InsaneJournal

On Friday I went to an exhibit at the Fenimore Art Museum called “American’s Rome: Artists in the Eternal City 1800-1900 that spotlighted the Roman themed work of 19^th century American Artists. The exhibit included many painting of ruins and the commentary on these featured a quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Marble Faun that I really liked:

“(America is) a land where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a common-place prosperity, in broad and simple daylight… Romance and poetry need Ruin to make them grow.”

Reading this I couldn’t help but add horror to Hawthorne’s list of ideas that require Ruin to thrive. Horror often mines ancient evils. Hawthorne himself looked back to his puritan ancestors in House of the Seven Gables and The Scarlet Letter. Later H. P. Lovecraft would create a dark New England of sinister in-bred ghouls and otherworldly terrors. Stephan King’s characters stir up paranormal discord by unearthing Indian burial grounds. America then does have its picturesque and gloomy wrongs, either uncovered or created, but I can see the appeal of European settings, of the “old world” and its imagery. Though it’s been tarnished by war, murder, injustice, evil and insanity America remains comparatively shiny and new.

In Alan Moore’s graphic novel From Hell there’s an amazing chapter where William Gull gives a tour of London spanning from druid times to the present day, revealing layer upon layer of history and mystery. It’s simply not possible to give such a tour of an American city. Because Native American culture and lore was essentially erased even the oldest parts of the country only go back a few centuries. The idea of a thousand or even two thousand years of documented, known, decaying history fascinates me.

It doesn’t surprise me that many of Edger Allen Poe’s most popular short stories are set in a mythical Europe and draw on centuries old imagery of the inquisition, skeleton filled catacombs and ancient family lineages. I thought of stories like The Pit and the Pendulum, Masque of the Red Death and The Fall of the House of Usher when I read Hawthorne’s quote.

I also thought of Hostel, a film I watched a couple of weeks ago for the first time. An extremely violent tale of American’s abroad who are lured to a hostel that provides victims for those willing to pay to murder and torture, Hostel was widely criticized when it was released for exploiting post-9/11 xenophobia and paranoia. Meditating on the quote by Hawthorne however I feel like it belongs in an older, gothic tradition where the American consciousness is mesmerized and frightened by the mystery and gloomy wrongs of an older world.