Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften	17. Nr.	Februar 2010
Sektion 1.11.	American and Austrian Literature and Film: Influences, Interactions and Intersections Sektionsleiter | Section Chair: Donald G. Daviau (University of California at Riverside) Dokumentation | Documentation | Documentation

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Two Tales of Gothic Guilt:

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Novel The Marble Faun and
Adalbert Stifter’s Story Das alte Siegel

Pamela S. Saur (Lamar University, Texas) [BIO]

Email: saurps@hal.lamar.edu

The term Gothic literature is well defined and extensively applied by scholars in the fields of British and American literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in the Anglophone context the word is also applied to more recent texts, and to popular romances and horror tales and films. Generally, and particularly from the British and American point of view, it is assumed that there was a strong German component within the international Gothic literary tradition, perhaps most famously in the influence of E.T.A. Hoffmann on Edgar Allan Poe. Within German literature, however, the word Gothic (“Gotik, gotisch”) is used much less frequently, and the term does not enjoy as much prestige as it does in American and British letters. Although there is no universal agreement on translation, the word is sometimes assumed to be equivalent to “Schauerroman” or “Schauerromantik.” Texts on German literature are also more likely to use other terms such as “arabesque,” “Grausen,” “schrecklich,” “dämonisch,” “unheimlich”or “uncanny” than “gothisch” or “Gothic.1 The “uncanny” also has significant psychological as well as literary import in the German language, due to a collection of essays on the subject by Sigmund Freud2 Although many literary comparatists and historians, especially those with a background in Anglophone literature, would maintain that German Romantic texts by such authors as Hofmannn, Arnim, Brentano, Eickendorff, and Tieck, display Gothic elements, the word is often omitted. One reason for this is the range, diversity, and prestige of German Romanticism. Because of the high regard it enjoys and its vastness and complexity, the Gothic in literature would generally be regarded not as an independent genre, but as a branch or set of features within Romanticism. A second reason is that the Gothic is more often used as a pejorative within the German tradition than the American and British. Evidence of this fact may be found in a discussion of E. T. A. Hoffmann by John Reddick. Without using the term, Reddick provides evidence that even Hoffmann himself regarded Gothic literary conventions as artistically inferior, asserting, “Hoffmann is sometimes quite happy to contrive ramshackle, disjointed intrigues, . . . . stagey setpieces of moonlight witchery, dark intrigue, cloaks and daggers etc.– what in fact Hoffmann himself styled ‘ein ganzes Arsenal von Ungereimtheiten und Spukereien.’” (79) To be sure, the artistic quality of Gothic literature is vulnerable to criticism because of its associations with popular films and stories in later years, and because it has always offered the possibility of making less than original use of a host of conventions and the potential for extreme sensationalism; however, emphasizing these negative associations should not prevent efforts to define the unique aspects of this genre and to recognize its significance in the history of American and European literature. 

Gothic fiction, “a literature of nightmare,” as Elizabeth MacAndrew asserts (3) evokes terror or horror, or at least strong disorientation and unease, using secrets, mysteries, and haunting legacies of the past. Specific conventions of Gothic literature include threatening, fateful landscapes and loud storms, eerie castles, churches, and ruins, evil priests, mad monks and messengers or servants, mysterious veiled women, objects such as magical mirrors, animated or eerie portraits or statues, old keepsakes, and mysterious missives.3 As conventional as it is in a host of such recurring elements, Gothic literature varies considerably in its use of religion and the supernatural. Probably all works that evoke Gothic emotional effects contain at least some temporary intimation of a possible plane of reality beyond that comprehensible by rational means. Gothic stories contain subtle hints or blatant evidence of a realm in which spiritual, supernatural powers are at work; in some texts these powers come to dominate, in others they prove not to be real; they are explained away, partially or fully, sometimes through coincidence, ventriloquism or somnambulism. Another area of significant variation concerns the nature of the Gothic supernatural; it may belong to the world of magical fantasy or of orthodox or peculiar religion, or a mixture of these realms. As Mary M. Tarr demonstrates in the book Catholicism and Gothic Fiction, Catholic buildings, figures, and practices are frequently infused with eeriness and mystery to evoke Gothic fears, not infrequently accompanied by overt hostility toward the Church and its doctrines.

