american gothic essay

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American Gothic

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• BBC - Culture - How American Gothic became an icon
• The Guardian - American Gothic: a state visit to Britain for the first couple

American Gothic , painting by Grant Wood completed in 1930.

Grant Wood, an artist from Iowa, was a member of the Regionalist movement in American art, which championed the solid rural values of central America against the complexities of European-influenced East Coast Modernism. Yet Wood’s most famous painting is artificially staged, complex, and ambivalent. Its most obvious inspiration is the work of Flemish artists such as Jan van Eyck that Wood had seen on visits to Europe, though it may also show an awareness of the contemporary German Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement.

“These are types of people I have known all my life. I tried to characterize them truthfully—to make them more like themselves than they were in actual life,” Grant Wood said about American Gothic .

Wood noticed the American Gothic–style white house, built in 1881 with its pinnacle and churchlike upper window, in the small town of Eldon, along the Des Moines River in southeastern Iowa. He used his sister Nan and his dentist, Dr. B.H. McKeeby, as models for the couple standing in front of it; each posed separately for Wood as he made his painting. The pitchfork—originally a rake in Wood’s sketches for the painting—suggests the man is a farmer, although whether this is a husband and wife or a father and daughter is unclear. They are a tight-lipped, buttoned-up couple. The farmer’s pose is defensive, the pitchfork planted as if to repel trespassers. The woman’s sideways glance is open to any reading. Both are posed to suggest the framing of a camera portrait for which neither subject is visibly enthusiastic. The posture of the couple also suggests the rigid countenances of Northern Renaissance portraiture. In any case, Wood intended them as archetypes , remarking, “These are types of people I have known all my life. I tried to characterize them truthfully—to make them more like themselves than they were in actual life.”

Superficially simple and naive, American Gothic is rich in visual puns and echoes—for example between the pitchfork and the bib of the farmer’s overalls, and the pinnacle on the house visually repeating the church spire in the far distance. Wood includes tiny details that draw interest: there are seven trees behind the balloon-frame house, suggestive of the seven trees of Isaiah 41:19; the woman wears a dress with a near-clerical collar; the unfaded calico drapes in the windows point to both orderliness, undone a touch by the loose strands of hair on the woman’s nape, and a certain degree of prosperity. Wood consistently rejected suggestions that the painting was a satire of the Midwest and its conservative values. Instead, with the three-tined pitchfork being read as meant to evoke the Christian trinity, the painting is perhaps better read as a paean to rural Protestant earnestness, humorless and hardworking, ever with an eye to salvation through one’s work and works.

An icon of American popular culture , the American Gothic trope lent itself to many parodies in popular culture. The painting is ambiguous and open to interpretation on many lines, and so is a favourite of curricula in art history and art appreciation. The painting is housed at the Art Institute of Chicago , where it is among the most visited works of art on exhibit.

Analisis of work “American Gothic” Essay

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“American Gothic” is a painting by Grant Wood in 1930. The image is iconic at this stage in American history, depicting the image of a stern-faced man holding a pitchfork and a younger woman both standing in front of a white farmhouse. According to reports, the artist was inspired to create the painting when he saw the farmhouse from the window of a car in his home state of Iowa. “He decided to paint the house – built in the ‘carpenter gothic’ style, which applied the lofty architecture of European cathedrals to flimsy American frame houses – along with ‘the kind of people I fancied should live in that house” (Fineman, 2005).

The image has made significant transitions in the way in which it has been interpreted over the years, largely due to the way in which people have approached it. Although the picture is widely considered to be the picture of the ultimate example of a Midwestern farmer and his wife, there are conflicting reports that Wood intended to represent a farmer and his wife. While Fineman suggests that this interpretation was offered by Wood’s sister Nan, who posed for the female character and was perhaps embarrassed by the prospect that she would be married to a man obviously so much older than she, the true nature of this relationship is actually not as important as the individual viewer’s interpretation.

Although we may be told what a particular painting is supposed to mean, ultimately, it is up to the individual to determine what the piece means to them in particular. As John Armstrong says, “however crowded the gallery, an encounter with a work of art is always something we pursue alone – no one else can make the work matter to us. When contemplating a work of art, one of the key questions ought to be ‘what is this to me?” (Armstrong, 2000: 4-5).

The reception of this piece of art illustrates the degree of difference in perspectives a different set of eyes can introduce to the work. According to Fineman (2005), Wood entered the painting in a competition at the Art Institute of Chicago where most of the judges considered it trivial and meaningless, but one patron of the museum saw something more important. It was thanks to this patron that the work received the bronze award along with a small cash prize and that the museum acquired the piece itself. When images of the painting finally reached Iowa, the response was largely negative as Wood’s fellow Iowans were dismayed at the way in which he portrayed them, as if they were always “grim-faced, puritanical Bible-thumpers” (Fineman, 2005).

More sophisticated assessments of the painting held that it was a brilliant satire of the “rigidity of American rural or small-town life” (Fineman, 2005). Wood himself carefully fostered new ways of thinking about the painting as it became more emblematic of “American virtue and the pioneer spirit” (Fineman, 2005). Looking at the painting, all of these various interpretations are certainly justifiable and, when one is looking at the painting with these ideas in mind, it is possible to trace their origins.

However, none of these interpretations convey any true meaning to the individual unless one considers what the painting means to them. For me, the painting is representative of the restrictive ways of life of the past as fathers stood jealous guard over their daughters, often to the daughter’s detriment. While attempting to view the image as one of a farmer and his wife, I noticed that the eyes of the younger woman are looking in the direction of the man but seem to see well beyond him, as if she longed to be able to explore what she might find beyond the trees, which are hinted at in the background.

Although she is dressed very conservatively, a wisp of hair falling from her bun and the sad, slightly cross look on her face indicates to me a sense of wishing she had more options in her attire and self-expression. They are obviously posing for a picture, as seen in the man’s direct gaze at the painter, but the woman stays distracted, a step behind the man and seeming as if she would run if she thought she had a chance.

This chance is removed from her by the barbed points of the man’s pitchfork which are repeated throughout the painting as if the girl is surrounded by pitchforks that threaten harm if she steps outside her bounds. At the same time, they ensure no one enters the space the man has defined as his territory, including the space of the woman’s social world. Whether she is daughter or wife, therefore, makes very little difference. Either way, she is trapped in a world not necessarily of her own choosing and obviously longs for something else.

While a number of interpretations have been offered on this image in a variety of ways and in numerous different social periods, these can only help to inform a personal opinion about the painting rather than take the place of this personal opinion. Painting means nothing if it does not mean something to the individual viewing the piece and this requires a close examination of the image in order to fully appreciate it.

While it has been argued that the woman is the daughter rather than the wife of the farmer, in my personal exploration of the piece, I have determined that her status really doesn’t matter to the meaning of the piece. Instead, to me, the image depicts the rigid social constraints women often found themselves in even in the early 1900s. Despite living in the free world, these women were not free, often living behind metaphorical pitchforks that governed their actions, their dress and their behavior, but could not control their inner desires or dreams.

Works Cited

Armstrong, John. Move Closer: An Intimate Philosophy of Art. New York: Farrar, Straus Girous, 2000.

Fineman, Mia. “The Most Famous Farm Couple in the World.” Slate. (2005). Web.

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The reality behind American Gothic

By Sarah Churchwell

Published on 16 February 2017

As ‘America after the Fall’ brings some of the country’s most iconic works to Europe for the first time, Sarah Churchwell considers the cultural and political backdrop to Depression Era art.

From the Spring 2017 issue of RA Magazine , issued quarterly to Friends of the RA .

A farmer stands ramrod straight, holding a three-pronged pitchfork and wearing bib overalls under a crumpled black jacket grown rusty with age. The pale blue Iowa sky is slightly less flinty than his expression. On his right stands a woman whom many take for his wife, but was intended by the artist to be his daughter. Her mouth seems similarly uncompromising, as is the blonde hair scraped back from her face. A straggling lock of hair, liberated by work, softens her expression; a closer look at her eyes reveals the worry.

Together, the couple below appear singularly grim. Behind them is a cream farmhouse with a window-blind on the upper floor flocked by the same pattern covering the woman’s simple brown dress. The window frame is Gothic, and many observers assume that it alone gives the painting its name. But the couple’s old-fashioned dress, demeanour and agrarian setting would also have been deemed figuratively "gothic" when the picture was painted, much as any old-fashioned style might be called "medieval". To be an American yeoman farmer while the rest of the nation extolled the modern was to belong to the dark ages.

American Gothic , painted in 1930 by Iowa native Grant Wood, is probably the most famous American painting in the world. If any artworks merit that overworked adjective "iconic", this is one of them. The contrast between modernity and archaism registers even in the picture’s Flemish style, which was also once called "Gothic". Wood employed the techniques of the so-called "primitives of Flanders" – whose 15th and early 16th-century works were later referred to as "Gothic painting" – to suggest his couple’s anachronistic qualities. Among other historical ironies that Wood’s juxtaposition creates, it captures the moment when Iowa, once a radical state dedicated to the fight against slavery (an all-but forgotten history that is the subject of Marilynne Robinson’s 2004 Pulitzer Prizewinning novel Gilead ), had become a byword for white rural conservatism.

The painting was immediately exhibited, and then purchased, by the Art Institute of Chicago , where it has hung ever since. Almost a century later, thanks to the exhibition America after the Fall it has made its first voyage to Europe, arriving in Paris at the Musée de l’Orangerie last autumn before making its way to the RA this spring. There is something ironically fitting about this, the rural Iowa couple clinging to outmoded values who finally leave the American heartland, at the age of nearly 90, to discover the world, rather as if American Gothic just got a passport.

For me, seeing this painting come to Europe for the first time is a decidedly uncanny experience, as it is one of the first famous pictures I remember seeing, and the one I most associate with home. I grew up in Chicago, and spent much of my adolescence wandering the grand corridors of the Art Institute, where I always took a swing by to look at American Gothic , enjoying the frisson of seeing in "real life" a picture so familiar from its endless reproductions and iterations. It’s such a stock image that I couldn’t possibly say when I first encountered it, but I vividly remember the excitement of seeing the original, when I was about ten. Many years later, I would read Walter Benjamin’s influential 1936 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction , which argues that reproducing art makes it democratically accessible, thus decreasing the mystical sense of "aura" surrounding an artwork. That said, it is also true that reproduction can increase the sense of aura around an original: the more an image is reproduced, the more exclusive its original seems. There is nothing so original as that which has been endlessly copied.

America after the Fall consists of 45 American artworks from between 1929, when Wall Street crashed, and 1941, when the United States entered the Second World War. This is the art of the Great Depression, and it is depressing indeed to note how relevant its themes have become. It was the most severe economic downturn of any Western country in modern history; in 1933, the worst year of the Depression, US unemployment hit 25 per cent and nearly half the nation’s banks had failed. International trade declined during the period by half, while farmers were especially hard hit, as crop prices in America fell by as much as 60 per cent. These economic conditions were exacerbated by a devastating drought and winds that hit the Great Plains in waves during the 1930s, creating the "Dust Bowl" that destroyed the livelihoods of millions of farmers. Meanwhile, as the show’s excellent exhibition catalogue notes, the US population doubled between 1890 and 1930, largely because of immigration: by the 1929 Crash, one in every ten Americans was an immigrant or born to immigrants. During a time of intense social anxiety and unrest, a sense emerged that art might be reparative, rather than consolatory, that it could take part in social protest, but also contribute to a democratic celebration of communities and bridge-building.

