decay in the post-war period. In Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967), the Gothic figure of the impostor or deceiver reveals the continuing interaction between motives and intentions, and hypocrisy and sincerity in the modern age. Chapter 5 examines the agrarian model of republican citizenship. It begins with a brief review of the development of a pastoral tradition in American writing and its interdependence with the discourse of republicanism. It discusses how agrarianism functioned as a way of distinguishing the Old World from the New, and the virtuous from the corrupt, and reveals that the essential threat to agrarian virtue was the rise of commerce and industrialization. The chapter then explores the republican dialectic of virtue and corruption in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1965). It argues that while Capote exploits the paraphernalia of the Gothic to explore the invasion and destruction of iconic Americans by monstrous outcasts, the characterization and structure of the narrative exposes the inherent ambiguity surrounding the values of agrarian virtue and progressive individualism in modern America.
Notes
1Joseph Anthony Mazzeo, ‘Some interpretations of the history of ideas’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 33, 3 (1972), 379–94 (389).
2Fred Botting, ‘Preface’, in Fred Botting (ed.), The Gothic, Essays and Studies (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001), pp. 1–6; for discussions on the Gothic’s mutability see Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996);Teresa Goddu, Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Jerrold E. Hogle, ‘Introduction’, in Jerrold E. Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 1–20; Robert Miles, Gothic Writing, 1750–1820: A Genealogy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002); Marie Mulvey-Roberts, ‘Introduction’, in Marie Mulvey-Roberts (ed.), The Handbook to Gothic Literature (New York: New York University Press, 1998), pp. xv–xviii; David Punter, The Literature of Terror: Volume 1, The Gothic Tradition (New York: Longman, 1996).
3The term’s artistic and architectural usages also intersect with its literary meanings; however, I am primarily concerned with the historical and political contours of the Gothic. For more on eighteenth-century Gothic art and architecture see Samuel Kliger, ‘Whig aesthetics: a phase of eighteenth-century taste’, ELH, 16 (1949), 135–50.
4 Goddu, Gothic America, p. 3.
5Robert Miles, ‘“Tranced Griefs”: Melville’s Pierre and the origins of the Gothic’, ELH, 66, 1 (1999), 157–77 (158).
6Edward J. Ingebretsen, At Stake: Monsters and the Rhetoric of Fear in Public Culture (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001), p. 21; Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (2nd edn; New York: Dell, 1966), p. 9.
7Justin D. Edwards, Gothic Passages: Racial Ambiguity and the American Gothic (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2003), p. xvii.
8Fiedler, Love and Death, p. 149.
9Ibid., pp. xi, xxiii (original emphasis).
10Ibid., p. 6; Irving Malin, New American Gothic (Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962), p. 5.
11Eric Savoy, ‘The rise of American Gothic’, in Jerrold E. Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 167–88 (p. 168).
12Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy (eds), American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1988), p. viii.
13Lionel Trilling, Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (Middlesex: Penguin, 1963), p. 19; Chester E. Eisinger, Fiction of the Forties (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1963), p. 9.
14Russell J. Reising, The Unusable Past: Theory and the Study of American Literature (New York: Methuen, 1986), p. 95.
15Ibid., p. 97; Philip Rahv, ‘Fiction and the criticism of fiction’, Kenyon Review, 18 (1956), 276–99 (280).
16Eisinger, Fiction of the Forties, pp. 96, 97, 86.
17Philip Rahv, ‘Our country and our culture’, Partisan Review, 19 (1952), 283–326 (304).
18 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, 1949), p. 245.
19Richard Chase, The American Novel and its Tradition (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1957), p. 1.
20Ibid., pp. 2, 22.
21Goddu, Gothic America, p. 7.
22Chase, The American Novel, p. 37
23Ibid., pp. 30, 36.
24Malin, New American Gothic, p. 5.
25Ihab Hassan, Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 31
26David Suchoff, ‘New historicism and containment: towards a post-cold war cultural theory’, Arizona Quarterly, 48 (1992), 137–61 (142).
27Irving Howe, ‘This age of conformity’, in Philip Rahv and William Phillips (eds), The Partisan Review Anthology (1954; London: Macmillan,1962), pp. 145–64 (p. 151).
28Sacvan Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 10, 11.
29Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflective Sociology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 190.
30Joyce Appleby, ‘Republicanism and ideology’, American Quarterly, 37, 4 (1985), 461–73 (463).
31Fred Botting, ‘In Gothic darkly: heterotopia, history, culture’, in David Punter (ed.), A Companion to the Gothic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 3–14 (p. 3).
32Robert A. Ferguson, Reading the Early Republic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 54.
33Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 312.
34Ibid., p. 314.
35Moses Coit Tyler, The Literary History of the American Revolution, 1763–1783 (New York: n. p., 1897), pp. 8–9.
36Savoy, ‘The rise of American Gothic’, p. 167.
37Fiedler, Love and Death, p. 131.
38 Punter, Literature of Terror, p. 165.
39Quoted in Robert Lawson-Peebles, American Literature before 1880 (Harlow, England: Pearson Longman, 2003), pp. 18, 19.
40J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Republican Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 545.
41J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Between Gog and Magog: the republican thesis and the ideologia Americana’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 48, 2 (1987), 325–46 (334).
42Fiedler, Love and Death, p. 131.
43Botting,
