American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Literature ed. by Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy

Abstract

REVIEWS grave and her mons veneris or female pubic mound, which be­ comes covered with hair during puberty. [...] The double mean­ ing of ‘m ound’ suggests incongruously that in death the woman reaches sexual m aturity.” Confronted by such flights of interpre­ tative fancy, one can only feel relief that the opening chapter on Hardy biography resisted the tem ptation to try and shed light on the enduring sexual secrets of Hardy’s marriages with the aid of such subtextual insights. But it is unfortunate that this weakest contribution should have closed what is overall such a strong collection. K E IT H W ILSO N / U n iversity o f O ttaw a Robert K. M artin and Eric Savoy, eds. American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Literature. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998. xii, 265. $32.95 (U.S.) cloth. As is only appropriate, Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel (1960; 2nd. ed. 1966) is cited in the Introduc­ tion and in seven of the thirteen essays collected in American Gothic. Fiedler was not the first critic to identify an impor­ tant gothic tradition in American literature, but he did make the fullest (and most sensational) explanatory case for its exis­ tence. American Gothic brings Fiedler’s argument — especially its subversive underside aspects — aggressively up to date and testifies to its continuing relevance and vitality. The intention to be cutting edge is signalled by the subtitle: New Interventions in a National Narrative. I do not think the claim to newness would have been seriously compromised by informing readers of the date of the conference held at the Université de Montréal where the papers were first presented. The conference is men­ tioned (xii) but the date (October 1994) is not. The over-riding theoretical aim is emphasized by the word “interventions.” This is a collection of “performative” essays that will (it is implicitly asserted) alter a “national narrative,” that is to say, affect the “construction” of both the American gothic imagination and life in America (and our sense of both). This claim might strike some as hyperbolic. 137 ESC 28, 2002 The essays generally are of superior quality, but their per­ suasiveness will vary depending upon the credence that a reader gives the various theoretical strategies employed. These include the Derridean, the Lacanian, the Baudrillardian, the Fiskean (did you know that one?), and the new historical. I do have some problems with new historicism (it has now been around long enough in these frenzied times for some of its limitations to have become apparent), but, in the case of what I would regard as one of the more overtly New Historical essays in this collection, my difficulty (as will appear) has to do with what strikes me as a dram atic abuse of that methodology. In their “Introduction” Eric Savoy and Robert K. M artin describe “gothic cultural production in the United States” as “a discursive field” rather than a genre or mode (vii). I take it that Savoy gets first credit here (the “Edited by” order is alphabet­ ical) because he wrote the original draft of the “Introduction.” To some degree, the theoretical terminology in the “Introduc­ tion” overlaps with that in Savoy’s opening essay. The phrase “a common tropics, a shared set of metaphors” (ix), where a modish formulation is explained by a more conventional one, sets the reader up for Savoy’s otherwise possibly confusing use of “tropics” in the opening sentence of his essay: “A ‘theory’ of gothic cultural production in the United States is necessar­ ily invested in a poetics of terror — a tropics, a recurring turn of language” (3). (A fondness for “predications,” the “predi­ cated,” and “predication” [viii, ix], however, is confined to the “Introduction.”) Savoy’s essay, “The Face of the Tenant: A Theory of the American Gothic” is the first of three under the section heading “Framing the Gothic: Theories and Histories.” It amounts to a rather contrived and lumpy theoretical mélange that combines various understandings of the gothic, allegory, personification (“prosopopoeia” is the term used [6]), psychoanalysis, and queer theory, all topped off by a discussion of Grant Wood’s...