American Gothic, page 3
“The House That Was Not”
Edgar Lee Masters
“Barry Holden”
Paul Laurence Dunbar
“The Lynching of Jube Benson”
Jack London
“Samuel”
New England Gothic
Cotton Mather
“The Tryal of G. B.”
“The Trial of Martha Carrier”
A Notable Exploit; wherein, Dux Faemina Facti
[The Narrative of Hannah Dustan]
“Abraham Panther”
A surprising account of the Discovery of a Lady …
Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Alice Doane’s Appeal”
“Young Goodman Brown”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“The Skeleton in Armor”
Harriet Prescott Spofford
“Circumstance”
Madeline Yale Wynne
“The Little Room”
Sarah Orne Jewett
“The Foreigner”
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
“Old Woman Magoun”
“Luella Miller”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
“The Giant Wisteria”
Edwin Arlington Robinson
“The Mill”
Race and Slavery
J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur
from Letters from an American Farmer: “Letter IX”
Edgar Allan Poe
“Hop-Frog”
Herman Melville
“The Bell-Tower”
Henry Clay Lewis
“A Struggle for Life”
George Washington Cable
“Jean-Ah Poquelin”
Kate Chopin
“Désirée’s Baby”
Anonymous
“Talking Bones”
Charles W. Chesnutt
“The Dumb Witness”
“The Sheriff’s Children”
Stephen Crane
“The Monster”
Paul Laurence Dunbar
“The Lynching of Jube Benson”
Revenge
“Abraham Panther”
A surprising account of the Discovery of a Lady …
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Alice Doane’s Appeal
Edgar Allan Poe
“The Cask of Amontillado”
Herman Melville
“The Bell-Tower”
Charles W. Chesnutt
“The Dumb Witness”
“The Sheriff’s Children”
Edith Wharton
“The Eyes”
Paul Laurence Dunbar
“The Lynching of Jube Benson”
Ruins
Edgar Allan Poe
“The Fall of the House of Usher”
“The City in the Sea”
Herman Melville
“The Bell-Tower”
Ambrose Bierce
“An Inhabitant of Carcosa”
Satan and Evil Gods
Cotton Mather
“The Tryal of G. B.”
“The Trial of Martha Carrier”
Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Young Goodman Brown”
Robert W. Chambers
“In the Court of the Dragon”
Southern Gothic
J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur
from Letters from an American Farmer: “Letter IX”
Henry Clay Lewis
“A Struggle for Life”
George Washington Cable
“Jean-Ah Poquelin”
Kate Chopin
“Désirée’s Baby”
Anonymous
“Talking Bones”
Charles W. Chesnutt
“The Dumb Witness”
“The Sheriff’s Children”
Paul Laurence Dunbar
“The Lynching of Jube Benson”
Suicide
Kate Chopin
“Désirée’s Baby”
Charles W. Chesnutt
“The Sheriff’s Children”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
“The Giant Wisteria”
Elia Wilkinson Peattie
“The House That Was Not”
Edwin Arlington Robinson
“Luke Havergal”
“The Mill”
Jack London
“Samuel”
Terror and Gothic Theory
J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur
from Letters from an American Farmer: “Letter IX”
Washington Irving
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”
Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Alice Doane’s Appeal”
Emily Dickinson
“’Tis so appalling – it exhilarates –”
“The Soul has Bandaged moments –”
“One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted –”
“’Twas like a Maelstrom, with a notch”
“What mystery pervades a well!”
Harriet Prescott Spofford
“Circumstance”
Robert W. Chambers
“In the Court of the Dragon”
Tombs
Edgar Allan Poe
“The Fall of the House of Usher”
“Ulalume”
“Annabel Lee”
Ambrose Bierce
“An Inhabitant of Carcosa”
“The Death of Halpin Frayser”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
“The Giant Wisteria”
H. P. Lovecraft
“The Outsider”
Village Life
Sarah Orne Jewett
“The Foreigner”
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
“Old Woman Magoun”
“Luella Miller”
Edgar Lee Masters
“Nancy Knapp”
“Barry Holden”
Stephen Crane
“The Monster”
Paul Laurence Dunbar
“The Lynching of Jube Benson”
Jack London
“Samuel”
Wilderness, Frontier, and the Natural World
Cotton Mather
A Notable Exploit; wherein, Dux Faemina Facti
[The Narrative of Hannah Dustan]
“Abraham Panther”
A surprising account of the Discovery of a Lady …
Charles Brockden Brown
“Somnambulism”
Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Young Goodman Brown”
Henry Clay Lewis
“A Struggle for Life”
Emily Dickinson
“Through lane it lay – thro’ bramble –”
“What mystery pervades a well!”
