Thursday
Thursday morning I delivered the following talk to Sewanee’s Rotary Club. I entitled it “America’s Obsession with Gothic Fantasy, from Poe to Game of Thrones.
When you hear someone mention gothic fantasy or gothic horror, what American stories, movies or television shows come to mind? Before I let you answer that question, let me define the genre.
The gothic is pretty much any story that, when you encounter it, you have a Twilight Zone oooOOOooo sensation. Gothic stories often have an element of the spooky supernatural. They feel creepy. They may feature haunted mansions, dark forests or ruined castles. Often you’ll encounter the grotesque, the decadent, or the rotten and decaying.
Gothics may repulse or revolt us although, at the same time, we may find ourselves unable to turn our eyes away. While the gothic is not to everyone’s taste, gothic strains can be found in much of America’s best-known and most respected literature, cinema, television, and other forms of media.
So let me ask again, what comes to mind when you hear “gothic fantasy” or “gothic horror”?
Edgar Allen Poe is, of course, a good starting point, a writer who maintains a popular following to this day. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote gothic stories and there’s a gothic dimension to The Scarlet Letter, as there is to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Louise Mae Alcott wrote gothic stories, Henry James’s best-known work is a ghost story (Turn of the Screw), and Daphne du Maurier still creeps us out with Rebecca and “The Birds.” One of America’s richest literary traditions—one that Sewanee is well familiar with and that I’ll examine shortly–is southern gothic writing, with practitioners like William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty and, later, James Dickey, Cormac McCarthy, and Anne Rice. In the 1950’s and 1960’s there was H.P. Lovecraft, then regarded as a pulp author but now taken seriously. In the 1970s we saw the emergence of Stephen King, one of the bestselling authors of all time (although bested by another gothic writer, J. K. Rowling).
The gothic has produced masterpieces in other media as well. In the 1930s there were the Universal horror pictures like Frankenstein, Dracula, Wolfman, and Phantom of the Opera. 1940s radio drama featured Orson Welles in The Shadow—“who knows what darkness lurks in the heart of man? The Shadow knows”–and in the 1950s and 1960s there were immensely popular television shows like Twilight Zone and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. (Hitchcock’s films are also full of gothic images, like the old Victorian house in Psycho.) In the 1980s we had a spate of teenage gothic horror movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, and Scream, and in 1991 a gothic slasher movie won all five major Oscars (Silence of the Lambs). If you were the parent of a teenager daughter over the past 10 years, perhaps you encountered an obsession with Twilight, and recently we’ve seen people hooked on HBO’s Game of Thrones.
As a literature and film professor, I have made it my scholarly mission to figure out what people’s literary and cinematic likes and dislikes reveal about them. What windows into the soul open up when we see someone interacting passionately with a novel, film, or tv show? I study both older works—why would 8th century Anglo-Saxon warriors have thrilled to the monsters in Beowulf—and contemporary ones. In the question and answer period, I hope you will ask me about gothics that have caught your attention. Choose one you like or, perhaps that a child or grandchild likes. If I’m familiar with the work, I help you figure out what it means.
First, however, here’s my theory about why American authors and American audiences have been riveted by the gothic since the dawn of the republic. The gothic explores that side of ourselves that we don’t want to admit to, even though part of us recognizes it only too well. When we deny some aspect of who we are, the gothic goes to work.
Sigmund Freud called this “the return of the repressed.” That which we push under returns in spooky form. Or what Freud termed “the uncanny.”
So what side of itself has America denied? Well, we were founded in part by two thought strains that seem the very antithesis of the gothic: purity and light. Our Pilgrim or Puritan ancestors came to this country with the vision of establishing (in John Winthrop’s memorable phrase) a city on a hill. “The eyes of the people are upon us,” Winthrop said as he looked ahead to creating an ideal society in the wilderness. We Americans have often thought of ourselves as an example that other nations should follow.
The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, meanwhile, owe a lot to the European Enlightenment, with figures like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Benjamin Franklin citing John Locke and Montesquieu. America started out with very high hopes for itself and, in some ways, it has never abandoned those hopes. We are a can-do nation, a nation that rises to every challenge and for whom the sky is the limit. It’s almost unpatriotic to be pessimistic, to not believe in the American Dream. The Pilgrims and the founding fathers alike thought that they could shuck off their European baggage and begin something new and clean. Talk to a recent immigrant—my Trinidadian daughter-in-law recently received her American citizenship—and you’ll find that they still think that way.
