What do you think?
Rate this book
The Haunted dusk: American supernatural fiction, 1820-1920
Book by
236 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1984
18 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 5, 2011
I read this as an adjunct to my recent finishing off of the comprehensive American Fantastic Tales:Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps, which covered the same time period. I'd had THE HAUNTED DUSK sitting on my shelf, and had a non-fiction book scheduled in my reading, so events converged.
This is a collection of scholarly essays about various cultural movements and how they impacted the form and substance of supernatural writings in the 19th century. All the big names are represented here: Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Herman Melville, etc. The essays are enjoyably free of jargon and even in cases where I thought I'd have no interest, they argue or illuminate fascinating ideas.
"Ghostly Rentals, Ghostly Purchases: Haunted Imaginations in James, Twain & Bellamy" by Jay Martin is short, more of a compact precis than an essay. It tracks how the Civil War served as a pivot point on American life, spirituality and literature. Pre-Civil War, Martin argues, America was generally a Cartesian, pragmatic culture that rejected writers like Poe and Hawthorne as morbid and morose. Post the trauma of the War, America embraced works like The Gates Ajar by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, as a kind of therapy, they promised an afterlife that mirrored the material world and stood cheek to jowl with it. The American reader of 1870 was therefore a thoroughgoing rationalist who believed in the supernaturalisms of traditional religion and the new Spiritualism, and the afterlife was analogous to the unconscious, as it was then understood (post-Eduard Von Hartmann, pre-Sigmund Freud). He then examines how, in their works, Henry James saw the afterlife/unconscious as a realm of the past, Mark Twain represented it as a dream-self of the present and Edward Bellamy conceived of it the unstructured, yet-to-happen future. Fascinating stuff.
Barton Levi St. Armand, in "'I Must Have Died At Ten Minutes Past One': Posthumous Reverie in Harriet Prescott Spofford's 'The Amber Gods'", sketches out the details of Spofford's story so well that now I'd love to read this character study of an amoral, New England, proto-decadent femme fatale and her eventual downfall.
Howard Kerr has a fascinating essay here - "James' Last Early Supernatural Tales: Hawthorne Demagnetized, Poe Depoetized" - about Henry James and his earlier (often considered "lesser") ghost stories and how two in particular indicate his need to assimilate and then discharge the influence and approaches of earlier writers in the genre - Hawthorne is taken care of in "Professor Fargo", Poe in "The Ghostly Rental".
Three essay's explore particular writers who made outward statements about their dislike and distrust of spiritualist matters, yet who, in private or in writing, exhibited an interest in same. Arch-realist William Dean Howells, dealt late in his life with the death of his daughter and the feelings it evoked by penning a novel about identity, death and the afterlife. The essay on this, "Psychology and the Psychic in W.D. Howells A Sleep and A Forgetting" by John W. Crowley & Charles L. Crow is extremely interesting (the ailment the female character suffers in the novel, in which she periodically loses her memory after a trauma, is rife with gender symbolism) and, once again, made me want to read the novel itself. "'When Other Amusements Fail': Mark Twain and the Occult" by Alan Gribben examines the master cynic's personal fascination with all forms of supernaturalism, as rationalist debunker, skeptic, student of human nature and interested party. Jack London's mother was a spiritualist fraud and so he roundly rejected the whole topic, yet it appears in his work in surprising ways as argued by Charles N. Watson Jr. in "Jack London: Up From Spiritualism".
The initial essay in the book, "Washington Irving and the American Ghost Story" by G.R. Thompson, suffers a bit by being a response to another argument in another book. That essay argued that Walter de la Mare or Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu invented the psychological, inconclusive ghost story. Thompson instead thinks that Irving can claim that title, and argues so by placing his well-known story "The Adventure Of the German Student" back into its original presentation context as one of a number of stories linked together in "Strange Stories By A Nervous Gentleman" in Tales of a Traveller. By Geoffrey Crayon Gent Part 2. While the essay starts with a lot of definitional dickering over "Gothic", ghost" and "horror" story, and the primacy of stories in those veins, the argument itself proves illuminating as Thompson shows how the original context of the story in a chain of tales told around a fire, each one approaching the ghost story from a different perspective (comedic, rationalist, psychological), opens up the familiar details in the story of a young man who meets a girl by the guillotine. Enjoyable read.
"The Color of 'The Damned Thing': The Occult and the Suprasensational" by Cruce Stark seems a bit thin to me (I guess De Maupassant being French excluded him from an essay about American writers but "The Horla" is the missing elephant in the room of invisible beasts here) but the central argument - that the religious undertones of spiritualism (lost souls communicating from the heavenly afterworld) were transmuted, by the acceptance of scientific advances in the popular mind, into ideas of the limits of human senses and things that could exist outside those limits, thus incorporating psychic spiritualism into theoretical science wholesale as merely being another layer of unperceived reality, a signal we hadn't learned how to tune in yet - makes perfect sense (see how the term "evolution" is misapplied constantly in the modern world). This concept is (rather hastily for my tastes) tied into Ambrose Bierce's "The Damned Thing".
