1 Who’s Afraid of Democracy?

Published in 1824, Washington Irving’s ‘The Adventure of the German Student’ recounts the misadventures of a German student as he wanders around Paris in the aftermath of the French Revolution (Figure 1).Footnote ¹ The distracted pupil comes across a beautiful woman at the foot of a bloodied guillotine, and they quickly profess their love for one another. It is, after all, a ‘time for wild theory and wild actions’. The German student strikes an egalitarian chord when he boldly tells his amour, ‘We are as one’ (Reference Irving and NeidersIrving 1998: 226). But when he wakes up the next morning, Irving’s melancholy protagonist discovers – to his shock – that the object of his affection is, in fact, a decapitated corpse, reanimated ‘to ensnare him’ (227). Apparently, falling prey to a popular delirium that springs from democratic demands, the young man loses hold of reality, and so he must pay the price of a life in the madhouse. This unsettling message from one of early America’s foremost writers speaks to anxious audiences two centuries later: when left unchecked, democracy leads to unspeakable horrors.

Figure 1 Washington Irving’s German student encounters his lover in the shadows of the guillotine

Yet if the shelves of popular booksellers are to be believed, contemporary American readers love democracy. They lament its perceived passing; they pine for its eventual realisation. Readers might assume, then, that the American Gothic and democracy have re-enforced one another across the generations, in that both modes, aesthetic as well as political, likely generate revulsion at the idea of oppressive monsters that threaten personal freedom. I could rehearse a lengthy list of repugnant tyrants from the (mostly British) canon: Horace Walpole’s Manfred, Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein, Matthew Lewis’s Ambrosio. Understandably, readers could be tempted to presume that the American Gothic is built upon a denunciation of destructive demagogues. The pages of American Gothic fiction ought to be populated by grotesque despots and express a sensationalised fear of democracies lost. But the story is not so simple because to oppose authoritarians does not automatically trigger an endorsement of democracy. Moreover, while many works in the American Gothic tradition are by default liberal, thanks to their reactionary protection of private property as well as their progressive focus on the survival of the hyper-individualist, the genre’s critics have not fully unpacked the genre’s unique connection to democracy. An exception to the rule, Alan Lloyd-Smith briefly ponders the ‘anxieties about popular democracy’ that manifest throughout the American Gothic (Reference Lloyd-SmithLloyd-Smith 2004: 4). In the sections that follow, I want to explore these anxieties in greater detail. From Irving to Edgar Allan Poe, from H.P. Lovecraft to Stephen King, most of the dominant figures within the American Gothic tradition act as naysayers of the nation’s ongoing democratic experiments. Irving’s beheaded spectre has long stalked the margins of American nightmares. In turn, the American Gothic ought to play a vital role in efforts to reclaim democracy, especially at the current moment in which America’s democratic institutions stand at the threshold of a managerial re-entrenchment – or a radical re-imagining.

One reason for the blurriness of the line between adoration and dread of democracy may be lingering uncertainties regarding what the term ‘democracy’ actually means. In the twenty-first century, the concept of democracy has become ubiquitous. Democracy can be found everywhere (and so, oddly enough, nowhere). It ostensibly covers everything like a fine mist. Crafty politicos conjure its fetishised form, sleepwalkers fantasise about its regenerative powers, and countless prophets foretell its immanent destruction. But what lies beneath the surface of these paeans? Before its champions defend democracy, they must face up to how a significant percentage of Americans truly feel concerning their purported ideals. The time has come to inject a more thorough analysis of fear into ongoing debates about the future of democracy. After all, ‘democracy puts its citizens under a strange form of psychological pressure by building them up as sovereigns and then regularly undermining each citizen’s experience of sovereignty’ (Reference AllenAllen 2004: 27). The fear of losing an election is a near constant. While many Americans sing songs of praise to the uplifting aspects of democracy, a careful listener hears mournful dirges dedicated to the anxiety of powers lost rather than gained. As this Element will show, the terrain of the American Gothic is a productive place to begin these conversations.

Based upon its initial Greek formulation, democracy means the power (kratos) of the people (demos). Since the early days in Athens, democracy has gradually come to mean the consent of the majority for certain representatives, a prioritisation of personal liberty, an investment in equality (one person, one vote), and an ongoing investment in interest groups mobilizing – that is, generating enthusiasm among – the masses.Footnote ² For democracy to function, citizens-stakeholders voluntarily abide by a set of behavioural expectations colloquially described as ‘democratic’. Eleanor Roosevelt described these values in a theological fashion: ‘The Revolutionary idea, guided by religious feeling, [is] the basis of Democracy’ (Reference RooseveltRoosevelt 2016: 33). Democracy is driven primarily by pathos. Still, the concept of a collective remains key: democracy signals a relentless pursuit of egalitarian ends since no single citizen counts more than any other, and the advantages of economic privilege must be countered by programmes that enhance political power for all. Jacques Rancière argues that democracy is ‘the wrench of equality jammed (objectively and subjectively) into the gears of domination, it’s what keeps politics from simply turning into law enforcement’ (Reference Rancière and AllenRancière 2011: 79). In its brightest moments, democracy sews the seeds of greater dignity, self-worth, civic responsibility, mass franchise, tolerance for diversity, and a conciliatory sense of what all individuals hold in common. America’s democratic project outwardly fuels itself on freedom as well as fraternity.

At the same time, democracy in practice means embracing dissatisfaction. No one will get everything they want, and because at its core democracy resists conclusive signification, a final arrangement that would require no further revisions, democrats must accept that any community remains comprised of individuals with variegated desires. There could never be a democracy that meets all of these criteria. A major proponent of democracy, Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously confesses: ‘A genuine democracy never has existed’ (Reference Rousseau and ScottRousseau 2014: 213). Nor could it exist. Believers in democracy must therefore hold in tension the impossibility of their agenda with an enduring faith in its utopian promise. Michael Hardt writes, ‘The democracy aimed for always exceeds the democracy practiced’ (Reference HardtHardt 2019: xxi). To which Astra Taylor adds, democracy offers ‘a distant and retreating horizon, something we must continue to reach towards yet fail to grasp’ (Reference TaylorTaylor 2019: 13). It is this requisite uncertainty, this perpetual dependence upon the unknown, that alerts readers to the possibility of a meaningful relationship between democracy and the American Gothic.

Admittedly, Gothic voices harbour plenty of reasons to be sceptical of democratic idealism. Shortly after the birth of Athenian democracy, Plato chastised its practitioners for allowing ‘the mob’ to gain an upper hand over his vaulted Philosopher-King. Baruch Spinoza later concurred, observing that, since a population is mostly ill-educated, democracy quite literally means rule by the ignorant.Footnote ³ According to these canonical thinkers, members of the perceived rabble inevitably fall prey to charlatans who capitalise upon their passions. Let us pivot to democracy in an American setting: of note, the word democracy does not appear in the American Declaration of Independence, and the vast majority of early Americans were uneasy with the prospect of a democratic society. In young America, ‘democracy was distrusted, even feared’ (Reference BryanBryan 2003: 25). To quote Toni Morrison: ‘It is striking how dour, how troubled, how frightened and haunted our early and founding literature truly is’ (Reference MorrisonMorrison 1992: 35). Following in the wake of the French Revolution, with its ghastly spectacles – Irving’s feverish phantasm glides past once more – prominent Americans expressed trepidation at the idea that their nascent republic would soon enter into a revolutionary spiral, with its citizens succumbing to the drug of democratic zeal. ‘Democracy became a virtual synonym for violent anarchy’ (Reference MillerMiller 2018: 59). Even cultural celebrities later presumed to be vocal proponents of democracy often felt frightened by it. For example, Ralph Waldo Emerson once blamed democracy for creating a deficient society ‘in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters’ (Reference Emerson and AtkinsonEmerson 2000: 44). For two centuries, democracy has been keeping Americans awake at night.

As I discuss in greater detail in the second section, Edgar Allan Poe frequently returns to the question of democracy. For instance, Poe’s ‘The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether’, a story set, like Irving’s ‘Adventure’, in the revolutionary hotbed of France, follows an unwitting narrator as he visits an uncanny French asylum. The narrator eventually learns that the patients have overrun their captors and now run the institution. Poe’s narrative offers a not-so-subtle critique of democracy. Initially, the reader encounters a sort of managerial democracy, a democracy that only superficially resembles its namesake; through what is called a ‘system of soothing’, the doctors ‘secretly watch’ the inmates yet leave them with ‘much apparent liberty’ (Reference Poe and QuinnPoe 1984: 700). Unconvinced by this curated version of democracy, Poe’s imprisoned mob grows increasingly cacophonous. By the end of the story, the asylum’s innately unreasonable crowd has subscribed to the anarchical law of tarring and feathering its enemies, hence the pun of the tale’s title. Pandemonium breaks out as Poe’s rebel madmen imagine they have ‘invented a better system of government’, although, in truth, they have established a ‘lunatic government’ (713). Poe closed this Gothic burlesque by comparing the democratic mob, as he habitually did, to a band of primates. Following in Irving’s footsteps, Poe’s conventional Gothic plotline captures a widespread sense of dread regarding the fate of American democracy.

A good number of twentieth-century Americans were no less afraid of democracy than their predecessors. After Woodrow Wilson’s time in office, presidential regimes minimised democratic feedback and slowly constructed a vast bureaucratic system that could counteract interference from a pesky electorate. Politicos wrote scathing treatises against what they called rabies democratica; in the early twenty-first century, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell spread the campaign phrase ‘jobs, not mobs’ and worked tirelessly to secure a conservative Supreme Court, in an effort arguably designed to bypass the will of the people under the guise of serving that same general will. But conservative reactionaries are hardly the only ones afraid of democracy. In an age of climate change denialism and the election of fascist-leaning leaders, left-leaning voters regularly wax Platonic on the subject of democracy. Many leftists maintain that democracy is simply too slow to address the urgent threats that American society faces, while the stauncher Marxists in their ranks contend that ‘a democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism’ (Reference LeninLenin 2019: 10). Although, they contend, the act of voting has been treated like a panacea, as American consumers hear the near-constant harangue to vote more (an act that will magically solve everything), this proposed salve has not stemmed the tide of systemic horrors. On either end of the political spectrum, fears of democracy run rampant. America’s trepidation regarding democracy returns regularly from its repression.

But this account may be a bit misleading. In some cases, I would argue that American audiences are not excessively afraid of democracy; in reality, Americans may not yet be afraid enough. Because democracy demands perpetual uncertainty – the open-endedness of ceaseless revolution; the endless disruption of a society empowered to redefine itself anew – a prominent Gothic element could help American democracy to function properly. That is, if citizens are not bone-chillingly fearful of what democracy means, they might be entirely too comfortable with a zombified version of democracy, one that is only half alive and therefore falls well short of its potential. To achieve their own revolutionary aims, perhaps Americans need to release the guardrails and plunge beyond the brink. In other words, to clear away failing institutions, democrats must come to terms with the true terror of the unknown. Accordingly, this Element explores a Gothic oscillation between reactionary horror and revolutionary terror: a generic paradox that conveys the consistently conflicted character of democracy in America.

Before turning to in-depth analyses of seminal texts in the sections to come, I would like to discuss briefly the illustrative example of the weird fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, a man who professed his appreciation for the anti-democratic tale by Irving that opened this introduction. Lovecraft was a well-known racist as well as an outspoken believer in social hierarchy. In one letter, he mocked ‘apostles of equality’ (Reference Lovecraft, Joshi and SchultzLovecraft 2005b: 27); in another letter, he stated: ‘Democracy … is a false ideal – a mere catchword and illusion of inferior classes, visionaries, and dying civilizations’ (qtd. in Reference JoshiJoshi 1996: 321). Lovecraft’s fiction doubles down on this mindset. His 1920 story ‘The Street’ erases the democratic rupture of the American Revolution by insisting that, in the wake of their revolutionary moment, Americans continued the conservative practice of ‘speaking of the old familiar things in the old familiar accents’ (Reference Lovecraft and LinkLovecraft 2019b: 71). Lovecraft’s story overtly prioritises ‘fine old traditions’ above ‘hideous revolution’, and it casts multi-ethnic cooperatives, the very basis of a modern democracy, as inherently anarchical (73). Elsewhere, Lovecraft expressed his attraction to Gothic narratives with an anti-democratic message by critiquing Charles Brockden Brown’s ‘Godwinian didacticism’ (William Godwin was a British radical democrat) while applauding Poe’s ‘anti-social qualities’ (Reference LovecraftLovecraft 2020: 26, 55). In short, Lovecraft’s weird tales expose a simmering dread of democracy.

