Prophet-Freaks: A Tocquevillian Consideration of the Grotesque in American Literature as Pathology and Remedy

After Pilgrim John has been tormented by a curse that causes him to see through skin to the “working of his own innards” in C. S. Lewis’ The Pilgrim’s Regress, he mistakenly believes that the real man is found in “the brains and the passages of the nose… and the saliva moving down the glands and the blood in the veins… and the intestines like a coil of snakes.” John believes that the skin, because it neatly conceals this graphic reality, is “only a veil for the bad.” His guide corrects him, asserting that the skin does not hide reality but rather forms an essential part of it. John retorts that if he cut a man open he would find this gruesome reality, to which the guide replies, “‘A man cut open is, so far, not a man: and if you did not sew him up speedily you would be seeing not organs, but death.’”

Much of American literature appears to fixate on the death, the organs, and the gruesome innards of man, as well as his darkest passions. The “fascination with the abomination” compels American authors and their readers. In literary theory, the ‘grotesque’ refers to that which elicits both empathy and disgust; often, characters with broken bodies, broken minds, or broken souls populate the literature of the grotesque. From Edgar Allen Poe’s raven to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘Roger Chillingworth,’ William Faulkner’s ‘Emily’ to Flannery O’Connor’s ‘the Misfit’ and her ‘Hazel Motes,’ the horrors abound throughout American literary history.

Whence arises the American literature of the grotesque, and has it any redemptive qualities?

Through the lenses of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and Flannery O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners, this paper explores the ways in which the transition from an aristocratic age to a democratic age, as outlined by Tocqueville, drives American authors to the grotesque. In addition, it considers whether the grotesque constitutes a symptom of pathology or a small remedy for some of the diseases to which Tocqueville claims the democratic soul and democratic society are susceptible.

This paper concludes by applying the effectual potential of the literature of the grotesque to the wounds inflicted by slavery upon the American South.