But dreams can become nightmares, and almost from the beginning authors looked at the side of America that wasn’t so pure and bright. Nathaniel Hawthorne, the descendant of a Salem hanging judge, gives us a Puritan grappling with his soul in the gothic tale “Young Goodman Brown.” Before he fully commits himself to his wife Faith, Brown decides he must look at the dark side of himself and ventures into a forest. There he encounters the devil, who reveals dark deeds performed by his ancestors, including Indian massacres and witch hangings. Upon emerging from the forest (or perhaps waking from a dream, Hawthorne is deliberately vague), Brown is a grim man who never finds peace or happiness.
If Hawthorne found the dark side of the Pilgrims’ longing for purity, Poe found the dark side of Jefferson’s longing for enlightenment. To be sure, there is a side of Poe that celebrates reason and rationality. Some consider him the inventor of the detective story, and in Dupin you have the forerunner of Sherlock Holmes, the detective who, through superior ratiocination, can find a pattern to clues that baffle the police. But in Poe’s stories one also find minds that, while intelligent, are also diseased. We get elaborate descriptions by the articulate narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” of how he kills, dismembers, and hides the remains of his neighbor and by the narrator of “The Black Cat” of how he almost gets away with walling up the corpse of his wife. Like Dupin, these characters emphasize reason, but in their case reason is closely aligned with madness.
Let me take a quick look at Southern Gothic literature before concluding with a couple of contemporary gothic authors. After the South lost the Civil War, there was an effort by some to portray the rebellion as a noble cause and the antebellum south as an idyllic Camelot. Movies like Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind reinforced this idealized picture.
People didn’t want to face up to the darker aspects of the south, not only slavery and violence against blacks but also poverty and backwardness. It is in those dark aspects, however, where authors like Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Truman Capote, Eudora Welty and others plant their gothics. You may think that southerners are “good country people,” to cite one O’Connor short story, but really they’re resentful conmen posing as Bible salesmen who will steal your wooden leg if you give them a chance.
For those who grew up watching television in the 1950’s, you might have thought that America was Mayfield in Leave It to Beaver. In Stephen King’s IT, one finds a Maine version of Mayfield, with a group of children spending a summer damming up streams, building an underground playhouse, and riding their bicycles. It actually sounds a lot like growing up in Sewanee, which may be one reason I like the novel so much.
Being Stephen King, however, he of course adds a twist: a homicidal clown resides in the sewer system. That the televised Mayfield doesn’t even seem to have a sewer system is part of King’s point: in our longing for a pure and hygienic town, we don’t want to acknowledge there are parts that are not so savory. In King’s fiction, the clown emerges every 17 years, at which point Americans go crazy and commit acts of atrocity—a bloody barroom fight, a racial lynching, an unhinged massacre of bank robbers. America may have enlightenment aspirations but it’s also capable of very dark behavior.
Also dark is George Martin’s Game of Thrones, which I consider to be America’s Lord of the Rings. Despite its medieval setting, Game of Thrones is very American. The Starks, noble pioneer figures guarding the northern wall against attacks from wilderness savages, expect fair play and believe that virtue will be rewarded. When Ned Stark attempts to have upfront dealings with others, however, he finds himself in a political snake pit where everyone is out for him or herself. Nor does it help if you have overwhelming fire power, as both American and Daenerys do. Daenerys may start out with American-type ideals, freeing all the slaves, but by the end she’s incinerating innocent civilians and going mad with power. Feel free to read your favorite disastrous American military incursion into that drama.
Because we are idealists who love our our country, we don’t like to admit its flaws. In this we are no different than other countries, which have their own gothic traditions. I think of gothic fiction, therefore, as a wake-up call. It takes us into areas that some part of ourselves knows is there and gives us a chance to work things out.
Ultimately, the effect of bringing the darkness into the light can actually be salutary. Yes, America has a dark past, but it’s not defined solely by its darkness. Face up to the repressed and it no longer has a hold over you.