Puritanism in New England

For a much more extensive description than appears on this brief page, see the works listed in
the Selected Bibliography on Puritanism.

The term "Puritan" first began as a taunt or insult applied by traditional Anglicans to those
who criticized or wished to "purify" the Church of England. Although the word is often
applied loosely, "Puritan" refers to two distinct groups: "separating" Puritans, such as the
Plymouth colonists, who believed that the Church of England was corrupt and that true
Christians must separate themselves from it; and non-separating Puritans, such as the
colonists who settled the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who believed in reform but not
separation. Most Massachusetts colonists were nonseparating Puritans who wished to
reform the established church, largely Congregationalists who believed in forming churches
through voluntary compacts. The idea of compacts orcovenants was central to the Puritans'
conception of social, political, and religious organizations.

Several beliefs differentiated Puritans from other Christians. The first was their belief in
predestination. Puritans believed that belief in Jesus and participation in the sacraments
could not alone effect one's salvation; one cannot choose salvation, for that is the privilege
of God alone. All features of salvation are determined by God's sovereignty, including
choosing those who will be saved and those who will receive God's irresistible grace. The
Puritans distinguished between "justification," or the gift of God's grace given to the elect,
and "sanctification," the holy behavior that supposedly resulted when an individual had been
saved; according to The English Literatures of America, "Sanctification is evidence of
salvation, but does not cause it" (434). When William Laud, an avowed Arminian, became
Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633, the Church of England began to embrace beliefs
abhorrent to Puritans: a focus on the individual's acceptance or rejection of grace; a
toleration of diverse religious beliefs; and an acceptance of "high church" rituals and
symbols.

According to Samuel Eliot Morison's Oxford History of the American People, the Puritans
"were deeply impressed by a story that their favorite church father, St. Augustine, told in
hisConfessions. He heard a voice saying, tolle et lege, 'Pick up and read.' Opening the Bible,
his eyes lit on Romans xiii:12-14: 'The night is far spent, the day is at hand; not in carousing
and drunkenness, not in debauchery and lust, not in strife and jealousy. But put ye on the Lord
Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts therof'" (62).

The concept of a covenant or contract between God and his elect pervaded Puritan theology
and social relationships. In religious terms, several types of covenants were central to Puritan
thought.

The Covenant of Works held that God promised Adam and his progeny eternal life if they
obeyed moral law. After Adam broke this covenant, God made a new Covenant of Grace with
Abraham (Genesis 18-19).
Covenant of Grace. This covenant requires an active faith, and, as such, it softens the
doctrine of predestination. Although God still chooses the elect, the relationship becomes one
of contract in which punishment for sins is a judicially proper response to disobedience.
During the Great Awakening, Jonathan Edwards later repudiated Covenant Theology to get
back to orthodox Calvinism. Those bound by the covenant considered themselves to be
charged with a mission from God.

Covenant of Redemption. The Covenant of Redemption was assumed to be preexistent to the

Covenant of Grace. It held that Christ, who freely chose to sacrifice himself for fallen man,
bound God to accept him as man's representative. Having accepted this pact, God is then
committed to carrying out the Covenant of Grace. According to Perry Miller, as one
contemporary source put it, "God covenanted with Christ that if he would pay the full price for
the redemption of beleevers, they should be discharged. Christ hath paid the price, God must
be unjust, or else hee must set thee free from all iniquitie" (New England Mind 406).

For more information, see also the following works suggested by EARAM-L members:

 Perry Miller's "The Marrow of Puritan Divinity" in Errand into the

Wilderness (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1956): 48-98.
 Emory Elliott, Power and the Pulpit in Puritan New England
 Charles Lloyd Cohen, "Covenant Psychology" in God's Caress: The Psychology of
Puritan Religious Experience (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1986)
 John von Rohr, The Covenant of Grace in Puritan Thought (Atlanta, GA: Scholars
Press, 1986)
 Darrett Rutman, American Puritanism
 David Hall, The Faithful Shepherd
 David Hall, The Antinomian Controversy
 Sargent Bush, The Writings of Thomas Hooker
 Michael McGiffert, "Grace and Works: The Rise and Division of Covenant Divinity in
Elizabethan Puritanism," Harvard Theological Review 75.4 (1982): 463-502.
 Amy Schrager Lang, Prophetic Woman

