Mark (Boomer) Redmond

Short Stories as a Genre

Professor Nancy Easterlin
6 December 2010

The Transfiguration of the Commonplace

The American Gothic functions as a window into the greater American

consciousness, offering a keen insight into the workings of the American psyche, and as

such, it can be claimed that it is the true, defining genre of American literature. In the

Introduction to American Gothic Fiction, Allan Lloyd Smith, writing of The Great

Gatsby, says the American 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" (Smith 1). The tropes of the genre divulge a great deal about

the American character, fears given form revealing basic traits and archetypes that allow

the critic to infer a great deal about the author and society.

Smith goes on to say that the imagined Americas in which the genre takes place are

"largely imitative if eccentric version of the dominant culture" (3), and that the works

themselves "are not so much working to adapt the Gothic mode; instead the Gothic

emerges from the conditions they seek to describe." The entire experience of the New

World, and the actions and consequences of its settlers, created new pressures that

crystallized the American Gothic as an emerging genre: "the frontier experience, with its

inherent solitude and potential violence; the Puritan inheritance; [...] the relative absence

of developed 'society'" (5). This essay will explore the importance of the American

Gothic to the larger American meta-narrative, the inextricable role of religion in both,

and will dissect three short stories representative of the genre by examining the tropes
used in each.

In his essay "A World of Wonders: The Mentality of the Supernatural in

Seventeenth-Century New England," David D. Hall writes "The people of seventeenth-

century New England lived in an enchanted universe. Theirs was a world of wonders.

Ghosts came to people in the night, and trumpets blared... events betokening the presence

of superhuman or supernatural forces" (Hall 29). Implausible but eccentric events,

including "blazing stars, monster births, a rainstorm of blood, [and] lightning" were

deemed supernatural and attributed to demonic influence. Retellings of these "signs and

wonders" became part of a new religious and cultural lexicon as these "cheap forms of

print" were "[h]awked by peddlars [sic] and hung up in stalls for everyone to see... they

reached the barely literate [and] the readers of more means and schooling" (31).

Primary among this distinctly Puritanical anxiety was the possibility of coming

face-to-face with the devil, a fear which reverberates throughout the genre as a whole,

from its prototypical roots in the "true" tales of the uncanny about which Hall writes, to

the early American Gothic work of Hawthorne, to recent appearances of the genre on

television, most notably series such as Supernatural (2005-2011) and the aptly-titled

American Gothic (1996-1998).

In his Introduction to Edge of Your Seat, Douglas Brode writes at length about the

capability of the modern horror and suspense story to map out the landscape of the

American mindset in two ways. First, by keenly accessing and at times exploiting the

current fears of a body of people regarding social change or world events. He cites the

rise of McCarthy-era anti-Communist sentiment and hysteria as the catalyst for the rise of

films that capitalize upon paranoia, such as The Invasion of the Body Snatchers or George
Romero's Night of the Living Dead. While vampirism had long been a perennial gothic

and horror trope, it experienced a wave of revival following the Hammer Films decayed

Dracula, with the release of information regarding HIV and the AIDS virus renewing a

fear of blood-borne pathogens. The conservative backlash against the Feminist movement

resulted in an outpouring of films which featured liberated women resisting the influence

of a culture which attempted to "put them back in the kitchen," the most triumphant

example from this era being The Stepford Wives.

For his second point, he quotes Stephen King: "[the genre] touches upon what

[King] calls 'phobic pressure points'... [which] 'play upon and express fears which exist

across a wide spectrum of people'.... These 'terminals of fear' are 'so deeply buried and

yet so vital that we may tap into them like artesian wells'" (Brode 9). Thus, it becomes

apparent that the gothic genre, as a subgenre of horror, has such traction because it preys

upon two kinds of fear: the first a kind of "learned" fear impressed upon one by society,

and the second an innate fear that stems from more primal concerns.

