The Gothic Literature and History of New England: Secrets of the Restless Dead

By Faye Ringel

The Gothic Literature and History of New England surveys the history, nature and future of the Gothic mode in the region, from the witch trials through the Black Lives Matter Movement. Texts include Cotton Mather and other Puritan divines who collected folklore of the supernatural; the Frontier Gothic of Indian captivity narratives; the canonical authors of the American Renaissance such as Melville and Hawthorne; the women's ghost story tradition and the Domestic Gothic from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Shirley Jackson; H. P. Lovecraft; Stephen King; and writers of the current generation who respond to racial and gender issues. The work brings to the surface the religious intolerance, racism and misogyny inherent in the New England Gothic, and how these nightmares continue to haunt literature and popular culture—films, television and more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Feb 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781785279058

Book preview

The Gothic Literature and History of New England

ANTHEM STUDIES IN GOTHIC LITERATURE

Anthem Studies in Gothic Literature incorporates a broad range of titles that undertake rigorous, multi-disciplinary and original scholarship in the domain of Gothic Studies and respond, where possible, to existing classroom/ module needs. The series aims to foster innovative international scholarship that interrogates established ideas in this rapidly growing field, to broaden critical and theoretical discussion among scholars and students, and to enhance the nature and availability of existing scholarly resources.

Series Editor

Carol Margaret Davison – University of Windsor, Canada

The Gothic Literature and History of New England Secrets of the Restless Dead

Faye Ringel

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2022

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

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Copyright © Faye Ringel 2022

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,

no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means

(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),

without the prior written permission of both the copyright

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book has been requested.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-903-4 (Pbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-903-3 (Pbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

The Rhode Island Slave History Medallion organization is a public awareness program committed to marking those historic sites connected to the history of slavery in Rhode Island. The medallion for this ongoing project to commemorate Rhode Island’s Slave History incorporates the winged soul design of Pompe Stevens, who carved the stone shown on the cover, located in the Common Burying Ground, Farewell Street, Newport, Rhode Island. The text on the stone reads: This stone was cut by Pompe Stevens in Memory of His Brother Cuffe Gibbs who died in 1768. It is one of few gravestones signed by an enslaved African American carver.

To the Monsters who scare us; who are us

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Chronology

Introduction

1.Gothic Origins

2.The Puritans’ Haunted Frontier

3.Haunting the Master’s House

4.Beyond Lovecraft Country: Racism, Xenophobia, New Directions

Works Cited

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Land Acknowledgment: This book was composed on land stolen from the Royal Mohegan Burial Ground, reserved by Uncas, Sachem of the Mohegans, in perpetuity from the Nine-Mile Square he provided to the English colonists in 1659.

Thank you to Lucy Maziar and the US Coast Guard Academy Library for extending off-campus access privileges to Professors Emeriti.

Thank you to my editors, Anna Maria Trusky and Carol Margaret Davison.

CHRONOLOGY

INTRODUCTION

The DEVIL, is more desirous to Regain poor New England, than any one American spot of ground.

—Cotton Mather, The Short History of New-England

(1694); emphasis in original

Old graveyards are found throughout the New England landscape. Gravestones like the one on the cover, its winged head symbolizing escape from the flesh, remind us of the Puritans for whom this was the sole allowable form of figurative art. In symbol and words, these gravestones are memento mori: remember, as I am, so shall you be. Sometimes—as with Cuffe Gibbs’s stone in Newport’s Common Burying Ground, signed by its carver Pompe Stevens—they express pride in survival. Given the Puritans’ contempt for the body, their rebellion against the Catholic and Anglican concept of hallowed ground meant that their family lands were often their last resting places. For the poor, the enslaved, the displaced, there are few markers.

Though their passing may have left no trace, the dead are restless and the world is changing. Hidden languages are emerging, rising again like rocks after the winter. Wampanoag, Mohegan, and other Algonquian peoples are reviving their once-lost languages, reminding us that the first Bible entirely printed in North America was John Eliot’s Wampanoag Bible. Rhode Island is acknowledging its secrets of slavery with medallions like the stumbling stones (Stolpersteine) Germany uses to mark houses where its slaughtered Jews once lived.¹ In the Gothic mode, the past is ever present, and nothing buried can remain undisturbed—not sins, bodies, or secrets.

For nearly fifty years, I have been addressing historical societies, family associations, and other genteel New England audiences, telling them the stories they did not want to know about their ancestors and their contemporaries. I’m rarely invited back. The descendants of New England’s founders have more than their share of family secrets. The Hale Family Reunion in Beverly, Massachusetts, in 1992 did not want to hear what Reverend Hale in 1692 said about women as witches. According to the docent at the John Brown House in Providence, home of the first benefactor of Brown University: If you say your ancestor was in the Caribbean Trade, it was slaves; the China Trade, opium. (Brown’s wealth came from both trades.) The Gothic mode is about abjection; in Julia Kristeva’s terms, what is abject, […] the jettisoned object, is radically excluded (2). Witches, slaves, the poor, and other objects of persecution and oppression may be cast out and excluded, but they can haunt us. The written and visual New England Gothic narratives studied here embody the repression, anxieties, and hypocrisy of four centuries of New England’s history and the literature that emerged from it of hauntings, immurement, repression, and revenge.

Chapter 1, Gothic Origins, explores the Gothic in literature and life, with an overview of the genre, its practitioners, and its critics in America and New England from its origins to the present, showing how America’s equivalent of the genre’s fantastic Middle Ages derives from the Puritans who transplanted Europe’s nightmares to the New World, demonizing the indigenous peoples and projecting their fears upon European settlers of other religions, women, and Blacks.

Chapter 2, "The Puritans’