The Gothicism of American Gothic: "Potato Boy"

[For the previous entry, click here.]


This episode of American Gothic actually never aired during the show's 1995 run, perhaps because it is rife with sexual innuendo (a lonesome Selena gets frisky with ten-year-old Caleb during an after-school lesson in her apartment).  Also, religion is debased throughout: a dead bug floats belly-up in a basin of holy water; a church looks like the setting for a splatter movie after a priest spills blood-red wine all over during communion; Sheriff Buck (providing voiceover) also wonders if one the prim and proper churchgoers is "a screamer or a squealer."  Yet anyone who has read The Monk 
knows that the negative portrayal of religion is a traditional feature of the Gothic.

The Potato Boy of the episode's title is a Boo Radley-type bogey that has captured the imagination of Trinity's children.  Rumor has it that the boy is the bastard child of creepy Old Man Warren and the young woman he imprisoned and impregnated.  She died delivering him, since the boy allegedly weighed 30 pounds at birth.  He was also wretchedly deformed (no eyes; giant claws for hands) and thus has been kept locked away in the mouldering Warren house ever since.  Turns out, the Potato Boy is inside, and he is disfigured, but he has a beautiful soul.  In another example of the episode's coupling of religion and the grotesque, the Potato Boy is given an angelic voice (which he uses to belt out church hymns).

The episode shows that Trinity is populated with secret sinners.  The school teacher is a harlot; the local psychiatrist is a pedophile; the priest is a dope fiend (who doesn't practice what he preaches when it comes to Christian forgiveness: he's disowned his wanton daughter, Selena, banishing her from his church [how a priest has come to have a daughter is a question the episode skirts]).  And of course, the sheriff is the most duplicitous figure of all.  But give the devil his due: Lucas Buck makes a good point when he advises Caleb, "Be careful what you see in a man's eyes.  It might not be the truth."  In Trinity, South Carolina, the windows to the soul tend to be darkly shaded.