Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

Farrell O'Gorman

• Éditeur: University of Notre Dame Press
• Année: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780268102203
• Sujet: Théologie et religion
• Sous-sujet: Littérature et arts dans le christianisme

In Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination, Farrell O'Gorman presents the first study of the recurrent role of Catholicism in a Gothic tradition that is essential to the literature of the United States. In this tradition, Catholicism is depicted as threatening to break down borders separating American citizens—or some representative American—from a larger world beyond. While earlier studies of Catholicism in the American literary imagination have tended to highlight the faith's historical association with Europe, O'Gorman stresses how that imagination often responds to a Catholicism associated with Latin America and the Caribbean. On a deeper level, O'Gorman demonstrates how the Gothic tradition he traces here builds on and ultimately transforms the persistent image in modern Anglophone literature of Catholicism as "a religion without a country; indeed, a religion inimical to nationhood." O'Gorman focuses on the work of J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur, Herman Melville, Kate Chopin, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Cormac McCarthy, and selected contemporary writers including Toni Morrison. These authors, representing historical periods from the early republic to the present day, have distinct experiences of borders within and around their nation and hemisphere, itself an ever-emergent "America." As O'Gorman carefully documents, they also have distinct experiences of Catholicism and distinct ways of imagining the faith, often shaped at least in part within the Church itself. In their narratives, Catholicism plays a complicated and profound role that ultimately challenges longstanding notions of American exceptionalism and individual autonomy. This analysis contributes not only to discourse regarding Gothic literature and nationalism but also to a broader ongoing dialogue regarding religion, secularism, and American literature.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. Goddu, Gothic America, 4. The centrality of Gothic fiction—sometimes deemed “dark romance”—to the U.S. canon has been recognized in major critical works ranging from Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel (1960) to Morrison’s Playing in the Dark (1992). Some critics have been inclined to read Gothic fiction as merely arousing a pleasing fear in the reader or as reflecting individual obsessions best understood in light of psychoanalytic theory. Since the 1990s, however, critics have generally agreed that major authors in the United States have deployed the Gothic mode for sustained and serious critical engagement of sociopolitical realities that must be understood in historical context. Goddu led this scholarly reconsideration in Gothic America, which emphasizes the Gothic’s role in depictions of race and slavery in U.S. literature. Recent works paying significant heed to U.S. Gothic fiction’s engagement with such realities include Lloyd-Smith, American Gothic Fiction; Martin and Savoy, American Gothic; and Crow, History of the Gothic.

2. See Sage, Horror Fiction.

3. On anti-Catholicism in the United States during the Cold War era, see McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, chapter 6. For the pervasiveness of anti-Catholicism in nineteenth-century U.S. culture, see Fenton, Religious Liberties; Franchot, Roads to Rome; and Griffin, Anti-Catholicism.

4. Huntington, Who Are We? 62–69.

5. Ibid., 59.

6. Ibid., 106. Speaking of Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, which defines America as a “Protestant nation,” Budde takes the author to task for his “instrumentalist view of Christianity”—“that it has social value to the extent that it serves more valuable institutions and allegiances”—and emphasizes that such a view could not be more “at variance with an ecclesiology that takes the church and the Gospel seriously” (Borders of Baptism, 66).

7. For example, Menand in “Patriot Games” rightly notes that Huntington is “not interested in values per se; he is interested in national security and national power.”

8. Huntington, Who Are We? xvi.

9. Fenton, Religious Liberties, 5. Fenton stresses that in early U.S. literature “Catholicism . . . operates as the institution against which U.S. liberalism can define itself” (5). On the apparent connection between dissenting Protestantism and an increasingly radical individualism in the United States, see Bellah, “Religion.”

10. “Autonomy” as considered with regard to the individual here is implicitly atomistic, detached from any concept of a common good beyond the borders of the self. It operates on the assumption that the self finally cannot govern itself or pursue its own interest without isolation from or domination of other selves.

11. On the connection of American exceptionalism and individualism to dissenting Protestantism, see Lipset, American Exceptionalism, 60–67.

12. Griffin, Anti-Catholicism, 17. Franchot is widely recognized as initiating this line of inquiry.

13. Fenton, Religious Liberties, 7.

14. Other broad studies of responses to Catholicism in U.S. literature have focused overwhelmingly on nineteenth-century authors of Protestant background: for example, Franchot, Roads to Rome; Gatta, American Madonna; Griffin, Anti-Catholicism; Fessenden, Culture and Redemption; Fenton, Religious Liberties.

15. Fessenden, Culture and Redemption, 4. Fessenden ably demonstrates this claim with regard to American print culture ranging from colonial Puritan texts and the antebellum New England Primer to the fiction of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and others. Fessenden maintains that Protestantism’s emancipation from Catholicism has also historically set “the limits” of secularism’s emancipation from religion: to be a good U.S. citizen—that is, increasingly, to be secular and individualistic—has been seen as first to be Protestant.

16. The only previous studies to examine such a chronologically expansive range of U.S. authors in relation to Catholicism are Giles, American Catholic Arts and Fictions, and Labrie, The Catholic Imagination in American Literature. Those studies are broader than mine in some respects (e.g., they do not focus on Gothic fiction) and narrower in others (e.g., they treat neither the eighteenth nor the twenty-first century and do not give substantial consideration to depictions of Catholicism by major authors of Protestant background).

17. Griffin, Anti-Catholicism, 4.

18. Deneen, Democratic Faith, 287.

19. Ibid., 5.

20. Ibid., 273.

21. Ibid., building on Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites.

22. Schmitt, Alien Nation, 158. Goddu’s Gothic America presents a similar approach, as does Hoeveler’s The Gothic Ideology with particular attention to the overlap between anti-Catholicism and the sociopolitical discourse of Britain in the long nineteenth century.

23. Baldick and Mighall, “Gothic Criticism,” 216.

24. Ibid. Recent scholarship on the Americas that addresses the religious concerns I highlight here includes Elliot, Empires of the Atlantic World; Richardson, Being-In-Christ; Goldschmidt and McAlister, Race, Nation, and Religion; and Pestana, Protestant Empire. Relatedly, scholars working in Hemispheric Americ...