America was never supposed to nurture a Gothic impulse. The new world was, as Leslie Fiedler announced, the "land of light and affirmation" (9). Optimistic, progressive and seemingly free of ancestral ghosts, there was no rational for evil monks and aristocrats that haunted the pages of British gothic. There were no gloomy castles for a start, no labyrinthine tunnels, no crumbling abbeys; in short, no history.
To account for the persistence of the American Gothic, analysis is centred on psychology. Widely seen as a reflection of colonial anxieties, Puritan repression and pathological guilt resulting from the nation’s encounter with slavery and Indian massacre, the parameters of the American Gothic are marked primarily by “psychological, internalised, and predominately racial concerns” (Edwards, p. xvii).
Love and Death in the American Novel
In Love and Death in the American Novel (1960),arguably the first work to focus exclusively on American Gothic writing, Leslie Fiedler’s Freudian reading of classic and contemporary American texts exemplifies this trend: “European Gothic identified blackness with the super-ego and was therefore revolutionary in its implications; the American gothic…identified evil with the id and was conservative at its deepest level of implications, whatever the intent of its authors” (p. 149).
For Fiedler, the Gothic is juvenile and repetitive because it deals primarily with a world of limited experience: a world American author’s return to time and again due to their inability “to deal with adult heterosexual love and [their] consequent obsession with death, incest, and innocent homosexuality” (p. xi). Contemporary writers, he argues, are doomed to repeat these patterns because they share a similar consciousness and the inescapable conditions of American life. However persistent the genre has been in American literature, for Fiedler the Gothic must be “symbolically understood, its machinery and décor translated into metaphors for a terror psychological, social and metaphysical” (p. xxii).
Fiedler’s analysis has had enormous influence on readings of American Gothic fiction. Propelled by his unequivocal announcement that the American novel is “pre-eminently a novel of terror” (p.6), subsequent critics constructed their analysis around the assumption that “the psyche is more important than society” (Malin, p.5). In New American Gothic (1962), Irving Malin locates the distinction between contemporary Gothic writers and their nineteenth-century predecessors in their engagement with the “disorder of the buried life”. In Malin’s analysis, “the writers of the new American Gothic are aware of tensions between ego and super-ego, self and society; they study the field of psychological conflict” (p. 5).
Organized around the theme of narcissism, for Malin the typical Gothic hero is crippled by self-love. Contrasted with those heroes found in Hawthorne and Melville, who are “great” and “Faustian” in their narcissism, the characters of the new American Gothic are weaklings who cannot demonstrate their self-love in strong ways: “Love for him is an attempt to create order out of chaos, strength out of weakness; however, it simply creates monsters” (p. 5).
A similar theme drives Ihab Hassan’s Radical Innocence (1961). In his examination of contemporary Gothic writers such as Truman Capote, Flannery O’Connor, and Carson McCullers, Hassan finds only “the self in recoil: anti-heroes, rebel-victims and innocent narcissists all on a quest for existential fulfilment” (p. 39).
Contemporary Literary Criticism
This approach continues to inform much of the criticism devoted to the American Gothic. As an explanation as to why the Gothic is “so at home on such inhospitable ground”, Eric Savoy contends that Gothic narratives express “a profound anxiety about historical crimes and perverse human desires that cast their shadow over what many would like to be the sunny American republic”. Like Fielder, Savoy views the American Gothic as “a pathological symptom rather than a proper literary movement” (p. 168).
In American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative (1998), Martin and Savoy claim their project is “indebted and in many way supplementary” to Fiedler’s “pioneering conjunction of historicism and psychoanalysis”. For these critics, Fiedler’s analysis has lost none of its “freshness,” and provides “the cultural frame for subsequent inquiry” (p. viii).
Since the 1960s, there have been other critical approaches to American Gothic fiction besides Fiedler’s psychoanalytic reading. Gender, socioeconomic, and political analysis have all contributed to a greater understanding of American culture and history. Nonetheless, Fiedler and Freud continue to influence critical approaches to American Gothic literature.
Whether a psychoanalytic framework is still relevant today is for critics and readers to decide. What is no longer in contention, largely because of Fiedler, is that, despite claims to the contrary, America indeed had a dark side, and America’s Gothic novelists had a keen eye for darkness.
Sources
Edwards, Justin D. Gothic Passages: Racial Ambiguity and the American Gothic (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2003).
Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel, 2nd ed.(New York: Dell, 1966).
Hassan, Ihab. Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961).
Malin, Irving. New American Gothic (Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962).
Martin, R.K. and Eric Savoy (eds). American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative, (Iowa City, 1988).
Savoy, Eric. "The Rise of American Gothic", in J. E. Hoggle (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge, 2002), 167-188.
Marilyn Michaud - Marilyn Michaud teaches English Literature and writing in Toronto. Her research interests include American history and culture, Gothic ...
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