In the American Gothic, the two forms are entwined early in the genre's

codification. Innate discomfort arises naturally from the state of the inhabited land,

surrounded on all sides by either an incomprehensibly vast ocean that separates one from

his or her roots and culture of origin, or an impenetrable woodland full of unknown

wildlife and "savages." Puritan (especially Calvinist) imagery provided the other form of

fear, images of damnation and darkness that helped to further populate the untamed

wilderness with devils and other temptors. This helped to turn the already foreboding

western horizon into a world of supernatural darkness fraught with terrifying omens and

harbingers, as outlined by Hall in his essay. By thoroughly linking these two separate
forms into one indistinguishable genre, the American Gothic became the primary

exemplar of American literature.

The narrative of American history is one that is saturated with religion. Early

leaders among the settlers used religious differences as a pretense for emigrating to the

New World, with large groups of believers in tow. Antebellum slaveholders were

encouraged to provide their human chattel with spiritual sustenance, and did so with

gusto. This included citing Paul's extolling of the virtues of obedience, and the parable of

the good master, all while obeying the implicit rule that the slaves must not be taught

anything that might inspire them to escape (the most obvious example of this was the

omission of the Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt, for fear that slaves make the logical

connection between the plights of the two groups) (Raboteau 81). For centuries, the life

of an American was one that was swept up in a supernatural fervor; this was not merely

religion for them, but a lifestyle. "Lived religion," David Hackett writes in the

Introduction for the second edition of Religion and American Culture, "embraces popular

religion's emphasis on the actions of the laity in creating their own religious practices

from the available cultural resources" (Hackett xv). This is further exemplified in the

"Religion of the Lost Cause" explained in an essay of the same name by Charles Reagan

Wilson: the citizens of the Confederacy were so disillusioned by their loss of the

American Civil War (and by extension, God's apparent tacit approval of the "Northern

Oppressor") that their faith was utterly shaken, and a new narrative of faith that

canonized "heroic" figures like Jefferson Davis had to be created.

In 1835, Nathaniel Hawthorne completed "Young Goodman Brown," in which the

titular character journeys through the nearly omnipresent genre set piece of the
"foreboding wood," where his Puritan worldview is challenged. In American Gothic: An

Anthology 1787-1916, Charles L. Crow states that "American writers understood, quite

early, that the Gothic offered a way to explore areas otherwise denied them" (Crow 2);

Hawthorne is perhaps the most triumphant example of this in the canon of early

American writers. If the genre does rely upon "buried secret[s]" and repression, as Smith

claims, then this is a "truth in fiction" trope in Hawthorne's own life, as his predilection

for writing the supernatural is often attributed to his fascination with the Salem Witch

Trials of the 1690s, in which his ancestor took part as a judge (Hawthorne 628).

In New American Gothic, Irving Malin writes: "Because the family is usually

considered a stable unit, [American Gothic] tries to destroy it--the assumption is that [...]

the family cannot offer security" (Malin 50). This is an obvious conclusion, as the family

is in many ways a microcosm of society, and the lack of a foundation of trust in this

smallest cell of the body of societal interaction plays a major role in Hawthorne's life and

work. Hawthorne's experience with the moral dissonance of his progenitor informed the

characterization of "Young Goodman Brown," who, upon meeting the man in the woods

(implicitly the Devil incarnate), replies to his invitation by saying "'My father never went

into the woods on such an errand, nor his father before him,'" (629), to which he is told

that the Brown family has long trafficked in infernal affairs. Brown does not wish to

accept this, but agrees to join the man on a midnight trek.

Along the path, Brown also observes other figures from his past in their interactions

with his companion, most notably Goody Cloyse, who, as his Sunday School teacher,

was his first instructor in matters of the faith, and Deacon Goodkin, religious figurehead

of the community. Goody Cloyse explicitly refers to the companion as the Devil, and
even more tellingly, calls him "your worship" (631). Brown comes to the realization that

he is being herded towards a dark, twisted version of the Puritan church, a coven of

witches, under the cover of the forest, acting out a warped reflection of the ceremonies

that Brown cherishes. Finally, he senses that his wife, the amusingly unsubtly named

"Faith," who he assumes to be an archetype of purity, is among the pagan revellers.

