Fw: Re: Back to V., MB's structure post cont.

[Dave Williams]

America was never supposed to nurture a Gothic impulse. The new world was, as Leslie Fiedler announced, the "land of light and affirmation" (9). Optimistic, progressive and seemingly free of ancestral ghosts, there was no rational for evil monks and aristocrats that haunted the pages of British gothic. There were no gloomy castles for a start, no labyrinthine tunnels, no crumbling abbeys; in short, no history.

To account for the persistence of the American Gothic, analysis is centred on psychology. Widely seen as a reflection of colonial anxieties, Puritan repression and pathological guilt resulting from the nation’s encounter with slavery and Indian massacre, the parameters of the American Gothic are marked primarily by “psychological, internalised, and predominately racial concerns” (Edwards, p. xvii).

Love and Death in the American Novel
In Love and Death in the American Novel (1960),arguably the first work to focus exclusively on American Gothic writing, Leslie Fiedler’s Freudian reading of classic and contemporary American texts exemplifies this trend: “European Gothic identified blackness with the super-ego and was therefore revolutionary in its implications; the American gothic…identified evil with the id and was conservative at its deepest level of implications, whatever the intent of its authors” (p. 149).

http://www.suite101.com/content/leslie-fiedlers-impact-on-american-literature-a268637