Two essays really stood out for me. One seemed, on initial reading, to be the least promising in the book - "Philanthropy and the Occult in the fiction of Hawthorne, Brownson and Melville" by Carolyn L. Karcher proved densely layered with detaIl. Karcher examines three books that were satires of the progressive movements of the early part of the 19th century (Utopianism, Suffragetes, Prison Reform, Worker's Rights, Abolition), but then shows how Hawthorne (in The Blithedale Romance) , Orestes Brownson (in The Spirit-Rapper An Autobiography) and Herman Melville (in The Confidence-Man) all dealt with these topics in different ways, Hawthorne taking a conservative religious approach (re: abolition - the Christian standard "slaves are slaves because God intended it that way and who are we to question God"), Brownson the approach of the religious zealot ("unions and women's rights movements are the work of a conspiracy of Satanists" essentially - funny how that's still around today in a somewhat more well-worded, easy to digest, Oil-Company backed propaganda form for the morons) and Melville, while questioning some of the more naive assumptions behind the movements (prison reform, for one, needed to be disabused of the notion that all prisoners where innocent or misunderstood) actually penned a scathing critique of the critics themselves, and the logical flaws of their critiques, in his novel. What this has to do with the supernatural is that Spiritualism and the like were concomitant in the popular culture with Progressive thought, and this leads to an interesting observation that the rise in Progressive thought always seemed to be twinned with a resurgence in occultic and supernatural beliefs (think of the 60's/70's and New Age) as societal structures are expanded into new possibilities. The author only lightly touches on this (the essay is mainly a thorough exploration of THE CONFIDENCE MAN, a reminder that I really need to read that book) but I'd love to see an expansion in book form.
The other great read here is "Phantasms of Death in Poe's Fiction" by J. Gerald Kennedy. There's well-argued observations here about how, pre-19th century, death in American culture/life was something ominous and accepted but as life became more civilized, death - the great uncontrollable - became more fearsome and unruly and so had to be "tamed" by the building of various new customs and art forms around it (funerary odes, elaborate ritual) through which the art of dying itself was redefined into a distanced, aesthetic event. Kennedy then argues that Poe, in an effort to undermine this distancing, represents death in his fiction in four symbolic forms (annihilation, compulsion, separation and transformation), which appear in various Poe stories, although only "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar", perhaps the author's grimmest story, contains all four. Always nice to learn new ways of thinking about Poe, that father of my favorite genre.
So, there you have it. Those who dislike critical approaches to their entertainment should stay away but I must say I learned a lot and you could too if you're so inclined.
This is a collection of scholarly essays about various cultural movements and how they impacted the form and substance of supernatural writings in the 19th century. All the big names are represented here: Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Herman Melville, etc. The essays are enjoyably free of jargon and even in cases where I thought I'd have no interest, they argue or illuminate fascinating ideas.
"Ghostly Rentals, Ghostly Purchases: Haunted Imaginations in James, Twain & Bellamy" by Jay Martin is short, more of a compact precis than an essay. It tracks how the Civil War served as a pivot point on American life, spirituality and literature. Pre-Civil War, Martin argues, America was generally a Cartesian, pragmatic culture that rejected writers like Poe and Hawthorne as morbid and morose. Post the trauma of the War, America embraced works like The Gates Ajar by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, as a kind of therapy, they promised an afterlife that mirrored the material world and stood cheek to jowl with it. The American reader of 1870 was therefore a thoroughgoing rationalist who believed in the supernaturalisms of traditional religion and the new Spiritualism, and the afterlife was analogous to the unconscious, as it was then understood (post-Eduard Von Hartmann, pre-Sigmund Freud). He then examines how, in their works, Henry James saw the afterlife/unconscious as a realm of the past, Mark Twain represented it as a dream-self of the present and Edward Bellamy conceived of it the unstructured, yet-to-happen future. Fascinating stuff.
Barton Levi St. Armand, in "'I Must Have Died At Ten Minutes Past One': Posthumous Reverie in Harriet Prescott Spofford's 'The Amber Gods'", sketches out the details of Spofford's story so well that now I'd love to read this character study of an amoral, New England, proto-decadent femme fatale and her eventual downfall.
Howard Kerr has a fascinating essay here - "James' Last Early Supernatural Tales: Hawthorne Demagnetized, Poe Depoetized" - about Henry James and his earlier (often considered "lesser") ghost stories and how two in particular indicate his need to assimilate and then discharge the influence and approaches of earlier writers in the genre - Hawthorne is taken care of in "Professor Fargo", Poe in "The Ghostly Rental".
