“Creeping, Damp Souls of . . . This North”: Minnesota Gothic and Indigenous Erasure in “The Ice Palace”

Abstract F. Scott Fitzgerald is seldom seen as an author of gothic works. Nor is Minnesota, his home state and the setting of some of his works, typically seen as gothic. Yet, as this article shows, Fitzgerald’s Minnesota story “The Ice Palace” (1920) is an example of a provincial gothic tale, where gothic conventions are employed to reveal regional pathology. The story examines the culture, the history—particularly, the fraught relationships between “white” explorers and settlers and Indigenous (more specifically, Dakota) people and immigrants—and the legendary frigid climate of Minnesota, revealing this place as haunted, repressing uncomfortable truths about itself, and thus just as gothic as the more obviously gothic South. In particular, the labyrinth in the titular ice palace, based on an edifice at St. Paul’s Winter Carnival, is pictured in the story as a repository of repressed elements of the culture. Historical research and textual analysis are used in this article to examine Fitzgerald’s use of conventions such as ghosts and zombies, haunted houses, damsels in distress and evil villains, labyrinths, and the unheimlich (“unhomelike”), along with elements from frontier, imperial, and carnival gothics, to comment subtly on such matters as racism, attitudes toward immigrants, and colonial conquest.