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2. Goth Americana
- Baylor University Press
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53 Two GOTH AMERICANA One Dark Day in the Middle of the Night Two Dead Boys Came out to Fight Back to back they Faced Each Other Pulled their knives And each shot the other. —Traditional rhyme Believe in Me, Be My Victim. —Candyman (1992) The stylish 1992 film Candyman, based on a Clive Barker short story, succeeds by combining a gothic sensibility with genuine terrors from the American past. A graduate student named Helen (played by Virginia Madsen), researching urban legends in contemporary Chicago , begins collecting stories of the mythical “Candyman.” The story of Candyman contains motifs not dissimilar from other well-known urban legends, including endangered babysitters, unquiet spirits that appear in mirrors when fatally summoned, and maniac killers with a hook for a hand. Helen’s research takes a deadly twist that the ingénue folklorist does not expect. Two African American women at her University, with connections to Chicago’s infamously violent Cabrini Green housing project, connect all the bloody motifs of the urban legend to a recent brutal murder. Monsters in America / 54 Cabrini Green, another scholar tells Helen, is “Candyman country .” This monster’s folklore comes complete with a historical origin story rooted in America’s cruel racial past. Candyman, though the son of a slave, had become a noted artist in the Midwest. A wealthy landowner asked him to paint a portrait of his “virginal young daughter.” The two fell in love and the young white woman became pregnant, the ultimate terror in the white supremacist nightmare. This flagrant violation of American racial mores resulted in a brutal lynching. The enraged mob cut off Candyman’s hand, covered him with honey so that bees would feast on him, and burned him alive. He haunts the Chicago housing project and soon he would haunt Helen herself.1 The story of Candyman is the story of an American monster, born out of the terrors of the past. The film borrowed heavily from nineteenthcentury gothic motifs, as well as from American anxieties over race, violence , and sexuality. It reflects the ironies and cross-grained tensions of a republic of liberty founded, and then torn apart, over the enslavement of human beings. The influence of the gothic tradition on American literature became a way to deal with the memory of a violent American past and a violent American present. Nineteenth-century American elites constructed their society out of a number of explosive materials, ready to detonate at any moment. White Americans, though they dominated most of the country’s economic and cultural institutions, perceived themselves as under siege. Slaves made up a majority of the population of some American states. Immigrants who shared neither Anglo-Saxon heritage nor Anglo-Saxon values began entering northeastern American port cities in the 1840s and 1850s. Immigrants and slaves provided workers for agrarian and industrial capitalists throughout the century and yet their presence appeared to native whites as an omen and a threat. The atmosphere was rich with the irony of a nation whose founding documents trumpeted liberty and democracy but whose prosperity rested on slavery and the labor of immigrants hated and feared by the dominant class.2 Slavery proved to be the most combustible element in the young nation. The sectional conflict that led to the Civil War dismembered the nation and transformed the way Americans thought about death. The killing of six hundred thousand men, most between the ages of 18 and 30, caused an enormous shift in social institutions and cultural sensibilities . The failure of Reconstruction unleashed a violent assault against the African American community in the South. African Americans would face similar horrors in the urban North by the time of the First World War.3 [54.221.110.87] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 00:06 GMT) Goth Americana / 55 Meanwhile, the postbellum era witnessed a new kind of internecine struggle, an emerging clash over social and ideological values that has remained a part of the American cultural conversation into the present. By the 1870s the struggle for gender equality begun in the antebellum era increasingly turned toward efforts by women to assert their autonomy over their bodies and their sexuality. This struggle inevitably raised questions about the nature of the American family, considered by many a sacrosanct institution protected by religious sanction. Nineteenth-century stories of the American monster attempted to make sense of unavoidable American social conflicts. American writers, meanwhile, borrowed from the European gothic tradition in an effort to explore the nature...