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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture
- Sprache: Englisch
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
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Seitenzahl: 1430
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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Table of Contents
Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Notes on Contributors
Preface
About the Book
Acknowledgments
Part I: Theorizing American Gothic
1: The Progress of Theory and the Study of the American Gothic
Cross-References
2: Gothic, Theory, Dream
Cross-References
3: American Ruins and the Ghost Town Syndrome
Introduction: American Ruins as “Different Spaces”
The Play of Substitutions: Ghost Towns in Recent American Literature
The Quasi-Eternity of Violence: Anasazi Ruins as the Ghost Town
Cross-References
4: American Monsters
Monsters Are Other People: The American Monster as Cultural Other
The Numinous American Monster
Made in America: Monsters Made By Man
Natural Monsters
Cross-References
5: Creation Anxiety in Gothic Metafiction: The Dark Half and Lunar Park
Cross-References
Part II: Origins of American Gothic
6: The African American Slave Narrative and the Gothic
Cross-References
7: Indian Captivity Narratives and the Origins of American Frontier Gothic
Cross-References
8: Early American Gothic Drama
Some Notable Achievements
Cross-References
9: Charles Brockden Brown: Godfather of the American Gothic
Cross-References
10: George Lippard and the Rise of the Urban Gothic
Cross-References
Part III: Classic American Gothic and Its Legacies
11: New England Gothic
Puritan Paranoia and Necromancy: A (Mainly) Male Gothic Tradition
Something in the House: The Female Gothic Tradition in New England
Gothic Revivals in New England
Gothic New England Today and in the Future
Cross-References
12: Descendentalism and the Dark Romantics: Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and the Subversion of American Transcendentalism
Nature, Sacred and Profane
Self-Reliant Individualism and Morbid Subjectivity
Utopianism and Dystopianism
Cross-References
13: “Gigantic Paradox, Too … Monstrous for Solution”: Nightmarish Democracy and the Schoolhouse Gothic from “William Wilson” to The Secret History
Cross-References
14: The Fall of the House, from Poe to Percy: The Evolution of an Enduring Gothic Convention
Cross-References
15: Henry James's Ghosts
Cross-References
16: A Sisterhood of Sleuths: The Gothic Heroine, the Girl Detective, and Their Readers
Cross-References
17: They Are Legend: The Popular American Gothic of Ambrose Bierce and Richard Matheson
Cross-References
Part IV: American Gothic and Race
18: Is There an Indigenous Gothic?
The Native American in American Gothic
Native American Gothic
Indigenous Gothic
Cross-References
19: Gothic Transgressions: Charles W. Chesnutt, Conjure, and the Law
Conjuring and the Law
“The Sheriff's Children”: Lynching, Law, Gothic
Cross-References
20: Undead Identities: Asian American Literature and the Gothic
Shared Terrains: Asian American Literature and the (American) Gothic Tradition
The Living Dead in Fae Myenne Ng's Bone
Conclusion
Cross-References
Part V: Gothic Modern and Postmodern
21: I Am Providence: H.P. Lovecraft
In the New England Gothic Tradition
Cosmic Gothicism: A Haunted Universe
Providence in Literature and Life
Critical Assessment and Influence: Past, Present, Future
Conclusion
Cross-References
22: Awful Mystery: Flannery O'Connor as Gothic Artist
Gothic Godliness
Heuristic Horror and Sacramental Significance
Monsters and Mimesis – The Enemy is Us
Truth in articulo mortis
The World is Not Conclusion
Cross-References
23: Not a Refuge Yet: Shirley Jackson's Domestic Hauntings
“I Live in a Dank Old Place”: Jackson's Retelling of the Domestic Myth
“Never Meant to be Lived In”: The Haunting of Hill House
“No Trespassing”: We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Cross-References
24: The Strange Case of Joyce Carol Oates
Cross-References
25: “Identical Boxes Spreading like Gangrene”: Defining the Suburban Gothic
Cross-References
26: The Cold War Gothic Poetry of Sylvia Plath
Defining Cold War Gothic
Posthuman Gothic Landscape Poems
Ghosts of the Holocaust and the Living Dead
Nuclear Power and the Vampire Death-Mother
Conclusion
Cross-References
27: Sexuality and the Twentieth-Century American Vampire
Cross-References
28: Why Stephen King Still Matters
Cross-References
29: The Ghost of the Counterfeit Child
A Tale of Two Semataries
A Child Is Being Buried
A Child Is Being Mourned
The American Way of Resurrection
Cross-References
30: Toni Morrison's Gothic: Headless Brides and Haunted Communes
The Terrible Family
The Beloved Community and its H(a)unted Women
Where to Now?
