The history of the gothic as a counter-Enlightenment discourse, albeit an ambivalent one, suggests the suitability, if not the inevitability, of the gothic portrayal of education and educators. Previously, I have designated representations of teachers, students and academic institutions that rely on gothic tropes such as the monster, the curse and the trap as ‘Schoolhouse Gothic’ (Truffin 2008). This genre includes imaginative works as diverse as Edgar Allan Poe's ‘William Wilson’ (1839); Flannery O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Away (1960); Stephen King's Carrie (1974), The Shining (1977), Rage (1977) and ‘Suffer the Little Children’ (1972); Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), David Mamet's Oleanna (1992), and Donna Tartt's The Secret History (1992). It also includes non-fiction representations of schools and schooling by figures such as Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Henry Giroux and others. Works in this mode examine schooling in relationship to such central gothic preoccupations as the tyranny of history, the terrors of physical or mental confinement, reification,and miscreation. Considered together, they suggest that schools are haunted or cursed by persistent power inequities (of race, gender, class) and, ironically, by the Enlightenment itself, which was to rescue Western civilization from the darkness of the past but which had a dark side of its own, born of its compulsion to dissect, define and dominate nature and humanity alike.

No stranger to the gothic, Joyce Carol Oates has returned more than once to the school as a source and scene of horror in novels like Zombie (1995) and Beasts (2002), which use zombification and consumption as metaphors for the effects of formal education (Truffin 2013b). The Accursed, published in 2013 but conceived and partially drafted in the 1980s (shortly after Oates began teaching at Princeton), both exemplifies and diverges from the Schoolhouse Gothic. Like other works in this mode, The Accursed portrays the university as a place of mystified power, physical isolation, social stress and emotional disintegration.

Unlike these works, however, school does not leave its primary studentfigure, Josiah Slade, permanently damaged, vengeful and monstrous. Josiah's most significant literary ancestor is fellow Ivy League student Quentin Compson of William Faulkner's The Sound the Fury (1929) and Absalom, Absalom (1936), and neither character experiences physical or psychological abuse at the hands of his professors, nor victimizes others in retaliation.