While Gothic literary features would be expected in German Romanticism, they would not be in keeping with the usual images of the Czech-Austrian Adalbert Stifter (1805-1868), a writer of German-language prose fiction who is ordinarily classified as belonging to movements considered contrasting to Romanticism, including Classicism, Poetic Realism, “Biedermeyer,” or  “Heimatliteratur” of his native Sudetenland. Critics frequently seek insights into Stifter’s prose by referring to his preface to the collection Bunte Steine (1853), in which he defends the worthiness of writing of small events and ordinary people, a hallmark of nineteenth century Realism and German Poetic Realism, and explicates the concept of “das sanfte Gesetz” or the “gentle law” governing human life. The dominant or surface impression of Stifter’s work conveys emphasis on idealism, virtue and nobility, detailed description, and a slow, sometimes uneventful and unemotional pace quite in contrast with Gothic suspense and sensation. However, critics have long been fascinated by muted undertones of threat and chaos, disturbing contradictions and complications, elements sometimes associated with Romanticism, even, in retrospect, with the “kafkaesque.”4 One aspect of the usually muted disturbing level of Stifter’s work is to be found in his use of Gothic elements in some of his works. Although they are certainly not dominant in his writings and have attracted little scholarly attention, overt employment of Gothic details can be identified in around half a dozen of Stifter’s works. Although Gothic is often assumed to be a German influence on American literature, a reverse direction is fruitful: scholarship on the Gothic from the Anglophone world is useful to analyze the Gothic in German literature.

In any analysis of the Gothic, it is important to identify particular types of landscapes, buildings, characters and objects. To be labeled Gothic, however, these elements must appear in an atmosphere of terror or deep disorientation. It is important to note that Stifter often placed considerable realistic rather than Gothic emphasis on the description of  material objects, including manuscripts and letters, clothing and jewelry, furniture, statues and paintings, and buildings, as well as on weather, minerals, geographical formations and landscapes, sometimes to serve such literary purposes as organizing sections of novellas by naming important buildings or ascribing qualities to minerals, and at other times apparently for the sake of visually detailed description in itself. Thus, context of plot events, emotion, and milieu, haunting effects of the past, and intimation of  supernatural forces must be considered before one can necessarily label as Gothic Stifter’s use of a typical Gothic requisite such as a ruined castle or a significant painting.5 

Gothic elements can be identified in several of Stifter’s tales; five of them relate Gothic experiences to processes of “Bildung,” a parallel to Stifter’s best known novel, Nachsommer of 1857. Stifter creates several young male protagonists on the brink of adulthood who are tested by disorienting, fearful, but in the end not overtly supernatural Gothic experiences connected in various ways to the past, to older male relatives and to problematic relationships with women, all fundamental aspects of forming a mature adult identity. To varying degrees, all meet the challenges they face and emerge wiser and more mature from their Gothic experiences; four of the five make decisions regarding marriage. In the case of “Das alte Siegel,” however, as will be shown, the apparent success of the young man proves to be ambivalent. In keeping with Gothic tradition, these tales all incorporate eerie or significant artworks, statues or portrait galleries, objects such as lockets or family seals, as well as portentous letters and diaries from the past. The five works include three stories published in 1844: Stifter’s only “ghost story,” which turns out to be a tale of sleep-walking, “Die Drei Schmiede ihres Schicksals,” as well as “Das alte Siegel,” which was influenced by two stories of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s,“Der Hagestolz” about a young man’s brave trek to his uncle’s eerie island mansion where he passes fearful tests, matures, and eventually establishes a good relationship with his eccentric relative, and “Das Narrenburg” featuring a mysterious family castle. Later works containing Gothic elements are “Turmalin,”(1852), which does not fit the Bildung tradition but focuses on eccentricity and isolation of several characters, and “Die Mappe meines Urgrossvaters”(1864) that uses a frame device with a Gothic aura. Just as Stifter’s use of the Gothic is confined to a select few of his texts, it is also moderate and restrained rather than sensationalistic. Although  the conclusions of these tales may well leave some lingering grim and disturbing elements, suggestions of supernatural forces are not borne out in the end.