Lovecraft’s short stories ‘The Rats in the Walls’ and ‘The Horror at Red Hook’ reflect their author’s palpable fear of an egalitarian politics that empowers everyone, including people marked as belonging to different races and ethnicities. Many white readers and writers tend to fear direct democracy because direct democracy would cease forcing people of colour to shoulder so much political loss (voter suppression, economic disparity, gerrymandering, etc.). Lovecraft ostensibly cannot stomach the concept of a genuinely level playing field. In a broader sense, both of Lovecraft’s weird tales emphasise the crumbling foundation of Western society, and this eroding foundation comes with specific sociopolitical associations. What is meant to be so terrifying to Lovecraft’s reader about a Hellenic fundament? The answer lurks within one of the haunted vaults from ‘Rats’, in which the narrator recognises ‘the severe and harmonious classicism of the age of the Caesars’ (Reference Lovecraft and StraubLovecraft 2005c: 87). The entire haunted edifice was built upon the particular starting point of the age of the Caesars – an age that marked the transition from democratic-republican values to despotism. In effect, much like the fictional architectures of Irving and Poe, Lovecraft’s unstable structures foretell the ruin of America’s inherently populist premise. A good number of Lovecraft’s stories depict democracy as an ill-fated substructure on which to build a world order.Footnote ⁴

Lovecraft exposed a pestilential populace in order to demonstrate the grotesqueness of ‘the people’, an abject entity that Lovecraft held should never be trusted to govern itself. Simply put, Lovecraft cleaved the people (demos) from the power (kratos). Channelling Poe’s ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, a text discussed at length in the second section, Lovecraft’s ‘Rats’ portrays a grotesque crowd that defies demands for greater social order. Significantly, ‘Rats’ highlights the unexpected death of American President Warren Harding as a ‘horribly yawning brink’, which is to say, as a site of tremendous uncertainty (Reference Lovecraft and StraubLovecraft 2005c: 95). Will democracy save the day or will the grotesque demos surge, like a pack of vermin, and tear the whole structure apart? Lovecraft’s democracy seems destined to collapse as those timeless rats, a ‘lean, filthy, ravenous army’, storm the figurative Bastille: ‘Their riot, stampeding […] in numbers apparently inexhaustible’ (82, 87). Lovecraft further stressed an unflattering depiction of the demos when he imagined a group of ‘flabby’, ‘fungous’ beasts, led by a possessed swineherd, in a correlation that foregrounds the Biblical story of Legion (88). ‘Horror’ offers yet another unsettling portrait of the people. In contrast to the ‘pleasantness’ of colonial times, Lovecraft’s democratised Brooklyn unleashes ‘a frightful and clandestine system of assemblies and orgies’ (Reference Lovecraft and StraubLovecraft 2005a: 130). In Lovecraft’s estimation, the free assembly of a diverse populace remains automatically terrible, secretive, and libidinal. Lovecraft’s demos arrives in the form of a ‘nightmare horde’, a ‘mad procession’ led by ‘baying dogs’ (142–43). Lovecraft’s life-long insistence on leaving his horrors unnamable could be read as a sign of the author’s mistrust of the hoi polloi. Regarding the mysteries of ‘Horror’, Lovecraft’s narrator insists that ‘the world knew … all that it ought to know’ (139). Repulsed by a pestilential people, Lovecraft sought refuge in his self-defined status as an isolated country gentleman.

Yet one could also read Lovecraft’s anti-democratic horrors as a reactionary façade. Beneath the surface, these weird stories enable forward-looking audiences to tap into the terror of democracy’s radical potential. The Lovecraftian sublime, the unspeakable beyond, triggers a palpable fear of what the aforementioned pests usher into being: an ontological rupture in the fabric of society; a shocking removal of the figurative floor beneath the status quo, manifested interchangeably as ‘the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space’ (14). His prose recycles Gothic tropes to comprehend the pervasive fear of democracy in America, including, most prominently, chaotic pests and unplumbed pits, a composite that Lovecraft described as ‘pest-gulfs’ (Reference Lovecraft and LinkLovecraft 2019a: 287). ‘Rats’, for example, evokes ‘a new pit of nameless fear’ (Reference Lovecraft and StraubLovecraft 2005c: 95); meanwhile, ‘Horror’ gestures at a ‘bottomless pit’ that opens up to ‘vistas of every realm of horror’ (Reference Lovecraft and StraubLovecraft 2005a: 141). Lovecraft’s use of the term vistas recalls Walt Whitman’s democratic vistas, a concept that Whitman himself framed as nightmarish when, in the preface a book of the name same, he actively distanced himself from ‘the People’s rudeness, vice, caprices’ (Reference Whitman and FolsomWhitman 2010: 4). At its most primal level, American democracy signifies the open-endedness of social arrangements. Below hordes of pestilent people, clamouring to have their demands met, Lovecraft unveiled the terror (or Terror with a capital T, to evoke the French precedent) of democratic revolution – or the abject terror of unplumbed pits. Excavating an important aspect of Lovecraft’s texts, Patricia MacCormack underlines the emancipatory ruptures within Lovecraft’s hierarchies, which she deems as openings for ‘multiplicity and connectivity’ – an alterity without any implied ‘replacement structure’ (Reference MacCormack, Weinstock and SederholmMacCormack 2016: 199, 205). Lovecraft’s pits undermine democracy by reminding his readers of democracy’s eternally unfinished essence. In this sense, the inegalitarian author unwittingly cautioned his reader not to be excessively afraid of egalitarianism; instead, his weird fiction reveals Americans to be not yet fearful enough of democracy’s potential. A Gothic theme, then: one relates to democracy like one relates to the omnipresence of death itself, being both irrationally horrified and maddeningly reserved at exactly the same time.

Much more than a superficial thematic concern, democracy materialises in the very structure of the American Gothic. Democracy is the political imperative that motors American narratives in the Gothic mode to their eventual resolution (or, more accurately, lack thereof). The book that follows remains indebted to Fredric Jameson’s concept of the political unconscious as well as theoretical interventions by Rancière, Chantal Mouffe, and Ernesto Laclau. These theorists encourage readers to challenge the relatively facile paeans to democracy that have been sold to American consumers. Taking cues from these figures, I attempt to rethink the complicated relationship between democracy and fear through a sustained engagement with foundational Gothic texts.

As such, I situate myself in conversation with scholars that have turned to Gothic imagery to contemplate what ails American democracy. On one side, Richard Rorty, who declares a need for more Ralph Waldo Emerson and less Poe, claims that democracy has become entirely too Gothic, which for him means ‘sadistic’ and ‘selfish’ (Reference RortyRorty 1997: 95). He argues that democracy has devolved into a paralyzed game of partisans that project monstrous opponents. On the other side, democracy requires fear, especially a fear of change. Indeed, a democracy without fear, if such a thing could ever really exist, would merely breed complacency and force its practitioners to go through the motions, under managerial types spouting platitudes. Bonnie Honig counters Rorty when she claims that American democracy is not yet Gothic enough, since its policymaking proponents prefer platitudes involving consensus and a facile resolution of differences to what Honig argues is a ‘healthier’ level of uncertainty, or citizens relating to one another ‘gothically’ (Reference HonigHonig 2001: 121). Is American democracy too Gothic, then, or not yet Gothic enough? To answer the question, this Element moves in two directions: it re-theorises American democracy through sustained engagement with the American Gothic and, at the same time, it re-theorises the American Gothic through engagement with American democracy. Democracy informs, and is informed by, the intimate shapes of the American Gothic, replete with claustrophobic crowds, ominous holes, torturous circles, and sublime vistas.

In sum, this Element holds that the anti-democratic streak of the American Gothic reflects a general unease in the populace with the promise of democracy, even as the Gothic mode offers a corrective by breaking unexpected pathways for a more democratic future. The trouble with certain defenders of democracy is that they tend to privilege the role of rationality in the upkeep of their preferred government model. When reciting a litany of pro-democracy talking points, democracy’s most strident defenders prioritise ‘reason, moderation, and consensus’ (Reference MouffeMouffe 2000: 148). In actuality, American democracy more convincingly parallels the subversive nature of the Gothic, in that both democracy and the Gothic contest the cherished illusion of a well-ordered society by interjecting political possibilities back into a moribund social order. Placing democracy and the Gothic into conversation, this Element emphasises the central part that passion must continue to play in politics, while simultaneously teasing out democracy’s innate dynamism – its conflicts, confrontations, and contradictions. In its most Gothic register, American democracy reveals that the ever-contestable character of politics cannot be repressed forever under ‘the veil of rationality or morality’ (Reference MouffeMouffe 2000: 150). Despite its reactionary origin, Irving’s headless spectre could goad audiences into greater democratic engagement. In turn, proponents of democracy ought to reconsider the Gothic as an aesthetic tool with which to restructure stratified political imaginations and evade undue orderliness as well as barbarous hierarchies. The Gothic element of American democracy remains one of its most invaluable assets.

2 The Horrors and Terrors of a Radical Democracy

Democracy is more often curated than experienced in a living, breathing sense. Today, countless Americans consume staged town halls that have been scripted and manufactured in accordance with the results of algorithmic polling. Social media companies train users to treat their platforms as the equivalent of the Athenian public forum, when in fact these platforms were designed with the express intent of turning a profit.Footnote ⁵ As the historian Gordon Wood puts it, ‘We Americans like to think of our revolution as not being radical’, as ‘essentially an intellectual event’ and so ‘hardly a revolution at all’ (Reference WoodWood 1991: 3–4). This problem is hardly new: since its inception in the era of Charles Brockden Brown and George Lippard (1790s–1840s), American democracy has been consistently choreographed and cleared of its political character. Precious few early Americans were permitted to vote and a plebiscitary approach to democracy prioritised well-endowed representatives, that is, elites with money and influence, to attain public office in lieu of direct forms of democracy. To many privileged individuals, the idea of an empowered electorate was nothing short of a nightmare.

In contrast to its meticulously managed twin, radical democracy upholds the terrifying kernel of the democratic promise – an ever-impending threat that ‘the people’ could unexpectedly rise to overturn the established way of doing things. Radical democracy holds open an empty place where centralised power would otherwise be, tracing the evasive outline of a better society to come in which power will be transferred from the select few to an ever more inclusive bloc. Although most citizens from this period did not possess the positive, if somewhat facile, connotations of democracy that would become ubiquitous in generations to follow, early Americans nonetheless worried about the fate of their democracy.Footnote ⁶ From Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Jackson, the spectre of a radical democracy haunted early America.

The spectre of a radical democracy perhaps manifested nowhere more visibly than in Philadelphia, the birthplace of the American Gothic as well as the sociopolitical backdrop against which Brown and Lippard set their respective Gothic texts. The constitutional convention of 1776 in Philadelphia, an event that produced results R.R. Palmer has since likened to the French constitution of 1793, became ‘a symbol of what democrats meant by democracy’, and it threatened to move the state of Pennsylvania much closer to something like a direct democracy in which voters would engage in self-governance with fewer degrees of separation (Reference PalmerPalmer 1969: 219). Sharing a state with the site of the Whiskey Rebellion of 1792, Philadelphia was home to the nation’s largest free black population, the abolitionist Quakers, and countless ‘communities of dissent that shaped the era’s momentous struggle over the meaning of American democracy’ (Reference JacksonJackson 2019: xiv). It was in Philadelphia in the year 1793 that America’s first democratic societies emerged: groups dedicated to fighting for egalitarian social arrangements. Some Philadelphians experienced a reactionary horror at this possibility; other Philadelphians felt terrified by the prospect of such an unsettled state. For better or worse, the horrors and terrors of democracy were kindled by the Gothic works of Philadelphia’s own Brown and Lippard.

Radical democracy found its initial expression in philosophical tracts by intellectuals with whom Brown and Lippard were well-acquainted, including the (in)famous Thomas Paine, another American figure forged in the revolutionary fires of Philadelphia. Paine’s 1791 tract ‘Rights of Man’ tarries about the chasm of the unknown, evoking ontological rupture as the defining characteristic of any democratic order. ‘Nothing of reform in the political world’, Paine argued, ‘ought to be held improbable’ (Reference Paine and FonerPaine 1995: 540). Brown participated in many spirited debates about Paine’s works. Initially celebrated for his revolutionary tracts, Paine’s opponents eventually turned Paine into a pariah due to his sympathies for the French Revolution as well as his outspoken atheism. The rebellious Lippard engaged with Paine due to a resurgence of Paine’s works as relevant source material for the labour movements of the 1830s and 1840s. Although, like most of their fellow Americans, Brown and Lippard held serious reservations about Paine’s prominence, their Gothic tales retain a strong link to the Painite tradition. The radicality that Painites impressed upon the heart of American democracy lingers in the shadowy corners of their narratives.

