Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (47 page)

1
  A good overview of
Candyman
and its relation to notions of place and space can be found in Avivia Breifel and Sianna Naigal, “How much did you pay for this place?: Fear, Entitlement and Urban Space in Bernard Roses’
Candyman
,”
Camera Obscura
37 (1997): 70–91.

2
  One of the best studies of the antebellum era, and one that emphasizes the unbelievable tensions in American society is William H. Freehling’s
The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

3
  On the end of Reconstruction and its effects, see some examples in Joel Williamson,
After Slavery
(Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1990).

4
  See Paul Hodkinson,
Goth: Identity, Style and Sub-culture
(Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2002) and Gavin Baddely,
Goth Chic: A Connoisseur’s Guide
(Medford, N.J.: Plexus Publishing, 2002).

5
  Anne Williams has argued that mythoi of gothic, their basic structure despite differing motifs, all relate in one way or another to the “terrors” of the patriarchal family. See her
Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

6
  A voluminous literary scholarship exists on the nature and definition of the gothic, and it is beyond my purpose to explore that scholarship here. I find especially useful Mark Edmundson’s formulation in his brilliant meditation
Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism and the Culture of the Gothic
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). Edmundson writes that “Gothic is the art of haunting, the art of possession.” He argues that, in contemporary America, “not all our gothic modes are fictive” and that the art of haunting has found its way into the very real occurrences of cultural, social, and political history. See pp. xi–xviii.

7
  Valdine Clemens,
Return of the Repressed
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 15–16. See also Clive Bloom’s
Gothic Histories: The Taste for Terror, 1764 to the Present
(London: Continuum, 2010), esp. 4, 5.

8
  Washington Irving,
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle
(Mahwah, N.J.; Watermill Press, 1980), 3.

9
  Irving,
Legend
, 5.

10
A good discussion of the 1819 Panic and its causes and effects appears in Sean Wilentz,
The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 206–17.

11
Wilentz,
Rise of American Democracy
, 207–8.

12
Irving,
Legend
, 12–13.

13
See Kent L. Steckmesser, “The Frontier Hero in History and Legend,”
The Wisconsin Magazine of History
46, no. 3 (1963): 168–79. Steckmesser gives numerous examples from the nineteenth-century accounts of the exploits of Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, Davy Crockett, and less well-known figures.

14
Irving,
Legend
, 36.

15
On the origins of vampire folklore, see Paul Barber,
Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).

16
James Twitchell,
Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 112.

17
David J. Skal,
The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror
(New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1992), 82.

18
Skal,
Monster Show
, 82.

19
Susan Tyler Hitchcock,
Frankenstein: A Cultural History
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 93; Mary Shelley,
Frankenstein
(New York: New American Library, 1978), x–xi.

20
See Michael Sappol,
A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 213–17.

21
On how quickly the creature in Shelley’s work became associated with industrial change and mechanical processes, see Hitchcock,
Frankenstein
, 101–6. See also Laurence A. Rickels’ discussion of Frankenstein and the birth of the “dark twins” in
The Vampire Lectures
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 277–86.

22
Elizabeth Young,
Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor
(New York: New York University Press, 2008), 5.

23
On Poe’s vampires, see Twitchell,
Dreadful Pleasures
, 121. The unpublished novel is entitled “The Last of the Vampires: A Tale of Baltimore City,” John Hill Hewitt Papers, Box 5, Emory University Special Collections.

24
H. P. Lovecraft,
Dagon and Other Macabre Tales
(Sauk City, Wisc.: Arkham House Publishers, 1965), 14–19.

25
Sherrie Lynne Lyons,
Species, Serpents, Spirits and Skulls
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), 34.

26
Lyons,
Species
, 30.

27
Lyons,
Species
, 40.

28
“The Sea Serpent Caught at Last!”
New York Tribune
, February 1852; reprinting of Captain Seabury’s account in Antoon Cornelis Oudemans and Loren Coleman,
The Great Sea Serpent
(New York: Cosimo Classics, 2008), 45–51.

29
Lyons,
Species
, 47.

30
Herman Melville,
Moby-Dick
or, The Whale
(New York: Penguin Classics, 1992), 498.

31
“Hydrarchos or Great Sea Serpent,” September 19, 1845; American Memory Project, Library of Congress.

32
M. Strakosch, “Sea Serpent Polka” (Boston: G. P. Reed), Rare Book, Manuscripts and Special Collections Library, Duke University.

33
Robert H. Brisendine Papers, box 11, file folder 22, Emory University Special Collections.

34
Brisendine Papers, box 24, file folder 82.

35
For an introduction to this vast critical commentary see
Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick
,
intro. and ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 2007). Melville quote taken from
Moby-Dick
(New York: Penguin Classics, 2003), 498.