Some of the most familiar names, and pictures, of the period are represented in the exhibition: several major works by Grant Wood, Edward Hopper, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Hart Benton, as well as a very early Jackson Pollock and a Georgia O’Keeffe ( Cow’s Skull with Calico Roses , 1931).

Late in life, O’Keeffe wrote: "Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest." This admonition is worth considering more closely. O’Keeffe does not insist only that what she has done should be of interest, but rather, what she has done with where she has been. Context and environment are part of interpretation – O’Keeffe didn’t want her work to be dislocated from its origins. "Where I have been" may mean the literal physical settings from which O’Keeffe and some of her contemporaries drew inspiration, in her case especially the majestic landscapes of the American southwest; but it may also figuratively denote the emotional, psychic or personal journeys that are also a matter of where artists, or their societies, have been. The question, as O’Keeffe notes, is what we have done with where we have been.

A widespread sense that the national iconography needed to be reclaimed and reimagined took hold of artists and thinkers across the country

Sarah Churchwell

Georgia O’Keeffe image

Cow’s skull with calico roses, 1931.

Alexandre Hogue image

Erosion no. 2 – mother earth laid bare, 1936.

Grant Wood image

Daughters of revolution, 1932.

This is an exhibition about what American artists did with where they had been: it is about context – historical, cultural, geographical, political – and it brings that context to life with great elegance and economy. It is an exhibition in active dialogue with modern American history.

In his 1918 essay On Creating a Usable Past , the American critic Van Wyck Brooks argued that America should view its past not from the perspective "of the successful fact but of the creative impulse". For Brooks and his colleagues in the Seven Arts movement, this was an American project, a nation’s encounter with its spiritual heritage. Lewis Mumford later wrote that artists and writers in the 1920s were the "scouts and prospectors in a new enterprise, the bringing to the surface of America’s buried cultural past."

By 1930, this influential lesson had been absorbed by painters like Grant Wood, whose Daughters of Revolution (1932, above) is a commentary on the historical irony of reactionary genealogical societies creating aristocracies out of revolution. Three prim, old, white women stand in old-fashioned dress, their expressions exuding self-satisfaction and superiority. They are positioned in front of a representation of Emanuel Leutze’s famous historical painting Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851); the revolutionaries’ radicalism and daring is counterpointed, pointedly, against the women’s conservative complacency, but Wood is also implicitly attacking the hypocrisies embedded in American mythologies. One of the women is holding an heirloom tea cup, drinking tea instead of dumping it in Boston Harbour, while all of the women would have despised the German-born immigrant Leutze, despite revering his painting. Wood slyly implies the Anglo-Saxon racial superiority being celebrated: "I don’t like to have anyone try to set up an aristocracy of birth in a Republic," he declared, calling the women three "tory gals". Similarly, American Gothic was an ironic commentary on the state of the Jeffersonian agrarian idyll during the onset of the Great Depression, a moment when many American artists and critics were declaring, flatly, that the American experiment had failed.

It was in 1931 that the phrase "American Dream" was first coined as a way to describe the American experiment, its hope that the nation might create a land of opportunity and promise for all, in a book called The Epic of America . Its author, James Truslow Adams, like so many Americans, was seeking to explain the failures of the nation, how it could have been brought so low. He argued that the country had lost sight of its values by merely chasing material prosperity, whereas the American Dream was properly a dream of a higher purpose, a spiritual vision of a nation in which humanity could better itself. The phrase instantly caught America’s imagination, appearing throughout the decade in debates and discussions about how the country could right its course. That sense of dreams and nightmares, of surrealism and the uncanny, of history recurring in a mythopoeic landscape, would recur throughout the art of the period as well. A widespread sense that the national iconography needed to be reclaimed and reimagined took hold of artists and thinkers across the country, as people began to question what the American Dream might mean in reality. They did not ask, as we have done during our own downturn, why the American Dream had failed; they thought they had failed, and wondered if the nation might be saved by an American Dream of a higher purpose than merely creating material prosperity.

Confronted with the stark failure of unregulated capitalism, America began in the 1930s seriously to consider socialism and communism for the only time in its history. American artists in particular were attracted to the promises of an entirely new social and political system, given the manifest failures of the old ones. The so-called Popular Front and the WPA – the Works Progress Administration – both sought to put artists to work creating explicitly political art, even propaganda. The government encouraged artists to discover, or create, an "American Scene" that addressed native arts and culture. They were seeking great statements of American public life, history and identity that would uplift the people and help revitalise and regenerate American society; the Public Works of Art Project particularly emphasised uplifting treatments of local places and the common people.

That sense of dreams and nightmares, of surrealism and the uncanny, of history recurring in a mythopoeic landscape, would recur.

The immense American murals of the 1930s, like those of Thomas Hart Benton, with their markedly Soviet-agitprop style, still grace some of America’s most important public buildings, including several state capitals and a great many post offices. Benton, one of the best-known public muralists, set the standard for WPA projects with America Today for New York’s New School for Social Research, which was commissioned in 1930 and is now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The scale of such art reflected a prevailing sense that monuments were required that might create a national, public or collective sense of identity.

An aesthetic debate developed between the advocates of realism as specifically and rootedly American, and abstraction as a universal language that might transcend nationalism: the mimetic social realism of the WPA murals turned toward an allegorical vision of history. Allegory was also put to the work of political and social protest by painters such as Alexandre Hogue. In Erosion No. 2 – Mother Earth Laid Bare (1936, above), Hogue painted an allegory of the terrible droughts of the mid-1930s in which farmland is depicted in the form of a nude woman’s body exposed by erosion.

In Aspiration (1936, below), Aaron Douglas encapsulates the progress of African Americans rising up from slavery by depicting dark figures in chains at the bottom of the image, with large silhouetted figures rising up from them holding symbols of knowledge and labour, bathed in violet light, pointing towards a futuristic city on a hill. Joe Jones likened his painting American Justice (1933) to a Renaissance crucifixion scene: a young black woman, her white dress torn from her bare breasts, lies in the foreground, a rope hanging ominously behind her, while white costumed members of the Ku Klux Klan burn a small house in the background.

The Harlem Renaissance, with its celebration of African American music, art, literature and history, was in full force, as paintings such as William H. Johnson’s vibrantly coloured Street Life, Harlem (1939) and Arthur Dove’s Swing Music (Louis Armstrong) (1938, below) suggest, while the latter also reflects the rising force of abstraction, its irregular shapes in varying reds and yellows against a deep black background evoking "red hot" jazz in a darkened space. Charles Green Shaw’s Wrigley’s (1937, below) prefigures Pop Art, fusing Abstract Expressionism and advertising iconography, as if a pack of gum had zoomed into an early Rothko.

Aaron Douglas image

Aspiration, 1936.

Charles Green Shaw image

Wrigley’s, 1937.

Arthur Dove image

Swing music (louis armstrong), 1938.

Less playfully and more mimetically, Edward Hopper was painting scenes of urban desolation, capturing the disappointment and deflated hopes of ordinary Americans during the Depression. Hopper’s vision of urban realism is not one of shiny new skyscrapers of geometric modernist abstraction, its dreams of Futurist utopias, but older, wearied, worn-out looking individuals and isolated buildings. His places are sparsely populated, full of voids and dark spaces, as if people are leaving a city about to be blighted. Hopper’s most famous painting, Nighthawks , which also hangs at the Art Institute of Chicago, was painted in 1942, just beyond the dates of this exhibition. But two of Hopper’s paintings are represented at the RA show, including Gas (1940), with its red fuel-pumps standing alone in the country landscape as if inspired by a line from The Great Gatsby : "Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of wayside garages, where new red gas-pumps sat out in pools of light." Hopper’s shiny streamlined gas-pumps stand in stark contrast to the dark, undulating trees and hills behind them, the isolated attendant alone in a vast landscape.

The second Hopper painting included in the show is the marvellous New York Movie (1939, below), which are placed in tacit discussion with two cityscapes by Reginald Marsh, whose highly populated canvases conjure the bustle and noise of urban existence. By no coincidence, both painters were interested in the movies as a symbol of modern life.

Hopper’s New York Movie emphasises the loneliness and longing of movie-goers. In a half-empty movie theatre a fraction of the silver screen can be glimpsed in the upper left corner, while off to the right, in the golden glow of lamplight, an usherette stands alone, lost in thought. As the catalogue notes, the screen shows "snowy mountain tops" perhaps intended to evoke the hit film Lost Horizon (1937), a story of paradise found and lost. In his scene outside a cinema, Twenty Cent Movie (1936), Marsh similarly suggests the role that movies played in shaping ordinary Americans’ aspirations and dreams, while ironically underscoring the contrast between their lives and the fairy-tale images of Hollywood. While the gaudy background colours of the advertisements and movie posters promise the "joys of the flesh", the movie-goers self-consciously pose, imitating their favourite stars, but do not interact.

Hollywood offered escapism into fantasies of all varieties, as the canvases of Hopper and Marsh suggest, including fantasies of history. The curators at L’Orangerie decided to close their version of the exhibition with a montage of Depression Era film, which worked strikingly well in dialogue with the show. Perhaps no more notoriously nostalgic movie has ever been made than that of Gone with the Wind in 1939, a few scenes from which were included in the Paris show. But the producers of Gone with the Wind were also creating a "usable past", one that spoke to audiences in 1939. As the iconic and climactic scene of Scarlett O’Hara vowing that she’ll never be hungry again suggests, the movie resonated with Depression Era audiences because of what it said about their experiences: it is about fighting for survival. The story certainly offered consoling lies about the antebellum South, but it also told current truths about hunger and endurance in the 1930s.

The cinema montage in the show also included the iconic Art Deco Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz (1939); Fred Astaire in discomfiting minstrelsy black-face, tap-dancing in Swing Time (1936); a homage to modernist technology as Carole Lombard excitedly takes her first plane trip in the earliest Technicolor movie, the hilariously cynical Nothing Sacred (1937) (also an edgy clip for the curators to choose, given that Lombard would tragically die in a plane crash while selling war bonds in 1942); and James Stewart demanding that the American government live up to its democratic values in Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939), a scene clearly chosen for its tacit commentary on the state of American politics now. Hollywood was central to the story of American life the exhibition is telling, and visitors may well want to explore some of these films from the era as well.

In 1934, F. Scott Fitzgerald published Tender is the Night . The novel begins just before the Wall Street Crash, with a young movie star Rosemary Hoyt, symbolising American innocence, who still has her very American "bouncing, breathless and exigent idealism". By the end of the novel, she, like her country, has lost her idealism, but not her stardom. The allure of American dreams remains powerful, even when they become more mature, darker and more cynical. The uses of history, art, allegory and mythmaking in nation-building are clear, but they’re also useful when rebuilding a nation. When America hit rock bottom, its artists helped it reimagine itself. After the fall, there are lessons to be learned about how to get back up.

Sarah Churchwell is Professorial Fellow of American Literature at the University of London, and author of Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby (Virago) .

America After the Fall: Painting in the 1930s , The Sackler Wing, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 25 February – 4 June 2017.

Events Grant Wood’s ‘American Gothic’, unvarnished with R. Tripp Evans, Friday 17 March, Royal Academy of Arts. The art of the American dream with Sarah Churchwell, Monday 27 March, Royal Academy of Arts.