Cross-References
31: When the Blood Trail Comes Full Circle: Cormac McCarthy's Gothic of Guilt
Cross-References
32: Becoming-Girl/Becoming-Fly/Becoming-Imperceptible: Gothic Posthumanism in Lynda Barry's Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel
Becoming Cruddy in the Days of the Father
Becoming-Fly
Becoming-Imperceptible
Cross-References
33: Gothic Self-Fashioning in Gibson's Novels: Nature, Culture, Identity, Improvisation, and Cyberspace
Monoculture and Hybridity
Nature, Space, Counterfeit Nature, and Cyberspace
Character, Self-Fashioning, Bio-Sculpture
Glossary
Cross-References
34: Contemporary Women's Gothic: From Lost Souls to Twilight
Introduction
Socially Radical Vampire Gothic
Lesbian Gothic
Dysfunctional Families: Vampires and Werewolves
Neighborhood Gothic
Vampire Romance
Conclusion
Cross-References
35: Apocalyptic Gothic
Apocalypse Now
Apocalypses Then
The End of America: Two Works of Apocalyptic Gothic
Cross-References
Part VI: Gothic in Other Media
36: The Darkest Nightmares Imaginable: Gothic Audio Drama from Radio to the Internet
Cross-References
37: Film Noir and the Gothic
Cross-References
38: The American Dream/The American Nightmare: American Gothic on the Small Screen
Cross-References
39: Digital Games and the American Gothic: Investigating Gothic Game Grammar
Digital Games as Medium: Why We Need to Consider Form
Adapting the American Gothic for Digital Games
Conclusion
Cross-References
Part VII: American Gothic and World Gothic
40: Self-Fragmentation, Diseased Landscapes, and other Enigmatic Engagements: American Gothic and the Literatures of East and Southeast Asia
Japanese Literature
Chinese Literature
Southeast Asian Literature
Conclusion
Cross-References
41: Fluid Bodies: Gothic Transmutations in Carlos Fuentes' Fiction
Transgression and Monsters
The Uncanny Irruption of the Other
Cross-References
42: Let a New Gender In? American Responses to Contemporary Scandinavian Gothicism
Cross-References
Index
Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A companion to American gothic / edited by Charles L. Crow.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-470-67187-0
1. Gothic revival (Literature)–United States–History. I. Crow, Charles L., editor of compilation.
PS374.G68C66 2014
813'.0872909–dc23
2013018583
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover image: Edwin Romanzo Elmer, Mourning, 1890. De Agostini Picture Library / The Bridgeman Art Library.
Cover design by Richard Boxall Design Associates
This book is dedicated to Allan Lloyd-Smith (1945–2010)
Notes on Contributors
Antonio Alcalá González is founder of the International Gothic Congress, coordinator and full-time professor at TEC de Monterrey, Mexico City campus, and lecturer on literary criticism at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). He is currently completing his PhD dissertation on the effects of the fin de siècle on the work of William Hope Hodgson and H.P. Lovecraft.
Ellen E. Berry directs the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society at Bowling Green State University, Ohio. Her books include Curved Thought and Textual Wandering: Gertrude Stein's Postmodernism, and Transcultural Experiments: Russian and American Models of Creative Communication. She edits Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge.
Ted Billy, Professor of English at Saint Mary's College (Notre Dame, Indiana), is the author of A Wilderness of Words: Closure and Disclosure in Conrad's Short Fiction. He has published more than thirty articles and notes on such writers as Poe, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville.
Steven Bruhm is Robert and Ruth Lumsden Professor of English at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, and managing editor of the journal Horror Studies. He is the author of Gothic Bodies: The Politics of Pain in Romantic Fiction, and Reflecting Narcissus: A Queer Aesthetic. He is currently working on a book entitled The Counterfeit Child.
Michelle Burnham is Professor of English at Santa Clara University, California, where she teaches early American literature, Native American literature, and popular culture. She has written and edited several books on early American and nineteenth-century American literature, and is currently at work on a book titled The Calculus of Risk.
Lynette Carpenter has collaborated with Wendy Kolmar on two books about women's ghost stories. Under the pen names D.B. Borton and Della Borton, she has also published ten mystery novels. She teaches American literature and film at Ohio Wesleyan University.
Gavin Cologne-Brookes is Professor of American Literature at Bath Spa University, England. He is the author of The Novels of William Styron: From Harmony to History (1995), Dark Eyes on America: The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates (2005), and Rereading William Styron (2013). He is also the co-editor of Writing and America (1996, with Neil Sammells and David Timms), and of a Studies in the Novel special number on Oates (2006).
Charles L. Crow is Professor Emeritus at Bowling Green State University, Ohio, and has been a visiting scholar in Austria, the Czech Republic, China, and Croatia. He is a founding member of the International Gothic Association, and has edited books and written books and articles on American Gothic and on regional American literatures.
Carol Margaret Davison is Professor and Head of the English Department at the University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada. Her published books include History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1764–1824 (2009) and Anti-Semitism and British Gothic Literature (2004). She is currently at work on a casebook of criticism of the British Gothic, 1764–1824, and a study of the Scottish Gothic.
Dara Downey lectures in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, and is currently researching late nineteeth-century American women's ghost stories and material culture. She has published on American Gothic writers including Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Henry James, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, and Mark Z. Danielewski.