The fact that Stifter was restrained in his use of Gothic effects is notable in an essay in which he managed to write about a tour through a most Gothic setting, the catacombs under St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, in a relatively matter-of fact manner. This piece, “Ein Gang durch den Katakomben” (1842) is part of a reflective and descriptive piece called “Wien.” The catacombs are presented as a place to visit in the city, and the underground perspective is balanced by its converse, a visual essay set atop the cathedral’s tower; moreover the catacomb tour is not taken by a vulnerable individual subject to fear and disorientation, but a group with a tour guide. The labyrinthian area, furnished with skulls, caskets, and corpses in varying degrees of decomposition, is described objectively, although there are a few mentions of moments of fear and disorientation and a few phrases suggesting Gothic moods and emotions, as in “unheimliche geheimnisvolle Schatten,” (36), and “ein seltsamer, gespenstiger Anblick.” (39) Prominent in the essay, however, are not Gothic experiences that challenge the self, but intellectual speculations on the mysteries of human life and death, many centered on the idea, “der Tod macht alles gleich.” (37)

Stifter’s restraint is also seen in his approach to religion in his literary works. As Keith Spalding points out, critics have long debated the question of Stifter’s own faith: “Attempts to claim him as a true Catholic or an undoubted Humanist remain equally unconvincing. . . . On the subject of religion his pronouncements verge on the platitudinous. . . There is no sign of a personal faith. . . “ (194) In other words, Stifter’s literary goals as a story-teller were not expressly religious, and his own religion ordinary and conventional. As a Gothic author, it is significant that Stifter was a Catholic from Catholic Austrio-Hungary. In “Das alte Siegel” he employs Gothic associations of the Church, but this tale displays neither the fanciful use of fictional supernatural forces nor the marked, sometimes virulent anti-Catholicism of many British and American Gothic works. In Stifter’s tale suggestions of supernatural forces can be said to be intimated, although largely cleared up later, by the protagonist’s experiences of mystery and fear, and, in some rather mild references to the operation of fate. 

This study will focus on a text by Stifter with definite Gothic elements, the story “Das alte Siegel,”(1844) and compare and contrast it with a well-known American Gothic novel of 1860, The Marble Faun by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Both feature intimations of the operation of fateful powers in the characters’ lives, love stories involving beautiful, mysterious women, the use of Catholicism to create eerie Gothic moods, fateful objects, and Gothic experiences in which individuals are led into mysterious, threatening realms. In both works, the horror of these Gothic experiences ultimately turns out to be more internal, namely moral corruption that involves the protagonists in guilt, than external peril. Together, these two works illuminate two important features of some Gothic tales: first of all, they demonstrate that individuals often endure Gothic experiences that prove to be trials and tests of their mettle, and sometimes processes of Bildung or maturation into adulthood, often fused with psychological journeys involving fateful sexual attraction. Secondly, both tales portray one possible outcome of Gothic tales: characters who fail to emerge from Gothic darkness and guilt  into the light of maturity and goodness. A prototype is found in one of the founding novels of the Gothic tradition, The Monk, 1796, by Matthew G. Lewis, in which evil, associated as so often later with the Catholic Church, triumphs. A pious monk is corrupted by a sorceress and descends into vile sins, even rape and murder of a woman who turns out to be his half-sister and her mother. To avoid torture by the Catholic Inquisition, he swears allegiance to the Devil and is carried away in his talons. Contrasting the tales by Hawthorne and Stifter also illuminates that Stifter’s use of the Gothic, as befits his general writing style, exercises considerable restraint and moderation in his employment of Gothic features in the tale. Finally, contrasting the two works also brings out differences of cultural milieu; Stifter’s tale is thoroughly European, and Hawthorne’s novel, set in Rome, shows how New World authors have often defined themselves in terms of complex interactions of identification and rebellion against Old World culture. 

