Social Transformation And Spatial Narratives

American gothic fictions,as an essential part of American Romanticism literature,deserve a deep and wide research.Though born after British gothic for decades,American gothic fiction has become an important chapter of history of American literature from late 18 century to the first half of 19 th century,with considerable masterpieces marked with gothic style and equipped some gothic elements from great authors including Washington Irving,Edgar Allan Poe,Nathaniel Hawthorne,and Herman Melville.Not only be reckoned as genius of telling tales of mystery,horror and grotesque,but also as origin of American literature and culture,which serves as basement of Americanness.The space of castle,locked room,wasteland and forests that supports the background setting of the story makes a central role in narrative and produce of meaning in fictions.According to the Henri Levefre,space serves as complicated social construction and result of social production rather than abstract,objective and constant being,which eventually makes influence on social practice and social cognition.Space narrative in literature,thus not only introduce background and support stories,but also reveal the sophisticated connection between literary actions and system of social production.Considering American history,especially the era from 1800 to civil war,which defined by history scholar as “Grand Transformation”,containing significant changes as well as conflict in the fields of economy,social relations,culture,belief and national state.Further,those changes and conflict retrospectively put great influence on theme and narrative form of American gothic fictions.What needed to point out here is the differences between original gothic fictions and American fictions.The former one,namely English gothic fictions,as a historical conception has already extinct;while the latter one makes a general reference to the fictions that influenced by tradition of European gothic fiction and at some level held gothic elements,characteristic,or themes.With combination of several characters from other genre,American gothic fictions enhanced with wider topics and more powerful narrative effects.Wasteland and castle,which make two classic narrative space in gothic fictions,inhered by Irving,Edgar Poe and Hawthorne in their creative writings,while some alterations and developments based on situation of America could observed.For American gothic fictions,the importance of wasteland raised and generated complicated narrative functions compared to English gothic fiction,due to the specialty of realization of colonial frontier experience and the position of repelling civilization,law and hypocrite of city.For Irving,wasteland and castle is the narrative space of forgetting system of American early history;while for Poe and Hawthorne,wasteland and castle can be interpreted as projection of anxiety,which externalized as sensible space.City and rural area,though not holding main position in traditional gothic fictions,play a more critical role in American gothic fictions due to complexity and impact on traditional ethics and social rules from urbanization.At some level,the space of city can interpret into gothic castle's transformation,which dominated in this era,and even developed into detective story,such “Trilogy of Dupin”,by Poe.As a contrary to city,rural area's descent into subordinate of city given to extending gaps at aspects of economy and politics leads to a crisis of subject and identity problem,which revealed on many other works,including my kinsman,major Molineux,by Hawthorne.Anti-industrialization,along with pastoral fantasy,serves as major romanticism imagination in American literature,and makes an endeavor to build so-called “Middle landscape society”,which intertwined with radical thoughts and religious obsession,generated some masterpiece with utopia imagination and criticism on industrialization and commercial life.In order to perfect humanity,Hawthorne tried to create an closed self-support system that defends damage to ethnic and relationship from power of Capitalism,which reflected in The house of seven Gables and The Romance of Blithdale.However,his fantasy,on one hand rejected erosion of Capitalism production,on the other hand tried to satisfy the need of modern people by low-efficiency and enclosed Middle ages-like social production,only leading to a definite failure.Ocean,which not concerned as typical gothic space narrative,equipped with forceful and mysterious characters for its vastness,mystery,danger,along with mechanism and metaphor for nation and empire,sets interactive relationship of death impulse,racial consciousness and empirical imagination from both the author and American as a nation.Compared to wasteland and forest,the irrational character and extreme danger make ocean as a non-civilized and even non-language space.Thus the escape,such as Arthur Gordon Pym and Ishmael in Moby-Dick,induced an attitude of rejecting civilization,which reflects a dark side of 19 th century America's social movement,and becomes an allegory of the future of both the country and the nation.