Everyday Gothic and Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys

Abstract

In drawing on the Gothic to represent the trauma of Black life under Jim Crow in The Nickel Boys (2019), Colson Whitehead contends with the Gothic tendency to present history’s horrors as literary effects—a tendency on display in Victor Séjour’s “The Mulatto,” the first known work of fiction published by an African American author. Binding the Gothic to realism, Whitehead resists this tendency and shows how the very ordinariness of suffering can amplify its Gothic intensity. Contrasting the discourse of the realist bildungsroman with that of the Gothic neo–slave narrative, Whitehead ultimately collapses them together, anchoring horror in the world of everyday experience, while also articulating a precarious, mobile form of Gothic personhood adapted to the challenges of balancing survival with self-validation.