Janice Knight, Orthodoxies in Massachusetts

The concept of the covenant also provided a practical means of organizing churches. Since
the state did not control the church, the Puritans reasoned, there must be an alternate
method of of establishing authority. According to Harry S. Stout, "For God's Word to function
freely, and for each member to feel an integral part of the church's operations, each
congregation must be self-sufficient, containing within itself all the offices and powers
necessary for self-regulation. New England's official apologist, John Cotton, termed this form
of church government 'Congregational,' meaning that all authority would be located within
particular congregations" (The New England Soul 17).

Cotton's sermon at Salem in 1636 described the basic elements of this system in which people
covenanting themselves to each other and pledging to obey the word of God might become a
self-governing church. Checks and balances in this self-governing model included the
requirement that members testify to their experience of grace (to ensure the purity of the
church and its members) and the election of church officials to ensure the appropriate
distribution of power, with a pastor to preach, a teacher to "attend to doctrine," elders to
oversee the "acts of spiritual Rule," and a deacon to manage the everyday tasks of church
organization and caring for the poor (Stout 19). The system of interlocking covenants that
bound households to each other and to their ministers in an autonomous, self-ruling
congregation was mirrored in the organization of towns. In each town, male church members
could vote to elect "selectmen" to run the town's day-to-day affairs, although town meetings
were held to vote on legislation.

Thus the ultimate authority in both political and religious spheres was God's word, but the
commitments made to congregation and community through voluntary obedience to covenants
ensured order and a functional system of religious and political governance. This system
came to be called the Congregational or "New England Way." According to Stout, "By
locating power in the particular towns and defining institutions in terms of local covenants and
mutual commitments, the dangers of mobility and atomism--the chief threats to stability in the
New World--were minimized. . . . As churches came into being only by means of a local
covenant, so individual members could be released from their sacred oath only with the
concurrence of the local body. . . . Persons leaving without the consent of the body sacrificed
not only church membership but also property title, which was contingent on local
residence. Through measures like these, which combined economic and spiritual restraints,
New England towns achieved extraordinarily high levels of persistence and social cohesion"
(23).

Unlike Anglican and Catholic churches of the time, Puritan churches did not hold that all
parish residents should be full church members. A true church, they believed, consisted not
of everyone but of the elect. As a test of election, many New England churches began to
require applicants for church membership to testify to their personal experience of God in
the form of autobiographical conversion narratives. Since citizenship was tied to church
membership, the motivation for experiencing conversion was secular and civil as well as
religious in nature. God's covenant that bound church members to him had to be renewed
and accepted by each individual believer, although this could be seen as a dilution of the
covenant binding God and his chosen people.

The children of first-generation believers were admitted to limited membership in the

Congregational church, on the grounds that as children of the elect, they would undoubtedly
experience conversion and become full members of the church. Not all underwent a
conversion experience, however, thus leaving in doubt the future of their children, the
grandchildren of the original church members.

Drafted by Richard Mather and approved in 1662, the Half-way Covenant proposed that
second-generation members be granted the same privilege of baptism (but not communion) as
had been granted to the first generation. According to Norman Grabo, "This encouraged
individual congregations to baptize the infant children of church members but not to admit
them to full membership until they were at least 14 years old" and could profess conversion.
"The partaking of the Lord's Supper became a lure to struggling half-way members to discover
their right to full membership and a public sign of the purest in the congregation."