The Marble Faun centers on Donatello, an Italian Count rumored to have a half-human faun in his ancestry, and an American artist Miriam and another couple, likewise an American female artist and an Italian man. The four friends visit the Roman catacombs, where Miriam becomes separated from the others and encounters a strange, apparently mad monk who resembles a satyr. In contrast to Stifter’s realistic portrayal of the catacombs of Vienna as an intriguing place to visit, in Hawthorne’s book an innocent tour of the catacombs results in fateful entanglement in evil for Donatello and Miriam. It is never explained why the evil monk singles Miriam out for torment, but he gains psychological power over her and follows her everywhere, destroying her peace of mind and ruining her art – a typical Gothic touch, for paintings and statues often possess uncanny meanings or powers -- apparently through some corruption of her spirit; the aura of evil also affects the peace of mind of the other couple. Finally Donatello, seeing the desperate look in her eye which he interprets as an order to kill, pushes Miriam’s nemesis over a precipice to his death. Donatello tells her the effect of her glance and she is stunned by the implication, “He declares, ‘I did what your eyes bade me do, when I asked them with mine, as I held the wretch over the precipice.’ These last words struck Miriam like a bullet? Could it be so?” (172) Miriam has some doubt that she is guilty of giving the command to kill, but this doubt does nothing to lessen the pangs of guilt suffered by the pair for the rest of their lives. Donatello withdraws from his beloved for a time, then decides to re-unite with her. The pair marries, but their bond is poisoned by the burden of guilt they share.

In addition to posing the question as to Miriam’s guilt incurred through a mere hateful glance interpreted by another as an order to kill, the novel’s Gothic attributes lead the reader to a confrontation with the very idea of evil or sin in human beings through combining religious and fanciful use of the supernatural. Initially the author puts forth rational explanations of the man apparently haunting the catacombs, commenting that “the reader” might well think that he was merely a beggar, thief, political offender, assassin, or “a lunatic, fleeing instinctively from man, and making it his dark pleasure to dwell among the tombs.” (35) However, the narrator reveals that the man, over a thousand years old,  had been a spy during the persecutions of the early Christians. He was given a single moment of divine grace when he could have been saved, but he refused and instead chose to haunt the catacombs. Like the monk’s story, the  non-rational realm of the novel is seen as well in the fact that Donatello is said to have a non-human or perhaps pre-human ancestor, a faun, a significant detail in the book’s presentation of evil. Donatello’s aversion to Miriam’s nemesis reflects his nature, as seen in this passage: “It resembled not so much a human dislike or hatred, as one of those instinctive, unreasoning antipathies which the lower animals sometimes display, and which generally prove more trustworthy than the acutest insight into character.” (36) Donatello’s transformation from innocent creature to criminal suffering guilt pangs suggests the concept of original sin to many readers, as stated by Evan Carton: “Readers of The Marble Faun, from its first appearance, have most frequently understood it to be an allegory of the Fall of Man. In this interpretation, . . . [Donatello’s] commission of an impulsive crime initiates him into the knowledge of good and evil and transforms him from a state of animal simplicity and innocence to one of human complexity and guilt.” (28) Stifter’s tale, in contrast, has only faint intimations of forces operating outside of the rational real; his use of the Gothic leads to confrontation with human wrongdoing and guilt on a much smaller, more individual and worldly scale.

Stifter’s story involves Hugo, a young man who is directed by an anonymous letter brought by a seemingly mad old man to meet a veiled woman in a church. He falls in love with the mysterious woman, Cöleste. In addition to the eerie church scenes, a particularly Gothic experience later in the story has him go to the house where he had met his beloved and find it unoccupied; its furnishings had been staged for him. After years apart the two meet again. Cöleste tells Hugo that she had been compelled to marry an abusive man against her will. This circumstance is a typical Gothic problem for young women; in many English texts evil priests conspire with parents to bring about oppressive marriages. Here, the church, although eerie at first, is not portrayed negatively. The corruption that envelops Hugo through his experiences in the church comes from Cöleste’s seduction, not from the church or its priests.