Justin D. Edwards is Professor of English Literature at the University of Surrey, England. He has published several books, including Grotesque, Mobility at Large, Postcolonial Literature, Gothic Canada, and Gothic Passages. He is also the co-editor of Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture and Postcolonial Travel Writing.
David Fine (1934–2013) was Emeritus Professor of English from California State University, Long Beach. He published The City, the Immigrant and American Fiction, 1880–1920; Imagining Los Angeles: A City in Fiction, and Missing Persons, a Novel. He wrote dozens of articles and reviews and edited or co-edited four collections of essays.
Benjamin F. Fisher, Emeritus Professor of English, University of Mississippi, has authored or edited many studies of literary Gothicism, many on American topics, notably Poe, and Victorian Gothic writers. He is a member of the Executive Committee for the International Gothic Association and serves on the editorial board of that organization's journal, Gothic Studies. In 1989 he was awarded a Governor's Citation, State of Maryland, for outstanding work on Poe.
Teresa A. Goddu is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Program in American Studies at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation. She is currently completing a study of the antislavery movement's role in the rise of mass culture in the antebellum United States.
Richard J. Hand is Professor of Theatre and Media Drama at the University of Glamorgan, Wales. He is the co-editor of the Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance and, in addition to adaptation and translation studies, his research interests include radio studies and horror studies.
Jerrold E. Hogle is University Distinguished Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies and Honors in English at the University of Arizona. His many publications range widely across Romantic poetry, literary theory, and Gothic literature and film, as in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction and The Undergrounds of “The Phantom of the Opera.”
William Hughes is Professor of Gothic Studies at Bath Spa University, England, and is the founding editor of the refereed journal Gothic Studies. The author, editor, or co-editor of fifteen books, he has a particular interest in the literary vampire and has published on J.S. Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, and Poppy Z. Brite.
Tanya Krzywinska is Professor in Screen Studies at Brunel University, England. She is the author of books and articles on different aspects of videogames and representations of the occult. Currently, she is working on a monograph, Gothic Games, and on an interactive Gothic fiction, “The Witch's Room.”
Chad Luck is an Assistant Professor of English at Cal State University, San Bernardino. He has published essays on a range of authors including Herman Melville, Charles Brockden Brown, and Elizabeth Stoddard. He is currently finishing a book project on ownership and affect in antebellum American literature.
Tony Magistrale is Professor and Chair of the English Department at the University of Vermont. He is the author of twenty books, including Stephen King: America's Storyteller and The Films of Stephen King.
William Moss holds the doctorate in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has taught at Wake Forest University for forty years, with breaks for teaching stints in England, Ireland, China, and Japan. His teaching and research specialties are Southern literature and nineteenth-century American literature.
Bernice M. Murphy is an Assistant Professor and Lecturer in Popular Literature at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. She has edited Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy, co-edited It Came From the 1950s: Popular Culture, Popular Anxieties, and is author of The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture. Her most recent research explores the relationship between horror and the American wilderness/countryside.
Andrew Hock Soon Ng is Senior Lecturer and teaches contemporary fiction, postcolonial writing, and theories of authorship at Monash University, Malaysia. He is the author of Dimensions of Monstrosity in Contemporary Narratives (2004), Interrogating Interstices (2007), and Intimating the Sacred (2011). His research focus is on Gothic literature and horror narratives, and he has published essays in various international journals.
Kathleen L. Nichols is Professor Emerita of English at Pittsburg State University, Kansas. Her recent publications include a collection of “Native American Myths, Narratives, and Songs” in Native America and “Return of the Goddess in the Novels of Toni Morrison and Leslie Marmon Silko” in Goddesses in World Culture.
Martin Procházka is Professor of English, American, and Comparative Literature and the Head of the Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. His recent books include Transversals (2012) and Ruins in the New World. He is the founding editor of an international academic journal, Litteraria Pragensia.
David Punter is Professor of English at the University of Bristol, England, and has written many books and essays on the Gothic, the best known of which is The Literature of Terror. His most recent books include Writing the Passions; Metaphor; Modernity; and Rapture: Literature, Addiction, Secrecy.
Arthur Redding is an Associate Professor of English at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He is author of “Haints”: American Ghosts, Millennial Passions, and Contemporary Gothic Fiction (2011), Turncoats, Traitors, and Fellow Travelers: Culture and Politics of the Early Cold War (2008), and Raids on Human Consciousness: Writing, Anarchism, and Violence (1998).
Faye Ringel, Professor Emerita of Humanities at the US Coast Guard Academy, New London, Connecticut, holds the doctorate in comparative literature from Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. She is the author of New England's Gothic Literature: History and Folklore of the Supernatural and articles on fantastic literature including Lovecraft, King, and Gothic medievalism.
Chad Rohman, Professor and Chair of English at Dominican University (River Forest, Illinois), is the current editor of the Mark Twain Circular and co-editor of Centenary Reflections on Mark Twain's No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger (2009). He regularly publishes and presents on Mark Twain and other American writers.