Richard, and, later, Increase Mather supported it, as did Edward Taylor; but Solomon
Stoddard from Northampton argued that, according to the Half-Way Covenant, no man was
permitted to partake of the Lord's Supper until he had certain knowledge and assurance of
salvation; without this knowledge, attendance at the sacrament was damning. Stoddard said
that no man could know he was saved with absolute certainty; thus all well-behaved Christians
should be admitted to the sacrament in hopes that they might secure saving grace or be
converted by it. (Grabo 32)

The plain style is the simplest of the three classical forms of style. In choosing the plain style,
Puritan writers eschewed features common to the rhetoric of the day; they declined to stuff
their sermons with the rhetorical flourishes and learned quotations of the metaphysical style
of sermon, believing that to be the province of Archbishop Laud and his followers. The
 Puritan sermontraditionally comprised three parts: doctrine, reasons, and uses. According to
Perry Miller in The New England Mind,

"The Anglican sermon is constructed on a symphonic scheme of progressively

widening vision; it moves from point to point by verbal analysis, weaving larger and
larger embroideries about the words of the text. The Puritan sermon quotes the text
and "opens" it as briefly as possible, expounding circumstances and context,
explaining its grammatical meanings, reducing its tropes and schemata to prose, and
setting forth its logical implications; the sermon then proclaims in a flat, indicative
sentence the "doctrine" contained in the text or logically deduced from it, and
proceeds to the first reason or proof. Reason follows reason, with no other transition
than a period and a number; after the last proof is stated there follow the uses or
applications, also in numbered sequence, and the sermon ends when there is
nothing more to be said. The Anglican sermon opens with a pianissimo exordium,
gathers momentum through a rising and quickening tempo, comes ge nerally to a
rolling, organ-toned peroration; the Puritan begins with a reading of the text, states
the reason in an order determined by logic, and the uses in an enumeration
determined by the kinds of person in the throng who need to be exhorted or
reproved, and it stops without flourish or resounding climax" (332-3).

 In a similar manner, Puritans preferred the plainness of the Geneva Bible to the rich
language of the King James version.

American Transcendentalism

For much more information than can be contained on this brief page,
see Lawrence Buell's Literary Transcendentalism and other works from the
selected bibliographies onHenry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo
Emerson.
American transcendentalism was an important movement in philosophy and
literature that flourished during the early to middle years of the nineteenth
century (about 1836-1860). It began as a reform movement in the Unitarian
church, extending the views of William Ellery Channing on an indwelling God
and the significance of intuitive thought. It was based on "a monism holding to
the unity of the world and God, and the immanence of God in the world" (Oxford
Companion to American Literature 770). For the transcendentalists, the soul of
each individual is identical with the soul of the world and contains what the world
contains.

Transcendentalists rejected Lockean empiricism, unlike the Unitarians: they

wanted to rejuvenate the mystical aspects of New England Calvinism (although none of its dogma)
and to go back to Jonathan Edwards' "divine and supernatural light," imparted immediately to the
soul by the spirit of God.

For an excellent overview of American transcendentalism, go to Chapter Four of Paul

Reuben's PAL site at California State University-Stanislaus and Ann Woodlief'sTranscendentalism
Web at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Related links: Tom Foran Clark's online biography of Franklin Benjamin Sanborn.

Key statements of its doctrine include Emerson's essays, especially Nature (1836), "The American
Scholar" (1837), "The Divinity School Address" (1838), "The Transcendentalist" (1842), and "Self-
Reliance," and Thoreau's Walden (1854). Others involved in the Transcendental Club and its
magazine The Dial included Margaret Fuller, editor of The Dial (1840-42), Amos Bronson Alcott,
and William Ellery Channing.

In addition to his famous "transparent eyeball" caricature of Emerson, see also Christopher Pearse
Cranch's poem "Correspondences" for a succinct statement of Transcendentalist doctrines.
Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture (1986)
"Transcendentalism, in fact, really began as a religious movement, an attempt to substitute a
Romanticized version of the mystical ideal that humankind is capable of direct experience of the
holy for the Unitarian rationalist view that the truths of religion are arrived at by a process of
empirical study and by rational inference from historical and natural evidence" (46).
William Henry Channing(1810-1844)
"Transcendentalism, as viewed by its disciples, was a pilgrimage from the idolatrous world of
creeds and rituals to the temple of the Living God in the soul. It was a putting to silence of tradition
and formulas, that the Sacred Oracle might be heard through intuitions of the single-eyed and
pure-hearted. Amidst materialists, zealots, and skeptics, the Transcendentalist believed in
perpetual inspiration, the miraculous power of will, and a birthright to universal good. He sought to
hold communion face to face with the unnameable Spirit of his spirit, and gave himself up to the
embrace of nature's perfect joy, as a babe seeks the breast of a mother."
Charles Mayo Ellis, An Essay on Transcendentalism (1842)
"That belief we term Transcendentalism which maintains that man has ideas, that come not
through the five senses or the powers of reasoning; but are either the result of direct revelation
from God, his immediate inspiration, or his immanent presence in the spiritual world. . . ."
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (1836)
"Standing on the bare ground,--my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into
infinite space,--all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am
nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am
part or parcel of God" (996). See also Emerson's essay "The
Transcendentalist."(1842)

