Coffeehouse #3 (Jia Ning response)

When reading Alan Lloyd Smith on American Gothic, several important ideas was shown in the text and these were the five most important ideas to me when I was reading.

#1. What led to American Gothic was the frontier experience of inherent solitude, potential violence, fear of European subversion, and anxieties about democracy which was new during its time, and the absence of a developed society racial issue concerning both slavery and Native Americans. (Page 4)

#2.  Gothic deals in transgressions and negativity, perhaps in reaction against the optimistic rationalism of its founding era. (Page 5)

#3. Gothic explores and tackles taboos such as religious profanities, demonism, occultism, necromancy, and incest. (Page 6)

#4. Gothic deals with extreme states of past traumas and guilt. (page 6-7)

#5. Gothic exposes the landscape of nature. In time these tropes of atmosphere, architecture, and landscape can become metaphorical to the Gothic setting. (Page 7)