Carol Siegel, Professor of English at Washington State University, Vancouver, is the author of Lawrence among the Women; Male Masochism: Modern Revisions of the Story of Love; New Millennial Sexstyles; and Goth's Dark Empire. She is currently working on a study of the representation of sexuality in non-pornographic cinema.
Matthew Wynn Sivils is an Assistant Professor of English at Iowa State University and has published numerous articles on the works of early American Gothic writers, including Charles Brockden Brown, John Neal, and James Fenimore Cooper. He is co-editor of the award-winning scholarly journal, Literature in the Early American Republic.
Andrew Smith is Reader in Nineteenth-Century English Literature at the University of Sheffield, England. Published books include The Ghost Story 1840–1920: A Cultural History (2010), Gothic Literature (2007), Victorian Demons (2004), and Gothic Radicalism (2000). He is joint president of the International Gothic Association.
Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet is Professor of American Literature at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Her first book, The Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic, was published in 2010, and a co-edited collection of essays, The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture, was published in 2012.
Sherry R. Truffin is an Associate Professor of English at Campbell University in North Carolina, where she teaches courses in American Literature and English Composition. In addition to her first monograph, Schoolhouse Gothic, she has published essays on James Baldwin, Stephen King, Chuck Palahniuk, Joyce Carol Oates, and The X-Files.
Ronja Vieth holds an MA in American Literature from TTU Carolina Wilhelmina/Braunschweig in Germany, an MA from the University of Louisiana in Lafayette, and a PhD from Texas Tech University. Her national and international presentations and publications include her article on Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian as Frontier Gothic.
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock is Professor of English at Central Michigan University. He is the author or editor of fourteen books, including The Vampire Film: Undead Cinema (2012), Charles Brockden Brown (2011), and Scare Tactics: Supernatural Fiction by American Women (2008). His Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters was published in 2013.
Maisha L. Wester is an Associate Professor at Indiana University. She teaches African American Literature, American Gothic Literature, and Horror Film Studies. Her publications include African American Gothic: Screams from Shadowed Places, and “Gothic and the Politics of Race,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Modern Gothic.
John Whatley is a teacher and administrator at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. His interests are in Romantic and Gothic literature, crime and literature, the literary essay, and the relation between the social sciences and literary criticism. He has published on Gothic and Romantic literature.
Gina Wisker is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Higher Education at the University of Brighton, England, a National Teaching Fellow, and co-editor of online dark fantasy journal Dissections and poetry magazine Spokes. Gina's books include Horror Fiction (2005), The GoodSupervisor (2008), and Wicked (creative work, 2012). Her essays often explore women's vampire writing and the Gothic.
Preface
Gothic American literature offers essential insights into the history and culture of the United States. This statement would not have been understood or accepted a few decades ago.
As late as the 1950s, the Gothic was regarded as a minor European tradition concerned with gloomy mansions and imperiled maidens and having little relevance in America. The achievements of Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe were accepted, and Faulkner sometimes was called a writer of Southern Gothic, but the larger pattern of American Gothic, and the usefulness of the category, was not generally recognized. I qualify the statement only because a few earlier scholars, notably Harry Levin in The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville (1958), provided ideas that anticipate the direction of current scholarship.
In the 1960s, a period of great change in literary studies, as in many aspects of our culture, the definition of the Gothic was radically revised, and broadened, both in the United States and in Europe. While a full account of the theory of the Gothic will be found in Jerrold Hogle's chapter, the first in this volume, we should note Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel (1960) as a paradigm shifter in American Studies. Fiedler's work made irrelevant the earlier critical conversation about the contending romance and novel traditions in American literature, and defined a single broad tradition of American Gothic comprising the culture's dark, repressed, and oppositional elements, running back at least to Charles Brockden Brown. All subsequent discussions of American Gothic were shaped by this insight.
At the end of the 1960s, discussion of British and European Gothic was reenergized by Robert Hume's PMLA essay “Gothic Versus Romantic” and the debate it provoked. Through the 1970s and 1980s, a number of works on American Gothic appeared, in many instances extending Fiedler's ideas. Uncanny American Fiction: Medusa's Face (1989) by Allan Lloyd-Smith (then known as Allan Gardner Smith), a British scholar of American culture, illustrates the merging of Gothic theory with the ideas of Derrida and Lacan in this period.
A defining moment in contemporary Gothic Studies was the foundation of the International Gothic Association (IGA) in 1991, with Allan Lloyd-Smith as its first president. The scholars attending the first IGA meeting at the University of East Anglia, its second, at Stirling, Scotland, in 1995, and subsequent biennial meetings, provided a cadre who developed Gothic courses and even degree programs in Britain, the United States, Canada, and indeed around the world. They, and their students, the second generation of IGA scholars, are well represented in this collection of essays.
