In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The Henry James Review Spring, 1985 Kerr Howard, John W. Crowley and Charles L. Crow eds. The Haunted Dusk: American Supernatural Fiction 1820-1920. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1983. 236 pp. $18.00. A well-focused and intelligently organized anthology of critical essays, The Haunted Dusk analyzes the development of American supernatural fiction, a tradition the editors maintain begins early in the nineteenth century and dies out early in the twentieth. Thus the book begins with an essay on Washington Irving and concludes widi essays on artists such as Twain, Howells, London, Bierce, and botii Wilham and Henry James, whose works straddle die late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Though each of the essays focuses on specific authors and themes, the volume as a whole illustrates a larger thesis: "Taken together, these studies chart die course of die genre from its emergence out of Gothicism to its merger with psychologism early in this century" (p. 1). Rich in theoretical insight, intellectual history, and colorful illustrations from a wide variety of authors—including major writers such as Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and James as well as interesting minor figures such as Orestes Brownson, Harriet Prescott Spofford, and Elizabetii Stuart Phelps—The Haunted Dusk succeeds admirably in describing and interpreting a fascinating tradition of American writing. Analyses of American literary tradition inevitably focus on ambivalence and ambiguity, but these qualities are especially evident in American treatments of supernatural themes. A natural (or supernatural) medium in which to dramatize fundamental conflicts about the nature of reality, American supernatural fiction expresses the spirit of a nation both proud of its pragmatic realism and hungry for romance, vigorously pursuing a manifest destiny in the common light of day, yet troubled and enraptured by twilight apparitions. The theme of The Haunted Dusk embraces both personal psychology and cultural myth, both the ambivalence of Twain and London alternately scornful and intrigued by psychic phenomena and the ongoing struggle to define our national character as a frontier people. The editors observe that, as a distinctively American tradition developed, it adapted die central American metaphor of the frontier to its own purposes. Faith in rationality and die axe only intensified curiosity about die shadows surrounding civilized clearings, which in supernatural fiction became "psychic frontiers on the edge of territories botii enticing and terrifying' ' : They [diese essays] also confirm, we hope, Howells's belief that American writers seem to have a special aptitude for handling die "filmy textures" and "vague shapes" of the occult. Introducing Shapes that Haunt the Dusk (1907), an anthology of psychical tales from which our tide is adapted, Howells asserted that the Americans' "love of the supernatural is their common heritage from our particular ancestry." Their fiction, he added, often gathers in the gray "twilight of reason," on "the borderland between experience and illusion." Howells' geographical metaphor was derived, of course, from Hawthorne's idea of a moonlit "neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairyland , where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself witii die other. ' ' Whether literally, as in Cooper's The Spy, or metaphorically, as in Hawthorne's works, the neutral territory /borderland was the familiar setting of American romance. As American writers came to realize, not only was there a borderland between East and West, civilization and wilderness, but also between the here and hereafter, between conscious and unconscious , "experience and illusion"—psychic frontiers on the edge of territories both enticing and terrifying, (pp. 1-2) Just as the anthology's overall argument illustrates the adaptability of die American frontier metaphor, so the individual essays illustrate the broad range of effects evoked by supernatural themes, ranging from Irving's whimsical ambiguities, to Poe's arabesque nightmares, to the satiric energy of Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance and Melville 's The Confidence Man, to the psychological complexity of James's and Howells's later tales. Each essay defines an intellectual and cultural context in which supernatural fiction was produced, so that the chronological arrangement of subjects provides a coherent analysis of how shifting attitudes toward supernatural phenomena affected literary technique. Having demonstrated in the opening essays that mid-nineteenth century supernatural fiction dramatized a lively debate about the...

pdf

Share