The Haunted States of America: Gothic Regionalism in Post-war American Fiction

By James Morgart

Prior studies of post-war American Gothic literature (and even American horror films) have primarily interpreted Gothic cultural production of the post-war period through a Cold War lens. Despite legitimate reasons for such an approach, this emphasis has limited inquiries into post-war fiction as well as our understanding of the nation’s complicated identity. While the federal government and its investigative agencies may have been preoccupied with the so-called ‘red menace’ that threatened to spread across the planet, each region of the country already possessed major strains of Gothic fiction that focused on regional anxieties – namely of those connected to women and minorities that threatened the region’s constructed identity and balance of power. The Haunted States of America shifts the focus to these Gothic strains by examining how the anxieties, fears and concerns illustrated in the works of several post-World War II writers can be best understood through regional history and identity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: May 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781786838780

Book preview

THE HAUNTED STATES OF AMERICA

SERIES PREFACE

Gothic Literary Studies is dedicated to publishing groundbreaking scholarship on Gothic in literature and film. The Gothic, which has been subjected to a variety of critical and theoretical approaches, is a form which plays an important role in our understanding of literary, intellectual and cultural histories. The series seeks to promote challenging and innovative approaches to Gothic which question any aspect of the Gothic tradition or perceived critical orthodoxy. Volumes in the series explore how issues such as gender, religion, nation and sexuality have shaped our view of the Gothic tradition. Both academically rigorous and informed by the latest developments in critical theory, the series provides an important focus for scholarly developments in Gothic studies, literary studies, cultural studies and critical theory. The series will be of interest to students of all levels and to scholars and teachers of the Gothic and literary and cultural histories.

SERIES EDITORS

Andrew Smith, University of Sheffield

Benjamin F. Fisher, University of Mississippi

EDITORIAL BOARD

Kent Ljungquist, Worcester Polytechnic Institute Massachusetts

Richard Fusco, St Joseph’s University, Philadelphia

David Punter, University of Bristol

Chris Baldick, University of London

Angela Wright, University of Sheffield

Jerrold E. Hogle, University of Arizona

For all titles in the Gothic Literary Studies series visit www.uwp.co.uk

The Haunted States of America

Gothic Regionalism in Post-war American Fiction

James Morgart

© James Morgart, 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3NS.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

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

ISBN 978-1-78683-876-6

e-ISBN 978-1-78683-878-0

The right of James Morgart to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For Kathrin

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1‘The Death of a Culture’: Subversion of Monstrosity in the Southern Gothic

2Hanging Women on the Hill: Exposure of Patriarchal Conformity in the New England Gothic

3Haunted Grounds of Healing: Horrors of Normativity and Genocide in the Gothic Midwest

4New York, New York … : Greed and Abjection in the New York Gothic

5Repressed Ramonas and Braceros: Return of the Oppressed in the Southern California Gothic

Coda

Notes

Works Cited

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am indebted to Sanford Schwartz, Michael Bérubé, Jonathan Eburne, Mark Morrisson and Dale Townshend for their support of this project from its inception and for their continued professional support and friendship. I sincerely thank the librarians at Mary F. Shipper Library for tracking down invaluable information, especially Virginia Stephens and Nicholas Gardner. I must also thank Sarah Lewis and University of Wales Press for taking a chance on my first attempt at a book-length literary study.

As I have worked on this book, I have had the distinct privilege of both learning from and working beside the brilliant faculty at Rider University, The Pennsylvania State University, New Jersey City University, Rutgers University and Potomac State College. I remain inspired by these professors’ unwavering dedication to their fields and to their students. Without encountering them, I would have never written and completed this book.

I also extend a very warm thanks to all my friends and family whose support while pursuing this project helped me to maintain my sanity and focus. Adam Torkel, Martin Sanelli, Debbie Rochon, Susan Heckel, Keryn Thompson, Damon Cagnolatti and Allison Morgart have all over the past nine years supported and encouraged me. Most particularly, Vic Fraternale’s unwavering friendship has made every valley not so low nor so lonely. I am also deeply grateful for Roberta Clipper’s mentorship. Without her support, scholarship would have remained something alien to me, a strange academic production hidden away in obscure databases and on dust-covered bookshelves. I especially owe all my successes to my parents, Rose and Jim, whose support have been second to none. My mother’s voracious appetite for books and my father’s mantra of ‘question everything’ indubitably led me here.

Above all else, I owe this book to Kathrin, Ada and Henry. Completing this project required sacrifices, and it takes a special type of family to endure the thousand cuts that those sacrifices can make. Without Kathrin’s support, this study would be stored on a hard drive incomplete. Without Kathrin, Ada and Henry’s love, I would be equally incomplete. Du bist meine Welt. Thank you.

