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Conclusion American Innocence I opened by suggesting that 1944 was the last year America might reasonably claim its innocence; in a brave new world of technological menace, amid the paranoid fantasizing of the Cold War (note how science fiction during the fifties and sixties transforms itself from a progressive to a paranoid discourse; Harlan Ellison replaces H. G. Wells as a symptomatic writer), one might expect the impostures of innocence to be cast into the dustbin of history. And yet, the ongoing project of America seems to have depended on the imagination of innocence at every juncture. The wellsprings of a fabulated American “innocence” seem inexhaustible. Consider, for example, the rhetoric of innocence and trauma that followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Innocence, which is always constructed in retrospect (innocence only manifests itself once it is lost, or threatened), is the very denial of haunting; or rather, it involves a heroic evasion of the fact that one’s actions are implicitly entwined with the destiny of others, in the face of all evidence to the contrary . Such innocence, then, is always in some sense threatened, haunted. As a construct by which we adjudicate and parcel out responsibility, the category of innocence needs to be threatened, or haunted: It would not otherwise exist or be understood as innocence. This is why crimes are assumed to be more heinous when they target “innocent victims” or involve hurt to “innocent ” bystanders. Innocence unknowingly (or half-knowingly) solicits, seduces haunting, as in Henry James’s deeply perverse novella, The Turn of the Screw, wherein the ghoulish pederasts, Peter Quint and his lover, Miss Jessel, are seductively summoned from their watery graves by the allure of the children , Miles and Flora. Indeed the pedophile cannothelp him or herself (to acknowledge how the will of pedophilia is crippled is not at all to blame the victim ). And pedophilia in whatever form (the murder of innocents, the murder of innocence) may be the central phenomena of gothic; it is no accident, as 108 Conclusion Edmundson notes, that a rather hysterical discourse of satanic pedophilia emerged in Reagan’s America of the 1980s, a society that sorely needed to refabricate its own innocence. The production of a retrospectively defensive innocence (an innocence always, alas, lost), which disavows responsibility (rather than being the simple opposite of “guilt”), is at the heart of American mythography. Alexis de Tocqueville puts it this way: “Not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendents and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart” (99), going on to speculate about the inevitable appearance of mysticism and “religious insanity in such a country.” As Gordon elaborates, for Nathaniel Hawthorne, America is likewise a land without ghosts. In the preface to The Marble Faun, Hawthorne insists that we inhabit “a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery , no picturesque and gloomy wrong” (15). Or, as Morrison says, “We live in a land where the past is always erased and America is the innocent future in which immigrants can come and start over, where the slate is clean. The past is absent or it’s romanticised” (“Living Memory” 10). Consequently, the “great tradition” in American letters, our eminently usable past, embellished as much in Greenwich Village as in Hollywood, “has taken as its concern the architecture of a new white man” (Morrison, Playing in the Dark 15), and was until recently thought to be a decidedly masculine imperative to exorcise one’s ghosts; its conventional theme, as the critic Mickey Pearlman argues , is the fear of historical entrapment, which assumes the form of a peculiar , and peculiarly American and heroic, exceptionalism: “the chronicle of the solitary hero, of man alone, man against society, man as individual, endlessly testing his strength and durability against his own resources on a mythic adventurous journey to epiphany and knowledge” (1). The dramatic and sacrificial logic of this tradition demands that society itself and the social conflicts that compose it be reduced to a mere backdrop, an arena or stage for individual heroism. The triumphal Yankee tradition involves a necessary reduction of social constraints—class, geographic origin, parentage, race—in accordance with the American myth of the “self-made man,” crystallized as early as Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and resurrected, almost facetiously, in the campaign rhetoric of Al Gore and...

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