Today Gothic Studies is well established in the academy. Several British universities offer MA degrees in the field, and one of the contributors to this volume, William Hughes, holds the title of Professor of Gothic Studies. The respected journal Gothic Studies, which was born at the Stirling IGA conference, can be found in university libraries globally and provides a juried forum for research. Major university presses publish significant new books every year, as the bibliographies of the following chapters attest. Courses in American Gothic, specifically, scarce heard of a few decades ago, are now taught in university English Departments and American Studies programs throughout the United States and in many other countries.
Thus, to return to the assertion of our opening sentence, our growing understanding of the Gothic has begun to reshape the larger disciplines of American Studies and American literature. Far from being a footnote to our literary tradition, the Gothic is now seen as essential to understanding our literature, and indeed our national project. The dominant, sanctioned history of the United States has been a narrative of social, economic, and technological progress. This narrative also asserts the doctrine of American exceptionalism, the belief that the country's essential innocence and its destiny place it above the constraints and judgments of other nations and of history. In contrast to this triumphant story, the Gothic is a counter-narrative, an alternative vision, recording fear, failure, despair, nightmare, crime, disease, and madness. The Gothic is that which is left out, what is excluded, by what W.D. Howells unfortunately once described as the smiling aspects of life that are more typically American. The Gothic thus is the natural medium for expression of our great national failures and crimes, such as the enslavement of Africans and the displacement and destruction of indigenous peoples. The Gothic is also a vehicle for stories of the oppression of women, and indeed for all groups forced to the margins of power by a patriarchal culture. The development of Gothic Studies has paralleled, and contributed to, the feminist movement and the field of women's studies, and the rediscovery of significant women authors of the nineteenth century. The Gothic also represented homosexuality obliquely in repressive times, and now directly engages gay culture. Gothic literature is the place where the nightmares of small and private lives have found expression. Indeed, only by studying American Gothic, a literature often of hysterical extremes, violence, obscurity, and the surreal, can one reach a balanced and rational understanding of American culture from colonial times to our present postmodern age.
About the Book
This volume presents the arena of American Gothic Studies as it is today. Its forty-two chapters were written by thirty-eight scholars, who come from the United States and eight other countries. In this group are some who attended that historic meeting at the University of East Anglia in 1991, as well as young academics representing a third generation of Gothic scholars. The essays range, in the chronology of their subjects, from American Indian mythology to contemporary television, vampire movies, and Gothic digital games, and illustrate a variety of critical approaches.
The chapters are grouped in seven parts. The first, “Theorizing American Gothic,” introduces key Gothic tropes. It surveys the technical approaches that have been used in the study of American Gothic, and also demonstrates the application of theory to several texts and problems. David Punter's far-ranging chapter illustrates the premise of the Gothic as exploration of national guilt and trauma – a notion that several later chapters will reference. Martin Procházka takes the most enduring of Gothic tropes, the ruin (which was most often, in Europe, a castle or mansion), and shows its persistence and mutations in America. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock's survey of monsters and the monstrous is relevant to a multitude of Gothic narratives. Sherry R. Truffin's chapter on “Gothic Metafiction” applies contemporary theory to two disturbing contemporary texts. All of the chapters in Part I might be seen as useful preparation for the chapters to follow.
Readers may observe a useful debate about the “Origins of American Gothic” in Part II. The critical inquiry about Gothic origins has pushed deeper and deeper into the colonial past. Certainly American Gothic long has been linked to the core issue of race, which is central to American culture in the way that class is in Britain. Chapters in this section by Teresa A. Goddu and Matthew Wynn Sivils explore the importance of the escaped slave narrative and the Indian captivity as foundations of American Gothic. Benjamin F. Fisher argues that the conventions of European Gothic were first introduced to America in the popular drama of the eighteenth century, even before the experiments of Charles Brockden Brown in fiction. Brown, the first American Gothic novelist, and founder of several enduring Gothic traditions in fiction, is the subject of a chapter by Carol Margaret Davison; George Lippard, Brown's fellow Philadelphian, author of the long-forgotten masterpiece The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall, is discussed by Chad Luck.
Part III contains essays on the classic period of American Gothic, the nineteenth century, and the legacy of its writers and texts into the twentieth century and the present. Faye Ringel's essay on New England explores the tradition of that region back to the time of the Puritans and forward to H.P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, and Stephen King, each of whom receives an individual chapter in Part V. Professor Ringel also introduces the important subject of Female Gothic, which, in the United States, largely originated in New England and began to be rediscovered and properly evaluated only in the late twentieth century. The debate between “Dark Romantics” and the Transcendentalists, which defined American Gothic for this age, and which is essential to understanding Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, is the subject of a chapter by Ted Billy.
