Gothic House Fiction, English and American Style

Abstract Chapter 3, “Gothic House Fiction, English and American Style,” compares two versions of fraught literary struggles with the past, set in mysterious old structures that retain the memory of oppressive social orders and repressed crimes. Reading English Gothic fiction from Horace Walpole to Charles Dickens to Mervyn Peake’s Ghormenghast, this chapter names inheritance as the preeminent concern of English novelistic plot and derives a rule: normative, realist, non-Gothic literary mansions may generate inheritance squabbles, but as these are resolved, the houses stand; it is those that embody threateningly false inheritance—mis-inheritance—that the Gothic mode imagines falling, so that right may be narratively restored in the family and nation. The nature of the heritable is transmuted in nineteenth-century Gothic fiction to favor values of love and spiritual truth over the perpetuation of a family line. In American literature, the transgressive spirit of the Gothic has served to unleash the guilty contradictions of American history, which replicated in race slavery and native genocide the tyranny of the European past it claimed to reject. Though little noted, the great house became the chief American literary chronotope of this guilt. Edgar Allan Poe invokes an Old-World-style sinful family and a horrific mis-inheritance scenario that dooms both house and family to collapse. His most influential invention, the trope of the sentient house, is developed in a peculiarly American subgenre into the haunted house imaginary, which ratchets Gothic weirdness up to the level at which the house itself is the terrorizing antagonist of the text.