 Reaction against New England Calvinism

 Reaction against eighteenth-century rationalism

 God as Deistic "divine watchmaker"

 skepticism

 Reaction against Lockean empiricism

 Emerging ideal of American democracy
 German philosophy

 idealism (principle of organicism--Leibniz)

 Kant and Neoplatonists (mind imposes form). Transcendentalism affirmed Kant's principle
of intuitive knowledge not derived from the senses. According to M. H. Abrams in A
Glossary of Literary Terms, "Kant had confined the expression 'transcendental knowledge'
to the cognizance of those forms and categories--such as space, time, quantity, causality-
which, in his view, are imposed on perception by the constitution of all human minds; he
regarded these aspects as the universal conditions of sense-experience. Emerson and
others, however, extended the concept of transcendental knowledge, in a way whose
validity Kant had specifically denied, to include an intuitive cognizance of moral and other
truths that transcend the limits of human sense-experience" (216).
  Schelling (emphasis on feeling; divinity and creative impulse in nature)

 The Romantic movement, especially Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the English romantics
(Emerson)
 Unitarianism
 Eastern philosophy
Emanuel Swedenborg
 Transcendentalism posits a distinction between "Understanding," or the normal means of
apprehending truth through the senses, and "Reason," a higher, more intuitive form of perception.
In Biographia Literaria, Coleridge cites Milton's Paradise Lost on the difference between reason
and understanding (Book V, ll. 479-490). In this passage from Paradise Lost, Raphael instructs
Adam and Eve on the distinction between heavenly and earthly perception:
So from the root
Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves
More aery, last the bright consummate flow'r
Spirits odorous breathes: flowr's and thir fruit
Man's nourishment, by gradual scale sublim'd
To vital spirits aspire, to animal,
To intellectual, give both life and sense
Fancy and understanding, whence the Soul
Reason receives, and reason is her being,
Discursive, or intuitive; discourse
Is oftest yours, the latter most is ours
Differing but in degree, of kind the same.
According to Emerson, reason is "the highest faculty of the soul--what we mean by the soul itself;
it never reasons, never proves, it simply perceives; it is vision." By contrast, "The Understanding
toils all the time, compares, contrives, adds, argues, near sighed but strong-sighted, dwelling in
the present the expedient the customary" (L1:412-413).
 Microcosm and macrocosm: each part of nature contains all within it. "Nature is a sea of forms
radically alike. . . ." ; "Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is
related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole. Each particle is a microcosm,
and faithfully renders the likeness of the world."
 Principle of analogy, of perceiving correspondences: "[M]an is an analogist, and studies
relations in all objects."
 Emblematic Nature: "Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact."
 Universal soul ("Oversoul"): "Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the
universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related."
 The principle of organicism; the concept of the circle.
 Transcendentalism, like other romantic movements, proposes that the essential nature of
human beings is good and that, left in a state of nature, human beings would seek the good.
Society is to blame for the corruption that mankind endures. Hawthorne's juxtaposition of the red
rose, the flower of nature, and the rusty, blackened prison, the "black flower" of society,
exemplifies this perspective. This view opposes the neoclassical vision that society alone is
responsible for keeping human beings from giving in to their own brutish natures.
Transcendentalism also takes the Romantic view of man's steady degeneration from childhood to
adulthood as he is corrupted by culture: "A man is a god in ruins."
 Perfectionism and optimism.
See also the Romantic concept of the sublime, especially the ideas of Edmund Burke.
Orestes Brownson, a philosopher and contemporary of Emerson's, raised objections to Emerson's
thought that are remarkable because he neither defends Lockean epistemology nor seems
worried (as were conservative thinkers) about the "murderous instincts" of the lower classes.
Although he retracted much of this later because he felt sympathy for Emerson (who was under
attack for these ideas), here are some of his initial impressions:
"But we give it up. We cannot analyze one of Mr. Emerson's discourses. He hardly ever has a
leading thought, to which all the parts of his discourse are subordinate, which is clearly stated,
systematically drawn out, and logically enforced. He is a poet rather than a philosopher--and not
always true even to the laws of poetry."
Reviewing the "Divinity School Address," Brownson said that we are told "to obey our instincts"
and to scorn to imitate even Jesus. But "How shall we determine which are our higher instincts
and which our lower instincts? We do not perceive that he gives us any instructions on this point. .
. . We are to act out ourselves. Now, why is not the sensualist as moral as the spiritualist,
providing he acts out himself?"