Poe's mighty shadow is the subject of two chapters. Sherry R. Truffin compares Poe's doppelgänger story “William Wilson” with a late twentieth-century example of “schoolhouse Gothic,” Donna Tartt's The Secret History. William Moss demonstrates Poe's influence upon the tradition of Southern Gothic, down to William Faulkner and Walker Percy. Andrew Smith's chapter on “Henry James's Ghosts” ventures into the labyrinths of the writer called “The Master” by his admirers, author of The Turn of the Screw, the single most discussed work of American literature. Lynette Carpenter's “A Sisterhood of Sleuths” traces the evolution of a Gothic convention into a popular American literary form. Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet's chapter pairs the cold ironic master of the weird tale, Ambrose Bierce, with Richard Matheson, whose I Am Legend began the modern revival of the vampire story – a subject that will be revisited in Part V.
Part IV, “American Gothic and Race,” returns to the crucial issue introduced in Part I. Michelle Burnham's question – “Is There an Indigenous Gothic?” – is answered not only by a survey of significant contemporary American Indian writers, but also, surprisingly, with the suggestion that Gothic issues were present in indigenous oral traditions before the European invasion. One of the finest of American authors, long neglected, is the subject of Justin D. Edwards's “Gothic Transgressions: Charles W. Chesnutt, Conjure, and the Law.” Andrew Hock Soon Ng analyzes the use of Gothic tropes by Asian American writers. The racial issues discussed by these chapters will be present, explicitly or implicitly, in many of those that follow.
Part V, “Gothic Modern and Postmodern,” contains essays on several significant authors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: H.P. Lovecraft (Faye Ringel), Flannery O'Connor (Chad Rohman), Shirley Jackson (Dara Downey), Joyce Carol Oates (Gavin Cologne-Brookes), Sylvia Plath (Kathleen L. Nichols), Stephen King (Tony Magistrale and Steven Bruhm), Nobel laureate Toni Morrison (Marsha L. Wester), William Gibson, the founder of cyberpunk science fiction (John Whatley), and Cormac McCarthy (Ronja Vieth). Lynda Barry's Cruddy – an “illustrated” novel, a form midway between print and graphic novels – is the subject of a chapter by Ellen E. Berry. This chapter, like Professor Whatley's, anticipates the new media chapters of Part VI.
Several chapters in Part V extend issues introduced earlier, such as the legacy of slavery and the traditions of New England and the South. The migration of the Gothic from the traditional sites of wilderness, haunted mansions, and ruins into modern American suburbia is the subject of Bernice M. Murphy's chapter. Our discussion of vampires, begun in Chapter 17, continues here in chapters by William Hughes and Gina Wisker, as well as in the chapters on King and Plath, and in Arthur Redding's chapter, “Apocalyptic Gothic.” Both Redding's chapter and Whatley's on William Gibson find that American Gothic haunts the future as well as the past.
The sections thus far have discussed print media, with the exception of the indigenous fables discussed by Michelle Burnham (Chapter 18) and theater (Fisher, Chapter 8), written primarily for performance rather than reading. Part VI, “Gothic in Other Media,” takes us into forms not often studied in literature courses but which have found, and continue to reach, audiences in the millions. Richard J. Hand's chapter on audio drama takes us back to the golden age of radio, when shows such as The Shadow and InnerSanctum deliciously frightened thousands of listeners every week, and demonstrated that the theater of the mind created by sound is one of the most effective of Gothic media – one that is still practiced in the Internet age. David Fine's chapter on “Film Noir and the Gothic” explores a tradition of Gothic in the movies, which may be the dominant narrative medium of the twentieth century. Carol Margaret Davison's “The American Dream/The American Nightmare: American Gothic on the Small Screen” defines the considerable Gothic achievement of television series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and True Blood, and reminds us that television, like film, is a medium that is more important even than print in the current Goth culture to the popularity of the vampire legend in its several permutations. The last chapter in this section, Tanya Krzywinska's “Digital Games and the American Gothic: Investigating Gothic Game Grammar,” is an introduction to a medium of infinite imaginative potential and a huge current audience, one that can only grow as the human mind and artificial intelligence continue to interact.
Part VII, “American Gothic and World Gothic,” outlines an issue suggested earlier in this introduction. American Gothic, in a global world market of ideas and culture, has many interactions with the imaginations of other lands. Andrew Hock Soon Ng's opening chapter in this section shows the influence of American Gothic authors, especially Poe and Faulkner, on writers in East and Southeast Asia. Antonio Alcalá González examines the use of Gothic tropes from the literature of the United States in the fiction of the great Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes. And Carol Siegel discusses American responses to contemporary Scandinavian Gothicism, such as the Swedish vampire movie Let the Right One In.
The forty-two chapters of this collection, then, illustrate both the rich variety of American Gothic and the diversity of critical lenses through which it may be viewed. As these chapters reveal, the Gothic is present in American culture from the beginning, born of the same interaction of Enlightenment and Romantic ideals that produced the new nation, tangled in its roots, and continuing to the present as a record of our fears and traumas. The development of Gothic Studies in the United States represents a growth of self-awareness and an encounter with the repressed and excluded; it is a conversation that is necessary and must continue.