Both Hawthorne’s and Stifter’s couples are in love, but their guilt makes happy unions impossible. Donatello and Miriam are told by a wise friend, “your bond is twined with such black threads, that you must never look upon it as identical with the ties that unite other living souls;” (322) they agree that their bond of guilt can never bring “earthly happiness.” The union of Hugo and Cöleste is not founded on the couple’s conspiracy to commit a murder, but on the sin of adultery. Although her husband has since died, Hugo renounces his beloved  when he learns that she was married at the time of their trysts. He is influenced by the “old seal” his father gave him, inscribed with a Latin motto that “honor” must always be preserved. The seal, which helps Hugo resist Gothic temptation, displays the Gothic quality of influences from the past, one could say from the grave of his deceased father, representing the honor of past generations as well. Hugo’s decision to embrace solitude, however, is not wholly virtuous, for it entails rejecting his own daughter by Cöleste. In neither Hawthorne’s nor Stifter’s tale does love offer escape from the realm of nightmare and wrongdoing.     

The story “Das alte Siegel” cannot be said to evoke real terror, but it involves considerable mystery, unease, and disorientation, a cluster of specifically Gothic buildings, figures, and events, and a young male protagonist tested by Gothic experiences. The Gothic emphasis on symbolic environments or buildings is seen in the sub-titles. First, “Die Berghalde,”evokes the protagonist Hugo’s home, family line, and loving respect for his father and his military tradition. The second two subtitles name structures that are places of his Gothic trials, “Die Kirche von Sankt Peter,” and “Das Lindenhäuschen.” Finally, “Das Eichenschloss” identifies the place where lingering mysteries are cleared up and Hugo can set his future life course accordingly. In the opening of “Das alte Siegel” young Hugo leaves home, prepared by his father, to try his fortune in the city. He is drawn into Gothic experiences by the fateful letter, brought by a messenger who seems mad, but is only a manservant assigned the tawdry job of luring the attractive blonde man into an adulterous affair with his mistress.

On his visits to church, Hugo observes that the last worshipers to leave after mass are a veiled woman, dressed in elderly fashion, and her young female servant clad in gray. When he catches a glimpse of the woman’s face uncovered by her veil, he is astonished to see that she is young and beautiful. Gradually, he moves from catching glimpses of her, to following her home, then making himself known and eventually speaking to her. References to her emphasize her black garb; she seems to be “innerhalb der schwarzen Wolke,” she is called “die schwarze Gestalt mit ihrem grauen Mädchen,” (142). After mass, the church seems darker than before, the place dreary and uninviting “unwirtlich” (141); a lame beggar adds to the eerie atmosphere. The mysterious woman’s association with the apparent madman, the somber church, and her garb create a faintly sinister aura about her; the reader and protagonist are given hints to be on guard against this woman. Hugo begins to wait outside the church to see her because he feels guilty: “Es schien ihm aber, daß der Zweck, dessentwillen er gekommen war, nicht mehr so gut sei wie bisher . . .” (141). In addition to the woman’s dark, unnaturally matronly dress, her veil is emphasized repeatedly (140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 147). In the study, “The Character in the Veil: Images of the Surface in the Gothic Novel,” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick discusses veiled women figures, and veils themselves, as typical Gothic details. She comments, “The veil itself . . . is also suffused with sexuality. . . . characters in Gothic novels fall in love as much with women’s veils as with women.” (256) She adds that the image of the veil can “represent sexuality itself–sexuality as error, as the driving, transitory illusion that a specific object can adequately answer to desire.” (257)

