through a butterfly. . . and causing it to stiffen in an ungainly and unnatural attitude.” ⁴ That would be to kill it instead of to give it artistic life.

In specific instances in the works of all three men, we get certain emotional and mental patterns that lead to particular behavior. There is always sense in the consistency and inevitability of the pattern, in light of the psychological process in each case. For them, “The art of the romancer is no longer, and is not intended to be, an imitation of nature, but rather an expression of the secret self.” ⁵ Through wide-ranging imaginative effects, there is always this human truth. “Hawthorne is perpetually looking for images which shall place themselves in picturesque correspondence with the spiritual facts with which he is concerned, and of course the search is of the very essence of poetry,” said Henry James. ⁶ What may be called ‘wildness’ in all of these stories is that poetic sensibility. Ordinary things, settings, people, and entire situations are draped in metaphor and symbol. They are deliberately placed in certain lights and shadows. There is a dream-like ethereal air about them, but they are always grounded in reality.

It has been said of Poe that in his works, he gives us a detailed dissection of his psychic self. Consequently, though I have found some of his truth morbid, it is often compelling. The compulsion of the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” is interesting. There is no reason for the man to want to kill. “Object there was none. Passion there was none.” There is no answer. Why doesn’t matter. What keeps our attention is the progress of obsession. “I [even] loved the old man.”! That may be depraved, but it’s even more arresting. We can speculate that the victim’s “Evil Eye” frightens the killer because he is harboring some guilt, or simply that he is insanely fearful, because there is no earthly reason why he should be. What concerns Poe, however, is what the given mental state can lead the man to do. What happens is inevitable. And it all proceeds without interference. It is solitary, indeed isolated, process. It is relentless and all-consuming. The murderer is not content with just killing. He has to let his victim know both that he is about to die and who is killing him.

One observer says of Poe that his theme “is alienation; his plot, survival; and his character, anxiety personified.”⁷ That is a capsule description of Poe’s own life, and it underscores the notion with precision, of the author’s despairing exploration of self as pictured in his writings. The achievement of the works, however, is itself the strongest evidence of the power of survival. And the force of the tales is in this determined expression of the individual identity. The hopeless man sometimes turns his undefined fear onto another human being. But it is self-loathing led to murder, and of course it is simultaneously suicide. The same self-destructive process is seen in “William Wilson,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and in “The Black Cat.” Poe seemed to be chronicling his own deterioration in an attempt to communicate. These may have been the only ordered fragments in his life, these carefully constructed plots born of wild and wonderful imaginings.

The settings and the props are real enough. But the atmosphere is usually a nightmare, both actual and fantastic. The action is apt to be realistic and equally strange. The overall effect is to heighten and expand sense impressions common to us all. There is hard-driving suspense in all of Poe that by its evocative force boils up the reader’s emotions; and by its resolution, means to leave his sensibilities throbbing. Hawthorne and Melville are kinsmen in the use of these same processes in varying degrees. Sometimes their effects are muted, muffled, or veiled. Often they’re sublime.

Bartleby, like Poe’s killers, is isolated too. It may be that he is too sensitive to bear workaday pressures. It could be that he is too idealistic to accept society’s crass commercial dicta. Or he might just be stubborn. He is certainly alone. He persists unto death in being “stationary.” That seems to me both perverse and noble. It doesn’t matter much here, either. What is told is believable; what is left unsaid makes one wonder. “Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!” The wonder of it all! That may be a double Amen. There is some futility in the sound. But it’s not hopelessness; more of a sigh than a whimper. In a sense, Bartleby was one of those dead letters he handled. He won’t write anymore at the end, and he himself has barely been written upon while he lived. He may be Locke’s “tabula rasa.” We wonder if it’s worth feeling and acting if the result is to end up merely “an eminently safe man” whose greatest virtues are being prudent and methodical. Bartleby thinks not. He “Lives without dining.” He dies in the Tombs. Having incarcerated himself amid society, he dies a dual prisoner in its actual jail.

