The Haunted House of American Fiction: William Gaddis’s Carpenter’s Gothic

In his third novel Carpenter’s Gothic (1985), William Gaddis presents a postmodern adaptation of a classic gothic plot: a brutal husband terrorizes his frail wife while scheming to take her inheritance. Gaddis’s description of his gothic heroine Elizabeth Booth, with her nervous habits and bizarre fear of mailboxes, as “this beautiful girl with red hair and this real pale white skin and these great high cheekbones” (90) conforms to traditional gothic norms. She is Gaddis’s portrait of a gothic lady, his Jamesian dove, shaped by her father’s domination and then abused by her husband. However, this novel, Gaddis’s sometimes-unwieldy fictional house, serves as its own double: Carpenter’s Gothic relies on the gothic trappings of the haunted house, on the one hand, and on the political, social, and cultural commentary symbolically presented through these elements, on the other. Because the centers cannot hold–Liz, the gothic heroine/victim, dies, and the house is abandoned in the end–Carpenter’s Gothic signals the death knell for the American family, for America as home. America becomes centerless, loses its voice of reason, leaving us with Northrop Frye’s winter of irony or perhaps even the nuclear winter of annihilation. Liz’s comic life and uncanny, tragic death reveal the cruelties and misfortunes of human life. This view flies in the face of nostalgic projections of America, of the Horatio Alger myth (often praised by Ronald Reagan) that Elizabeth’s husband Paul is determined to make his own. Gaddis’s portrayal of gothic America openly ridicules such nostalgic modes of thinking. Instead, he breaks down mythic perceptions of America by presenting it as a cacophonic and sometimes merciless gothic land.

“They Want a Haunted House, They’ve Found It”: Gaddis’s House of Fiction

The title Carpenter’s Gothic refers to the architectural style “designed from the outside” (124) in which the “inside’s a hodgepodge of good intentions like one last ridiculous effort at something worth doing even on this small a scale” (228); it serves as a metaphor not only for America as a whole but also for Gaddis’s own efforts with this “small scale” novel, his “good intentions” patched together into a “hodgepodge” of characterization, conspiracy, and media chaos. The novel itself remains steadily, unwaveringly, focused on the Carpenter Gothic house in New York, on a dead-end road, that Paul and Elizabeth Booth rent from Mr. McCandless. Gaddis himself says he deliberately “preserved the unity: one place, one very small amount of time, very small group of characters” (qtd. in Grove B10) while composing a tale of political intrigue, adultery, and religious fraud that ultimately resonates across America, as these characters, “unprepossessing” though they may be, “have no difficulty nudging the world toward Armageddon” (Prescott 64). While working on Carpenter’s Gothic, Gaddis revealed that his new novel was going to “be labeled ‘a romance’” if “the characters continue to behave” (“Works” 49), and his use of Jane Eyre, both the 1847 text by Charlotte Brontë and the 1944 film starring Orson Welles, seems to attest to this assertion. However, as many early reviews noted, the finished product was “a spoof of Gothic romances” (Prescott 64). Instead, Carpenter’s Gothic turns to tragedy both in its dramatic form and in the death of the gothic heroine. In constructing his tightly plotted, yet spectral, gothic house of fiction, Gaddis rejects the “childlike quality of romance,” and the issues involved in its “persistent nostalgia” (Frye 186).

In his attempt to take “all the clichés of modern fiction” and “make a new novel, one that works in our own time with these old pieces of wood” (Writers), Gaddis built a book that is both an examination of and a reaction to American society in the 1980s, becoming part of his larger project of describing “what America’s all about” (Gaddis, J R 27). Gaddis’s two novels that follow–A Frolic of His Own (1994) and Agapē, Agape (2002)–help complete his guide to America, one that he worked his entire career to create. However, Gaddis...