Exhibition organised by the Art Institute of Chicago in collaboration with the Royal Academy of Arts, London and Établissement public du musée d'Orsay et du musée de l'Orangerie, Paris

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• > The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction
• > The rise of American Gothic

Book contents

• Frontmatter
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The genesis of “Gothic” fiction
• 3 The 1790s
• 4 French and German Gothic
• 5 Gothic fictions and Romantic writing in Britain
• 6 Scottish and Irish Gothic
• 7 English Gothic theatre
• 8 The Victorian Gothic in English novels and stories, 1830-1880
• 9 The rise of American Gothic
• 10 British Gothic fiction, 1885-1930
• 11 The Gothic on screen
• 12 Colonial and postcolonial Gothic
• 13 The contemporary Gothic
• 14 Aftergothic
• Guide to further reading
• Filmography
• Series list

9 - The rise of American Gothic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2006

From the turn of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century and the beginnings of a distinctive American literature, the Gothic has stubbornly flourished in the United States. Its cultural role, though, has been entirely paradoxical: an optimistic country founded upon the Enlightenment principles of liberty and “the pursuit of happiness,” a country that supposedly repudiated the burden of history and its irrational claims, has produced a strain of literature that is haunted by an insistent, undead past and fascinated by the strange beauty of sorrow. How can the strikingly ironic, even perverse, career of the Gothic in America be accounted for? Why has it been so at home on such inhospitable ground?

The most common responses to these questions have recourse to conventional metaphors: the Gothic, it is frequently reasoned, embodies and gives voice to the dark nightmare that is the underside of “the American dream.” This formulation is true up to a point, for it reveals the limitations of American faith in social and material progress. Yet a simple opposition between the convenient figures of dream and nightmare is overly reductive. These clichés, and the impulses in American life that they represent, are not in mere opposition; they actually interfuse and interact with each other. This realization will take us far in understanding the odd centrality of Gothic cultural production in the United States, where the past constantly inhabits the present, where progress generates an almost unbearable anxiety about its costs, and where an insatiable appetite for spectacles of grotesque violence is part of the texture of everyday reality.

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• The rise of American Gothic
• By Eric Savoy
• Edited by Jerrold E. Hogle , University of Arizona
• Book: The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction
• Online publication: 28 May 2006
• Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521791243.009

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Formal Analysis on American Gothic, Essay Example

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Grant Wood’s American Gothic (1930)

This painting is probably America’s most recognizable one, known even to those who do not know its age, locale, title, or name of its painter. Its worldwide fame is on par with that of the Mona Lisa and The Scream. Like those latter two iconic works, American Gothic has been endlessly copied, parodied, and interpreted over the years. Grant himself was ambivalent on what it meant, if anything. Initially some Iowans (the painting’s locale) hated it and Wood both.

Being a portrait, it has an entirely different look from the hyper-rounded, almost cartoonish appearance of Wood’s landscapes, some of which look like they could almost have been done by Thomas Hart Benton in a mellow mood. There is nothing outwardly exaggerated about the farmer and his wife (or daughter — the relationship is unaddressed), nor the house behind them. (However, a photo of the pair in modern dress taken some time after the picture was taken shows that the woman’s face in the painting is much narrower than the actual model’s. The man’s face, by contrast, is virtually a photographic likeness.) The other elements — its composition, line, space, light, color, and overall impression are organized, tight, and terse — and almost entirely a depression-era plains derivative (called Carpenter Gothic) of the Northern Renaissance, particularly the Flemish school. Grant studied that branch extensively during his early trips to Europe, and basing American Gothic on that artistic template necessarily limited his options. But this was not a problem. The arched window at the center of the picture, above and behind the couple, is the inspiration for the entire painting. It provides its focal point and title, the latter because its design is clearly derived from classic European Gothic-era Church windows (Douglas, 2011). There is nothing else remarkable about the building. The window is everything.

Wood saw that window from his car one day, and was struck by it. He thought it somewhat pretentious, yet artistically affecting. Next he thought of who would likely inhabit the house. And these are the three fundamental elements the picture is built from. In other words, it’s a triptych, a Renaissance staple of European art, updated and transplanted with a wry but serious twist to the American Midwest. However, the window is not realistic in the sense of reporting exactly what the painter saw: it’s actually noticeably wider than its painted version. That artistic narrowness is also central to the picture. It is reinforced by the vertical slat-construction showing on both floors of the house and red barn, as well in the subtle but emphatic narrowness of the man and woman. She shows sloping shoulders, flat chest, a long neck, narrow face, and hair pulled back tightly around it. The man’s head is, if anything, even narrower, so much so that it counters the effect of his rectangular shoulders. The final emphasis on narrowness is the weird mirroring of the man’s pitchfork (which itself echoes the triptych) on his bib overall and shirt. All this is obvious, as what it all connotates: the couple were as narrow-minded as their faces.

Whatever more that narrowness was actually meant to convey (if anything), the colors used are another expression of that design and sentiment. The only pronounced ones are dark — either black or brown — and white. I think this harkens back to the Northern Renaissance effect as well, and in this particular painting he achieves a typical supporting effect by putting the darker colors well in front of the contrasting pale blue sky. Some commentators have also noted the corpse-like look of the man. Whether that was deliberate or not, the combined effect of the two dour faces in dark and old fashioned clothing (the woman’s rickrack was already old-fashioned) does lend a funeral sense to the picture; the man’s black coat indicates he is a minister of the local church; the woman looks turned away, as if in grief; and the shaded windows in day was a mourning tradition. But as for their faces, Grant may simply have been mimicking 19 th century photographs, where long exposure required people to stand perfectly still and maintain the same expression — that being the commonly given reason as to why few of the subjects ever smiled. (However, in Wood’s other portraits, almost none of the subjects smile.)

Once Wood saw the window, he had a difficult choice to make: how many people to put in the picture. It seems obvious now, but a look at Grant’s other portraits, both before and after this one, show that he preferred to paint a single person. Woman with Plants (1929) is a close precursor to American Gothic (the woman even wears a cameo), but it is unknown to the public. Having decided on a presumably married couple (and there is no reason to think of them as other than married), next came the choice of how to place the couple — which on the left and the right? If we assume the man to be right-handed, then had he been on the left (looking at the picture), he would have had to hold the pitchfork in his left hand to keep the pitchfork in the center of the picture, which is probably a design imperative. Interestingly, during traditional weddings, the groom is on right (looking at them from behind as they stand facing the minister) in order to keep his right “sword hand” free to fight off enemies (Stritof). In this picture, then, the pitchfork is in the man’s sword hand. Had Grant composed the picture with the man on the left side and holding the pitchfork in his left hand, we may be sure it would be resulted in a good deal of earnest interpretation and endless questions about it.

There has been a good deal of earnest interpretation and endless questions anyway. But that is probably the fate of all great art when it is seen by thousands, then (in modern times) millions. This increases with longevity of relevance. American Gothic has it. This is the central fact of a great work of art: it simply is. No one really knows why . It keeps its secrets from us.

Works Cited

Douglas, Chad. Connect Tristates. Trip to American Gothic House . 2011.Web.

Stritof, Sheri. About.com. Marriage: Groom on the Right, Bride on the Left . 2012. Web.

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The American Gothic

• June 4, 2018
• 18th Century , 19th Century , 20th Century , Collection Essays

Introduction

Ever read a strange book or watch a scary film, and feel the hairs on your arms stand on end? Ever get the “chills” encountering a creepy story, or have a hard-to-pin-down, icky feeling while standing in a cemetery or house that feels “haunted”? Have you ever had a funny feeling, but can’t quite put your finger on what it is that’s actually bothering you?

Those feelings are intrinsic to the experience of reading Gothic literature. Many authors of Gothic literature capitalized on those creepy feelings in order to usher in a new literary experience for readers. Broadly conceived, the Gothic is a sub-category of the Romantic genre including poetry, short stories, or novels designed to thrill readers by providing mystery and blood-curdling accounts of villainy, murder, and the supernatural. Common characteristics of classic Gothic literature include: wild and desolate landscapes; ancient buildings (ruined mansions, monasteries, etc.); castles and dungeons; secret doors and winding stairways; and apparitions and phantoms (“Literary Terms and Definitions”). J. A. Cuddon aptly describes one important quality of the Gothic: “an atmosphere of brooding gloom” ( Dictionary of Literary Terms , 381-82). While many Gothic texts include seemingly impossible scenarios and otherworldly events, the biggest, and most effective, thrill of the Gothic is how it taps into the essential terrors of human experience, hidden fears and desires, and the hauntings of the historical past. Narratives about crumbling castles and damsels in distress may not be in style anymore, but many characteristics of the Gothic prevail today in popular culture—ranging from the Harry Potter series, to noir films, to the Twilight franchise.

For the purposes of introducing and studying the Gothic in the classroom, however, one important characteristic is the particular role the genre plays in American literature, history, and culture. The American Gothic can be approached as a cultural lens, through which we can examine the social, political, and aesthetic investments of a particular historical period.

Gothic literature has a long, complex, and multi-layered history. In many ways, the Gothic genre invites many larger questions about the literary field, including—but not limited to—the ideas of how and when literary “canons” are formed, by whom, and under what conditions. As with any genre, the frameworks of the Gothic can be studied, as well as disrupted. For instance, how would our perspective on the American Gothic change in the context of transatlantic (Henry James), postcolonial (Jean Rhys), or North American (Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood) perspectives? While this essay focuses on writers often taught in American literature classrooms, it is necessary to recognize—and even challenge—the categories that have organized how we read and teach literature in the classroom.

Finally, this collection approaches the American Gothic literary text is a cultural and social object; in other words, not only does it convey important material in the writing itself, as it pertains to conventions related to the language (plot, underlying symbolism and messages, staging a critique, calling attention to a social problem, etc.). As a physical object, an American Gothic text also performs important cultural work. Through observing and analyzing its paratextual qualities (qualities of the text other than the written language, including its physical appearance, circumstances of publication, book sales, circulation, etc.), we can encounter, first-hand, the ways in which an American Gothic text functions as a historical and cultural artifact.

This Digital Collections in the Classroom essay gives a taste of the vast array of items found in The Newberry Library’s collection pertaining to the foundations of Gothic literature, as well as its particular flavor in American literary culture.

Essential Questions:

• What are some characteristics of the Gothic genre? The American Gothic genre?
• What are the advantages and disadvantages of working within a literary genre?
• How does the American Gothic genre reflect historical, political, and cultural concerns of the time?
• Was there a time in your life when you felt that “creepy” feeling often associated with Gothic themes? Write a short story in response to that experience.

The Foundations of Gothic Literature

In order to study the American Gothic, it is important to understand its original foundations, found in the eighteenth century. While “spooky” things have certainly always existed, those who study the Gothic literary tradition identify its beginnings with Horace Walpole, a British art historian, writer, and politician. In 1749, motivated by his own fascination with medieval history and artifacts, Walpole built Strawberry Hill House, a Gothic villa in Twickenham, a neighborhood in southwest London. This series of turreted, castle-like buildings departed from the classical architecture popular in the 18th century, and helped bring Gothic revival architecture to public’s imagination. It also became closely connected to the Gothic literary movement.

