A Companion to American Gothic

Charles L. Crow, Charles L. Crow

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118608425
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria norteamericana

A Companion to American Gothic features a collection of original essays that explore America's gothic literary tradition.

• The largest collection of essays in the field of American Gothic
• Contributions from a wide variety of scholars from around the world
• The most complete coverage of theory, major authors, popular culture and non-print media available

Part I

Theorizing American Gothic

1

The Progress of Theory and the Study of the American Gothic

Jerrold E. Hogle

The very fact of this volume indicates acceptance of what Leslie Fiedler was the first to argue thoroughly in 1960: that American fiction is quite frequently, if not always, “a gothic fiction,” a “literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation” (Fiedler 1966: 29). Before Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel, however, except here and there, the Gothic strain in American writing has rarely been deemed worthy of attention in the academic study of literature in the United States. Most acknowledgments of it prior to Fiedler have regarded American Gothic writings and films as both anomalous in their nature and “low culture” in their aesthetic status, even when the focus has been Edgar Allan Poe. After all, for most nineteenth-century critics, despite sophisticated novels by Charles Brockden Brown from Philadelphia that confess their adaptation of the European Gothic as early as the 1790s (see Brown 1988: 3–4), “Gothic was an inferior genre incapable of high seriousness and appealing only to readers of questionable tastes” (Frank 1990: x). That judgment was intensified from the 1920s on by the rise in academia of what came to be called the “New Criticism,” which also included the promulgation of New Critical literary theory and the teaching of most earlier theories as insufficiently “literary.” For this movement, the analysis of texts should concentrate on the symbolic interplay of every work's verbal images and stylistic features with each other. It therefore distinguishes certain texts as the ones deserving of study, as “high culture,” because they are either artistically “organic” according to the theories of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his progeny or verbally tight in their intricacy and manipulations of generic norms within the more recent criteria of T.S. Eliot. Gothic fictions have remained unworthy of attention until the 1960s because they have never fit into such molds. Since England's Horace Walpole defined the “Gothic Story” in his second edition of The Castle of Otranto (1765) as a “blend” of “two kinds of romance,” the aristocratic, Catholic, and supernatural “ancient” and the middle-class, largely Protestant, and more realistic “modern” (Walpole 1996: 9) – an in-organicism echoed by Hawthorne in his 1851 Preface to The House of the Seven Gables (1962: 15–17) – the Gothic has become established as anti-New Critical in its flagrant mixture of different genres and ideologies, an arouser of the fears instigated by visible conflicts between retrogressive and progressive views of the world. Moreover, the New Critics' casting of Gothic into “low culture” has been reinforced by what we now regard as “Old” Historicism and its frequent connection with the History of Ideas. These approaches, devoted to the deep-seated “Spirit of the Age” (or unified period mentality) made prominent by French historicism in the late nineteenth century, see literary texts as windows through which readers can grasp pervasive worldviews that provide a culture with an underlying coherence during the era of each work, even when ideational constructs (such as the “Great Chain of Being”) have lasted from one period into another. Since the Gothic, by its anomalous nature, points up the disunities in the ideologies it is pulled between at any given time, this set of stances is just as inclined to undervalue it as the New Criticism is. The exiling of the Gothic from centrality in American literature thus becomes firmly established in the highly influential book that combines New Criticism, the History of Ideas, and some Old Historicism: American Renaissance (1941) by F.O. Matthiessen, which even extols Coleridge and T.S. Eliot as inspirations for its “technique” (xvii). There – and hence in many other studies of American literature – the Gothic, along with Poe, is relegated to manifesting a “mechanical horror” (231) that, if occasionally employed by Hawthorne, is overcome in the 1840s–1850s by the “tendency of American idealism to see a spiritual significance in every natural fact” (243).

It has taken the resurgence of some earlier theoretical schemes undervalued by New Criticism and the rise of quite new theories of what should be the focus of literary interpretation to bring the Gothic to the fore as an unsettling but pervasive mode of expression throughout the history of American culture. To be sure, the New Critical–Old Historicist–History of Ideas alliance has occasionally interpreted the American Gothic within its combination of criteria. The Power of Blackness (1958) by Harry Levin, which takes its title from Melville's 1850 phrase for Hawthorne's most distinctive revelation for American literature (Levin 1958: 26), counters Matthiessen by asserting that “the affinity between the American psyche and the Gothic Romance” (20) is rooted Old Historically in a “union of opposites” basic to “the American outlook” (xi) in which there are “hesitations between tradition and modernity” (241) because the “New World” (4) is haunted by Old-World Original Sins, among them the “institution of slavery” (34). This account even brings Brockden Brown and Poe back into equality with Hawthorne and Melville by showing how they all manifest this conflicted mentality through a “literary iconology” of recast older archetypes (x). Levin thus combines New Critical and History of Ideas assumptions by invoking a Jungian sense of primal images in the collective Western mind that gain new significance from their transportation into American textual forms, a mode of analysis that had just been solidified in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism (1957). As late as the early 1970s, moreover, G.R. Thompson rehabilitates Poe by equally New Critical and History of Ideas standards. He close-reads Poe's Gothic tales by revealing how they combine European and American features, yet makes these texts as organically and artistically ironic as a T.S. Eliot “objective correlative” (Thompson 1973: 17). They render in dense verbal form the “philosophical consciousness of Poe himself,” as per the History of Ideas, in ways that manifest his transformation of tired Gothic conventions into Americanizations of the earlier “Romantic Ironists” of England and Germany (12–13). Yet here, ultimately, the Gothic is a set of devalued ingredients, not really essential to American writing at Poe's time, that Poe rescues from deserved obscurity by reinvesting them with a Romantic Irony apparently not as connected to the Gothic as it actually was in the Europe of the early nineteenth century. The Gothic cannot really be seen as intimately bound up with American self-fashioning until it is fully shown to be that central, first by theoretical stances that have harkened back to assumptions deemphasized by the New Criticism and Old Historicism, and then by newly transformative kinds of theory, some of them building on the older ones, about what most underlies literature and culture, of which American Gothic works have turned out to be supremely revealing indicators. I now want to trace how this theoretical turn has played itself out over several stages from 1960 through the present day by highlighting the bedrock assumptions and key articulations of them over time, counting on my readers to probe more deeply into each approach after perusing this overview of the most influential developments in theory and criticism for the study of the American Gothic.

