What Makes It American Gothic?
Part two: Eleanor Digby
Colonizers of the Americas stood on the precipice of—seemingly—silent darkness.
I’m trying to understand the genre American Gothic.
I’ve realized as I have worked through this problem—of what exactly the word Gothic means—since publishing that piece that I’m going to have to drag some meaning from a constellation of places if I want to grasp the American Gothic at all.
The hub of this wheel is American Gothic Tales, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, and not only the stories within, but the introduction Oates wrote to the collection. Wheel spokes, so far, have included Zombie by JCO (published the year before American Gothic Tales and no doubt each inform the other for the writing professor), How Stuff Works podcast episodes “Salem Witch Trials” and “Puritans,” 1491 by Charles C Mann, the oeuvre of Kazuo Ishiguro, and lots more.
I still stand by what I said in the first episode of this string: Gothic is a plastic word so overused it doesn’t mean much.
But Gothic does mean this: initially, at least, a reflection of the psyche of English-speaking colonizers of the Americas.
Ahem, so, as I was saying: Colonizers stood on the precipice of silent darkness.
Well, the darkness wasn’t silent. But in her introduction to American Gothic Tales JCO paints it that way. “How uncanny, how mysterious, how unknowable and infinitely beyond their control must have seemed the vast wilderness of the Now World, to the seventeenth-century Puritan settlers! The inscrutable silence of Nature—the muteness that, not heralding God, must be a dominion of Satan’s…” she writes.
“The muteness that, not heralding God…” Oates is speaking not for herself here, but for the Puritans—pilgrims who left Europe because they were so particular about how to worship God they couldn’t bear to be around anyone who practiced any other way. They saw the people who already lived in North America as godless heathens. Imagine if you suddenly moved to Trump territory.
Puritan rigidity is the lens through which to view “The Man of Adamant.” Nathaniel Hawthorne published it in 1846, but as Oates points out, Hawthorne descended from John Hawthorne, one of the judges in the Salem Witch Trials. His own ancestry fascinated the writer.
And he writes of these elder days with unambiguous dislike: “In the old times of religious gloom and intolerance, lived Richard Digby, the gloomiest and most intolerant of a stern brotherhood,” the story begins. It’s a funny opening, with a nice repetition of “gloom” and “intolerance” and a swift characterization of the Mr Digby. The fable-like tone creates distance between the main character and the narrator, and this is important to the next part of my thesis:
Dramatic irony is at the core of the American Gothic genre.
Richard Digby thinks he is sacred. He believes he’s found the way to salvation and “he took special care to keep it out of [others’] reach.” The irony of being saved and preventing others from being saved is lost on him.
The movement of the story is simple: Digby leaves a town, unnamed, but perhaps Salem Town, and marches off into the woods until he finds a cave. He decides the cave will be the site of his ascension to heaven. He gives no basis for this determination, and the narrator doesn’t ask one of him, either.
At the cave, Digby reads the Bible. He nurses himself on the water dripping from the stalactites overhead. The light is dim and he butchers passages of the Bible. A vision appears to him, trying to draw him away from that cave. Assuming it is the devil, Digby scornfully mocks the vision until it leaves. He dies. His body calcifies into stone.
Hawthorne’s narrator is merciless throughout with Digby. Take this example, when Digby arrives at the cave: “…a cave which, at first sight, reminded him of Elijah’s cave, at Horeb, though perhaps it more resembled Abraham’s sepulchral cave, at Machpelah.”
In the First Book of Kings, Elijah shelters in a cave on Mount Horeb after traveling for forty days. God speaks to him in the cave. The cave at Machpelah is the final resting place of Sarah and of Abraham. I had to look these references up and I don’t know how many readers in Hawthorne’s day would have known them, probably a fair number, but the narration drips with disdain for Digby. He sounds pretentious. Hawthorne shows the reader that Digby thinks he knows the Bible better than us. And then there’s the foreshadowing: as the cave resembles Abraham’s sepulcher, so it will soon become Digby’s tomb.
It is ironic that Digby thinks he is found a holy place when it is obvious to the reader its a grim, useless cave where he will die.
“At the close of the third day he sat in the portal of his mansion” what a word to use there, mansion, “reading the Bible aloud, because no other ear could profit by it…”
Digby’s a pig. His piety is his superiority, and this hypocrisy is the rocky pit at the core of this story. The description continues: “and reading it amiss, because the rays of the setting sun did not penetrate the dismal depth of shadow round about him, nor fall upon the sacred page.”
The narrator’s treatment of Digby informs the reader’s. We can see clearly that he’s going to die here and, despite what he thinks, he’s not found some secret path to redemption.
It’s clear to the reader what Digby doesn’t understand: he’s so far from God that the sun won’t even illuminate the good book for him to read. And he doesn’t seem to notice. He blunders on, “converting all that was gracious and merciful to denunciations of vengeance and unutterable woe on every created being but himself.” The whit of irony.
Oates points out that original works of Gothic art “insist” on physical transformation. Hawthorne’s work here insists on that, too. Richard Digby has been suckling at the stalactites on the ceiling of the cave. The mineral-rich water is calcifying in his bloodstream and over the course of three Biblical days, he turns completely to stone.
The final result is grotestque and terrifying. A century later, children explore the cave and find Richard Digby frozen in a hideous snarl.