Harriet Prescott Spofford
“Circumstance”
Sarah Orne Jewett
“The Foreigner”
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
“Old Woman Magoun”
Elia Wilkinson Peattie
“The House That Was Not”
Alexander Posey
“Chinnubbie and the Owl”
Witchcraft
Cotton Mather
“The Tryal of G. B.”
“The Trial of Martha Carrier”
Washington Irving
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”
Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Young Goodman Brown”
Madeline Yale Wynne
“The Little Room”
Sarah Orne Jewett
“The Foreigner”
Preface to the Second Edition
The first edition of this volume appeared in 1999. In the intervening period of more than a decade, Gothic studies has grown as an academic discipline, in large part due to work by members of the International Gothic Association, which celebrated the twentieth anniversary of its founding at its 2011 convention in Heidelberg.
In American Gothic specifically, classes and seminars in the field, once rare, now are found in universities throughout the United States and in many other countries.
In recent years, researchers have combed through periodicals of the nineteenth century and have uncovered a rich trove of Gothic texts, many by women authors. Many recent studies, as represented by this edition’s bibliography, have sharpened our historical and critical understanding of American Gothic. This second edition reflects the growth of this scholarship and the experiences of students and teachers who have used the book, many of whom have made helpful suggestions.
Editorial Principles
Sources are given for each text. Wherever possible the exact spelling and punctuation of the original are retained, even (and especially) in the case of eccentric usage by writers like Emily Dickinson. Original spelling and punctuation are retained also for the oldest works, those by Cotton Mather. In a few instances obvious errors have been corrected, and this has been stated in the headnote.
Words that may be unfamiliar but can be checked in a desk dictionary usually are not footnoted. Words that are less accessible, potentially misleading to the contemporary reader, or in dialect or a foreign language are footnoted, as are literary and biblical allusions, where possible.
Acknowledgments
In the years since the first edition of this book, I have benefited from collegial discussions with members of the International Gothic Association, of whom I would like to mention especially Jerrold E. Hogle (who first suggested this anthology), David Punter, William Hughes, Andrew Smith, John Whatley, Zofia Kolbuszewska, and the late Allan Lloyd-Smith.
A number of scholars have made suggestions for this edition, or have helpfully answered my queries. Among them are Chad Rohman, Carol Siegel, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, Cynthia Kuhn, Matthew W. Sivils, Bernice M. Murphy, and Sherry Truffin. Wiley-Blackwell’s reviewers for this revised edition made useful comments, most of which have been incorporated.
My graduate students at Bowling Green State University were among the first users of the 1999 edition. Though more than a decade has passed, those discussions are remembered and have influenced the evolution of our text. I would like to recognize the contributions particularly of Katherine Harper and Julia Shaw.
In my acknowledgments to the first edition, I thanked Cynthia, Jon, and Sarah Crow “for keeping the Editor from sinking too deeply into Gothic gloom.” That gratitude needs to be repeated, and extended to new members of the family, Joan Lau and Raphael, Fiona and Jacob Goldman.
The following publishers have granted permission to reprint material under copyright:
Poems by Emily Dickinson reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition, edited by Ralph W. Franklin (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), Copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Duke University Press for Charles Chesnutt, “The Dumb Witness,” in The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales, edited by Richard Broadhead, pp. 158–71. Copyright © 1993, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. www.dukeupress.edu.
Alexander Posey’s “Chinnubbie and the Owl” reprinted with permission from the Alexander Posey Collection, Gilcrease Museum Archives, University of Tulsa. Flat Storage. Registration #4627.33.
H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Outsider” Copyright 1926 and renewed © 1963 by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei. Reprinted by permission of Arkham House Publishers, Inc., and Arkham’s agents, JABerwocky Literary Agency, Inc., PO Box 4558, Sunnyside NY 11104-0558.
Introduction
The Gothic is a larger and more important part of the literature of the United States than is generally thought. It has been so since colonial days, and has been used to explore serious issues. And much of the country’s literature is Gothic: it is not an obscure area, but includes some of its best-known works and authors. Moby-Dick is Gothic; so are many of the poems of Emily Dickinson; so are The Sea Wolf, Absalom, Absalom!, Native Son, and Beloved. So are films as diverse as Alien, Lone Star, Sling Blade, and Winter’s Bone.
Clearly some definitions are needed to support these claims. We begin with a distinction. The supernatural is permitted but not essential to the Gothic. Mysterious events and shadowy beings have had a continuous presence in this tradition, from early English Gothic romances to the latest thriller by Stephen King or the last installment in Anne Rice’s vampire saga; but they are not essential. Nor is there any particular setting required by the Gothic, in spite of the prevalence of big old houses, claustrophobic rooms, and dark forests. A whaling ship can be a suitable Gothic site as well as a castle. Poe observed that “terror is not of Germany, but of the soul,” and his observation points us in the right direction, and away from the stage props.
