New England Gothic

“Poor dull Concord. Nothing colorful has come through here since the Redcoats.” ― Louisa May Alcott

Other names

"Northern Gothic"

Decade of origin

1835

Creator/s

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Key motifs

The Puritans, the Salem Witch Trials, witchcraft, the occult, old graveyards, colonial-era architecture, run-down harbor towns and mill towns.

Key colours

Gray, white, black, yellows, oranges, reds, Sadd colors

Key values

Anti-Calvinism and anti-Puritanism, anti-colonialism, isolation, terrible knowledge, opposition to religious fanaticism, predestination, reticence, dryness.

Related aesthetics

Dark Naturalism
Dark Nautical
Gothic
Midwest Gothic
New England
Regional Gothic
Romanticism
Southern Gothic

This article is part of a series on Regional Gothic

New England Gothic revolves around strange and sinister secrets and occurrences in the New England region of the United States. It typically draws upon local history, folklore, imagery, and values, often relating to Protestantism and the region's colonial period. It commonly features the supernatural, such as witches, ghosts, demons, the Devil, and other strange entities.

Like other Regional Gothic aesthetics, its popularity resurged during the mid 2010s, with added aspects of liminal space and specifically formatted text posts, but it has origins in Dark Romantic literature of the early 19th century.

History and Development[]

“Shall we never never get rid of this Past? ... It lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

Literature[]

New England Gothic got a start as a literary tradition. The earliest known work of fiction containing ideas and imagery now associated with New England Gothic is “The Devil and Tom Walker” by Washington Irving (of "Sleepy Hollow" fame) first published in 1824, and is regarded as New England's Faust. In about the year 1727, the titular Tom Walker is met in a wooded swamp at the remains of an Indian fort by Old Scratch, who, taking a liking to Tom, offers to reveal to him the nearby buried treasure of Captain Kidd, under certain conditions. Though satirical in nature and now obscure, it and its author should not be disregarded, as Irving is said to have encouraged the likes of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allen Poe. ^[1]

Another important work to New England Gothic is Rachel Dyer: A North American Story by John Dean, published in 1828. It centers on a fictional victim Rachel Dyer and George Burroughs, while following the trials of accused witches in court. Though it is also obscure and was overshadowed by its dialectal writing, it is the first bound novel about the Salem Witch Trials, and it is held to be John Dean's most successful work of literature. It was ambitious in its scope, addressing issues from sexual frustration to the abuse of the Native Americans by the Puritans. Like "The Devil and Tom Walker," it is believed to have influenced Nathaniel Hawthorne among other important authors. ^[2]

Hawthorne is the one credited with the creation of New England Gothic with his fiction, ^[3] starting with “Young Goodman Brown” in 1835. Set in 17th Century Puritan New England, the titular Goodman Brown leaves his wife at home on a trip through the forest which takes a turn down a gloomy path of scrutiny and failing faith. Hawthorne was troubled by and ashamed of his great-great-grandfather, John Hathorne, an instrumental judge in the Salem Witch Trials who never repented for his actions, and this shadow over Hawthorne is apparent throughout his works.

Hawthorne and Poe would, through their works, influence possibly the most well-recognized New England Gothic author, H.P. Lovecraft, ^[4] whose foray into New England Gothic is “The Terrible Old Man,” first published in 1921. Set in a fictional seaside Massachusetts town, it centers around an attempted burglary of the very old house of a local resident "so old that no one can remember when he was young," who, among other strange facts, is thought to have been a clipper ship's captain, and keeps stones with odd symbols on them on his property. Lovecraft sought to break the Gothic molds of his time, and pioneered cosmic horror, fueled by his deep-seated xenophobia and using his native New England as a setting almost all the while. Through Lovecraft, New England Gothic became intertwined with cosmic horror, the fear of the Other, and the Weird, and other pulp writers - with his encouragement - borrowed from his works to produce New England Gothic tales in similarly weird veins. Such writers include August Derleth, Henry Kuttner, and even Robert Bloch (who would go on to pen Psycho.)

Another important though understated figure in New England Gothic’s development in literature is Shirley Jackson, starting with her controversial short story “The Lottery” in 1948, which depicts a brutal ritual in a contemporary small-town American community. Though she was born and raised in California, Jackson eventually moved East. Her new home in North Bennington, Vermont, served as a recurrent backdrop for her Gothic stories, while the abuse she suffered, from her parents even after moving out and from her husband in marriage, as well as her ostracism from the surrounding community, ^[5] undoubtedly informed their substance.

