American Gothic

by Nick Taylor

image courtesy of Harvard University Press

You know what the problem is with U.Va. English Professor Mark Edmundson? He's ungrateful. In his infamous September 1997 Harper's article, he laments the "here we are now, entertain us" attitude of today's undergraduates. But he calls us consumers without realizing that this role is one of the most valuable we perform for him. We are his test audience.

Suppose for a moment that a professor is like a stand-up comic. He wants to hit the big time, appear on Leno, get published by Oxford University Press. But before he spends ten months laboring over a manuscript, he has to test his material to see if it will play in Des Moines. My friends, Cabell Hall is Des Moines. Look up from this article for a sec. See that person standing at the front of the room talking? That's your professor, and he's not up there for his health. Whatever he is talking about -- Iranian tragicomedy, environmentally conscious uses of petroleum jelly, the osmolality of spit -- your professor is lecturing with the hope that one day he will be regarded as the world's authority on something.

Professor Edmundson is worried about undergraduates using his classes as "lite entertainment." This may be the case, at least for some. But what about his motives? Is he not using us as well? During the summer of 1996, Mr. Edmundson taught a class about the perceived Gothic revival in contemporary American culture, a theory he later turned into a book, Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism, and the Culture of the Gothic (Harvard University Press, 1997). Was there not a symbiosis at work in that summer session class? A quid pro quo? The students had the benefit of exploring a fresh perspective on their culture, and Mr. Edmundson had the benefit of a sounding board; rather, 15 different sounding boards. Perhaps rather than pointing fingers -- trying to pinpoint the delinquency in contemporary academic exchange -- we might do better to appreciate the distinct role performed by each party. We should appreciate Mr. Edmundson's generosity in sharing his ideas with us, and Mr. Edmundson, in turn, should appreciate his students for their valuable feedback on his theories. Academics should be, after all, a collaborative effort.

For those of us who missed the summer Gothic class, there is, thankfully, the book. And it is fascinating. Any critique is in danger of being drier than the book itself, which reads like a 179-page magazine article. Edmundson's journalistic style has earned him rave reviews from the book world, but a somewhat icier reception within academia. I suspect that Edmundson rather enjoys this reputation, however, for is it not every English professor's dream to be cast as the mysterious outsider, the misunderstood genius?

Edmundson admittedly writes for a more general audience than most of his colleagues in the Department of English. As he explains in the preface, "Nightmare on Main Street ought to be accessible to anyone with an interest in current culture and a willingness to hear it construed from a new angle."

The book falls most naturally under the category of "cultural studies," a relatively new academic field which seeks a critical perspective on pop culture. Like a member of the pop studies department in Don DeLillo's White Noise, Edmundson finds all worldly phenomena to be reflections, somehow, of contemporary films and television shows.

Several films figure prominently in Edmundson's argument. The central theme of the book is best expressed as an ideological struggle between Freddy Krueger and Forrest Gump. Freddy embodies what Edmundson calls "the Gothic mode," while Forrest represents a way of transcending the Gothic. The Gothic mode is defined as a mode of narrative that utilizes the following elements: a cruel hero-villian (Freddy, for example), a cringing victim (Nancy and countless others), and a terrible place (the boiler room).

Although Gothic had its heyday in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, with books like Walpole's Castle of Otranto and Shelley's Frankenstein, Edmundson sees a Gothic revival in late twentieth-century America. Horror films are his point of departure, but he extends his observations to include phenomena like day-time talk shows which, with their stark adversarial format, exemplify Gothic discourse.

Other topics of note include tattooing, body piercing, cockrings, tit clamps, and riding crops [Note: no horses involved]. Sadomasochism looms large in Edmundson's predictions about the future of the Gothic mode in America. He writes that "in a culture that is in many ways dominated by the Gothic, the sadomasochistic mode, in love and in all other human relations as well, will come progressively further to the fore."

In other words, "sadomasochistic sex would be normal sex" somewhere in the future of America. Edmundson arrives at this conclusion by way of Freud, whose tripartite theory of the psyche is, to Edmundson, a striking example of Gothic conflict. Within the Gothic scheme, the superego can be seen as the Freddy Krueger-like hero-villain, ceaselessly haunting the defenseless ego. However, the ego enjoys being tortured -- hence our natural predisposition towards sadomasochism.

In conclusion, then, Edmundson observes that our culture is becoming more and more like our psyches -- that is, more adversarial, more Gothic. The cultural alternatives we produce -- like happy-go-lucky Forrest Gump -- are altogether unsatisfying, and as a result, he predicts that we will continue to organize our cultural consciousness around the framework of Gothic conflict.

But why can't we shake this obsession with the Gothic? Why can't we be fascinated with sugar and spice and everything nice? Edmundson argues that it is because we are intellectually lazy. He calls the Gothic aesthetic "an epistemological cop-out." He maintains that "we'd rather have Gothic despair for life's meaning than be compelled to make meanings of our own." We have adopted the Gothic because it's easy to believe that the world is a shitty place. Easier than trying to think of reasons why it's not. It is hard to believe that all of this -- the schema of slasher flicks, the rise of raunchy talk shows, the inevitability of S&M -- is being debated right now somewhere in Bryan Hall. Sort of makes you excited about school, doesn't it? My friend Anantha reads academic books for fun. I always thought she was wasting her time, but now I'm thinking maybe she's on to something.