The major transition by Fiedler in 1960, after all, is made possible, as he admits, by renewed interest in psychoanalysis and Marxism, theoretical modes that have since been used extensively and effectively in interpretations of the Gothic in many forms. Psychoanalytic theory looks back chiefly, of course, to Sigmund Freud's writings on the unconscious and how its repressed irrational impulses sublimate themselves in dreams and other symbolic performances. It can even be argued that his constructions of the levels of mind, from the most submerged and archaic to those governed by conscious reality-principles of the present moment, are actually prefigured by the sepulchral depths, the risings from them, and the “realistic” daylight resistances to them in Gothic fictions, which partly explain why psychoanalysis has revealingly interpreted Gothic tales from times before and after Freud's own. As Fiedler notes, the increasing influence of Freudian thinking since the 1890s, even among those who question some of it, has therefore led to momentary claims before 1960 about underlying drives of the primal and irrational in the American Gothic: in Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) by D.H. Lawrence; Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927) by H.P. Lovecraft, himself an American author of “Gothics” reminiscent of Poe's; and the 1934 essay by Edmund Wilson on the Freudian basis of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (1898) followed by Wilson's own justification of US “Tales of Horror” as a means for American audiences to articulate “the terrors that lie deep[est] in the human psyche” (Wilson 1950: 175). But it is Fiedler who has most applied “orthodox Freudianism and Jungian revisionism” together (1966: 14) in distinctively American terms. What Freud sees as the preconscious drive of the son seeking to rejoin the mother (which would really mean death) but being prevented by the father-figure he desires to kill, all of which makes up the Oedipus complex, is for Fiedler's collective American psyche “the guilt of the revolutionary haunted by the (paternal [European]) past he has been striving to destroy” (1966): that repressed conflict includes “the fear that in destroying the old ego-ideals of Church and State” the American “has opened a way” to either “insanity and the disintegration of the self” or a regression into the maternal “womb from whose darkness the ego first emerged” (1966: 129–132); hence the American Gothic hero's flight towards ever-new frontiers and away from the feminine other to whom he is all too deeply attracted in texts from Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly and Poe's “Ligeia” to Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and beyond. The theoretical richness of this reading, which makes the Gothic's original tendencies quite broadly suited to the American experience, has consequently continued to reappear in approaches to the American Gothic for several decades, if sometimes with only half-agreement. It is there again, for example, if somewhat more hopefully, in Irving Malin's New American Gothic (1962) on the fiction of Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, and J.D. Salinger, among others, and as recently as the essays by William Veeder and Maggie Kilgour in the highly theoretical collection American Gothic (Martin and Savoy 1998: 20–53).

Marxism, though, is just as important to Fiedler's retheorizing of the American Gothic, and so that perspective has become equally influential in the decades following the early 1960s. The Gothic from the time of Walpole, as suggested above, has been rooted in conflicts among ideologies and class-based genres (aristocratic/Catholic vs. bourgeois/Protestant) that arise from highly material conflicts among cultural groups and retrogressive-versus-progressive modes of production, all of which The Castle of Otranto and its immediate progeny disguise, but also suggest, by displacing eighteenth-century social issues into the medieval past. Consequently, occasional Marxist analyses of the European Gothic have paralleled the psychoanalytic ones from the 1930s to the 1950s, building on Karl Marx's nineteenth-century theory that all cultural constructs are rooted in socioeconomic rivalries of particular historical eras that are distorted by, yet reflected in, the contending belief-systems and art-works that are produced to deal with them. When Fiedler brings this perspective to bear on the American Gothic, he sees the beginnings of both America and its Gothic fictions as arising from the ideological tug-of-war in the “bourgeois, Protestant mind” between “Rationalism and Sentimentalism” as dominant ideologies. These half-cloak and half-manifest a deeper struggle “between the drive for economic power” that pulls people back towards Old-World forms of domination in new guises, on the one hand, “and the need for cultural autonomy,” on the other, that could make the New World and its rising classes more progressive than the Old with its ruling orders and myths, by which the American experiment is still attracted, and thus haunted, in trying to overthrow them (Fiedler 1966: 32). Criticism, then, has a license it has used long after the 1960s to make both past and recent examples of US Gothic show, under a hyperfictional guise, that “American identity always comes back to social relations that are simultaneously economic and cultural”; each American Gothic “novel” of importance by these lights is a “palimpsest” that, once penetrated, “reveals traces” of such hidden dynamics as a conflicted “sense of identity that is conferred by historical ownership of plantations and slaves” or “the erotic” being pursued yet also seen as “disruptive to the process of commodity production and the flow, circulation, and expansion of value” (Sonser 2001: 103). Readers can find this approach quite recently in such studies as A Passion for Consumption by Anna Sonser or The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture (2009) by Bernice M. Murphy. The combination of psychoanalytic and Marxist theory in Fiedler, since both are always focused like the Gothic on repressed ...