http://oxfordre.com/literature/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.001.

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Several scholars have attempted to categorize the Gothic: H. L. Malchow defines it not as a
genre but a discourse, “a language of panic, of unreasoning anxiety.

H. L. Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford

University Press, 1996), 4.

David Punter points to the themes of paranoia, the barbaric, and taboo,2

David Punter, The Literature of Terror: Volume 1, The Gothic Tradition, 2d ed. (New York:
Routledge, 1996).

and Allan Lloyd-Smith states that the Gothic is “about the return of the past, of the repressed
and denied, the buried secret that subverts and corrodes the present, whatever the culture
does not want to know or admit, will not or dare not tell itself.”3

Alan Lloyd-Smith, American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction (New York: Continuum, 2004), 1.

. As Jerrold Hogle notes, since the 18th century, Gothic fiction has enabled readers to
“address and disguise some of the most important desires, quandaries, and sources of
anxiety, from the most internal and mental to the widely social and cultural.”4

Jerrold E. Hogle “Introduction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold
E. Hogle (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 4.

Charles Brockden Brown, the first professional American author, is credited with inventing
the American Gothic novel with Wieland (1798). According to Eric Savoy, what makes
Brown’s novel stand out is the way in which it “resituate[s] ‘history’ in a pathologized return of
the repressed whereby the present witnesses the unfolding and fulfillment of terrible
destinies incipient in the American past.”5

Eric Savoy, “The Rise of the American Gothic,” in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic
Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 174.

Leslie Fiedler has argued that the American Gothic tradition is best understood as “a
pathological symptom rather than a proper literary movement,”6

Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press,
1997), 135.

Generally, the sense of the past that pervades Gothic lit-

erature does not encourage the writer to explain origins in clear relation
to end-points in a seamless linear narrative. Nor does the writer seize on
history as a coherent field that is subject to authorial control. Instead, his-
tory controls and determines the writer. Gothic texts return obsessively to
the personal, the familial, and the national pasts to complicate rather than
to clarify them, but mainly to implicate the individual in a deep morass of
American desires and deeds that allow no final escape from or transcendence
of them. (Savoy 169)
Gothic images in
America thereby suggest the attraction and repulsion of a monstrous history,
the desire to “know” the traumatic Real of American being and yet the flight
from that unbearable and remote knowledge. (169)

g where culture, religion, and society are direct by-products of biological weakness.

The historica ldimension of American Gothic is entire ly congruent

with the
notion of the Real– of the myriad things and amorphous physica lity beyond
representation that haunt our subjectivity and demand our attention

To engage with the Rea lis to bring the powerfu lresources of literary form and language
to bear on a traumatic “otherness,” including much of America’s past, that has crucially
shaped identity and everyday reality in the present – yet finally to face the limited power
of those resources at the same time.