Poe, Faulkner, And Gothic America Essay

Poe, Faulkner, and Gothic America

ITOH Shoko

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I. Introduction: Shift in the Framework of Gothic Theory

    In multicultural environment with the crossing of the color-line in progress, the theory of the Gothic as a genre that has inherited the disturbance planted at the time of national birth is now undergoing a great change. Now in considering the Gothic of Poe and Faulkner, we should begin the discussion by looking briefly into the shift in the framework of Gothic theory.
    If we think back on the studies of American Gothic, it becomes apparent that we have three kinds of variations (that does not necessarily mean historical transition) concerning Gothic studies: the rhetorical framework has shifted from the Gothic of landscape to that of psychology, and currently to a genre exploring "cultural contradiction." Primarily the first flow has discussed how this minor genre of literature starting in England in the 18th century was Americanized and brought to the New World as a unique expression of the terror and horror experienced in the frontier between the settled land and the wilderness. The Americanization of European Gothic apparatus and devices as an old castle, a well, a letter, an abbey, into the wilderness, a cave, a great swirl, a somber residence; an "Indian," and murder impelled by madness have been widely researched. The search for the transformation of the original Gothic to fit in the American culture leads to the conclusion that "the Gothic novels in Europe were born as a backlash of the authors against the outer world, the overwhelming power of church and nation, and also as a counter-reaction against the rationalism and the archaism up to the 18th century, while the American Gothic was imported to create an original genre in the background of political and cultural immaturity" (Itoh, 359).
    In the second approach, a main source of the American Gothic...