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The Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic: Gender and Slavery in Nineteenth- Century American Literature by Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2010), ISBN 978-1-4094-0056-1, 163pp, $89.95hb.
As David Punter reminded us recently in his tribute to Allan Lloyd-Smith on the IGA website, Gothic Studies is a new discipline, one that was not inevitable twenty-five years ago. Professor Monnet's book is both an example of the sophistication the discipline has achieved, and an explanation of how it has reached this point.
In 1930, when Grant Wood painted the popular image that is the cover art for Monnet's study, its title, American Gothic, seemed a comic, oxymoronic yoking of incompatible terms. Monnet's introductory chapter traces the evolution of the term 'American Gothic' in criticism to the present, then loops back to Woods's painting to show how Gothic theory can, indeed, illuminate this ambiguous painting. She then introduces Gordon Parks's photograph of an African American woman holding a mop and boom, also titled American Gothic (1942), which signifies on Wood's painting. The dialog of these two images establishes the importance of race and gender, the twin subjects of her study, in American Gothic.
This opening is witty, stimulating, and informative. A seminar on the American Gothic could spend a profitable first meeting discussing the critical history Monnet provides in her introduction.
Monnet's own contribution to the discourse of Gothic begins by discounting its emotional impact on its audience: no sophisticated reader of Gothic fiction is really badly frightened, and we all become sophisticated very quickly. Monnet's interest, rather, is in the questions of judgment raised by the Gothic, and in the ways 'nineteenth-century American writers adapted the gothic to explore political and cultural dilemmas' (18). Gothic writers often maneuver readers into situations where the judgment is required but forestalled...