Biel begins the book by relating his experience visiting the “American Gothic House” in Eldon, Iowa. He describes the unique dissonance modern Americans sense in the presence of something they have been “taught” to see through a media lens, a sensation that is amplified by tourist conventions (e.g., guide materials, signs, or plaques that explicitly frame or channel one’s experience). I was reminded of James Loewen’s compelling work, especially his iconoclastic Lies Across America, in which he deconstructs the narratives offered by memorials and historical sites. The “most photographed barn in America” segment of Don DeLillo’s White Noise also came to mind, and Biel himself dwells on this example himself later in the chapter. Along similar lines, Walker Percy’s essay “The Loss of the Creature” investigates how mass media affects our visceral experience with the physical world. Bearing certain expectations based upon what we’ve seen second-hand (and how we’ve been taught to see), our first-hand sensory experiences (of famous places, for example) are filtered, pre-defined, and distorted.
Biel calls the house painted by Wood the “original,” with quotations, and he takes a kind of deconstructionist approach to seeing it for the first time, remarking on what is likely a disconcerting echoing effect. I’ve felt something similar on encountering a famous thing or person made famous through images. Later in the chapter he records the utterances of visitors to the actual painting in the Art Institute of Chicago. These comments (“This is a very famous painting,” “Isn’t it funny to actually see it?” 41) remark primarily on the phenomenon of the work rather than the thing itself. Biel concludes the chapter with questions that are similar to my own: what does the painting mean, and what has is meant? If it is a storytelling picture, “what stories has it told and to whom?” (44).
Other points of interest in the first chapter:
- There is some speculation that Wood was legitimately interested in the house (which he saw on a drive through town) for its “emphatic design,” though others feel he found it an absurd and pretentious imitation of Old World styles (22)
- Wood’s original sketch featured a rake in place of the fork (22-23)
- Wood drew from earlier “visual cliches” in posing his figures, notably a tradition of pioneers and homesteaders posing stiffly before their very modest homes. This possibly lends more credence to a more ironic interpretation of the painting (24-25)
- Biel mentions the brief notoriety that Roseanne and Tom Arnold brought to Eldon in the early 1990s with their plans (eventually scrapped) to build a mansion in the vicinity (33-34). The Arnolds, of course, created their own version of the painting (below)
- The “realness” of the figures Wood depicted–the idea that they are meant to represent certain people–has been assumed from the earliest of critics (who called the work a “comic valentine”). This assumption may be important to understanding its resonance for so many (42-44).
Roseanne and Tom Arnold
Gothic Thoughts 
