It has become a critical truism to say that the gothic as a literary form is inextricable from the institution of slavery, especially, but not solely, in the United States. Violence (physical, spiritual, sexual, cultural); the grotesque; otherness; incarceration; living death; and the arbitrary exercise of power: these are both literary devices of the gothic and the material practices of various forms of social oppression, from the transatlantic and American slave trade, to current practices of mass imprisonment, to the patriarchy, to heteronormativity, to capitalism and its wider divisions of populations. Slavery in the US, however, does stand apart, because it was the debate over slavery that nearly kept the nation from forming as such, and which later sundered the US into two warring nations. The historical congruence of the rise of classic nineteenth-century American gothic and the institution of slavery, when read next to the relation of generic conventions to material practices of slavery, may indicate a causal relationship (in which slavery is the base of the American gothic superstructure). But, more generally, when combined with the long-standing connections between the gothic mode and American literature, film and other cultural forms, it appears not only that American culture is gothic throughout, as Fiedler hinted (Fiedler 1966: 29), but also that large swathes of it are defined by the mutual mediations of the gothic and slavery. In this reading, the gothic relies on metaphors and depictions of slavery just as abolitionist and pro-slavery cultural forms rely on gothic aesthetics and devices: ‘slavery's Gothic history and the Atlantic world's Gothic fictions’, as Teresa A. Goddu writes, are ‘mutually constituted’ (Goddu 2013: 72).