Acknowledgments
Figure 6.1 Cover illustration from the Narrative of James Williams, who was for several years a driver on a cotton plantation in Alabama. Rare Books, MS-E444.W743, University of Tennessee Libraries, Knoxville, Special Collections. Reproduced by permission of the University of Tennessee Library.
Figure 41.1 Drawing of Chac Mool. Reproduced by permission of the artist, Fanny Gutiérrez Guzmán.
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 levels and their sublimations, also continues in scholarship long after Love and Death. One example is in Redefining the American Gothic by Louis Gross, in which older and newer Gothic texts and films are paired with each other to reveal “alternative vision[s] of the American experience” appropriate to each era, retorts to those discourses that have avoided the deepest-seated “social, sexual, and political projections” of American thought (Gross 1989: 2).
The revival of the American Gothic's importance because of psychoanalysis and Marxism, however, continues as it does, in part, because these theoretical schemes have been forcefully challenged by, then often combined with, other types of theory that have asserted themselves, mainly after 1965. One such scheme is poststructuralism, particularly the kind linked to “deconstruction” in the writings of Jacques Derrida, whose first major texts appeared in 1967. French structuralism in the 1950s–1960s developed Ferdinand de Saussure's much earlier theory of language as composed of conventional but firmly structured relationships between signifiers (acoustic images without meanings attached), signifieds (concepts), and referents (objects). Literary structuralists used such terms to describe the dominant symbolic relations and oppositions that underlie whole genres of writing, and these included the ways different genres connect signifiers to signifieds at their deepest levels and yet reveal how each side of an opposition is dependent on its counterpart, for instance “the identification of center with self” and “the symmetry of the inside–outside relation” in the early Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's The Coherence of Gothic Conventions on the British Gothic (Sedgwick 1980: 14). But Derrida has shown that the extra-verbal “presence” asserted as the point of reference for traditional signifying structures (the supposed oneness and always-present “essence” within an object, thought, or God) is always a projection out of what comes first: the differing-between and deferring-to-each-other among signifiers themselves, which, if pointed out, can put in question the philosophical and religious priority of “centers,” “insides,” or “origins,” since representations of these must refer, before anything, to other ones that are also signifiers, just as texts have to refer to other texts (prior uses of the same signs, their “intertextuality”) before they can begin to posit foundations or objects behind or beyond their symbolic forms. This view, as older theories could not yet see, is an excellent fit for a Gothic mode that has always been dependent on signifiers that have “floated” away from grounded points of reference. The Castle of Otranto's allusions to medieval Catholic superstitions, including its ghosts, are defined in its first edition preface as based only on beliefs “exploded now even from romances” (Walpole 1996: 6), making Walpole's specters clearly shades mainly of previous texts. By the end of the 1970s, therefore, critics of the British Gothic start claiming that it could really be about a decentering instability of signification that haunts claims of certainty in absolutist constructs, and, not surprisingly, analysts of the American Gothic have followed this lead in the 1980s and 1990s. In Through the Custom-House, John Carlos Rowe sees several novels now widely recognized as Gothic from Hawthorne and Poe to Twain and James as driven by “the repeated desire to establish a structural center that is perpetually frustrated by the straying of the text” (Rowe 1982: 23). By doing so, Rowe extends a tendency already well launched, especially regarding Poe, in John T. Irwin'sAmerican Hieroglyphics (1980), which combines deconstruction with elements of psychoanalysis and the History of Ideas. More recently, too, Dieter Meindl, ranging from the American Renaissance to postmodern uses of Gothic, adds the existential phenomenology of Heidegger and the highly linguistic Marxism of Mikhail Bakhtin to Derrida's “rejection of the metaphysics of presence” so that the texts now analyzed manifest the links of their grotesque incongruities to a “decentering of consciousness” in the American psyche faced with a “nonrational, pre-individual dimension of the totality of life” that is ultimately a play of differences and never an organic coherence (Meindl 1996: 9–11).
