American Gothic and Racial Dread

Along with D. H. Lawrence, who everywhere underlined the anger, fear and destructiveness of the American imagination, critics as diverse as Leslie Fiedler, Toni Morrison, Teresa Goddu, and Eric Savoy all agree that traditional American gothic literature has been in large part motivated by racial dread and anxieties about the purportedly destabilizing effects of miscegenation. ‘From the moment at which our serious literature began’, notes Fiedler, ‘there were established in the American psyche images of the savage and the colored man as threats to stable and organized life’ (Fiedler 1966: 148). Morrison notes that early American gothic and romance were strikingly ‘frightened and haunted’ (Morrison 1992: 35) by the Africanist presence in the US. And for Goddu, gothic ‘registers its culture's contradictions, presenting a distorted, not a disengaged, version of reality’ which is deeply and often alertly entwined with ‘historical horror – revolution, Indian massacre, the transformation of the marketplace … slavery’ (Goddu 1997: 3). Savoy in turn asserts that it is ‘the specter of Otherness that haunts the house of national narrative’ (Savoy 1998: 14). It comes as small wonder, then, that in his important study of Native American fiction, Louis Owens asserts that contemporary ‘American Indian novelists … are in their fiction rejecting the American gothic, with its haunted, guilt-burdened wilderness and doomed Native and emphatically making the Indian the hero of other destinies, other plots’ (Owens 1992: 18). Insofar as Native Americans, Blacks and other swarthy-skinned characters have served – and continue to serve – as synecdochal figures of menace and terror in dominant cultural narratives, contemporary ethnic writers strive to undo prevailing racist and racially inflected stereotypes.

Curiously, however, and paradoxically, a number of contemporary writers self-consciously deploy and rework gothic tropes and idioms. That is, instead of simply ‘rejecting’ gothic, as Owens advises, contemporary writers are everywhere refashioning the genre. This repurposing takes on two general aims. The first is critique and exposure, as writers capitalize on the inherent anxieties of American gothic in order to make explicit the racialism embedded in the hegemonic cultural narratives of opportunity and upward mobility available via the assimilationist ideology of an ethnic ‘melting pot’.