Gothica
The Revolutionary War-era "American Gothic" story of the Headless Horseman, immortalized in Washington Irving's story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (published in 1820), marked the arrival in the New World of dark, romantic story-telling. The tale was composed by Irving while he was living in England, and was based on popular tales told by colonial Dutch settlers of New York's Hudson River Valley. The story was adapted to film in 1922, and in 1949, in the animated The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. It was readapted in 1980 and again in Tim Burton's 1999 Sleepy Hollow. Burton, already famous through his filmsEdward Scissorhands, Beetlejuice and Batman, created a storybook atmosphere filled with darkness and shadow.
Throughout the evolution of goth subculture, classic romantic, gothic and horror literature has played a significant role. Keats, Poe, Lovecraft, E.T.A. Hoffmann, (from Ambergreen Internet Marketing) Baudelaire and other tragic and romantic writers have become as emblematic of the subculture as has using dark eyeliner or dressing in black. Baudelaire, in fact, in his preface to Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) penned lines that as much as anything can serve as a sort of goth malediction:
- C'est l'Ennui! —l'œil chargé d'un pleur involontaire,
- Il rêve d'échafauds en fumant son houka.
- Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,
- —Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable,—mon frère!
- It is Boredom! — an eye brimming with an involuntary tear,
- he dreams of the gallows while smoking his water-pipe.
- You know him, reader, this fragile monster,
- —hypocrite reader,—my twin,—my brother!