It has been especially difficult for poststructuralism, even so, to leave psychoanalysis behind, not just because of Fiedler but because of Jacques Lacan, some others in his wake, and how suitable their theories have turned out to be to the American Gothic. Once Lacan collected nearly thirty years of writing in his Écrits (1966) and thereby gained worldwide influence, there came to be wider acceptance of his Saussurean sense of the unpredefined subject existentially thrown forth to fashion its self-construction in the Symbolic Order of “floating signifiers” that can refer to many potential signifieds, some of them suppressed to keep them from the gaze of the father-figure that supposedly regulates the subject's possibilities. This vision has even taken the place in some circles of the psychoanalytic interiority and even the Marxist “alienation” attached by Fiedler to the American Gothic. After all, the Gothic is inherently Lacanian from outset, since the Walpolean Gothic even in 1764–1765 is about characters cast into a mysterious arena where all the signs are uprooted, cryptic suggestions of either old or newer assumptions about identity. All of these contend with each other while each questing subject remains fearful of an overarching male gaze, which in Otranto ultimately takes “the form of saint Nicholas” (Walpole 1996: 113), one of the figures pre-established as but a sign now emptied of its medieval Catholic power. Moreover, as Lacan himself is famous for seeing in his published “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’ ” (1955), this kind of subject-in-process is the most frequent central figure in the tales of Edgar Allan Poe. It is thus not a leap for Lacanian approaches to treat the American Gothic, in (say) Melville's Pierre (1852), as a place where haunted subjects “disturb [what seems to be] the walls of the paternal vault” that apparently restrict the child's self-expansion in order “to challenge [this] basis of symbolic being” in “ambiguous signs” interpreted both in retrograde and disruptive ways all at once (Régis Durand in Davis 1981: 71). Such readings of Faulkner's Gothic as well as Melville's appear in the collection The Fictional Father (Davis 1981: 48–72 and 115–168), and there are similar interpretations of Hawthorne and Henry James at their most Gothic in Using Lacan, Reading Fiction (1991) by James Mellard. At the same time, such fusions of the psychoanalytic with the poststructural deemphasize some dimensions of Lacan and related thinkers that have come to be just as valuable for unlocking the “depths” in the American Gothic. Allan Lloyd-Smith has shown the revelatory power of the suggestions in Lacan, reinforced by Slavoj Žižek from the later 1980s on, of a level of being called “the Real” which lies outside of all signification and is feared to be a locus of chaos, “trauma,” and the blurrings of all distinctions (such as American vs. un-American or white vs. black) but is capable of disguised “incursions” into the Symbolic that suggest that horrific morass, as in H.P. Lovecraft's subterranean grotesques mixing different species (Lloyd-Smith 2004: 142). There is additional insight for Lloyd-Smith, too, provided by a psychoanalytic-symbolic notion that Derrida has highlighted in the work of Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok: a “geneological inheritance” within the “unconscious” that they call “the phantom” in a special sense. In this scheme, spectral signs that haunt subjects internally or externally harbor “unacknowledged traumas” in the minds of much older ancestors and/or a collective unconscious of suppressed “cultural determinants,” as in The House of the Seven Gables when its characters' memories and hidden documents turn out to sequester a “class wrong” against one man and his sect several generations ago and “the larger wrong of the dispossession of the Native Americans,” aspects of which were kept secret by the wronged man, his descendents, and their usurpers (2004: 146–148).
Nonetheless, another “large wrong” of “dispossession” has given rise to a different vein of theory and criticism that has just as strongly, and sometimes in concert with psychoanalysis and poststructuralism, transformed the study of the American Gothic over the same span of time (the late 1960s through the early 2000s). This is the vein instigated by feminism, which has itself widened out into several multifaceted forms of gender theory in more recent years. The women's movement of the 1960s–1970s, aided in literary studies by Ellen Moers, Elaine Showalter, and Annette Kolodny (among others) in the United States and several rising French feminist critics who extended the arguments of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1947) in poststructuralist ways, demanded a change in the second-class status of women in general and a recovery-from-repression of writing by and about women in particular, thus challenging the traditional “canon” of largely male-authored texts. These drives, among the many influences on them, actually echoed earlier ones endemic to the already non-canonical Gothic. Large portions of Walpole's Otranto and his Gothic play The Mysterious Mother (both written in the 1760s as challenges to the traditions they combine) are about the fearful confinement of women in patriarchal institutions, especially in underground vaults or inaccessible upper rooms. These semi-protests against the oppression of femininity and the burial of the legacy of mothers, more importantly, led to the adoption of this mode, albeit in the disguise it provided, by women authors and female readers of the later eighteenth century and beyond, a gender-based shift given ocean-crossing force by the popularity in England and America of Ann Radcliffe's Gothic “Romances” published from 1789 to 1797 in England in the wake of the American and French revolutions (including appeals for the rights of women) that they never directly address. The post-1960s recovery of older writings by American women, then, has seen the republication of Gothically inflected texts by female Americans under Radcliffe's influence ranging from Sarah Orne Jewett and Louisa May Alcott to Charlotte Perkins Gilman and even Edith Wharton. Much of the criticism of these, and even male-authored, writings about women, though, has concentrated on their “double-voiced discourse” (Elaine Showalter's theoretical phrase) in which the feminine perspective, somewhat as in Radcliffe, must express itself under and through the cover of what seems styled as a “normal” male style of writing, thereby making the “woman's voice” multilayered and in that way only subtly subversive. Inspired by Julianne Fleenor's British-oriented collection The Female Gothic (1983) and Janice Radway's Reading the Romance (1984) about the value of Harlequin fictions to seemingly unliberated women of the twentieth century, Marianne Noble has thus shown how “masochism” in American Gothic female sentimentality from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Emily Dickinson and others is often a way for “women to wield power in complicitous alliance with hegemonic ideologies” via the “double-edgedness of masochistic fantasies” that keeps the potential pain at a distance while allowing an assertion of female control that seems its very opposite (Noble