Locked in. Alone. Isolated. Symbolically and literally, it is a familiar condition repeated frequently in these stories. Sometimes society seems to blame. But over and over we are shown people in the same situations choosing opposites attitudes: participation instead of retirement; struggle instead of resignation; life instead of death. The forces are strange and marvelous; often they’re unaccountable. That they obtain and that we care to try to understand are all that matter. Poe had a theory of the self-destruction process. He writes that “perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart—one of the indivisible primary faculties or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man.” ⁸ Melville may have agreed to a point, if Bartleby is any indication, but he is less nihilistic and certainly more touching when he says that “Sometimes sweet sense of duty will entice one to bitter doom.” ⁹

He suggests that of Jimmy Rose. It might apply to Arthur Dimmesdale as well, or even to Melville himself. There is no telling why Jimmy choose to continue. He once had fame and wealth, and enjoyed it. Bartleby was always obscure, had nothing, and enjoyed not at all. But just as relentlessly as the scrivener shunned life, Jimmy pursues it. It can be argued that it’s more painful to be bereft after having had than never to have had at all. Moreover, Jimmy may have been as isolated when he was attracting jolly company as was Bartleby the complete loner. Still, in the one being the center of his universe leads him to destruction. In the other there is an indomitable force of survival. Both affect the people around them, but most deeply the reader. Each colors his surroundings like Melville’s Drummond light:

. . . raying away from itself all around it—everything is lit by it,

everything starts up to it. . . so that, in certain minds, there follows . . .

an effect, in its way, akin to that which in Genesis attends upon

the beginning of things. ¹⁰

Bartleby’s rays are “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlon!” Jimmy’s, on the other hands, are bright even after his death. His chronicler will always remember “those undying roses which bloomed in ruined Jimmy’s cheek.” So will we. Though one bespeaks gloomy resignation and the other smiling survival, both have been isolates and each, in his choice, “a strange example.” ¹¹ Melville himself lived both ways, I’ve read.

Hawthorne cared to try to strip away despair and ugliness in order “to open an intercourse with the world.” ¹² He saw the noble as well as the mean and the trivial, just as Melville did. But his vision was perhaps brighter, at least in execution. “What is called poetic insight is the gift of discerning, in this sphere of strangely mingled elements, the beauty and the majesty which are compelled to assume a garb so sordid.” ¹³ Arthur Dimmesdale’s vestments were black and white; there is no such judgement of motives for Hawthorne. The prism of The Scarlet Letter is small but many-faceted. Its colors range from deepest red through moonlight silver and gold, to black, and sunshiny brightness. Arthur’s psyche runs the gamut. It may be his “sweet sense of duty” that compels him to his doom. Or it could be moral cowardice. It is surely inordinate fear, which festers to madness and physical agony as well, living as it does in solitary confinement. Perhaps he needs to overwhelm his monster guilt with an even larger suffering. Considering who and what he is, his personal epic of sin, penance, retribution and death is inevitable. The battle raging in his soul is realistically and picturesquely reflected in his immediate society. Or is he the mirror?

On the night of his attempted confession, the combatants within his breast are present all around him in the moonlight and shadows. Governor Bellingham, representative of civil law, appears at his window to investigate the mysterious cry in the night. His sister Mistress Hibbins, the Devil’s disciple, hears the lament too. The Reverend Mr. Wilson passes by returning from a death vigil at the bedside of another temporal leader, Governor Winthrop. And finally Hester herself and Peal appear. The symbolism may be obvious, but it’s sketched with fine detail as well. Arthur sees the figure of the Governor, but he makes out the very “expression of her [Mistress Hibbins’] sour and discontented face.” His fellow clergyman comes close enough to speak to him. And Hester and Pearl join him on the scaffold. The proximities of these figures tell the degrees of their effects in the minister’s mind and heart.

Later, with Poe’s “primitive” and “primary” perverseness rising in his soul, several times he comes close to revealing himself in degrading action toward his parishioners in the streets. He resists once again, but his expiation is imminent:

Before Mr. Dimmesdale reached home, his inner man gave him

other evidence of a revolution in the sphere of thought and

feeling. In truth, nothing short of a total change of dynasty

and moral code, in that interior kingdom, was adequate to

account for the impulses now communicated to the

unfortunate and startled minister.