Brownson accuses Emerson of "transcendental selfishness": "Are all things in the universe to be
held subordinate to the individual soul? Shall a man take himself as the center of the universe,
and say all things are for his use, and count them of value only as they contribute something to his
growth or well-being?" According to this system, "I am everything; all else is nothing, at least
nothing except what it derives from the fact that it is something to me."

Gothic, Novel, and Romance: Brief Definitions

Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957; Johns Hopkins, 1980)

[. . . ] [T]he word must signify, besides the more obvious qualities of the picturesque and the
heroic, an assumed freedom from the ordinary novelistic requirements of verisimilitude,
development, and continuity; a tendency towards melodrama and idyl; a more or less formal
abstractness and, on the other hand, a tendency to plunge into the underside of
consciousness; a willingness to abandon moral questions or to ignore the spectacle of man
in society, or to consider these things only indirectly or abstractly (ix).

Doubtless the main difference between the novel and the romance is in the way in which
they view reality. The novel renders reality closely and in comprehensive detail. It takes a
group of people and set them going about the business of life. We come to see these people
in their real complexity of temperament and motive. They are in explicable relation to nature,
to each other, to their social class, to their own past. Character is more important than action
and plot, and probably the tragic or comic actions of the narrative will have the primary
purpose of enhancing our knowledge of and feeling for an important character, a group of
characters, or a way of life. The events that occur will usually be plausible, given the
circumstances, and if the novelist includes a violent or sensational occurrence in his plot, he
will introduce it only into such scenes as have been (in the words of Percy Lubbock) "already
prepared to vouch for it." Historically, as it has often been said, the novel has served the
interests and aspirations of an insurgent middle class (12).
Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition

By contrast the romance, following distantly the medieval example, feels free to render reality
in less volume and detail. It tends to prefer action to character, and action will be freer in a
romance than in a novel, encountering, as it were, less resistance from reality. (This is not
always true, as we see in what might be called the static romances of Hawthorne, in which
the author uses the allegorical and moral, rather than the dramatic, possibilities of the form.)
The romance can flourish without providing much intricacy of relation. The characters,
probably rather two-dimensional types, will not be complexly related to each other or to
society or to the past. Human beings will on the whole be shown in an ideal relation--that is,
they will share emotions only after these have become abstract or symbolic. To be sure,
characters may become profoundly involved in some way, as in Hawthorne or Melville, but it
will be a deep and narrow, an obsessive, involvement. In American romances it will not
matter much what class people come from, and where the novelist would arouse our interest
in a character by exploring his origin, the romancer will probably do so by enveloping it in
mystery. Character itself becomes, then, somewhat abstract and ideal, so much so in some
romances that it seems to be merely a function of plot. The plot we may expect to be highly
colored. Astonishing events may occur, and these are likely to have a symbolic or
ideological, rather than a realistic, plausibility. Being less committed to the immediate
rendition of reality than the novel, the romance will more freely veer toward mythic,
allegorical, and symbolistic forms. --Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its
Tradition (13)

Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Custom-House" (preface to The Scarlet Letter)

