So What Does American Gothic Mean?

"American Gothic": the phrase has served as the title for an 80's slasher movie, a 90's TV series, a novel by Psycho author Robert Bloch, even a Smashing Pumpkins EP.  In academic circles, "American Gothic" (vs. the broader and allegedly more lowbrow term "horror") categorizes a literary mode--i.e. American literature stocked with Gothic elements/figures/themes.  Such a rubric simultaneously marks a distinction from traditional, European Gothic forms.  America, with its relative lack of history, and absence of recognized aristocracy, made for an unlikely locale for familiar Gothic settings such as the ancient, mountaintop castle.  Writers determined to avoid anachronism accordingly had to find native equivalents (as William Faulkner did with the series of Southern mansions in his Yoknapatawpha novels).  This need for cultural translation has been noted as far back as 1799, when America's first (Gothic) novelist, Charles Brockden Brown, declared in his preface to Edgar Huntly, or Memoirs of a Sleepwalker:

One merit the writer [i.e. Brown himself] may at least claim; that of calling forth the passions and engaging the symapthies of the reader, by means hitherto unemployed by preceding authors.  Puerile superstition and exploded manners; Gothic castles and chimeras are materials usually employed for this end.  The incidents of Indian hostility, and the perils of the western wilderness, are far more suitable, and, for a native of America to overlook them, would admit of no apology.

Countless volumes of literary criticism have been written about Americna Gothic.  I won't delve into that subject here; instead I'd just like to offer my own working definition: American Gothic deals with the horrors hidden behind closed doors, with the animosity underlying smiling facades, with the dark side of everyday life in Anytown, U.S.A.

But without a doubt, the most memorable use of the phrase is by artist Grant Wood, as the title of a 1930 painting.  For eight decades now the famous portrait of the severe-looking couple (the woman was Wood's sister, the man his dentist, and ironically, the two posed neither together nor in front of the actual house in Eldon, Iowa) has resonated with the American public.  The image has been imprinted on the mass consciousness thanks not just to the arresting painting itself, but also because of the endless echoes, parodies, and advertising appropriations of it.

Characters encounter American Gothic in films as diverse as The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, not to mention in episodes of TV programs such as The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Simpsons.  Stephen King (writing as Richard Bachman) makes pointed reference to the painting in his 1979 novel The Long Walk, as does British playwright Anthony Weigh in his 2007 work 2,000 Feet Away (which employs Eldon, Iowa, as its main setting, and recurs to the Chicago Art Institute, where Wood's original is exhibited).

The iconic couple's side-by-side pose has been rehearsed on Broadway (1957's The Music Man) as well as on TV (the opening credits of the 60's sitcom Green Acres).  In 1942, for a picture also entitled "American Gothic," photographer Gordon Parks conflated the two figures into Washington, D.C. cleaning woman Ella Watson (creating an intriguing racial commentary in the process):

And who could forget Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie posing as a pair of farm harlots to promote the first season of their reality show The Simple Life?

Wood's American Gothic inspired a popular 60's TV commercial for General Mills' Conutry Corn Flakes.  Even today one can't traverse the supermarket without coming across the image--on various Newman's Own products:

The rural couple have also become a Halloween staple, as seen in decorations such as this plastic wall hanging:

These various echoes and revisions, though, while continuing to popularize Grant's original image, have done little to help analyze it.  So what does American Gothic mean?  What sort of statement was the artist trying to make with the painting?  It's impossible to say for certain, of course, especially considering the oftentimes contradictory commentary Wood himself offered.  He claimed that he hadn't painted a rude caricature, that he wasn't satirizing Iowan provinicialism by depicting a pair of grim and proper Midwestern Puritans.  But Wood might have taken this stance merely in self-defense, in an attempt to shield himself from the backlash when the local populace bristled at the portrait (one Iowan farmwife notoriously threatened to bite off Wood's ear).  Still, Wood's own words on the painting are worth quoting, such as this explanation given in a March 1941 letter:

The persons in the painting, as I imagined them, are small town folk rather than farmers [conversely, in a 1933 interview Wood states the cottage was meant to be "a farmer's home"].  Papa runs the local bank or perhaps the lumber yard.  He is prominent in the church and possibly preaches occasionally.  In the evening he comes home from work, takes off his collar, slips on overalls and an old coat, and goes out to the barn to hay the cow.  The prim lady with him is his grown-up daughter [in the 1933 interview, Wood refers to the man as "the husband"; perhaps he sings a different tune in 1941 because of Midwesterners' vocal disapproval of the obvious age difference between the man and woman].  Needless to say, she is very self-righteous like her father.  I let the lock of hair escape to show that she was, after all, human.

