American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative (review)

In American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative, editors Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy attempt to, as Martin points out in the introduction, construct a book that “approaches the persistence of the gothic in American culture not by seeking historical comprehensivity or even critical consensus but . . . by providing a composite of ‘interventions’ that explore specific issues . . . in order to advance particular and distinct theoretical paradigms” (vii). To this end, the essays found in American Gothic draw upon psychoanalysis, revisionist historiography, and other theoretical schools; these various methods converge to create “the matrix of ‘work’ on the gothic in the postmodern moment” (ix). This intermingling of theories creates some enlightening chapters on the historical framing of the gothic, psychoanalysis, race, gender, and the postmodern gothic.

Before examining the psychological, racial, gender, and postmodern aspects of the American gothic, the book contains a section of three essays that work to outline the gothic: “Framing the Gothic: Theories and Histories.” In “The Face of the Tenant: A Theory of American Gothic,” Savoy traces the critical history of the American gothic from Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel through the works of Maggie Kilgour, Anne Williams, and Louis S. Gross; Savoy’s path eventually leads him to argue that the American gothic is “a tropic field that approaches allegory: the gothic is most powerful, and most distinctly American, when it strains towards allegorical translucency” (5–6). The American gothic, as Williams says, is ultimately “complex,” drawing upon history, psychology, language, and architecture. The other two essays in the introductory section, William Veeder’s “The Nurture of the Gothic, or How Can a Text Be Both Popular and Subversive?” and Maggie Kilgour’s “Dr. Frankenstein Meets Dr. Freud,” both focus on the psychological aspects of the gothic. Veeder centers on the gothic’s “commitment to the simultaneous exploration of inner and outer, the psychological and the social” (22), and more importantly, explores the ideas of sexual repression put forward by Foucault. In her essay, Kilgour argues that the gothic and analysis both “reveal the dark truth that the autonomous subject is not a unified whole but fragmented and dismembered, internally ruptured so that it is alienated not only from nature and others but from itself” (41). Kilgour works this doubling out and uses it to examine the novel and movie adaptation of Thomas Harris’s Silence of the Lambs. The framing essays do an adequate job of centering the essays that follow throughout the rest of the book, providing a historical discussion of the gothic, which could be more in depth, and an investigation of specific psychological ideas that have been, and are, used to examine gothic texts.

While the essays collected in American Gothic provide insights into the gothic in American literature and culture, the collection fails to cultivate fertile ground within the discussion of race. The back matter states: “Special attention is paid to the issues of slavery and race in both black and white texts, including those by Ralph Ellison and William Faulkner.” Essays do focus on “slavery and race”; however, African American texts make up a miniscule amount of the overall work. No essays focus on the works of Ralph Ellison; in fact, he only appears twice in the book. Otherwise, the discussion of race in the American gothic focuses on works by Poe, Hawthorne, and Faulkner.

The only in-depth examination of a “black” text comes courtesy of George Piggford’s “Looking into Black Skulls: American Gothic, The Revolutionary Theatre, and Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman.” Piggford’s essay justifies reading Baraka’s play as a gothic text by confronting three reasons why it would not be read as a gothic work: the inversion of Leslie Fiedler’s trope of blackness, Fiedler’s view that only fiction elevates the American gothic to a high cultural level, and critics’ arguments that Baraka’s play has a strong “emphasis on polemics over aesthetics” (144). Ultimately, Piggford asserts that in...