lonely as any virgin forest’. For Fiedler, the Gothic is juvenile and repetitive because it deals primarily with a world of limited experience: a world American authors return to time and again due to their inability ‘to deal with adult heterosexual love and [their] consequent obsession with death, incest, and innocent homosexuality’. Contemporary writers, he claims, are doomed to repeat these patterns because they share a similar consciousness and the inescapable conditions of American life. Therefore, for Fiedler, the Gothic must be ‘symbolically understood, its machinery and décor translated into metaphors for a terror psychological, social and metaphysical’.9
Fiedler’s analysis has had enormous influence on contemporary readings of American Gothic fiction. Propelled by his unequivocal announcement that the American novel is ‘pre-eminently a novel of terror’, subsequent critics constructed their analysis of the Gothic around the assumption that ‘the psyche is more important than society’.10 As an explanation for why the Gothic is ‘so at home on such inhospitable ground’, Eric Savoy contends that Gothic narratives express ‘a profound anxiety about historical crimes and perverse human desires that cast their shadow over what many would like to be the sunny American republic’. Like Fielder, Savoy views the American Gothic as ‘a pathological symptom rather than a proper literary movement’.11 In American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative, Martin and Savoy claim their project is ‘indebted and in many way supplementary’ to Fiedler’s ‘pioneering conjunction of historicism and psychoanalysis’. For these critics, Fiedler’s analysis has lost none of its ‘freshness’ and provides ‘the cultural frame for subsequent inquiry’.12 Yet, however valuable Fiedler’s work has been to our understanding of American Gothic, it is useful to remember that his interpretative framework arises out of a political culture that eschewed social and ideological conflict in favour of an all-pervading liberal consensus. It was, as Daniel Bell declared, the ‘end of ideology’, a period in which academics were less interested in political history than in wresting the fiction of the ‘American renaissance’ away from the Marxist intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s and replacing it with a pluralist, consensus model free of the anti-capitalism of the Progressives and the formulism of the New Critics. The intellectual movement from Progressive to new liberal ideology was also contemporaneous with the development of the American studies curriculum in the 1950s and a new-found interest in the study of culture. Crystallizing this change was Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination, a work that would come to dominate cultural theory in the mid twentieth century. While conservatives called for ‘a life-drive in literature, for immersion in the American past, for recognition of progress and the goodness of man’, Trilling emphasized ‘the disenchantment of our culture with culture’.13 If the Progressive school interpreted American history as edging ever closer toward a form of democracy that would expose the material roots of conflict in class struggle, post-war liberals were suspicious of a linear model of progress and substituted a model of history characterized by ambiguity, paradox and irony.14 Trilling’s novel, The Middle of the Journey (1947), exposes this interest in the new dialectic, a belief in the self finding a middle way through a confrontation with reality and experience. Although Trilling shared the Progressive desire to reveal the underlying forces of history, his goal was synthesis, not opposition: it was a model that posited, as his novel’s title suggests, a ‘middle landscape’ rejecting the materialistic emphasis on economics or extremism in politics in favour of the internal human psyche. As Russell Reising observes, Trilling’s work ‘presaged a general shift in aesthetic evaluation, an elevation of works which tended to see reality as an ambiguous fabric and a denigration of those which dealt frankly with social, political, and economic matters’. In this new evaluation of ‘realism’, ‘[p]rotest was out, equipoise was in’. The result was an ‘obsession with the search for symbols, allegories and mythic patterns’ in American literature.15
Coetaneous to this intellectual movement was the political determination to redefine liberalism. As Marxism and the Communist party faded from the American intellectual scene, the nineteenth-century concept of liberalism went into decline. The shift began with the outbreak of the Second World War and the federal government’s decade-long curbing of individual liberties. The Alien Registration Act (1940), the Selective Service Act (1940), the conferring of permanent status on the Un-American Activities Committee (1945), federal loyalty programmes and the passage of the McCarran Internal Security Act (1950) outlawing Communism, all resulted in what many liberals viewed as a garrison state using police state methods. The effect was ‘to pose a conflict between national security and individual liberty’. In this climate, the optimism and nostalgia of the liberal imagination weakened and ‘[f]ear settled upon large segments of the citizenry; silence followed; and dissent seemed almost dead’. Individual liberty, the mainstay of traditional liberalism, was suddenly under threat by the growth of the centralized state:
The growth of the corporation in an industrialized and interdependent society also promised economic security to those who fitted into the corporate structure. But such people, the faceless organizationmen, stood to lose their freedom and their identity. The liberal’s faith in progress and science as avenues which would liberate the individual had brought him to the bleak possibility that these avenues would instead eliminate the individual.
What emerged in its place is what Eisinger termed the ‘new liberalism’; ‘chastened’ and ‘modified’, it projected an ambiguous and tortured vision which recognized the limitations and problems it had previously been unable to identify.16 This revised liberalism originated from a sense of betrayal and disillusionment after the Moscow show trials and Stalin’s nonaggression pact with Hitler. In ‘Our country and our culture’, Philip Rahv, editor of the Partisan Review, summarized the prevalent view: ‘Among the factors entering into the change, the principal one, to my mind, is the exposure of the Soviet myth and the consequent resolve (shared by nearly all but the few remaining fellow travellers) to be done with Utopian illusions and heady expectations.’17 From the perspective of new liberalism, the Progressive conception of reality was naive and extreme;instead, in both politics and culture, the centre was the place to be.‘The thrust of the democratic faith’, declared Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., ‘is away from fanaticism; it is towards compromise, persuasion, and consent in politics, towards tolerance and diversity in society.’18
Liberal consensus politics had enormous influence on readings of American Gothic fiction. When Richard Chase set out to define the American novel, he found it to be ‘shaped by the contradictions and not by the unities and harmonies of our culture’, and founds his tradition on the thesis that Americans do not write social fiction.19 In The American Novel and its Tradition, he conceives of an isolated hero on a quest through a symbolic universe unfettered by the pressure of social limits. Stirred by the ‘aesthetic possibilities of radical forms of alienation, contradiction, and disorder’, the American novel is essentially romantic. ‘In a romance’, Chase explained, ‘“experience” has less to do with human beings as“social creatures”than as individuals. Heroes, villains, victims, legendary types, confronting other individuals or confronting mysterious or other dire forces – this is what we meet in romances.’20 One of the central assumptions of pluralism was that American writers adopted a variety of literary strategies as a way of compensating for their impoverished social existence. Paradoxically, in their attempt to canonize the writers of the American renaissance, critics avoided association with the Gothic while acknowledging its prevalence in American literature. As Goddu notes, the term ‘Gothic’ and its popular connotations are substituted with a literary vocabulary more amenable to a clean or, we might say, liberal canon.21 Chase, for example, subsumes Gothic under the heading of melodrama:
The term [Gothic] has taken on a general meaning beyond the Mrs. Radcliffe kind of thing and is often used rather loosely to suggest violence, mysteries, improbabilities, morbid passions, inflated and complex language of any sort. It is a useful word but since, in its general reference, it becomes confused with ‘melodrama’, it seems sensible to use ‘melodrama’ for the general category and reserve ‘Gothic’ for its more limited meaning.22
For
