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      To penetrate fully into a work of literature is finally to make a serious effort to develop the historical imagination, to view the world . . . through another culture, another time, another nationality.

      Joseph Anthony Mazzeo¹

      The initial task of scholarship devoted to the Gothic is often an attempt at definition: what is Gothic? Typically, the discussion will begin with an exploration of the relationship between the nascent British form and its various progenitors followed by the inevitable conclusion that the term is ‘fluid’, ‘troublesome’ and ‘mutable’. The solution, Fred Botting suggests, is more criticism: ‘Elusive, phantom-like, if not phantasmatic, floating across generic and historical boundaries, Gothic (re) appearances demand and disappoint, and demand again, further critical scrutiny to account for their continued mutation.’² In an effort to illuminate the genre, analysis has splintered into a host of thematic, temporal and regional subspecialities each functioning to demarcate the multiplicity of approaches and the changing interpretative needs orbiting the term ‘Gothic’. Yet, while these new readings challenge some durable myths surrounding the production, circulation and interpretation of texts, they too tend to be fragments, telling only part of the story of the Gothic’s origin and meaning. The result is that significant explanatory relations often go unrecognized and, in particular, the relationship between the term’s literary meaning and its prevalent historical and ideological usages.³ This is particularly true in relation to the American Gothic which for many critics represents a troublesome contradiction. As Teresa Goddu argues, when modified by the word American, the Gothic loses all its ‘usual referents’; not only does it lack the ‘self-evident validity of its British counterpart’, it is essentially antagonistic to American identity.⁴ American Gothic, Robert Miles asserts, is an ‘oxymoron signalling its own uncanniness’: ‘The Gothic ought to have undergone ideological erasure, foritsmeaning was essentially anti-American: it spelled entrapment, enclosure, the inescapable, parasitic power of the past, the inglorious triumph of class, feudalism, vestigial institutions, and even nature itself.’⁵

      While it is no longer contentious to claim that American culture is ‘drenched in Gothic sensibility’, for many critics, its presence in the land of ‘light and affirmation’ remains an unremitting paradox.⁶ The popularity of American Gothic fiction indicates how ardently critics feel the need to explain the persistence of the form in a political and cultural environment seemingly divorced from traditional Gothic impulses. To account for a Gothic imagination in American culture, analysis has centred on psychology. 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’.⁷ In Love and Death in the American Novel, arguably the first work to focus exclusively on American Gothic writing, Leslie Fielder’s reading of early American texts exemplifies this approach: ‘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.’⁸ Unlike their British counterparts, American writers are always in a state of ‘beginning, saying for the first time . . . what it is like to stand alone before nature, or in a city as appallingly lonely as any virgin forest’. For Fiedler, the Gothic is juvenile and repetitive because it deals primarily with a world of limited experience: a world American authors return to time and again due to their inability ‘to deal with adult heterosexual love and [their] consequent obsession with death, incest, and innocent homosexuality’. Contemporary writers, he claims, are doomed to repeat these patterns because they share a similar consciousness and the inescapable conditions of American life. Therefore, for Fiedler, the Gothic must be ‘symbolically understood, its machinery and décor translated into metaphors for a terror psychological, social and metaphysical’.⁹

      Fiedler’s analysis has

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