His aesthetic interest filtered into his life as an author, as well. Walpole wrote the book The Castle of Otranto (under the pseudonym “William Marshal”) while a member of British Parliament for the Whig Party in 1764. It is deemed among scholars to be the first supernatural novel, as well as a mixture of old and new themes—with “real people” in ordinary life experiencing otherworldly, extraordinary situations that are difficult to rationalize and explain.

In the first edition, Walpole claimed that the story was a translation of an original Italian manuscript from 1529 by “Onuphrio Muralto.” It was only until the publication of the second edition of the book that he admitted himself as the author. One possible reason for not admitting full authorship of the story would be to distance himself from sensational fiction, which was a controversial literary genre in the eighteenth century. The idea of discovering a manuscript would, therefore, makes the circumstances surrounding the story seem more historical than fantastical. (Undoubtedly, as an art historian, Walpole had the theme of history at the front of his mind.) However, another motivation for Walpole’s denial could relate to the idea of deflecting authorial responsibility for the story, as he claims himself a mere “translator” of another writer’s narrative. Additionally, the idea of a 16th-century manuscript heightens the exotic narrative of Otranto , staging it in an otherworldly place (Italy) as well as another time, “long ago.” These otherworldly characteristics contribute to the effect of the Gothic as displacing the reader from “normal life” into another setting, in which the supernatural reigns.

The story of The Castle of Otranto is a long and convoluted one. It focuses on a man named Manfred, whose son, Conrad, dies before his wedding to the princess Isabella. Anxious about continuing the family line, Manfred marries Isabella after divorcing his wife. As his plans become increasingly evil, the castle becomes haunted. Aside from centering on Manfred’s concern about continuing the family line, the story features many supernatural occurrences, portraits that come to life and walk around, trapdoors and secret passageways, and doors that open without warning.

Walpole’s novel was an immediate success, and inspired other authors to write their own Gothic stories, including Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron (1778) and M.G. Lewis’s The Monk (1796).

Questions to Consider:

• What are some examples of the story line of The Castle of Otranto that combine the hard-to-explain with the real and explainable?
• What do you believe is the main reason Walpole credited his story to a fake manuscript writer from 1529? And why would he use a pseudonym instead of his real name? What may be some other underlying reasons for these decisions?
• Why is the emphasis on heritage, bloodlines, and ancestry such an important theme in the Gothic?
• Design your own Gothic estate, inspired by the castle in the frontispiece to The Castle of Otranto . What would you include, and why? Include a written “rationale” with your illustration.

This section’s featured woodcut image depicts the famous scene in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), during which Poe’s narrator and Roderick Usher carrys his sister, Madeline, into the family tomb. Abner Epstein’s woodcut, in a 20th-century edition of Poe’s story, depicts a stark aesthetic, with Roderick’s disheveled look—and maddening gaze—placed front and center. This pictorial representation of Poe’s story contrasts the flowery, fantastical illustration of Otranto in Horace’s frontispiece, pictured in the previous section. Instead of focusing on the romantic scenery and majestic buildings, this woodcut illustrates the downward spiral of one’s own psyche, symbolized further in the downward descent of the (we later learn, half-live) corpse into the tomb.

Because of their different time periods and artistic mediums, these two illustrations call attention to how the Gothic has evolved as a literary genre across the centuries. Certainly, we identify important influences of the eighteenth-century Gothic in American works; take, for instance, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” which takes place in an unknown Italian city, in the catacombs during a raucous Carnival festival.

The American Gothic as a genre generally shifts away from the outward appearances of haunted landscapes and buildings, as well as outward signs of the supernatural, to the inward terrors of one’s own mind. The image below of the title page and illustration for The Cask of Amontillado is an apt symbol of Poe’s preoccupations as a storyteller—as well as his important influence on the Gothic genre in America.

Many American writers have been categorized as “Gothic” writers, including (but not limited to): Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, Ambrose Bierce, Stephen Crane, William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, Stephen King, and Joyce Carol Oates. These writers deploy elements of the Gothic to illustrate their social, political, and cultural concerns about what they observe around them.

The American Gothic genre is at once vast and diverse, and unified by shared thematic concerns. Whereas earlier centuries emphasized the Gothic genre as a form of escapist literature, with a “long ago and far away” atmosphere, the American Gothic focuses on important elements of daily life that, when framed in a Gothic nature, brings a new light to social issues that may be at first too “ordinary” to notice. In his book American Gothic (2009), Charles Crow claims that this genre enabled “the imaginative expression of the fears and forbidden desires of Americans” (1). In comparison to earlier versions of the Gothic, which focused on ancestral bloodlines and decaying, centuries-old castles, the American Gothic digs deeper into the darker, often psychological underbelly of everyday life. Even in outwardly “extra-ordinary” plot lines (a drunken party during carnival season, like in Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” for example), there lies an emphasis on one’s inner evils, drives, and secret desires. Poe, in particular, often utilizes a self-proclaimed “rational” narrator to illuminate his own inner demons and murderous drives (Crow).

Examples of ordinary occurrences and events, framed with gothic qualities, include post-Reconstruction South and slavery (William Faulkner, “A Rose for Emily”), and women’s issues, including depression, childbirth, and the abuse by men in the medical profession (Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wall-Paper”). The former, an example of the Southern Gothic sub-genre, rests on the tension between a dangerously false, nostalgic representation of American slavery with the economic, social, and physical realities of slavery and its aftermath in American history. The latter illustrates the feminist possibilities within what may originally seem a “damsel-in-distress” genre. Gilman’s loosely autobiographical story of a woman’s descent into madness while participating in the “rest cure” illuminates the conflict between one’s desires (especially to engage in creative expression, through writing) and the social constraints of marriage and motherhood. Additionally, “The Yellow Wall-Paper” has played a crucial role in scholarship that re-examines the American literary “canon” and makes conscious efforts to bring more women writers into the conversation. While less popular on class syllabi than “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” Gilman’s re-discovered manuscript,  Unpunished: A Mystery  (pictured here), engages with themes of the American Gothic discussed in this essay. This book was published in 1997 by The Feminist Press, a publisher that continues to play a crucial role in bringing many women writers back into academic studies.

Crow, responding to and building from Leslie Fiedler’s definition of the American Gothic in his seminal work Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), writes that “[the] American Gothic is no longer defined as a narrow tradition bound by certain props (ruined castles, usually in foreign lands, and imperiled maidens). It is now usually seen as a tradition of oppositional literature, presenting in disturbing, usually frightening ways, a skeptical, ambiguous view of human nature and of history. The Gothic exposes the repressed, what is hidden, unspoken, deliberately forgotten, in the lives of individuals and of cultures” (2).

Crow’s assessment of the American Gothic prioritizes how the way things appear on the surface can amplify the felt, unseen terrors that lie beneath an individual, community, or nation.

• Compare and contrast the images from The Castle of Otranto and “The Fall of the House of Usher”. Aside from the ways they are discussed above, what are some other differences you notice in the representation of the Gothic? Similarities?
• What are some creative opportunities for the Gothic genre to change and evolve, within this new historical and geographical context of “America”?
• How does the inward turn to the psyche affect one’s interpretation of Gothic texts?

The American Gothic Wilderness

It would be impossible to catalog all of the important themes found in the American Gothic genre. Yet, one important way to identify what makes the American Gothic so unique is by identifying the role landscape plays in these narratives.

As previously discussed, the American Gothic takes on a more interior and psychological dimension to the earlier definitions of the Gothic. The openness, mystery, and wildness associated with the colonized American landscape provide a backdrop for exploring issues of cultural and national identities. Whereas the plot of the traditional Gothic story hinges on the physical environment’s architecture and spooky outward characteristics, the American Gothic uses the landscape to symbolize the beliefs, priorities, and anxieties of its characters and communities.

Contemporary scholars, educators, and students are right to call out the idea of the American landscape—as untouched, unoccupied territory—as a white colonizer’s fantasy, which has persisted in the American literary imagination. This fantasy demonized further the original inhabitants of North America, the Native Americans, and provided means of justification for the colonial settlers’ violent behaviors. One way we can study how the Gothic shifts away from the Old World context (like Walpole’s) to that of the New World is how the American landscape becomes utilized to these ends. There are no dilapidated Italian castles in which the plots unfold. The ghosts of one’s ancestral past are now replaced by cultural “others,” especially Native Americans. This brings to mind the idea that American Gothic narratives negotiate the anxiety of one’s lineage differently than Gothic stories across the pond; one common thread connecting much of early American Gothic writing is a proclaimed anxiety about the mysterious nature of the new republic’s lands, and its peoples.

One of the earliest writers of the American Gothic, Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810), articulated the need to adjust a Gothic tale to America’s particular setting. He wrote in his preface to Edgar Huntly (1799), “Puerile superstition and exploded manners; Gothic castles and chimeras, are the materials usually employed for [‘engaging the sympathies’ of readers]. The incidents of Indian hostility, and the perils of the western wilderness, are far more suitable…” (Krause, qtd. in Crow, 25). Here Brockden Brown suggests that storytelling needs to shift to account for the specific contents of America—away from the “castles and chimeras” and towards the “perils of the western wilderness.” His problematic mention of “incidents of Indian hostility” positions the white colonizer as a potential victim of Native American terrors, but nevertheless depicts the role of the American wilderness as a sort of character in itself, rife with tales that entertain and entice readers.

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Young Goodman Brown” (first published anonymously in 1835, and later under his name in 1846) also contains these undertones of colonial anxiety about Native American inhabitants, while taking a slightly more spiritual angle. The eponymous protagonist goes on a mysterious errand in the forest that leads to his loss of faith in his community, including his wife, also named “Faith.” Here, Hawthorne deploys the American “wilderness” as a site for looking inward to one’s spirituality and that even the most pure and faithful of people may have a dark side.

In the context of the Charles Brockden Brown, Fiedler wrote on the author’s contribution to the gothic genre; however, one can apply his words to the larger idea of the American Gothic as a whole. For instance, Fielder wrote that Brockden Brown created “a tradition of dealing with the exaggerated and the grotesque, which impose themselves on us, not as they are verifiable in any external landscape or sociological observation of manners and men, but as they correspond in quality to our deepest fears and guilt as projected in our dreams or lived through in extreme situations” (142).

Roughly one hundred years later, Edgar Allan Poe picks up the important role of the landscape in the Gothic tradition. The narrator in “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) provides an important combination of “Old World” and “New World” ideas that came to define the American Gothic. He describes his arrival to the Usher estate, where his childhood friend, Roderick Usher, resides:

“I know not how it was—but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit…I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white decayed trees—with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveler upon opium—the bitter lapse into everyday life—the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart—an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher?”

As this passage demonstrates, Poe uses the physical characteristics of the Usher estate to illuminate the gloomy or “creepy” feelings experienced by the narrator. As the story progresses, the lush and exotic-looking estate grounds and the decaying Usher mansion serve to reflect the spiritual decay of the Usher family line. While not a traditional representation of the “wilderness” per se, Poe nevertheless shows the untamed—and often, terrifying—nature of the human soul.

Selection: Edgar Allen Poe, The Raven and Other Poems (1845).

Other American texts, like Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved (1987), works with the theme of the American landscape and wilderness to illuminate other social and political issues intrinsic to the American historical experience. Morrison’s uses the southern slave plantation to reveal the dark and violent history of US enslavement. Morrison, and others, continue the tradition of the American Gothic and imbue it with themes that call attention to this nation’s fraught historical past.

