What is goth? It’s an often-irritating question, stubborn in its resistance to a decisive answer. Worthy of deconstruction, goth is a culture with identity but not necessarily definition.

There is the school that, not unreasonably, sees goth as little more than a particular co-mingling of fashion and music; an aesthetic. They invoke the deities – Bauhaus, of course, Siouxsie, and others – and point to fans’ desire to make a badge of their musical affinities. Yet aesthetics alone don’t quite explain goth’s longevity as a culture, it’s ability to ebb and flow beyond mainstream trends, it’s capacity to recover from neglect. Cue the school that views goth as a manifestation of personality, of perspective, of – dare I say it? – morbid outlook. An appreciation for sorrow and death, the so-called “dark” aspects of life – defining features of a mindset possessed by the few and not the mainstream. But which of these is correct, or is it even a question of either/or? Into the fray comes the unlikely voice of Eric G. Wilson, an English professor at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and author of Against Happiness.

“Surely all this happiness can’t be for real,” he writes. “How can so many people be so happy in the midst of all the problems that beset our globe – not only the collective and apocalyptic ills... but also those particular irritations that bedevil our everyday existences, those money issues and marital spats, those stifling vocations and lonely dawns?” A valid question, though one might wonder if the book’s title, Against Happiness, isn’t a bit needlessly provocative. After all, don’t we all want to be happy in our lives? Isn’t happiness a good thing? The subtitle is far better: In Defense of Melancholy.

Happiness has a particular, and generally sensible, meaning for Wilson: “I’m right now thinking only about this specific type of American happiness. I’m not questioning joy in general.” It is the fake happiness of consumerism, of the paradoxical alienation that comes from technology that can bring people (virtually) together while simultaneously keeping them (actually) apart. It is the happiness that can’t withstand the merest sign of discontent, lest it vanish. It is the inability to acknowledge the world’s profound troubles. Wilson is critical of a quest for happiness that deprives us of what he theatrically describes as “life’s vital rhythms” and the “way to earthly heaven.” In other words, the quest for an artificial happiness denies life its very power, even its meaning.

To make his case, Wilson draws on the life stories of several artistic figures – Melville, Coleridge, Keats, Beethoven, John Lennon, and others. One might suspect him of hiding behind these illustrious names in an effort to avoid sharing any personal, autobiographical details. Or perhaps he feels that drawing on these tortured artists lends his arguments more weight than if he described his own intimate melancholy. But the point remains the same and is well taken: “Feeling, in our nerves, this finitude, we enjoy, perhaps for the first time, beauty. Death like a slow-burning fire is consuming our very hearts. We sense its vital force consuming our ventricles and our aortas, illuminating them, stimulating them, even as it eats away at them. Every single beat becomes to us a miracle, one more stay against the final thump before the silence.” So there it is: death, beauty, delicious irony. Wilson expresses what many goths feel in their bones, namely, the tremendous power of sorrow to fuel creativity and inspire art.

Yet Wilson is not charitable towards goths despite sharing similar sensibilities. He steps into “what is goth?” waters with a challenge: “...these same citizens understand that we have a dark side, a side attuned to mulling over moons alone, they want us to stay safely in that quarter, to group with those few Americans who have embraced melancholia. They want us to sidle up close to those Emos or those Goths, those Grungers or those Satanists, small hordes making sadness their pastime.” Puffing out his chest, oblivious to the stereotypes and ignorance he’s peddling, he goes for the extremes. The “happy” and the “sad” types, in his view, miss out on the rich limbo in between. “These sad-types – those black-clad poseurs who identify only with the darkness – choose sulleness as one picks a religion or a hair cut. Like their brighter opponents, these self-consciously depressed denizens cut half of life away.”

Wilson does have a point about the value of that grey limbo, of appreciating the ambiguities and the imperfections that give life it’s character. And while his distinction between happiness and joy/ecstasy, the latter of which is achievable through melancholy, is too undeveloped to be convincing, it is intriguing. But he’s awfully smug in criticizing happy types. “Indeed, these folks – almost all of them happy types – can’t really perceive beauty at all. All that they see is their expectation of the picture-perfect shot, pretty and presentable.” In what might very well be the first documented case of a gother-than-thou attitude in a non-goth, Wilson ultimately doesn’t quite know when to let go of raising melancholy up on high and simply letting people feel what they feel. Ironically, he comes across as one of those poseurs who identify only with melancholy, cutting off the joyfulness life also possesses – the very joyfulness he earlier claims not to be arguing against.

Wilson’s smugness, along with a tendency for overwhelming genuine eloquence with deep purple prose, makes Against Happiness an alternatively moving and frustrating blend of strong polemic and overbaked melodrama. Despite this, the book does take a meaningful step towards giving melancholy its proper due. It has value to those of us looking to reject the perception of goth as mere appearance. When we consider, then, how goth has come to encompass music, painting, writing, fashion – art, in other words – a view of goth beyond appearance presents itself quite naturally. It will always be subject to debate, of course, but perhaps we can say this: goth is an art movement and melancholy is its manifesto.