[t]he deacons of many a church have drunk the communion wine with me; the selectmen, of divers town, make me their chairman; and a majority of the Great and General Court are firm supporters of my interests. The governor and I, too â but these are state-secrets.
(Hawthorne, 1835, p. 251)
The second example is Ambrose Bierceâs, 1897 short story âThe Eyes of the Pantherâ, which looks back favorably at the early days of USAmerican colonization even as it expresses the colonial anxieties of miscegenation and racialized cuckoldry in the form of a panther. The equivalent of Hawthorneâs Goodman Brown is Bierceâs Charles Marlowe, who is
of the class, now extinct in this country, of woodmen pioneers â men who found their most acceptable surroundings in sylvan solitudes that stretched along the eastern slope of the Mississippi Valley, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. For more than a hundred years these men pushed ever westward, generation after generation, with rifle and ax, reclaiming from Nature and her savage children here and there an isolated acreage for the plow, no sooner reclaimed than surrendered to their less venturesome but more thrifty successors.
(Bierce, 1897)
Here, the effects of colonization on the landscape are clear, as the relationship of white men to the forest and its âsavage childrenâ reflects the expansionary assumptions of Manifest Destiny; where once Goodman Brown journeyed into a forest beyond the village-bound limits of white male hegemony, in Bierceâs story, colonizers are reclaiming a landscape that has been usurped by Nature and its indigenous inhabitants. To position Nature as an unnatural imposition on white menâs âacreageâ reflects the oxymoronic logic of white settler identity, which must frame the resistance to invasion as an initializing violence rather than a response to the initial violence of invasion.
The racialized threat of sexual violence and cuckoldry appears in the form of a panther that terrorizes Marloweâs wife and child (unnamed except for the titles âthe wifeâ and âBabyâ). In the story, the panther never attacks but rather keeps Marloweâs wife cowering âin absolute silenceâ, with âthe moments growing to hours, to years, to agesâ as she gradually smothers her baby (Bierce, 1897). Three months after the event she dies in childbirth, though this child â named Irene â grows up to be âyoung, blonde, gracefulâ with eyes described as âgray-green, long and narrow, with an expression defying analysis. One could only know that they were disquieting. Cleopatra may have had such eyesâ (Bierce, 1897). Despite the three-month gestation that complicates a literal reading, the panther in the story cannot help but appear as an allusion to the perceived threat of miscegenation and racialized sexual violence, particularly as the storyâs pre-Civil War setting allows for the possibility that the panther represents an even more complex racialized threat in the form of the maroon communities made up of runaway slaves and indigenous people. This fear eventually leads to Ireneâs death, as a rejected suitor shoots her in the night when he apparently mistakes her for a panther, making clear the degree to which white menâs fear of racialized sexual violence is directly tied to their own violence against women.
In the 2016 book The Weird and the Eerie, cultural critic Mark Fisher rejects the notion that Hawthorne or Bierce might be considered part of the weird, comparing them unfavorably in this regard to H.P. Lovecraft and writing that âany discussion of weird fiction must begin with Lovecraftâ, who wrote for the pulp magazine Weird Tales (pp. 16, 18). Instead, Fisher considers Hawthorne and Bierce to be âGothic novelistsâ whose work lacks âLovecraftâs emphasis on the materiality of the anomalous entities in his storiesâ (Fisher, 2016, p. 18). Fisherâs expulsion of Hawthorne and Bierce from the catalogue of weird fiction does not by any means indicate a widely accepted boundary for the genre (Bierce, 2018), but the way he focuses on Lovecraft is instructive for appreciating how thoroughly the anxieties that permeate âYoung Goodman Brownâ and âThe Eyes of the Pantherâ characterize the USAmerican weird.
Although Fisher points to âthe supreme significance of Lovecraft setting so many of his stories in New Englandâ while writing many of them in the first person, he never actually connects Lovecraftâs autobiographical geography to the content of his work in any detail (Fisher, 2016, pp. 19â20). This oversight is remarkable because even a cursory consideration would highlight the degree to which Lovecraftâs work reflects the same racial and gender ideology as his precursors, but Fisher proceeds without mentioning Lovecraftâs well-documented racism, even as he remarks on the degree to which Lovecraftâs stories âare obsessively fixated on the question of the outside: an outside that breaks through in encounters with anomalous entities from the deep past, in altered states of consciousness, in bizarre twists in the structure of timeâ (Fisher, 2016, p. 16). Fisherâs oversight is only compounded by readings of The Weird and the Eerie that present this dehistoricizing lacuna as a sign of intellectual independence rather than a straightforward lack of the necessary context:
One may pause on the political use of the weird (though perhaps not the eerie) that is found in Fisherâs text. This is not to say he advocates a politics of the weird, but that there are certain aesthetic and affective themes which cannot but eventually be translated, willfully or not, into the political register. While much ado has been made of Lovecraftâs fascism and racism, this has not stopped those who revile his work from banking on his aesthetic-political power. [âŚ] Such strategies may perturb the ideological purity of some Leftists, a purity which often results in a paranoia that equates explaining with justifying, engagement with promotion. But these equations are forms of defensive panic which prefer preaching to the choir rather than productively disagreeing.
(Woodard, 2017, p. 1182)
Such a reading is remarkable because it misses the rather obvious point that addressing Lovecraftâs racism makes his work (and thus the weird) more intelligible, not less. This much was made clear by William Hutson of the experimental rap group clipping., who remarked during an interview to promote their âAfrofuturist, dystopian concept albumâ Splendor & Misery that
H. P. Lovecraftâs cosmic pessimism is only terrifying if youâre a straight white man and you thought you were the center of the universe anyway. To anyone else â and this is why his racism comes into it â finding out that youâre not the most important thing in the universe is a relief. I think itâs interesting that his characters go mad when they figure out that humanity doesnât matter. Itâs only terrifying if you ever thought you were important, if everything in society has propped you up as the dominant category.
(Burns, 2016)
Hutsonâs summary will only become more relevant in the pages to follow as the connections between this earlier literary weird and the kept weird of 21st century USAmerican cities becomes clear.