• When placed alongside the earlier characteristics of the Gothic, which was associated with “Old World” traditions, how do the qualities of the American Gothic compare? Contrast?
• In the passage above from “The Fall of the House of Usher,” how does Poe stay loyal to earlier characteristics of the Gothic? How does he depart from them?
• Read Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” featured in this section. If one were to make a case for the American “wilderness” in this poem, what would it look like? How is it different than traditional approaches to Gothic landscapes? Further, how is it similar to–or different from–Poe’s description in “The Fall of the House of Usher”?
• What are some other narratives in American literature that you studied in which landscape plays an important role? In what ways do they engage with Gothic traditions?

The Gothic Text in American Culture

The Table of Contents from Poe’s “Prose Tales” shows an unidentified reader engaging with the stories in Poe’s collected  Prose Tales . The various reactions, indicated by the writing in the margins (also called “marginalia”), indicates how this reader connected with these stories so powerfully that he or she wanted to scribble commentary inside of the book itself. This is not an unusual thing to see in nineteenth-century books; however, in the context of the American Gothic, it is important to remember that these stories are meant to engage, titillate, and terrify their readers. 

Aside from some important shared formal characteristics, Gothic American literature can allow us to witness important cultural moments and debates in American history. Various texts held at the Newberry Library show us the ways in which these stories circulated and—as in the case of the image of the table of contents from Poe’s Prose Tales —were received by audiences.

As this collection has shown, the Gothic genre is quite vast. It is partly such a large genre because people have used elements of the Gothic to communicate other ideas about society, politics, gender, health and medicine, and history. The Gothic genre has been utilized by writers to communicate messages about their contemporary lifetimes that they believe are problematic, controversial, or worthy of social change.

The paratextual qualities (characteristics of a text that do not relate to written content) of sentimental writer Mary E. Wilkins [Freeman’s] The Wind in the Rose-Bush (1903) contain several stylistic flourishes that suggest a targeted female readership. The book cover, including a red rose and a faintly-drawn woman spirit, ascribes to traditional conceptions of femininity as aesthetically beautiful and delicate. Even the gold type of Wilkins’s title adds a bit of glamour to this collection of ghost stories, and one can imagine the edition looking very elegant sitting in a bookshelf in a personal library. The illustrations, by Peter Newell, have a genteel, soft quality that humanizes the spiritual apparitions—almost as if to make the ghosts more personable and less threatening, despite their otherworldly state.

Selection: Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, The Wind in the Rose-Bush (1903).

In addition to Wilkins’s book, many published short stories can reveal the way the Gothic genre can be used to advocate for social change. An important example in the women’s writing genre is Charlotte Perkins Stetson [Gilman’s] short story “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892), first published in New England Magazine .

This story, which is told in journal entries, is about a woman’s descent into mental illness or so-called “madness.” She becomes enthralled and, eventually, obsessed by the changing patterns in the wallpaper of her room (which used to be a nursery), and she eventually succumbs to them with erratic and obsessive behavior. Arguably exacerbated by the medical cure intended to treat her “nervous condition” in the first place, the narrator is a patient of the “rest cure”—a treatment that required complete abstention from physical and mental activity, including writing. For a creative and prolific writer, as well as feminist, such as Gilman, one can imagine that this issue was close to the author’s heart.

Selection: Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman, “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” in New England Magazine , volume 1 (1892).

“The Yellow Wall-Paper” contains many important themes found in the Gothic tradition, including the speaker’s powerlessness and expressions of inner turmoil and—possibly—madness. In one of her journal entries, she mentions the “queer” state of the old house in which she resides (647)—echoing Poe’s narrator’s feelings of uneasiness in the opening pages of “The Fall of the House of Usher.” She also describes feeling like a prisoner in her own home, and the lengths she would go to in order to be free: “I am getting angry enough to do something desperate. To jump out of the window would be admirable exercise, but the bars are too strong even to try” (655-656). By the end of the story, the narrator’s behavior upends the household, rendering her husband, a doctor named John, senseless on the floor after fainting.

Many readers interpret “The Yellow Wall-Paper” as an autobiographical story inspired by Gilman’s own experiences under the rest cure, developed by the physician Silas Weir Mitchell. Gilman allegedly wrote the story to inspire Weir to consider the detrimental effects of the rest cure. The Newberry owns a copy of one of his publications, Doctor and Patient (1888).

For Gilman, the Gothic specter terrorizing her life is not an ancestral ghost, or a “haunted” mansion; it is the pressure of maternal and marital convention—the struggle between individual desires and social expectations for all women at the turn of the twentieth century. And while the story describes a house ridden by unusual events, ultimately “The Yellow Wall-Paper” cautions readers—women readers, in particular—of the terrifying and terrorizing presence of professional male doctors like Mitchell, with his abusive treatments and far-reaching power in the medical profession, domestic sphere, and the world of print. While Gilman wrote in a time before “mansplaining” was a mainstream term, she indeed criticized the all-powerful reach of Weir’s medical theories and treatments, and called attention to how his influence on the medical profession and women’s health exercises a traumatic influence over the body, as well as the mind. Alan Ryan sums up this idea of Gilman’s version of the Gothic the lines, “[Gilman’s story] is one of the finest, and strongest, tales of horror ever written. It may be a ghost story. Worse yet, it may not” (56).

Selection: Silas Weir Mitchell, Doctor and Patient (1888).

• What kinds of things can we learn from studying a text’s paratextual qualities? What do we learn about the anonymous reader of Prose Tales ? What are some assumptions we can make about how the reader is affected by the different stories?
• Given what we know already about the plot of “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” how does Gilman create terror out of everyday situations?
• If you were to create a book cover for “The Yellow Wall-Paper” to appeal to the stereotypical female readership from the nineteenth century, what would it look like and why? What aesthetic elements would you be sure to include? (Keep in mind the possible motivations for Gilman’s authorship of this text.)
• Examine the title page and opposite page from Mitchell’s Doctor and Patient . What kind of tone does it contain? Even if we weren’t to read the entire book, what kinds of evidence can we gather about Mitchell as a writer and physician? How is it different from the representation of medicine in “The Yellow-Wallpaper”?

Further Reading

Baker, Brian. “Gothic Masculinities.” The Routledge Companion to Gothic . Ed. Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy. New York: Routledge, 2007. 164-173.

Bondhus, Charlie. “Sublime Patriarchs and the Problems of the New Middle Class in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian .” Gothic Studies 12.1 (2010): 13-32.

Brabon, Benjamin A., & Stéphanie Genz. Postfeminist Gothic: Critical Interventions in Contemporary Culture . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

“The Castle of Otranto: The Creepy Tale that Launched Gothic Fiction.” BBC News Magazine . Accessed 8 Aug 2018.

Clery, E. J. Women’s Gothic: From Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley . Tavistock: Northcote House, 2000.

Crow, Charles L. American Gothic . Cardiff, Wales: University of Wales Press, 2009.

Cuddon, J. A. Dictionary of Literary Terms . London: Deutsch, 1977.

Edwards, Justin D. Gothic Passages: Racial Ambiguity and the American Gothic . Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2003.

Elbert, Monika & Bridget M. Marshall, eds.  Transnational Gothic: Literary and Social Exchanges in the Long Nineteenth Century . Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013.

Ellis, Kate Ferguson. The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology . Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989.

Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel . New York: Criterion Books, 1960.

Fleenor, Juliann E. “Introduction: The Female Gothic.” The Female Gothic . Ed. Juliann E. Fleenor. Montreal: Eden, 1983. 3-28.

Garrett, Peter. Gothic Reflections: Narrative Force in Nineteenth-Century Fiction . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003.

Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.

Goddu, Teresa A. Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation . New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

Gross, Louis S. Redefining the American Gothic: from Wieland to Day of the Dead . Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 1989.

Krause, Sydney J., ed.  Three Gothic Novels: Wieland, Arthur Mervyn, Edgar Huntly . Library of America, 1998.

“Literary Terms and Definitions.” Saylor Academy Online. Accessed 10 June 2018.

Milbank, Alison. Daughters of the House: Modes of the Gothic in Victorian Fiction . New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.

Oates, Joyce Carol. “The King of Weird.” The New York Review of Books . Accessed 17 Aug. 2018.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Library of America, 1984. 317-336.

Ringe, Donald A. American Gothic: Imagination and reason in Nineteenth-Century Fiction . Lexington, KY: UP of Kentucky, 1982.

Roberts, Siân Silyn. Gothic Subjects: The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 1790-1861 . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.

Ronald, Ann. “Terror-Gothic: Nightmare and Dream in Ann Radcliffe and Charlotte Brontë.” The Female Gothic . Ed. Juliann E. Fleenor. Montreal: Eden, 1983. 176-186.

Ryan, Alan. Haunting Women . Avon Books, 1988.

“The Romantic Period: Gothic: Overview.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Norton Topics Online . Accessed 10 June 2018.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “The Character in the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic Novel.” PMLA 96.2 (1981): 255-270.

Wallace, Diana & Andrew Smith. Introduction. The Female Gothic: New Directions . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 1-12.

Wester, Maisha L. African American Gothic: Screams from Shadowed Places . New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Whiting, Patricia. “Literal and Literary Representations of the Family in The Mysteries of Udolpho .” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 8.4 (1996): 485-501.

Whitney, Sarah E. Splattered Ink: Postfeminist Gothic Fiction and Gendered Violence . Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016.

Wright, Angela. Gothic Fiction . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

WASHINGTON, D.C. AND ELLA WATSON, 1942

Text-image-gpx.

American Gothic, Washington, D.C., 1942

In January 1942, Parks arrived in Washington, D.C., to work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). He was eager to document the African American community as he had done in Chicago. However, he did not yet realize the challenges he would face as a Black man in the city—which lay on the racial fault line between the nation’s North and South.

Knowing the situation all too well, FSA director Roy Stryker suggested that Parks begin by exploring Washington without his camera. Parks found bigotry everywhere. He was turned away by restaurants, kicked out of theaters, and denied service at a respected department store where he attempted to buy a winter coat. After just a few days, Parks was utterly demoralized. “In this radiant, historic place,” he lamented, “racism was rampant” ( Half Past Autumn , 1997).

When a humiliated Parks returned to FSA headquarters, Stryker recommended that he begin his project closer to home. Parks approached a Black woman who was cleaning the FSA offices. Her name was Ella Watson. She told Parks she had become pregnant out of high school, and that her husband had been shot to death two days before their second daughter was born. She was now working to support herself and her two grandchildren. 

At the end of their conversation, Parks asked if he could take Watson’s picture. She agreed, and for four months gave him access to her home and her community. The resulting photographs were a breakthrough in Parks’ career. Through Watson, he gained an intimate perspective on the reality of life for Blacks beyond the historical gleam of white Washington, D.C.: crumbling homes, trash-filled neighborhoods, and childhood lessons on the street. He photographed families gathered around meager tables, pensive in their sparsely furnished homes, and attentively negotiating their surroundings in the city. He also took joyous photos of life within the walls of Watson’s church. The church was an invaluable gathering place for Black communities, and Parks captured the “joie de vivre” that rang within it.

Culminating this series is the photograph titled American Gothic , in which Watson poses coolly with a mop and broom in front of the U.S. flag. Among the most famous pictures Parks ever took, it points to the complexity of his mature style. Not only does the photograph connect the intimacy of one person’s life with a national state of affairs, it also engages with a larger history of American images by referring to and reinterpreting Grant Wood’s celebrated 1930 painting of the same name.

