Get In and Get Out: White Racial Transformation and the US Gothic Imagination

Abstract

This article examines the Gothic trope of White racial transformation in Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee (1836) and Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017). These seemingly disparate texts both feature White men who turn Black via supernatural body hopping or experimental surgery. In these texts, Blackness acts as an emotional and material resource for White characters that perversely bolsters Whiteness by escaping it. Little-known outside of antebellum specialisms, Sheppard Lee enhances our understanding of race in the Gothic by considering why Whiteness may be rejected in the early nation. Written in the context of blackface minstrelsy, the novel transforms downwardly mobile Sheppard into an enslaved man as a respite from the pressures of economic success. Get Out builds on its nineteenth-century precursors by showing the Black body as a desired and necessary vessel for the “post-racial” White American self, who swaps their physical Whiteness for Blackness to extend or enhance their own life, turning Black men into extensions and enforcers of White middle-class culture. In uniting these texts through the lens of critical Whiteness studies, this article argues that White racial transformation is a long-held tradition in the US Gothic that not only expresses White desires and anxieties, but itself transforms in each specific historical racial context.