Finally, no work of scholarship would be complete without permission from authors, their estates and/or their publishers, and I am appreciative of everyone who assisted me in the process of securing permissions. Excerpts from Intruder in the Dust by William Faulkner, copyright 1948 by Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright renewed 1975 by Jill Faulkner Summers. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Excerpts from Lie Down in Darkness by William Styron, copyright © 1951, copyright renewed 1979 by William Styron. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Excerpts from Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson, copyright 1951 by Shirley Jackson. Used by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Excerpts from The Martian Chronicles reprinted by permission of Don Congdon Associates, Inc. © 1950, renewed 1977 by Ray Bradbury. Excerpts from The Barbarous Coast by Ross Macdonald, copyright © 1956 by Ross Macdonald. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, and by permission of Harold Ober Associates. All rights reserved.

Introduction

Central to this study on Gothic regionalism and post-war American fiction is the Gothic’s relationship to ‘outsiders’ that ‘insiders’ treat as abnormal and subsequently exclude or eject from their culture. The very word ‘Gothic’ derives from Visigoths and Ostrogoths – Germanic tribes living on the outskirts of an ‘advanced’ Roman empire that depicted these groups as ‘uncivilised’.¹ This association of ‘Gothic’ with people known for their ‘wild’ or ‘barbaric’ culture and behaviour led to Renaissance critics coining the phrase ‘Gothic architecture’ to describe ‘gloomy’ architectural designs and ‘sombre castles [that] appeared dark and barbarous’.² Reminiscent of how the ostracised Goths evoked feelings of disgust and horror from the Romans, medieval architecture reminded neoclassical critics of an unsophisticated, barbaric past. As Montague Summers observes, until the eighteenth century, ‘the word Gothic … conveyed the idea of barbarous, tramontane, and antique, and was merely a term of reproach and contempt … [and] came to connote almost anything medieval’.³ Fittingly perhaps, Gothic literature has been most readily identified by what Fred Botting categorises as ‘negative aesthetics’.⁴As Valerie Steele and Jennifer Park assert, set in opposition to and as an outcast from neoclassical norms, early Gothic literature ‘was characterized by gloomy settings (such as ruined castles), mysterious, violent, and supernatural events, and a general atmosphere of degeneration and decay’.⁵ These texts countered Enlightenment norms, revelling in the darkness and insecurity of the unknown and providing spine-tingling thrills and imaginative, often terrifying, fantasies. In other words, from its very inception, Gothic literature featured aberrant aesthetics, behaviours and ideas.

Although the Gothic shifted in its signification – from a group of loathed barbarians to a detested medieval architecture to a popular yet debased literature centred on entertaining readers – all of these uses are indicative of Otherness that offended, terrified or disgusted those responsible for representing (or even constructing) ‘normality’. Rather unsurprisingly, despite Gothic literature’s popularity following the publication of what is widely recognised as the first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), the Gothic genre held a fairly dubious position among contemporary literary and social critics.⁶ As Devendra P. Varma details, initial critical responses to the Gothic were that it featured subject matter ‘not worthy of attention’ and ‘suited to gratify only a vitiated and uncultivated taste’.⁷ Over time, the Gothic came to be associated with ‘wild or ghastly imagination’, thereby removing some of its ‘stigma of inferiority’.⁸ However, as Anne Williams shows, a number of prominent critics ranging from F. R. Leavis to Wayne Booth were far from willing to accept that the Gothic had shed its ‘stigma’. As Williams puts it, ‘twentieth-century keepers of the House of Fiction have always treated Gothic as a skeleton in the closet’.⁹ This Otherness is at the heart of the Gothic, and it is why subsequent scholars have repeatedly observed its literary form as possessing the potential to reveal the narratives of marginalised groups. Whether it is used to describe architecture, literature or even a group of people, the Gothic is that which is outcast or marginalised by standardised norms. Despite attempts to ignore, marginalise and bury these deviations from the norm, the Gothic ultimately returns to terrorise, horrify and disgust.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Gothic scholars have found American fiction to be a wellspring for their studies. The overwhelming consensus is that American fiction, when laced with Gothic imagery or conventions, possesses the potential to be read as revealing the hidden horrors that the national narrative anxiously attempts to bury.¹⁰ Analyses explicitly connecting American literature’s Gothic tendencies to the nation’s repressed horrors are often traced back to Leslie A. Fiedler’s landmark study Love and Death in the American Novel (1960).¹¹ Arguing that the ‘American Novel is pre-eminently a novel of terror’, Fiedler observes that the protagonist of many American classics is often a wanderer who either escapes from or is cast out of civilisation, regularly in flight from either an overbearing patriarchal figure or overwhelming patriarchal duties.¹² This fleeing protagonist soon finds themselves in a wilderness or forest where they, ‘more a motherless child than free man’, are met by a wife or mother-substitute: ‘the natural man, the good companion, pagan and unashamed – Queequeg or Chingachgook or Nigger Jim’.¹³ As Fiedler argues, this mother-substitute figure is a reminder of the nation’s past and thus inhabits the dual position of ‘a dream and a nightmare at once’.¹⁴ Fiedler asserts that this is precisely why tales of terror are so alluring for Americans: ‘in the United States, certain special guilts awaited projection in the gothic form’.¹⁵

