The Urban Gothic Vision of Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist (1999)

Abstract

But we do have in Negro embodiment of a past tragic enough to appease spiritual hunger of even a James; and we have in oppression of Negro a shadow athwart our national life dense and heavy enough to satisfy even gloomy broodings of a Hawthorne. And if Poe were alive, he would not have to invent horror; would invent him. --Richard Wright, Native Son xxxiv By listing Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe as cultural references in his essay Bigger Was Born Richard Wright does not merely address similarities between richness and depth of African American literature and historical and cultural focus of these authors. As implicit in his use of word horror to describe racial history of United States, Wright was also drawing an important connection between black America and literary tradition known as gothic. On its surface gothic literature seems an unlikely context in which to find a discussion of African American experience. Originating as a formal literary tradition first in Europe with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, published in 1764, and consisting of such figures as castles and abbeys, tyrannical aristocrats, and damsels in distress, genre's main purpose is to terrify, to reflect threats and anxiety that individuals and societies often confront. With Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland, or Transformation (1798), American gothic literary tradition began, thus transplanting genre onto US soil and transforming many of earlier conventions. Rural towns and plantations replaced castles and abbeys, and landed gentry and slave owners stood in for European aristocracy. The gothic literature that would arise out of each of these contexts, even with their differences, took its inspiration from social and political climates of late eighteenth century. Despite temporal and contextual distance from its European and American gothic counterparts of nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, contemporary African American literature resonates with many characteristics of gothic aesthetic. The past still influences present and future, and issues of identity still create conflicts within individual. What contemporary African American gothic literature offers is a new set of questions: What does it mean to be a modern black American? Have class and gender differences replaced racial distinctions as main threats to societal stability, for blacks and whites? How is future racial uplift to be achieved? In diverse ways, Wright and other novelists--Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, and Ralph Ellison, in particular--have widened perception of gothic genre. (1) Like these black authors before him, Colson Whitehead demonstrates a gothic sensibility in his 1999 novel The Intuitionist. Set against unusual backdrop of an investigation into elevator operations, The Intuitionist is an allegorical tale of blacks' struggle for upward mobility. Whitehead uses an urban gothic landscape and traditional gothic conventions to portray alienation of modern black American due to progress in urban cities and to speculate on future of US race relations. In The Intuitionist Lila Mae Watson is an elevator inspector who becomes embroiled in big-city politics when an elevator that she has passed free-falls, fortunately without any passenger injuries. Lila Mae's occupation as an elevator inspector, and her subsequent investigation into accident, is a clever variance of detective figure and detective genre, seen throughout African American literature, but also closely tied to gothic narrative. (2) As Lila Mae s inquiry deepens, she dashes with dangerous characters and learns of plans for a new elevator design called the black box. These plans lie at heart of a power struggle within elevator industry, and underscore a much larger social battle. …

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 10 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.