When Hugo finally asks to visit Cöleste, she accepts, but places responsibility elsewhere, saying: “Was das Schicksal will, das muß geschehen.”(146) In the same vein, and in a connection anticipating the “gentle law” he explicates a few years later, the author likens the pair’s relationship to a phenomenon of nature, a great avalanche that begins with a small, quiet event, a single snowflake: “So wie die Sage das Beginnen des Schneesturzes erzählt, ist es oft mit den Anfängen eines ganzen Geschickes der Menschen.”(148) Hugo is overwhelmed with anticipation, but he does not know what lies before him: “Ein Vorhang hatte sich entzwei gerissen, aber er sah noch nicht, was dahinter stand. Das blinde Leben hatte auf einmal ein schönes Auge aufgeschlagen – aber er verstand den Blick noch nicht.”(144) The two begin to meet, under the condition that he never ask about her background or situation. Hugo is intrigued by the veil of secrecy over the woman and the “linden cottage” where they meet: “Das weiße Häuschen schimmerte ihm aus den Linden wie ein schönes Geheimnis entgegen.”(153) However, the cottage has a strangely unreal atmosphere. He begins to realize that the house is a stage setting for their meetings, not an inhabited dwelling. Everything is in the same place from visit to visit, an unfinished work of knitting is never completed; the air is musty like that of an uninhabited room. When he passes by in the evening  the house never has lights burning or smoke coming from the chimney. Hugo is deeply saddened, for he realizes that his love is illusory too. When Hugo misses a few assignations, then comes there uninvited, the house is empty. He walks through the silent rooms, finding some familiar furniture, but many objects gone and everything covered in dust. The atmosphere of the house is described with the word, “Unwirtlichkeit;” (164), recalling that the eerie church had been called “unwirtlich” as well.  The word is emotionally muted, far short of “horror” or “terror,” but still indicative of a Gothic effect. Not surprisingly, the neighbors cannot tell him where the tenants have gone or who they were. The empty house, reminiscent of Hoffmann’s story “Das öde Haus,” could makes the reader wonder not only who the mysterious Cöleste is, but also if she is real.

During the years in which the couple is separated, Hugo establishes his mettle as a man, soldier, and son of his father, by serving in the Napoleonic Wars. Hugo encounters his beloved by chance and visits her at the story’s final Gothic setting, the “Eichenschloß.” The environment is bleak; words employed include “öde,” and “düster.” (171) Hugo rides through a black gate, his heard pounding. He finds replicas of the linden cottage rooms. Cöleste finally tells Hugo the truth about her life. In typical Gothic fashion, his fateful decision to renounce their love is influenced by an object from the past, the “old seal” his father gave him, inscribed with a Latin motto that “honor” must always be preserved.  He rejects his own daughter, whom he sees briefly in a mirror, an eerie Gothic touch. As David Turner concludes, “. . . his reaction is governed by the past, by the rigid, abstract conception of honour inherited from his father; and so he neglects his responsibility to the living future in the shape of his daughter, whom he fails to acknowledge or even recognize (it is not quite clear which).” (117) Another commentator, Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, also faults Hugo’s fanatic sense of honor, saying, “Hugo gibt Cöleste auf, um seinen Grundsätzen treu zu bleiben.” (12) Hugo is, unhappily for him, concerned for his own honor, not for Cöleste’s. In his elder years, he throws the seal into a chasm – a gesture indicating that he regrets his strict moralistic decision. 

The moral dilemma faced by Hugo has been explicated by Susi Gröble in Schuld und Sühne im Werk Adalbert Stifters. She notes that young Hugo is isolated and naive when he moves to the city. Therefore he is more vulnerable to the disorienting Gothic experiences that test him. His father has raised him well, but in a realm too removed from the world: “Die abseitige Erziehung bewirkt, daß Hugo als reiner Tor in die Welt hinaustritt. . . . Hugo hält sich in seiner Einsamkeit genau an die Regeln seines Vaters. Weil er die Welt, in der er lebt, nicht versteht, fehlt ihm die Liebe zu ihr. Nur mit der Welt seines Vaters verbindet ihn ein lebendiges Band.” (70) After his father’s death, Hugo holds to his father’s legacy of principle and virtue, symbolized by the old seal. Gröble notes that Stifter encourages the reader to question the virtue represented by the seal by inserting the detail that it lacks a family coat of arms: “Hugos Siegel ist von kunstreicher Arbeit, hat aber kein Wappen: seine Familie hat kein Gesicht. Die Liebe fehlt ihr. . . . Das starre Siegel mit dem blanken Schild wird zum Sinnbild von Hugos Leben: der Schild ist am Ende seines Lebens noch blank. Und doch hätte er ihm ein Wappen aufprägen können: das der Liebe, die über die Ehre geht.” (70-71)