Fiedler’s revelation that these novels project ‘special guilts’ has long since become the foundation for much of Gothic scholarship on American fiction.¹⁶ However, such scholarship typically examines American fiction through a national lens with even the Southern Gothic sometimes having its ‘regionality’ challenged.¹⁷ While the country’s regions undoubtedly share in common certain cultural values that emphasise the nation’s difference from other national identities, we would be remiss to overlook each region’s distinct culture, identity and history. By examining these regional distinctions, we gain insight to how certain groups maintain power over others. Specifically, we can better understand the ways that the Gothic is sometimes used by those in power to marginalise the powerless and other times used by the powerless – or by advocates for the powerless – to undermine dominant forces. Therefore, this study proposes to begin considering Gothic regionalism – a synthesis of the Gothic with critical regionalism – as a lens through which to examine how regional culture often shapes the ways that Gothic language, imagery and conventions are mobilised in American fiction.

To facilitate this, my study focuses on fiction produced during what is often considered to have been the United States’ most ‘unified’ time period in terms of a national identity: the immediate post-Second World War era. Generally speaking, the time period is often associated with economic growth and stability, threatened by an underlying current of Cold War tensions. As Morris Dickstein observes, a number of scholars have thus ‘tried to demonstrate that nearly every cultural phenomenon of those years, from genre films and literary criticism to abstract art, was somehow a reflex of the Cold War, a hegemonic expression of a national security state and the containment policy toward international Communism’.¹⁸ Despite much of Gothic post-war scholarship implementing this Cold War lens, the post-war fiction in this study reflects the cultural politics of local settings more than has previously been accounted for.¹⁹ My contention is that by implementing a regional lens, we find many post-war works exhibiting greater coherence than when placed solely in a national context, which tends to overlook their regional attributes. By using a regional lens to show how several works exhibit concerns outside of Cold War politics, the study: (1) establishes significant currents of how the Gothic is invoked to either label certain groups as ‘threats’ within each region’s culture and/or reveal the dominant group and their values as oppressive; (2) demonstrates regional trends in post-war fiction’s use of the Gothic that either emerge or extend existing uses of the Gothic to subvert the region’s dominant identity and culture; and (3) highlights exemplary and innovative uses of the Gothic that reveal the regional oppression of marginalised groups. The result is a reconsideration of how to approach the Gothic in American fiction as well as a new understanding of how several post-war American writers cast a far sharper critical eye than has been previously understood.

The post-war era is also particularly important because up until recently, many critics – even many of those who did not embrace a Cold War lens – mistakenly believed that the post-war rise in mass culture and urbanisation had rendered regionalism obsolete. As Michael C. Steiner and David M. Wrobel observe, the post-war cultural shift created the feeling that regionalism is ‘a lost cause doomed by the forces of modernity’.²⁰ However, over the past two decades, a renewed attention to regional narratives and identities has changed our understanding of American culture and authorship. Colin Woodard, for example, emphasises that ‘there isn’t and never has been one America, but rather several Americas’ separated by regional identities.²¹ To assert a unified culture is to ‘overlook a glaring historical fact: Americans have been deeply divided since the days of Jamestown and Plymouth’.²² Notably, Ginette Aley reveals that the importance of recognising local culture is ‘in being able to see people in their own right, as decision makers in their immediate world and … in realizing a region’s relationship to other regions and its role in larger national and transnational processes and histories’.²³

