Chapter 2 of Biel’s American Gothic, titled “Iconoclasm,” investigates the social forces at work in the years surrounding 1930 and the painting’s inception.
Some notes and comments:
- The painting was originally (and wrongly) captioned as An Iowa Farmer and His Wife. Wood’s comments about the nature of the figures depicted is conflicting. He refers to them as townsfolk in some accounts, and as farm-dwellers in others.
- Biel reports on Wood’s connection to an artistic sensibility of the time that called into question conventional midwestern (and by extension, American) values. Inspired by the social critique of writers such as H. L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis, a cadre of bohemian artists sought to identify and satirize prevailing mores (the Philistinism of Babbittry, the Puritanism of joyless superstition, and the Pioneerism of ceaseless drudgery) and, in their various visions of alternatives and rebellions, dwelt upon the deeper social tensions of the time. Again, Wood is hard to pin down here. While he aligned himself with this movement, he also made public gestures that seemed to support traditional values.
- Cultural tensions–caused by the shift away from Puritan thrift and Victorian codes to the values of a nascent, youth-driven consumer culture–characterized the time period. Essentially, this era marks the beginning of suburbia, which, as Robert Beuka details in SuburbiaNation, is much more than a locale, but a mindscape, a representational space, a conflicted zone of competing values.
- Part of the irony of the painting is that its implied depiction of the American Everyman’s suspicion of art has resulted in its own artistic fame.
- Through the course of Biel’s analysis of the social milieu of the time he touches upon a variety of ways to read the painting. I’ve been reading simultaneously Sheridan Blau’s The Literature Workshop, which offers specific strategies by which students can arrive at self-generated interpretations of texts from which conventional theoretical frames emerge. That is, rather than a top-down “lens” brought to the text, they build from a series of close and personal readings to create a cohesive way of seeing that is then connected (possibly) to existing theoretical perspectives. At any rate, the following ways of seeing the painting are mentioned or described in the chapter:
- as a realistic depiction
- as an exercise in form or aesthetics
- as insight into the biography of the artist
- as psychological insight into the artist (or the artist’s family)
- as a gender or class commentary
- as a playful twist on/questioning of genre and definition
- a comment on the political relationship of art to society
- as an cultural example of a contemporary bohemian counterculture
- as a cultural symbol of changing and conflicting norms
Gothic Thoughts 