Brown flees the area, only to return home and find Faith next to him in the morning.

Hawthorne was the codifier for many of the tropes of the American Gothic genre,

and in this piece, he provides the reader with an embarassment of riches in this regard.

Cloyse and Goodkin, and by extension all authority in Brown's life, represent the

repressed cultural secrets and "strangeness within the familiar" that pervade the genre.

The vastness of the frontier plays a role as the deep, dark woods that encompasses Brown

and seems to consume his soul, and, like many of the genre's protagonists, he finds

himself in the presence of Old Scratch himself. Even Faith becomes lost to him, as he

spends the rest of his life in an all consuming paranoid fear (although not without some

justification) that even her love is an artifice, whithering away in his distrust, until he dies

after a protracted lifetime of misery. Whether or not the events in the woods happened or

were an intense hallucination or fever dream is left to the imagination of the reader, but

the affect on Brown is the same regardless: disillusionment, iconoclasm, and loss of faith.

George Parsons Lathop writes in A Study of Hawthorne that Puritan imagery,

particularly of hell and the Devil, found powerful footing in the imagination of

Hawthorne and his successors, as seen in twentieth century literature. Stephen King's

"The Man in the Black Suit" contains a much more explicit meeting of the Devil and a

mortal. The story is told in flashback by a now-adult Gary, who, like his spiritual ancestor
Goodman Brown, lived out the rest of his life in fear after encountering the specter. As a

dying, elderly man, Gary recounts after eight decades that he can "remember meals I ate,

games I played, girls I kissed.... Yet of all the memories the one of the man in the black

suit is the strongest" (King 795).

Calvinism played a strong role in shaping the Protestantism that became part of the

American cultural background, as experienced by both Hawthorne and King. Perhaps

Calvinism's greatest "contribution" was in its rejection of a notion of salvation through

grace, in favor of a doctrine that was characterized by the notion that those who would be

saved from damnation were already known by God. This adoption of predestination was

a topic of much heated religious debate in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and

its mark is apparent here in King's story. There is no deliverance here by divine grace.

Of note, despite the fact that "The Man in the Black Suit" takes place--like most of

King's work--in Maine, it has the feel of a Southern Gothic story; the New England

approach to manifestations of evil generally took the route of a spectral visitor, or, in the

case of "Young Goodman Brown," an almost elegant figure, leaving the "grotesque" that

haunts the landscape of the American Gothic supergenre to be created by Southern and

Mid-Western writers. The notable exceptions to this are the Old Gods of H.P. Lovecraft,

adamantly a man of New England, but the presence of these eldritch abominations push

much of Lovecraft's body of work into a separate category, one more predisposed to

"horror" than the "psychological terror" of the American Gothic.

The Southern Gothic subgenre is informed by three primary influences: the

aforementioned Lost Cause theology present throughout the South following the defeat of

the Confederacy in 1865, the religion of the slaves and their emancipated descendants,
and, especially in Louisiana, French Gothic overtones. This last, the Cajun aesthetic of

Southern Gothic, strangely exists largely without infernal interference, focusing on

vengeful spirits and ghosts. Instead, the influence for the appearance of the Devil in "The

Man in the Black Suit" is culled from a combination of the other two influences. Zora

Neale Hurston spent several years of her life compiling African American folklore in the

1920s. Most of the oral folklore she recorded presented the Devil as more of a trickster

archetype, for two reasons. First, it grafted older, African trickster myths onto the

predominant religion enforced by slaveholders, allowing the myth to outlive its origin.

