Gothic mode or genre is among the often-employed narrative styles of its productions. HBO, known for its progressive cultural capital and liberal ethos, distinguishes itself in the daring narrative productions which often tackle polarizing themes of race, gender, sexuality, etc. Whether the polarization is understood as a deep moral divide among Americans, i.e., as the culture war between liberals and conservatives, or as a superficially maintained political hostility, i.e., as party sorting between Democrats and Republicans, most scholars agree that the media sphere is deeply polarized, especially since 2016 when Donald Trump emerged as a political figure and then the U.S. At the same time, her study persuasively argues that the Gothic's endurance and ubiquity are in large part related to its being uniquely adapted to rehearse questions about judgment and justice that continue to fascinate and disturb.Ĭultural and political polarization in The United States has been a prominent topic both in social sciences and the media since the beginning of the 1990s. Focusing on "The Fall of the House of Usher," The Marble Faun, Pierre, The Turn of the Screw, and "The Yellow Wallpaper," Monnet brings to bear minor texts by the same authors that further enrich her innovative readings of these canonical works.
Similarly, Melville, Gilman, and James use the gothic to explore the categories of gender and sexuality that were being renegotiated during the latter half of the century. Thus, Monnet suggests, while slavery and race are not the explicit subject matter of antebellum works by Poe and Hawthorne, they nevertheless permeate it through suggestive analogies and tacit references. Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Gilman, and James all shared a concern with the political and ideological debates of their time, but tended to approach these debates indirectly. Instead, Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet argues that the American Gothic, and gothic literature in general, is also about judgment: how to judge and what happens when judgment is confronted with situations that defy its limits.
Taking as its point of departure recent insights about the performative nature of genre, The Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic challenges the critical tendency to accept at face value that gothic literature is mainly about fear.
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