California Gothic explores the California Dream and its dark inversion
as nightmare, as illustrated in fiction, poetry, and film. California
began as a literary invention, a magic island, in a Spanish romance
before conquistadors first visited the land. From early days to the
present, the California dream of happiness in a land of new beginnings
has been maintained by suppression of disturbing realities: above all,
the destruction of native peoples; and by events and facts such as the
tragedy of the Donner Party, the persistence of poverty and crime in the
golden land, disturbing crimes such as the Black Dahlia; and pandemics
and ecological disaster.
The exposure of the Dream's dark side began early in California's
history and literature. The tragedy of the Donner Party is an emblem of
California's hope and disillusionment and is a foundational event of
California. Later, after the madness of the Gold Rush, Ambrose Bierce
and Emma Dawson explored the ghostly potential of San Francisco and its
environs. In Carmel, George Stirling's community of writers and artists
attempted a life in harmony with sea and landscape, like that of the
lost natives as they imagined them. Instead, they evoked demons that led
many to suicide. The story of the lotos eaters of Carmel anticipates the
disillusionment of the 1960s, as represented by the novels of Kem Nunn,
Thomas Pynchon, and Denis Johnson. George Stirling's friend Jack London
battled his own demons, and left, in the ruins of Wolf House, one of
California's true Gothic places.
California Gothic has interacted with the Noir tradition, a European
transplant that found rich soil in California, creating a style, mood
and subject matter in movies and the crime fiction that often provided
the films' screenplays. Often deeply Gothic, Noir produced masterpieces
such as Hitchcock's Vertigo and Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2002)
that, like most of the works discussed in California Gothic, speak to
America and the world at large, while being deeply rooted in the culture
and history of the Golden State.