Aley’s insight is particularly worth dwelling on because when we dismiss regional influences on the formation of American culture, we deny an essential component of the nation’s history that is worth critical interrogation. As we will see, regions play an important role in the nation’s ‘process’ of identity formation as well as in the nation’s historical narrative. For example, as the second chapter mentions, New England historians and writers took advantage of the South’s defeat following the American Civil War by placing New England at the centre of the country’s historical narrative. This, of course, not only favours New England and buries the nation’s link to slavery, it also ignores that Virginia is the nation’s oldest colony and the birthplace of extremely influential figures, including four of the first five presidents of the United States. As another example, as chapter 3 suggests, the Midwest’s projection of the small town and idyllic homelife produced by Midwestern values served as a ‘healing ground’ for the United States following the Civil War, and similar to how New England’s narrative came to be accepted nationally, the Midwestern identity became widely co-opted nationally by the 1950s. This identity, however, hides both the oppressive qualities of ‘normality’ that small-town culture impresses upon the individual and the systematic removal of Native Americans to clear the Midwest for settlement.

Consequently, of great importance to this study is how dominant regional identities bury horrific events, histories and treatment of others. Regional identity and pride share in common with national identity the problem that both tend to unconsciously – and sometimes quite intentionally – repress or abject certain groups. For example, nineteenth-century historians favouring New England not only contributed to a narrative placing the region at the centre of the nation’s formation, they also often ignored – or severely relegated – Puritanical intolerance and maltreatment of others. When one investigates New England, they are likely to find puritanical intolerance not as an isolated incident during the Salem Witch Trials but as a pervasive force during its time that has left a cultural residue present in even modern texts. As Douglas Reichert Powell observes in his breakthrough work, Critical Regionalism (2007), a significant aspect to critical regionalism is to identify ‘the processes by which ideas about regions come into being and become influential’.²⁴ Therefore, it is important for scholars not just to recognise that regionalism exists even in works that evade the limiting, and sometimes dismissive, label of ‘local colour’, but to also ask ‘whose interests are served by a given version of region’.²⁵

The regional suppression of marginalised narratives to fashion a regional identity affects much American fiction wherein the plot is set in a specific area of the country. Since the dominant regional identity is ‘taken for granted like the circumambient air [we] breathe’, many works repeat the marginalisation of these people.²⁶ However, texts invoking the Gothic hold the potential to unveil hidden regional secrets that undermine both the national narrative and the dominant regional narrative. For example, a dominant regional understanding of Southern California would likely reflect its reputation as a place where dreams are realised through stardom and people can create a new identity. On the one hand, this idea of Southern California would not necessarily deviate too far from the dominant American identity that the country is a land of opportunity wherein one can remake themselves and achieve the ‘American dream’. On the other hand, within Southern California there are undoubtedly numerous marginal groups that undermine, serve to disrupt and/or haunt this identity whether it be Native Americans, Latinx Americans or women. This is inarguably true of every region of the country. Therefore, to know a place is to know its secrets, and few literary devices are as adept at unveiling secrets as those belonging to the Gothic.

Early in this book’s conception, I recognised the difficult task of narrowing down my subject matter. Woodard’s study alone asserts that at least eleven distinct American regions exist. Limiting the study’s scope to the post-war era certainly helped to an extent; however, even then, I encountered works that pushed me in competing directions of either broadening a region or narrowing it. As one example of the many organisational puzzles, works such as Edward Abbey’s early novels, Bernice Carey’s crime fiction and Jack Finney’s early genre fiction could be considered together under a highly generalised chapter on Western Gothic fiction that would combine them with the Southern California Gothic fiction that chapter 5 addresses. However, to do so felt like a disservice to the cultural differences that represent their specific regions and can be identified in their texts. It seemed, and I believe the study bears this out, that these works would be best contextualised in separate chapters discussing Southern California, the Southwest or the Pacific Northwest. Unfortunately, I could not cover every region, so with constraints such as time, space and resources in mind, I eventually made the difficult decision to exclude several regions and their accompanying works.

In addition to the problem of which regions to write about, I faced the problem of how to decide what constitutes a region. For example, some scholars and regionalists still debate what constitutes the Midwest or the South. Is Texas part of the South? Is Missouri? Interestingly enough, critical regionalism has largely wrested itself free from preoccupations over geography. As Powell explains, a significant trend in regional studies is that there is less ‘emphasis’ on ‘the definitions of region themselves’ and greater emphasis on ‘the processes by which ideas about regions come into being and become influential’.²⁷ In this regard, I am less interested in a region’s geographical boundaries than I am about how particular ideas about that region have excluded certain groups and the oppression that they have faced. For example, I am far less interested in whether or not Missouri is a midwestern state than I am about ‘the Midwest’ as a cultural idea – not much unlike Benedict Anderson’s notion of ‘an imagined community’ – and how that community’s identity as a ‘healing ground’ for the United States conveniently excludes the mass genocide of Native Americans.²⁸

