Why Dark Romanticism à la Poe, Hawthorne and Melville is still all the rage
By: Jasmin James
Tags: Romanticism, Reading, Books, Death And Dying, Pain

Masked Death and Suffering, the supreme Equalizer

With Edgar Allan Poe, we are assured that nothing will ever turn out sunny side up.

And yet, we revel in that because there is something glorious in that amount of stark honesty. In many ways, the man who gave us the first detective story, the first horror and maybe even the first science fiction story seemed pre-destined to throw off the veil of starkly optimistic Romanticism. Haunted by the early deaths of his parents, the ongoing sickness and death of his wife, struggling with his alcohol addiction and bitterness stemming from unfair remuneration when contemporary poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (still esteemed yet not as much as Poe is these days) was much more flush, he was a man steeped in darkness.

I’ve read an analysis cleverly exhibiting how the many dark-haired, beautiful women warped in Poe’s fiction are representations of the women of his life, with the stories celebrating their beauty only to show their suffering and degradation even more painstakingly at the end. The author was impressed by his willingness to face that darkness within himself, a darkness he could not bind but was ultimately not afraid to look into.

Poe was a proponent of the beauty of the human spirit, of endurance and of strength rather than the inherent beauty of nature.

I find that poignant in these days of insecurity.

We are mired in troubles and yet there is hope. The struggle to reach that light is something Poe grapples with vividly in his fiction. Martin Luther King once said: ‘Only in the dark can we see the stars’ and in his fiction, it seems like there are many dark suns blooming.

Co-incidentally, Poe was one of the few writers I remembered to be a universal hit with my classmates in English class. We would never grow tired discussing the phantasmagorical imagery in The Pit and the Pendulum or the chilling prose in The Fall of the House of Usher. The Tell-Tale Heart had us in raptures-that protagonist, madness maddened, the slow build-up, the delicious tension-it was like being on tenterhooks, like reading instead of watching Jaws. I think, at that age, it was the element of substance abuse, melancholy, despair, decay and personified evil that spoke to our teenage psyche but now I find the stories refreshing and liberating purely for their amoral characters.

How to explain it? One of the main characters in popular YA fiction The Hazel Wood expresses it best.

In the passage, he tries to explain to the, in many ways aptly named Alice, (go check it out, I’m not spoiling anything 😃) something of the universal allure her grand-mother’s dark fairy tales hold within an avid fan community.

‘Is it good?’ ‘Good?’ He thought for a moment. ‘Good isn’t the right word. It puts you in this weird headspace. I’d just gone through some family stuff when I read it. I was all messed up. Getting the book at that exact moment was just what I needed. It gave me a feeling like…[…] Don’t laugh. It made me feel the way love songs do when you’re falling in love. Except in a messed-up way, ’cause that’s where my head was at. There’s a lot of darkness in them. I can’t remember now how much of that was in the stories and how much of it was mine. I loved them either way’

Poe hits that same mark while Dark Romanticism holds the same potential to save us when we are messed up.

Only question is, are we ready to fall?