The Gothic: Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho
Harry Goodwin Year 12
ret Easton Ellis wrote his novel American Psycho at the height of post- Reagan consumerism in New York: in it, he adapts classic Gothic tropes to explore the alienating effects of ultra-capitalist ‘yuppie’ culture on the individual within American society. These tropes include the use of setting to replicate the narrator’s joylessness and lethargy, the structural juxtaposition of banality and violence and deliberate blurring of boundaries between man and nature. Although Ellis’s novel makes unique use of the economic and cultural context in which it was written, his use of classic Gothic conventions is in accordance with a literary tradition dating back to the 1760s. Ellis ‘Gothicises’ his story by setting it in an environment which is representative of the psychological corrosion of the individual by the ‘Greed is Good’ philosophy of post-Reagan New York and of the flimsiness of man’s grip over nature. The narrator finds himself in Central Park Zoo, a place where man flaunts his power over nature for financial reward; yet, later on, the narrator observes that ‘the zoo seems empty, devoid of life’, just like his soul. The paradoxical nature of this observation – we would expect a zoo to be positively teeming with life – implies that the narrator’s experience of New York as a whole is underpinned by a paradox: that of a society which preaches unalloyed individualism whilst alienating and atomising the individual at every available opportunity. The narrator goes on to note a sign by the seal’s tank warning ‘COINS CAN KILL… DO NOT THROW COINS IN THE POOL.’ The narrator responds by ‘toss[ing] and handful of change into the tank when none of the zookeepers are watching.’ This underscores not only the intensity of the narrator’s desire to become a moral transgressor – which mirrors similarly deranged characters from across the Gothic canon including Jacques in Emile Zola’s La Bête Humaine – but also the amorality of American consumerism. Like all the members of the ‘yuppie’ class he represents, the narrator needlessly lavishes his money upon things which he knows to be wrong. Yet like Jacques the narrator commits his transgression not because it is a means to a hedonistic end, but because the act of transgression is enjoyable in and of itself. The aura of decadence and depravity around high consumerism, Ellis seems to be implying, only adds to its allure. Ellis also uses structural juxtaposition between the banality of everyday existence in New York and the subversion of societal norms through the violence by the narrator. For instance, at the start of the extract narrator informs us that ‘I feel aimless, things look cloudy, my homicidal compulsion, which surfaces, disappears, surfaces again, leaves again, lies barely dormant during a quiet lunch at Alex Goes to Camp.’ The narrator’s ‘aimless’ sentiments reflects his lack of a coherent moral purpose in a society which has abandoned any commitment to the common good. That things look ‘cloudy’ implies that the narrator is in a liminal state: like a turgid storm-cloud, he is on the verge of but not yet capable of unleashing his destructive power on the ordinary mortals beneath him. What is most significant, however, is the juxtaposition, softened by a succession of superfluous clauses, of ‘my homicidal compulsion’ and ‘a quiet lunch.’ The deliberate softening of this contrast between evil and banality is indicative of the extent to which American society has become desensitised to violence and the narcissistic quenching of amoral desires by the rich and influential. Similarly, in Bram Stoker’s fin-de-siècle novel Dracula , the cardinal B
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