These particulars, of course, don't really matter.  What does matter is whether or not those faces are true to American life and reveal something about it.  It seemed to me that there was a significant relationship between the people and the false Gothic house with its ecclesiastical window.

Incidentally, I did not intend the painting as a satire.  I endeavored to paint these people as they existed for me in the life I knew.  It seems to me that they are basically solid and good people.  But I don't feel that one gets at this fact better by denying their faults and fanaticism.  (Letter from Grant Wood to Nellie Suduth, archived on the CampSilos website).

What's my own take on American Gothic?  I think Wood deliberately foregrounded darkness when he dressed his couple in black.  The man's expression seems not just dour but defiant.  The tool he stands gripping (brandishing?) is mirrored not only in the pattern of his overalls but also in the wrinkles entrenched in his skeletal face.  Judging from these visual echoes, this guy is more apt to stab you in the heart or up under the chin than to invite you in for some apple pie.  And then there's the ostrich-necked woman beside him, her slanted, vacant stare suggesting not so much timidness as traumatization.  That coil of her that has sprung loose intimates that this woman has been too tightly wound, and that all is not in order on her top floor.  The idea is reinforced by the fact that the material of her apron matches that of the curtain in the upstairs window: Wood could be hinting that that's where the woman is normally locked away from the world.  If so, she would be another embodiment of the madwoman-in-the-attic archetype so prevalent in Gothic fiction (e.g., Bertha Rochestor in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre; the obsessive narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper").

My reading of the painting obviously veers toward the sinister, but hey, that might just be the way I'm wired.  And in hindsight, maybe the painting wouldn't be viewed so darkly if Wood hadn't actually called it American Gothic (when the image was circulated in national newspapers in the early 30's, it received the more innocuous caption "An Iowa Farmer and His Wife").  It begs the question, though, of why Wood did resort to such a labeling.  Was he simply referencing the house's Carpenter Gothic style of architecture, or was he probing at something deeper?  In other words, was he accenting the Gothicness of the residence or the residents?  It's hard to ignore the potential satanic symbolism of the painting, starting with the tri-pronged tool at its center (technically, it's a hay fork rather than a pitchfork).  Additionally, there's the serpentine shape of the woman's wayward lock, which in turn makes one wonder if it's just a coincidence that the object looming over her shoulder (situated back on the porch) is a snake plant.  So perhaps, then, the key to understanding the painting lies in Wood's quoted comment about "the significant relationship between the people and the false Gothic house with its ecclesiastical window."  The people ultimately match the house (a flimsy A-frame construction mimicking the architecture of the great stone cathedrals of Europe) in terms of falseness, of religious pretensiousness.  The man and woman might present a face of propriety to the community, but that doesn't mean they aren't living much differently in private, behind those conspicuously shaded windows.

Scholar Steven Biel has written a fascinating book (American Gothic: A Life of America's Most Famous Painting) that details the story of the painting's creation, and its subsequent cultural history.  I recommend it highly to anyone interested in the subject.  One of Biel's key obervations is that American Gothic has been invested with starkly different meanings by different generations of Americans; over the course of the 20th Century, the painting has been viewed as a satire or a celebration of the very same Midwestern values.  Biel might have seized upon the secret of the painting's enduring popularity--American Gothic's ambiguity, its perennial openness to interpretation, invites the scrutiny of every beholder.

I've presented Wood's commentary, and offered my own interpretation of the painting, but now the time has come to ask what you think.  What's your reaction when you look at American Gothic?  I'm eager to read your responses in the comments section below.