Hawthorne’s Gothic American novel The Marble Faun reflects a great deal of awareness of the contrast between the cultures of the Old World and the New. The novel contains many negative messages about the Old World, but Hawthorne and his characters seek it out and seem connected to its history. The Marble Faun places two American Puritans not just in a Catholic European country, Italy, but in an Italy presented as steeped in the mythology and pagan culture of ancient Roman, as seen in the characters’ relationships to satyrs and fauns. Despite these dubious associations, the book does reflect appreciation of the culture and art of European heritage; some passages resemble a travelogue of Rome. The Old World Catholic religion is associated with ancient paganism and idolatry, but passages on atonement and comfort concede some positive effects of Catholic doctrine. As is the case in much American writing, cultural identity is forged by a combined and simultaneous process of identifying with and rejecting the cultural legacy of the Old World; a dependence is seen even as the youthful nation defined itself in terms of difference from its European roots.

Just as Hawthorne’s novel reflects his culture, Stifter’s has a strong Central European identity. Steeped in the classical tradition of the Bildungsroman of Goethe, with some borrowings from short stories by E. T. A. Hoffmann, the story locates itself within the classical and Romantic traditions of German literature, and is tacitly accepting of  the Catholicism of the author’s homeland. The tale also encompasses a dimension of European history by including the Napoleonic wars. Both stories, which have specific but contrasting cultural milieus, present Gothic experiences that serve as tests and trials of young, developing individuals. Part of their journey to adulthood involves the Gothic nightmare, the confrontation with the vulnerable, solitary self, threatened from within and without, facing one’s own fears, the pressures of adulthood and responsibility, one’s own sexual drives and objects of sexual desire, and menacing realities of guilt, sin, and evil. In both stories the protagonists are initiated into sin through Gothic trials, seemingly fated for them, and neither fully transcends the resulting guilt. Both conclude with decisions regarding marriage, and neither decision nor ending is at all happy.  Hawthorne’s novel is much more sensational and has many suggestions of magical as well as religious forces.

The Gothic, on one level associated with shallow Halloween entertainment and formulaic horror films, can be seen as a psychological representation of the universal fears and nightmares of the individual encountering threats to the self (from within as well as without) and difficulties understanding the world, which may appear as governed by unknowable menacing forces; the meeting of such Gothic challenges often represents a process of development into maturity; the failure to do so wrong choices and guilt. In The Marble Faun the victims of Gothic threat become involved in murder and the guilt it brings is permanent; in “Das alte Siegel,” Gothic threat leads the protagonist to adultery, for which he atones, but only by withdrawing from human affections and embracing isolation. The English and American Gothic tradition illuminates Gothic elements in Stifter’s works, but contrasting them with more sensational works such as The Marble Faun reveals Stifter’s customary restraint. Both common elements and differences are revealed by viewing these two works of fiction together in the context of the international tradition of Gothic literature.

1. A sampling of findings follows. Andrew Webber in German Literature of the Nineteenth Century 1832-1899 (Vol. 9, Camden House History of German Literature, Ed. Clayton Koelb and Eric Downing. New York: Camden House, 2005) refers to “Gothic horror” and associates it with the terms “Grausen” and “schauerlich.” He defines the Gothic as equivalent to “Schauerromantik” (23) and thereafter employs that German term. In Romantic German Literature (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1979) Glyn Tegai Hughes uses the term “Gothic horrors” (93) in discussing Arno von Arnim, and tells of the influence of the British and German “Gothic horror tradition” (122) on Clemens Brentano. However, in The Romantic Movement in Germany (New York: Russell & Russell, 1966), L. A. Willoughby discusses the Gothic only in regard to the interest of major German Romantic writers in Gothic architecture. Horst Conrad does not use the term Gothic in Die Literarische Angst: Das Schreckliche in Schauerromantik und Detektivgeschichte (Düsseldorf: Bertelsmann, 1974). The peculair lack of use of the term is discussed by Michael Hadley in The Undiscovered Genre: A Search for the German Gothic Novel (Bern: Lang, 1978). A check of the Modern Language Associatin International Bibligraphy in 2007 yielded 987 entries for the Gothic and English literature, 621 for American literature, and only 92 for German, and 0 for Austrian.