Secondly, and more importantly, the image of the Devil was distilled from the image of

white slaveholders: he was bald, pale to the point of albinism, and obsessed with

posession of one's soul. Allowing him to be tricked, in tales like "How Jack Beat the

Devil" (Hurston 47) and "Ole Massa and John Who Wanted to Go to Heaven" (70),

provided a cathartic experience for the survivors of the cultural holocaust of slavery. This

image, white, sharp teeth, and smelling of sulphur, was combined with the intangible but

overwhelming darkness that threatened to consume the very spirit of the Lost Cause

devotees to create the Southern Gothic Devil, borrowed by King. Further, Gary manages

his escape not, as noted, through divine intervention, but through ingenuity and luck, just

like African American folk heroes Jack and John; "just luck, and not the intercession of

the God I have worshipped and sung hymns to all my life" (King 795).

The story proper opens with nine-year-old Gary in 1914, King purposely placing

the action in an era that predates most tropes of modernity: "a world without airplanes

droning overhead, a world almost without cars or trucks, a world where the skies were

not cut into lanes and slices by overhead power lines" (781); it is not the world of
Hawthorne, but it comes as close to that aesthetic as possible while maintaining a

foothold in the present. King respects Hawthorne's genre awareness, and uses this to his

advantage by imitating some of the tropes in action in "Young Goodman Brown." John

Seelye writes that in order "to establish himself as a writer of what we now call gothic

fiction, [Hawthorne] availed himself of the past as a zone sufficiently unfamiliar as to

permit a certain license with the observable facts of life" (Seelye 2).

For both Hawthorne and King, the American Gothic genre, because it is not just a

"return of the past," as Smith wrote, but a return to the past as well, allowed for a greater

and more mythical element to enter the frame. Among the forms of literature that were

cannibalized to create the American Gothic genre were European folktales and myths; the

(non-native) inhabitants of the New World had no history of folklore upon which to base

their mythology, which included imitating the "Once upon a time..." trope inherent in

recycling these folk myths. This included substituting the settings and themes of the Old

World with what Smith calls the "Frontier Gothic": "where the dungeon becomes a cave"

(Smith 79), eschewing the labyrinthine castles and catacombs that were nigh omnipresent

in the European Gothic aesthetic in lieu of the equally unnavigable caves of the frontier.

The American Gothic as a New World mythology invokes the link to the past, while also

inhabiting that past.

Modernity serves as a counterpoint to the language King utilizes, which is evocative

of the Romantic tradition that helped lay the foundation for the American Gothic. Smith

writes "[The subjects of American Gothic] can be interpreted as a dark side of

Enlightenment freethinking or the persistence of an increasingly excluded occultist

tradition in western culture, one which paradoxically insisted on an acknowledgment of

the continuing existence of magic, religious, and demonic forces within a more and more

secular society" (Smith 5-6).

This ties into the previously discussed essay by David Hall. For those living in the

seventeenth century, there was no question as to whether the supernatural realm was

tangible; bizarre events that were beyond the science of the day to explain were

interpreted as "signs and wonders," and to accept that some were divinely inspired carried

with it the implicit understanding that some of these inexplicable happenings were the

work of imps and other infernal agents. Two centuries later, Hawthorne's writings further

entrenched the idea of a physical manifestation as something wholly believable, and the

twentieth century yielded Joyce Carol Oates's "Where Are You Going, Where Have You

Been?"

While both "Young Goodman Brown" and "The Man in the Black Suit" relied

heavily upon the wilderness for atmosphere, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You

Been?" proves unequivocally that the genre need not confine itself to such parameters.

Recall Malin's assertion that in the American Gothic, family can offer no security. This is

an important trope of the genre, named "domestic abjection" by Smith, who wrote "If the

devil lurked in the wilderness for American Gothicists, he might more easily be found

nearer to hand—at home, in fact" (Smith 94). Both Brown and Gary find the Devil in the

wilderness, recognize him almost immediately, and his specter follows them home, in the

form of a fear that haunts them for the rest of their lives. In contrast, Oates's Connie is

confronted by the Devil at her own home, and only gradually realizes that she has seen

him before. Just as his true nature is revealed through some tell-tale sign in Hawthorne

and King (his serpent-like staff and his sulphurous stench, respectively), "Arnold Friend"
wobbles in his "high boots" like a man with cloven hooves for feet (Oates 1030).

