AMERICAN GOTHIC: A CREATIVE EXPLORATION Thesis Submitted to The College of Arts and Sciences of the UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for The Degree of Master of Arts in English By Aaron Trevor Goode UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON Dayton, Ohio May 2019 AMERICAN GOTHIC: A CREATIVE EXPLORATION Name: Goode, Aaron Trevor APPROVED BY: ___________________________________ Bryan Bardine, Ph.D. Committee Chair Professor ___________________________________ Christopher Burnside, MFA Committee Member Professor ___________________________________ Stephen Wilhoit, PhD. Committee Member Professor ii © Copyright by Aaron Trevor Goode All rights reserved 2019 iii ABSTRACT AMERICAN GOTHIC: A CREATIVE EXPLORATION Name: Goode, Aaron Trevor University of Dayton Advisor: Bryan Bardine This work endeavors to explore the various movements of American Gothic by presenting an original narrative that represents key facets of each movement. Various authors and subgenres are mentioned throughout via text boxes containing annotative notes. These annotations are intended to enhance reader understanding of the American Gothic genre by familiarizing them with the stylistic conventions common to key authors and famous works of the genre. The story itself is broken up into seven sections, each distinct with regard to style and content while maintaining a cohesive narrative with a unified plot. As the readers progress through the plot, they will also progress chronologically through the history of American Gothic. from the earliest work of Charles Brockden Brown up to the Postmodern style of Mark Danielewski. iv Dedicated to My Wife v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would first like to thank my advisor, Dr. Bardine, for his openness to this unconventional project, as well as for the opportunity to discuss metal and attend shows with his students. I would also like to thank Mr. Burnside and Dr. Wilhoit for their critical feedback and advice in this undertaking. I also owe gratitude to the people who read my work and offered their thoughts in a non-official capacity: Rebekah, Chris, Michael, and Jacob. Many thanks. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………....ii DEDICATION…………………………………………………………………………….v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………………vi PART I…………………………………………………………………………………….1 PART II……………………………………………………………………………………7 PART III………………………………………………………………………………....14 PART IV…………………………………………………………………………………18 PART V………………………………………………………………………………….24 PART VI…………………………………………………………………………………29 PART VII………………………………………………………………………………...35 vii PART I As I resolve to write this, I fully feel the crushing burden of my choices and actions suffocating me like a body of stones forcing the air from my lungs. My intent is not to justify myself, nor is it to offer any excuses for what I have done. Looking at this white surface, I lay down across it and grimace as my skin begins to shift and writhe over my muscle and bone. There’s something in my skin. With a sharp, rending pain, a rupture near my eye breaks open, and an inky black worm pushes through the wound, wriggling out of my flesh and dropping wetly onto the floor. With a fiendish precision, the worm begins to roll and rub its body against the surface, leaving the dark effusions of its skin as stains on the fabric. As the worm continues to move, I watch as the black stains begin to form words, and the words begin to tell my story… For Sarah, the Mother of my Child I never knew the name of the Scotsman; I His obsession with “The only knew him as I will refer to him here. He died Scotsman” reflects the common incorporation of Europe as a long before I came into being, and the memory of source of corruption. Not far removed from the American him had faded from all repositories except the Revolution, the earliest American Gothic, Weiland, by dustiest and most dismissible of records kept in Charles Brockden Brown, is an excellent example of how this the city archives. These records, I found when I popular sentiment was represented in the Gothic of the had coaxed them from the amiable woman whose time. job it was to watch over the largely unremarkable history of this town, contained 1 neither his origins nor his purposes. I can only assume they were the same lofty and misguided goals that have predestined my own path almost 100 years later. As an author, my dream was to explore some important branches of the constitution of man, and, as a Gothic author, to demonstrate the pervading corruption and depravity of the human soul. I believe the Scotsman understood this truth. The records, although scantly detailed, indicated some manner of perversion and subversion in his activities that shocked the townsfolk; truly, when he died, and the police were forced to enter his house and retrieve his body, they instead burned