At the same time, these two men, for reasons personal as well as political, could not outright endorse Paine’s vision. Their narratives reflect an anti-Jacobin, counter-revolutionary tendency. ‘Many authors [from this era] produced work possessed of some distinctively anti-Jacobin motifs and characteristic whilst manifesting an ideological ambivalence’ (Reference GrenbyGrenby 2005: 204). It was easier for most early nineteenth-century writers to sell anti-Jacobin monsters to American readers than to endorse the ominous alternative. This market reality induced fictions replete with democracy’s ostensibly grotesque horrors, even as writers like Brown and Lippard covertly, perhaps unconsciously, preserved the terrifying spectre of a radical democracy.

In short, the look and feel of the American Gothic offered fertile terrain on which writers could wrestle with the legacy of Paine as well as the future of his unorthodox vision for democracy. Ronald Paulson contends that modern democratic revolution proliferated as a political and aesthetic category. In turn, the American Gothic helped readers to imagine, or in certain cases fail to imagine, genuine revolution, as a ‘phenomenon many believed to be outside their experience and accustomed vocabulary’ (Reference PaulsonPaulson 1987: 1). In their sublime moments, authors like Brown and Lippard fostered a sense of awe at the notion of political upheaval, or the awe-inspiring restlessness at the heart of a true democracy. But the American Gothic simultaneously serviced the needs of an anti-Jacobin crowd by encouraging readers to experience dread at the thought of the revolutionary politics that was tearing France apart. The anti-Jacobins – the classification ‘Jacobin’ remained a necessarily plastic one – recycled conventional objects of horror, such as the libertine seducer, the charismatic spell-binder, and the blood-thirsty crowd, to repress signs of radical democratic intervention during the American Revolution, including mob protests and effigy burnings, and to promote the reactionary fears needed to superintend the expectations of what American democracy would become. The democratically minded antifederalists feared that ‘the victorious federalists had abandoned the democratic impulse of 1776’; the conservative federalists, meanwhile, were ‘fearful [of] mob role’ (Reference BursteinBurstein 2000: 147). As a result, ‘fear of tyranny and fear of anarchy rent America in two’ (187). Caught up in these cultural eddies, the Gothic works of Brown and Lippard prove to be ‘object[s] and agent[s] of critique’: they stir horror at the consequences of revolution even as they compel readers to experience internal as well as external revolutions through blind terror (Reference McCannMcCann 1999: 110). In short, many American consumers of the Gothic have been too fearful of democracy and, at the same time, not yet fearful enough.

The Gothic novels of Brown and Lippard are therefore polysemous, or inherently contradictory. To understand better the fate of American democracy’s radical dimension, I would like to tease apart the horrors and the terrors of these novels. Jerrold Hogle segregates horror Gothic (the confrontational, explicit, and gross) from terror Gothic, or that which ‘holds characters and readers mostly in anxious suspense about threats […] largely out of sight’ (Reference Hogle and HogleHogle 2002: 3). Although it is never a simple one-to-one breakdown – Lippard, for instance, can be quite puerile in his descriptions of horrors associated with anti-democratic elites – I argue that, by and large, the horrors on display in texts by Brown and Lippard remain anti-Jacobin, however unaware the authors may have been of this fact. Many of the horrors in Gothic works by Brown and Lippard reflect the supposedly repulsive and reprehensible outcomes of the revolutionary energies boiling just beneath the surface in Pennsylvania. Concurrently, though, the terrors experienced in these books are frequently Jacobin in nature. For Brown and Lippard, faceless terrors, evoked through cliffs, caverns, trapdoors, and bottomless pits, sustain the imaginative work demanded of a radical democracy. That is, these literal and figurative openings preserve unexpected ruptures in the fabric of artistic as well as political experience. While horrors can be meticulously managed, terrors resist oversight. In this way, the ambivalent relationship of certain writers to their nation’s evolving democratic project structured the formulaic patterns of the early American Gothic (and vice versa).

What is at stake for contemporary readers in bifurcating the Gothic works of Brown and Lippard between reactionary horror and progressive terror? To paraphrase Maximilien Robespierre, the most contorted of characters from the French Revolution, many defenders of democracy today are guilty of wanting a revolution without revolution. Self-described champions of democracy too readily accept a heavily orchestrated democratic experience and they do not dare to plunge into a real democratic revolution, with all of its attendant uncertainties. In his recent introduction to a collection of works by Robespierre, Slavoj Žižek contends that the subject must break away from what he calls a ‘(post)politics of fear’ and take greater risks if they are to imagine a ‘better world’ (Reference Žižek and DucangeŽižek 2017: xxvii). To initiate a plunge of this magnitude means pushing past conventional horrors, meted out on a regular basis, in order to confront the unnerving potential of a fully actualised democracy. Žižek wonders, ‘How are we to reinvent the Jacobin terror?’ (xxiv). This emancipatory terror should unsettle patrollers of the status quo and, at the same time, re-politicise a democracy that has become entirely too regimented, too thoroughly choreographed. By cutting through reactionary monsters, citizens might experience the bone-chilling terror that remains a crucial first step to democratic revolution. Importantly, Žižek recognises ‘the connotations of horror fiction’ within his own efforts to rehabilitate Robespierre’s legacy (xiv). Let us revisit, then, the horrors and terrors of Brown and Lippard in the name of reassessing American democracy as a nightmare – for worse or, just maybe, for better.

‘The Grotesque-Sublime’

Unlike Brown, whose political profile was rather opaque, George Lippard was an unapologetic radical democrat, a bloc known colloquially in his day as Loco-Focos. Lippard worked for a democratic law firm, published a weekly newsletter concerned with reformist issues, and founded The Brotherhood of the Union (a secret society that strove to advance the cause of the common labourer in Philadelphia). Crucially, Lippard saw in Brown a kindred spirit and dedicated a number of his works to his Pennsylvanian predecessor, including the Gothic novel that this section considers at length, The Quaker City, Or the Monks of Monk Hall (1845). Quaker City was the bestselling novel in the United States prior to the 1852 publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and, perhaps surprisingly, given its mainstream acceptance, the text ‘brims with radical democratic energies’ (Reference EmersonEmerson 2015: 107). This novel is a loose constellation of unsettling vignettes, held together by the barest of threads: a pair of star-crossed men battle over the fate of an innocent sister; the innocent sister is lured into Monk Hall, a den of sin in Philadelphia, and the majority of the book focuses upon attempts to rescue her from the talons of the city’s wealthy villains. Lippard’s book examines how the wealthy few commit covert crimes against the masses and, as such, it offers a stinging rebuke of Philadelphia’s anti-democratic elements. Said another way, Quaker reproduces the soul-quaking terrors of a democratic revolution (or Terror, to sustain the era’s Francophobilia/Francophobia strains). In its most terrifying scenes, scenes in which the political as well as aesthetic floor is quite literally pulled out from under character and reader alike, Lippard’s Quaker holds open the promise – a threatening promise, certainly; a promise founded in requisite shocks to the system – of a radical democracy.

The ‘specter of Jacobin conspiracy’ stalks Lippard’s seminal text (Reference CotlarCotlar 2014: 106). Quaker occasionally pivots from revolutionary terror to reactionary horror. Alexander Hamilton referred to the radicals of Pennsylvania as ‘the Jacobin Scandal-Club’, and this supposedly unflattering moniker resurfaced decades later in countless responses to the labour movements of the 1830s and 1840s in which Lippard participated. Counter-revolutionaries hunted down evidence of a widespread conspiracy among the revolutionaries espousing democratic change.

In what may have been an attempt to attract a broader audience, Lippard rehashed anti-Jacobin talking points by conjuring images of the grisly excesses of the Terror, including the massacres of 1792 as well as the public executions of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in 1793. Burke once described the French Revolution as ‘a deformed, grotesque creature, more terrifying than any of the monsters which have overwhelmed and enslaved the human imagination’ (qtd. in Reference TocquevilleTocqueville 2008: 20). Even that staunch defender of American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville, shared some of Burke’s apprehensions: ‘No sooner did the head of this monster make its appearance, then its peculiar and terrifying character emerged … it undermined the foundations of society … the human mind looked upon it with open-mouthed disbelief’ (Reference TocquevilleTocqueville 2008: 19). Echoing this fear-mongering, the most sensational aspects of Quaker support the value of orthodox family bonds. Lippard upheld the ideal of a traditional family against the assumed ideological zealotry of revisionists lurking in the pubs and club rooms of Philadelphia. His novel appealed to a conservative wing of American politics by exposing and then squelching revolutionary energies.

But readers should not forget that Lippard openly identified as a radical democrat, and so it would be misleading to dismiss the horrifying excesses of Quaker as proof positive that Lippard simply profited from an all-too-familiar Francophobia (feelings that had been percolating in America since before the XYZ Affair of 1797, during which Federalists seized upon anti-Jacobin imagery to consolidate their power). Things are much muddier than they appear.Footnote ¹⁰ For instance, secret societies play a complicated role throughout the text. On the one hand, Lippard channelled the counter-revolutionary when he imagined Jacobins to be nefarious, conspiratorial, and utterly secretive. He used horror to attract a conservative reader that remained wary of radical democracy. On the other hand, Lippard founded his own secret society, and he recycled the populist musings of an Antimasonry movement that railed against a hidden cabal of monied elites. Indeed, popular democratic societies of that day ‘looked to the [French] revolution for examples and solidarity’ (Reference WilentzWilentz 2005: 53). Lippard evoked feelings of terror to evince a thorough rewiring of the American mind. These dual sensations reflect the ubiquity of literary conventions associated with anti-Jacobinism as well as the endurance of the Terror as a productive source of radical ideas in America. To illustrate this point, I now turn to three of the most conflicted elements of Lippard’s novel: the pit, the dream, and the false prophet.

The French Revolution lingers in traces throughout Lippard’s text. Readers learn that a ‘wealthy foreigner’ first erected the titular Monk Hall, with its ‘mass of black and red brick’ (Reference LippardLippard 1995: 46). While it is improbable that Lippard would have been familiar with Stendhal’s 1830 work, The Red and the Black, since it would not be translated into English for several decades, Lippard was unquestionably aware of the sartorial markers of the Bourbon Restoration – red for the revolutionary soldier, black for the conservative clergy – as well as the original Jacobin flag, with its red backdrop and prominent black lettering. With its colour-coded design, Monk Hall visibly connotes the revisionist energies that surged in revolutionary France. In similar ways, Quaker begins in an imposing Tower that calls to mind the Bastille in Paris, the storming of which helped to launch the French Revolution. Within this Tower, the tyrants of Philadelphia imprison innocent victims. Lippard explicitly marked many of the debaucherous occupants of Monk Hall as French: the villain Lorrimer is a libertine who wears ‘a vest of plain white Marseilles’ and drinks champagne, an identifiably French alcoholic beverage (89). Lippard’s novel further underscores its villain’s associations with the French by gesturing at a devilish seducer, Claude Mellnotte, from a play by Bulwer. Elsewhere, one of the ‘fallen’ women illustrates her fallenness by donning the ‘silks of France’ (249). Given Lippard’s faith in radical democracy, why did he wed the Quaker City’s den of sinfulness to caricatures of French radicalism?

One answer to this question may be found at the edge of a pit at the centre of Lippard’s story. Beneath Monk Hall, readers discover an immeasurable chasm that elicits unspeakable terrors. The monstrous gatekeeper of Monk Hall, Devil-Bug, ventures to its brink, and although he laughs off the gruesome figures that slouch through the building, even he ‘shudders’ at the thought of the pit and the prospect of going down ‘step by step into the lowest depth’ (304–305). The pit of Monk Hall fills Devil-Bug ‘with a feeling of supernatural awe’ (229). The pit enabled Lippard to juxtapose the superficial horrors of Monk Hall with the more bone-chilling, foundational terror of the unknown. A strange object of terror as well as liberation, Lippard’s pit provides a breath of fresh air in an otherwise toxic atmosphere. It is the only escape route through which victims might exit Monk Hall: ‘The foul atmosphere of the Tower Room, lost half its deadly qualities […] as the cool air, came rushing from the chasm’ (122). Moreover, as the literal and figurative opening at the heart of the novel, the pit signifies the breach that is required as the basis of a radical democratic consciousness.Footnote ¹¹ Because any radical democracy demands a lack of secure footing – the open-endedness of a society that can be perpetually made anew, similarly evoked in the wilderness of Brown’s Huntly – Lippard’s pit provides a sublime object of contemplation. Its terror is the salvation of the story because it is the only thing that can effectively unnerve the powerful despots shambling above.

