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  • Haunting Realities: Naturalist Gothic and American Realism ed. by Monika Elbert and Wendy Ryden
  • Ann M. Ryan
Haunting Realities: Naturalist Gothic and American Realism. Edited by Monika Elbert and Wendy Ryden. 2017. Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama Press, 2017. 304 pp. Cloth, $64.95; ebook, $64.95.

Haunting Realities: Naturalist Gothic and American Realism is an extraordinary collection of essays by scholars deeply versed in American literary history and the nuances of genre studies. In their illuminating introduction, Elbert and Ryden nod to debates about whether "Gothicism or Naturalism constitute a genre or a mode" without becoming mired in resolving those debates. Rather, their aim is "to better understand what reality certain late nineteenth-century American authors perceived and, inevitably, themselves helped to create and constitute through their work." What matters more to the editors are the cultural practices and histories that blur the lines between a deterministic worldview and the gothic imaginings that represent it. Ryden and Elbert deftly trace the movement from Romance to Realism to Naturalism and find that in turn-of-the-century America, "reality becomes a Gothic ruin inflected through Darwinian science and Spencerian philosophy that can only be rendered as horrific or ghostly in human apprehension." Haunted by the memory of slavery and the Civil War, alienated by a wage-slave economy, and anxious about changes in technology and science, the authors discussed—from Norris to Crane to Dunbar to Wharton and more—use the Gothic to mediate the real-world terrors of American history.

The seventeen essays in Haunting Realities are divided into five sections: Imprisoning Genders; Horrors of the Civil War and its Aftermath; Wicked Money, Haunted Objects; Paranormal Longings and Warnings; and Spectral Landscapes and Locations. Not only do these divisions help to organize the volume, they make the experience of reading it something like attending a smart literary conference; each essay in each chapter seems to be pointedly in conversation with the insights of the others. The volume includes essays by critics whose interests are as diverse as the chapter headings suggest. There are, however, a few texts—both literary and critical—that recur as touchstones throughout the collection: Frank Norris' McTeague, Stephen Crane's The Monster, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps' The Gates Ajar, the short stories of Charles Chestnutt, and the critical work of Charles Crow, Teresa Goddu, Keith Newlin, Donald Pizer, and Maisha Wester, to name a few. [End Page 86]

Even where critics take up these familiar works, their arguments and associations are provocative and original. For example, Wendy Ryden sees Chesnutt's portraits of slave marriages as gothic repudiations of progress; David Greven reads the fate of Crane's Henry Johnson as "an allegory of sexual consumerism"; Monika Elbert argues that for both Bierce and Phelps the "bloody battlefields" of the Civil War make the domestic realm "much more unheimlich"; and Daniel Mrozowski reads the paranormal research of Hamlin Garland as a Gothic affirmation of the Progressive Age. Contributors also engage lesser-known authors and texts: Alice Cary's Clover-nook; Elizabeth Robins' My Little Sister; Pauline Hopkins' Of One Blood, and Elizabeth Stoddard's The Morgesons. More than simply widening our sense of the canonical literature of the period, these essays reveal the interplay among shifting cultural paradigms, historical events, and both popular and self-consciously literary art.

Each of the contributions to this volume deserves notice. Taken as a whole, Haunted Realities offers a thorough exploration of a cultural moment that appears—thanks to the carefully researched and articulated work of these critics—far more complex than previously narrow understandings of the period or genre have suggested. Perhaps Naturalism is not a genre, and it is possible that the Gothic may only be a mode; nonetheless, like the ghost of Quint at the window, they continue to embody—according to these scholars—the losses, crimes, and histories we still struggle to acknowledge and accept.

Ann M. Ryan
Le Moyne College
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