the structure to the ground with his body inside rather than allow the press or curious bystanders to see what was within. The contents of the house were never elaborated on, and neither was the cause of the Scotsman’s death. It was this event, the burning of the house The narrator’s obsession with uncovering the nature of and the intentional amnesia regarding its contents, mankind reflects a statement by Brown in the beginning of that drew me to the location. I had been struggling Weiland, which reads “His purpose is neither selfish nor for years to produce a work, a novel, that would temporary, but aims at the illustration of some important engrave my name in the history of Gothic literature branches of the moral constitution of man.” alongside my idols: Poe, Lovecraft, Hawthorne, James… To this end, I had foregone college, believing the influence of academia would dilute the truth I sought to convey. I had worked only enough to feed myself, often being fired for poor performance or absenteeism. I counted this as a benefit, as surely an occupation would only detract from the attention my masterwork demanded. My family had long ago broken off contact with me, or I with them, out of disappointment and frustration. 2 All the attempts I had made at securing “The puritan consciousness itself, although waning in this publication for my manuscript were met with period, had establish a profoundly ‘Gothic’ rejection after rejection, on grounds that I imagination of good and evil, and the perilous human grudgingly admitted were justified. The work experience.”- Allan Lloyd Smith was lacking. My ingenious explorations of the miasmic depths of the human soul were at best derivative of my literary ancestors, and at worst a self-aggrandizing sermon more befitting Jonathan Edwards’s pulpit. While my repeated failures as an author created a sense of inadequacy and insecurity within me, they also served to increase my desperation. In my poor financial and emotional state, I became more obsessed, not less, with crafting my ultimate Gothic work. The fever that possessed me and drove me to this end would not allow me any other occupation. I was convinced in my soul that what I lacked was the appropriately Gothic setting that would ignite my imagination to new and original peaks of terror and wonder—something truly sublime. I knew that no simple cemetery or decrepit house on a hill would suffice. I needed a scene that went beyond the surface level aesthetics of fear. I also knew that locations that had been the scenes of gruesome crimes would be beneath my aims. Simple murders or suicides were far too commonplace to inspire the level of writing I required. With this conviction, I began the intensive research necessary to uncover a place that had witnessed things sacrilegious, violent, occult in the truest sense. It was this belief that led me, after months of research in libraries and newspaper archives, to find the fragmented memories of the Scotsman. The newspapers were painfully vague as to who he was and what he’d done to warrant such a drastic response by the police, but they were very specific as to where his 3 The importance of setting in all house had stood. With some direction from the forms of Gothic, American and others, cannot be overstated. woman in the city archives, whose services I Commonly accepted as the first Gothic work, Horace Walpoles The had come to rely on, I was able to make my Castle of Otranto was created out of a mental state Walpole induced in way to the exact spot where the house had himself by constructing and curating an architecturally Gothic space and stood. To reach the point described, I had to filling it with “arcane collectibles.” walk just beyond the city limits, where town gave way to fields and farmhouses, and roads became more a means of separating different crops than a means of transportation. After a few hours, I finally found it in a corner of a field, bordered by trees growing through a fence line. Of course, every field had a corner, and most of them were delineated by fences and trees or both. But somehow, whether by infernal impression or my own intense desire to have not walked so far for nothing, I knew this was the site. To my disappointment, the site was marked by an acre of corn, soon to be the object of a late harvest. I cannot entirely credit my intuition, for, as if overtaken by some blight, the corn in this area was withered and stunted, standing in contrast with the healthy stalks and ears just past where the immolated house had stood. With nothing but my obsession and what small sum I had gathered by selling nearly everything I owned, I approached the farmhouse that seemed most likely to contain the owner of the field. It was a small house; the modesty of it spoke of a family whose pride was in their farm and whose aspirations likely did not extend beyond their property.