In contrast to having to narrow the number of regions engaged, this study embraces a variety of Gothic offshoots, critical concepts and motifs. As detailed above, the Gothic possesses a deep history that extends beyond the literary genre that emerged following Walpole’s novel. Rather than being identified as a fixed genre or literary mode, the Gothic is best understood as ‘a fluid tendency’ or, as described above, a ‘negative aesthetic’ that crosses any number of genres and art forms.²⁹ Therefore, readers should not be surprised to see works typically classified as pulp fiction, horror fiction, detective fiction, hardboiled fiction, science fiction, domestic fiction and literary fiction discussed here. With few exceptions, there is little interest in debates over each work’s genre classification; instead, each work’s relationship to the Gothic within its regional context is the focus. Therefore, this book homes in on specific conventions, tropes and, in some cases, even theoretical concepts worth highlighting.

In regard to this last point, and as can be derived from the discussion above, the study’s theoretical framework is heavily indebted to previous Gothic scholarship rooted in psychoanalysis. This work not only borrows terminology from these ideas but also attempts to demonstrate that each text either features the return of the region’s repressed past horrors, or reveals an abject secret that is simultaneously linked to and rejected by a part of the region’s dominant identity. The former can be aligned with Freud’s theorisation of the uncanny and the latter with Kristeva’s theorisation of the abject – although the two closely resemble one another. Freud’s essay ‘The Uncanny’ (1919) has long been considered a significant work in Gothic studies for its meditation on fears linked to ‘animated objects, ghosts, fear of premature burial and notions of the double’ as manifestations of ‘the breakdown of a sense of subjective unity in the face of unconscious and external disturbances’.³⁰ In the words of Friedrich Schelling, one of the many definitions Freud examines, the uncanny is ‘the name for everything that ought to have remained … secret and hidden but has come to light’.³¹ Freud’s exploration of definitions simultaneously emphasises the obsolete usage of the uncanny (unheimlich) as ‘unhomely’, suggesting that the return of the repressed elicits a strange feeling of familiarity. Kristeva draws a fine line of distinction between her theory of abjection and Freud’s uncanny. It is ‘essentially different from uncanniness, more violent, too, abjection is elaborated through a failure to recognize its kin; nothing is familiar, not even the shadow of a memory’.³² Unlike the uncanny, abjection is so horrifyingly revolting that all possible recognition of a familiarity is short-circuited. Kristeva provides a number of examples, including ‘loathing an item of food, a piece of filth, waste, or dung’, and suggesting that the resulting reactions of ‘spasms and vomiting’ serve to ‘protect me’.³³ By physically retching in the face of such grotesque creations, the self can maintain its identity as ‘naturally’ separate, clean and healthy. In other words, abjection is a subject’s refusal to acknowledge any kinship to the abject object despite the object originating from the subject; more significantly, it is a refusal that serves to protect the self from the destabilising threat that the abject object presents. These two theories can be especially useful when reading Gothic texts in relation to a region’s identity, and are explicitly addressed in two chapters where it is necessary to understand the concepts to draw out the most striking aspects of the works under examination.³⁴ As can be deduced, American Gothic texts highlighted here often invoke Gothic tropes regularly connected to either the abject or the uncanny by bringing attention to marginalised pasts and/or people who have been cast out of a region’s dominant identity or narrative.

Accordingly, each chapter opens with a historical overview of significantly relevant ways that the region’s literature has used the Gothic, tracing the use of Gothic imagery and conventions within the region’s literary history. Each overview is by no means comprehensive but rather seeks to establish a major current of the region’s use of the Gothic. For example, in most – though not all – early regional literature, the dominant culture utilises Gothic language to alienate particular groups they deem threatening or subhuman. Often, there is the production of subsequent literature that subverts the dominant culture by inverting their implementation of the Gothic to reveal that culture and those who benefit from it as monstrous because of the horrors that has been inflicted on the powerless. I establish these currents to contextualise one of the most significant findings of this study: Gothic innovations within each region’s post-war fiction. After providing close readings of post-war fiction to show the ways in which these works are connected to their regional Gothic tradition, each chapter focuses solely on the works of one or two major writers that are either exemplary of a post-war regional trend or unusually innovative in their use of the Gothic within their regional context. Through these works, we see some of the most fascinating mobilisations of the Gothic being employed in an attempt to upend the dominant regional narratives, norms and identities. In so doing, this book accomplishes its goal of drawing critical attention to long overlooked works and writers.

The chapters have been arranged by chronological order from oldest identity