ENERGY AND APOCALYPSE IN THE GOTHIC FICTION OF HAWTHORNE AND POE

Abstract

This thesis explores the treatment and manifestation of the concept of energy in the gothic fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, and relates their understanding of energy to the apocalyptic imagination of nineteenth-century America. It examines the enactment of energy as a powerful agent of force and change that controls the structural and thematic organisation of these writers' gothic texts, and how this in tum reflects, and is reflected by, social attitudes, transitions, and preoccupations of the time. By interrogating the relationship between apocalyptic anxieties and narratives of enclosure and dissolution, we discover not only the peculiar American gothic style of Hawthorne and Poe that is deeply rooted in contemporary issues of national and personal identity-formation in post-independence America, but more significantly, their efforts in seeking renewal and redemption within a climate of apocalyptic paranoia. The gothic mode, as represented by these writers, is thus to be assessed as a genre whose intensity is carefully measured and distributed in order to manage one's limited resources meaningfully in the advent of destruction or dissipation. The paradigm of energy with its scientific, metaphorical, and ideological associations provides the conceptual clues and framework towards a better understanding of the motivations and concerns of "gothic survival" that inform the work of Hawthorne and Poe. The gothic fiction of Hawthorne and Poe demonstrates the need to move out of self-encapsulation to allow energy to extend beyond or transcend the entropic fate of inertia and apocalyptic doom. Through strategies of elimination, concentration, or subversion, gothic energy struggles to retain or create an existence in the face of universal depletion. While Hawthorne criticises hermetic structures of thought that inhibit moral growth, genealogical progression, and the free circulation of energy, Poe seeks a perverse redemption in the annihilation of the mortal, finite self to release an energy-unconfined by corporeality-into the infinite realm of Imagination or Effect. The variation in style and content of these writers in dealing with traditional gothic themes of death, delusion, and excess, provides an important literary base upon which to discuss the American entropic imagination in context. Energy is firstly expounded in the Introduction as an empirical, spiritual, historical, and thermodynamic force; these various interpretations are then converged into a conceptualisation of "gothic energies" as reflecting and enacting social anxieties of being and extinction. A narratology of the concept of entropy offers a scientific prologue to the calculated use of finite energy within a closed system that is crucial towards an understanding of gothic systems of confinement, exhaustion, and self-destruction, as demonstrated in these writers' fiction. Chapter one examines the treatment of historical energy in temporal dimensions, primarily in Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables and Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado"; through these texts, the chapter discusses American gothic's struggle for continuity and remembrance in its preoccupation with re-creating the past. Chapters two and three focus respectively on Poe's and Hawthorne's literary strategies of sustaining and preserving energy to prevent wastage and homogenisation-in Chapter two, we investigate how Poe renews energy through aesthetic re-enactment and repetition in three of his short stories: "The Fall of the House of Usher", "The Tell-Tale Heart", and "The Man of the Crowd"; in Chapter three, we study Hawthorne's distribution of isolated energies in the form of universal sympathy in two of his other novels, The Scarlet Letter and The Marble Faun. Chapter four examines, in particular, gothic characters created by Hawthorne and Poe who exert consumptive energies on their subjects as a form of self-empowerment and rejuvenation. Finally, Chapter five locates all these perceptions and uses of energy in a socio-cultural framework via an examination of Poe's gothic survivors and Hawthome's social warnings to explain how gothic energy-when channelled towards a meaningful direction or cause-may be revived from its stagnant or suppressed conditions to effect meaningful change or conversion, and increase sensibility in coping with the fears generated by apocalyptic determinism.