What, then, are the qualities of the Gothic? Most definitions divide into two approaches, and either address the response of the reader or the characters and events within the work. Certainly most readers understand that the Gothic generates fear, or something like fear. We feel a certain chill at some point, as we encounter a Gothic work. This emotional response – what takes place in the soul, as Poe terms it – is in some way the point of the Gothic experience, and is, paradoxically, a source of pleasure. “’Tis so appalling – it exhilarates,” as Emily Dickinson puts it. The thrill can be mindless, like that of riding a roller-coaster, and can be satisfied by manipulation of formulas by skilled popular authors or film makers. Yet moments of fear can also be moments of imaginative liberation, and of recognition. In the Gothic, taboos are often broken, forbidden secrets are spoken, and barriers are crossed. The key moment in a Gothic work will occur at the point of boundary crossing or revelation, when something hidden or unexpressed is revealed, and we experience the shock of an encounter which is both unexpected and expected. If we think, and perhaps scream, No! then another part of our mind may be acknowledging: Yes, that is it!
Within a Gothic work, there is usually a confusion of good and evil, as conventionally defined. We may be asked to suspend our usual patterns of judgment. A frequently encountered character combines and blurs the roles of hero and villain. Captain Ahab, the “grand ungodly godlike man,” is a model of the Gothic villain-hero. But Gothic characters occur in small and private worlds as well. In our collection, Old Woman Magoun is both a kindly, nurturing grandmother and a child murderer. The governess of Henry James’s famously ambiguous novella The Turn of the Screw may be a heroic defender of her pupils or a lunatic.
American writers understood, quite early, that the Gothic offered a way to explore areas otherwise denied them. The Gothic is a literature of opposition. If the national story of the United States has been one of faith in progress and success and in opportunity for the individual, Gothic literature can tell the story of those who are rejected, oppressed, or who have failed. The Gothic has provided a forum for long-standing national concerns about race, that great and continuing issue that challenges the national myth. In this collection, for example, a number of stories about monsters objectify racial fear and hatred, and the largely forbidden topic of miscegenation is explored by several authors. If the national myth was of equality, a society in which class (like race) does not matter, the Gothic could expose, in stories about brutes, the real class anxiety present in periods of emigration and economic flux. Similarly, in an age when gender roles were shifting, sexual difference could be a source of fear. This anxiety was further heightened by an epidemic of sexually transmitted disease, another forbidden topic of the age. Scholar Elaine Showalter has suggested that this issue underlies the popularity of vampires in Victorian fiction. In any case, the Gothic has been especially congenial to women authors, who found in it ways to explore alternative visions of female life, power, and even revenge. Similarly, homophobia and homoeroticism could be approached within the Gothic when overt discussion was impossible. If the dominant national story was about progress, and a part of this set of values was faith in science and technology to improve everyone’s life, then the Gothic can expose anxiety about what the scientist might create, and what threats might be posed by machines, if they escape our control. While we want to believe in wholesome families, the Gothic can expose what many may know about, and never acknowledge: the hatred that can exist alongside of love, the reality of child abuse, even incest.
In all of these areas, then, Gothic explores frontiers: between races, genders, and classes; people and machines; health and disease; the living and the dead; and the boundary of the closed door. It has enabled a dialog to exist instead of a single story, and has given a voice to people, and fears, otherwise left silent.
This volume attempts to show the breadth of the American Gothic tradition. Authors long understood to practice the Gothic, like Poe and Hawthorne, are of course represented. But the reader will find familiar authors who are seldom defined as Gothic, such as Stephen Crane and Jack London. Little-known authors – some of them unjustly obscure – are represented as well as familiar and famous names. Moreover, since it is our intention to stretch the definition of the Gothic, the reader will encounter works which are subtly Gothic; that is, which reveal their Gothic elements slowly, or upon reflection, or in hybrid form with other modes of discourse.
We begin with the Puritan divine and historian Cotton Mather. Mather certainly did not consider himself a Gothic writer. Indeed, the term would have been meaningless to him. Nonetheless, the two selections from Mather represent two of the foundations of American Gothic: the “Matter of Salem” (the witch trials of 1692–3) so important to later writers like Hawthorne; and the Indian captivity narrative, a distinctive American form that shaped the Gothic of American wilderness.
Our collection ends, more than two hundred years later, with stories and poems that carry American Gothic into the modern age.
Cotton Mather (1663–1728)