The works of Lovecraft and Jackson would go on to influence none other than Stephen King, ^[6] ^[7] who has been spawning New England Gothic tales of his own at least since his debut novel Carrie, released in April of 1974. Carrie tells the story of Carrie White, a friendless teenage girl bullied by schoolmates and abused by a domineering and overly religious mother in a Maine village, who discovers that she has telekinetic powers. In her efforts to fit in, she suffers humiliation in front of everyone at the school prom, driving her to terrible violence. In contrast to Lovecraft exploring external fears with verbosity, King explores internal fears and the human side of horror with casual prose and complex characters, almost always in a rich setting in his native Maine.

Film and Television[]

With the advent of film, New England Gothic began being depicted through a different medium. It has been on screen since at least 1910, with the premier of The House of the Seven Gables, directed by J. Searle Dawley and starring Mary Fuller. ^[8]

Music[]

New England Gothic is noticeably lacking in music compared to other Regional Gothics, and New England's music tradition in general, with the possible exception of a repertoire of shanties and sea ballads, is small and limited compared to the South and the West. This is probably a symptom of the notions of the "practical" Yankee and the Puritan before them, as both devoted little time to the arts.

Food[]

Food associated with New England Gothic is largely the same as that associated with the New England aesthetic. Simple, inexpensive dishes are favorable to the aesthetic. Seafood-based dishes may evoke New England's coast and the weirdness of the sea.

Social Media[]

When the Regional Gothic Trend took off on Tumblr in early 2015, it produced specimens set in New England, albeit based on Southern Gothic clichés, effectively breathing new life into the aesthetic, but approaching it from a different angle.

Criticism[]

Though influential on New England Gothic and horror in general, the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft is criticized for the racist ideas recurrent throughout it. There is no getting around that Lovecraft was a white supremacist, and his racist views are inseparable from his writing, but understanding this is important to understanding the power of his work.

Media[]

"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality..."
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

Literature[]

"The Devil and Tom Walker" by Washington Irving
Rachel Dyer: A North American Story by John Dean
Several of Nathaniel Hawthorne's works, such as "Young Goodman Brown," "The Minister's Black Veil," The Scarlet Letter, and The House of the Seven Gables.
"The Black Dog" by W.H.C. Pynchon.
Many of H.P. Lovecraft's works, such as "The Shunned House," The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The Dunwich Horror, The Shadow over Innsmouth, "The Dreams in the Witch House" and "The Horror in the Burying-Ground" with Hazel Heald.
"The Graveyard Rats" and "The Salem Horror" by Henry Kuttner
Several of Shirley Jackson's works, such as "The Lottery," The Haunting of Hill House, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle
The Crucible by Arthur Miller
The Peyton Place series by Grace Metalious
Harvest Home by Thomas Tryon
Many of Stephen King's works, such as Carrie, 'Salem's Lot, Pet Sematary, It, and Dolores Claiborne
The Witches of Eastwick duology by John Updike
Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman
The Weight of Water by Anita Shreve
Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane
Many of the works of Steve Burt, including most of those collected in New England - Seaside, Roadside, Graveside, Darkside.
The Hopeless, Maine series by Tom and Nimue Brown
Spooky New England by S.E. Schlosser
The Northern Reach by W.S. Winslow

Cookbooks[]

Castle Rock Kitchen by Theresa Carle-Sanders

Film[]

(Film adaptations of New England Gothic novels and short stories are not counted here. Many films here (especially those from the 1980s) are mostly horror that possess gothic elements and are adapted to a New England setting, or relate to the Salem Witch Trials in some way.)

Maid of Salem (1937)
The Spiral Staircase (1946) *
The Trouble with Harry (1955)
Tormented (1960)
The City of the Dead (1962)
The Curse of the Living Corpse (1969)
Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971)
The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976)
Superstition (1982)
The Devonsville Terror (1983)
Witchery (1988)
Warlock (1989)
Hocus Pocus (1993)
In the Mouth of Madness (1994)
Scooby-Doo and the Witch's Ghost (1999)
What Lies Beneath (2000)
Session 9 (2001)
The Haunting in Connecticut (2009)
YellowBrickRoad (2010)
The Innkeepers (2011)
Para-Norman (2012)
The Conjuring (2013)
The Witch (2015)
The Lighthouse (2018)
Fear Street trilogy (2021)
Blow the Man Down (2022)

*Fascinatingly, while the novel the film is based on (Some Must Watch by Ethel Lina White) is set in then-contemporary England, the film adaptation is instead set in turn-of-the-century New England, in order to "give it a more threatening gothic atmosphere."^[9]