Wednesday
I write today about my Lifelong Learning class on “the Gothic Supernatural in American Literature.” Like many scholars, I explain America’s centuries-long fascination with the gothic by Freud’s return of the repressed—which is to say, when we don’t like something about ourselves, we push it under, only to see it return in the form of dark dreams.
In the first week, as I reported, I looked at how Hawthorne uses the gothic genre to expose the not-so-pure side of Puritanism and Poe uses it to expose the not-so-reasonable side of the founding fathers’ belief in a republic based upon Enlightenment Reason. Continuing in this vein last week, I contrasted Henry James’s Turn of the Screw with L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz.
The stark contrast between the two works, written two years apart (1898 and 1900), made my point. Exhibiting the eternal optimism of an American pioneer, Baum wanted to write fairy tales with no shadows. Turn of the Screw, on the other hand, resides permanently in the shadow world.
After initially complimenting the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen and the Grimm brothers, Baum introduced Wizard of Oz with the following:
Yet the old time fairy tale, having served for generations, may now be classed as “historical” in the children’s library; for the time has come for a series of newer “wonder tales” in which the stereotyped genie, dwarf and fairy are eliminated, together with all the horrible and blood-curdling incidents devised by their authors to point a fearsome moral to each tale. Modern education includes morality; therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder tales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident.
Having this thought in mind, the story of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” was written solely to please children of today. It aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out.
What Baum wants is innocent children and an innocent America. Dorothy echoes the legendary pioneer women, venturing out to restore the American Dream. (Laura Ingalls Wilder would later write in this vein.) I’ve noted in the past about how Wizard reflects confidence in an America that can rediscover its head, heart, courage and idealism as it emerges from the Long Depression. Baum believed that a fresh new start was possible.
James, on the other hand, didn’t. Longing for an innocent America is like longing for the Puritans’ pure “city on a hill” or the founders’ shining republic. True believers shut their eyes to the fact that the world is never as innocent, pure or reasonable as we want. Often we look to children to embody our hopes, attempting to preserve their innocence (and ours) by sheltering them from stories with “horrible and blood-curdling incidents.”
James’s children are little angels until they aren’t. Flora has “the deep, sweet serenity indeed of one of Raphael’s holy infants” and the governess sees in Miles “something extraordinarily sensitive, yet extraordinarily happy.” And yet these same children appear (at least to the governess) to be interacting with malevolent ghosts that, when alive, corrupted them in unmentionable ways. Turn of the Screw is the most horrifying and frightening ghost story I know.
This past Monday I took a quick glance at the Southern Gothic, even though it doesn’t contain supernatural elements. What is America repressing, I asked, that would generate a fiction filled with grotesques and haunted venues? The answer: a belief in a golden age of gentility, swept away by the Civil War. (Check out Birth of a Nation or Gone with the Wind for cinematic images.)
The white South of the early 20th century wouldn’t admit how this golden past, not to mention its current iteration, was built upon oppression of blacks. Violence lurks in the decaying house of Miss Emily Grierson (Faulkner’s “Rose for Emily”), and it roams the countryside in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” It resides within Eudora Welty’s “Petrified Man” (a rapist hiding out in a southern freak show), it erupts and kills an innocent family in cold blood (Truman Capote), and it threatens to float to the surface in James Dickey’s Deliverance. The southern past that is never past, in Faulkner’s famous phrase, is a past of unacknowledged white violence.
Next week I’ll look at contemporary gothic stories, including the work of Toni Morrison, Stephen King, and Joyce Carol Oates. As always, I will begin every work with the question, “So what repressed truth led to this story?”