Three essay's explore particular writers who made outward statements about their dislike and distrust of spiritualist matters, yet who, in private or in writing, exhibited an interest in same. Arch-realist William Dean Howells, dealt late in his life with the death of his daughter and the feelings it evoked by penning a novel about identity, death and the afterlife. The essay on this, "Psychology and the Psychic in W.D. Howells A Sleep and A Forgetting" by John W. Crowley & Charles L. Crow is extremely interesting (the ailment the female character suffers in the novel, in which she periodically loses her memory after a trauma, is rife with gender symbolism) and, once again, made me want to read the novel itself. "'When Other Amusements Fail': Mark Twain and the Occult" by Alan Gribben examines the master cynic's personal fascination with all forms of supernaturalism, as rationalist debunker, skeptic, student of human nature and interested party. Jack London's mother was a spiritualist fraud and so he roundly rejected the whole topic, yet it appears in his work in surprising ways as argued by Charles N. Watson Jr. in "Jack London: Up From Spiritualism".
The initial essay in the book, "Washington Irving and the American Ghost Story" by G.R. Thompson, suffers a bit by being a response to another argument in another book. That essay argued that Walter de la Mare or Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu invented the psychological, inconclusive ghost story. Thompson instead thinks that Irving can claim that title, and argues so by placing his well-known story "The Adventure Of the German Student" back into its original presentation context as one of a number of stories linked together in "Strange Stories By A Nervous Gentleman" in Tales of a Traveller. By Geoffrey Crayon Gent Part 2. While the essay starts with a lot of definitional dickering over "Gothic", ghost" and "horror" story, and the primacy of stories in those veins, the argument itself proves illuminating as Thompson shows how the original context of the story in a chain of tales told around a fire, each one approaching the ghost story from a different perspective (comedic, rationalist, psychological), opens up the familiar details in the story of a young man who meets a girl by the guillotine. Enjoyable read.
"The Color of 'The Damned Thing': The Occult and the Suprasensational" by Cruce Stark seems a bit thin to me (I guess De Maupassant being French excluded him from an essay about American writers but "The Horla" is the missing elephant in the room of invisible beasts here) but the central argument - that the religious undertones of spiritualism (lost souls communicating from the heavenly afterworld) were transmuted, by the acceptance of scientific advances in the popular mind, into ideas of the limits of human senses and things that could exist outside those limits, thus incorporating psychic spiritualism into theoretical science wholesale as merely being another layer of unperceived reality, a signal we hadn't learned how to tune in yet - makes perfect sense (see how the term "evolution" is misapplied constantly in the modern world). This concept is (rather hastily for my tastes) tied into Ambrose Bierce's "The Damned Thing".
Two essays really stood out for me. One seemed, on initial reading, to be the least promising in the book - "Philanthropy and the Occult in the fiction of Hawthorne, Brownson and Melville" by Carolyn L. Karcher proved densely layered with detaIl. Karcher examines three books that were satires of the progressive movements of the early part of the 19th century (Utopianism, Suffragetes, Prison Reform, Worker's Rights, Abolition), but then shows how Hawthorne (in The Blithedale Romance) , Orestes Brownson (in The Spirit-Rapper An Autobiography) and Herman Melville (in The Confidence-Man) all dealt with these topics in different ways, Hawthorne taking a conservative religious approach (re: abolition - the Christian standard "slaves are slaves because God intended it that way and who are we to question God"), Brownson the approach of the religious zealot ("unions and women's rights movements are the work of a conspiracy of Satanists" essentially - funny how that's still around today in a somewhat more well-worded, easy to digest, Oil-Company backed propaganda form for the morons) and Melville, while questioning some of the more naive assumptions behind the movements (prison reform, for one, needed to be disabused of the notion that all prisoners where innocent or misunderstood) actually penned a scathing critique of the critics themselves, and the logical flaws of their critiques, in his novel. What this has to do with the supernatural is that Spiritualism and the like were concomitant in the popular culture with Progressive thought, and this leads to an interesting observation that the rise in Progressive thought always seemed to be twinned with a resurgence in occultic and supernatural beliefs (think of the 60's/70's and New Age) as societal structures are expanded into new possibilities. The author only lightly touches on this (the essay is mainly a thorough exploration of THE CONFIDENCE MAN, a reminder that I really need to read that book) but I'd love to see an expansion in book form.
The other great read here is "Phantasms of Death in Poe's Fiction" by J. Gerald Kennedy. There's well-argued observations here about how, pre-19th century, death in American culture/life was something ominous and accepted but as life became more civilized, death - the great uncontrollable - became more fearsome and unruly and so had to be "tamed" by the building of various new customs and art forms around it (funerary odes, elaborate ritual) through which the art of dying itself was redefined into a distanced, aesthetic event. Kennedy then argues that Poe, in an effort to undermine this distancing, represents death in his fiction in four symbolic forms (annihilation, compulsion, separation and transformation), which appear in various Poe stories, although only "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar", perhaps the author's grimmest story, contains all four. Always nice to learn new ways of thinking about Poe, that father of my favorite genre.
So, there you have it. Those who dislike critical approaches to their entertainment should stay away but I must say I learned a lot and you could too if you're so inclined.
June 14, 2022
Informative and straightforward essays on 100 years of American supernatural fiction. The essay on the last of Henry James' early ghost stories was particularly interesting.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews