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WISCONSIN DEA TH TRIP. AN EXCURSION INTO THE
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2/05 uniﬁcmmms

WISCONSIN DEATH TRIP: AN EXCURSION INTO THE MIDWESTERN
GOTHIC

By

Charlotte Louise Quinney

A THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
Department of American Studies

2005

ABSTRACT

WISCONSIN DEA TH TRIP: AN EXCURSION INTO THE MIDWESTERN
GOTHIC

By
Charlotte Louise Quinney
Deemed morbid treachery to the robust historical narrative and the plight of the
democratic individual, Wisconsin Death Trip has been negated as little more than a
cultural studies farce. Located within the context of historical events, such as the
Panic of 1893, and the literary genres of naturalism and postmodernism,
sensationalism and the avant-garde, Lesy’s text is presented as deserving great
scholarly attention. Wisconsin Death Trip is discussed as a gothic text, according to
the theory of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject, and is
located alongside literature and ﬁlm of the Middle West including Glenway
Wescott’s The Grandmothers (1927), Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919),
Pope Brook’s Indiana Gothic (1999), Harmony Korine’s Gummo (1997), and Michael
and Mark Polish’s Northfork (2003). Collectively, these examples formulate a
comprehensive theory of Midwestern Gothic which depicts the particular psychic and
social attributes of a region which failed to provide many with the cultural rewards
promised by the mythology of the rural idyll and the Old Republican ideal of a
Jeffersonian ideology, Manifest Destiny and Turner’s heady Frontier Thesis.
Midwestern Gothic is characterized by visual rhetoric, the repressed secrets of the
archive, monomania, insanity, and familial trauma, framed through the lens of the

economy and national mythology.

C0pyright by
CHARLOTTE LOUISE QUINNEY
2005

TABLE OF CONTENTS

“A Handbook of Inner Culture for External Barbarians”: An Introduction
to the Ostracism, History, and Ideology of Wisconsin Death Trip .............................. 1

Chapter 1: “. .. those ﬁlthy things you used to read”: Abjcct History and
MidwesternGothic.............. ................................................................................... 34

Chapter 2: “Life is a mystery, everyone must stand alone”: The
Midwestern Gothic in Literature and Film. . . .............................................................. 54

2.2: Film ...................................................................................................................... 72
Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 83
Endnotes ...................................................................................................................... 99
Bibliography .............................................................................................................. 101

iv

“A Handbook of Inner Culture for External Barbarians”: An Introduction to

the Ostracism, History, and Ideology of Wisconsin Death Trip.
A voice from out the Future cries, “On! on!” — but o’er the Past
(Dim Gulf!) my spirit hovering lies

Mute, motionless, aghast! -
Edgar Allan Poe, “To One in Paradise”

In 1857, Henry Hamilton Bennett traveled with his father and an uncle from
Famharn, lower Canada, to Kilboum City, Wisconsin, then the ﬁnal destination of
the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul railroad. In the spring of 1865, Bennett
purchased the photography business of Leroy Gates at Kilboum and began the
practice of landscape photography. On the frontier, Mr. Bennett encountered
eclectic characters who were to form the foundation of tales that would be told to
the numerous visitors of Bennett’s studio. Recollections of his early experiences
in the western country included anecdotes which, along with some of his pictures,
were considered “somewhat of a fable” (Bennett 270). Bennett’s tales of the
Wisconsin Dells included poisoned water, drowned lumbermen, a woman who
killed her husband by pouring hot lead into his cars, a hermit whose house was
destroyed by ﬁre, and the superstitious and primitive behavior of the Winnebago
Indians who “infested” the region (Bennett 269). Bennett formulated a
technological and mythic infrastructure, whereby his development of
photographic techniques and inventions intersected with the creation of local folk
tales, to chronicle the land as “civilization began to creep into the western
country” (Bennett 270).

The introduction of technological mechanisms on the frontier instilled

apprehension in the native population that believed Bennett’s contraption would

steal the soul of the photographic subject. As historian A. C. Bennett recounts,
“it appeared that some time before[,] an Indian had been photographed and
shortly afterwards had died. It took a great deal of talking to convince them that
the mystery of picture taking was not responsible for this Indian’s death” (270).
In the 1890’s, photography was still regarded by the population as a “semi-
magical act that symbolically dealt with time and mortality” (Lesy, Wisconsin),
and in the small town of Black River Falls, Wisconsin, studio photographer
Charles Van Shaick captured 30,000 images of Wisconsinites who have come to
be perceived as historical ghosts whose tenuous nerves reverberated from the
shock of steam power, electricity and technological development, conforming to
George Beard’s 1881 declaration of American nervousness.1

The invasion of .the ‘machine’ disturbed the traditional paradigm of the
countryside as a bucolic retreat, unsettling the “Old Republican idyll” or the
“myth of the garden.” The countryside was becoming steadily infected by the
encroachment of industrialization. Indeed, in Lesy’s text a sketch of a locomotive
spanning two pages dislocates the center of the book. The effect seems similar to
that which Hawthorne experienced in the east in 1844; “Until he hears the train’s
whistle Hawthome enjoys serenity close to euphoria. The lay of the land
represents a singular insulation from disturbance, and so enhances the feeling of
security and repose. The hollow is a virtual cocoon of freedom from anxiety,
guilt, and conﬂict — a shrine of the pleasure principle” (Marx 28). On the other
hand, Black River Falls, located in Central WisConsin, also suffered as a

beleaguered town as it became evident that the area was particularly lagging

behind the industrial development of the surrounding country. In the 18703,
wheat farming begins to move to larger tracts in the West which were more ably
farmed with technological progress, resulting in falling wheat production shortly
after 1870. In the 18808, iron mining develops in the north of Wisconsin, and
lumbering becomes the state’s most important industry, followed by the paper and
wood produce industries. The meatpacking and brewing industry arises in
Milwaukee, and in the south, the dairy industry develops with the inﬂux of skilled
dairy farmers from New York and Scandinavia. The region of Black River Falls
was left to scrutinize its marginally sufﬁcient base position. Therefore, as
civilization and technology developed, a sense of doom was presented through
spasmodic, jagged, and elliptical texts, and the contradiction of the “machine in
the garden” disclosed that the inherited and utopian symbol of order and beauty
had been “divested of meaning” (Marx 276, 364).

Henry Hamilton Bennett’s Panorama From the Overhanging Cliﬁj Wisconsin
Dells (1891) is paralleled in the idyllic opening sequence of James Marsh’s ﬁlrnic
adaptation of Wisconsin Death Trip released in 1999. The ﬁlm also captures the
eccentric character of the Wisconsin frontier and oscillates between scenes of
“acceptance and denial” of national mythology (Lesy, Wisconsin). Another
parallel can be found in the opening scene of David Lynch’s cult television series
Twin Peaks (1990-1991) whereby the seemingly tranquil aerial view of cascading
falls and the river below precede the macabre incidents which take place in the
remote logging town. The interest in these texts lies in the disjunction between a

reputable narrative of sublime opportunity and a subversive narrative of

regression and disaster. In Michael Lesy’s 1973 montage, the metanarrative of
progress is supplanted with that of decay as he presents civilization’s creep
through darkness.

Wisconsin Death Trip is a collection of photographs, newspaper accounts,
literary extracts, asylum records, advertisements, tall tales, vernacular history,
montages and sociological, philosophical and historical commentary which denies
the social and economic cohesion of the 18905 and subtly parallels the increasing
social and political disorientation of the 19708. Lesy juxtaposes extracts from
Frank Cooper of the Badger State Banner, the Mendota State Asylum Record
Book, the literature of Hamlin Garland, Glenway Wescott and Edgar Lee Masters,
the mythical voice of the provincial historian and the town gossip, and the
photography of the local monied and eccentric Charles Van Shaik. Wisconsin
Death Trip is an aesthetics or poetics of history rather than a documentary
manual. The text’s moribund nature is established by so-called grisly vignettes
which transgress our contemporary perception of decency. Accounts of parricide,
suicide, abortion, lesbianism, religious mania, and arson perforate the text, along
with racism, gross speculation, poverty and disease. We are presented with three
chapters which exhibit a trinity of despair which reveals the desecration of the
American Dream.

The text, however, does not scream sensationalism. Rather it seems stilted
with often bland and sparse prose, and its components appear arbitrary and
contrived. We perceive a host of unidentiﬁed ﬁgures who “stare

uncomprehendingly” from the pages, offering neither exposition nor disavowal

(Taylor 346). The text seems labyrinthine in scope, aided by unpagination and
the lack of titles, labels, and quotes accompanying each photograph, as Lesy
provides a succession of facts which deny linear explication and generate
disorientation rather than resolution. This arcane structure parallels the thematics
of hysteria and disintegration as it reads as “a rotting network of decayed nerve
endings” (Lesy, Wisconsin).

Lesy seeks to rationalize his endeavor in ornate prose by providing a summary
of the neurasthenic condition - a response to rapid technological advancement, the
modernization of industrial practices and hereditary decline; however, it seems to
lack an economic, social and political historical groundwork which may serve as a
key to the bizarre subject matter. James Marsh parallels Lesy’s vision elucidates
in an interview with cultural critic Greil Marcus, “That was the ﬁrst choice I
made, not to try and explain the social-political-cultural history of anything. The
stories are based on a respect for these individual tragedies and disasters. If the
ﬁlm lacks one thing, it’s a governing [explanatory] idea on that level — but it
would have been a travesty.” The force of Lesy’s book seems to lie with his
thesis of degeneration as he attests to the poisoning of civilized peoples,
according to the 1895 philosophy of writer and physician Max Nordau. Nordau
summarizes:

A race which is regularly addicted, even without excess, to narcotics and
stimulants in any form (such as fermented alcoholic drinks, tobacco,
opium, hashish, arcenic), which partakes of tainted foods (bread made
with bad corn), which absorbs organic poisons (marsh fever, syphilis,
tuberculosis, goiter), begets degenerate descendents who, if they remain
exposed to the same inﬂuences, rapidly descend to the lowest degrees of
degeneracy, to idiocy, to dwarﬁshness, etc. (34)

Accordingly, as sociologists such as Robert Dugdale and Frank Blackrnar did at
the turn of the century, Lesy presents a litany which evokes an entreaty for the
reviviﬁcation of the principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Lesy’s text has been afﬁrmed as resoundingly redundant in the sparse
scholarship which has dealt with it. Deemed morbid treachery to the robust
historical narrative and the plight of the democratic individual, Wisconsin Death
Trip has been negated as little more than a cultural studies farce. Upon its
publication, both the Journal of American History and the American Historical
Review deigned the book undeserving of an appraisal. Likewise, James Marsh’s
1999 ﬁlmic vision of the text was also rejected by European companies on the
grounds that the project was “morbid, distasteﬁil and obsessed with the wrong
aspects of human life,” and the submission received no response ﬁom the PBS
series entitled “The American Experience” (Marcus). Critics found the book to
be of dubious value in terms of method, conclusion and content, and it has
remained “on the fringe of serious scholarship” since its publication (McArthur
411). In 1987, critic Liz Harris declared that, “At best, Wisconsin Death Trip
provided tiny peepholes into the past, which the curious but not too squeamish
could gaze through and ponder. At worst, it reduced rich lives to psychobabble
and robbed death of its most potent and meaningful contexts: intimacy and
personal history” (qtd. in Ruby 10). The critical espousal of proﬂigacy and
disdain continued in Susan Sontag’s critical work On Photography (1977),
whereby she claimed that the book is “rousing, fashionably pessimistic polemic,

and totally whimsical as history” (73). The book appeared suitable merely for a

voyeuristic immersal in death and misfortune. Indeed, Lesy’s pathological
portrait of the ‘small town’ provoked resident Dave Wood to publish a booklength
rebuttal, now out of print, entitled Wisconsin Life Trip: A Love Aﬂair With Rural
Life (1976). I

Reductionist critique has also initiated the text into a discourse of horror;
however, the relationship made is merely one of content and aesthetics rather than
ideological agenda. Christopher Sharrett, who has written in detail about violence
and apocalyptic theory, made an unfortunately ﬂeeting and decontextualized
comment that, “The portraits of dead babies, constricted, raw-boned farmers, and
sundry small-town oddities is a metahistory that works as a cultural supplement to
ﬁlms like Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the ﬁlms of David Lynch”
(Sharrett). Comparisons have also been made with Stephen King, Tim Burton’s
Sleepy Hollow (1999), and photographer Diane Arbus’ freak show portraits of
uncanny children, transvestites, dwarves, giants and prostitutes, Marsh’s
documentary underscores this vein by referencing Wisconsin’s notorious serial
killer Ed Gein (the model for Norman Bates and the Texas cannibals) and Jeffrey
Dahmer, and by bathing contemporary high school students in a red wash of light,
comparing them to their eccentric ancestors while implicating them in a scene
from Carrie (1976). Framed in this fashion, the alienatory and schlock value of
the text is enhanced while the critical lens is distorted or denied.

What should be gleaned from Wisconsin Death Trip, according to Lesy’s
ﬁ'amework, is the harsh and stoic blade of puritanical rubric which slices through

the discourse of horror. The text is ﬁlled with the alienated “creatures who had

been separated and divided by a selﬁsh culture of secular Calvinism” (Lesy,
Wisconsin). Indeed, Herman Melville noted the Calvinistic strain which has
informed America’s most haunting discourse, stating that the “power of
blackness” derived? its force from “its appeals to that Calvinistic sense of Innate
Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no
deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free” (qtd. in Levin 26). Lesy’s intent,
therefore, is not necessarily to shock, but to discern why we are alarmed by an
outbreak of greed, disease and failure and to interrogate the cultural assumptions
which determine our reactions. Lesy’s puritanical lens may be interrogated,
however, as it is questionable whether the large immigrant community of
Germans and Norwegians in Central Wisconsin were imbued with the Puritan
code of hard work and guilt. In Voices in the Valley (1964), cultural historian
Frank Kramer presents the disjunction between an immigrant “folk heritage of
land and lore” (63) and the “logical” soul of the Yankee (103). He explains this
divergence stating:

the glitter of Yankee stars seemed frosty and remote to the great mass of
immigrants pouring into the Middle West after 1848. The conﬂict
between the social myth of these peoples and the rational myth of the
New Englanders was joined in the Middle West wherever traditional
human know-how and intuitive relationships challenged the claims of a
rationally articulated way of life. (104)

9

The immigrant folk community was cloaked in “magic word and ritual drama’
and negotiated with a “supernatural Presence,” making “primitive “science” a
psychology” (183). According to Kramer, “Like a psychological pharmacy, the

minds of the people of the valley were ﬁlled with vials of folk formulae,” and as

folk tales and rumor often included a strong element of the supernatural, folk
belief could be a source of the ‘dark’ excerpts in Lesy’s text.

Critics have tended to perceive Wisconsin Death Trip as a concatenation of
primary sources and, as such, have objectiﬁed Lesy’s project, highlighting its
failure as a key to “causal or systematic knowledge” (Susman). They see the text
as ineffable and ultimately obfuscating without locating it within the conventions
of genre, literary modes, or ideological agendas. Irnportantly, 1973 witnessed the
publication of seminal texts in anthropology, revisionist. history and
postmodernism, the most notable being Clifford Geertz’s The Interpretation of
Cultures, Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence, Hayden White’s
Metahistory and Daniel Bell’s The Coming of Postindustrial Society.2 Geertz
proposed that the ethnographer’s role is to observe, record and analyze a culture,
interpreting signs in order to comprehend their meaning. F easibly informing
Lesy’s mode, Geertz proposed that interpretation must be based on the “thick
description” of a sign in order to glean the numerous implications and that large
conclusions may be drawn from small I and densely textured facts. Slotkin
published a dark interpretation of American colonization, reinvisioning history
through the lens of genocide, white supremacy and environmental exploitation,
thus undermining the mythic representation of western expansion. Like Lesy,
Slotkin revises the optimistic and progressive development of the frontier.
White’s Metahistory aimed to delineate pointed historical techniques and to
discern ideological implications, tropes and methods of emplotrnent, and to stress

the poetic and aesthetic value of history, just as Lesy was experimenting with

technique and aesthetics in his historical work. According to White’s categorized
afﬁnities between the preﬁguration of the historical ﬁeld and the explanatory
strategies used by a historian in a given work, Lesy seems to demonstrate a
radical ideology, a mechanistic argument which focuses upon location, act and
agency, utilizes the reductionist trope of metonymy, exploits tragedy as a source
of emplotrnent, and reﬂects the work of Alexis de Tocqueville and Karl Marx.
Lesy’s work therefore emerged during an important period of scholarly
production, suggesting that his work has similar force. As Warren Susman states
in his introduction to the 2000 edition of the text, Lesy has provided us with “a
consciousness of a territory still unexplored,” and it is this refrain which will be
addressed in the following pages. Wisconsin Death Trip will be contextualized
according to history and genre in order to glean a fuller understanding of the
attributes of the text.

Lesy proposes that “Neither the pictures nor the“ events were, when they were
made or experienced, considered to be unique, extraordinary, or sensational”
(Wisconsin). Historical and sociological sources prove Lesy’s logic and also
redeem the text in terms of historical credibility. Information on posthumous
mourning practices, health in rural Wisconsin, and the 1893 depression reinforce
Lesy’s statement.3 Posthumous mourning paintings were both “publicly
acknowledged and socially acceptable” and were rife in the northeastern United
States circa 1830-1860. The painters fashioned an illusion of “life in death” while
postmortem. photographs attempted the illusion of “the last sleep.” According to

Ruby, during the ﬁrst forty years of photography, approximately 1840—1880,

10

professional photographers regularly advertised that they would take “likenesses
of deceased persons” (52). From 1880 to 1910, images usually contained the
entire body, typically in a casket, thus nullifying the illusion of life. Ruby
suggests that the advent of casket and funeral photographs was a reﬂection of
three alterations in the funeral customs of America: embalming, the replacement
of the cofﬁn with the casket, and the increasing popularity of funeral ﬂowers (75).
The mourning practice impacted material culture as ‘widow’s weeds’ or funeral
and mourning clothes, memorial jewelry containing photographs and braided hair,
and embroidered mourning pictures were common. From the 1890s to the 19205,
the cabinet memorial card was common in the northeastern and Midwestern
United States, and at the turn of the century the concept of photographing funeral
ﬂowers and skeleton leaf arrangements was “sufﬁciently common and of interest
to the stereograph buying public to warrant the publication of commercial ﬂoral
arrangements” (Ruby 137). There is, therefore, tantamount evidence of a strong
‘death industry’ in the nineteenth century United States. This ﬁmereal culture
bolster’s Lesy’s inclusion of town gossip which reads:

They’d put the funeral pictures right alongside the rest in the family
album. When company came, they’d sit down and open the album. It
was the polite thing. They’d turn the album pages and every once in a
while the company would say something about how long Arthur’s hair
had been when he was little, or how sweet the baby looked, and which
one was it, since they knew you’d lost little Robert, and Lawrence, and
Ida. (Wisconsin)

Moreover, historian Geoffrey Gorer explains that:

During most of [the nineteenth century] death was no mystery, except in
the sense that death is always a mystery. Children were encouraged to
think about death, their own deaths and the edifying or cautionary death-
beds of others. It can have been a rare individual who, in the nineteenth
century with its high mortality, had not witnessed at least one actual
dying, as well as paying their respect to “beautiful corpses”; funerals

ll

were the occasion of the greatest display for working class, middle class
and aristocrat. (Ruby 60)

Lesy’s seemingly abrasive portrayal of corpses and commemorative artifacts thus
illuminates normative cultural practices of the nineteenth century.

The history of public health and sanitation also elucidates Lesy’s text. During
the 18805 Central Wisconsin experienced a rapid population growth. From 1870
to 1880 the population doubled, augmenting sanitation problems (Coombs 289).
Without effective regulations to control the disposal of waste materials, protect
water supplies, or enforce quarantine, infectious disease was ubiquitous. As
historian Jan Coombs explains:

During the years following its own organization in 1875, the Wisconsin
State Board of Health had encouraged local governments to establish
boards of health and appoint health officers; however, few rural
municipalities or towns had heeded their advice. When such boards and
ofﬁcers did exist in Central Wisconsin, many residents - especially
immigrants from the German Empire where public health enforcement
was a local police function -- ignored or openly resisted measures to
control their living habits. (286)

In 1887, Dr. W. H. Budge from Marshﬁeld declared to the state board, “The worst
obstacle encountered is the difﬁculty of making people obey orders, especially
with regard to keeping children from infected houses away from others” (Coombs
296). Indeed, families, schools and churches were chastised for disregarding
quarantine measures. Budge continued, “[T]he residents here are largely foreign
born, and have queer ideas of personal liberty; many among them moreover are
grossly ignorant” (Coombs 296). The early acknowledgement of sanitation
measures is noted in Wisconsin Death Trip as one record states, “Dr. H. B. Cole,
health ofﬁcer recommended that our citizens be required to use unusual care in

the disposition of garbage and slops, that all pig stys in the thickly settled portion

12

of the city be declared nuisances, and that none be allowed except they maintain a
ﬂoor and it be cleaned twice a week during the summer.” Based on information
'derived from the 1880 census population and mortality statistics, evidence also
reveals that citizens accepted folk beliefs about disease. For example, stillbirths
were attributed to overwork or fright, physicians still ascribed “rniasm,” or ﬁlth
theories of infection, female illness was attributed to “uterine colic” or “womb
sickness,” and authorities asserted that insanity and tuberculosis were the result of
heredity, or an overindulgence in sex, alcohol, or tobacco (Coombs 287-288,
297)

Census reports also reveal that “gilded ladies,” or prostitutes, formed a
signiﬁcant part of the Central Wisconsin population, and, analogous to the
frontier of the “Wild West,”4 alcoholism was implicated in many deaths:

When a “party of Norwegians attended a dance in Rudolph,” in Wood

County, “four of the party pitched into the ﬁfth man and pounded the

fellow nearly to death because they all “got woefully drunk.” [The]

same paper recounted a game of draw poker. At one of the gambling

dens in Centralia,” where Richard Johnson shot Frank Brown “in a

dispute over stakes, the ball going through the latter’s hat just above the

band.” (Coombs 300).
Accidental death was rife due to easy access to guns and axes, ﬁres from faulty
chimneys and lighting funnels, and dangerous equipment and working conditions
caused logging accidents to be chronicled in almost every issue of Central
Wisconsin’s weekly newspapers during the early 18805 (Coombs 298). Injuries
from threshing machines and other farm machinery, and the railroad were also

common. Devoid of regulatory measures, life on the semifrontier was perceptibly

dangerous.

13

Coombs contends that at the time of the 1880 census, Central Wisconsin
residents had “virtually no public health protection” (311). Primary source
statistics derived from census data and research in medical and economic history
prove that rural mortality rates were perpetually high during the latter decades of
the nineteenth century. Published reports demonstrate that rural mortality rates
remained constant while urban death rates drastically declined. On the one hand,
historians attribute this to progressive public health reforms in the city, while on
the other, improvements in vital statistics methods may have produced the
uniform death rate (Coombs 311). Nonetheless, Lesy’s text proves the historical
record that infectious disease was critical and that the perceptibly gradual
development of regulatory health and safety mechanisms, public health reform
and scientiﬁc knowledge led to a high death rate in Central Wisconsin.

The 18905 were a tumultuous decade as historian Ranjit Dighe makes evident.
He describes the 18905 as “a decade of drama and ferment” which included:

the much-noted “closing of the frontier”; the ﬁnal military aggression
against American Indians at Wounded Knee; a great wave of
immigration, marked by the opening of Ellis Island in 1892; America’s
entry into the quest for overseas empire, culminating in the Spanish-
American War of 1898 and the occupation of the Phillippines; the 1893-
7 depression, at the time the most severe economic contraction in
American history; violent showdowns between capital and labor in the
Pullman and Homestead strikes; [and] the continued rise of big business.
(32)

Indeed, incidents of racism, economic strife, drafting of young males, and
nostalgic Indian portraits punctuate Wisconsin Death Trip. An important
historical conjuncture to be considered in relation to the book is the economic
crisis entitled the Panic of 1893. Evidence of economic woes are evident in the

book as Lesy includes excerpts detailing “the crash of ﬁnancial affairs of

14

substantial and ﬁnancially responsible houses” and records from the Mendota
State Asylum for the Insane such as one dating from 1894 which reads,
“Norwegian. Age 27. Single. Farmer. Poor. Deranged on the subject of
ﬁnances.” The economic blight is often masked by the ostentatious Columbian
Exposition, also known as the Chicago World’s Fair, which promulgated luxury
and the leisure class. Indeed, in the history of the Old Northwest, a pattern
emerged whereby, “local divergence [was] viewed as anomalous and transitory in
the national narrative. After each disruption, the “heartland” image was
reestablished and local problems were swept under the rug of nationalism, as they
were at the ChicagoFair” (Watts 219); In the ﬁnal days of Benjamin Harrison’s
administration in 1892, the Reading Railroad, a major eastern line, went into
receivership. The 1892 collapse was magniﬁed as other banks and businesses,
dependent upon the railroad, went into recession. Concomitantly, the stock
market plunged dramatically, and European investors, also in recession,
withdrew. The enduring agricultural depression caused by storm, drought and
overproduction deepened. A5 historian David Whitten explains:

Midwestern and Southern farming regions seethed with discontent as
growers watched staple prices fall by as much as two-thirds after 1870
and all farm prices by two-ﬁfths; meanwhile, the general wholesale
index fell by one-fourth. The situation was grave for many. Farmers'
terms of trade had worsened, and dollar debts willingly incurred in good
times to permit agricultural expansion were becoming unbearable
burdens. Debt payments and low prices restricted agrarian purchasing
power and demand for goods and services. Signiﬁcantly, both output and
consumption of farm equipment began to fall as early as 1891, marking a
decline in agricultural investment. (Par. 13)

The gold standard plunged in the early days of Cleveland’s government. The

lavish spending of the ‘Billion Dollar Congress’ and the gold drain caused by the

15

Sherman Silver Purchase Act were responsible for the surplus reduction. The
depression was also attributed to underconsurnption and deﬂation dating back to
the Civil War. Farmer activists, demanding that the government stamp more
silver, became involved in “Prairie Populism” generating a third-party political
movement which assembled under the banner of the People’s or Populist Party in
1892. In a speech given at the 1896 Democratic Convention in Chicago, William
Jennings Bryan denounced the gold standard declaring, “You shall not press down
upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a
cross of gold” (qtd. in Dighe 139). The discontent of the working-class “tillers
and toilers” was strikingly evident, and the dire economic situation did not abate
until mid-1897.

Interestingly, however, the Mid West did become a source of signiﬁcant
source of social and political ideas and leadership at the turn of the century, and
Wisconsin became a model state of the “Heartland.” This may be attributed, in
some cases, to strong Midwestern leadership during the economic crisis.
Examples of this supportive Midwestern leadership include Jacob S. Coxey, who
led Coxey’s Army, a band of unemployed men, from Masillon, Ohio, to
Washington, DC. in 1894 to demand that Congress print greenbacks in order to
ﬁnance public works projects, James B. Weaver, who helped form the Farmers’
Alliance and was the Populist Party candidate in 1892, William Jennings Bryan,
from Salem, Illinois, who gave the infamous “Cross of Gold” speech, Robert M.

LaFollette who promoted the “Wisconsin Idea” of progressive reform, and

16

socialist Eugene Debbs. This attests to Lesy’s declaration of a schizophrenic era
which harbors both images of afﬁrmation and denial.

A ﬁnal important historical context to consider in relation to Wisconsin Death
Trip is the “Farm Crisis” of the 19705 and 19805. Echoing the Panic of 1893, the
economic crisis resulted in rural distress, murder and suicide, including the deadly
ambush of two Minnesota bankers, the gunning down of a banker, farrnwife and
farmer in Iowa, and the murder of two US. Marshals in North Dakota (Dudley
14). As historian and sociologist Kathryn Marie Dudley explains in Debt and
Dispossession (2000), “Economic failure is a stigma in virtually all walks of life,
but it is especially discrediting in rural townships, where viable farms remain in
the family for generations. A pioneering spirit runs deep in the hearts of those
who till the land, and these settlers of the prairie have never looked kindly upon
those who succumb to adversity” (5). Most poignantly, in relation to Lesy’s text,
she states, “Poking up through the public story are feelings of ' anger and
ambivalence, humiliation and betrayal — and a haunting sense that something has
gone seriously wrong in America” (47). Dudley lists the “seeds of the farm
crisis,” sown during the 19705 as optimism about the future of agriculture,
whereby the Nixon administration encouraged farmers to plant “fencerow to
fencerow” due to factors including “ﬂoating” currency, poor weather in other
parts of the globe, and a Soviet Union contract for wheat and feed grain in 1972
(12, 23). Due to this trade agreement with the USSR, between the summers of
1972 and 1973, the price of wheat rose from $1.61 to more than $5.00 per bushel

(Nordin & Scott 191). The agricultural boom of the 19705 depended upon

17

worldwide demand for US. farm products and low-cost credit, resulting in high
inﬂation (Dudley 33). In 1980 President Jimmy Carter pronounced a grain
embargo on the USSR in response to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan.
During the mid-19805, international commodity markets slumped and interest
rates “soared into double digits” (Dudley 13). Farmers were forced to default on
their loans and “more agricultural banks failed in 1987 than in any year since the
Great Depression” (Dudley 13). This agricultural depression parallels that
economic panic in Wisconsin Death Trip, including the concomitant
psychological trauma, providing a more accessible lens for the text. All these
historical factors suggest a relationship of causality between the events in the
book and the social, economic and political climate of the United States in the
18905, and begin to explicate Lesy’s purportedly intangible text.

This project will gain further support from an investigation of mode and genre
as it is evident that Lesy’s alchemical historical mirror reﬂects net only the
literary movements of ﬁn de siecle nineteenth century culture, but also his
contemporaneous postindustrial era. I will locate Lesy’s so-called “genre-
defying” text within the discourse of naturalism and postmodernism in order to
ground the text in paradigmatic literary theory.

Wisconsin Death Trip is a striking example of the naturalistic philosophy of
pessimistic materialistic determinism, and realism and naturalism’s explicit
engagement with historical transformation such as the rise of science and
scientiﬁc theory, industrialism and a growing consumer culture, and the changing

roles of men and women at the turn of the century. The populace of Lesy’s text,

18

like the characters of naturalistic ﬁction, stoop to Max Nordau’s ﬁn de siecle
assertion that, “The whole peOple fell into the condition of a man suddenly visited
by a crushing blow of destiny, in his fortune, his position, his family, his
reputation, even in his self-respect” (42). Lesy’s subjects suffer from “the
condition of [their] capture at birth” displaying the lack of agency and autonomy
of the disposition of naturalism.5 Lesy’s death trip, yoked with a host of
discontents who desire to discover “magical devices that could overcome and
perhaps even eliminate fate” seems more at home with the brutal reality of
Theodore Dreiser, in the arms of Silas Weir Mitchell, or in the teeth of McTeague
(Lesy, Wisconsin). The excerpts in Lesy’s text parallel the thematics of economic
strife and avarice found in the naturalist novel. A salient example would be the
photograph of a teak table laden with gold coins, and an excerpt which reads,
“Mania for speculation unbalanced [Judge S. C. Simonds’] mind years ago which
led him to squander his earnings in bucket shops and other forms 'of chance”
(Wisconsin). These seem emblematic of Frank Norris’ novels of greed including
McTeague (1899), The Octopus (1901) and The Pit (1903).

Lesy’s book functions in the “discourse of obsessionality” which is the
hallmark of the naturalistic text (Fleissner 45).6 This relates directly to Lesy’s
assertion that the book emulates the social philosophy or cultural disease of
neurasthenia or, as George Beard described in 1881: American nervousness.
Literary critic Jennifer Fleissner explains that, “A version of obsession-
compulsion emerged speciﬁcally out of a prior diagnosis, neurasthenia, that

linked the stuckness of literal historical individuals in detail and hyperbolic

19

ordering to a potential stagnation of history” (51). Indeed, Nordau criticized

99 ‘6

literature in the age of neurasthenia as “an “inane reverie, a boundless, aimless,
and shoreless stream of fugitive ideas” linked at most by “capricious” and “purely
mechanical” forms of association” (qtd. in Fleissner 56). This offers a clue to
Lesy’s stylistic oeuvre and to the critical backlash to his work. Wisconsin Death
Trip evokes the ‘compulsion to‘ describe’ (along with the compulsion to horde,
burn, purify and revere), or the situational and descriptive characteristics of the
naturalist author which are said to parallel the characters’ lack of agency within
their work.

Lesy proclaims that his book is ﬁlled with words, “not so casual as
descriptive” that ﬁll the space of the book with a “constantly repeated theme”
(Lesy, Wisconsin). The concept of traumatic repetition may be directly related to
the discourse of naturalism as it has been described as a “repeated semantic
choice - as ﬁxed like a game of chance, if not ﬁxated, like'a neurotic”
(Sedgwick n.23 175). The ﬁxity of exhaustive description has come under ﬁre by
literary critics who propose the impotence of a model which does little more than
aestheticize the historical. According to Jean-Christophe Agnew, not only does
this mode threaten the classic linear movement of historical narrative but it opens
“vistas of interpretation that are almost vertiginous in their potential complexity”
(qtd. in F leissner 46). Although Warren Susman defends Lesy in his introduction
to Wisconsin Death Trip, quoting French thinker and literary historian Hippolyte

Taine:

[E]very action which we see involves an inﬁnite association of
reasonings, emotions, sensations new and old, which have served to
bring [a new world] to light, and which, like great rocks deep-seated in

20

the ground, ﬁnd in it their end and their level. This underworld is a new
subj ect-matter, proper to the historian.

However, Lesy does provides us with paper trails whereby we attempt to glean
connections and patterns in his work through an analysis of juxtaposition and
repetition, but are ultimately ﬁ'ustrated. Alan Liu, an opponent of new
historicisrn, purports that “The picture of great detail threatens to become a
great picture of detail,” whereby the reader is positioned as an “entranced”
spectator, who “views the perfect form of cultural agony as if from across the
proscenium” (qtd. in Fleissner 47). We are left without deﬁnitions and
explanation, often wondering what each detail means in terms of culture,
individual psychology and societal ramiﬁcations. Susman makes this overt in his
introduction as he questions, “What does the horror of ﬁre — what appears to be an
obsessive horror — mean?” Philippe Hamon contends that, “the more [the
naturalist text] becomes saturated with descriptions the more it becomes
organized and repetitious, thus becoming increasingly a closed system [that]
constantly evokes itself” (F leissner 47). The intricately repetitive design of
Wisconsin Death Trip may explain why the book has been perceived as a self-
referential text which does not accord with ideological and generic paradigms.
This explains the charges of “mute cacophony” made against Lesy’s work.
Naturalism was also chastised as a deviant discourse for its desire to achieve
“so-called ‘comprehension’ of every bestiality” (Fleissner 57). Lesy does include
such bestialities as rape, assault, and arson, attesting to the brute nature of man.

Hamlin Garland, whose “camera-like writing” is included as a ‘vein’ in Lesy’s

21

body of work, expresses his dismay at the predominance of sexual vice and crime
in pioneering naturalist novels:

For the most part, the men and women I had known in my youth were

normal, hardworking and decent in work and action. Their lives were

hard, unlovely, sometimes drab and bitter but they were not sexual

perverts. As a veritist I argued that one could be as real and true in

presenting the average man and woman as in describing cases of incest,

adultery and murder. 1 found as Whitman told me he had found in the

life of the average American a certain decorum and normality. (Reuben)
Lesy’s text does in fact demonstrate the morbid pessimism of late nineteenth
century culture whereby authors such as Edgar Saltus argued for the validity of a
“new pessimism” in literature, aesthetics and philosophy, exempliﬁed by authors
such as Arthur Schopenhauer, who declared the fundamental irrationality of the
universe, and Edward Von Hartrnann. In The Philosophy of Disenchantment
published in 1885, the year that Lesy’s text originates, Saltus decreed that, “The
world is a theater of misery in which, were the choice accorded it it would be
preferable not to be born at all” (Lutz 105). Saltus was a stylistic entrepreneur
who reveled in the dark side of history. He raised desperation to the level of a
“ﬁrst principle” and declared that literature and philosophy represented afﬂiction
“anatomized” (Lutz 105). The events in Wisconsin Death Trip thus represent the
prevailing climate of tragedy, disavowal and debasement which was evident in the
late nineteenth century. Lesy therefore displays the thematics of a pessimistic
culture and the stylistic mechanism of the degenerate. This may be summarized

in the words of Nordau, who described the literature and culture of degeneration:

Everything in these houses aims at exciting the nerves and dazzling the
senses. The disconnected and antithetical effects in all arrangements, the
constant contradiction between form and purpose, the outlandishness of
most objects, is intended to be bewildering. All is discrepant,

22

indiscriminate jumble. The unity of abiding by one deﬁnite historical
style counts as old-fashioned, provincial, Philistine, and the time has not
yet produced a style of its own. (11)

This notion of disjuncture is also suited to the climate of the 19705 and the
postindustrial age. As historian J. David Hoeveler, Jr. explains, during this age
things took on “greater abstraction, arnorphousness, intangibility. The sense of
solidness, permanence, and wholeness [yielded] to ﬁssures, disintegration,
intangibility” (6). The postindustrial period displayed the ethereality of social ties
and the emergence of a therapeutic culture, whereby according to 19705 social
critic Christopher Lasch, the population hungered for “the feeling, the momentary
illusion, of personal well-being, health, and psychic security” (Hoeveler 12). This
era represented a moment of temporal estrangement infused by nebulous
historical tenses which denied insight and ediﬁcation. Photography became the
sign of serial consumption and the image the signiﬁer of hyperreal panache. The
19705 was the period in which postmodernism emerged, with its distinct features
of historical nostalgia, psychic fragmentation and the ascendancy of the image
resulting in the “random cannibalization” and vogue of styles of the past (Jameson
18). With its concoction of verbal and visual documentary, intermittent arcane
literary extracts and seemingly confabulatory excerpts, Lesy’s work exempliﬁes a
polyphony that corresponds to postrnodemism’s heterogeneity.

The scholarly ostracisim of Lesy’s “coffee-table” text may thus gain weight
from the condemnation of postmodern tactics as well as a contemporary critique
of New Historicism. New Historicism marks the decline of the grand narrative of

history, which J can-Francois Lyotard and others have referred to as a referent of

the postmodern condition. Its interdisciplinary approach, which privileges image

23

and narrative as accomplishing cultural work and contextualizes both author and
narrative product, has been referred to as the “fantastic interdisciplinary
nothingness of metaphor” (Budge 118). New Historicist discourse is purportedly
a historical symptom characterized by “ephemerality” due to the fact that
' “historical fragments are incorporated . .. in such a way as to frustrate any
tendency to symbolic resonance” (Budge 132). Postmodernism has been
similarly repudiated as “the coexisting wreckage of all cultures, universally
available but equally emptied of meaning; traversed and exploited by the cruise
ships of bloated consumers of the image” (Smith 6). In such a critical climate, it
would not be surprising for Lesy’s text to be considered part of the “anarchic
starnpcollecting of unrelated moments” that purportedly characterizes the
postmodern era (Davis 201). I would argue that Lesy’s text does not speak to
unrelated moments but bridges moments of historical homogeneity discovered
through scholarly excavation.

Lesy’s text plays into the fashion for the archive that emerged in the 19705 and
its indisputable hunt for images of the past. The vogue of the storeroom and the
dusty spectacle is evident in Wisconsin Death Trip, as it is based on artifacts by
which, “Twenty years of the common but multivariate life of a county seat, now
transformed into images composed of elementary chemical ciphers, sat enclosed
by the space of one dry and dusty four-walled and ceilinged room” (Lesy,
Wisconsin). Lesy’s repetitious visual refrains, including collages which duplicate
hands, faces and bodies, and the reiteration of ﬁgures and scenes, transform the

subject into a museological prosthetic object, composing “extraordinary montages

24

which belong more to a combinatory process with large photo, kino or
historic-synthetic machines that leave us somehow totally indifferent” due
to their reproducibility (Baudrillard 195). As Paul Grainge explains,
contemporary critics understand contemporary memory practices in terms of
depthlessness (Fredric Jameson), struggle (Andreas Huyssen), and inauthenticity
. (Pierre Nora). One must thus be (a)ware of charges of superﬁciality, high-tech
amnesia, or deceptions and biases which distort social and cultural practices and
compositions. According to Grainge, the nostalgic mode is “embroiled in these
different schemes of beleaguered mnemonic experience” and memorial culture
has been implicated as a “regressive malady, the commodiﬁed result of a
rapacious heritage industry” (Grainge 85, 3).

Fredric Jameson elucidates in Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism (1991) that the “remarkable current intensiﬁcation of an addiction to
the photographic image is itself a tangible symptom of an omnipresent,
omnivorous, and well-nigh libidinal historicism” (18). Lesy’s reiﬁcation of a
number of Charley Van Shaick’s 3,000 preserved images demonstrates J arneson’s
assertion that “the resurrection of the dead of anonymous and silenced
generations, the retrospective dimension indispensable to any vital reorientation
of our collective future — has meanwhile itself become a vast collection of images,
a multitudinous photographic simulacrum” (18). Indeed, the images chosen by
Lesy are repeated and reappropriated in such a manner that they seem to
represent, as Jean Baudrillard outlined in Simulacra and Simulation (1981), a

copy without an original or a model. The picture of a dead baby in a cofﬁn is

25

repeated twice in the book in its original context. The opening of Marsh’s
Wisconsin Death Trip then depicts the photographer capturing a picture of a dead
child. A close up shot of a dead child in a cofﬁn is then displayed as an enlarged
portrait one woman carries under her arm as she walks down the street. A picture
of a dead girl in a cofﬁn is also used to market the ﬁlm on the ofﬁcial website.
The proliferation of this image thus decontextualizes and depersonalizes the death
of the children and desensitizes us to the sight of a corpse.

Postmodern critique deprecates stylistic renderings of the past displayed
through the frame of the glossy image. As Baudrillard decries in “The Evil
Demon of Images and the Procession of Simulacra”:

[I]f [images] fascinate us so much it is not because they are sites of the
production of meaning and representation it is on the contrary because
they are sites of the disappearance of meaning and representation, sites
in which we are caught quite apart from any judgment of reality, thus
sites of a fatal strategy of degeneration of the real and of the reality
principle. (1 94)

In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes discusses the concept of the photograph as
purveyor of funereal immobility which, as a dead object, evinces the
disappearance of meaning. He states that the ﬁgure in a photograph “[does] not
emerge, [does] not leave,” it is “anesthetized and fastened down, like butterﬂies”
(57). He states that “Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a Tableau
Vivant, a ﬁguration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the
dead,” thus demonstrating the “degeneration of the real” (32). Georg Lukacs also
disparages the stultifying nature of obsessive, imagistic, descriptive discourse
which relates to this theory of photography. He claims that the individuals

depicted are devolved into “mere objects arranged within this portrait of the social

26

world as “still lives” (qtd. in F leissner 40). Most importantly, he feared that
“description would transform living persons into “inanimate objects,” mere bodies
meant to stand as labeled exhibits (often of particular pathologies) for the text’s
clinical gaze” (qtd. in Fleissner 47). According to these critics, therefore, the
photograph may be praised for its hallucinogenic qualities as merely an uncanny
apparition of the past which does not accord concrete knowledge.

The tacitum nature of photographs has also been pronounced by Susan Sontag
who claimed that “to photograph someone is a sublimated murder - a soft murder,
appropriate to a sad, frightened time” and that “Photography also converts the
whole world into a cemetery” (0n Photography 14, “Introduction”). The
inclusion of the words “Death Trip” in Lesy’s title may thus suggest a visual
memory practice, or the action of shooting and viewing pictures. In July, 1846
after Walt Whitman visited “Plumbe’s Daguerreotype Establishment” on lower
Broadway, New York, he reported in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

Ah! What tales might those pictures tell if their mute lips had the power
of speech! How romance then, would be inﬁnitely outdone by fact
[A] great legion of human faces [with all those] eyes gazing silently but
ﬁxedly upon you [suggests] an immense Phantom concourse -
speechless and motionless, but yet [of] realities. You are indeed in a

new world — a peopled world, though mute as the grave. (qtd. in
Trachtenberg, Reading 25).
In this equation, according to Andre Bazin, “[The photograph] embalrns time,
rescuing it from its proper condition” (qtd. in Ruby). Therefore, the aura in the
age of mechanical reproduction is apparently nothing more than, according to
Douglas Crimp, a shadow of the past (179). Indeed, Wisconsin Death Trip does

not represent the “sacred” photography of those such as Walker Evans who

canonized the vernacular landscape of 1930’s America, including its noble

27

simplicity, folkloric charm, and emblematic portrayal of rural American virtues.
The style of Lesy’s visual images resonates more strongly with that of the
“profane” period of the 19605 and 19705 which'was dominated by the “New
Topographics.” These photographers perceived the modern American landscape
as “a wasteland of banality and self-imposed isolation,” and the photographs
themselves were presented with a minimum amount of interpretation (Davis 192).
The photographs were presented as an “objective transcription of social and
physical facts” with prosaic inﬂection and “mind-numbing repetitiveness” (Davis
206-7). The blank landscapes of profane photography represent the “bankrupt
dreams and existential despair” of 19705 America much as the monotone and
ghostly faces suggested the spirit—deadening gloom and failure of Lesy’s 18905
(Davis 208).

Wisconsin Death Trip, which speaks to the pessimism of the heuristic
abstraction of neurasthenia and the accompanying pessimism of the 18905, also
reﬂects the current of “malaise” in the era in which it was produced. A sense of
dislocation in the 19705 is attributed to the Arab oil embargo and America’s
withdrawal from Vietnam, the Watergate scandal and the tarnishing of the
Presidency, and the confusions of sexual morality and family values that
prompted Jimmy Carter to declare an American “crisis of conﬁdence” in 1979.
This would also continue into the 19805 with the rural “Farm Crisis.” According
to Grainge, the climate of the 19705 was one of “sociopolitical disorientation and
creative enervation” (43). The disposition of the period is expressed in Hunter S.

Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, ﬁrst published in Rolling Stone

28

magazine in 1971. Thompson’s ‘gonzo journalism’ described the “bad
vibrations” of paranoia, madness, fear and loathing” and questions, “What is
sane? Especially here in ‘our own country’ — in this doomstruck era of Nixon”
(85, 178). Thompson describes “grim meathook realities” and “a generation of
permanent cripples, failed seekers” (179). This corresponds to the logic of the

‘post’ society as, according to J arneson:

[Wlhat categorizes the newer ‘intensities’ of the postmodern, which have

also been characterized in terms of the ‘bad trip’ and schizophrenic

submersion, can just as well be formulated in terms of the messiness of a

dispersed existence, existential messiness, the perpetual distraction of

post-sixties life. Indeed, one is tempted. . . to evoke the more general

informing context of some larger virtual nightmare, which can be

identiﬁed as the sixties gone toxic, a whole historical and countercultural

‘bad trip’ in which psychic fragmentation is raised to a qualitatively new

power, the structural disintegrations of the decentered subject. (qtd. in

Smith 13)
This concept of a delirious historical nightmare implies the hallucinogenic
quality of Wisconsin Death Trip. Indeed, Lesy admits that this title was an epithet
for a drug-induced hallucination of death and potential rebirth (Forbidden 14).
Like Thompson’s text of inebriation, this death trip can be read as an allegory of
“that place where the wave ﬁnally broke and rolled back” (68). The notion of an
historical ‘bad trip’ encapsulates what I believe to be Lesy’s ideological vision.
Wisconsin Death Trip could be considered as “realism with a vengeance,” the
label given to E. W. Howe’s The Story of a Country Town by Hamlin Garland in
1886 (Watts 185). Lesy presents a narrative of rupture whereby the optimism and
progress of Manifest Destiny has regressed to the point of stagnation and decline.

In 1893 Wisconsinite Frederick Jackson Turner annunciated his “Frontier Thesis”

to the meeting of the American Historical Association at the Columbian

29

Exposition. From his narrative of evolutionary advancement and virtuous
Americanization, one perilous remark remains strikingly poignant; “[A]t the
frontier the environment is at ﬁrst too strong for the man. He must accept the
conditions which it ﬁrmishes, or perish” (qtd. in Taylor 2).. Lesy’s text complies
with Turner’s articulation of frontier stages or waves, but, according to Turner’s
thesis, the populace of Wisconsin Death Trip are merely in the phase of barbarity:

So long as free land exists, the opportunity for a competency exists
[E]ach one of the periods of lax ﬁnancial integrity coincides with periods
when a new set of frontier communities had arisen The recent Populist
agitation is a case in point. Many a State that now declines any
connection with the tenets of the Populists, itself adhered to such ideas in
an earlier stage of the development of the State. A primitive society can
hardly be expected to show the intelligent appreciation of the complexity
of business interests in a developed society. (qtd. in Taylor 15)

Wisconsin Death Trip does indeed describe a calamitous civilization. As Warren
Susman suggests in his pointed preface, “Many historians have concerned
themselves with American aspirations and hopes; few with its fears and
nightmares. Lesy offers us a unique opportunity to face not the American Dream
but the American Nightmare.” His text challenges “The rhetoric of the
Everlasting Yea, the rhapsody of the eagle-screaming orator, and the note of self-
praise [which has] clangorously predominated, affecting the mood of attempts to
interpret [American] culture” (Levin 7). Lesy’s logic of disintegration
undermines the grand narrative of progress in terms of content and style,
becoming a ‘demonic history text’ that pervasively intimates the “dark thing” or
ﬁssure in the nation’s history (Lesy, Wisconsin).

Wisconsin Death Trip can be read as a Gothic text. The 1929 edition of

Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary describes one meaning of the Gothic which

30

reads, “Of, pertaining to, or characteristic of, the Middle Ages; medieval;
derogatory, of, pertaining to, or characteristic of the Dark Ages; hence: rude;
barbarous.” In this manner, the Gothic has been perceived as a disreputable label,
encouraging negative reactions to, for example, Grant Wood’s painting entitled
American Gothic (1930). Teresa Goddu provides a pertinent deﬁnition of the
American Gothic in Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (1997),
stating:

American gothic literature criticizes America’ national myth of new-
world innocence by voicing the culnnal contradictions that undermine
the nation’s claim to purity and equality. Showing how these
contradictions contest and constitute national identity even as they are
denied, the gothic tells of the historical horrors that make national
identity possible yet must be repressed in order to sustain it.” (10)

American Gothic can be contrasted with that of European authors who focused on
archaic settings, the supernatural and ghosts or goblins, or railed against the
church and the state. American Gothic was decidedly adapted to capture the
development of national identity, revealing the cultural and historical challenges
presented by the new nation. The deﬁnition of gothic used in this essay will relate
to both the notion of ‘cultural contradiction’ and that of mental or psychic
frontiers. Lesy’s montage of toil, strife, anxiety, and untimely death interrogates
America’s foundational mythology, thus disturbing the logocentric order of
history. Borrowing from Eric Savoy’s theory of the American Gothic, “it is not
simply the case that a horriﬁc “alternative” history emerges as a cohesive or fully
explanatory corrective that is superimposed upon nostalgic history. Rather, it
interrupts by ﬁts and starts in a semiotic that is fragmentary, one that is more

suggestive than conclusive” (8). Wisconsin Death Trip does at times present an

31

ambivalent thesis, juxtaposing images of afﬁrmation or acceptance, such as a
strong and healthy masculine body, such as that associated with the West at the
turn of the century, with a disconcerting discourse which challenges a hegemonic
interpretation of history. These contradictions reveal the text’s subversive
potential.

My purpose is to read Wisconsin Death Trip as an example of Midwestern
Gothic, a sub-genre which, as yet, has not received critical attention. While
critics have theorized the Gothic nature of the eastern seaboard and the Southern
United States, little scholarly attention has been paid to the Mid West. A
theoretical intimation has been provided by David Mogen, Scott Sanders and
Joanne Karpinski in their collection Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at the
Frontier in American Literature, as they state, “The dark, gothic underside of
American ﬁ'ontier literature ironically symbolizes the desolation wrought by
progress, the psychological deprivation of alienation, and the threatening but
revolutionary possibilities that appear when civilized conventions are left behind”
(19). Indeed, the Midwestern Gothic reads as a subversion of the pioneer
narrative, oftentimes demonstrating the antithesis of progress and focusing on the
grave aspects of psychic and familial history.

Lesy’s book also displays Gothic attributes in terms of both style and content.
The text will be read alongside Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject as the
seamless narrative of progress is dismantled and “the place where meaning
collapses” emerges. The text’s architecture will also be read according to Eve

Kosofsky Sedgwick’s delineation of Gothic conventions. I will then locate Lesy’s

32

text within a particular spatial model, outlining the attributes of a Midwestern
Gothic alongside literary and visual texts from Middle America. These texts are
also seemingly tangential and, for the most part, have received little scholarly
attention. I will discuss Glenway Wescott’s eulogy to family history entitled The
Grandmothers (1927), Sherwood Anderson’s obscene and unruly text entitled
Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and Pope Brook’s Indiana Gothic (1999), a tale of
adultery, insanity and murder. I will also examine Harmony Korine’s repulsive
portrait of Xenia, Ohio, a town ravaged by a tornado, poverty, and decadence,
which is named after its degenerate protagonist Gummo (1997). Finally, I will
explore Mark and Michael Polish’s somber portrait of the death of a small town in
the name of progress, entitled Northfork (2003). These examples parallel Lesy’s
text in terms of style and subject matter, and collectively they formulate a more
comprehensive theory of Midwestern Gothic. Lesy’s text will be elevated to the
realm of serious scholarship as the nuances of the supposedly “mad hatter’s tea
party full of mock testimony and false witness” will be given new resonance. As
Thomas Pyncheon claims in Gravity ’3 Rainbow (1973), infused with historical
and cultural references and the threat of obliteration, “This serpentine slag-heap

is not a ruin at all. It is in perfect working order.”

33

Chapter 1: “... those ﬁlthy things you used to read”: Abject History and
Midwestern Gothic

In Leander’s mind every moment left an indestructible remnant, as each
dying coral plant in the sea leaves a bit of stone where it lived, pink with
its blood which does not fade.

Glenway Wescott, The Grandmothers

Mrs. Jennie Jones of Oconto, charged with sending obscene matter

through the mails, pleaded guilty in US. court recently and was
sentenced to one year imprisonment.

[5/8, State]

Wisconsin Death Trip

Eric Savoy inaugurates his theory of the American Gothic with the chilling
interjection of a photographic face. The picture is of a murderer of a farm family
from the high wheat plains of western Kansas. Savoy explains the Gothic
imperative of the photograph in the desire to locate a static face within the
narrative, disrupting and suspending its trajectory. He expresses the perturbing
nature of the photograph due to its ability to aid the imaginative reconstruction of
a historical event and to provide “intuitive, visceral knowledge of terrible affect
that approaches the experiential” (3-4). The palpable effect of a photograph
stimulates memory and the recurrence of past events similar to the gothic facet of
the return of the repressed, and also intimates a tendency of American gothic by
which, as Leslie Fiedler has suggested, “the past, even dead, especially dead,
could continue to work harm” (qtd. in Savoy 4). This ‘return of the repressed’
evokes Wisconsin Death T rip’s “inhalations and exhalations [that] were
crystallized in silver emulsion on 30,000 glass plate negatives” which resist a

vanishing point as they are anticipated to “recede into futurity” (Savoy 4). The

34

haunting nature of these pictures will be augmented with time as each prospective
viewer will occupy an enhanced position of distantiation.

Lesy’s text, perceived as a “ﬂexible mirror” attempts to focus the imagination
in order to recreate the past and preempt the future, again suggesting historical
continuity, although its predictions seem customarily dispiriting. Lesy’s use of
the term “mirror” echoes the unsettling temperament induced by early
daguerreotype and portrait photography. The lifelike image reproduced by early
photography had associations with necromancy and black magic. Alan
Trachtenberg explains that the “suspicion of the apparitional image evokes a not
uncommon moment in the early career of photography in America, a moment of
shudder and refusal” (Reading 23). Lesy appears, therefore, like Roland Barthes,
as a photographic realist. Barthes explains, “the realists do not take the
photograph for a “copy” of reality, but for an emanation of past reality: a magic,
not an art” (88). The “stilted look” of early portraits caused a fearful tremor
amongst the technologically na’r‘ve population and still retains this effect today as
we witness “that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the
return of the dead” (Barthes 9). The photograph or the portrait, which contained
1 the unamiable face, seemed to threaten the soul of both subject and onlooker, a
theme which was prevalent in 18305 and 18405 popular gothic ﬁction written by
authors such as A. J. H. Duganne, and Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
While the metaphor of the mirror was associated with divination and transgressive
encounters with the dead or absent, it also stood simultaneously for truth and

deception and connoted the gothic metaphysic of light and shade, surface and

35

depth, and silence and speech (Trachtenberg, “Photograph” 27, 37). The
photograph was thus conceived as a device which alluded to inexplicable events
and the undercurrent of social life.

The pictorial image has been purveyed as a source of what Nebraska
photographer Wright Monis termed “mystic meaning” demanding imaginative
constructive work, or a conjuration of historical and social import. Like the
photographs of the Kansan killers referenced by Savoy, the visual image in the
Mid West has been alluded to as staple rhetoric of a gothic formula. Morris, who
juxtaposed visual and verbal dialogue in photo-texts such as The Inhabitants and
The Home Place, noted his “yearning for blackness” in a 1977 interview (Rice
129). He demonstrated his romantic afﬁnity to haunting ruins and the
imagination, presented “artifacts, representing conditions, and ballads singing of
heartbreak, death pleasurable longing. and that ﬁne madness that gives to
airy nothing a local habitation and a name” (qtd. in Rice 128-9). Morris’s texts
oscillate between a depiction of loss and gain, just as Lesy’s text vacillates
between “acceptance and denial.” Morris resists the harmonious turn of nostalgia,
as does Lesy, depicting, as he describes in World in The Attic, “home-town
nausea” and projecting “disturbing internal states of mind” (Rice 139). Through
his photographs, Morris’ strain of Gothicism suggests dehumanization, isolation
and the “empty spaces and remote vacancies of a tenuous past”, providing “a
thoughtful counter to the superﬂuity of deceptive cliches born of the prosperity of
post-World War II American. society” (Rice 139, 129). Grant Wood’s Iowa

portrait, entitled American Gothic (1930), also denotes “historical suffering”

36

(Savoy 17). Its “shadow of signiﬁcation” which interrogates the national
symbolic also intimates “delusional retrospection” and a “claustrophobia of spirit
among the rolling ﬁelds” (Savoy 16-17). The faces represent a particular
perspective of the American psyche such as that delineated by D. H. Lawrence
who claimed that “the essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.
It has never yet melted” (qtd. in Slotkin).

Wood and Morris’ pictorial works strive to exhibit inhabitation and the “ghosts
of return” in a region of isolation and estrangement, and Lesy’s text provides that
prosopopoeia of Midwestern dismay which is alluded to by the former artworks.
Eve Sedgwick stresses the centrality of the human face to the gothic text,
commenting:

The human face seems to tyrannize over the Gothic novel, and its
insistence is mostly closely related to what readers see as the ﬂatness,
the devitalization of characters in these novels. F aces tyrannize here
neither by beauty nor by ugliness but by their very freight of meaning
Flesh marked by furrows? — yes or no. Eyes ﬁery? (Fiery eyes go
with furrowed ﬂesh, for they are reservoirs of the fury born of
mutilation.) Features in motion? - yes or no. Like the characters
impressed on them, the faces themselves seem to be halfway toward
becoming a language, a code, a limited system of differentials that could
cast a broad net of reference and interrelation. Since faces in these
novels are said to record history and every social relation, such a
language could have a great deal to say. (158)

Lesy’s text is implicated in this hieroglyphic language as he bones in on particular
faces, repeatedly emphasizing a striking countenance from a group portrait. On
discovering the images which were later to be included in Wisconsin Death Trip,
Lesy states that the faces registered “fear and astonishment” (Forbidden 12)

which could represent the shock of temporal disorientation and an apocalyptic

discourse which is characteristic of the American psyche. Commenting on the

37

baroque nature of allegory, Walter Benjamin states that, “Everything about
history that, from the very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful,
is expressed in a face — or rather a death’s head” (qtd. in Seyhan 238). The
suggestive image of a face thus haunts the psyche, intimating the reconstruction
of a historical event and evoking the “visceral knowledge of terrible affect”
(Savoy 4). Eric Savoy’s introductory lens of “The Face of the Tenant” thus
provides ingress to Wisconsin Death Trip.

What is also noteworthy about Savoy’s essay, however, is the geographical
structuring of his piece. He begins and ends his theory of gothic cultural
production in the United States in Middle America. Commencing on the plains of
Kansas and concluding in Iowa, Savoy seems to be delineating fertile ground for a

6‘“

regional study. While initially affirming that American gothic” does not exist
apart from its speciﬁc regional manifestations,” he then states that “the burden of
a scarifying past is more typical of New England and southern gothic than, for
example, that of the prairies” (6). While gesturing toward a new temporal site of
social and psychic gothic historiography, Savoy does not afﬁrm the area as
fruitﬁrl for further study. Wisconsin Death Trip suggests otherwise as Lesy
claims that his “text and photographs might suggest certain abstract ideas not only
about the town of Black River Falls, county of Jackson, state of Wisconsin, but
about the entire region and era in which the town, county, and state were
enmeshed” (Wisconsin). Savoy’s suggestive examples will here denote the

starting point for a study of Wisconsin Death Trip in relation to a speciﬁcally

Midwestern gothic which contradicts the notion of a rural idyll through the trope

38

of labor, familial and psychic strife, and evinces archivists of the abject who
disinter the dearth of historical knowledge.7

Wisconsin Death Trip can be located within the speciﬁc conventional bounds
of the gothic. In her book entitled The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick outlines the format of a gothic text. She explains:

A fully legible manuscript or an uninterrupted narrative is rare; rarer still
is the novel whose story is comprised by a single narrator, without the
extensive interruption into the middle of the book of a new history with a
new historian; rarest of all is the book presented by the author, in her or
his own person, without a pseudonym and an elaborate account of the
provenance and antiquity of the supposedly original manuscript. (14)

The notion of a distinctive and antique manuscript is true of Lesy’s profuse
explanation of the archive and sociological history, and the inclusive
concatenation of voices. Sedgwick delimits the characteristic preoccupations of
the gothic as “sleeplike and deathlike states, doubles, afﬁnities between narrative
and pictorial art, unnatural echoes or silences, the unspeakable, the poisonous
effects of guilt and shame, apparitions from the past, civil insurrections and ﬁres,
the chamel house and the madhouse” (9). Sedgwick’s inventory reads like a
replica of the images and incidents prevalent in Lesy’s text. This gothic register
is paralleled in the postmortem photographs, the relation between the “cold,
sardonic” voice “like black marble” of Frank Cooper and the rigidly inanimate
pictorial portraits, the “organized body of incendiaries” and the “aberration of
mind” which results in the repeated declaration of “Admitted to the Mendota State
Asylum for the Insane”, the unnatural repetition of ﬁgures inverted as if in a
mirror image or refracted as in a kaleidoscope, sudden disappearances due to

claims of incest and rape, the seizure of “obscene matter” in the mail, the stark

39

 

doubling of scenes representing the natural world in health and decay, the silence
of rational, economical and statistical explanation, and the numerous apparitions
from the past caught on the silver emulsion plates of Charley Van Shaik. The text
itself can be seen as an archival chamel house as it houses the psychological
skeleton of the visual and verbal social network of the 18905. The text’s
depiction of disease and dis-ease, represented in the numerous epidemics and the
obsolete nature of an endemically fragmented narrative, also prove Sedgwick’s
statement that, "The ravages of a noiseless, subterraneous, invisible disease, the
threatening presence of the unintelligible and the incommunicable - these utterly
characteristic accretions only accentuate the Gothic posture of febrile immobility”
(85).

This incoherent and immobile posturing lends itself to the melancholy gaze of
allegory, which views history as a “petriﬁed landscape” and a “heap of
fragments” (Seyhan 238-239). The trope of allegory is organized according to
semiotic rifts and in this case, may ﬁnd its place in the ruptured seamless
narrative of national progress. Wisconsin Death Trip is not concerned with
mastery of the object, but with the hieroglyphic staccato of faces, hands,
obituaries and tittle-tattle. What they suggest is the atrophy of the Frontier
Thesis, the disillusionment of a generation of pioneers who experienced
“bitterness and fury [as] the natural offspring of impossibly great expectations”
(Savoy 18), whose puritanical stoicism and Calvinistic work ethic proved arduous
constraints, and whose work and labor prove fruitless. We are presented with

‘paradise lost’ and the illusory aspect of innocence which is symbolized by the

40

pictorial representation of the wizened crone who resolutely overlooks the
untimely death of a small child, the prevalence of infant mortality, the collage
which superimposes the slogan “NO LABOR NO REWARD” upon a funereal
arrangement, and the positioning of a funeral wreath amidst'women searching and
seeking under the hot sun. The fret of farm life, the toll of disease, those who got
“shack-wacky”, the fall from a “Special Destiny” to the “sack cloth and ashes
of failure”: “relentless sweeps the stroke of fate” in Wisconsin Death Trip. Lesy
provides an allegory of a pathological epidemic, one that is characterized by
disillusionment and failure.

A quote from Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology is included in the
ﬁnal section of the book which reads, “Sometimes a man’s life turns into a cancer
from being bruised and continually bruised, and swells into a purplish mass, like
growths on stalks of com.” This metaphor summarizes the allegorical intent of
Wisconsin Death Trip which reﬂects the infection of the pure small-town
American soul. This may be elaborated using a quote from Thomas de Quincey:

The situation here contemplated exposes a dreadful ulcer, lurking far
down in the depths of human nature. It is not that men generally are
summoned to face such awful trials. But potentially, and in shadowy
outline, such a trial is moving subterraneously in perhaps all men’s
natures. Upon the secret mirror of our dreams such a trial is darkly
projected, perhaps, to every one of us. That dream, so familiar to
childhood, of meeting a lion, and, through languishing prostration in
"hope and the energies of hope, that constant sequel of lying down before
the lion, publishes the secret frailty of human nature, reveals its deep-
seated falsehood to itself - records its abysmal treachery. Perhaps not
one of us escapes this dream; perhaps, as by some sorrowful doom of
man, that dream repeats for every one of us, through every generation,
the original temptation in Eden. (qtd. in Sedgwick 70)

The lion in this case represents the emotions felt by the disillusioned country

people who for the ﬁrst time saw the socioeconomic system of the United States

41

as a “trap” (Lesy, Wisconsin). We [are reminded of Hamlin Garland’s short story
“Under the Lion’s Paw” which appeared in his 1891 collection Main-Travelled
Roads. The story depicts “the muck of the furrows, black and tenacious as tar” of
a Dakota farm (133). Homeless Haskins, with a “pathetic” face works diligently,
experiencing the “ferocity of labor” to purchase a farm from the speculator Butler
(142). Garland describes Haskins, “dripping with sweat, arms aching, ﬁlled with
briers, ﬁngers raw and bleeding,” but Butler pays no heed to his hard work as it
has increased the value of the farm and could be sold to a higher bidder. On
discovery of this disheartening fact, “Haskins sat down blindly on a bundle of oats
near by, and with staring eyes and drooping head went over the situation. He was
under the lion’s paw. He felt a horrible numbness in his heart and limbs” (149).
This encourages Haskins to threaten Butler with a pitchfork, deforming his own
innocent character. Haskins realized the inequitable nature of his position and his
shame at being a homeless and cheated man. The populace of Lesy’s text also
succumbed to feelings of shame, anger and paranoia which demonstrated their
treachery to the democratic republic. The temptations they felt were to take
license to violence against property, the community and oneself, and to discover
knowledge in frail mortality and death.

Here we move into the realm of the abject, whose utmost fear is “death
infecting life” (Kristeva 4). The internal ulcers and the cankers in the population
provide evidence that all is not wholesome in the land. This aspect of Lesy’s text
parallels the media response to Harmony Korine’s 1997 ﬁlm Gummo, whereby

one critic exclaimed, “Come and smell the rotting corpse of America while it

42

lasts” (Guthrnann). Lesy’s archival expose of “records of ﬂesh” parallels a
newsworthy incident in his book whereby, “At the funeral of George Smith
one of the cross staves supporting the casket broke, letting it plunge forward,
breaking the cofﬁn” thus revealing that which should be contained. The abject is
a “terror that dissembles,” and Lesy’s fragmentary and morbid text represents the
putrefaction of the body politic. As Julia Kristeva elucidates in Powers of
Horror: An Essay 0n Abjection (1982), “The clean and proper (in the sense of the
incorporated and the incorporable) becomes ﬁlthy, the sought-after turns into the
banished, fascination into shame” (8). This implies the ostracized reputation of
Wisconsin Death Trip and the purportedly vulgar material it presents in terms of
both content and the historical imagination. Lesy’s text, as a ‘terror that
dissembles’ threatens the seamlessly sealed clean and proper body of, in this case,
the national narrative, interrogating the myths promulgated by the progressive
optimists. The Mid West is no longer perceived as a fertile and plea5ant retreat,
but as a location of mental, pecuniary and bodily destitution. In describing rural
Ohio, a superior destination in the 18305 and 40’s, satirical gothic author
Ambrose Bierce recalled in 1883, “The malarious farm, the west, fungus grown
wildwood,/ The chills then contracted that since have remained./ The scum-
' covered duck pond, the pigstye close by it,/ The ditch where the sour-smelling
house drainage fell,/ The damp shaded dwelling, the foul barnyard night it....”
(qtd. in Anderson, “Old Northwest” 97).

In the mid nineteenth century, Walt Whitman declared, “I do not doubt there is

far more in trivialities, insects, vulgar persons, slaves, dwarfs, weeds, rejected

43

refuse, than I have supposed” (qtd. in Sontag 29). Lesy’s subversive composition
of small-town Wisconsin includes incidental news broadcasts, which include
racial slurs, tramps, and idiots, town gossip delineating witches and werewolves,
and photographs including dwarves and snakes which suggest Whitrnan’s acute
democratic vision. This is a vision which adheres to the true notion of democratic
history, presenting a culture according to its imperfections, negligible details
along with its ultimate desires. Lesy declares of those who deal with the

moribund nature of life that:

For some reason, they have chosen to set up shop on the shores of a
gigantic whirlpool, a place where transcendent visions, ﬁnal truths,
ultimate meanings, famous last words, and dying breaths swirl around,
mixed with every kind of garbage, both physical and spiritual, every kind
of cruelty and pain, every variety of lie and deception, every remnant of
false hope and evasion, and all the most pathetic shreds of memory and
forgetfulness. (Forbidden 6)

This notion of the fragmentary and the generic echoes postmodernism as an art
“within the archive” and which has been labeled according to metaphors of
denial. It also contains a schizophrenic syntax which registers the linguistic
fragmentation of social life formulating a maelstrom of cultural wreckage. The
postmodern scene has been described as “Baudrillard’s excremental culture,” a
“technoscope [with] a body without organs (Artaud),” a “negative space
(Rosalind Krauss),” a “pure implosion (Lyotard),” a “looking away (Barthes),” or
an “aleatory mechanism (Serres)” (Hutcheon 8). Here postmodernism registers
repulsion toward the ragrnan who refers to an abyss of historical representation.
Lesy’s text harbors the detritus of history, that which could not be assimilated in

the rhetoric of the American Dream. In this respect, he parallels Nordau’s

description of the highly gifted degenerate: “[They] frequently exercise a deep
inﬂuence, but this is always a baneful one. If contemporaries do not recognize
it, the historian of morals will point it out a posteriori. They, likewise, are
leading men along the paths they themselves have found to new goals; but these
goals are abysses or waste places” (24).

The investigation of the abyss or waste place corresponds to Jacques Denida’s
theory of the archive. It is interesting to note that archive derives from area,
meaning the cupboard (reminding one of the Cabinet of 3 Wonders whose
paraphernalia may include two-headed beasts and legendary artifacts), the cofﬁn,
the prison cell, or the cistern, thus intimating a space of secretion, desecration or
superﬂuity. It is, as Barthes said of the photograph, an important archival object;
“The only way I can transform [it] is into refuse: either the drawer or the
wastebasket” as “like a living organism, it is born on the level of the sprouting
silver grains, it ﬂourishes a moment, then ages Attacked by light, by humidity,
it fades, weakens, vanishes; there is nothing left to do but throw it away” (93).
When recalling his ﬁrst experience in the Wisconsin archive, Lesy explains the
artifacts of death and decomposition which he held in his hands:

I saw the face of a young woman, dark-haired, dark-eyed, dressed in a
black silk gown, standing behind her mother in a family portrait
Above her head, the emulsion of the negative had so decayed that it
looked as if the air around her had ruptured and turned to blood. Of
course, this couldn’t be: it was only thelength of the original exposure in
the photographer’s studio that had frozen open her eyes. (Forbidden 12)

Derrida perceives those who mine the archive as exhibiting the ‘death drive.’
They compose repetitious gestures of ghostly auras, gathering together simulacra

or impressions of the past. In Camera Lucida, Barthes also claims that

45

photographs do not actively call up the past but refer to reality in a past state, as a
living corpse as it were. He states that the punctum, or that piercing detail which
renders the particularity of a photograph, which is visibly legible in historical
photographs is the defeat of Time: “that is dead and that. is going to die” (96).
Indeed, Derrida posits that “the structure of the archive is spectral. It is spectra] a
priori: neither present nor absent “in the ﬂesh,” neither visible nor invisible, a
trace always referring to another whose eyes can never be met” (84). The archive,
therefore, reveals the ghosts of the past which will never be a voice to challenge
or debate the current of history they are reported as belonging to.

Derrida explains, “the archive takes place at the place of originary and
structural breakdown of the said memory” (11). Lesy’s intimation of deathly
historical artifacts not only deals with morose subject matter that threatens the
master narrative of American progress, but also within itself reﬂects a
heterogeneous discourse which threatens to reveal secrets, contradictions and
ambiguities that threaten the possibility of consignation, or the gathering together
of signs. This is evident in Wisconsin Death Trip as, for example, a local
historian’s tale of Jacob Spaulding, who carved out his territory in the wilderness
in a Slotkinian manner, is juxtaposed with a terse visual image of a stern well-
dressed, middle-class woman on horseback, thus conﬁrsing Lesy’s description of
early civilization. Lesy may thus be said to exhibit en mal d ’archive or ‘archive
fever’ which suggests the “topology of catastrophe” put forward by Kristeva (9).
As Kristeva explains, “the Other no longer has a grip on the three apices of the

triangle where subjective homogeneity resides; and so, it jettisons the object into

46

an abominable real, inaccessible except through jouissance” (9). She explains
that when one experiences jouissance, the “I” is heterogenous:

Discomfort, unease, dizziness stemming from an ambiguity that, through
the violence of a revolt against, demarcates a space out of which signs
and objects arise. This braided, woven, ambivalent, a heterogeneous ﬂux
marks out a territory that I can call my own. (10).

What Lesy depicts, therefore, is the exiled and the alienated; his method of
compiling diverse archival components and layering a disconcert of signs
represents the deject who can neither belong nor obtain his or her bearings in a
master narrative. In this archival discourse of the exile, “Each layer seems to
gape slightly, as the lips of a wound” (Derrida 20) and each voice, each face
seems placed in an abyss of reason or subject to a process of suturing
estrangement.

Lesy composes montages which suture the portrait of a ﬁgure and its mirror
image together. These doubles suggests the uncanny, the startling realization of
the self as unfamiliar which also suggests “a vortex of summons and repulsion
[which] places the one haunted by it literally beside himself” (Kristeva 1). He
evinces a rift in the self which registers a trauma in the subject. The subversion of
the ﬁgures suggests a foreign position of alienation. This phantom of the self
suggests a Manichean dualism between hope and dismay, between victory and
failure, suggesting an otherness in one’s history and representing “a burden both
repellent and repelled, a deep well of memory that is [both] unapproachable and
intimate” (Kristeva 6). Lesy’s method also suggests the early treatment of
insanity in asylums, pertinent due to the fact that his text is populated with the

insane admitted to the Mendota Asylum, and that the town today still retains an

47

institutionalized population which is “signiﬁcantly above state average” (Black
River Falls, Wisconsin). According to French historian Michel Foucault in
Madness and Civilization, mirrors were placed within the community of madrnen
whereby the madman was “imprisoned in an inﬁnitely self-referring
observation” (265). Foucault states that “Awareness was now linked to the shame
of being identical to that other, of being comprised in him, and of already
despising oneself before being able to recognize or to know oneself” (265). The
image of uncanny recognition corresponds to the gothic mechanism that
acknowledges the cultural contradictions and horrors which undermine the
nation’s claim to innocence and purity, leading to a deeper understanding of
national identity. The other facet of the use of mirrors in the asylum is “Perpetual
Judgement” through which, “as by silence, madness is ceaselessly called upon to
judge itself” (Foucault 265). This shrewdness parallels the introspective
Puritanical character of the American who, as Lesy suggests, is overwrought by
the burden of Calvinistic sin and depravity. Lesy suggests that that which is
unapproachable in the American psyche are obsessional fears of injury, shame,
death and decay which citizens have attempted to control through a regime of
paranoid scrutiny which also attempts to isolate the impure, the sinful and the
immoral. What is evident in Wisconsin Death Trip is an archaic economy of
“narcissistic crisis” (Kristeva 14) whereby a terrible distinction is made between
prosperity, gentility, dominion, and success, and “pure and simple failure.”

This sense of narcissistic crisis is also registered in Michael Lesy’s book

entitled Dreamland-America at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (1997). The

48

chronological pictorial trail begins in 1900, the year that Wisconsin Death Trip
concluded. Lesy’s pictorial narrative ironically upholds the master narrative of
progress and “Special Destiny,” depicting the “noble savage” in the section
named “Natives in Costume” and stereotypical portraits of cowboys on the rude
ﬁontier under the heading “Real Men.” These images represent the onward
march of progress suggested by Turner’s Frontier Thesis, and the title Dreamland
upholds the view of America as a land of hope and opportunity. What is alluded
to is the desire to sustain a homogenous and hegemonic tale suitable to a patriotic
discourse that maintains the grandiose motif of a “City Upon a Hill.” However,
mythology was challenged in the revisionist histories of the 19705 (published in
the era when Lesy completed his ﬁrst book) which followed war, social change,
radical grassroots movements, the challenge of the progressive movement, and
presidential irnpeachments, which contested conventional interpretations and
nationalist, bourgeois and racist concerns. Lesy prefaces the text With a quote
from T. S. Eliot’s Gerontion (1920) which alludes to the “foul lining” of history
(Kristeva 20). The quote begins, “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?
Think now/ History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors/ And issues,
deceives with whispering ambitions,/ Guides us by vanities.” Here Lesy infers
the conceited nature of historical and ideological discourse in the United States.

In Dreamland, Lesy attempts to converse with the conceited hegemonic
production of history, coupling the grand photographs of William Henry Jackson
and the Detroit Publishing Company with disasters and the beleaguered elements

of foreign and domestic policy and policymakers. He notes the glaring absences

49

in this pictorial narrative of harmony and luxury, including “the tenements and
airless rooms, the epidemics, adulterated food, impoverishments, strikes,
brutalities, and corruption” (xiii). Lesy makes the harsh indictment that, “What
we now know to be true we have learned only because of the passage of time: the
arrow of progress that these people — our ancestors — shot into the air has landed
in our backs” (xiv). He declares, “The moments when these pictures were made
was like the instant — strangely painless -— after a deep clean, knife wound all
the toxins we now live with were being let loose” (xiv). What he refers to are the
poisons of environmental damage, the growth of big business and the
accompanying fraudulence and economic vulnerability, and the exoticization of
racial minorities. The images of afﬁrmation, including Times Square and the
Flatiron Building, steam freighters and railroad terminals, Niagara Falls, Thunder
Mountain and “Cowboys at Lunch,” provide an example of the master narrative
that Wisconsin Death Trip serves to undermine, and also provides short
statements which worry and unsettle the text. For example, when discussing
negotiations regarding the Panama Canal, Lesy notes “President Roosevelt
responded by calling the Colombians “dagos”,” disasters include such facts as “A
ﬁre in the Iroquois Theater in Chicago killed 588 people,” and dire incidents
reported include the fact that “architect Stanford White was shot and killed by
Pittsburgh millionaire Harry K. Thaw during a musical revue in a restaurfarrtion
the roof of Madison Square Garden” (62,107).

What Lesy’s texts stand in conjunction to is a paranoid and narcissistic

discourse which attempted to frame the historical imagination according to the

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ideals of the early republic. This condition could be described in the terms of
psychoanalysis that Lesy applies in his conclusion to Wisconsin Death Trip,
which also relates to Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 declaration of the “paranoid
style” in American political and social life: I

A person who is afraid of being overwhelmed by fantasies resulting
from inadequately repressed anal impulses lives in horror of those
physical or metaphysical empty spaces in whose far reaches live the
barely secret temptations that will make him lose all control. A person
obsessed by anal fantasies will indulge in compulsive acts to void,
disguise, or ﬁll such empty spaces of threatening imagination.

Lesy proves that in the historical archives such “threatening imagination” could
be uncovered which challenges psychological and mythical security.

Derrida explains, the “trouble with the archive is — what inhibits sight and
knowledge, but also the trouble of troubled and troubling affairs.” The archive
contains the “trouble of secrets, of plots, of clandestineness, of half-private, half-
public conjurations, always at the unstable limit between public and private,
between the family, the society, and the state, between the family and an intimacy
even more private than the family, between oneself and oneself” (90). These
troubling secrets will be later be illuminated in a discussion of Midwestern Gothic
texts.

The abyssal waste place that Lesy mines thus reveals the voices and faces
which could trouble the logocentric view of history. As a feature of the
Midwestern Gothic, an antique, document, or artifact provides a link to historical
and familial secrets which depict the alienation of the subject from the family,
him or herself and, ultimately from the national narrative of grandiose western

history or the compulsion toward the supernatural holiness of the Midwestern

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Protestant values of “abstinence, frugality, and independence — the home grown,
made-on-the-farrn trinity” (Rice 137). Lesy introduces men with likeness to
nineteenth-century iconoclast authors Robert Ingersoll, Ambrose Bierce and E.
W. Howe who experienced paternal failure to seize opportunities in an open,
dynamic society, “a contagious frontier faith in democracy” and oppressive
fundamental religious enthusiasm (Bierce’s mother, direct descendent of William
Bradford, being the “pious old lady at home after service singing ‘Plunged in a
Gulf of Dark Despair’”), and a young life of hard work and distasteful farming
(Anderson, “Old Northwest” 98-100). As Howe declared in The Story of a
Country Town (1883), “I became early impressed with the fact that our people
seemed to be miserable and discontented, and frequently wondered that they did
not load their effects on wagons again, and move away from a place which made
all men surly and rough, and the women pale and fretful.... (qtd. in Anderson,
“Old Northwest” 1 11).

These unsettling Midwestern texts thus depict the “vulgar persons” or
“rejected refuse” which were unassimilated in the march of progress. In these
texts, subject matter such as adultery, murder, deceit, and the destruction of
community coincide with the perversion of innocence as civilization is revealed
as a fall from grace, a morbid trap or a dog-eat—dog existence. The wilderness is
represented by the destructive power of nature which enhances the style and
content of the texts as fragmentary and immobile, suggesting their potential as
gothic allegories. Most strikingly is the prevalent use of visual vignettes and the

faces and bodies which register the place “where meaning collapses” and there is

52

a “failure to recognize . .. kin,” whereby “nothing is familiar, not even the shadow
of a memory” (Kristeva 5). These uncanny pictures reveal that the promise of the

American Dream was exceedingly stilted.

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Chapter 2: “Life is a mystery, everyone must stand alone”: The Literature
and Film of Midwestern Gothic

“1 have not lost faith. I proclaim that. I have only been brought to the
place where I know my faith will not be realized. . ..”
Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

Wisconsin Death Trip may be elucidated by placing it in a tradition of
~Midwestern literature and ﬁlm dealing with the subject matter of familial and
national grievance and the stylistically obscure. The texts discussed in this
chapter are also either relatively unknown, deserving of greater contemporary
scholarly attention, or are deemed ‘cult’ narrative thus seemingly inaccessible.
Juxtaposing these texts discloses a thematic unity which, in turn, provides a
coherent thesis of Midwestern Gothic. The novels and ﬁhns span a broad time
period, produced from 1919 to 2003. They deal with the late nineteenth century,
the dawning of the twentieth century, and the decades of the ﬁfties and the
eighties, thus spanning the decades through which Wisconsin Death Trip
originated, delved into the territory of nostalgic excavation, and culminated in the
postmodem era. The novels and ﬁlms address a past that wavers between the
disastrous and the heartbreaking, reveling in death and the underbelly of
promises, dreams and grand truths. They light out upon a territory that is out of
bounds; they deject or stray into! a historic and psychic region that challenges the
grand narrative of afﬁrmation. As Glenway Wescott explains in The
Grandmothers: A Family Portrait:

[I]t was an instinctive law for Americans, the one he had broken. Never
be infatuated with nor by to interpret as an omen the poverty, the
desperation, of the past; whoever remembers it will be punished, or
punish himself; never remember. Upon pain of loneliness, upon pain of
a sort of expatriation though at home. The past was by nature tragic.
No tragic arts ought to ﬂourish; tragedy was treason, the betrayal of state

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secrets to the enemy, even the enemy in one’s self. Memory was

incest. . .. (299)
In this sense, memory has become taboo, that which must be repressed as a
primitive instinct. Revelation in the case of these texts, discloses toil, shame,
disillusionment and a courage that could only wreak disaster. They divulge that
the “prosaic chroniclers” of Lesy’s text had indeed captured the adulterated and

long repressed spirit of the Middle West.

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2.1 Literature

Excerpts from Glenway Wescott’s The Grandmothers intersperse the pictorial
and media accounts in Lesy’s text. Formulating what Lesy terms a “vein” of the
piece, Wescott’s text could be read as an artery or lifeblood of the work. His
formulation of memory, the attitude of the pioneer descendents and the central
profusion of macabre portraits which appear in a chapter entitled “The Dead. His
Grandmother’s Final Grief. The Photograph Albums,” reveal Wescott’s more
than supplementary inﬂuence on Wisconsin Death Trip. The Grandmothers
traces the attempt of Alwyn Tower to piece together his family history and “the
long series of passions which had in the end produced himself” (6). The novel
portrays the long and arduous history of the Tower family and the “wilderness of
history and hearsay, that distorted landscape of a dream” which lies “buried under
the plowed land, the feet of modern men, and the ripening crops” (9). Alywn
Tower seeks to discover the psyche of his ancestors but, like the gaping hole
represented by the cistern or the outhouse - a popular motif in these texts- , he is
afraid of “the abysses [with] which his elders dealt so carelessly and capably” (7).
Into the darkness of the abyss his grandmother delves and her mind “like the rays

9’ 6‘

of a magic lantern, illuminated with disconnected pictures the darkness of many
lives - in fact, the darkness of life itself” (6).

Memory is described in the novel as scrappy. Like a patchwork quilt it is
stitched together through photographs, locks of hair, and short tales. Wescott

portrays memory as an arcane ship which “grows ghostly and sinks in the sea; and

one has to wait for the tides to cast on the beach, fragment by fragment the

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awaited cargo” (6). This notion of disintegration and gathering together
summarizes the method of Lesy’s text, which also composes the debris of the
archive into a historical narrative. Furthermore, Wescott raises the difﬁculty of
having these ghostly remnants ‘speak’, suggesting that these faces and traces of
hair gesture to the past but the boy has “no hope of being answered, since [his
ancestors] were dead” (13). He refers to the mute nature of the ancestors stating,
“All the secrets of all the lives must be like that — they could not tell. All they
could do was to hang such a picture on the wall, or merely in their hearts” (14).
The concept of the unspeakable suggests, therefore, the ultimate futility in
attempting to glean answers from a picture or artifact. These relics hold secrets,
tales of a tragic past, and one can hope only to discover a suggestive emotion, a
tone or a sentiment in the thing they possess.

Wescott elicits hope that these artifacts may indulge a sensation of the past as
these seemingly silent relics represent “a monument having on the outside an
appearance of solidity, but hollow within, where, like the few breaths of air which
are imprisoned inside a bronze, the bitter-sweet of youth, passion, and disgrace
would be secreted” (237). What the relics to the past reveal to Alwyn is a
melancholy history, a “vast and somber picture” whereby the whole history of the
family seemed “unmentionably 5a ” (119). His pioneering ancestors discovered
in Wisconsin a legacy of hard labor, “failed plans and unmaterialized dreams” and
a lovelom and isolated existence (35). The “hard, loving faces” that are revealed

to him are “all scarred with shadows” (148).8 Alwyn thus discovers a “family

57

birthright of anxiety, ambition, loneliness” (197). He constructs an essay relating
his family history which proclaims of the Towers, the “perpetual pioneers”:

Two younger sons had been obliged to come to America in search of
fortune. They had failed to find it; their descendents were still seeking,
seeking among fools and brutes. Superior men, Cheated of their
inheritance, disguised as inferiors and unable to reveal themselves...
They said little, but this conviction took possession of all their minds:
they were not born to be beasts of burden; they should not have to work
as these others worked; they were not menials, but deserved a sweeter
fate; life was unjust. This conviction was inherited by every Tower, from
father to son; and in that inheritance younger son shared equally with
elder. A grievance was their birthright. (28)
Alwyn’s dismal concept of labor reﬂects a motto included in Wisconsin Death '
Trip which reads, “Work is the Law of Life.”9 His statements contradict the
“myth of the garden” which was initially evident in the pastoral ethic of the
Jeffersonian economy whereby rural sufﬁciency lead to psychic balance and in
such texts as Robert Beverley’s History and Present State of Virginia (1705).
Beverley depicts a primitive utopia “without the Curse of Industry, their
Diversion alone, and not their Labour, supplying their Necessities none of the
Toils of Husbandry were exercised by this happy People” (qtd. in Marx 80). As
Henry Nash Smith explains, the image of a vast and growing agricultural society
became “a collective representation, a poetic idea that deﬁned the promise of
American life. The master symbol of the garden embraced a cluster of metaphors
expressing fecundity, growth, increase, and blissful labor in the earth” (qtd. in
Marx 142). This mythology is countered in Wescott’s historical vision.
According to Wescott’s pioneers, America was perceived as a talent to master,

demanding the aptitude and faculty of its settlers to govern, master and till the

land. America was a talent “Lent, not given; to be guarded and risked and

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multiplied and used to the glory of God, the owner” (194). These individuals,
however, seemed to berate that talent as one which they were not adept, not
dedicated, and not humble enough for. Wescott reveals the restlessness and
despair of those who believed they had failed and saw failure surround them in
them personal relationships.

Those who did practice the talent of being an American seemed caught in a
stoic, Puritanical trap, destined to “grow old angrily, like an innocent prisoner in a
mysterious jail” (Wescott 147). Under the weight of this American onus, some
characters developed what Lesy describes as “The character type of failure
[which] is now called paranoid” (Wisconsin). Alwyn expresses, “They grieved,
but stifled their grief being ashamed of it; for if they worked harder, if they had
lead purer lives, if they still worked harden...” (24). Alwyn’s ancestors
developed the nervous traits of anxiety including paranoia and obsessive
compulsive disorder. Lesy includes one tale which describes Alwyn’s
Grandmother’s fetish for modesty, which also attempts to cloak the impurities of
historical experience; “There was a history of the conquest of America with
innumerable illustrations, in which the savages offered their daughters to the
discoverers in dresses which she drew, and even the slain lay beneath shrouds as
fanciful as valentines — the work of many weeks” (Wescott 263). These ancestors
exhibit a strain for purity, attempting to “ﬁrlﬁll the command Keep Thyself Pure”
as it relates to both life and national identity (Lesy, Wisconsin).

Wescott describes the characters in his novel as illiterate mystics, those who

were governed by grand practices and beliefs but who could not seem to fathom

59

the temperament to which they aspired. These enigmatic characters are presented
in a photograph album to Alwyn, who is then acquainted with the “disastrous
comedies” of their lives (120). Alwyn’s description of this album reﬂects the
effect that Lesy attempts to create in his visual anecdotes: '

[H]eads and busts and family groups, pygmy men and women as if seen

through a telescope — the men in daydream, the women anxious about

their children, their lovers, their clothes. Mouths like bits of carved wax,

nostrils of an insatiable arrogance; eyes long closed in death The

lifeless light half hid and half revealed all the possible combinations

of all the motives there were - greed and sensuality and courage and

compassion and cruelty and nostalgia; all the destinies there were -

manias, consolations, regrets. (121 )
Wescott captures the melancholy emotion that Lesy intends the viewer to
experience when reading his text. Although we do not know the particular tale or
identity behind each picture, we experience the “secretion” of affect.

Wescott describes, “Each picture was a tomb where a dead heart lay buried

— buried with its affections, its apathy, its fury” (121). The pictures symbolize
children dead of disease, husbands killed, men and women who drank and
boarded excessively. Lesy’s photography evokes such characters as are depicted
in Wescott’s book, for example, Mr. Peter Greeley, the notorious rrriser who lived
in sin and misery but who was depicted in a daguerreotype as a young man of
twenty-three with “An anxious effeminate face; his moistened hair combed low
on his forehead, resembling the parallel strokes of a pen” (125). The disjunction
between outward appearance and emotional insight demonstrates the ambiguities
between an internal and external life, leading us to believe that the deferential

portraits included in Wisconsin Death Trip may also conceal inner desolation.

The exposition of internal and external layers suggests the gothic convention of

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“an X within an X,” or a story within a story which “represents the broadest
structural application of the thematic convention of the unspeakable,” having a
similar relation to the convention of live burial (Sedgwick 20). These faces thus
act as a key to the repressed narrative of malaise'in the bucolic setting.

Another portrait depicts Mr. Homer O’Sullivan, the “well-educated,
unsuccessful man” who looks ill at ease in the photograph as it had “paralyzed a
singular restlessness of mind and body” (126), and Mr. and Mrs. A. Rollo whose
eyes “are looking, not for what they desire, but for the body of desire itself, lost
and perhaps dead” (132). Indeed, Wescott depicts in his portraits a country where
“avidity had never been assuaged,” 6r had been abandoned altogether (295).
However, the trope of America’s Manifest Destiny still remains a staple mythic
commodity as Wescott states of the Midwestern country, “It had not kept its
promise, so it was still the promised land” (295).

Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio exhibits a similar spiritual
disorientation to that of Wisconsin Death Trip and The Grandmothers. Aspiring
artist Max Wald lent Anderson a copy of Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River
Anthology (1915) — excerpts from which are included in Lesy’s text - which
- Anderson devoured in one night. Much like Spoon River, Winesburg, Ohio also
marks the “effect of our life-denying life: sin and disease and death,” displaying
“the conﬂict of American life against its own rigid forms” (Sutton 431).
Winesburg depicts the monomanias which are evident in an array of Midwestern
gothic texts, including “Misogyny, inarticulateness, ﬁigidity, God-infatuation,

homosexuality, drunkenness” (Howe 99). Anderson believed that the crudity of

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American thought and society was a fact which must be taken into consideration
in the presentation of life. He stressed that American literature must face the
limitations of its people, representing the heart and reality of American life, and
stating that the true novelist “is a man gone a little mad with the life of his times”
(Winesburg xx). Indeed, the reaction to Anderson’s text included charges of
‘“‘Neuroticism!” “Obscenity!” and “Exaggeration!’”’ (Winesburg xxiii). Like
Lesy, Anderson revealed the pathological aspects of the people of Winesburg;
their obsessions and their fears, to produce what Hart Crane declared as “the truth
about our small mid-westem towns” (xxiii).

Anderson’s truth, however, also oscillates between a tone of “acceptance and
denial,” again illuminating the schizophrenic nature of the American psyche. In
his Mid-American Chants (1918) he declared, “I have heard gods whispering in
the corn and wind/.... I have run back to gods, to prayers and dreams,” asserting
“Westward the ﬁeld of the cloth of gold” (Sutton 406, 404). Windy McPherson ’s
Son (1916) also denotes the desire for a “satisfactory end,” illustrating “an upward
and onward note in all the early pages of the book, a boy, coming out of an Iowa
com-shipping town to rise in the business world, that ﬁtted into the American
mood of the day” (Pearson 103). Winesburg, however, reveals the obverse side of
this optimism. Anderson begins his collection of what could arguably be
considered vignettes, short stories or sketches with a chapter entitled “The Book
of the Grotesque” which details a writer, seemingly ludicrous with old age. The
writer, lying in bed one night, imagines a host of characters whose staunch faith in

the truths of the world made them “grotesque”. These truths include, “the truth of

62

virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and
of proﬂigacy” (5). The espousal of social truths, or an aloft social mythology,
results in the distortion of man’s vision and the investment in false dreams and
goals (Anderson Sherwood Anderson 40, 41, 49). Indeed, cultural critic Edward

Watts writes of John and Jo in BA. Howe’s The Story of a Country Town (1883):

[T]hey bore the larger burden of not only creating a good society but -

more importantly - the “most American of all places.” Haunted by the

inevitability of failing to meet this ideal, John and Jo, like all colonials,

lack the maginative ﬂexibility to disassociate themselves or their

community from the idealizing and universalizing role they have been

given as part of the realization of the grandeur of Manifest Destiny.”

(190)
The men who cling to these aloft ideals are included in “The Book of the
Grotesque,” which was never published but made an “indelible impression” on
the narrator’s mind (5). They become immobile and arcane wreckage as opposed
to the vibrancy of the “young thing inside” which saved the old man (6). We can
infer that the old writer, from whom the narrator derived his inspiration, was none
other than George Willard, newspaper reporter for the Winesburg Eagle who
documented the stories and townsfolk of his community.

What the ﬁctional Willard compiled in his imagination were memories of the
townsfolk who aid his realization that “he must live and die in uncertainty, a thing
blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt in the sun” (219). The tales
of his neighbors reveal that any attempt to adhere to a particular creed, even that
of life and death, leads to unhealthy obsession and insanity. A particular tale that

resonates is that of the fanatic Jesse Bentley. Jesse’s pioneer ancestors moved

from New York state to the Middle West, becoming poverty-stricken farmers

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whereby, “Plows run through the ﬁelds caught on hidden roots, stones lay all
about, on the low places water gathered, and the young com turned yellow,
sickened and died” (46). The narrator relates:

The four young men of the family worked hard all dayin the ﬁelds, they

ate heavily of coarse, greasy food, and at night slept like tired beasts on

beds of straw. Into their lives came little that was not coarse and brutal

and outwardly they themselves were coarse and brutal. (46)
This notion of being coarse and brutal seems to be a family inheritance, like the
hereditary nature of degeneracy described by sociologists Robert Dugdale and
Frank Blackrnar, if not characterizing the majority of the citizens of Winesburg
who attempt to cloak themselves in respectability, in the same manner. The
narrator explains that a “crude and animal-like poetic fervor” possessed the
Bentley boys and manifested itself in Jesse. He strove to make his life a thing of
great importance, desiring production, land and power. The narrator relates,
“Jesse’s mind went back to the men of Old Testament days who had also owned
lands and herds. He remembered how God had come down out of the skies and
talked to these men and he wanted God to notice and talk to him also” (51). The
myth of 3 Manifest Destiny is alluded to as Jesse ruminates, “The land that lay
stretched out before him became of vast signiﬁcance, a place peopled by his fancy
with a new race of men sprung from himself” (52). He longed for the
“atmosphere of old times and places” and longed for a son named David who
would parallel the biblical shepherd and King. J esse’s vision is reminiscent of the
epigraph included in Ole Edvart Rolvaag’s Giants in the Earth (1927), which is

taken from Genesis 6:4; “There were giants in the earth in those days; and also

after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bore

64

children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of
renown.” Giants in the Earth was also a narrative of pioneer hardship and the
oppressiveness of open space, although on the plains of the Dakota Territory.lo
Jesse’s neurotic daughter Louise eventually gives birth to a son, David, and Jesse
decided to take the boy and make a sacriﬁce to God. Jesse’s fanatic desire to rule
a fertile kingdom was destroyed as be terriﬁed the boy and apprehended that he
had become “too greedy for glory” (84). He became invested in the avaricious
splendor of a mythic, heady pioneer life, thus illustrating the narrowness and
distortion of vision which lead to barbarous monomaniacal tendencies.

Hands are a striking motif throughout this text, echoing Lesy’s collages of
hands which waver between community and friendship, and idleness and
alienation, or are depicted as rheumatic and gnarled, suggesting the labor of hard
work and discontent. The ﬁrst chapter in Winesburg, Ohio is entitled “Hands”
and those of Wing Biddlebaum are described as “ﬂuttering pennants of promise”
for a dreamed of “pastoral golden age” (12,11). These hands seemingly represent
productive labor as Winesburg was proud of these hands in the same spirit in
which it was proud of “Banker White’s new stone house and Wesley Moyer’s bay
stallion” (10). However, these hands symbolize a restless energy to indulge in
perverse and compulsive acts. No longer a symbol of productive labor,
craftsmanship and close ties, hands are implicated in the molestation of young
boys, the dictation of obscene thoughts onto scraps of paper, and the bloodstained
hands of Dr. Parcival are even implicated in brutal murders from Chicago to

Ohio. The hands represent a compulsive disorder, described by Lesy as “a

65

response to intolerable states of subjective and objective anxiety, hostility, or
despair,” (Wisconsin) which is paralleled by the Priest’s repetitious desire to see
the carnal ﬂesh of Kate Swift, the compulsive quips of Ebenezer Cowley, the
“Queer” man of the village, and the mental acuity of Joe Welling, the “Man of
Ideas” that echoes the men in Lesy’s text who strove to invent perpetual motion.
Those who are not continually agitated by life, are perceived as the clods and
dullards of the town. They may amount to little, but bolster the refrain that “many
people must live and die alone” (103). Indeed, the suicide of Windpeter Winters,
which conforms and corresponds to the anecdotes in Wisconsin Death Trip,
reveals the desire not to live an emasculated, lonely and unproductive life:

They said that old Windpeter stood up on the seat of his wagon, raving

and swearing at the onrushing locomotive, and that he fairly screamed

with delight when the team, maddened by his incessant slashing at them,

rushed straight ahead to certain death. Most boys have seasons of

wishing they could die gloriously instead of just being grocery clerks and

going on with their humdrum lives. (187).
The yearning to escape to a more prosperous and unencumbered existence is
ﬁnally realized by George Willard, who at the denouement of the text leaves on a
train bound for Chicago to escape the stigrnas of shame and entrapment which
characterize the country.

Pope Brook’s 1999 novel Indiana Gothic exposes a family history which lay
“buried” or repressed for nearly eighty years. The episode of “adultery and
murder in an American family” contributed to familial shame concealed by a
puritanical backlash of “rigid and desperate decorum” which pervaded the

household during Brook’s childhood (vii). The records of the events which

occurred during the ﬁrst decade of the twentieth century in Indiana were, for the

66

most part, destroyed, leaving Brock to trace a fragmentary record and immerse
himself in temporal and geographical research. The story depicts turn of the
century Indiana in much the same respect as Wisconsin Death Trip. The
countryside was laden with religious fanatics, temperance crusaders, vigilante.
groups including the Black Avengers, and epidemics of smallpox and
tuberculosis. Brock emphasizes the effect of religion on his ancestors, espousing
the notion of original sin as a pertinent biblical context. His ancestor, Ham
Dillon, recalls the stigma attached to farming life according to the actions of
Adam and Eve:

"Cursed is the ground for thy sake

“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread!

God condemning Adam and Eve to be farmers. Ham had never much
liked this part of the story, what it implied about his livelihood - that
when God was casting around for a punishment, farming was the worst
thing He could think of if you believed the Bible, farmers were all
prisoners doing hard time in a penal colony. (124)

It appears that throughout the historical reconstruction of the lives. of the Dillon
and Hale families, each person struggles to master or escape the drudgery of the
life which surrounds them. Brook’s narrative recounts the events which occurred
to two sisters, Maggie and Allie, and their husbands, Ham and Lincoln Hale.
Ham aspires to be a top notch politician in Indianapolis, aided by the
determination of his wife to assume an honorable position. Allie married a
schoolteacher and, disenchanted with her marriage, engages in a passionate affair
with her sister’s husband. After several years and the birth of an illicit child, Link
ﬁnally discovers the two lovers and descends into emotional and religious mania.

On his way to a Sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, he makes a rash and

67

temporary stop to take care of monetary business and is caught up in a political
rally in which Ham is the star candidate. Overwhelmed by tumultuous emotions,
Link ﬁres ﬁve shots and Ham dies from the poisonous wounds inﬂicted.
Throughout the text, it is implied that the family feels under the spell of God’s
curse, leaving them prey to original sin and the punishment of odious ground. In
an artifact discovered by Brook, Allie Thompson wrote on October 24, 1888, the
day before her marriage to Hardin Lincoln Hale, “Of course you’ll expect
something original,/ But I’ll tell you before I begin,/ That there’s nothing original
in me,/ Excepting Original Sin” (67). Allie is also haunted by the religious
culture of the time and the emphasis placed upon the value of one’s spirit. As
Lesy explains, “rural and country town culture was primarily an elaboration of
secular Calvinism and Smithian egoism, [whereby] a man’s success and a man’s
failure were judged to be reﬂections of his soul” (Wisconsin). As her son lies
suffering from what she speculates could be T.B. but which is in fact the croup,
Allie contemplates, “If he dies, it ’s a judgment on me” (7). As she considers the
. arduous life of her family, and her own misdeeds, she is pushed to “the ragged
edge of hysteria” (7).

Brock documents the toils faced by the members of the Hale family, those who
have no ties to the Age of Optimism evident in the emergent metropolis. In a
conversation with Dr. Busby, a staff specialist from Five Oaks sanitarium, it is
revealed that “More farm wives go crazy in Indiana than anyone else” (166).
Indeed, in Wisconsin Death Trip, Lesy includes an excerpt from Hamlin Garland

which acknowledges “these bedraggled and weary wives,” with their “forlorn,

68

aimless and pathetic wandering up and down the street.” Lesy also includes the
fate of one farm wife, Mary Karban, wife of Wenzel Karban, a farmer of the town
of Neva, who “committed suicide by eating the heads of 4 boxes of matches.”
Allie, who gains courage from her adulterous relationship with the budding
politician, ﬁnds resonance in the thought of these women as Brock narrates, “She
would think of all the women beaten down by farm life, by the loneliness and
crushing labor. She didn’t feel so fragile as to fear that she would join them, but
it haunted her to know they were there” (166).

Not only is Allie frenzied by her home life, which does little to reinforce the
sanctity of the American family, but her son Denton becomes disenchanted with
country life and the disjunction between rural reticence and the antediluvian
nature of his surroundings, and the progressive enlightenment of the city.
Denton’s isolation is revealed as he makes a pilgrimage to the barn whose
“vastness and musty peace somehow soothed his loneliness” (157). The barn
houses an old Johnson harnmerless revolver which Denton becomesincreasingly
enamored with as an instrument of powerful respite. On one particularly morose
day, when Denton’s feelings of isolation from “civilization and hope” are
exacerbated, he tramps the revolver to the “necessity house,” “trailing failure”
(158). Inside the outhouse, he lifts down a Sears, Roebuck catalogue, whose
pages of “earthly delights” intended to have a soothing effect upon the indigent
and isolated; “it made farmers feel like part of things. They could live out to hell
and gone but even so, thanks to the catalogue, they could belong to the USA;

they could share in the explosion of goods that was coming to be called the

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American way of life” (159). Denton, however, perceives the catalogue as a tool
of derision. He compares his “unmentionable location” — the outhouse — to the
plush, unspoiled commodities in the catalogue, feeling mocked by “the good life,
minutely itemized” (159). Feeling mentally contaminated, his mind, like the land,
“a malarial bog,” Denton stumbles across an advertisement for a porcelain bowl,
and acknowledging the admonishing rebuke to his lowly life, he lifts the revolver
and shoots himself in the stomach.

Denton’s father and Allie’s husband, Link, also suffers ﬁ'om the mental
diseases of the age. Burdened with a struggle to achieve a good wage and respect
from his family, and also with the suspicion of his wife’s affair and the
illegitimate child, he descends into mania and temporary insanity whereby he
shoots Ham Dillon, the converse symbol of his fortune. Throughout his life he
suffers the threatening burden of emasculation, and deems his success in the
murder trial as his “last chance to be a brave man” (356). Like the citizens
who populate Lesy’s text, Link is diagnosed as a neurasthenic, “a new sort of
disorder that’s arisen just in the past decade or two caused by the general
movement in our society away from physical labor and toward mental labor”
(301). The symptoms include “Tenderness in the scalp, teeth, or gums.
Abnormal secretions. Chills, heat ﬂashes, morbid fears, headaches” and is treated .
by electric shocks, arsenic, strychnine, and quinine (302-303). Throughout the
trial, Link is judged according to turn of the century deﬁnitions of mania which
correspond to the archaic classiﬁcations in Wisconsin Death Trip. The prosecutor

asks to what extent Link has been “noisy, profane, obscene, restless, destructive,

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ﬁlthy, syphilitic, scrofulous, phtihisical, hysterical, choreic, deformed,
intemperate, deaf, mute, blind, lame, or paralyzed” (270). The defendant does not
evince signs from this catalog, but does demonstrate signs of religious mania,
reciting passages from Revelations citing the abomination and ﬁlthiness of
fornication,- and also imparts the stories of Cain, who suffered the Divine
rejection, and Job, who lost property, family, and health. Finally, Link’s insanity
is blamed upon an inundation of “katastates” in the blood stream which are said to
oppose “positive emotions, pure thoughts, the higher truths” and are a product of
the evil feelings of fear and rage which are displayed when one is not in harmony
with his or her environment (309). This argument was a staple of late nineteenth-
century popular science and was incorporated by naturalist authors such as
Theodore Dreiser. The tale of Hardin Lincoln Hale therefore provides evidence
of the popular conceptions of insanity which abounded in turn of the century
America and which erupt profusely in Lesy’s book.

Brook’s true family story is concluded with pessimistic anecdotes which also
suit the fatalistic tone of Lesy’s American ancestors. We are told that Albert, the
love child, committed suicide by shooting himself through the head in 1951, and
that Ham’s brother Dennis was stung to death by a cloud of yellow jackets in
1935 (371). It appears that the family was perpetually haunted by a legacy of
misery and that under the “cattle and cropland” lies a disturbing history of
encumbered, disenchanted and fatefully cursed country folk: an inheritance which

may be revealed through oral history and archival remnants.

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2.2 Film

Harmony Korine’s perverse experimental drama, Gummo (1997) has been
described as a “grim, darkly humorous postmortem on small-town America”
(Guthmann). The ﬁlm received callous criticism for its advertently distressing
portrait of Ohioan citizens and its antagonizing sh(l)ock value; therefore, it seems
the perfect portrait of spiritual bankruptcy directed by a contemporary degenerate.
The ﬁlm was also criticized for its condescendingly stylistic composition,
suggesting its iconic and ﬁguratively fashionable status rather than its
accessibility. Korine depicts an “ultrachaotic environment” with “images coming
in from all directions” which belies a sense of community (Herzog & Korine).
The ﬁlm follows two poverty-stricken teenagers, Solomon and Tummler, through
an eccentric tour of their scandalous occupations and demoralizing daily routines,
juxtaposed with “postcards from hell” of the other local residents of Xenia, Ohio
(Anderson, “Searny Snapshots”).ll Like Lesy’s fragmentary doCuments, these
video shorts seem to be authenticated by our contemporary therapeutic culture
which privileges an exorbitant mixture of the Springer-esque talk show and reality
television to deﬁne the mental climate of America. Similarities to the style and
timbre of Wisconsin Death Trip become strikingly apparent as the visual text is
said by journalist Edward Guthmann to mix “the rawness of documentary and the
hyper-reality of a dream or an acid trip,” and is paralleled, again, with the work of
Diane Arbus, which includes triplets, giants, estranged couples, masked women
and portraits which intensify anomalous facial features, and also by the work of

David Lynch such as the revelation of “festering rot” in Blue Velvet (1986). The

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charge is made that cohesion is utterly devoid from the text in terms of stylistic
unity, narrative structure, and character relationships. One journalist details that
“When Tod Browning made Freaks back in 1932, the point was that community
exists even among the most Godforsaken of creatures” (Anderson “Seamy
Snapshots”). In Gummo, the seemingly distorted funhouse ﬁgures appear
alienated even from themselves. The ﬁlm is saturated with an air of despondency
which seems to be a key term for the mental anguish of failure and unmaterialized
dreams in the genre of Midwestern Gothic.

The ﬁlm depicts the skeletal wreck of the town of Xenia after a great tornado
hit and devastated the settlement. The tornado represented the strewn hopes of
the townspeople as “houses were split open and you could see necklaces hanging
from branches of trees” (Gummo). We are told in the hushed and whispered voice
of Solomon that the tornado killed people “left and right,” leading to the refrain
that “People die in Xenia.” Indeed, the town homes in on death, from the
discussion of lost and buried parents, to multiple discussions of suicide and ﬁnally
to the boys’ discovery of a catatonic grandmother, hooked to a life support
machine and putrefying in her own waste, whom they believe to have been dead
her whole life. The family portraits hung in one Xenia living room do not
represent exuberant life and memories of success, but are merely tools to prevent
a host of ﬂies in the cavity of the house from seeping into the house. The tornado
thus signiﬁes the onslaught of destruction and decay pervading the remainder of

the ﬁlm.

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One wonders if the title Gummo is ironically derived from the name from the
name of the star that played Dorothy in MGM’s 1939 fantasy classic The Wizard
of Oz. Featuring a tornado that whisked a young Dorothy Gale into the
Technicolor land of Oz on a spiritual quest to ﬁnd the Emerald city, the
protagonist was played by Judy Garland whose actual name is Frances Ethel
Gumm.12 This 1997 ﬁlm, however, reveals that the coming of age quest does not
lead to the realization of dreams, wisdom, courage and bravery, nor to a path
paved with gold and greenbacks. Gummo represents the obverse of L. Frank
Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of 02 which “aspire[d] to being a modernized
fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heart-aches and
nightmares are left out” (qtd. in Dighe 42). It does, however, suggest that there is
“no place like home;” as home is represented as a negative space and a menagerie
of rancor, eccentric behavior, and hidden secrets in which the perverseness of
childhood and its insecurities may ﬂourish. The characters do not follow a road
to progress nor inﬁnite possibility, but are harbored in a mire of paucity and
detritus. An initial character, a young boy dressed in nothing but shorts and
bunny ears, is depicted on an overpass suspended above the road, sitting and
playing on concrete strewn with refuse, and his own spit and piss, underneath a
murky sky laden with rain. This suggests that the possibility to journey beyond
these social, economic and mental limitations is impeded.

Many of the short excerpts which depict a documentary ﬂourish reﬂect the
frustration of the thwarted characters in Wisconsin Death Trip. These detail the

rape and sexual assault of a young girl, two brothers who murdered their parents

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in an apparent striving for power, a set of identical twins who died in 1983, a
cocaine addict, and a man who claims that suicide is the only way out of the blue
collar race. Tummler makes his own home videos which depict him, against a
background of bad techno music, declaring his dissatisfaction with life; “Dear
world, I think it was a mistake I was ever born, I’ve had jobs since I was 13 years
old the problem is all I see is misery and darkness.” We learn that his
employment, however, consists of killing cats to supply meat for the local grocery
store.

This dissatisfaction is heightened against the intimated background of a cult of
celebrity and a cult of masculinity. Solomon’s tap-dancing mother wishes to be
Marlene Dietrich, an albino woman makes a dating tape professing her love for
Patrick Swayze, and a young girl repeatedly cries “I want a moustache dammit”
so that she can be Burt Reynolds. One of the closing scenes depicts the bleach
blonde-haired sisters Dot and Darby, frolicking in a swimming pool to the sound

’9

of Roy Orbison’s “Crying. However, this one seeming scene of luxury takes
place in the shadow of a power plant, suggesting the hard labor of the
manufacturing industry and its contemporary decline and concomitant loss of
employment. The males in the ﬁlm seem chided with emasculation, from a boy
whose birth was accompanied by a lesbian midwife and had to suffer the rage of
his mother’s early menopausal symptoms, to Solomon, whose overbearing mother
puts a gun to head exclaiming, “Hey you son of a bitch, if you don’t smile I will

kill you” and who makes him spaghetti to eat in the bathtub while she washes his

imp-like head. The paramount scene of masculine disavowal occurs when a

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group of men, including Tummler’s father, sit around a kitchen bare-chested and
wrestle with a table and chair in order to prove their domination and control of
some household object. The threat of emasculation reﬂects one excerpt from the
Mendota State Asylum in Wisconsin Death Trip which reads, “Always talking
about being ‘put down,’ ‘undermined,’ and abused by his brothers Thinks he
has 1055 of Manhood.” This motif of frustrated manhood is particularly poignant
in Gummo, as at least three men contemplate suicide and two ﬁnd a way out to the
big city and its promise of fame and fortune by becoming transvestites.

The presence and metaphorical value of disease which are so prevalent in
Lesy’s text are also rife in Gummo. The epidemics of tuberculosis, smallpox and
diphtheria, however, are replaced by modern diseases as, for example, before
Solomon’s father died, he “had a bad case of the diabetes” and the object of Dot
and Darby’s affections, one tennis playing, mullet adorned stud, is afﬂicted with
Attention Deﬁcit Disorder (ADD). In an early scene, Tummler discovers a lump
in his girlﬁ'iend’s breast. Later in the ﬁlm her family visit her in the hospital as
she is preparing for surgery to remove the cancer and she conﬁdes that this will
only increase her isolation and distance from the other members of the town. The
presence of disease heightens the residents of Xenia’s sense of afﬂiction and
metaphorically represents the infection of the body politic, its degeneration and its
nervous and restless desire to be recognized.

The text is disturbed by two foundational incidents, however, which reveal the
original investment in an American Dream, or America as Idea. In one scene, two

young boys are dressed as cowboys with hat, boots, belt and toy gun. They police

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a junkyard in an advertently aggressive and hostile manner, “killing” the poverty
stricken rabbit that represents to them a “queer” ideology. In another abrupt and
disjunctive scene, the voice of Tummler recites, “Without wood there’d be no
America, no ship to bring the Pilgrims across the ocean, no log cabins, no
schoolhouse, no churches, no covered wagons, no railroad ties, no cigar store
Indians, no nothing.” Here Tummler ruminates on primitive origins and
iconographic lore, perhaps attempting to transﬁgure a linear narrative of his own
peculiar position. It seems glaringly evident that the aspirations of the pioneers
contrast sharply to the despondent attitude of Tummler and Solomon, who reel
against a facade of happiness, of “life” and “home.”

Michael and Mark Polish’s Northfork (2003) places a strong thematic
investment in death. The ﬁlm charts the birth and death of a small Montana town
in the name of progress. The ﬁlm opens with Viewmaster footage of pictures
which would easily tessellate with the grand and optimistic images in Lesy’s
Dreamland. Black and white images of dam construction, railroad cars, blasting,
the gloriﬁcation of male labor and a stilted portrait of the Indian community in the
region demonstrate the conclusive archived images of the dying town. These
sanguine representations are juxtaposed with the barrenness of Northfork as the
black suited Evacuation Committee ensures the departure of the residents in order
to prepare for the construction of a dam whose waters will inundate the town.

In the desolate and austere town, the Polish brothers focus their story around
two characters who each reveal a particular perspective upon death. Irwin, an

orphaned child, spends his ﬁnal days languishing in the orphanage until his death

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converges with the obliteration of Northfork. Walter, a member of the Evacuation
Committee, must also come to terms with the death of his wife, whose body he
must exhume ﬁom the cemetery before the ﬂood. One of the initial images in the
ﬁlm displays a cofﬁn surfacing in a large body of water displaying the town’s
deep seated anxieties about the death of children, adults and the community alike.

Irwin’s story attempts to locate him in the sentimental rubric which has always
enveloped the death of a child. An obituary from Wisconsin Death Trip
exempliﬁes the rhetoric which is fundamental to Irwin’s story; “He started home
long ago and has been waiting outside for weary months. . .. He left his suffering
and weakness all this side the gate... His father sat by him in the closing hours,
yet heard not the ﬂutter of angel wings as they came so gently and bore his dear
one away.” The rhetorical tactics employed by Father Harlan, who sits by the
orphan’s bedside, seem to suggest to the boy that he is, in fact, an angel, and in
dream-like sequences which project the boy’s death, Irwin joMeys through a
graveyard coming to stop at the residence of three eccentric angels. Cast from the
paraphernalia which lies at the dying boys bedside, Cod, Happy, Flower Hercules
and Cup of Tea put the child through rigorous tests to discern if he is the lost
angel they have been seeking. These angels hold the key to Irwin’s seemingly
purgatorial position in Northfork, as they own a painting which depicts an
unconventional recital of ﬁontier mythology. In the painting, a ﬂock of angels
are hunted down by a lasso wielding cowboy on an overbearing steed. This
unhallowed genocide suggests that with the progressive movement westward,

innocence was destroyed and only the sinister side of life remained.

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The ﬁhn is shot with a heavy emphasis on grayscale, and many of the scenes
appear bleached and waning. This is particularly evident in a shot of the
American ﬂag which is conceived in grey and black tones. The use of grayscale
enhances the pessimistic tone of the movie, but also demonstrates how American
ideals have been subverted. These settlers have become impoverished in the
name of capital and big business, homes have been literally divided or lost, and
the people have become alienated from the land. The Polish brothers’ picture of
modernization from 1955 seems to parallel the 1890 portrait of the Wisconsin
countryside as a place of dry bones. The ﬁlm is also laden with local eccentrics
who seem to hold onto grotesque truths. For example, one man has built himself
an ark, complete with two wives, in order to save himself from the march of
progress. Another fanatic hammers large ironnails through his feet in order to
anchor himself to his cherished perception of home. Northfork offers a portrait of
a dying town which appears to subvert traditional values as Lesy does, exploiting
the paradigm of perverse nostalgia. This ﬁlm offers fantastical characters,
grotesque ﬁgures, dream sequences, and competing snapshots of the American
landscape providing a postmodern “fragmentary history that [farmers and
ranchers] understand” (Polish).

The texts discussed in this chapter thus serve to provide an example of the
Midwestern Gothic genre. These eccentric and often incoherent texts represent
“A disorder like that of [Alwyn’s] grandmother Duff’s unbalanced mind:

memories, inverted ideas, many-voiced wandering symmetrical discords, the

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entire material of three-quarters of a century’s experience rewoven more brieﬂy in
a deafening fugue” (Wescott 292). This paradigm of the ancestor and youthful
counterpart, particularly represented as a male/ female dichotomy, suggests
thematic unity within these Midwestern texts. As Alwyn relates, “The whole
country had one symbol: a very young man, always at the beginning of a career,
always beside his mother He would never forget that when she had been at his
side, the mirage had seemed real and not far away; he would never again be so
happy as he had been, under her spell” (Wescott 25). A sense of optimism may
still be cultivated in a youthful ﬁgure; however, adolescence brings with it trials
and tribulations which reveal the sour nature of the ‘virgin land.’ In Winesburg,
Ohio, Elizabeth Willard hopes that her son will not reach the same bitter end she
achieves; “In the boyish ﬁgure she yearned to see something half forgotten that
had once been a part of herself re-created. The prayer concerned that. “Even
though I die, I will in some way keep defeat from you”” (22). She ruminates,
“Within him there is a secret something that is striving to grow. It is the thing I
let be killed in myself” (25). This “thing” may refer to a sense of hopeful
optimism which was soon lost with maturity. Alwyn’s depiction of his ancestors
also notes “the waste, wreckage, or abandonment of gifts amid which youth is
turned into maturity,” and conclusively Wisconsin is depicted as a grandmother
with “resistance, abandon and spiteful changes of heart” (Wescott 175, 290).
In Gummo, Solomon and Tummler express their only tender affection toward a
grandmother on a life support machine. Approaching her in clown masks which

connote their immaturity, Tummler strokes her hair and then pulls the plug on the

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machine, cutting off her oxygen supply. This murder is carried out with
compassion, however, as the boys seem to realize that her long, aging life has
only brought despair. The children must rid themselves of the threat of maturity
which seemingly brings toil and “no reward.” As Lesy explains:

The people who left the land came to cities . .. not to be masters but to be
charges. They followed yellow brick roads to emerald cities presided
over by; imaginary wizards who would permit them to live in happy
adolescence for the rest of their lives. By leaving the land, they
disavowed a certain kind of adulthood whose mature rewards they
understood to be confusion and bereavement. By going to emerald
cities, they chose a certain kind of adolescence forever free from frailty,
responsibility and death. (Wisconsin)

The texts parallel Harry Levin’s assertion that “Most American novels are
parables,” representing “a timeless and unlocated psychomania” (17). The
characters are haunted by the threat of maturity and humility, and the American
experience becomes increasingly destabilized as we are introduced to mentally or
pecuniary impoverished characters who fail to experience the master narrative of
Ammcan life. We are presented with an almost schizophrenic rhythm which
reveals the aspiration for, and repeal of, the prevailing ideology. This is evident
in a poemby Sherwood Anderson:

We were the heavy ones, heavy and sure.
The wind in the comﬁelds moved us not.
We the Americans, worthy and sure,
Worthy and sure of ourselves.

Torn killed his brother on Wedneday night,
Back of the comcrib, under the hill. (qtd. in Sutton 419-20)

These characters represent an antonym of success, delving into abyssal truths
which reveal “A patrimony, an unearned inheritance, of knowledge of life, of
skeletons in the closet” (Wescott 292). From the spectral archive repressed ghosts

' come to the fore, much like those who haunt George Willard’s rural fair. These

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texts portray a life which is indeed both passionate and senseless, claustrophobic,
greedy, and exhausting, like a great county fair:

A village of rickety buildings inclosed by a fence too high to climb; a
narrow entrance, a narrow exit. A multitude of laughing or irritable
people dragging awe-stricken children by one hand. Many spoiling their
appetites with the unwholesome refreshments that are for sale - some of
these hiding afterward because they are sick. Some stingy, some
extravagant, nearly everyone wanting to be more prosperously dressed;
everyone tired to death. Women indignant at the neglect of their men;
little ones whimpering because their mothers are out of sight. Games
of chance — the players always losing, the proprietors always poor.
Eager or scandalized blushes in the tents where there is nakedness to be
seen Shouting around the pits in which human anolmalies and sick
wild animals are exhibited jugglers seeming to ﬁnd the loud
applause inadequate. (Wescott 115)

We are presented with the death of idealism and the realization of the dearth of

life.

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Conclusion

The book that would be fashionable must, above all, be obscure.
Max Nordau, Degeneration.

Midwestern gothic depicts the particular psychic and social attributes of a
region that failed to provide many with the cultural rewards promised by the
mythology of the rural idyll and the Old Republican ideal of a Jeffersonian
ideology, Manifest Destiny, and Turner’s heady . Frontier Thesis. This mode
registers the unheimlich contradictions inherent in national mythology, exhibiting
the return of repressed or secret knowledge illuminating failure, disillusionment
and demise, the obverse of the American Dream. It is as Hamlin Garland wrote in
“Up the Coulee,” “I’ve come to the conclusion that life is a failure for ninety-nine
percent of us. You can’t help me now. It’s too late” (qtd. in Watts 207). As
cultural critic Edward Watts suggests, “There will be no happy ending: no
reparation, no atonement or even a cathartic dea ” (207). MidWestem Gothic
acknowledges the pecuniary historical trauma which affected farmers, ranchers
and blue-collar workers, and deals with the speciﬁc hardships of those who live in
the ‘frost belt’ and who suffer from the dislocation wrought by harsh natural
conditions. Indeed, in his sociological conclusion, Lesy notes of the late
nineteenth century that the rural inhabitants, “suffered from undervitalization as
well as a lack of sanitation, and were often driven mad by the morbid states that
inevitably arose from the economic overcrowding they now experienced on the
deserted frontier. Even the itinerant farrnhands who managed to ﬁnd work and

avoid the madness were crippled by a vicious cycle of boredom and immorality”

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(Wisconsin). In Madness and Civilization, Foucault also notes a moral economy
which was linked to insanity:

A class of society that lives in disorder, in negligence, and almost in
illegality: If on the one hand we see families prosper for a long series of
years in the bosom of harmony and order and concord, how many others,
especially in the lower classes, afﬂict the eye with a repulsive spectacle
of debauchery, of dissensions, and shameful distress! That, according to
my daily notes, is the most fertile source of the insanity we treat in the
hospitals. In the classical period, indigence, laziness, vice, and
madneSs mingled in an equal guilt within unreason; madmen were caught
in the great conﬁnement of poverty and unemployment, but all had been
promoted, in the proximity of transgression, to the essence of a Fall.
Now madness belonged to social failure, which appeared without
distinction as its cause, model, and limit. (259).

The wholesome values with which the Midwest is honored -- including a
Puritanical work ethic, familial cohesion, and veneration of the home -- are
reevaluated. Midwestern Gothic registers the particular isolation of those who
have become detached from families, communities, even oneself, as each
individual applies an introspective psychological examination, judging him or
herself against an ideological yardstick. The individual ﬁnally becomes alienated
from the land which had promised to sustain him, resulting in “that loneliness
which could once evoke Nigger Jim’s chant of praise to the Mississippi pastoral
but which here has become fearful and sour” (Howe 98). The Midwestern Gothic
therefore renders an archival or mnemonic eulogy to atrophied ﬁgures, presenting
a malignant dialectic which challenges prevailing images of afﬁrmation.

The Midwest appears to occupy a liminal space between the inﬂuential
triangular apices of the United States, situated between Eastern sophistication,
civilization, and the decadence of governmental, historical and ﬁscal superiority,

and Western health, vigor and bravado. The area is also infected by the culture of

84

the Southern States, as often the violence which permeates the texts originates
from the South, such as the Kentuckian murderer in Indiana Gothic and the
crowing presence of a Confederate ﬂag in Gummo. The region of the Middle
West also faces the psychic challenge of a marginal identity which
schizophrenically attempts to incorporate conﬂicting ideals.

In The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957), Richard Chase declared that a
contradiction between radically opposed forces lay at the heart of American
literature. French novelist and philosopher J can-Paul Sartre also claimed that
Americans tend to suffer from “an ambivalence of anguish” (qtd. in Levin 6). i
The ambivalence between success and failure, abundance and depletion is evident
in these Midwestem texts and is particularly emphatic in James Marsh’s rendering
of Wisconsin Death Trip (1999). During the Opening scenes of the ﬁlm the
deadpan narrator, played by Ian Holm, speaks of the “Great continent” of
America and the “desirable residence” of Wisconsin. Afﬁnnative proclamations
are then contradicted by the scenes of suicide, murder, arson, vigilante justice and
the terrorizing shadow of a cocaine-snorting, window smashing woman. Marsh’s
more co-opted take on Lesy’s book also retains the mythic symbols of America in
his juxtaposing scenes of contemporary Wisconsin which depict childlike
innocence and the concluding vision of an American Flag. The oveniding force
of national mythology is difﬁcult to challenge, thus suggesting the aberrant nature
of these alternative and historically traumatic texts. The difﬁculty of challenging

mythic optimism corresponds to Ohioan Judge Timothy Walker’s address before

85

the Ohio Historical and Philosophical Society in Columbus, ~1837 whereby he

stated:

I can well remember when, in Massachusetts, the rage for moving to
Ohio was so great, that resort was had to counteracting ﬁctions, in order
to discourage it; and this region was represented as cold, sterile, sickly,
and full of all sorts of monsters. I have a distinct recollection of a
picture, which I saw in boyhood, preﬁxed to a penny, anti-moving to
Ohio pamphlet, in which a stout, ruddy, well-dressed man, on a sleek, fat
horse, with a label, “I am going to Ohio,” meets a pale, and ghastly ,
skeleton of a man, scarcely half dressed, on the wreck of what was once
a horse with a label, “I have been to Ohio.” But neither falsehood nor
ridicule could deter the enterprising from seeking a new home. Hither
they came in droves. (Anderson, “Old Northwest” 96-7)

In Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip and several other Midwestern texts the
underside of this optimistic ideology prevails. Lesy’s historical approach, which
combines the agenda of the naturalists, the revisionists, and the degenerates,
displays the spiritual aihnents of both the 18905 and 19705, exhibiting the
pessimism of malaise which was evident in both time periods. He must respond
to Jack London’s assertion of displeasure in The Kempton Wace Letters (1903):

I, overcivilized, decadent dreamer that I am, rejoice that the past binds
us, am proud of a history so old and so signiﬁcant and of a heritage so
marvelous You are suffering from, what has been called, the sadness
of science... You discover that romance has a history, and lo’ romance
has vanished! You are a werther of science, sad to the heart with a
melancholy all your own and dropping inert tears on the shrine of your
accumulated facts. . .. (qtd. in Lutz 277)

Lesy’s “accumulated facts” indeed reveal the facade of romance, much as Hamlin
Garland’s 1903 diaries depicting Iowa disclose disenchantment with his former
rural vision. On May 26, 1903, he declared that the people seemed “uncouth” and
“dirty.” He stated “The old people of the town depress me. In an unexpected
phase of western life the small town has become in a certain sense the hospital

home into which farmers and their wives, old and gray, drift to wear out a few

86

short years of decrepitude” (qtd. in Lutz 118). In a regretful manner he claims,
“All this common placeness cuts me off from the past — or rather it separates
me from these people and scenes... My old-time world, the world that appealed
to my imagination is gone - This ﬂat, stale and unproﬁtable world inhabited by
melancholy ghosts of the past was a sad surprise” (qtd. in Lutz 188). In a similar
vein, Lesy reveals the reality of rural life, chastising the imaginative perception of
the “Platonists who believed America to be an idea” (Wisconsin).

Lesy challenges the idealistic concept of the Midwest, which is tinged with
nostalgic reverie. As described by Paul Grainge, “Theoretically, nostalgia is
understood as a socio-cultural response to forms of discontinuity, claiming a
vision of stability and authenticity in some conceptual “golden age”” (21). Lesy,
however, highlights periods of historical rupture which belie an optimistic
ideology. He provides a dialectic access to the past which negotiates symbolic
truths.

His memory practice is caustic and perverse. He belongs to a tradition of
abject Midwestern archivists who reveal the hidden spaces of a historical
trajectory. Lesy presents grotesque relics of the past who, like the characters in
Winesburg, Ohio, are, “Stripped of their animate wholeness and twisted into
frozen postures of defense” (Howe 99). Both visual and written texts imply a hue
of anthropomorphic taxidermy as Alwyn Tower acknowledges in The
Grandmothers:

He might try to write something about [his relatives]... It occurred to
him discouragingly that he would then be doing no more than his father
did with birds and animals: Spreading out and cleaning the bones (the
drier, the better they would keep); choosing a single attitude for each one
and wiring it as ﬁrmly as possible; arranging them in groups as lifelike as

87

groups of lifeless bodies could be. His father also gave them glass eyes,
and painted their mouths and claws; the paint faded. But then, so did
living colors-on beak and claw, and human face as well. (283)

The relationship between death, taxidermy, and the violence of history and
historical representation is acknowledged by Lesy as he includes an excerpt by
Wescott concerning taxidermy in Wisconsin Death Trip:

Alwyn invariably felt sick when he went into the room at one end of the
house which was his [father’s] workshop. Bodies of birds and small
animals bleeding slowly on newspapers, while his father imitated them
with wire, tow, string, and wet clay; the pelts drying on wooden forms
and the bird skins turned inside out, and dusted with cornmeal and
arsenic; scraping knives in the skulls of deer, the odor of stale meat and
green bone.

The interruption of this commentary links historical investigation and the “death
drive” of the archive. Not only does it relate to the repellent facts one may
discover about familial or national history, but it also relates to the tone of the
artifacts as well. One eerie photograph depicts two young boys, their images
refracted and interspersed with a trophy deer head which reﬂects their own
somber and stilted attitude. Barthes provides an explanation of the
anthropological place of Death, expounding, “Death must be somewhere in
society; if it is no longer (or less intensely) in religion, it must be elsewhere;
perhaps in this image which produces Death while trying to preserve life” (92).
He continues, “Contemporary with the withdrawal of rites, Photography may
correspond to the intrusion, in our modern society, of an asymbolic Death, outside
of religion, outside of ritual, a kind of abrupt dive into literal Dea ” (92). What
photography, like taxidermy, reveals is not unmitigated access to a living entity
but a tomb or a corpse of a once breathing socially and culturally informed

subject. The artifact of funereal immobility reveals a momentary sliver of time

88

which is now lost or “dead” to us. Historical artifacts and fragmentary memories
therefore become cadavers — the ultimate in the realm of abject horror.13

As an abject text, Wisconsin Death Trip may be read as a work of the Neo
Avant-Garde. In her work Recycled Culture in Contemporary Film and Art, Vera
Dika states that:

. Calciﬁed images and old generic elements have formed possible points
of resistance through a system of displacements and disruptions. Used as
codes, these elements have engendered an internal friction between past .
and present, between old images and new narratives, and between
representation and the real. Instead of diminishing our ability to picture
our historical moment, this method has often encouraged confrontations
with the present through the rupture of representational surfaces. (224)

The “calciﬁed images” of Lesy’s text, such as the pictures of rigid girls who look
as if they are covered with the creep of frost, do form a series of disruptions in the
national narrative, as the code of faces and hands and the morse-like staccato of
records and extracts challenge the representation of the rural region and psychic
security of the Mid West. They register a historical trauma similar to that of the
decaying farmhouse, manic slaughterhouse, and withered landscape of The Texas
Chainsaw Massacre, released one year after Lesy’s book in 1974, and deriving
inﬂuence from the Plainsﬁeld, Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein. As Dika explains,
“The whole epidermis of the ﬁlm has been presented as somehow festering with
dis-ease” (76). Like Lesy’s documentary effort, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
also demonstrates a “faux realism” composed of . “a grainy, repulsive visual
surface depicting deteriorating locations and people” (Dika 73). As Lesy’s book
also intimates, the ﬁlm registered the despondency of the 19705 due to the
Vietnam War and the socio-political disruptions resulting in loss and despair.

This ﬁlm also evinced a sense of the apocalyptic which gained urgency in the

89

19705 and may also inform Wisconsin Death Trip. The apocalyptic in 19705
literature and ﬁlm encompassed, according to Christopher Sharret, “The
unrecuperabil‘ity of society, with the dissolution and futility of all human effort”
(qtd. in Williams 184). It also represented a “pathological reaction toward the
viewer’s negative self-image within a historical situation seemingly impervious to
progressive change” (Williams 185). This parallels the aberrant introspection
which characterized the town of Black River Falls as it experienced turmoil and
strife for over a decade. In this literature and ﬁlm, much as in the Midwestern
Gothic texts studied, the literary convention whereby “dark families threaten .
younger generations” is strikingly evident (Williams 185).

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was linked with the historical avant-garde of
the surrealists and the second neo-avant-garde of the postmodern artists due to its
incriminating onslaught of the waning of affect, and was purchased by the
Museum of I Modern Art as part of its permanent collection (Dika 69). Wisconsin
Death Trip may also be aligned with avant-garde work as it is associated with
repetition and return, and temporality and textuality which are “the twin
obsessions of the neo-avant-gardes” (Foster 32). Cultural critic Hal Foster claims
that “the theoretical elaboration of museological temporality and cultural
intertextuality” are hallmarks of the avant-garde (32). Temporality and
intertextuality are foundational to Lesy’s archival work which assimilates sources
from visual and written sources, polyvalent voices, and cultural critique that
contextualizes both a nineteenth and twentieth century social, economic, and

political framework. Lesy’s distressing historical portrait also registers the

90

schema of avant-garde work which “is never historically effective or fully
signiﬁcant in its initial moments. It cannot be because it is traumatic — a hole in
the symbolic order of its time that is not prepared for it, that cannot receive it, at
least not immediately” (Foster 29). With at least thirty years distance, the
increasingly candid notion of historical discontent, and the established discourses
of revisionisrn and postmodernism, we may distinguish the cultural merits of
Wisconsin Death Trip. '

As well as locating Wisconsin Death Trip in an elite cultural context, it may
also be considered alongside sensational and satirical discourses which deny its
purportedly prosaic nature. The prevalence of the sensational press is evident in
Indiana Gothic whereby Marguerite, Link’s daughter, liked to read selections
from the daily paper aloud, including such tidbits as “Lumberjack Dislocates Jaw
Yawning,” “Maniac Conducts Prayer Meeting,” “Four Sisters Are Insane,” and
“DRIVEN DISANE BY CIGARETTES” (102, 161, 162). During Link’s trial,
psychiatrist Dr. Upchurch contends, “You see, public sympathy with these cases
depends upon the dramatic skill with which the husband, and the agents acting in
his behalf, present his story. He has to appeal to the degenerate tastes of the
public” (292). He laments, “Unfortunately Americans are fast becoming pigs at
the trough of popular entertainment — that is to say, lurid books, magazines,
moving pictures — an appetite which is fed every day by the depraved tone of the
public press” (292). Lesy’s documents may reﬂect this trend. Indeed, “Poe once
wrote that the rise of the sensational penny newspapers in the early 1830’s had an

inﬂuence upon American life and letters that was probably beyond all

91

calculation” (Reynolds 171). Literary critic David Reynolds agrees with this
statement asserting, “[Poe] was right: it is impossible to measure precisely the
effects of a journalistic revolution that had a lasting impact upon all aspects of
America’s cultural life” (171). In the 1880’s a visiting British woman named
Emily Faithful] declared that “the American newspaper very often startles its
more cultured readers with extraordinary sensational headings and the
prominence it gives to horrors of all kinds — murders, elopements, divorces, and
wickedness in general” (Reynolds 172). In Wisconsin Death Trip, sensationalism
is evident in the accounts of suicide, assault, and murder of family members. One
such example exclairns:

Middle Ridge was the scene of the most terrible crime ever committed
in La Crosse County. Edmund Ott, while temporarily insane and fearing
death at the hands of an imaginary mob, sought to put his wife and baby
out of the way of desperadoes he thought were about to hang him. He
shot and killed his 3 year old daughter. He shot his wife twice, but she
will recover. He then killed himself. The gunshot set ﬁre to Ott’s
clothing and also to the house. His body was burnt to a crisp and the
house destroyed.

This excerpt is presented alongside tales of sea creatures, werewolves, “a reptile
about 40ft. long in the water,” and men who consume bedsprings. The book may
thus illustrate the tradition which began in 18305 newspapers such as the New
York Morning Post, the New York Sun, the Boston Daily Times, and James
Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald, and related criminal and trial pamphlets. It
corresponds to the appetite for “horror, gore, and perversity” amongst the early
reading public (Reynolds 171).

Wisconsin Death Trip also relates to the satirical inﬂection of Mark Twain or

gothic naturalist Ambrose Bierce’s work. In The Adventures of Huckleberry F inn

92

(1885), Twain portrays the American obsession with death and violence which
disrupts the pastoral, sanguine and innocent idyll. He depicts a morbid obsession
with funereal culture, depicting a young girl who:

[K]ept a scrapbook and used to paste obituaries and accidents and
cases of patient suffering Every time a (man died, or a woman died, or
a child died, she would be on hand with her “tribute” before he was
cold. . .. Everyone was sony she died, because she had laid out a lot more
of those pictures to do.... With her disposition she was having a better
time in the graveyard. (qtd. in Ruby 121)

Literary critic Leslie Fiedler also points out the irony inherent in the popular and
acclaimed “children’s” novel which focused on violence; “that euphoric boys’
book, begins with its protagonist holding off at gun point his father half driven
mad by the D.T.’s and ends (after a lynching, a disinterrnent, and a series of
violent deaths relieved by such humorous incidents as soaking a dog with
kerosene and setting him aﬁre) with the revelation of that father’s sordid dea ”
(215). This demonstrates the jouissance of sordid knowledge whilst exposing the
contradictory nature of America’s bouyant ideology. ‘

Journalist Ambrose Bierce, an opponent of the dire life of rural Ohio, also
wrote macabre satirical extracts in the late nineteenth century. One, for example,
read, “Last week was the best week for dead babies we ever had. Of the seventy-
four deaths occurring in the city, more than half were of infants under two years
of age. Thirty were under one year. Whom the gods love die young, particularly
if their parents get drunk and neglect them” (qtd. in Hopkins 3). He also wrote
excerpts on suicide entitled “San Francisco’s Advantages For Suicide” (1877),
“Where Ratsbane Didn’t Succeed” (1869), and “Suicide As an Art” (1869). One

article read, “Linton cut his wind-pipe completely off with a very dull chisel

93

because he could not get work. He immediately obtained all the work he wanted:
he had to work very hard to breathe" (qtd. in Morris xvi). Bierce expresses a deep
cynicism with life stemming from his early Midwestern misery, and his voice
seemingly operates as a silent subtext in Lesy’s book. These misanthropic
authors therefore attest to the prevalence of a subterranean misery and cynicism
lurking in the landscape, acknowledging the contradictions which abound in the
American psyche.

Wisconsin Death Trip also encourages the reappraisal of, not only little known
authors, but also historical events and individuals which would hitherto be
neglected in a hegemonic narrative. Those on the fringes of society, or those who
compose an intimate, personal account, may be given greater significance,
especially when considering economic, social and cultural history. Taking the
Midwestern state of Michigan, for example, one may discover such characters as
Andrew Kehoe, who performed one of the first terrorist attacks in the United
States on a schoolhouse in Bath. Like the individuals who p0pu1ate Lesy’s book,
Kehoe also seemed to suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder, or a devout
belief in purity. One historian explains, “Andrew was habitually neat and his
sanitary habits were well known. He often changed his shirt in mid-day or
whenever the slightest hint of dirt appeared on his shirt. Anyone who ever
worked with him knew that if Andrew got dirty, he would immediately clean up
and emerge from the washroom neat as a pin. He was meticulous in his dress and
manner” (Gado “Hell Comes to Bath”). He also had a reputation for thriftiness.

In the early 19205 he feared losing his farm and plunging into debt, and protested

94

against high taxes. He targeted the schoolhouse as a source of his anxiety and
imminent economic misfortune. During 1926 he became insane, purchasing
Pyrotol which he planned to use in an arson attack. The repeated explosions on
his property lead the community to believe he was a dynamite farmer. Indeed, he
received an early contract from DuPont. In 1927 he began an intricate wiring
system in the Bath Consolidated School and wired his home in the same manner.
On May 17, he killed his wife, Nellie, and set ﬁre to the farm and on May 18 he
blew up the school, killing forty-two. Kehoe’s ﬁnal words, approximating a
naturalistic refrain, were “Criminals are made, not born.” This incident attests to
the presence of an “American Nightmare” and also provides further evidence of
those who suffered crises of psychic stability, masculinity and economic
trepidation.

Another individual to consider would be tourist attraction “Rock the Hermit.”
Born in Poland in 1846, Rock was an immigrant who, according to one account,
accidentally killed a student in Alpena, Michigan. Following this incident, be
imposed the hermit lifestyle upon himself as a penance. As historian Chris Miller
explains, even though he was a hermit, Rock ended up posing for a variety of
photographs which were made into postcards during the first two decades of the
twentieth century (105). He was then admitted to the Traverse City State
Hospital, formerly Northern Michigan Asylum, in 1919. Whether posing for
monetary gain or community recognition, “Rock the Hermit” was acknowledged

and served as a source of fascination for the local populace.

95

Family history may also provide a source of archival and historically
disruptive information. Personal research conducted with the Michigan State
University Museum has led to the discovery of an intricate and captivating
history. Mr. Rowe of Chicora, Michigan retains many anecdotes of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century which would ﬁt into the annals of a history
like Wisconsin Death Trip. For example, his Grandfather owned a three-legged
bull which was sold to buy his burial suit, and his Grandmother Phoebe Bell was
declared insane aﬁer the birth of his father, Frank, a fact which was unknown
until Mr. Rowe discovered it in an old newspaper article. Her insanity could be
attributed to what is now known as postnatal depression. In the 1920’s, his
ancestors belonged to the revival Ku Klux Klan movement, which was
predominantly an anti-Catholic movement, but was also seen as an association for

community entertainment and solidarity. '4

These historical narratives all provide
an alternative and unique perspective of Midwestern history.

A further study of Wisconsin Death Trip may also reveal a more detailed
archival approach. For example, the personal history of the individuals included
in the book could be researched, examining census data and considering speciﬁc
geographical location, occupation, economic status, literacy and by discovering
political orientation and whether the individuals belonged to particular social
clubs or societies. A broader genealogical study could be approached, including
interviews with descendants and their perspective of family inclusion in

Wisconsin Death Trip. A history of the practices, legislation and intellectual tools

used in asylums or sanatoriums could be developed. The book could particularly

96

beneﬁt ﬁom a study of masculine and feminine identity within its pages. There
appears to be fertile ground for a study of these concepts, and this could be related
to the evolution of these roles at the turn of the century. One could also consider
the practice of Victorian grotesque taxidermy or the particular methods of
photography and photographic preservation which relate directly to the visual
images. A greater explication of the historical context, particularly the Panic of
1893 to 1897 and the events in the 19705 which culminated in the “Farm Crisis,”
could also be developed. F urtherrnore, Wisconsin Death Trip could be read
speciﬁcally alongside naturalist texts or postmodern literary historical and
mythological works. Other interdisciplinary works to be considered in the genre
of Midwestern Gothic may include Ambrose Bierce’s Ohio short stories; Jane
Smiley’s novel A Thousand Acres (1992) which deals with battery and incest on a
thousand acre farm in Zebulon County, Iowa; director Richard Pearce’s ﬁlm
Country (1984), dealing with the ﬁnancial failure of a farm; Maxwell
Mackenzie’s interdisciplinary project American Ruins: Ghosts on the Landscape
(2001) which juxtaposes rural architecture with quotations ﬁ'om Willa Cather,
Johnathan Raban, Trade Journals and historical pieces such as Annette Atkins’
Harvest of Grief} Grasshopper Plagues and Public Assistance in Minnesota,
1872- 7; and Grant Wood’s painting “Death on the Ridge Road, 1935.”

It is important to note that the shock and anxiety registered in Wisconsin Death
Trip are also repeated in the contemporary period. As Alvin Tofﬂer explains,
“We face the chaos of future shock, a free fall into confusion and

disorientation as the temporal process outpaces our every step” (qtd. in Hoeveler

97

5). Lesy’s explication of the 18903 could also be repeated for our own generation
in future years to come, especially as society becomes more alienated with
technological advancement. Lesy provides a new historical method which shapes
3 direction for the twentieth century historian. ’ Indeed, the postmodern
anthropologist attempts to evoke a multiplicity of meanings and to be “discursive
rather than deﬁnitive” (David 209). The work of postmodern ethnography
“aspires to be evocative rather than analytic, fragmentary rather than complete,
authored rather than condescending, and allegorical rather than representational”
(David 209). This resists the hegemonic creation of mythology or ideology, and
allows for a multitude of voices and interpretations which aspire toward to
legitimacy and accuracy.

Lesy’s brash rendering of the past which reveals a perverse reality of the
Midwestern experience attests to Bathes’ exclamation referring to nineteenth-
century photography; ‘Vvhoever looks you in the eye is mad” (113). As a
haphazard and traumatic text, Wisconsin Death Trip certainly ruptures mythic
structures and allows us to consider the social, economic and cultural attributes of
our heritage:

Through madness, a work that seems to drown in the world, to reveal
there its non-sense, and to transﬁgure itself with the features of
pathology alone, actually engages within itself the world’s time, masters
it, and leads it; by the madness which interrupts it, a work of art opens a
void, a moment of silence, a question without answer, provokes a breach
without reconciliation where the world is forced to question itself. What
is necessarily a profanation in the work of art returns to that point, and in
the time of that work swamped in madness, the world is made aware of
its guilt. (Foucault 288)

98

ENDNOTES

 

' For a ﬁrller discussion of neurasthenia and technology see Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation
of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982, and Stephen
Kern, The Culture of Time and Space [880-1918. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1983. '

2 Other relevant texts published in the 1970’s include Michael Foucault’s Madness and
Civilization (1971), Alvin Tofﬂer’s Future Shock (1970), and Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of
Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1978).

3 In Secure the Shadow, Jay Ruby states, “I accepted the received wisdom of the time from people
like Michael Lesy (1973) that the practice [of postmortem and funeral photography] was virtually
nonexistent - a bizarre Victorian custom now conﬁned to a few ethnic enclaves” (3). I ﬁnd this
statement to be unfounded as Lesy emphasizes the conventional nature of the repetitious images of
funereal culture.

‘ Wisconsin Death Trip could also be compared to histories of law and order. One may consider

‘ studies of historical violence such as those written by Robert R. Dykstra or Richard Maxwell
Brown.

5 The ﬁgures in Wisconsin Death Trip may also represent the trappings of a cormnodiﬁed identity
which developed in the late nineteenth century. The realist inventory seems to parallel the
emergence of the corrrrnercial person. In a review of Hippolyte Taine’s Notes On Paris, Henry
James notes that “His book overﬂows with the description of material objects of face, hair,
shoulders and arms, jewels, dresses, and furniture.” This is very similar to the objectiﬁed nature
of Van Shaik’s subjects. As Mark Seltzer notes in Bodies and Machines (1992) the logistics of
representation, including imitation, copying and reproduction, represent the American as
artifactual and reproducible and as an aesthetic representation of industrial and market culture (53-
56). Lesy’s montages which evince the reproduction of bodies, faces and hands seems to parallel

. this economy of physical capital.

6 The presence of obsessive-compulsive disorder in McTeague has been noted by several critics.
See Karen F. Jacobson, “Who’s the Boss? McTeague, naturalism, and obsessive-compulsive
disorder.” Mosaic 32.2 (June 1999) 27-42. William Freedman, “Oral Pasivityand Oral Sadism in
Norris’s McTeague.” Literature and Psychology 30 (1980): 52-61. Edwin Haviland Miller, “The
Art of Frank Norris in Me Teague.” Markham Review 8 (1979): 61-65. According to Marie
Asberg, “the frrst comprehensive description was given by Carl Westphal, a professor of
psychiatry in Berlin, in a speech to the Berlin Society of Medical Psychology in 1877.” Freud ﬁrst
published use of the term obsessional neurosis was probably in his 1895 tract “On the Grounds for
Detaching a Particular Syndrome ﬁ'om Neurasthenia under the description Anxiety Neurosis.” The
term obsession is attributed by psychological historians to Krafft-Ebbing who introduced it in
1897. The relationship between naturalism and OCD may be identiﬁed in their stress upon
heredity, environment, and unconscious physiological causes. (Jacobson 28-30).

7 Southern Gothic was a term coined by Ellen Glasgow at the University of Virginia in 1936. It is
typically characterized by the grotesque, sexual aberration, cultural inequities of the South, racial
and religious fanaticisrrr, the interrogation of southern female archetypes and a fatal patriotism It
is evident in the works of William Faulkner, F lannery O’Connor, Erskine Caldwell, Carson
McCullers, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Harry Crews and Corrnac McCarthy. Essays on
Western and Southerwestern gothic can also be found in David Mogen, Scott P. Sanders and
Joanne B. Karpinski’s collection Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at the Frontier in American
Literature. London & Toronto: Associated University Presses, 2003. James Marsh’s documentary
of the making of Wisconsin Death Trip goes under the title of Midwestern Gothic.

8 See also Susan Kollin, “Race, Labor, and the Gothic Western: Dispelling Frontier Myths in
Dorothy Scarborough’s The Wind.” Modern Fiction Studies 46.3 (Fall 2000): 675-694.

9 This motto is interestingly reminiscent of the ironic sign which adorned the gates of the
Auschwitz death carrrp in Nazi Germany which read, “Arbeit Macht F rei” or “Work Makes One
Free.”

99

 

'0 See David S. Gross, “No Place To Hide: Gothic Naturalism in O. E. Rolvaag’s Giants in the
Earth.” In Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wander at the Frontier in American Literature.

” Gummo may also be considered alongside ﬁlms such as Charles Laughton’s The Night of the
Hunter (1955), Jack Starret’s Race With the Devil (1975) and Rob Zombie’s House of 1,000
Corpses (2003). These texts present isolated, small-town settings, macabre incidents, devil
worship, ambivalence, commentary on family and the community; and interrogate aesthetic and
creative production.

'2 The allegorical intent of The Wizard of 02 was noted by Henry Littleﬁeld in a 1964 American
Quarterly article entitled “The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism” This relates to the history of
the Midwest as Littleﬁeld asserted that “Baum delineated a Midwestemer’s vibrant and ironic
portrait of this country as it entered the twentieth century.” In this allegory, the yellow brick road
represented the gold standard; the scarecrow, a farmer; the brains symbolized the derision farmer’s
faced as they were chastised as stupid and solely to blame for their econonric woes; the tin man, an
industrial worker; the Wicked Witch of the East, Wall Street and Big Business; and the Wicked
Witch of the West, drought and the malignant forces of nature (Dighe 2). This corresponds to the
liminal position of the Midwest and the economic strife which continues to plague certain areas in
the twentieth century.

’3 The link between taxidermy, the archive, and Midwestern horror may also be made in reference
to notorious Plainﬁeld, Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein. Gein was considered a polite and reticent
rural farmer who exhumed corpses, including that of his mother, and had a rare collection of
bodily trophies. In Chuck Parello’s Ed Gein (2001) a stack of newspapers line every stair and
hallway to the bedroom which houses his collection of death masks, shrunken heads and lamps
made from human bones and skin, suggesting that he was a collector and boarder of the most
extreme degree. Indeed, on investigation of Gein’s farmhouse, the few rooms that weren’t nailed
off were littered with books, old papers, newspapers and magazines, including history books on
Nazi Germany. One of his murdered victims, Bernice Worden, had been disemboweled like a
deer. Gein was raised on 160 acre farm with a domineering and devoutly religious mother who
had a strong concept of sin. He was kept busy by his mother during his younger years who
engaged him in farm work. He was an isolated man who bore a psychological burden of
Puritanical education. Gein was the archetype for Robert Bloch and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.
In the movie, Norman Bates is depicted as a taxidermist, his parlor ﬁlled with stuffed birds. He
declares, “it’s more than a hobby. A hobby’s supposed to pass the time not ﬁll it.” He also
represents the immobility and machinations of fate of the characters in Wisconsin Death Trip
stating, “You know what I think? I think that - we’re all in our private traps — clarrrped in them
And none of us can ever get out. We - we scratch and we claw, but - only at each other. And for
all of it, we never budge an inch. I was born in mine.”

" See archived Ku Klux Klan quilt and project by Charlotte Quinney, Mary Worrall and Marsha
Macdowell in the Michigan State University Museum.

100

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