Relatedly, Lippard made liberal use of unseen trapdoors, the presence of which routinely removes literal as well as figurative floors from beneath characters and readers. The horrors of Monk Hall pale in comparison to the abject terror of the unknown at its core: a terror made all the more palpable by the structure of the story as well as its titular edifice. The frontispiece to the first edition of Quaker visualises this terror by positioning the characters around a gap in a curtain that exposes an inky blackness, or the unknowable at the centre of Lippard’s tale (Figure 2). The fissure of democratic open-endedness remains gaping beneath the floorboards of the status quo. Through his multiple, unexpected openings, Lippard generated a nightmare that opens always to an even worse nightmare: ‘A terrible awakening’ (544). For Lippard, it is only from such a state of heightened suspense that the vanguard could ever be substantively challenged.

Figure 2 Readers glimpse a dark chasm at the centre of George Lippard’s Monk Hall

This contrast between the horrors of the French Revolution, which trigger anti-Jacobin responses, and the awesome openings that terrify the elites appears again in Devil-Bug’s apocalyptic dream. Devil-Bug’s dream of the end of the world presents a two-faced portrait of ‘the people’ in the throes of revolution. On the one hand, the text shows ‘throngs of laughing citizens’, set off to attend the execution of a king and enact ‘the vengeance of the People’ (378, 347). On the other hand, Lippard’s novel reveals a multitude of shrouded dead, marching unrecognised alongside their counterparts. The ‘Monarch’s terror’ strikes when the royal personage at last sees the unseen ‘People’ rising up against him (390). In this way, Quaker forces its reader to gaze through two prisms at once: to feel anti-Jacobin horror at the threat of a grotesque, anarchical mob and, at the same time, to feel Jacobin terror (the ‘Monarch’s terror’, to be precise) at the sudden recognition of a righteous People that had, until that moment, remained invisible to him. Radical democracy shuttles readers past their reactionary horrors to experience a terrible awakening in which what had previously remained out of sight – a multitude comprised of common laborers – bursts unexpectedly into view. To describe this odd admixture of sensations, Lippard employed the term ‘grotesque-sublime’ (305).

In closing, let us consider the doubled character of Signor Ravoni, a tyrannical madman that appears at the close of Quaker. The ruthless demagogue places his listeners under a spell in an attempt to create a new world order. Once more, Lippard coded his arch-villain as French, as Ravoni wears the costume worn by ‘the Chevaliers of France’ prior to the French Revolution (421).Footnote ¹² This connection is made even more explicit when Ravoni declares, ‘When the pikes of the Revolution glittered around the scaffold of a doomed King … I was there!’ (423). Moving parallel to the trajectory of Jacobin France, Quaker marches from the prison Tower of Monk Hall to Ravoni’s Temple. Lippard’s readers would have recalled how, following the Revolution, King Louis XVI awaited his execution in the Temple in Paris. An unsettling circularity materialises as Ravoni’s Temple, like Monk Hall, contains ‘all the horrors of the Bastile [sic]’ (528). The anti-Jacobin horror of Ravoni is that he plays the part of spell-binder, a manipulator, a powerful populist; the Jacobin terror of Ravoni is that he signifies the chasm of an impending revolution, an apocalyptic upheaval of the old order in favour of ‘a giant Truth’ (424). Lippard encapsulated the tension between the horrifying and terrifying visages of Ravoni in a line that records the audience’s initial reaction to Ravoni’s spectacle alongside the compensatory reaction of his habituated crowd: ‘The first awful pause of terror was past, and a murmured cry of horror shook the room’ (441, emphasis mine). Although the Janus-faced Ravoni eventually elicits reactionary cries of horror at his gruesome deeds, the far greater danger might be the ‘awful pause of terror’ that accompanies his revolutionary threat. Before the reactionaries can repress them, radical democrats depend upon upsetting moments of rupture.

In his analysis of the Janus-faced Robespierre, who was both revolutionary and tyrant in one, Claude Lefort underlines the paramount value of the sublime within a revolutionary imagination. Lefort maintains that Robespierre effectively elicited fear among his followers that ‘today’s heroes may be tomorrow’s guilty men’, which is to say, a fear of the democratic imperative that a central seat of power is only ever temporarily occupied (Reference LefortLefort 1988: 67). Robespierre intuited that a revolution would lose steam if it became terminable by erecting institutions that depend upon cultish reverence and an illusion of consensus. He understood all too well the revolutionary need for a lasting Terror, and so he tarried with ‘an absolute gap’ and cultivated ‘a fascination with the abyss’ (83–84). As we have seen, Lippard rendered visible Robespierre’s absolute gap through his many textual trapdoors and yawning pits.

Lippard’s Ravoni conjures the tortured figure of Robespierre. Like Robespierre, Ravoni is a clandestine antagonist and, from the vantage point of the anti-Jacobin at least, the horrifying figurehead of a vast conspiratorial movement. By all accounts, Robespierre, anticipating Ravoni, was a master of ‘crowd manipulation’ as well as a moral preacher with ‘deep convictions’, prone to sermonizing (Reference FuretFuret 1995: 148). Although Lippard’s Ravoni is clearly a monster, he is a monster with whom Lippard would have partially identified. Mirroring Lippard’s own secret society, the Brotherhood of Ravioni inverts the brotherhood of Monk Hall by signalling a new future, born from the ashes of a corrupt past. Ravoni and Robespierre are both ‘execrated and exalted’: they remain ever-shifting symbols, ‘the protean specter of Jacobinism’ as well as its active repression (Reference LippardLippard 1995: 1, 189).

Readers can preserve the radicality of American democracy by preserving the terror at the heart of the early American Gothic. Beyond its reactionary horrors, the early American Gothic awakened its audiences in unknown caverns and goaded them into gamboling around bottomless pits, thereby opening themselves to the requisite ruptures of a real democracy. The Gothic works of Lippard and Brown illustrate how American democracy must terrify audiences to the very marrow of their being. While many Americans have been too frightened by the prospect of democracy, assuming reactionary or managerial postures, many Americans have not feared democracy enough for it to flourish fully. The readers who demand systemic changes are left waiting at the precipice, hungry for a better terror to come.

3 The Jacksonian Gothic

Together, American democracy and the American Gothic came of age. Andrew Jackson served from 1829 to 1837 as the nation’s first populist president: a leader whose ostensibly democratic regime stirred incredible amounts of anxiety amongst the elites that had presided over the Era of Good Feelings, in which democratic engagement was quite limited. The surge of voter participation under Jackson, as well as Jackson’s professed love of the so-called common man, signalled a monumental shift in governance (in theory, if not always in practice). Multiple Gothic writers cultivated literary terror alongside a burgeoning fear of Jacksonian democracy. In tales from prominent figures including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville, Jackson’s authoritarian democracy proves to be America’s greatest nightmare. While it is relatively common to read the work of these writers as a sign of Americans being too fearful of democracy – and there is a kernel of truth to this assessment, given the differing degree of inegalitarian sentiments displayed by the authors in question – I would argue that these works more significantly signalled to their Jacksonian reader that she was not yet fearful enough.

It would be an error to cast these authors, or their respective audiences, as mere reactionaries engaged in a snobbish dismissal of an empowered electorate. After all, Jackson was a demagogue who exploited the pretence of democracy to exploit marginalised peoples and expand an oppressive economic system, all while proposing tyrannical initiatives like the censorship of mail.Footnote ¹³ The Whigs viewed their Jacksonian opponents as covert despots that practised subterfuge ‘to create an empire of influence’ (Reference WilentzWilentz 2005: 486). Political cartoonists of the time routinely depicted Jackson in this light (Figure 3).Footnote ¹⁴ For the Gothic figures in question, the fear of Jacksonian democracy was a fairly reasonable one, since Jackson’s democratic triumphalism foreshadowed a dismal drift into despotism – from E pluribus Unum to ex uno plures, or from the will of Many to the will of One (and only One). ‘Democracies carry within them, by their very nature, the prospect of their own totalitarian negation’, Maurice Gauchet observes (Reference GauchetGauchet 2016: 183). Democracy appears to possess a latent ‘will to sameness’ (205). J.L. Talmon labels this phenomenon as totalitarian democracy, or ‘a dictatorship based on ideology and the enthusiasm of the masses’; according to Talmon, the ideals of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who played an invaluable role in the creation of modern democracy, helped certain actors to squash contradiction in the name of imagined unanimity and absolutist rule (Reference TalmonTalmon 1970: 6). Some of America’s earliest Gothic writers held that the Jackson regime heralded a romanticised equality that threatened to eradicate all signs of meaningful difference. But let us be a bit more granular: although scholarship concerning the American Gothic frequently handles ‘the double’ as a trope intimately tied to the personal psyche, Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville each revealed in their own way how the trope of the double can serve as a provocative political symbol of democracy’s innate circularity. Paul Downes comments that these writers ‘trouble simple solemnizations of democracy’ by gesturing at ‘the specific forms of terror and uncertainty introduced by post-feudal and egalitarian forms of social belonging […] a monstrous singularity’ (Reference DownesDownes 2004: 31, emphasis mine). Like Downes, I take seriously the fears that Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville expressed in regard to the Jacksonian democratic imperative – its monstrous singularity – that was consuming early nineteenth-century America.

Figure 3 This widely circulated political cartoon portrays Andrew Jackson as an aspiring monarch

To muse upon a circular democracy was not an uncommon practice during this era. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s transcendental meditations conjoined the self-reliant, sovereign subject to a vast fraternal order. In his well-known essay ‘Circles’, Emerson employed the image of a growing circle to illustrate the endless expanse of human development via democratic progress. But he always looped back to a solitary individual whose greatness encompasses all: ‘The extent to which this generation of circles, wheel without wheel, will go, depends on the force or truth of the individual soul’ (Reference Emerson and PorteEmerson 1983a: 404). ‘Circles’ closes with a citation from Oliver Cromwell, a man widely recognised as one of the fathers of modern democracy. Emerson later noted ‘the beauty that all circular movement has’, before offering a clear vision of democratic Oneness: ‘There are the gods still sitting around him on their thrones, – they alone with him alone’ (Reference Emerson and PorteEmerson 1983b: 1105, 1124). Rousseau famously claimed that democracy could only realise itself in a nation of gods because only gods, with their innate equal standing, could bypass the hierarchies of human existence. Although he privately expressed wariness regarding the democratic project, Emerson publicly supplemented Rousseau’s thesis by imagining a nation of gods, seated in a circle, independent yet in a state of absolute solidarity. Commenting upon similar visions of a rounded democracy, Elias Canetti details how the symbol of the circle calls to mind the Athenian arena with its members of a crowd sitting in a wreath-like formation, mirrored: ‘They all look alike and they all behave in a similar fashion […] strangely homogeneous’ (Reference CanettiCanetti 1984: 28). The Jacksonian Gothic responds to this circular formation by exposing a dread of this strange homogeneity: the latent horror of an acutely spherical democratic imaginary.

Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville each exposed Emerson’s democratic circle to be a prison in which sovereignty masquerades as egalitarianism and transcendental unity proves to be more hell than heaven. For one, self-fashioned democrats welcomed any electoral outcome except the outcomes that they did not deem to be adequately ‘democratic’, thereby culling oppositional ideas from the start. A democratic majority circled the proverbial wagons and compelled members of the minority to join in or be forcibly ejected. Moreover, laws were constantly rewritten according to the majority’s will, which left no room for anything beyond the tightly circumscribed parameters of the majority’s political vision. In other words, Jacksonian democracy perpetually demolished its purportedly open-ended mode of governance and replaced it with a mode of governance that was always-already foreclosed. At the same time, and in a related way, democratic idealists tended to laud a person – and, by extension, a people – that remained completely self-determined. In effect, a democratic subject supposedly (re)generated herself without external influence: ‘A people is a people before giving itself to a king’ (Reference Rousseau and ScottRousseau 2014: 171, 190). The ideal democratic subject, be it a people or a person, maintained a perversely circular relationship with itself. Expressing much more than a reactionary refutation of consensual governance, practitioners of the Jacksonian Gothic therefore challenged what they believed to be the facile assumptions held by democracy’s most starry-eyed proponents.

