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Dark Romanticism: The Gothic, the Macabre, and the Dark Side of the Movement

“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.” — Edgar Allan Poe, 1849

Dark romanticism is the strand of Romanticism that dealt with the dark, the macabre, the supernatural, the psychological, the disturbed, and the violent. While the mainstream Romantics celebrated nature, feeling, and the heroic individual, the dark Romantics explored the night side of human experience: the haunted conscience, the obsessed mind, the murderous impulse, the corrupt family, the social outcast, the ruin, the nightmare, the supernatural visitation, and the descent into madness. The dark Romantics — Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, the Brontës, the Marquis de Sade, the late Hoffmann, the early Henry James — produced some of the most powerful and most disturbing works in the entire Romantic tradition, and they helped inaugurate the modern genres of horror, the psychological thriller, and the dark fantasy.

The Origins of Dark Romanticism

The dark Romantic tradition has its roots in several strands of late-eighteenth-century thought and literature:

  • The Gothic novel of the 1760s and 1770s — Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Matthew “Monk” Lewis’s The Monk (1796) — established many of the conventions that the dark Romantics would develop further.
  • The graveyard poetry of Thomas Gray, Edward Young, and Robert Blair — melancholy, meditative, often set in churchyards and tombs.
  • The Faust legend — the German folk tradition of the scholar who sells his soul to the devil, developed in the Romantic period by Goethe, Marlowe (earlier), and many others.
  • The new psychological interests of the period — the rise of the novel of sensibility, the development of the asylum, the new philosophical interest in the darker regions of the human mind.

The Major American Dark Romantics

The dark Romantic tradition was particularly strong in the new American republic, where the bright promises of the Revolution and the new democratic order were shadowed by the realities of slavery, the treatment of Native Americans, the violence of the frontier, the legacy of Puritanism, and the dark underside of the new American dream.

  • Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810) — the first major American novelist, author of Wieland (1798) and Edgar Huntly (1799), with their themes of sleepwalking, mesmerism, double identity, and frontier violence.
  • Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) — the great American poet, critic, and short-story writer, author of “The Raven,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “Ligeia,” and the Dupin detective stories. Poe’s tales of horror, his explorations of psychological extremity, and his invention of the modern detective story made him one of the most influential writers of the nineteenth century.
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) — author of The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the Seven Gables (1851), and the great short stories collected in Mosses from an Old Manse (1846) and Twice-Told Tales (1837). Hawthorne’s works explore the New England Puritan past, the psychology of guilt, the dark secrets of the family, and the moral ambiguity of the human condition.
  • Herman Melville (1819–1891) — author of Moby-Dick (1851), Billy Budd (published posthumously in 1924), and the great short stories collected in The Piazza Tales (1856). Melville’s works explore obsession, the dark side of the American missionary and democratic enterprise, and the metaphysical reaches of human experience.
  • The later American tradition — the Southern Gothic of Faulkner, O’Connor, McCullers, and Capote; the psychological realism of Henry James; the modernist explorations of consciousness in Eliot, Joyce, and Woolf — all of these draw, in different ways, on the dark Romantic inheritance.

The Major European Dark Romantics

The dark Romantic tradition also flourished in Europe:

  • E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776–1822) — the great German author of the uncanny, whose tales of automata, doubles, sleepwalkers, and the supernatural became major contributions to the dark Romantic tradition.
  • The Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) — the great (and notorious) French writer, whose exploration of violence, cruelty, and sexual transgression pushed the Romantic conception of individual freedom to its most extreme limit.
  • Matthew “Monk” Lewis (1775–1818) — the English author of The Monk (1796), a founding work of the dark Romantic tradition.
  • Charles Robert Maturin (1782–1824) — the Irish author of Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), one of the great dark Romantic novels.
  • The Brontës — Charlotte (Jane Eyre, 1847), Emily (Wuthering Heights, 1847), and Anne (The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, 1848) — whose novels of intense feeling, hidden secrets, and dark passion are major works of the dark Romantic tradition.
  • Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907), Octave Mirbeau (1848–1917), and the late-nineteenth-century Decadents — whose explorations of decadence, perversion, and the strange took the dark Romantic project in new directions.

The Continuing Influence

The dark Romantic tradition has had a profound influence on later Western literature and culture. The late-Victorian and Edwardian ghost stories; the great modern horror of Bram Stoker (Dracula, 1897), Mary Shelley (Frankenstein, 1818), H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), and the American Weird Tale tradition; the twentieth-century psychological thriller; the contemporary genres of horror, dark fantasy, and the supernatural — all draw, in different ways, on the dark Romantic inheritance. The contemporary figure of the vampire, the werewolf, the haunted house, the troubled detective, the unreliable narrator, the dark family secret — all are descendants of the dark Romantic tradition.

Further Reading

  • Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (Criterion, 1960) — the founding American study of the dark Romantic tradition in American fiction.
  • Eric Savoy, “The Face of the Tenant: A Theory of American Gothic,” in American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative (Iowa, 1998) — the most useful modern critical anthology.
  • For primary texts, Project Gutenberg hosts free editions of Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and most of the major dark Romantics.