The same torpor, as regarded the capacity for intellectual effort, accompanied me home, and
weighed upon me, in the chamber which I most absurdly termed my study. Nor did it quit me
when, late at night, I sat in the deserted parlour, lighted only by the glimmering coal-fire and
the moon, striving to picture forth imaginary scenes, which, the next day, might flow out on
the brightening page in many-hued description.
If the imaginative faculty refused to act at such an hour, it might well be deemed a hopeless
case. Moonlight, in a familiar room, falling so white upon the carpet, and showing all its
figures so distinctly,—making every object so minutely visible, yet so unlike a morning or
noontide visibility,—is a medium the most suitable for a romance-writer to get acquainted
with his illusive guests. There is the little domestic scenery of the well-known apartment; the
chairs, with each its separate individuality; the centre-table, sustaining a work-basket, a
volume or two, and an extinguished lamp; the sofa; the book-case; the picture on the wall;—
all these details, so completely seen, are so spiritualized by the unusual light, that they seem
to lose their actual substance, and become things of intellect. Nothing is too small or too
trifling to undergo this change, and acquire dignity thereby. A child’s shoe; the doll, seated in
her little wicker carriage; the hobby-horse;—whatever, in a word, has been used or played
with, during the day, is now invested with a quality of strangeness and remoteness, though
still almost as vividly present as by daylight. Thus, therefore, the floor of our familiar room
has become a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the
Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other.
Ghosts might enter here, without affrighting us. It would be too much in keeping with the
scene to excite surprise, were we to look about us and discover a form, beloved, but gone
hence, now sitting quietly in a streak of this magic moonshine, with an aspect that would
make us doubt whether it had returned from afar, or had never once stirred from our fireside.

The somewhat dim coal-fire has an essential influence in producing the effect which I would
describe. It throws its unobtrusive tinge throughout the room, with a faint ruddiness upon the
walls and ceiling, and a reflected gleam from the polish of the furniture. This warmer light
mingles itself with the cold spirituality of the moonbeams, and communicates, as it were, a
heart and sensibilities of human tenderness to the forms which fancy summons up. It
converts them from snow-images into men and women. Glancing at the looking-glass, we
behold—deep within its haunted verge—the smouldering glow of the half-extinguished
anthracite, the white moonbeams on the floor, and a repetition of all the gleam and shadow
of the picture, with one remove farther from the actual, and nearer to the imaginative. Then,
at such an hour, and with this scene before him, if a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream
strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances.
Purposes

To create terror

To open fiction to the realm of the irrational—perverse impulses, nightmarish terrors,

obsessions—lying beneath the surface of the civilized mind

To demonstrate the presence of the uncanny existing in the world that we know rationally
through experience.
Characters

May include an innocent heroine persecuted by a lustful villain

Appearance of ghosts

Characters who disappear mysteriously

Supernatural occurrences

Focus on death and the events surrounding death; the living may seem half-dead and the
dead half-alive.

Characters act from negative emotions: fear, revenge, despair, hatred, anger.

Characteristics

 An atmosphere of gloom, terror, or mystery.

 Elements of the uncanny (unheimlich) that challenge reality, including mysterious
events that cause the protagonist to question the evidence of his or her senses and
the presence of seemingly supernatural beings.
 An exotic setting isolated in time or space from contemporary life, often a ruined
mansion or castle. The building may be associated with past violence and contain
contains hidden doors, subterranean secret passages, concealed staircases, and
other such features.
 Events, often violent or macabre, that cannot be hidden or rationalized despite the
efforts of the narrator.
 A disturbed or unnatural relation between the orders of things that are usually
separate, such as life and death, good and evil, dream life and reality, or rationality
and madness.
 A hidden or double reality beneath the surface of what at first appears to be a single
narrative. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick explains, a primary feature of the Gothic is that
the self is “massively blocked off from something to which it ought normally to have
access” (12). Thus the narrative arc of the Gothic story leads to an exposure of what
was once hidden, breaking down the barrier between the surface reality and the
reality beneath the surface. Often a physical barrier symbolizes a barrier to the
information that provides a key to the truth or explanation of the events. Sometimes
the truth is revealed through an artifact that breaches the barrier between what is
known and what is unknown: a document telling a family secret, a key that opens a
secret room, or even a creature imprisoned behind the wall, as in Edgar Allan Poe’s
“The Black Cat.” Poe represents this process symbolically in “The Fall of the House of
Usher” in the violent death-embrace of Madeline and Roderick Usher. An emblem of
the hidden secret, Madeline, who has escaped from the tomb where she has been
buried alive, totters into the room and falls dead as she clutches her brother Roderick,
who by ignoring the signs that she has been buried alive and pretending a surface
normality, has refused to acknowledge his culpability in burying her.
 An interrupted narrative form that relies on multiple methods—inserted documents,
letters, dreams, fragments of the story told by several narrators—to tell the tale.