Revolutions

Embroiled in the Jacksonian climate, Edgar Allan Poe harboured misgivings on the subject of democracy. He came of age in the world of Virginia elites and he held quite firmly throughout his life to a belief in ‘natural aristocracy’. At its core, Poe’s macabre fiction expresses sincere doubts about the capacity of a general populace to govern itself. Larzer Ziff summarises, ‘Poe feared the mob’ (Reference ZiffZiff 1981: 70). Poe frequently depicted social reformers as fanatics of one stripe or another, and, even more damningly, he exposed the tyrannical tendencies of a Democratic agenda, made most visible in the grotesque demagoguery of Jackson himself. A glance at pictures produced by one of his best-known illustrators, Arthur Rackham, affirms Poe’s anti-democratic streak.Footnote ¹⁷ The image that accompanies Poe’s ‘Imp of the Perverse’ (Figure 4), for instance, underscores how Poe’s story mirrors the narrator’s desire to ‘plunge’ into the ‘abyss’ with the narrator’s desire to submit himself to the judgment of ‘the crowd’ (Reference Poe and HarrapPoe 1935: 14). Poe’s perverse imps, pictured on the left, find their echo in the unbridled energy of the demos. Elsewhere, the image that accompanies Poe’s ‘Hop-Frog’ conveys both the result of a democratic revolution as well as the shame of a crowd that has turned a blind eye to the fiendish demagogue in its midst (Figure 5). Rackham’s illustrations convey the mistrust that Poe felt towards the idea that the American populace could ever truly govern itself – the people (demos) wielding the power (kratos).

Figure 4 The imps that attempt to pull Edgar Allan Poe’s narrator into the abyss find their mirror image in the rabble

Figure 5 The faces of a Jacobin mob manifest upon the walls of this Spanish prison

Still, it would be a mistake to read Poe as a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary. Poe remained deeply engaged in the debates over democracy that were consuming the Jacksonian age. To dismiss Poe’s politics as ‘conservative’ is hardly sufficient because he did not merely reject democracy in favour of aristocratic rule. Poe found despotism and Jacksonian democracy to be synonyms, doubles, a kind of self-perpetuating cycle. In his poem ‘The Conqueror Worm’, Poe worried over how a powerful person might find himself stuck in the self-same spot (a democratic crisis of the highest order).

Readers most readily locate the anti-democratic edge of Poe’s works in his satirical stories involving Jackson and his political progeny. ‘King Pest’ deflates the sombre pomp of Jackson himself a.k.a. King Mob.Footnote ¹⁸ From ‘The Man that was Used Up’ to ‘Four Beasts in One – the Homo-Camelopard’, Poe spent his early career painting democratic engagement with what can be described as the broad brush of a political cartoonist. Reflecting a widespread disillusionment with government following the economic distress of 1837, as well as his own personal disillusionment following his inability to gain a plum political post within John Tyler’s administration, Poe’s fiction confirms its author’s Whiggish tendencies. (Of note, the opportunist Poe likely believed that stories with a partisan bent would be more marketable in the increasingly partisan press of the 1830s and 1840s.) Simply put, Poe exposed the Gothic underpinnings of so-called democratic ideals being championed by the Jacksonians. To theorise Poe’s nuanced vision of democracy in greater detail, this section considers his early story ‘William Wilson’ in conversation with his later tale ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’: two works with alliterative titles as well as plotlines that subtly echo one another. ‘Wilson’ tells the tale of a man haunted by his double until his dying day, while ‘Pit’ details the unsettling torture of a prisoner by the Spanish Inquisition. In the suggestive doubling of these texts, that is, in their self-circling, Poe’s readers glimpse a yawning abyss that Poe saw at the centre of America’s democratic experiment, or what Monika Elbert has called ‘the annihilation of the individual’ (Reference ElbertElbert 1991: 26).

For Poe, the danger of democracy comes not from outside but from within. The trouble with democracy stems not from an excess of Otherness, a fear of diversity that readers might assume a self-fashioned aristocrat like Poe to hold, but from the eventual absence of any meaningful difference between individuals. In ‘Mellonta Tauta’, Poe determined: ‘The same opinions come round in a circle among men’ (Reference Poe and QuinnPoe 1984b: 873, emphasis mine). Poe consistently argued that the levelling effect of democracy, which promises to create absolute equality across the multitude, leads to an erasure of difference and therefore pushes America towards the antithesis of its professed ideals: ‘What is everybody’s business is nobody’s’ (873). Poe thus tarried around an abject circularity in which the assumed expansion of freedom and equality espoused by Jacksonians leads to its very opposite – an increasingly circumscribed society, dictated by an ever-narrower subset of the population. Although he did not comment upon the political valence of this ominous shape, Harold Bloom described Poe’s fictional universe as an ‘apocalyptic circle’ (Reference Bloom and BloomBloom 1985: 11). Indeed, Poe viewed American democracy not as an escape from the clutches of the tyrant but as a tightening of the tyrant’s grip. He painted a grim portrait of ‘a perverted form of sovereignty’, underscoring ‘the excesses of sovereign power […] the tyranny of the One’ that was taking hold under Jackson (Reference RodriguezRodriguez 2016: 39). Here Poe’s readers encounter the shadow of kratos within democracy: power of an all-consuming variety that ostensibly includes everyone and yet (this amounts to the same thing) winds up including virtually no one.

‘Wilson’ and ‘Pit’ confront the self-destructive tendencies of American democracy in a similar fashion. Each story begins by visualizing a sovereign authority. In ‘Wilson’, the narrator describes a teacher with ‘robes so glossy and so clerically flowing, with wig so minutely powdered’ (Reference Poe and QuinnPoe 1984d: 339); in ‘Pit’, the narrator obsesses over ‘the lips of the black-robed judges’ and the ‘sable draperies’ of the courtroom (Reference Poe and QuinnPoe 1984c: 491). Following this encounter with an awesome sovereign power, the two narrators pace their proverbial cages to measure out the enclosures within which they find themselves imprisoned. Each story tells of attempts by these two protagonists to escape from hierarchical arrangements. The narrator of ‘Pit’ feels festering within him ‘the idea of revolution’ and he clings to ‘the hope that triumphs on the rack’ (Reference Poe and QuinnPoe 1984c: 491, 501). Meanwhile, from under the oppressive thumb of heavy-handed authoritarians, the narrator of ‘Wilson’ tries to establish himself as ‘a single exception’ (Reference Poe and QuinnPoe 1984d: 341). Through his ‘imperious’ behaviour, he tries to become the law: to make the law for himself rather than remain bound by edicts from on high (341). Yet each of the tales conclude with the profound failure of its protagonist to become sovereign over himself. Far from a panacea, democracy’s promise of self-sovereignty destroys Poe’s twin narrators. Nineteenth-century readers might well have responded to this exposure of the dark underbelly of Jacksonian democracy with a perverse sense of nostalgia for the cage.

‘Wilson’ is a story about a man plagued throughout his life by his double: a Gothic theme that amplifies the circular nature of democracy (the sovereignty intrinsic to a democratic collective and the democratic subject’s assumed sovereignty over herself). Although he longs to control others, from his parents to his competitors, the narrator of ‘Wilson’ cannot shake the dread of ‘equality’ that his double represents (Reference Poe and QuinnPoe 1984d: 342). When sovereignty is shared by all, the results are damning. Equality becomes a horrifying conceit, an all-consuming schema in which the will of a particular group, or a single subject, subsumes the will of everyone else. In this way, Poe effectively channelled ‘the Whig fear of democracy’s becoming authoritarian [and] submerging all into the mob by erasing differences’ (Reference BrittBritt 1995: 202). Regardless of the narrator’s presumed autonomy – he is, after all, the offspring of his own will, or will-son – and unmoved by his claim that he will ‘submit not longer to be enslaved’, Wilson’s double holds illimitable dominion over him (Reference Poe and QuinnPoe 1984d: 354). The double’s ‘inscrutable tyranny’ blankets the relationship of the two men and so, when the narrator at last murders his double, the narrator effectively commits suicide (355). In much of Poe’s fiction, the levelling effect of democracy produces a disturbing negation of difference.

Poe’s vision of democracy leaves little room for individualism. The narrator of ‘Wilson’ tries to free himself from the bothersome equality that his double assumes by attempting to ‘hesitate’ and ‘resist’ (Reference Poe and QuinnPoe 1984d: 355). But Poe’s tale quickly neutralises the narrator’s effort: when attacked, the double ‘hesitates but for an instant’ and reveals himself to be ‘unresisting’ (356). This dark equilibrium – a hesitation undone by its opposite; a resistance undermined by acquiescence – exposes a democratic impetus that leaves no room for the unexpected. Everything has always-already been calculated in advance. To employ one of Poe’s favourite metaphors, the promise of democratic release reveals itself to be but a dream within a dream: ‘Total equality is not a liberating ideal but a prison house’ (Reference FahertyFaherty 2005: 9).

Jacques Derrida returned to this monstrous singularity almost two hundred years later. Speaking out against the hegemonic initiatives of the United States in the Middle East being advanced in the name of democracy, Derrida wonders if American democracy only ever induces a solipsistic circle. Derrida echoes Poe when he equates democracy with the rack: a torture device that involves ‘an encircling violence and an insistent repetition’ (Reference Derrida and NaasDerrida 2005: 8). For Derrida, this sort of democracy – the type once advocated by Jacksonians – trains a society to consider itself as both cause and effect, without externalities: ‘God, circle, volt, revolution, torture … a circular and specular autoaffection’ (Reference Derrida and NaasDerrida 2005: 14–15). Once the precepts of American-style democracy have spread into every corner of the globe, what is left of the plurality, the sense of difference, that theoretically drives a democratic project? Having announced its triumph as global consensus, American democracy leaves virtually no alternatives to itself, and so it forecloses the open-endedness that has been its raison d’etre. Forecasting figures like Derrida, Poe viewed democracy as a potentially torturous feedback loop.

Opening with a reference to Jacobin Houses, the hotbed of French democracy at the close of the eighteenth century, Poe’s ‘Pit and the Pendulum’ offers yet another narrative about democratic ‘revolutions’. The text describes the narrator’s narrow evasion of an ever-descending pendulum as rats flood into the cell to gnaw off the robes that hold him. Rats serve as a metaphor for the Jacobin crowd that triggered the French Revolution. Rackham’s illustration of the story captures the correlation between the faces of the Jacobin mob and the walls of the prison, thus underscoring Poe’s suggestion that Jacksonian democracy has become a self-enclosed prison (Figure 6). The ravenous animals boldly move upon the narrator, thronging like a mass of ‘fresh troops’ (Reference Poe and QuinnPoe 1984c: 503). They ‘overrun’ the barricades, foreshadowing the destruction of the prison that ends the story: ‘My deliverers’ (503). Calling to mind the storming of the Bastille in July of 1789, Poe’s story creates a palpable sense of revulsion at the notion of a revolutionary mob. By marking the narrator’s ‘deliverance’ in a heavily ironic fashion, Poe’s tale implies that an assumed democratic escape from authoritarians is only ever a deeper form of imprisonment. General Lasalle grabs the swooning narrator at the last possible moment – but, as the wheel takes one more ominous turn, Poe’s reader would have known all too well how, historically speaking, the Jacobin insurrection eventually became a Reign of Terror. The pendulum doubles as a guillotine, and the beheading of one French tyrant (Louis XVI) is followed by the beheading of another (Robespierre). In effect, the French Revolution and its aftermath exposed that the end of one sovereign is really just the assertion of a more absolute sovereignty. And this repetition, enacted under the banner of democracy, has left fewer and fewer resources for hesitation or resistance.

Figure 6 The unruly crowd is disgusted, at last, by what its demagogue has done

Poe’s ‘Pit’ insists that Americans cannot rid democracy of its intrinsic kratos, or its latent hunger for imperial power. Poe here pondered over ‘the undecidable limit between the demagogic and the democratic’ (Reference Derrida and NaasDerrida 2005: 67). Again, Jackson was an anxiety-inducing example of this abject circularity because he famously ‘liberated’ the common people in order to enhance his own sovereignty, which is to say, Jackson’s ever-expanding enfranchisement of the common man was accompanied by a frightening exclusion of dissenting individuals. Consider the similar ways that ‘Pit’ closes in upon itself: its flattening of history, in which disparate events, the Spanish Inquisition and the French Revolution, become synonyms; its monomania, in which a single consciousness (the narrator’s tyrannical ‘I’) eradicates everything exterior to itself. Recalling Hawthorne’s Robin, everything that occurs in ‘Pit’ may be a manifestation of the lone narrator’s unconscious. Poe’s democracy therefore remains frightfully self-enclosed and utterly circular. The reader must entertain ‘the idea of revolution – perhaps from its association in fancy with the burr of a mill wheel’ (Reference Poe and QuinnPoe 1984c: 491).

