Falling Houses: Linden Hills and Poe's Legacy in Black Women's Speculative Fiction

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This article examines Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills (1986) as an intertextual response to Edgar Allan Poe's sinister aesthetic and gothicism that anticipates innovations in late-twentieth-century Black women's speculative fiction and horror. Naylor explores the corrosive side effects of Black capitalism and assimilation while simultaneously illustrating the conflicting desires and patriarchal aspirations embedded within Black nationalist rhetoric. Poe's gothic interiors and narrative perspective provide a template for how Naylor's chapters work as cautionary tales about the obsessive and accumulative qualities of American individualism. Reading Naylor's depiction of the Nedeed home that is at the center of the Dantesque planned community of Linden Hills through "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839) also illuminates the influence of earlier authors, like Pauline Elizabeth Hop-kins and Ann Petry, in shaping the African American gothic tradition. The concluding section focuses on Tananarive Due's deployment of the falling house trope in The Good House (2004), a novel that reckons with residual trauma resulting from the palimpsestic nature of racial violence and settler colonialism.