American Gothic
Definition and Origin
American Gothic is a subset or offshoot genre of Gothic, a major literary genre that has evolved and adapted itself to many cultural contexts since its creation in 18th-century England, and disseminated into forms and media beyond the original novel. Gothic expressions include not just literary works of prose, poetry, and drama, but also visual arts and cinema.
[American Gothic is also the name of a famous 1930 painting by Grant Wood, the title derived from the style of the house in the background, ‘Carpenter Gothic.’ It is only very loosely connected to the literary genre.]
American Gothic gave rise to a unique subset of Southern Gothic. Both genres employ the signature dark atmosphere of dread or sense of looming peril and mounting tension that defines Gothic, as well as other elements and tropes characteristic of the style; but each deals with location and culture-specific tensions and traumas. The American Gothic literary genre goes back to Colonial America and continues to thrive in the 21st century American Gothic-themed films and television series are also widely popular.
Comparison to Classic Gothic
Classic Gothic began as a literary genre with the 1764 publication of The Castle of Otranto, a novel by Horace Walpole. This work started a new genre but it was also part of Romanticism, an 18th-century movement with a powerful influence in the arts including music and philosophy. Romanticism celebrated creativity and passion, and exhibited a fascination with the sublime (a powerful sense of awe) and transcendence; as such it countered the previous era of the Enlightenment, which favored reason and rationality, balance and order.
Walpole’s novel created the quintessential Gothic mood that is the genre’s most clearly defining characteristic. The mood of foreboding terror or dread is one of anticipation and uncertainty, as opposed to sheer horror at a horrible happening. In this first novel Walpole also introduced many of the tropes and elements associated with classic Gothic: a castle that holds a family curse; an innocent maiden fleeing before unnamed horrors (and a rapacious nobleman); torch-lit hallways and chambers; storms; family portraits, sometimes haunted; ghosts and supernatural occurrences (which may or may not have rational explanations or causes); and characters who are not what they seem.
American Gothic shares a sense of dread, ‘unheimlich’ (eerie, sinister mood), and fear of the unseen with most other Gothic expressions including the original genre; but it places its characters in situations that reflect American settings and in dangers that would be more familiar and therefore more relatable to American readers. Rather than a noble’s castle, the setting might be a New England village, the wilderness, or a city. Rather than an ancient family curse, superstitions and folk tales may come to bear on the present time. And the Classic Gothic underlying theme of the aristocracy’s power and its corruption gives way, in American Gothic, to other foundational issues and themes.
Core Themes
American Gothic adapted itself, as Gothic always does, to its time, place, and social context. The fierce and unyielding Puritanism of the early settlements, and its clash with human nature and the resulting guilt, provided an unnerving psychic space for the unwary to navigate. Superstition and folklore could create a threat of unseen forces. The expanding frontier that encountered native cultures with fundamentally different perceptions and beliefs offered the possibility of primordial dangers. The trauma caused by genocide of the native Americans, and the impact of slavery afforded areas of contention and tension for exploration in American Gothic.
With his 1959 novel Psycho, Robert Bloch brought the American Gothic setting to the mundane familiarity of a motel and adjacent home of the owner, and its subject to the interior of an unraveling mind. The destruction or degeneration of the family, and of the individual personality or mind, in American Gothic indicates a shift from external threats to interior ones.
American Gothic Works and Authors
Washington Irving’s 1819 short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” deals with superstition and the supernatural but like many earlier Gothic works, offers an alternative rational explanation. Edgar Allen Poe brought Gothic sensibilities into American literature with numerous short stories, including “The Fall of the House of Usher,” (1830) which addresses the literal and metaphorical dissolution of a family and its ancestral home. Short stories by Nathanial Hawthorne (“The Minister’s Black Veil,” “Young Goodman Brown”) contain Gothic elements in conjunction with themes of Puritan repression and guilt about sin.
Shirley Jackson was one of the most gifted writers of American Gothic in the 20th century. Her short story “The Lottery” was published in The New Yorker in 1948 and caused a sensation among readers, who found its understated evil set in a New England village so unsettling that the magazine received a high volume of letters in reaction,many canceling their subscriptions. Jackson took Gothic into the domestic sphere with her novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), and returned to the classic haunted mansion in The Haunting of Hill House (1959).
Notable Southern Gothic writers include Flannery O’Connor, Truman Capote, Eudora Welty, and William Faukner. Their writings explore the deep contradictions of a culture with strong family traditions including denial of dysfunction, one that prizes superficial manners but is tainted by the cultural trauma of chattel slavery. O’Connor in particular employs a Southern Gothic trope of grotesquery, with characters whose physical issues mirror their moral defects.
Contemporary American Gothic writers include Stephen King, author of 64 novels and more than 200 short stories, many considered Gothic or having Gothic elements; Anne Rice whose best-selling Vampire Chronicles brought vampires into the 20th century; Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize winner and author of Gothic works such as Beloved and Sula, centering around the ongoing generational trauma of slavery; and Cormac McCarthy, widely considered one of the greatest American writers and a MacArthur Grant recipient, whose novels are known for their powerful dark moods and sense of danger.
~ K. R. Bailey, 2021
References
Baldick, Chris. The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales. Oxford ; Toronto, Oxford University Press, 2001.
Lloyd-Smith, Alan. American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction. First ed., New York, NY, The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2001.