Hiding in Plain Sight - James Maroney Inc.

While only his “closest” circle of gentlemen friends realized it, Cole’s Last of the
Mohicans, Cora Kneeling at the Feet of Tamenund, 1827, impounded a (fairly obvious!)
erotic message, linking together as appositional texts a crude impulse behind a refined
literary allusion. A century later, invoking exactly this tradition—and precisely naming it
with almost truculent conviction—Wood’s American Gothic linked together the quaint,
Midwestern attributes of the pathetically simple farmer and his serenely apathetic
wife/daughter to one of the most sinister horrors in the Gothic catalogue: homosexuality.
Wood, like Cole before him, gambled that his audiences’ sanctimonious adherence to
propriety would trump any temptation to appear interested in the “Other,” thereby
bearding a very organic passion behind a very thin gloss of politesse.
It worked: Wood was, in fact, so confident his ruse was intact that as a response to
contemporary criticism of the predominantly “vertical lines” in American Gothic, he
actually said he might, as a follow-up, “do a couple in front of a Mission-style house with
the emphasis on the horizontal.” 37 Please: (couple… Mission[ary]-style…emphasis on the
horizontal…?!) Wood was fairly hitting us over the head with his unwholesome theme
and he was supremely certain that we were insistently not getting it.
This, then, is the major theme in this essay: we do not see what we are predisposed not to
see largely because “We have met the enemy—and he is us!” 38
§
37 Grant Wood, Letter to the Editor, Des Moines Register, December 21, 1930, cited in Corn, op. cit., p. 129
38 Walt Kelly, Pogo, (Anti-pollution poster for Earth Day), 1970
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