American Gothic , Washington, D.C., 1942

Negro Woman in Her Bedroom , Washington, D.C., 1942

Neighborhood Children , Washington, D.C., 1942  (Courtesy of Library of Congress)

Gordon Parks

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Introduction

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This introduction defines American gothic historically, thematically, and conceptually, and traces the history of the cultural analysis of the American gothic. It suggests that the definitions of America and those of gothic are so closely related as to be inseparable. For the purposes of this Companion, America is gothic.

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American Gothic: Evidence of the Gothic and the Age of Sensibility in Federal America

By Alden O'Brien

Alden O’Brien (email:  aobrien@dar.org ) is the Curator of Costume and Textiles at the DAR Museum in Washington, D.C.  Her 2016 exhibit “’An Agreeable Tyrant’: Fashion After the Revolution” ( agreeabletyrant.dar.org ) addressed contemporary debates about national identity and cultural independence.  Her 2019 exhibit “A Piece of Her Mind” ( apieceofhermind.dar.org ) includes the Dr. Syntax quilt.

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Volume 40, No. 1 — Winter 2019

Arts, Portraits, Painting ›   Female Accomplishments ›   Fashion (Clothing, Accessories, Jewelry) ›  

Related Works

Northanger Abbey ›  

Readers of  Northanger Abbey  in England would have been familiar with the source material being parodied.  But did the gothic, and its adjacent cultural trends (the age of sensibility, the admiration of the picturesque and sublime, and so on) fascinate Americans to anything like the same degree?  In the first decades after the Revolution, Americans wrestled with the issue of how to forge ahead as a new nation, independent not only politically but economically and culturally.

Writers in newspapers and magazines debated whether we should follow European countries’ lead in fashion and other aspects of culture.  There was a widespread concern with casting off not just the monarchy but an aristocratic class system.  Yet despite this ambivalence, possibly only found in print and not in average citizens’ minds, Americans continued to embrace trends and products coming across the Atlantic.  The Romantic period certainly manifested itself in American culture, in all its aspects:  the taste for the gothic, the sentimental, and the sublime can be found in architecture, decorative arts, and literary culture in the new nation. 

Evidence in the surviving material culture, including schoolgirl artwork, decorative arts, and painting and architecture, demonstrates that the gothic and its adjacent trends were known to and adopted by even non-élite Americans outside of major population centers.  Gothic literature was consumed, enjoyed, and, as Austen did, mocked in America at the same time as in England.  There was often an American slant to these trends, and, when it came to gothic design, there was a significant time lag.  The delay was not due to ignorance or even conservatism but to Americans’ initial preference for the Greco-Roman styles that spoke to our new democratic ideals.  Examining a variety of areas of design, and some evidence of New Englanders’ reading habits, illustrates how Federal-era America participated in every aspect of Romanticism, of which the gothic novel is one manifestation. 

Americans did not embrace gothic architecture and design during the first gothic revival of Austen’s lifetime.  Having arrived on this continent long after medieval times, we had no original gothic architecture here to revere or imitate.  Building in the gothic style would not, therefore, as it might for British gentry, remind American neighbors of one’s “family pride and lineage, [and] put the visitor in mind of the medieval England to which you wished your family to be traced” (Clarke 97), nor could it hark back to a shared national identity.  Instead, enamored of the U. S. government’s Greek democratic and Roman republican origins, Americans based most civic and domestic architecture on Greco-Roman styles. 

“Gothic Mansion,” built by John Dorsey, in The Casket: Flowers of Literature, Wit, and Sentiment (October 1830).

“A Cottage in the English or Rural Gothic Style” from Cottage Residences (1847).

A rare exception is John Dorsey’s Gothic Mansion, as it was known, designed by Dorsey himself, a merchant and self-taught architect, in 1809–1810 .  Dorsey was considered eccentric:  it would be thirty more years before domestic gothic architecture had widespread appeal in America.  Long after the gothic novel craze had faded on both sides of the Atlantic, American architect Alexander Jackson Davis introduced gothic revival designs in his 1838 book   Rural Residences , followed in the 1840s by several influential publications co-authored by Andrew Jackson Downing, beginning with   Cottage Residences   in 1842, with many houses identified as “gothic.”  Because these houses were often built of wood, with wooden trim supplying the gothic motifs, this style has been dubbed “carpenter gothic.”  They were Victorian houses with gothic-inspired details:  steeply pitched roofs, windows with pointed arches, and the occasional tower; no medieval houses had ever looked like this.  Some homeowners simply added gothic trim to an existing Greek revival structure, such as in the George Bourne house in Kennebunk, Maine, commonly called “the wedding cake house,” whose Palladian window and symmetrical rectangular shape are discernable behind an elaborate structure mimicking buttresses supporting gothic arches and trim.  The American love of Greek temples and the Rome’s Pantheon was too strong to allow the use of gothic style in many public buildings.  One exception is the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, designed by Alexander Jackson Davis and Ithiel Town in the early 1840s. 

Churches were a natural fit for gothic architecture; the first gothic revival church in America was New Haven’s Trinity (Episcopal) church built in 1813.  The gothic style seems to have been used most often in the Episcopal Church, the American branch of the Church of England.  Though American domestic architecture claimed no medieval heritage, gothic architecture may have been a way of evoking parishioners’ Anglican roots and linking themselves to their liturgical heritage. 

Desk and bookcase, New York, 1830s. DAR Museum 5761.

Gothic furniture, available by the late 1830s, was less widespread than other historic revivals, not adapting well to the Victorian taste for upholstered seating.  Still, tables, chairs and sofas, and desk and bookcase units were manufactured in the gothic taste.  These do not attempt to replicate actual medieval furniture forms or styles but incorporate gothic arches and other design elements taken from architecture. 1   Gothic design was more easily incorporated into smaller items such as silver, glass, and ceramics.  A pearlware tea bowl and saucer of about 1820 with a transfer-printed castle ruin, used in Massachusetts, testifies to American consumers’ gothic taste.  Harriet Thorne Gibson took her set of Staffordshire plates with gothic ruins, part of her 1825 trousseau, from Vermont to homes in Quebec and Wisconsin.  Numerous furnishing fabrics of the 1830s and 1840s either depicted ruined churches or used gothic windows and other features in their design. 2  

The discerning eye can even find traces of gothicism in women’s fashions from the 1790s through the 1840s.  Medieval and Renaissance revival design details were popular after about 1810, when the craze for Greek and Roman revival styles inevitably played itself out and fashion demanded new inspiration; historicism, especially a love of the medieval, is an important aspect of the gothic as Lynne Bassett explores (Bassett 20ff;).  Such historicism is also evident in the gothic-arched sticks on fans of the 1820s and 1830s.  Dresses and accessories of the 1790s, 1820s, and 1830s often feature sawtooth or zig-zag trim or edging.  These elements were called Vandykes, after the similarly shaped lace collars in that artist’s portraits, reinforcing the historicism of the age; but they also visually evoked gothic arches.  Bassett has argued moreover that the very silhouette of 1840s dresses mimics the shape of gothic windows prevalent at that time in architectural revivals (51).  Altogether the gothic revival persisted alongside half a dozen other revivals in the decorative arts, surging back into greater popularity again in the 1870s.  

Pierced horn fan, about 1820. DAR Museum 2731.   

But we must look beyond gothic taste to see how the young United States participated in the Romantic movement.  Here, the aesthetic of the picturesque and sublime becomes critical.  The Romantic taste preferred awe-inspiring landscapes to the Enlightenment’s orderly and serenely beautiful vistas.  To be picturesque, literally picture-worthy, required only some dramatic aspect or detail.  But the sublime demanded more:  the extremes and power of Nature, intended to inspire awe, reverence, and even terror.  Edmund Burke famously declared that “terror is in all cases . . . the ruling principle of the sublime” (97).  Thus, landscape painting aligns itself with gothic literature:  Catherine Morland might enjoy the same enjoyable frisson of fear regarding a painting as reading a novel.  The grandeur of the American continent provided plenty of sublime aspects for painters, and the works of Thomas Cole and his ilk are some of the best examples of the Romantic era’s influence in the United States.

William Gilpin defined characteristics of the picturesque (i.e., picture-worthy) landscape in his many popular books exhorting readers to travel to (and ideally, sketch) picturesque landscapes.  We know Austen appreciated Gilpin, and we hear his echoes in Elizabeth Bennet’s cry, as she anticipates the tour with the Gardiners—“‘what are men to rocks and mountains?’” ( PP 154)—and in Marianne’s rhapsodies over a view, which Edward Ferrars fails to appreciate ( SS 88).

In addition to mild raillery by Austen, Gilpin was satirized in William Combe’s narrative poem   Tour of Doctor Syntax in Search of the Picturesque   (1812), in which he sent his unprepossessing curate hero, Dr. Syntax, on a journey astride his noble but scrawny steed, Grizzle.  He intends to publish a book on his travels, declaring “I’ll   prose   it here, I’ll   verse   it there, / And   picturesque   it ev’ry where” (6).  Instead, he meets a series of misadventures.  Illustrations by Thomas Rowlandson, one of England’s finest caricaturists of the age, heightened the humor of the tale.  His depiction of a gothic ruin opposite a lake shows familiarity with picturesque tropes. 

“Doctor Syntax Tumbling into the Water” by Thomas Rowlandson (1812). DAR Museum 2018.7.7. 

Wholecloth quilt, about 1820, by anonymous Virginia quiltmaker (detail). Copperplate printed cotton with scenes from Dr. Syntax’s first tour, English, 1815–1820. DAR Museum 91.61. ( Click here to see a larger version. )

Syntax’s adventures, wildly popular, led to two sequels; Austen even refers to the doctor in a letter in 1814 (Dow and Halsey 2010).  Commercial products capitalized on the doctor’s peregrinations, including plates, figurines, and printed cotton toile combining elements of eleven of Rowlandson’s illustrations.  Some of this cotton found its way to the United States, where it was made into a quilt by an unknown Virginia woman.  It is logical to assume that she was in on the joke, recognized Dr. Syntax, and understood the trend being parodied when she chose Dr. Syntax’s story for her quilt. 

For more satire of the gothic, American readers could enjoy   Northanger Abbey   soon after its publication.  Long before Carey & Lea produced the first authorized American edition in 1832, booksellers offered imported copies.  In the Salem (Massachusetts)   Gazette   of 23 October 1821, John M. Ives used bold type to announce the arrival of the combined edition of   Northanger   and   Persuasion   at his “Essex Circulating Library and Bookstore” (3).  His addition “by the author of ‘Pride and Prejudice’” indicates that his customers knew and appreciated Austen’s earlier work.  It seems that there were pirated printings in the United States from an early date as well.  Scarcely two months after   Northanger Abbey   was published in England, James Eastburn & Co. advertised in the New York   Daily Advertiser   for 23 February 1818 that he “will immediately put to press, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, by the author of pride and prejudice, &c. &c.” (3).  Much is implicit here:  the eagerness of his American customers to read the latest Austen novel, and their assumed appreciation of not only   Pride and Prejudice   but other works included in the “&c.”  A summary of a recent edition of the English   Quarterly Review   in the New York   Spectator   of 1 June 1821 went further when it devoted a paragraph to summing up an “Essay upon Modern Novels, with critical remarks upon the character and writings of Miss Austin,” listing all six novels, presumably in expectation that many readers would recognize several titles.  Not only is Austen named (albeit misspelled), but the   Quarterly ’s reported approval of the “sense and judgment, combined with sound and healthful principles” seems to apply specifically to Austen’s works as much as more generally to “Modern Novels” (2). 3

Elizabeth Coburn Courtney of South Carolina wears a mourning pendant with imagery similar to that in mourning needleworks in her c. 1795 portrait by James Earl. DAR Museum 71.100. ( Click here to see a larger version .)

