[This week’s series is, well, obvious. Your thoughts on American scary stories—real
or fictional, artistic or historical, fun or horrifying, and anything else you
can think of—will as always be anything but frightening. Boo!]
On whether America can have home-grown horror—and where we might find it.
Nathaniel Hawthorne once famously complained (in the Preface to The Marble Faun) about “the difficulty of writing a romance about a
country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and
gloomy wrong … Romances need ruin to make them grow.” Given what he and his era meant by “the Romance,” it’s possible to paraphrase his point this way: America was, at least in
the early 19th century but perhaps remains, too young, too devoid of
a distant past and the ancient castles and ruins that come with it, to produce
a Gothic literary tradition in the same way as Europe. Even Edgar Allan Poe,
the Hawthorne contemporary and American Gothic writer who would seem so clearly
to disprove this idea, set his most Gothic stories either abroad or (as in “The Fall of the
House of Usher”) in an undefined place
that could be anywhere (and feels more European than American to be sure). So
it might indeed be fair to ask whether there can be a homegrown American
Gothic.
It was of course in implied response to such a question that Grant Wood painted American Gothic (1930), one of
the most famous and most ambiguous works of American art. Using his sister and
the family dentist as his models for the iconic farmer and his wife, Wood
created what seemed to be a simple and realistic portrait of two average (and somewhat
unhappy and stiff, but not particularly mysterious) people. But then he gave it
that title, and the whole thing suddenly became a great deal more complex and
challenging. Is the title sarcastic, contrasting the simplicity and even
boring-ness with those much more mysterious and compelling qualities Hawthorne
had listed? Is it genuine, attempting to draw attention to the horrors that can lurk in quiet farmyards or families? Or is it an ironic combination of the two, recognizing
that America does not have the overtly gothic qualities but might in its
apparent simplicity and ordinariness possess a subtler and very different but
ultimately no less horrifying quality?
Your mileage may vary, of course, and Wood’s painting will always remain
open to those and many other possible interpretations. But I would argue for
the ironic interpretation, not least because it fits with the painting’s own
two contrasted yet interconnected levels (what’s on the canvas and what’s in
the title). And I would connect it to our contemporary popular culture by
noting the echoes of Wood’s title in the recent hit TV show American Horror Story. At least in its first season (the show has changed
settings and characters yearly), Story
could be seen as an extended and far more explicit (this was 2012, and they had
a full season of episodes to fill) representation of the idea that average
American families and homes contain within them great and gothic horrors, that
the scariest thing of all might not be a ruined castle full of vengeful ghosts
and supernatural terrors, but a sunlit suburban home full of, well, those same things.
I’d like to think that Hawthorne would be entirely on that board with that idea.
Next spoooooky post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Other scary
stories you’d highlight?
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