The horrors of the mill wheel manifest as a torturous repetition throughout Poe’s corpus. Poe worried about the rallying cry of an ostensibly democratic regime that would marshal its subjects into a grotesque sameness, or what he called ‘an omni-prevalent Democracy’ (Reference Poe and QuinnPoe 1984a: 451). Like Derrida in the century to come, Poe conflated his assault on the tyrannical notion of reason with his attack on an omni-prevalent Jacksonian democracy. When brought to their limit, both reason and democracy abolish self-critique, as the touted transcendental Oneness of reason and democracy eventually overwhelms the operative capacity of these ideals to sustain a healthy degree of difference. As reason becomes instrumental, and democracy becomes a disguise for dominion, Poe’s Gothic circles expose Jacksonian democracy’s tendency to totalise. Just as Poe revealed that reason always blurs with madness, he illustrated how democracy invariably doubles as despotism. In turn, Poe discovered innovative ways to show that ‘life on earth is not a closed circle’ (Reference TalmonTalmon 1970: 10).

4 Spectres of Democracy

Upon first glance, the works of Shirley Jackson and Stephen King focus upon the mysterious engine that drives communities together or tears them apart. Consider Eleanor’s precarious familial group in Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959) or the slippery (re)alignments of the Losers’ Club in King’s IT (Reference King1986). Jackson and King each underscore the combustible engine of a democracy that compels small-minded people to form violent groups. But upon second glance, the political visions of Jackson and King prove to be inverted images of one another: because of her uneasy alignment with the gentry class, made legible in her fiction via a healthy dose of irony as well as apocalyptic dread, Jackson left the fate of American democracy decidedly uncertain; in contrast, King’s democracy leads always to demagoguery and destruction. The distinction really matters. Whereas Jackson’s lack of assurance about democracy affirmed one of democracy’s core truths – specifically, its requisite open-endedness – King’s pessimistic certitude about mob rule serves as a harbinger of American democracy’s imminent demise.

Democracy haunts American life. It is both everywhere and nowhere at once. But let us be more specific when detailing the contours of this haunting: democracy is ‘a continuous process of egalitarian inclusion and power sharing made possible by tireless agitators’ (Reference TaylorTaylor 2019: 5). In effect, democracy involves an unending state of restlessness. A democratic people can never fully realise their aims because their political demands as well as alliances remain forever mutable. A truly democratic society never achieves stasis because stasis requires the termination of what needs to be a continuous process. Simply put, a democracy devoid of uncertainty would no longer be democratic, at least not in any meaningful sense. Democracy therefore endures as the most prominent of America’s political spectres: ‘An elusive fantasy, forever out of reach, forever unrealized’ (Reference MillerMiller 2018: 131). Political theorists including Claude Lefort, Joan Copjec, and Chantal Mouffe have shown how democracy persists as an immaterial presence. With a propensity for the unseen, as well as an appetite for that which agitates, the American Gothic offers an ideal site for grappling with democracy as an immaterial presence. And just as the American Gothic often works best when its monsters do not take a visible form but instead dwell in the ephemeral realm, in a shadowy substrate that defies description, American democracy works best when it maintains a somewhat shapeless quality.

For her part, Jackson depicted the patrician world in which she lived as a cloistered fantasy world. Yet beyond the horizons of her aristocratic, agoraphobic universe, something else abides. Even as Jackson’s elitist characters ostensibly borrow the grammar of the horror novel to reject the demos (the democratic populace), the imminent threat of a world without hierarchy invariably returns from its repression. To Jackson’s plutocrats, the egalitarian threat remains incomprehensible and thoroughly unnerving. King, meanwhile, endows democracy with the tangible and invariably repellent form of the despot. He expresses this ungodly bond between the demos and the despot in his tome The Stand: ‘Let the princes of this world get along as best they could with the people who had elected them … they deserved each other’ (Reference KingKing 1991: 51).While Jackson’s anti-democratic façade fosters democratic desires, King’s works fuel anti-democratic yearning as they reveal tyranny to be the preordained conclusion of a dead-end democratic experiment. Contrasting these distinctive visions, readers can recognise how the American Gothic preserves democracy best by refusing to exorcise democracy’s amorphous phantoms.

Razing Demos

Shirley Jackson’s texts track wealthy Americans as they shirk their democratic responsibilities. Her elites cling to illusions of independence by sealing themselves off in hermetically sealed castles and stubbornly refusing a democratic charter. Some critics have read Jackson herself as a closeted reactionary; after all, she was the child of a privileged caste and the wife of a college professor at a highly selective liberal arts institution. However, by making the term ‘democracy’ synonymous with the unrealisable, which is to say, as the sublime object at the centre of her fictionalised New England villages, Jackson not only rendered the levelling potential of democracy as that which terrifies her reader but – this point remains essential – she also upheld democracy as that which remains the most real for her reader. Due to their need for the illusion of hierarchy, members of Jackson’s gentry imagine the masses in the form of comforting horrors: conventional bogeys that mask the underlying fear of a lost social order. In turn, the true terror of these tales never fully emerges, instead skulking ominously in the margins. Put simply, it is the terror of a universal equality. Jackson’s Gothic stories tarry around the failure of American democracy to materialise and, by so doing, these stories maintain democracy as an impossible-yet-immanent promise.Footnote ²³

Admittedly, to render the threat of democracy as a loadbearing pillar of Jackson’s fiction is to read against the grain. Biographers typically present Jackson as being apolitical at best. ‘Her political knowledge was almost nonexistent’, Judy Oppenheimer opines. ‘Her vision was personal, not political’ (Reference OppenheimerOppenheimer 1989: 131, 164). In truth, Jackson dallied with Marxism during her college years and she was intensely self-aware when it came to feelings of chosen-ness among the American aristocrats with whom her family associated. A number of her stories skewer the upper crust by exposing their insecurities and lamenting their belief in their own superiority. At the same time, Jackson clearly wanted her reader to identify with the upper crust, however temporarily, and as a result her fiction transforms the democratic populace into a demonic force, a mobocracy that should not be allowed to govern itself. Jackson would have understood that paranoid perspective all too well since she felt set apart from her neighbours in the Green Mountain state and worried constantly about the power of groupthink, a residual concern in part held over from the atrocities of the Second World War. (King will swim in similar waters as a dissident forged in the fires of war in Vietnam.) Upon first glance, then, her narratives depict the rabble as a hellish brood that attacks any sign of difference, thereby reflecting midcentury America’s fear of the demos.

Jackson’s most famous story ‘The Lottery’ seemingly affirms Jackson’s antipathy for the demos. The narrative depicts the gruesome native ritual of a small-minded village in which members of the tribe must draw lots and, if they are selected, the villagers stone them to death. In one reading, ‘The Lottery’ exposes the perversity of direct democracy when it likens casting lots to casting stones. Eligible members of the ancient Athenian demos selected their governing officials through the drawing of lots, in a process known as sortition. This procedure, which remained random by design, aimed to keep the pool of possible leaders fresh and thus avoid corruption. Anyone (or, almost anyone) could be chosen to lead. In ‘The Lottery’, direct democracy ostensibly permits the people to make their own decisions and instigate their own ruin. Jackson’s fable appears to chastise the demos for behaving like a bunch of reckless children: ‘The feeling of liberty sat uneasily on most of them’ (Reference JacksonJackson 1991a: 291). When at last the villagers descend upon their innocent victim, they taunt her: ‘Be a good sport … all of us took the same chance’ (298). It remains difficult not to interpret ‘The Lottery’ as proof positive of the tyranny of the majority. The story appears to underscore an anti-democratic need to protect elite individuals from irrational doxa (or, the vagaries of public opinion). In a letter to her agent, Jackson once slyly suggested: ‘I got a letter from a lady saying didn’t I once write a letter about an election where one of the candidates got killed with a rock? Did I, do you think?’ (Reference Jackson and MurphyJackson 2022: 225).

And yet Jackson never fully committed to such a fetishised vision of democracy. There are actually two levels in ‘The Lottery’ – the horrifying and the terrifying. As we have seen, at the first level, the reader shares the victim’s reactionary horror when it comes to groupthink. At the second level, though, Jackson’s reader shares the terror of Old Man Warner, an aged member of the community troubled by the prospect of a populace that no longer holds onto its ritualised acts of violence. By inviting her reader to share in Old Man Warner’s perspective, Jackson concurrently invited her reader to imagine the terrifying potential of a democracy that could live up to its own ideals. Like Old Man Warner, the reader might feel disquieted by the notion of a democratic society in which citizens would draw lots not to vilify one another but to expand participation and share in the collective work of forming a better society. If levellers did somehow usher in a democratic future, what would happen to the brutal antagonisms upon which Old Man Warner’s way of life depends? Unsettled by the suggestion of a world without the comfortable horrors of prejudicial monsters, Jackson’s Gothic works preserve democracy as a kernel of the sublime: a terror looming just beyond the borders of tightly cloistered communities, one that subverts the established norms of reactionaries like Warner.

Put differently, the horrific monsters conjured on behalf of class warfare actually protect Jackson’s short-sighted characters (as well as her short-sighted audience) from what could be a genuinely egalitarian politics. Jackson’s stories demonstrate how a visible struggle between aristocrats and ‘the people’ provides a degree of succour at the brink of an unspeakable terror – the loss of hierarchy that would accompany a full-fledged democratic turn. One cannot too quickly dismiss the soul-quaking terror felt by Old Man Warner.

In her most overtly political novel, The Sundial, Jackson wonders about this human need for reactionary monstrosities, and how this compulsion to exclude Others works to shield her characters – and, vicariously, her readers – from the unconscious dread of a fully actualised democracy. After an eccentric aunt delivers to her family an apocalyptic message, the Halloran family holes up in their mansion to await the end times. The remainder of the text exposes the sociopolitical dimensions of an agoraphobic group that defines itself as ‘chosen’ while maintaining the pretence of democratic respectability, especially in their relationship to the local village. The leader of this group, Mrs. Halloran, fashions her deceased father as ‘a democratic man’ and presents his noblesse oblige as a sign of the family’s magnanimous democratic character (Reference JacksonJackson 2014: 85). The Hallorans summon villagers to one last party at their manor, an event that will be followed by a closing of the gates and, or so the prophecy says, an evisceration of the populace. On the one hand, if the villagers knew their coming fate, members of Jackson’s beau monde presume that they ‘would stand with their jaws hanging, looking at each other and grinning in a foolish fashion’ (200). In these moments, readers share in Mrs. Halloran’s superior position as they perceive an undeserving demos that cannot process the horrors that have befallen it. On the other hand, by pivoting away from Mrs. Halloran’s perspective, Jackson’s novel highlights the craven selfishness of the Hallorans and satirises their unearned sense of entitlement. By novel’s end, neither character nor reader have sorted out what a ‘democratic man’ would actually look like. The Hallorans return to the conventional monsters of class conflict to repress a more democratic vision.

A sign of comfort and disquiet, the cumulative image of The Sundial involves a character placing upon the head of another character a pagan wreath. In ancient Greece, pagan crowns marked a distinguished mortal as part of a ritual designed to deify worthy members of the demos. This Athenian wreath reminds Jackson’s reader of the elusive democratic promise, echoed by the crowd gathered around the perimeter of the Halloran estate. Re-tracing the shape of the Athenian wreath, doubled in the symbolic space of the arena, the local crowd repeatedly encircles Jackson’s gentry in a way that imprisons the family and, at the same time, recounts the unnerving openness of an unleashed egalitarianism. Calling to mind the spherical images described in the preceding section of this Element, the crowd of The Sundial moves in a ‘circular turn’, stalking ‘in great circles’ (Reference JacksonJackson 2014: 186, 201). Horrifying as well as emancipatory, the demos wheels about the hapless Hallorans: ‘The circle went round and round’ (202).

The Sundial also conjures the Athenian philosopher Plato. The Hallorans share with the Athenian philosopher a wariness of the demos as well as a recognition that earthly individuals exist in private worlds of their own making. A sundial provides a point of contrast between the sun, or the Truth, and deceptive shadows. Tracking the logic of Plato’s metaphor to its logical conclusion, The Sundial closes with the leader Mrs. Halloran refusing to expose the villagers to their ignorance. Yet what exists beyond Mrs. Halloran’s delusions? Following Mrs. Halloran’s death, the apocalyptic text spends its last breaths wondering what comes next. ‘If we are to play at all in the future’, a character muses during a game of bridge, ‘We must compromise our different styles’ (220). The exterior to Jackson’s cavernous realm is the world of tomorrow, in which the comforting shadow-play of hierarchy might no longer be upheld – a world in which ‘different styles’ could be ‘compromised’ without reliance upon petty tyrants like Mrs. Halloran. Of course, Jackson’s reader never gets to see this world to come. The open-ended conclusion to The Sundial provocatively gestures at a society with neither castles nor moats and so Jackson’s novel encourages its reader to contemplate a community constituted by a lack of clear-cut borders or overzealous stone throwers. What could be more inspiring, or bone-chilling?