Oates's story, unlike the two previously discussed, exhibits what Smith refers to as a

frequently recurring motif of sexual interest, saying that "[in] exploring extremes [of]

sexual degradation, the Gothic tends to reinforce, if only in a novel’s final pages,

culturally prescribed doctrines of morality and propriety " (Smith 5). Here the reader

notices another tie to the archetypes of European folklore that germinated into the

American Gothic: Connie, like the Grimm Brothers's Little Red Riding Hood and King's

Gary before her, has strayed too far from the path and attracted the attention of an entity

she is not equipped to handle. At the end of the story, it becomes apparent that Connie,

like Red, is trapped by a lascivious wolf, with no escape. The genre trope of the inability

of the family to support the protagonist precludes the arrival of a savior, just as Gary had

to escape without the intervention of divine forces or parental assistance.

The breakdown of the family dynamic plays a key role in Oates's piece. Unlike

Gary's mother and father, who maintain a strong presence in their son's life (it is his

father who warns him not to go beyond a certain boundary in the forest, just as Red

Riding Hood is warned not to stray into the woods), Connie's parents are largely

disconnected from their daughter's life, remaining blissfully unaware of her activities and

the subsequent danger in which she finds herself. This is the devoutly Catholic Oates's

commentary on a life without spiritual guidance, and it shares this outlook with "The

Man in the Black Suit." In the backstory for King's piece, Gary's older brother dies from

an allergic reaction to multiple bee stings (the wilderness encroaching upon them),

shaking their mother's faith, and resulting in their absence from organized religion. Oates

also explicitly states that Connie's family is "not the kind who goes to church," leading
the reader to infer that, if they were, Connie would not be engaging in the sexual

experimentation that leaves her open to demonic influence, or, at the very least, she

would have some recourse against Arnold's intrusion.

Further, in all three stories, the Devil undermines the family. In "Young Goodman

Brown," society is seen as complicit in doing the Devil's work, and Brown's link to his

family is irrevocably sullied by the Devil's implications. In "The Man in the Black Suit,"

the Devil torments Gary by lying to him, claiming that he can see his mother, back at

their home, collapsed and dying from a bee sting. In "Where Are You Going, Where

Have You Been?", Arnold actually does see Connie's parents, but they are too physically

and emotionally distant to be of any help to her, too absorbed in their own activities to

come to her rescue.

Perhaps one of the most obvious tropes in all three stories is the presence of an

implicit guilt. Hawthorne's Brown, upon first meeting the Devil in the woods, calls the

specter "friend," and says mentions having made a covenant with him (Hawthorne 629).

Gary is at first unwilling to divulge the details of his excursion to his father, because he is

aware that by disobeying him, he invited danger upon himself. Connie, despite her youth,

finds herself in posession of carnal knowledge because of her premarital sexual activities,

a grievous sin in the eyes of her creator, Oates. Further, Connie's visitor introduces

himself as "Arnold Friend," claiming to be a friend to all, and because of her proclivities,

she recognizes him from his frequent appearances near the restaurant where young people

go to slake their lust. Each protagonist knows that he or she has in some way broken a

societal rule, and this guilt is what allows the darkness to gain a foothold.

The American Gothic is characterized by many tropes: the deep dark frontier, full
of danger and the unknown; interactions with infernal forces, often allowed entrance by

the actions of the characters; guilt over mistreatment of minorities, most notably African

Americans and Native Americans; and the inability of family or society to prevent the

horrific from happening. All of these narrative devices spring from ideas and fears that

are uniquely American, the result of tapping into both primal anxieties and spiritual and

existential angst that spring from religious indoctrination and dominance. There is

virtually no aspect of the American Gothic that cannot be attributed to issues and

concerns that are entirely American in nature; it is the pre-eminent example of American

literature, the one truly American genre.