Friday
Here’s a wild literary comparison that took me by surprise but has grown on me: Donald Trump as Emily Grierson from William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily.”
John Stoehr of The Editorial Page came up with the idea when he was trying to describe his response to Donald Trump’s State of the Union address. Only a Southern Gothic masterpiece could do his feelings justice, he says:
Afterward, I struggled briefly to think of ways to communicate my feelings. I wanted to express their complexity, a fantasia of rage, delirium and dread, without speaking incoherently.
“Rose for Emily” is about a woman whose father won’t let her marry anyone and who later, as a desperate spinster, kills a man to keep him running away from her. She hides the corpse in the attic and sleeps next it, and the town doesn’t learn of it until after she dies years later.
Stoehr sets out the parallels as follows:
Trump is like Emily. America is like Homer. Emily couldn’t get her father’s love. Neither could Trump. Emily longed for what she cannot have. So does Trump. Emily would rather kill Homer than lose him. With Trump and America, we shall see.
While I’m as open as anyone to comparing Trump to literary figures, the image of him bedding down in a necrophiliac love relationship with an America that he has killed is a bit strained. Furthermore, Trump is unlike Emily in that his crimes are in the open for everyone to see. He openly skewers anyone who attempts to jilt him.
I’ll grant Stoehr that Trump, like Emily, is desperate for love and approval and also that many Republicans have been drawn to him before fully realizing his madness. It’s a shock to Homer Barron that, by dating Emily, he becomes entangled in a madness from which he can never escape. To that extent, Stoehr is on to something.
His best insight, however, is that Southern Gothic is a fitting vehicle to describe the Trump presidency. This will take some explaining so I’ll first let Stoehr lay out his case:
“A Rose for Emily” is a textbook example of a literary genre often called “Southern Gothic.” There are many ways of defining it, but I take it to mean an expression of life in which you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t. There are no choices save bad choices. There is no faith except bad faith. Hope is meaningless. Fate is certain. Human beings are mites compared to the menacing forces bearing down on them.
“Southern Gothic” is also an exploration of what can done to the human mind when social, political and communal conditions are arrayed against the individual. Empty and in pain, Emily has come to believe up is down, left is right, wrong is right—and that it’s totally normal to kill your husband and sleep next to his decomposing body. Emily’s father was a ghoul of a man bent on breaking her will instead of nourishing it. She’s now as broken as the line between victimhood and villainy. It’s impossible to say if she’s good or if she’s bad. Nothing matters. All that remains is power and death.
After watching last night two hours of Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech, the word “gothic” keep ringing in my ears. It wouldn’t stop. His address was a perversion of morality, an inversion of common sense and a glorification of pettiness and barbarism. Making it all the more gothic and horrible was the press corps pretending it was none of these things. Afterward, CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell said: “This was a speech unlike any other I have witnessed from President Donald Trump—the reality TV president took on the state of the union, a master showman at his best.”
A sense of powerlessness is not unique to gothic drama. Many social realist and naturalist novels feature victims trapped in “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” scenarios. Stoehr gets at the situation’s gothic dimensions, however, when he contrasts what he is witnessing with how certain members of the public and the media respond. They rationalize “perversion of morality” as “politics as usual,” and the resulting cognitive dissonance results in Stoehr’s sense of the gothic uncanny.
As I explained Tuesday, the gothic plays a major role in American letters because it captures a dark side that Americans don’t want to face up to. The energy we spend denying the darkness renders it toxic, and it returns (Freud’s “return of the repressed”) as Stoehr’s “fantasia of rage, delirium and dread.” (Cue the musical signature of The Twilight Zone.)
Watching Trump upend the stateliness of the State of the Union address–and watching many accept the upending–is like Faulkner’s townsfolk refusing to acknowledge what they in fact are witnessing. Although they could connect the dots–Miss Emily’s arsenic purchase, Homer’s sudden disappearance, the awful smell emanating from the house–they don’t because they are unwilling to admit the rot. Better to think of Miss Emily–and of Trump, the GOP, and the American republic–as merely eccentric.
In the story, when some want to investigate the horrible smell, the local judge turns them down. “Dammit, sir,” Judge Stevens tells the complainers, “will you accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad?” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called out Trump’s speech for smelling bad by tearing up her copy. And she was the one accused of incivility.