American women also produced expressions of the age of sentiment.  After stitching her simple marking sampler (such as the marking sampler stitched by Cassandra owned by Jane Austen’s House Museum), a girl might—if her family valued and could afford further education—create a decorative needlework scene.  These were stitched in silk on cream-colored silk taffeta with watercolor and inked and penciled details in the background and faces.  Along with scenes from literature, mourning pictures were enormously popular.  In the latter, a tomb overhung with weeping willows displays an inscription, such as “sacred to the memory of” one or more deceased.  American girls produced numerous mourning scenes in honor of George Washington after his death in 1799 and of both Washingtons after Martha’s death in 1802.  In either personal or public mourning pictures, one or more women in fashionable neoclassical dress stand beside the tomb, drooping gracefully to indicate grief; sometimes a husband and children are included. 4   These scenes were also painted on jewelry, worn to proclaim the owner’s sensibility and grief for the departed.  The needlework pictures were so popular that girls sometimes had to rack their family tree for a relative whom they might commemorate in a touching scene to be given pride of place on the parlor wall.  That these artworks weren’t entirely about showing actual grief is suggested by the author of the fictional memoir   My Thimbles , who related her dilemma choosing a design for her final needlework at school.  One “containing a monument and drooping willow. . . appealed strongly to the sentimental part of my nature.  But unfortunately I had not lost any relations, and I did not wish to put ‘Sacred to the memory of — ’ unless I could fill the blank with some real name” (Hall 12–13). 

Mourning needlework in memory of George and Martha Washington, based on S. Seymour’s print of John Trumbull’s 1804 painting. DAR Museum 2015.9.

Mourning needlework by Polly Marston of Barnstaple, Massachusetts, about 1805–1810. DAR Museum 2012.20.

Elizabeth Chandler’s copybook, 1820s. DAR Museum 83.8.2. ( Click here to see a larger version. )

Many girls and women kept copy books in which they wrote excerpts of poetry and other works, adding watercolors and sketches; one kept by Quaker Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, a published poet and an abolitionist, suggests that gothic topics had wide appeal.  One sketch depicts a woman seated in a picturesque setting, including a blasted tree.  Another copies the first stanzas of an 1820 poem by a fellow Quaker, Bernard Barton, illustrated with a picturesque ruin that resembles the real Leiston Abbey, though an illustrated edition of Barton’s poetry that might have inspired Chandler cannot be located.  Rebecca Rooker, a recent English immigrant to Maryland, made a masterful needlework copy of a print of a ruined church in about 1810.  Prints of gothic scenes, too, would have hung on American walls. 

Rebecca Rooker’s needlework picture (1805–1810), from William Cartwright’s aquatint of Thomas Walmsley’s painting A View near Exeter . DAR Museum 63.44.2.

Finally, let us consider gothic literature in the United States.  At the time, the American novel barely existed. Scarcely thirty were published before 1800 (Blanck 64).  Many were aimed at a female audience—the presumed demographic of novel-readers—and either told cautionary tales of seduction, outlined ideas of women’s education, or both. 

One American author, Charles Brockden Brown, published four gothic novels in the late 1790s.    Wieland ,   Ormond ,   Edgar Huntly, or Memoirs of a Sleepwalker , and   Arthur Mervyn   are set in America.  Like landscape artists, Brown found drama in the American wilderness, explaining in   Edgar Huntly   that “incidents of Indian hostility, and the perils of the Western wilderness, are far more suitable” than “[p]uerile superstition and exploded manners, gothic castles and chimeras” (4).  Still, he used many other gothic tropes:  mysterious characters with questionable identities abound, as do evocative landscapes, madness, secrets, and murders.  The plots’ settings—in, for example, the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 and on the frontier—give them an American flavor, as do their themes of religious mania, revolutions, and racial and ethnic tensions.  Though mostly forgotten now, Brown influenced Cooper, Hawthorne, Poe, and others. 

But if American readers had little home-grown gothic, they enjoyed the same English novels as Catherine Morland, through both imported and American editions.  Booksellers’ newspaper advertisements often mention gothic novels.  Surviving book lists from circulating and “social” libraries 5   include gothic authors as well as Richardson, Burney, Goldsmith, and other generally approved writers—though in far fewer numbers than non-fiction.  Books were expensive:  a two-volume novel cost a dollar fifty to two dollars (Winans 270); but as the Dedham, Massacusetts,   Columbian Minerva   noted in an article of 22 June 1802, “[s]ocial libraries, in most of our towns, have been established with much success” (1).  According to Winans’s source, 248 were established between 1771 and 1800 (273).  Circulating libraries may have been less common; but even tiny Pawlet, Vermont—population 458 in the 1800 federal census—had one by 1799 (Haswell). 6

So a literate readership existed, and gothic novels were readily available.  More elusive is a sense of how American readers responded to them.  Happily, Sylvia Lewis and Candace Roberts of Bristol, Connecticut kept diaries from the age of fifteen and commented on their reading.  Sylvia, born in June 1785, was the daughter of a farmer, Royce Lewis, whose father was one of the first to settle in Bristol when it was a secondary parish of the adjacent township, Farmington.  Candace was six months older than Sylvia; her father, Gideon Roberts, was the first wooden clockmaker in Bristol, which, later in the century, became a center for clockmaking and other industries in Connecticut.  The girls began their diaries on the same day in 1801, after Sylvia and “considerable company,” probably other peers, met at Candace’s house after afternoon church services at the Baptist meeting house (Lewis, 1 March 1801). 7   Sylvia kept her diary through 1821 and again sporadically 1829–1831, through marriage, a move to the Ohio frontier, and the birth, adoption, and temporary fostering of a combined nine children; she died in 1851 in Vienna, Ohio.  Candace died in Bristol during an epidemic of typhus fever in December 1806, just before her twenty-second birthday. 

In the tradition of New England work diaries, the girls mostly recorded chores, socializing, and their paid work.  Typical early entries are:  “Sowed [i.e., sewed] in the forenoon in the afternoon washed” (Roberts, 9 May 1801); “I did some house work and some sowing and some knitting and visited at Benjamin Hungerfords in the afternoon” (Lewis, 12 June 1801).  Their comments about gothic novels, therefore, are unusual if subtle outbursts.  Sylvia wrote she “read and heard the Children of the Abbey the most entertaineing books I ever read” (7 February 1806). 8   The “read and heard” suggests one form of access to books:  earlier that week (2 February 1806), her friend Lot Newell had been reading to her, and he seems to be the reader of   Children   on this day.  It may have been his own copy, but Bristol also had a circulating library as early as 1792, to which Sylvia probably belonged. 9   She also mentions borrowing a book from her friend Betsey Mitchell (29 January 1806), whose father was one of Bristol’s three merchants and may have sold books or even offered a small circulating library himself.  With a volume costing a dollar—Sylvia’s approximate pay for a week of teaching 10 —borrowing and sharing would have been common. 

Candace, too, found “the children of the Abbey . . . the most entertaining book I ever read in life There is the most beautiful characters and the most infamous characters I ever read of” (19 January 1804).    The Romance of the Forest   moved her to write a long, 164-word plot summary, whose lack of punctuation throughout lends it a breathless quality: 

the most amiable of women struggling with adverse fortune . . . her enemy pursues carries her off and she escapes . . . finds her best friend, remains some time with him but an unfortunate accident happens which seperates them . . . Theodore condemned to death Adeline confined in an old Abbey La Mott hired to kill her . . . find [her lover] confined in a prison . . . but he was reprieved and finds her Fathers murderer marries Theodore.  (3 March 1804) 

This description suggests a strong emotional response. 

Candace’s diary entries after this one become more emotional, with bursts of flowery language.  It is tempting to think that novel-reading influenced her style, which begins to feature passages like “[t]he airy visions of fancy serve to divert the mind from grief & render less poignant the bitter stings of misfortune” (2 September1805).  Other Bristol girls also dabbled in romantic prose, suggestive of literary influence.  Candace transcribed a friend’s letter, reading in part:  “stern Winter has usurped his iron rule & binds all nature fast in adamantine chains Yes while I write, my hand trembles his chilling blasts rattle the casements” (Roberts, November or December 1805).  In other words, Connecticut was cold. 

Sylvia, Sense to Candace’s Sensibility, retained her straightforward prose, perhaps because she read comparatively little fiction.  Lists kept in 1806 and 1808 show that she read seven novels (two were gothic) and the narrative poem   Palemon and Lavinia . 11   About thirteen titles were non-fiction, mostly history.  Another seven were advice books, mostly with a religious bent.  Twenty were overtly religious or spiritual:  essays, letters, biographies, and extracts with titles like “Remedies for the Terror of Death.”  Hardly surprising that she found Roche’s novel, her first gothic and perhaps her first novel of any kind, “entertaining.” 

Sylvia was not unmoved, however, by her reading of gothic novels:  on the contrary, her response to one is the longest single entry in twenty years of journal-keeping, reading in full: 

I finished my spencer read Newspaper taught school wrote some and it snowed all day.  At noon I read the Dutchess of C—or Count of Belmire her lover and Duke of C—her husband Oh dreadful dreadful to relate, alas says she, “all my misfortunes are of my own creation” but still a gleam of hope appears, & in true contrition and sorrow there is something expiatory and healing, the remorse of guilt harrows up the soul, but in the repentance of voluntary working, there is nothing painful or severe These virtuous sentiments mark us for our faults and reconcile us to ourselves.  Yes she had the comforts of Religion in her dark cavern to support her for nine long Years—but that happy day the 3 rd   of June when the Count of Belmire arrived was the happiest of her life, what a meeting—I cannot describe it the Count restored her to her liberty to light her Father Mother Daughter and all the comforts of life she being then twenty seven years of age and imagined her self fifty—the Count Married her Daughter she renewed her health, and was taught to praise God every day for the blessings she enjoyed and even for the miseries she had endured since they had expiated her faults, purified her heart and taught her the inestimable worth of the felicity that was restored to her— 

Sylvia Lewis’s diary: the first page of her entry on The Duchess of C***, February 1808. NSDAR Americana Collection. ( Click here to see a larger version .)

She concludes, “I must needs shed a few tears upon it and begin school for afternoon and in the evening began to work a cap border for Mrs Nancy Lewis,” with which she prosaically returns to the real world (Lewis, 28 February 1808). 

Sylvia was describing   The Affecting History of the Duchess of C*** .  Originally related in Stéphanie de Genlis’s educational novel   Adèle et Théodore   (1782), its intended lesson was the danger of not confiding in one’s parents:  unaware that her daughter loved the Count, the Duchess’s mother married her to the Duke.  If this viewpoint seems to blame the victim, it was still “one of the earliest female-authored and feminocentric gothic tales in Europe” (Dow 34).  Translated as part of   Adelaide and Theodore   and also printed as a stand-alone novel, the Duchess’s story was hugely popular in England (Dow 35–36).  English painter John Francis Rigaud executed a series of illustrations of the story, which were engraved and thus available to a wider audience.  Out of context, the original moral is lost.  Sylvia instead took more spiritual lessons from her reading, first commenting that “in true contrition and sorrow there is something expiatory and healing” and then reflecting that the Duchess “was taught to praise God every day . . . even for the miseries she had endured since they had expiated her faults.”   