Hester Prynne is exiled, too. But she comes to terms with her inner self just as she reconciles in her outer life conflicts between herself and the community. Through acceptance and positive and helpful action, Hester is redeemed. There are too many variations on the theme to detail here. The common preoccupation in all of these works is unmistakable.

There are primal forces throughout, and symbols always, that have meaning for every one of us. We may learn something more about ourselves by reading these stories, or we may be reminded in powerful ways of what we already know is in us. But their truths needn’t be larger than an individual, except insofar as they are applicable to many men. Hawthorne says,

A high truth, indeed, fairly, finely, and skillfully wrought out,

brightening at every step, and crowning the final development

of a work of fiction, may add an artistic glory, but is never any

truer, and seldom any more evident, at the last page than at the first. ¹⁴

Intrinsic in that expression is the principle of total effect. All of our authors’ works have that in common. Poe insists that a story convey its intended impression from the first word to the last. The truth must be consistent and coherent. The teaching, if there is any, is “a far more subtile [sic] process than the ostensible one.” ¹⁵ The truth each time is in the sense the story makes in light of the psychological condition given. If there is ever a high or higher truth, it is in the broad application of that force, its possibility in all of us. Much of the charm is in the rendering: in the setting; in the tone; in the lights and shadows; in the coloring; and in the pervading mood, to which all the details contribute. These are fascinating fragments, dreamy but seriously considered pieces of the grand puzzle of personal identity.

There is something legendary in these characters. Melville’s people feel like humble folk heroes. Hawthorne’s do, too; or like colorful figures in an early American pageant. And Poe’s men and women seem like Gothic ghosts. The symbolism is sometimes overdone. The red streak in the sky above Arthur and the congregation is perhaps too much. Poe’s relentless horror and repeated types and symbols can be galling. Melville abstracts so that sometimes his people are little more than representative profiles, instead of full human beings. But the results are affecting and often surprising. Even the most abstracted characters emerge with the force of archetypes. By their very narrowness they can be especially compelling. When they are more carefully detailed, the effect is immediately touching, as when, for instance, Peal tearfully kisses her father; or when Jimmy Rose wolfs his alms through a smoke screen of chatter. Poe’s dark visions and nightmarish journeys are titillating because we can come back from those vaults and strange rooms and limbo lands. I like Joel Porte’s view that

In the works of Hawthorne and Melville, as in those of Poe,

the dream becomes the type of romance art: a surrealistic

distortion of experience that manages to distill essential

meaning from events and actions. ¹⁶

They are moving and meaningful dream-myths, these tales, that have enriched my life.

REFERENCES

Joel Porte, The Romance in America, “Poe,” p. 60.
Poe, “The Impossibility of Writing a Truthful Autobiography,” The Portable Poe (The Viking Portable Library), p. 651.
Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” The Portable Melville (The Viking Portable Library), p. 416.
Hawthorne, Preface to The Blithedale Romance, The Portable Hawthorne (The Viking Portable Library), p. 563.
Joel Porte, The Romance in America, “Poe,” p. 58.
Henry James, Hawthorne (Collier Books, New York), p. 105.
Stephen L. Mooney, “Poe’s Goth Waste Land,” reprinted in The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe (Edited by Eric W. Carlson), p. 280.
Poe, “The Black Cat.”
Melville, “Jimmy Rose.”
Melville, Chapter XXIV, “Quite an Original,” The Confidence–Man.
Melville, “Jimmy Rose.”
Hawthorne, Preface to the Third Edition of Twice–Told Tales, The Portable Hawthorne (The Viking Portable Library), P. 285.
Hawthorne, “The Little Shop-Window,” Chapter II, The House of the Seven Gables, The Portable Hawthorne(The Viking Portable Library), p. 561.
Hawthorne, Preface to The Blithedale Romance, The Portable Hawthorne (The Viking Portable Library), p. 563.
Joel Porte, The Romance in America, “Poe,” p. 57.

“The Tell-Tale Heart”

“Bartleby the Scrivener”

“Jimmy Rose”

The Scarlet Letter