American Gothic

Characteristics of the 19th-Century American Gothic: 

"Without a feudal past and those relics so convenient for the European Gothicist, castles and monasteries and legends, the American landscape seemed an unlikely place for such fictions. Yet four indigenous features were to prove decisive in producing a powerful and long-lasting American variant of the Gothic: the frontier, the Puritan legacy, race, and political utopianism." (109) 

In Gothic sensationalism "there is a dark impulse beyond understanding which wreaks havoc, operating in complete contradiction to the normative assumption of the early United States polity, that individuals will always seek to act in their own best interests (and therefore can be trusted with democratic self-government and capitalist enterprise." (114-115) 

"The shadow of patriarchy, slavery and racism, as of Puritan extremes of the imagination and the political horror of a failed utopianism, fall across these works of American Gothic and direct its shape towards a concern with social and political issues as well as towards an agonised introspection concerning the evil that lies within the self." (120) 

-- Allan Lloyd-Smith, from "Nineteenth-Century American Gothic" in the Blackwell Companion to the Gothic.