American Gothic landscapes: the New World to Vietnam

Abstract

The proliferation of proposed Amendments to the United States Constitution in recent years, particularly since the Republican Party regained control of both houses of Congress in 1994, brought tensions over the interpretation of this national narrative to the forefront of partisan politics. Informing debates over terms limits, welfare reform, and a balanced budget is the question of how much government the Constitution authorises. In the case of welfare reform, the debate circulates around the extent to which the government should intervene in the lives of individuals to ensure their equal access to the rights and protections of democracy. These questions regarding equality have demanded constant revision and reinterpretation of the document since its ratification. While the parties’ competing attempts to revise the Constitution to reflect the framers’ original intent have dominated the popular media, American Gothic literature reflects the ‘haunted consciousness’ of the nation: the awareness that at the heart of its governing text are contradictions that threaten to unveil American democracy as a fiction. These texts bring to the surface the repressed knowledge that the founding value of the Constitution, equality, is predicated on the exclusion of selected populations on the basis of race, gender and property.