Definition adapted from M. H. Abrams's A Glossary of Literary Terms: "The Gothic novel, or in
an alternate term, "Gothic romance" . . . flourished through the early nineteenth century.
Authors of such novels set their stories in the medieval period, often in a gloomy castle
replete with dungeons, subterranean passages, and sliding panels, and made plentiful use of
ghosts, mysterious disappearances, and other sensational and supernatural occurrences;
their principal aim was to evoke chilling terror by exploiting mystery, cruelty, and a variety of
horrors. The term "gothic" has also been extended to denote a type of fiction which lacks the
medieval setting but develops a brooding atmosphere of gloom or terror, represents events
which are uncanny, or macabre, or melodramatically violent, and often deals with aberrant
psychological states (Eighth Edition, pp. 117-118)

Selections from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New
York: Metheuen, 1986).

When "an individual fictional self is the subject of one of these conventions, that self is
spatialized in the following way. It is the position of the self to be massively blocked off from
something to which it ought normally to have access. This something can be its own past,
the details of its family history; it can be the free air, when the self has been literally buried
alive; it can be a lover; it can be just all the circumambient life, when the self is pinned in a
death-like sleep. Typically, however, there is both something going on inside the isolation
(the present, the continuous consciousness, the dream, the sensation itself) and something
intensely relevant going on impossibly out of reach. While the three main elements (what's
inside, what's outside, and what separates them) take [12] on the most varied guises, the
terms of the relationship are immutable.The self and whatever it is that is outside have a
proper, natural, necessary connection to each other, but one that the self is suddenly
incapable of making.The inside life and the outside life have to continue separately,
becoming counterparts rather than partners, the relationship between them one of parallels
and correspondences rather than communication. This, though it may happen in an instant,
is a fundamental reorganization, creating a doubleness where singleness should be. And the
lengths there are to go to reintegrate the sundered elements-finally, the impossibility of
restoring them to their original oneness-are the most characteristic energies of the Gothic
novel. The worst violence, the most potent magic, and the most paralyzing instances of the
uncanny in these novels do not occur in, for example, the catacombs of the Inquisition or the
stultification of nightmares. Instead, they are evoked in the very breach of the imprisoning
wall. The fires, earthquakes, and insurrections that restore the prisoners of tyranny to their
"natural" freedom are tremendously more violent than what has gone on either inside or
outside the prisons. Similarly, no nightmare is ever as terrifying as is waking up from some
innocuous dream to find it true. The barrier between the self and what should belong to it can
be caused by anything and nothing; but only violence or magic, and both of a singularly
threatening kind, can ever succeed in joining them again" (12-13).

"Of all the Gothic conventions dealing with the sudden, mysterious, seemingly arbitrary, but
massive inaccessibility of those things that should normally be most accessible, the difficulty
the story has in getting itself told is of the most obvious structural significance. This difficulty
occurs at every [13] level of the novels. A fully legible manuscript or an uninterrupted
narrative is rare; rarer still is the novel whose story is comprised by a single narrator, without
the extensive irruption into the middle of the book of a new history with a new historian. . ."
(13-14).

"If the story-within-etc. represents the broadest structural application of the otherwise verbal
or thematic convention of the unspeakable, it has a similar relation to the convention of live
burial . . . . The live burial that is a favorite conventual punishment in Gothic novels derives
much of its horror not from the buried person's loss of outside activities (that would be the
horror or dead burial) , but from the continuation of a parallel activity that is suddenly
redundant" (20).