36
Andrew Delbanco, “Introduction,” in
Moby-Dick
, xiii.

37
Melville,
Moby-Dick
, 13, 14.

38
Melville,
Moby-Dick
, 13–15.

39
Melville,
Moby-Dick
, 624.

40
Melville,
Moby-Dick
, 259.

41
See Bruce Levine,
Half-Slave and Half-Free: Roots of the Civil War
(New York: Hill & Wang, 1992). Sean Wilentz describes the context of Moby-Dick, which he sees as a “prophecy of America’s destruction,” in
Rise of American Democracy
, 653–55.

42
Gross quoted in Teresa A. Goddu,
Gothic America
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 133; Morrison quoted in Bettye J. Parker, “Complexity: Toni Morrison’s Women—An Interview Essay,” in
Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature
(New York: Anchor Books, 1979).

43
Goddu,
Gothic America
, 133ff.

44
See Eric Foner,
Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 97–102, 119–20.

45
Quoted in Young,
Black Frankenstein
, 49–50.

46
Goddu,
Gothic America
, 133.

47
Goddu,
Gothic America
, 133–36.

48
W. Scott Poole,
South Carolina’s Civil War
(Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2005), 23.

49
See Annalee Newitz’s brilliant examination of Crane in
Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 16–19.

50
R. B. Rosenburg,
Living Monuments: Confederate Soldiers’ Homes in the New South
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 14.

51
Anthony Lee and Elizabeth Young,
On Alexander Gardner’s Photographic Sketchbook of the Civil War
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

52
Gary Laderman,
The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Toward Death, 1799–1883
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 78.

53
See Michael Griffin, “The Great War Photographs: Constructing Myths of History and Photojournalism,” in
Picturing the Past: Media, History and Photography
, ed. Bonnie Brennen and Hanno Hardt (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 135–39. See also an excellent survey of the Brady photographs in Jarret Ruminski, “A Terrible Fascination: Civil War Photography and the Advent of Photographic Realism” (M.A. thesis, Youngstown State University, 2007), esp. 4, 6, 63–80.

54
Newitz,
Pretend We’re Dead
, 19–20.

55
Described in Laderman,
Sacred Remains
, 100.

56
Laderman,
Sacred Remains
, 168–69.

57
This turn in theology is explored fully in Drew Gilpin Faust’s
This Republic of Suffering
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 177–189.

58
Ambrose Bierce,
Ghost and Horror Stories of Ambrose Bierce
(Toronto: Dover Publications, 1964).

59
Quoted in David Schmid,
Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 44.

60
Schmid,
Natural Born Celebrities
, 46.

61
The best known account of Holmes is Eric Larson’s
The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair that Changed America
(New York: Vintage Books, 2004). See also Schmid,
Natural Born Celebrities
, 49–65.

62
Mary P. Ryan examines the social and economic origins of “the cult of true womanhood” ideology in
Cradle of the Middle Class
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 191–229. See also Nancy F. Cott,
The Bonds of Womanhood: “Women’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), esp. 197–206.

63
Literary criticism of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s work in relation to the gothic is truly voluminous. One good place to begin is an excellent essay by Robert K. Martin entitled “Haunted by Jim Crow: Gothic Fictions by Hawthorne and Faulkner,” in
American Gothic: New Interventions in the National Narrative
, ed. Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998), 129–42. Martin sees in Hawthorne a return of the “national repressed.”

64
This reading of ”Young Goodman Brown” draws on the work of James C. Keil, “Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown: Early Nineteenth Century and Puritan Constructions of Gender,”
New England Quarterly
69, no. 1 (1996): 33–55.

65
See Scott Peeples,
The After-Life of Edgar Allan Poe
(Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2004), 108–15. Peeples argues that “addressing gender in Poe involves acknowledging his benighted thinking on the subject while also recognizing the ways he exposes the dangers of the dominant (sexist) ideology in his work.”

66
Goddu,
Gothic America
, 78.

67
In
Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film
(Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1996), Tony Williams makes the argument that what he calls “family horror” has been central to both gothic literature and later film conventions in America. See esp. 26–30.

68
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” in
Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
(New York: Doubleday, 1966), 181–82.

69
Poe, “Fall of the House of Usher,” 190–91.

70
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar in
The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984) describe the common nineteenth-century trope of “The monster-woman threatening to replace her angelic sister [who], embodies intransigent female autonomy and thus represents both the author’s ability to allay his anxieties by calling their source bad names (witch, bitch, fiend, monster) and, simultaneously, the mysterious power of the character who refuses to stay in her textually ordained ‘place.’” See p. 28. This describes most of Poe’s female characters and their narratives.

71
The most detailed study of Woodhull’s construction in the press is Amanda Frisken’s
Victoria Woodhull’s Sexual Revolution: Political Theater and the Popular Press in Nineteenth-Century America
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Frisken looks into how men’s “sporting papers” often feature attacks and cartoons on Woodhull. See esp. 16, 17, 140–45.