Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination by Farrell O’Gorman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination by Farrell O’Gorman Jordan Cofer Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination. By Farrell O’Gorman. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017. 338 pp. $60.00. When one thinks of the crossover between Gothic and Catholic writers, one might think of Kate Chopin or Flannery O’Connor, but may not immediately consider Herman Melville. O’Gorman, however, makes these connections work. An experienced scholar, Farrell O’Gorman, the author of Peculiar Crossroads: Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and Catholic Vision in Postwar Southern Fiction, presents a thorough study on the ways that Catholicism has shaped American Gothic fiction. O’Gorman explores “the complicated and profound role that Catholicism has played in Gothic narratives of U.S. identity” (4). Yet, [End Page 77] while O’Gorman acknowledges the anti-Catholic roots of Gothic fiction, especially British fiction (Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk), this book is concerned with more than the origins of Gothic American literature. Using Kristeva as a lens to help theorize the gothic, O’Gorman is interested in borders in American literature—be they geographical borders, imagined borders, borders separating identities, or even ways in which these borders are crossed. O’Gorman’s study starts in the eighteenth century United States with Crèvecœur’s Letters from an American Farmer. Written in a Puritanical context, O’Gorman highlights Crèvecœur’s French Catholic influences for a world in which religious identity has previously “received little sustained attention” (42). In his study of the influence of Letters from an American Farmer, this reviewer was struck by O’Gorman’s observation that Crèvecœur’s life, unlike his protagonist James, was “spent constantly crossing borders,” navigating identity in a country still in its cultural infancy (53). Moving into the nineteenth century, readers encounter studies on Melville’s monkish fables and then an extended chapter on Chopin’s Gothic Catholic tales. Although Melville was not Catholic, his nautical adventures put him face-to-face with Catholic cultures, which would have a significant impact on his life, since “Catholicism provided a powerful nexus of images and associations that he would draw on” (76). Chopin, on the other hand, was raised Catholic and this influence on her fiction deepen throughout her life, even as her practice waned. As for the twentieth century, “Waste Lands, Border Histories, Gothic Frontiers” is primarily concerned with Walker Percy, William Faulkner, and Cormac McCarthy. Yet, O’Gorman begins by engaging Catholicism’s role in Modernism, specifically addressing Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, which grapples with geographic borders in the United States as “Cather recognized that when New Mexico became a U.S. territory, its native Catholic inhabitants complicated longstanding Anglo-American narratives of national identity” (145). Unlike previous chapters, which focus on multiple [End Page 78] works by one author, this chapter is concerned with novels: Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom!, McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, and Percy’s Lancelot. O’Gorman notes that while “Percy was a convert to Catholicism; McCarthy was raised a Catholic; Faulkner knew the Catholic Church only indirectly,” the differences between these writers are important, although “each novel is explicitly concerned with historiography, and each ultimately depicts a Gothic encounter with a Latin Catholic South” (143, 152). In his final chapter, O’Gorman analyzes Flannery O’Connor’s engagement with the Gothic, arguing that although O’Connor resisted the label Gothic, she did identify herself a “‘descendant’ of Hawthorne— and . . . shared his critical engagement with the legacy of Puritanism in particular,” which is telling since O’Connor believed that the Gothic tradition in American literature “in large part began with him” (191). O’Gorman’s final chapter not only analyzes O’Connor’s short fiction (“A View of the Woods,” “The Artificial Nigger”), but puts her work in conversation with Richard Rodriguez, a Catholic writer fascinated “with Catholic-Protestant Relationships in the Americas” (199). Interestingly enough, O’Gorman’s study ends with a payoff for readers in the coda, which updates the study by applying the critical lens...