Once more, democracy is a style of government constituted by its own impossibility. Even Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that most ardent of democracy’s defenders, confessed that no democracy had ever really existed. Democracy must remain open-ended because the political fiction of ‘the people’ can at any moment rewrite its own imagined essence; it could even cease to practise democracy. True democracy perpetually rejects the imaginary ground upon which any governing regime relies. Jackson’s Gothic stories sustain the democratic ideal precisely because they uphold democracy as something that can never be said aloud.

To illustrate this subversive undercurrent, let us turn to Jackson’s ‘The Summer People’. The elderly Allisons opt to stay longer than usual in their summer cottage; in response, their backwards neighbours decide to eject them from their midst (or so the Allisons believe). With a simmering sense of dread, ‘The Summer People’ never provides Jackson’s reader with an unimpeded shot of its central terror; rather, the story closes with the husband and wife clinging to one another, waiting for what they feel is (long to be?) their impending comeuppance. It is a typical Jackson tale in that Jackson’s reader must share in the delusion of superiority held by a pair of American elitists. The narrative voice of ‘The Summer People’ floats between the consciousness of the haughty Mrs. Allison and unmoored observations in which an undetermined voice initially justifies Mrs. Allison’s position at the top of the social pyramid, rejecting the notion that villagers ‘deserved an explanation’ for her peculiar decision-making (Reference Jackson and OatesJackson 2010: 597). Elsewhere, this unidentified narrative voice asks its readers to share in Mrs. Allison’s perspective when it considers New England stock to be ‘degenerated’ (596). By coercing her audience to move lockstep with Mrs. Allison in her detachment from her provincial surroundings, Jackson encouraged her reader to understand what follows – the apparently monstrous machinations of the masses – as part and parcel of the gentry’s already-existing nightmare of encroachment by the demos. In effect, Mrs. Allison transposes her latent class anxieties into the typical reactionary horrors of Gothic fiction by demonizing her neighbours to justify her own sense of entitlement. However, because these traditional monsters remain the creations of Mrs. Allison, readers must ask what Mrs. Allison actually fears.

Beneath her performative noblesse oblige, Mrs. Allison remains dimly aware of her own parasitic function within the body politic. Even as she outwardly declares that the rabble depend upon her, she vaguely, perhaps even unconsciously, recognises the unsettling fact that it is she who depends upon the demos. Her real terror stems not from zombified masses encroaching on the domain of the wealthy, then, but from the threat that her parasitic duo will be cut off from public goods such as gas, electricity, and the postal service. The ‘indefinable assets’ upon which the couple begrudgingly depends become glaringly visible as the villagers realise that they no longer need the Allisons (594). The possibility that the demos will dispatch with the Allisons exists as a terrifying, and seductive, hole in the middle of Jackson’s story: ‘“But if there’s no mail –,” and leaving an awful silence behind him, [Mr. Allison] went off’ (604). Jackson’s surface-level horror of a steadily encroaching demos with ungodly appetites veils a second, far more unnerving terror: the reality that the Allisons are actually no better than anyone else.

Since ‘The Summer People’ remains replete with uncanny repetitions, Jackson’s reader starts to suspect that the entire edifice of liberal society, built upon a stratified order that segregates the propertied class from everyone else, represses a disturbing sameness that encompasses every member of the demos, including the Allisons. The villagers restate what the Allisons say; the Allisons mimic the laconic style of their neighbours. The story’s repetitive rhythm underscores the unnerving fact that social difference is only ever a performance, and so the imagined distinctions between the Allisons and the villagers are only ever a false front. Jackson’s story closes with an echo heard across a lake, in anticipation of Mark Fisher’s ‘eerie cry’, which produces ‘a feeling that the enigma might involve forms of knowledge, subjectivity, and sensation that lie beyond common experience’ (Reference FisherFisher 2017: 62). Jackson’s echo signals the eeriness of a democracy to come.

Crucially, the final echo of ‘The Summer People’ returns ‘unwanted’ (Reference Jackson and OatesJackson 2010: 606). Indeed, this uncomfortable feeling of being unwanted permeates the text. Translating the anxiety that their children no longer need them into the apparently more digestible register of class struggle, the Allisons must come to terms with their own irrelevance. When the Allisons blur the line between their children and the villagers, they expose their own feelings of superiority. Yet the deeper fear expressed by ‘The Summer People’ is that neither their children nor their neighbours actually depend upon the Allisons. In the end, Jackson’s story shifts its narrative voice away from the perspective of the Allisons and into the position of the demos itself. The unmoored voice at last rejects the story’s earlier notion that the Allisons ‘deserved to hear news’; now, in the twilight of their dominance, the voice of the public ‘no longer reache[s] them’ (607). The Allisons secretly long to have a purpose, to belong within the body politic that they consciously reject. At the same time, their greatest nightmare is an impending democratic rearrangement in which the fiction of their own pre-eminence will be revealed to be nothing more than the stuff of fantasy.

Even as the Allisons rehearse the grotesque theatrics of class conflict, they unconsciously hold open the possibility for a levelled society in which the assets of the commons could be widely shared and in which every person depends equally upon every other person. Jackson’s implicated reader must confront the layers of her own political nightmares: the first layer of horrifying Others that haunt the Allisons (as self-defined elites) and the second layer of a terrifying democracy – a radical arrangement that could never be totally actualised but proves all the more influential because of this unrealisability. Jackson’s vision of democracy can be neither fetishised in the form of a tyrant nor fetishised as the composite figure of the demanding rabble. Through the ironic distance that her fiction maintains from democracy as a sublime object, Jackson allows her stories to preserve democracy’s unnerving potential.

5 The Requisite Fears of Democracy

To varying degrees, the horror films written and directed by Jordan Peele highlight the hypocrisies of American democracy. They feature alienated Black characters that grapple with their oppression within a system that proclaims itself to be equitable. For example, Peele’s first film Get Out tracks a young Black man as an ostensibly welcoming white family reveals that it has nefarious plans to exploit him. This chapter will turn to Peele’s 2019 release Us to show how American democracy remains in no small part driven by reactionary horrors. And yet the film also holds that a healthy democracy must maintain a sense of terror: a terror that precariously holds ‘us’ together through traumatic ruptures, inevitable gaps, and the simmering dread of what cannot be known.Footnote ³⁰ According to Us, the horror film is a vital instrument for re-theorising what has become, in popular discourse at least, a rather bullish democratic utopianism.

Peele’s title foregrounds a dialectic: the title remains both particular (the film focuses upon the United States) and universal (‘Us’ could mean everyone within earshot). In turn, the film asks penetrating questions about the nature of the nation’s democratic promise. Must democracy be premised upon a veiled exclusion, what political philosopher Carl Schmitt calls the friend/enemy distinction, and, if so, why should disenfranchised subjects continue to believe in greater enfranchisement as their sole salvation? Is democracy doomed to warfare between parties defined by their prescriptive racial, ethnic, and cultural identities, or should it be rooted in an all-embracing Us? In its attempt to address these questions, Peele’s Us highlights a constitutive tension between the horrors of democracy – the need for monstrous Others to rally a cohesive unit, for example, the countless bourgeois family clans that endure at the close of Hollywood horror films – and the terrors of democracy – specifically, the prospect of a totalised equality, or a democratic sublime. By tarrying at this fault line, Us reveals the horror film to be a vehicle for re-imagining the perils as well as the possibilities of America’s beleaguered democratic project.

While on vacation in Santa Cruz, the Wilson family uncovers the troubled past of the maternal Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o). When she was a child, Adelaide ventured into a tunnel beneath the Santa Cruz boardwalk labelled ‘Vision Quest: Find Yourself’. Once inside the dark underbelly, Adelaide’s double accosted her, took her place, and left the young girl handcuffed to a bunkbed in a strange underground lair. The audience learns that the government has been experimenting with doubles, soulless zombies known as the tethered which were designed to mimic their doppelgängers above the surface. When the ‘real’ Adelaide arrives, the subterranean populace begins to plot an insurrection against its above-ground counterpart. Flash forward to the present: the Wilsons must face off against their doubles, dispatching them in grisly fashion. At film’s end, as the tethered coalition forms a line of protesters across the nation, Adelaide remembers that she herself started underground, which is to say, she is actually the tethered version of herself. Because Us renders egalitarian connectivity as a grotesque proposition, at times ironically and at times with apparent sincerity, Peele’s audience cannot too quickly romanticise the consensual Oneness pictured at the close of the film – the solidarity of an unfathomable line of individuals, joined together to evoke seismic change. Us challenges the democratic fantasies of countless American spectators by exposing their reactionary horrors as well as their revolutionary terrors.

A democratic contradiction drives Peele’s film. On the one hand, Us channels a widespread fear of egalitarianism as the Wilson family rallies against the collectivist revolution at hand. The film upholds in these moments a rampant bourgeois tribalisation. Many Americans remain entirely too afraid of democracy, especially when it threatens a relatively stable economic situation for the individual in question. On the other hand, Us rejects the pre-supposition that ‘the [horror] genre cannot formulate that the problem is a collective one rather than one that besets a small familial group’ (Reference McGowanMcGowan 2019: 66). Peele’s film claims that a sublime unity exists not in what binds reactionary groups together but in what each group as well as each of its members cannot secure. A mother kills the thing that ostensibly made her whole; a son chooses to wear a mask to protect himself from the knowing gaze of a parent. The film features countless traumatic remainders of what has been excluded from the imagined general will. Peele’s alternative vision of togetherness preserves a vital sense of estrangement and it thus underscores how absence, instead of utopian consensus, defines a democratic polis. When it comes to their feelings about democracy, Us posits, many Americans have not yet reckoned with the necessity of a fear that makes the system work.

But let us unpack first the reactionary horrors critiqued throughout the film. Like most of the Gothic figures considered in the preceding sections, Peele’s spectator shares in the angst of the privileged caste as they face an encroaching horde of dispossessed beings. In these moments, Us assumes the singular perspective of a subject that has benefited from the unfair advantages of what has been labelled as white democracy: a society designed to benefit the white majority under the guise of universal inclusivity. However unconsciously, the Wilsons identify with a white majority. The parents encourage their daughter to ‘shoot for the stars’ and reassure her that she can achieve whatever she sets out to achieve. As Peele’s film unreservedly demonstrates, these platitudes ought to sound nonsensical to people of colour living in America. Us exposes the myth of equality, the defining trait of an assumed democracy, to be a fiction as Peele’s characters as well as his audience realise that the game has been rigged. With its faux fraternity as well as its phony sense of patriotic unity, the rhetoric of the Hands Across America campaign, which appears frequently in the film, represses the inconvenient truth that the fable of equal opportunity in the United States has evolved in parallel with brutal acts of exclusion of women, indigenous peoples, and enslaved individuals (the list goes on). Adelaide’s son Jason (Evan Alex) glimpses this macabre reality when he walks in on his mother bludgeoning one of the tethered. As they relish in violence against the tethered, Peele’s characters appear to be enjoying democracy precisely because of its tendency towards tribalisation. Unlike the platitudes of egalitarian love that countless Americans consume on a daily basis, Peele’s Us contends that democracy in the United States has long been driven by the perverse pleasures associated with a graphic destruction of Others. Reactionary horrors propel American democracy.

Cornel West would likely agree with Peele’s opening salvo: ‘Race is the crucial intersection point where democratic energies clash with American imperial realities’ (Reference WestWest 2005: 14). Nevertheless, although he remains wary of forces that appropriate the idea of democracy for exploitative ends, West sustains ‘a deep public reverence for – a love of – democracy in America’ (15). Peele’s Us will not let its audience off the hook so easily. Instead, it claims that democracy is neither a symptom of a latent loving culture nor an expression of America’s intrinsic conciliatory tendencies. No, democratic energies do not ‘clash with’ American imperialism; they sustain it. ‘Racial oppression and American democracy are mutually constitutive’ (Reference OlsonOlson 2004: xv). At their most fundamental level, the concept of race and democracy necessitate the consolidation of individuals under joint identity markers, and they generate forms of solidarity through an active exclusion of imagined outsiders. A problem therefore arises within the very logic of American democracy, as the loosely defined tribal bloc of ‘whiteness’ presents an unfair advantage. Historically, white democracy has erected an insurmountable barrier to entry for certain citizens (or non-citizens, as the case may be). It has promised equal opportunity but aggressively restricted the participation of subjects deemed to be non-white. When the tethered arrives, members of the Wilson clan awaken from their slumber and realise that their attempt to ‘keep up with the Joneses’ – their obnoxious white friends who own a mansion and a fleet of expensive vehicles – has been a fool’s errand. Their sense of friendly competition has in truth been founded upon violent, exclusionary principles. The family’s white friend (Tim Heidecker) looks out his window and jokes that he has identified an impending intruder as O.J. Simpson, a well-known football star accused of murdering his wife. Regardless of the specific details of the case itself, the Simpson trial was a public spectacle that unified predominantly white spectators in their sense of civic justice by rallying them against a single Black man.