The Duchess of C*** Deliverance, print by Pietro Bettelini after John Francis Rigaud (London, 1787). Trustees of the British Museum.

Sylvia’s commentary raises a larger question:  what these Connecticut Yankees made of their gothic novels.  Fiction was even more suspect in the United States than in England:  “Many early Americans, dedicated to the ideals of classical republicanism, saw the popularity of fiction as a sign of modern degeneration: . . . [it] reflected the young Republic’s distance from the virtuous republics of antiquity and served as a harbinger of its failure” (Koenigs 301).  The heavy responsibility placed on American women for the virtue of the republic lent a uniquely American flavor to moralists’ distaste for novels.  In a republic that depended on the “virtue,” civic and otherwise, of its citizens, fiction must be carefully chosen for its educational and moral merits.  As it was assumed that women were the primary readers of novels, the matter of novels’ merits (individually and as a class) became a highly gendered issue.  These debates likely had little relevance to the average reader.  We have seen how the Duchess’s tale was parsed by Sylvia; moralists concerned that novels would have deleterious effects on their readers might have taken comfort from her reflections. 

Scholars have discussed the ways that gothic novels and architecture express English nationalism, but this nuance probably escaped American readers.  Some have also noted that novels set in Catholic (continental and Irish) countries suggest a subtext of anti-Catholic sentiment, and heavily imply the superiority of Protestant England, although Diane Long Hoeveler argues that “the issue of religion’s uncanny presence in the period’s literature is much more complex and conflicted” (139). 12   Still, when Henry Tilney says, “‘Remember that we are English, that we are Christians,’” he might as well say, “Protestants” ( NA   197).  It is notable that two of Sylvia’s readings were overtly anti-Catholic.    The Captive of Deerfield   emphasizes the steadfastness of John Williams’s resistance to pressure to convert to Catholicism.    The French Convert ’s subtitle reveals its bias, promising a story of the conversion of   A Noble French Lady, From the Errors and Superstitions of Popery .  But the anti-Catholicism of gothic novels is more subtle; Sylvia and Candace may have been utterly deaf to what Beth Wallace has called, referring to Austen’s works, “the ambient noise” of Catholicism (160).  If anything, astute American readers—in which we may or may not include Sylvia and Candace—might instead have inferred evidence of a theme familiar from American essays and newspapers:  the corruption and decay of monarchical and ancient European society that their country was rejecting in favor of “republican virtue.”  Equally possibly, the girls simply enjoyed the drama. 

The girls’ reading was closely linked to that of Austen and her characters.  Candace, Sylvia, and   Emma ’s Harriet Smith all read   The Children of the Abbey   and   The Romance of the Forest   (Lewis 12 January 1813;   E   29).  Perhaps they were so popular as to be iconic.  It also seems appropriate that Sylvia and   Emma ’s Robert Martin, both of middling farmer stock, read   The Vicar of Wakefield , approved by even the strictest moralists (Lewis 10 November 1806;   E   29).    The Duchess of C***   is not specifically mentioned in Austen’s novels, but Susan Allen Ford has discussed Austen’s play in   Emma   on de Genlis’s larger work   Adelaide and Theodore , “adapting and transforming incidents, plot structures, and thematic concerns” (173).  Gillian Dow has further argued that   Northanger Abbey   owes as much to de Genlis as it does to Radcliffe, noting that several plot points, including Catherine’s notion that Mrs. Tilney, like the Duchess, might be not dead but imprisoned, tally with Catherine Morland’s imaginings (36–37).  Candace also read   Camilla , and Sylvia,   Evelina   (Roberts 26 February 1804; Lewis 10 April 1806) by Austen’s favorite Mrs. Burney, and they and their contemporaries performed   The Busy-body   by Susanna Centlivre, also known to Austen (Lewis 22 March 1804; Dow and Halsey). 

Palemon and Lavinia , engraved by Ralph Rawdon (American, 1814), after Henry Singleton (British, 1792).  Courtesy of Yale University Art Gallery.

Even the names of Sylvia’s friends connect to Austen and indicate that the Puritans’ Revolution-era descendants were imbibing fiction, if in carefully curated doses.  Her cousin-in-law Isabinda Peck Lewis was named for a character in   The Busy-body ; her friend Charles Grandison Ives was named after Austen’s favorite Samuel Richardson novel (he was one of two Charles Grandisons in Bristol at the time).  Three Clarissas, presumably named for Richardson’s heroine, populated federal-era Bristol, some of them known friends of Sylvia and Candace.  Our diarists also knew several girls with variations on the name Lavinia, the heroine of Thomson’s enormously popular poem   Palemon and Lavinia , which Sylvia read in 1808 (7 September). 13  

Taken together, Sylvia’s and Candace’s diaries, with the evidence from the material culture—including schoolgirl artwork, decorative arts, and painting and architecture—demonstrate that Americans were keeping abreast of trends in English culture.  Even non-elite Americans outside of major population centers were reading gothic novels and participating in other elements of the Romantic movement.  Despite the competing goals of forming a new nation with its own culture and aspiring to European gentility, Americans were imbibing the English gothic literary and design trends and producing their own American Gothic.

1 The DAR Museum’s collections are being put online at  collections.dar.org ; more information, including detailed descriptions and known history of each object, is available in the database. 

2 See the Winterthur Museum’s online database (  http://www.winterthur.org/collections/online-collections/ ), especially 1965.0006, 1969.3846.001. 

3 This would seem to refer to the  Quarterly Review  published by John Murray in London, but its April 1821 edition does not contain any of the articles discussed in the  Spectator  article.  It is uncertain, therefore, what publication is referred to. 

4 See, for example, the DAR Museum’s silk needlework scenes:  from Homer (67.244); from  A Sentimental Journey  (87.95.198).  Some examples of mourning scenes include accession numbers 4312, 64.129, 72.72, and 82.40, and 83.2, as well as 64.223, a painting with the same iconography; others, and mourning jewelry, can also be found in the online collection database. 

5 Social libraries were “essentially joint stock companies formed to purchase and loan books to shareholders,” whereas circulating libraries were “strictly commercial ventures, usually run by booksellers, and their selection of books was necessarily based on current popularity trends” (Winans 268–69). 

6 The library catalogs of historical societies of the New England states and the American Antiquarian Society’s Early American Imprints database contain listings of extant catalogues of both social and circulating libraries.  For this study, I omitted larger cities’ catalogues to focus on tastes of less urban readers, as evidence of reading habits of a less elite population. 

7 Sylvia usually attended the Congregational church near her father’s house but occasionally went to the Baptist church.  If other girls in the “considerable company” at Candace’s house were also inspired to begin diaries, these have not survived. 

8 Before 1806, Sylvia almost never recorded titles.  She usually read on Saturday nights, the beginning of the Sabbath, when she would have read only spiritual works (confirmed in later years when she gives titles of her Saturday readings). 

9 This claim is strongly suggested by the fact that Sylvia read Rollins’s  Ancient History  (4 November 1806), named by Roswell Atkins as an 8-volume set in the early library’s holdings (378), which Sylvia surely borrowed rather than owned.  I am grateful to Jay Manewitz of Bristol Public Library’s Bristol History room for tracking down details of the library’s early history not specified by Atkins, in various library records. 

10 For example, after teaching from May 21 through October 2, 1805, Sylvia received twenty dollars on October 4.  Working at a local button manufactory, she might earn fifty cents in a day if she went significantly over her daily quota (1805,  passim ), but, at quota, this work’s pay was similar to her teaching. 

11 In 1806 and 1808, she compiled lists at year’s end in addition to naming titles throughout the year.  The 1807 and 1809 volumes are lost. 

12 See, for example, Wein and Griffin. 

13 Naming patterns in this and other New England towns reveal a shift in the second half of the eighteenth century from biblical or spiritual names (such as Charity) to an increasing use of names from classical mythology and fiction.  Friends and relations of Candace and Sylvia (her own name being an example) included Parthenia, Chloe, Almira, Phebe, Minerva, Clorinda, and others.  The popularity of  Palemon and Lavinia , including Lavinia’s popularity as a name, is traced by Stevenson.  

Works Cited

• Atkins, Roswell.  “Reminiscences of Youthful Pastimes.”    Bristol, Connecticut, in the Olden Time “New Cambridge” Which Includes Forestville .  Hartford: City Printing Company, 1907.
• Austen, Jane.    The Novels of Jane Austen .  Ed. R. W. Chapman.  3rd ed.  Oxford: OUP, 1933-69.
• Bassett, Lynne Zacek.    Gothic to Goth: Romantic Era Fashion & Its Legacy .  Hartford: Wadsworth Atheneum, 2016.
• Blanck, Jacob N.  “The Juvenile Reading of Certain Nineteenth-Century American Worthies.”    Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society   79 (1967): 64–73.
• Brown, Charles Brockden.    Edward Huntly. Or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker .  Philadelphia: Maxwell, 1799.

Burke, Edmund.  A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.  2nd ed.  London, 1759.

• Clarke, Stephen.  “ Abbeys Real and Imagined: Northanger, Fonthill, and Aspects of the Gothic Revival. ”    Persuasions   20 (1998): 93–105.
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• Dow, Gillian.  “ Northanger Abbey , French Fiction, and the Affecting History of the Duchess of C***. ”    Persuasions   32 (2010): 32–45.
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Ella Watson: The Empowered Woman of Gordon Parks's 'American Gothic'

Gordon Parks's photograph “American Gothic” afforded rare attention to a black female subject who was not a celebrity or entertainer, but a mother and a worker.

By Deborah Willis

The first time I saw Gordon Parks’s photograph “American Gothic” — during a slide presentation in an undergraduate art school class in the 1970s — I was awe-struck.

I wanted to hold fast to the memory of that image of Ella Watson even as the professor moved to the next photo. Her polka-dot dress with puffed sleeves and two missing buttons, her wire-rimmed glasses half in shadow. The inverted tools of her trade, the straw curve of the worn broom and the curl of cotton mop, made me curious.

Parks met Ella Watson in 1942, when he had a Rosenwald fellowship with the Farm Security Administration in Washington, D.C. She was a cleaning woman in the offices there, and he went on to photograph her at work, at home with her family, in her neighborhood, and at St. Martin’s Spiritual Church.

“American Gothic” — a reference to the famous Grant Wood painting — is a construction that afforded rare attention to a black female subject who was not a celebrity or entertainer, but a mother and a worker. In this photograph, Parks formed an image of Mrs. Watson at work, her loosely fitted work dress pinned closed, allowing the viewer to link the necessity of her role as a family provider with the harshness of her existence. The American flag that hangs behind her frames her with the tools of her labor.

Ever since that moment in class, I have remained curious about the photograph and about Ella Watson herself. I was impressed by the solemnity of her pose and the expression on her face as she looks at the camera, yet beyond the photographer. Her gaze allowed me to enter into the picture and wonder — was she a willing model, did she satisfy the request of Parks, who undoubtedly directed this unconventional pose? Whatever their exchange about patriotism, inequality and commitment, Ella Watson took her role seriously as the artist’s muse.

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