Hiding in Plain Sight - James Maroney Inc.

1965), Stephen King (The Shining, 1980) and yes, Annie Proulx (Brokeback Mountain,
2005).
All Gothic literature relies for its impact upon the setting up of some seemingly regular
circumstance: a visit to the old, ancestral lodge or a moonlit boating trip along the edge of
a remote, sylvan lake. Having once set the scene, the author then slowly, relentlessly,
submerges the reader in a morass of forbidden emotions conventionally beyond the
pale—incest, patricide, familial dysfunction, abject rage and erotic desire—emotions
refined readers would consider as not just out-of-this-world but “Other.” 35 Gothic’s
“hook” derives its strength from the seemingly casual intraposition of the familiar with an
imminent, sensational terror of inordinate violence or the prospect of—always lurking—
illicit or immoral sexual arousal of delectable intensity. Upper-class gentlemen of
breeding who drink dark potions or who inject drugs that give license to wicked,
forbidden desires; lightning storms that illuminate dark castles where aristocratic
scientists, who sew together body parts stolen from graves, give life to brutal, murderous
monsters. Scantily clad beauties scream for their deliverance: delightful!
John Quidor, Tom Walker’s Flight, 1856, Fine Arts
Museums of San Francisco
But stay: Gothic does not allow
indulgence in its pleasures without
exacting an admission from readers of
how craven are they themselves and of
how very near is their own affinity for
the forbidden. Since the authors rely
upon the premise that illicit urges and
forbidden desires lie hidden in every
breast, the redeeming promise of the
mode is temporary freedom from
societal (or self-imposed) repression,
especially repression of sexual instincts,
the darkest and most feared of all
human emotions.
Add to this that the death, in the late nineteenth-century, of carnival with its shameless
exploitation of the freakishly uncanny and the decidedly queer, its deliberate
transgressions of gender boundaries and insinuation of a panoply of sexual preference,
coincided with the emergence of new forms of societal release: for women, hysteria (the
vapors); for men, psychoanalysis; and for all, the revival of the ghost story. The first two
of these novel, outré expressions arrived with the benefit of pseudo-medical or pseudoscientific
sanction. But they all shared a common mechanism with their predecessor: an
antidote to the dark and mysterious emotional wounds polite society haplessly and
35 William Veeder, “The Nurture of the Gothic or How can a Text be both Popular and Subversive” in
Robert K. Martin, ed., Eric Savoy, ed., American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative (Iowa
City: University of Iowa Press, 1998) p. 23
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