Christina Beltran recycles the term Herrenvolk democracy, or a democracy designed exclusively for a ‘master race’ (Reference BeltranBeltran 2020: 14). Beltran demonstrates how ‘democratic feeling’ became pervasive in the United States alongside, and not in distinction from, narratives of white supremacy. She holds that the gloss of a participatory ethos in American democracy has been secured through laws that embolden white supremacists and reduce the participation of subjects that it deems to be non-white. ‘Civic creation’, Beltran points out, has long involved ‘acts of racialised violence’. That is to say, democratic citizenship has been upheld in the United States by ‘deprivation, exclusion, suffering, and removal … a recursive scarcity logic that premises one’s own thriving in the denial of such thriving of others’ (42, 30–31). Us similarly exposes the sanguineous machinations of a Herrenvolk democracy by solidifying a normative family unit (the Wilsons) that expels the tethered from its ancestral cabin. Through their aggressive expulsion of the Other, the Wilsons re-enact the barbarism of belonging that accompanies any Herrenvolk democracy. The clichéd stick family decal on the back of the Wilson vehicle foreshadows the eventual restoration of a bourgeois clan that must either fall in line with the basic precepts of white democracy or ‘get out’. The preceding sections uncover how this sort of reactionary consolidation occurs in the American Gothic, from works by Washington Irving to the tales of H.P Lovecraft. The horror of a democratic mob storming the proverbial castle evokes a strong urge to rally the privileged few into a posture of self-defence. American horror stories incessantly fantasise about a democratic society upheld by an exclusion of the Other.

On a related note, as a tale about doubles, Peele’s film reflects upon a general anxiety felt by Americans regarding the concept of an unchecked egalitarianism. Parodying the anti-democratic spirit of Edgar Allan Poe, the name of Peele’s family echoes Poe’s short story ‘William Wilson’, discussed at length in the second section of this Element. Once relatively comfortable in their alignment with white democracy, members of the Wilson family are confronted by their own unexceptional status when their duplicates arrive on the scene. Like the self-defined elites of Shirley Jackson’s fiction, the Wilsons initially try to re-contain the tethered versions of themselves by transposing their doubles into a monstrous register, a tactic quickly swatted away by Adelaide’s double Red. ‘What are you people?’ one of the Wilsons inquires, dehumanising his double by treating him as a ‘what’ instead of a ‘who’. Red confidently replies: ‘We’re Americans’. Red later indignantly reminds her privileged counterpart, ‘We’re human, too, you know’. Despite efforts by the Wilsons to treat their doubles as abject Others, Us reminds its audience of the uncomfortable fact that these doubles are worthy of equal standing. After all, the maternal protagonist is herself one of the tethered. The fear that Peele’s film conveys is distinctive from Poe’s trepidation, however, because rather than position the anxiety of a displaced privileged caste at the fore of the film, it foregrounds the anxiety of disenfranchised people of colour: ostracised individuals forced to confront the grim reality that they will never be included within the victorious majority due to the colour of their skin.Footnote ³¹ Without the imagined refuge of an exclusionary whiteness, the Wilsons must inevitably join their doubles not as equal citizens but as invisible beings, segregated, like Ralph Ellison’s eponymous character, in the sewers. The promise of democratic equality only ever sooths citizens that already enjoy the privilege of aligning with an established majority as a result of the phenotype with which they were born. To cite Juliet Hooker, Peele’s horrifying portrayal of democratic consensus, infused with Adelaide’s as well as Red’s painful sense of Black grief, differs in kind from Poe’s horrifying portrayal of egalitarianism, infused as it is with Poe’s white grievances as a self-fashioned Southern elite.

Despite their status as outsiders, Adelaide as well as Red ignore their shared grief and persist in a kind of democratic utopianism. Adelaide suppresses the egalitarian fright caused by her double by reasserting, ‘Everything’s going to be like it was before’; meanwhile, Red recycles theological language to envision a joint soul or, as she puts it, ‘One shared by Two’. Red speaks prophetically when she tells Adelaide, ‘God brought us together that night’, and she judges her counterpart’s ethics when she states, ‘You could have taken me with you’. This viewpoint explains why the tethered do not technically free themselves at the end of the film; instead, they join hands to become tethered once more. This reactionary unification conveys the excessive fear of a typical American when confronted by the radical differences of a genuine democracy. Said another way, the tethered, with their limited vision of democracy, ultimately erase all signs of difference to (re)achieve an illusion of unity. But democracy is antagonistic or it is nothing at all – a reality that remains its truest terror. Democracy demands difference, or the open-endedness of a society occupied by citizens with variegated desires.

The closing shot of Us gestures at an uncertainty that cannot be resolved. The final image is a perfect example of the democratic sublime: members of the tethered spread out across the land and, borrowing the language of the Hands Across America movement, stretch ‘from sea to shining sea’. Peele’s spectator gazes down upon the masses, linked together to achieve collective ends. The father of the Wilson clan describes the crowd as ‘a group engaged in demonstration, or protest’ – a movement that took ‘a shitload of coordination’. This democratic movement cannot be confined to a television screen or a cheesy t-shirt logo; it explodes beyond the margins of the screen itself. The son Jason asks, ‘How many of everybody is there going to be?’ According to the film’s form as well as its content, the answer to Jason’s question remains unfathomable.

Us repeatedly gestures at the democratic multitude, or the empowered ‘people’. When members of the tethered first arrive, the young Adelaide stands at the edge of the sea, drawing Peele’s spectators into marvelling at the sights and sounds of the vast ocean. Once inside of the haunted hall of mirrors, spectators glimpse a refracted EXIT sign. At the exact moment that a revolution ruptures the status quo, Peele’s film conjures the theoretical work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri by making it possible for audiences to imagine a limitless number of pathways out of the current social arrangement. In each of these instances, the democratic revolution creates a gap, both within the diegetic world and in the manner with which audiences visualise that revolution. According to Peele’s film, democracy is like a boundless sea or a hall of mirrors. It endures not because of a latent will to wholeness, then, but because of the holes that puncture the subject’s comprehension of a fully realised democratic ideal. Joan Copjec describes something like the democratic sublime when she writes, ‘Democracy is not a utopia … Democracy seems designed […] to acknowledge the impossibility of its alleviation … it is only because I doubt that I am therefore a democratic citizen’ (Reference CopjecCopjec 1994: 161).Footnote ³² Dystopian, impossible, shrouded in doubt: it is not as though the American Gothic monopolises these emotions, of course, but it does dramatically heighten them. Adapting Poe’s aggrieved imagination to the grief of being Black in America, Peele’s film tarries around a figurative pit: a conceptual chasm that evades the mind’s capacity to understand it, not unlike the perilous well at the centre of Get Out. Ontologically speaking, democratic subjects like Adelaide/Red must reopen the traumatic rupture between their reactionary identity markers (cohesive; coherent) and the thrilling as well as terrifying reality that, within their democratic arrangement, they must make themselves endlessly anew. As a result, these encounters with the democratic sublime might stop American democracy from settling into a deficient or dead-end version of itself.

Despite the fact that Peele’s film relentlessly references the tribal logic that undergirds Hollywood horror, from Stephen Spielberg’s Jaws to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, this tribal logic cannot endure in the face of the film’s repetition with difference. As the Wilsons drive over the horizon into the unknown in the dwindling moments of the story, something fundamental within the film’s formulaic structure has changed. What appears to be the tight-knit unity of the Wilson clan – forged in the fires of an obscene amount of violence – bears a striking resemblance to the outcome of myriad horror films. However, the film’s return to unity within a small unit is not quite the same as the regressive conclusions of the works being referenced. What glues the Wilsons together is not a compulsory destruction of monstrous Others, or a naïve return to romanticised Oneness, but a knowledge that every member of the family persists as a traumatised, incomplete being. They have viscerally killed off their shadows and in so doing revealed themselves to be utterly lacking: the One become Two. Any hope for a utopian resolution or reconciliation reveals itself to be a lost cause. For the Wilsons, the brutal enjoyment of tribal democracy (its unsavoury, inegalitarian horrors) has been replaced by a sense of belonging that doubles as a sense of estrangement, of non-belonging – its core egalitarian terror. Consider Adelaide’s enigmatic look as Jason pulls his mask back down over his face at the close of the film, or the moment in which Jason and his double sit in the closet and reach a tentative understanding because of their shared status as masked outsiders (Figure 7).

Figure 7 Jason (Evan Alex) identifies with his double Pluto as masked outsiders

Credit: Blumhouse Productions / Universal Pictures / Monkeypaw Produ / Album / Alamy Stock Photo

The Wilson tribe has been irrevocably ruptured by the realisation that its members must remain alienated from each other as well as from themselves. The defiant solidarity that congeals in the closing moments of Us is haunted, then, by what has been erased over the course of the film. To illustrate this point, the film lingers upon Red as she severs the link between herself and Adelaide, in a shot that juxtaposes her severing of the bond with an interminable series of linked figures that Red has drawn on the blackboard behind her (Figure 8).

Figure 8 This shot juxtaposes the severed bond between two stick figures with the interminable collective that sprawls across the blackboard

Credit: Blumhouse Productions / Universal Pictures / Monkeypaw Produ / Album / Alamy Stock Photo

Peele’s alternative democratic vision is precariously, and fearfully, created from the broken bonds of particular subjects, joined in their singularities to face an unknowable future. The final ‘Us’ of the Wilson clan suggests that the (impossible) promise of democratic solidarity should be based in trauma and terror rather than wholeness and horror.

Peele’s American democracy proves to be a dark romance. In part because of its structural logic as a horror film, Us remains dissatisfied with utopian resolutions and unconvinced by calls for ever more participation, more voting, more democracy. The film in turn asks what could possibly come next for America’s dysfunctional democracy. Which is more unsettling, a never-ending antagonism between groups or a blanket egalitarianism that erases differences? Particularly when one considers the perspective of disenfranchised people of colour, the dread of democracy reveals itself to be a complex conundrum. The kind of democracy that Us endorses is a distinctly Gothic one.

Far removed from idyllic eulogies to democratic decline, Us underscores how the American Gothic can contribute to ongoing fights to revamp the nation’s democratic project.Footnote ³³ As Peele’s horror film illustrates, the Gothic imaginary lends itself well to the ceaseless imperfection required of a functional democracy.Footnote ³⁴ Consider the helicopter shot of the boundless tethered: the sheer vastness of the democratic sublime compels character and spectator alike into reactionary groupings; concurrently, though, this sublime shot disrupts the conventional hierarchies that have historically constituted Hollywood horror. In dialectical fashion, the dizzying spell cast by the prospect of an unfettered, all-encompassing demos is then broken by the last-second encroachment of military helicopters, presumably sent to re-establish a white democracy with extreme prejudice. This fleeting glimpse of a Gothicised democracy – or democratised Gothic – leaves Peele’s audience appropriately unsettled. Us reveals that although democracy depends upon pleasures tied to the inegalitarian horror of demonised Others storming the gates (a particular Us), it also retains the pleasurable power of an egalitarian movement that can terrify the establishment through moments of soul-quaking alarm (a universal Us).

The soul-quaking alarm triggered by the closing moments of Us is the terror of a democracy that has never really asked its white citizens to fear losing their hold on power.Footnote ³⁵ Because all citizens are not called on to make themselves equally vulnerable in a white democracy, the experience of democracy for most white citizens has been relatively stable, comfortable, and, one might say, undemocratic. Therefore, the imagined transfer of political loss in Us, from Adelaide/Red to the spectator, serves as a meaningful corrective for a curated democracy that has not yet lived up to its own terrifying premise, in part because it has dwelt upon white grievance rather than Black grief. And American democracy might be better equipped to survive if spectators could confront, through Gothic encounters, the unexpected enjoyment that accompanies the terrors of a democratic experiment. Peele’s spectators ought to emerge from the darkened theatre having realised that they are too fearful of democracy and, at the same time, not yet fearful enough. Like the stalwart spectator that looks to the horror film for both pain and pleasure, Peele’s audience finds unexpected insights as well as delights in democracy’s most Gothic elements.