2. Sigmund Freud, Das Unheimliche: Aufsätze zur Literatur. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1963.

3..MacAndrew mentions many of the conventional details found in Stifter, saying for example, that in the Gothic, “a man’s soul . . . already reflected in paintings and statues, began to look at him from mirrors.” (7) She mentions “the theme of inherited evil,” (12) “the identity of castle and man,”(14), “retainers who convey vital information” (136), and symbolic use of the weather and nature: “The exterior landscape, the storms and sunshine are reflective of the figures in and beneath them.” (214).

4. See Naomi Ritter, “Kafka and Stifter: Points of Contact.” Newsletter of the Kafka Society of America 1 (1979): 21-39.

5. In Stifter’s signature novel, Nachsommer, paintings and statues have considerable significance, but they do not evoke reactions associated with the Gothic. The article, “The Monstrous Painting in Stifter’s Nachsommer by Christine O Sjögren, Journal of English and German Philology 68 (1969): 92-99, presents an insightful analysis of a painting of a “desolate wasteland” (94) by the talented artist, Roland, a character outside of the balance and control the novel idealizes in other characters. The painting depicts “a nightmarish wasteland where men, the ‘strangers’ symbolized by rocks, are haphazardly thrown into an alien and unregulated world, and mankind, through the viewer Heinrich, is confronted with death, sterility, and meaninglessness.” (96) Sjögren finds subdued, almost hidden undercurrents of “death, sterility and meaninglessness,” but not the supernatural fears typical of the Gothic.

Works Cited:

• Carton, Evan. The Marble Faun: Hawthorne’s Transformation. New York: Twayne, 1992.
• Gröble, Susi. Schuld und Sühne im Werk Adalbert Stifters. Bern: Francke Verlag, 1965. 
• Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Marble Faun: or the Romance of Monte Beni. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1968.
• Lewis, Matthew G. The Monk. A Romance. London: Oxford UP, 1973.
• MacAndrew, Elizabeth. The Gothic Tradition in Fiction. New York: Columbia UP, 1979.
• Redding, John. “E. T. A. Hoffmann.” German Men of Letters. Vol. V. Ed. Alex Natan.  London: Dufour, 1969. 77-105.
• Sedgwick, Eva . “The Character in the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic Novel.” PMLA 96.2 (Mar. 1981): 255-270.
• Spalding, Keith. “Adalbert Stifter.” German Men of Letters. Vol. V. 183-206.
• Stifter, Alalbert. “Das alte Siegel.” Gesammelte Werke, II, Studien II, Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1959: 117-184.
• __.       “Die drei Schmiede ihres Schicksals,” Werke, III, Bunte Steine: Erzählungen, 353-384.
• —.      “Der Hagestolz,” Werke, II, 255-390.
• —.      “Die Mappe meines Urgroßvaters,” Werke, I, Studien I, 441-674.
• —.      “Nachsommer,” Werke, IV.
• —.      “Die Narrenburg,” Werke I, Studien I, 319-340.
• —.      “Turmalin,” Werke, III,133-180.
• —.     “Vorrede,” Werke, III, 7-14.
• __.      Wien. Die Sonnenfinsternis. Stuttgart: P. Reclam, 1963.
• Tarr, Mary M. Catholicism in Gothic Fiction: A Study of the Nature and Fiction of Catholic Materials in Gothic Fiction in England (1762-1820). Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1946, New York: Garland, 1979. 
• Turner, David. “Time and the Almots: Tradition, Anachronism and Routine in Stifter’s Das Alte Siegel.”  German Life and Letters 45.2 (April 1992): 114-125.
• Watanabe-O’Kelly, Helen. “Stifters Schicksalstheorie in der Erzählung ‘Das alte Siegel.’” Adalbert Stifter Institut des Landes Oberösterreich: Vierteljahresschrift. 30.1-2 (1981): 3-13.                             

1.11. American and Austrian Literature and Film: Influences, Interactions and Intersections

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