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“Art is a wound turned to light.” — Georges Braque, via Bret Hart

“God save us from reading nothing but the best.” — Robertson Davies

Under the Mat

On April 14, 2026, Diana Hart took to Instagram to air out something that had been weighing on her mind for many years. ‘Bret does not present his statements as opinions; he states them as facts. That distinction matters, because many of his claims […] are simply not true.’^[1]

A ghost from the past intruding on the present. In his 2007 memoir Hitman: My Real Life in the Cartoon World of Wrestling, her brother Bret Hart claims that, at rehearsal for their SummerSlam ‘92 match, Diana Hart’s late ex-husband Davey Boy Smith, d.b.a. The British Bulldog, confided in him that, while nursing a knee injury at home in Florida, he had been smoking crack cocaine non-stop for weeks with their mutual brother-in-law Jim Neidhart, d.b.a. The Anvil.^[2] This leads to an anecdote about having to call the match live and carry the Bulldog to a decent performance in front of eighty thousand fans at Wembley Stadium, during which Smith is reported to have said that legendary utterance, ‘Bret, I’m fooked.’^[3]

Diana Hart proceeded to quite literally bring the receipts, posting hospital bills, medical records and other evidentiary material that she felt proved Bret had made a distortion of the material facts about Davey in his memoir almost 20 years ago. ‘Confabulation,’ she concluded, ‘But Davey doesn’t need to be collateral damage from Bret’s stroke… seems Davey’s become a victim of a stroke victim.’^[4]

Let’s talk about 2001’s Under the Mat by Diana Hart. Like Frankenstein or The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Diana Hart is telling a story about an encounter with a monster. And like many of the classics of Gothic horror that came before it, Under the Mat was met on release with shock and scandal. In fact, you can’t find Under the Mat in print anywhere because it was withdrawn — not retracted — shortly after release. It was withdrawn because Martha Hart sued her.

In Roger Luckhurst’s The Trauma Question he observes that ‘generations of famous families “touched by tragedy” develop a peculiar glow of overdetermined trauma that sustains an ambivalent attraction and repulsion.’^[5] This phenomenon is well known in pro wrestling — perhaps best typified by the Von Erichs of Iron Claw fame, who all died but for one. The Hart family, too, is surrounded, perhaps even characterized, by trauma and tragedy. Diana Hart set out to document her account of these tragedies in her book.

Diana Hart is one of the twelve children of Stu Hart, Canadian wrestling luminary, and his wife Helen.^[6] Most of the boys became wrestlers; all of the daughters married wrestlers. As such, they were all struck by the thousand natural shocks of the wrestling business — drugs, devil worship, premature death. The more famous of the brothers, Bret Hart, suffered a career-ending concussion in 2000. Owen Hart, husband of Martha, the other brother who made it to the WWF, died on the job in a stunt gone wrong in 1999 at the age of 34. Davey Boy Smith’s wrestling career was largely over at the time of the book’s writing, drug abuse having irreparably damaged his body. Diana Hart was moved to write by witnessing all of this. ‘Parts of this book may not make everyone in the wrestling world happy but it’s high time someone who’s paid her dues, sings the blues,’^[7] concludes a brief foreword questionably attributed to Stu Hart.

‘The book is filled with distortions, misstatements and unjustified slurs that attempt to destroy the reputation of my family and me, and undermine the memory of Owen,’ Martha told the Calgary Herald in a statement at the time, further alleging that the book was riddled with ‘significant factual errors, unsubstantiated allegations and misleading statements.’ Kirstie McLellan, the book’s co-author replied that ‘everything written in the book is true’ and that Diana Hart was ‘a person of great integrity and remarkable memory.’^[8] Diana replied in the Herald days later that she would ‘stand by [her] book and let the courts decide,’ saying ‘I felt I had a right to finally have my say.’^[9] By the time the year 2002 came around, Under the Mat was withdrawn by the publisher after settling out of court. McLellan told the Herald that ‘a withdrawal notice is not the same as a retraction. A retraction admits there’s a mistake, [and] a withdrawal notice says you can send back unsold copies if you wish.’ A payment was also made by the publisher to the Owen Hart Foundation.^[10] But the imbroglio caused by Under the Mat had raised enough attention that other books followed. That year, Martha got to work on her own book, Broken Harts, to get her own side of the story out, and Martha Erb wrote her own book on the life of Stu Hart, Stu Hart: Lord of the Ring.

Kirstie McLellan was the Calgary Herald’s entertainment columnist when she wrote Under the Mat; that same year, she also wrote a true-crime book about a double murder of two children in Calgary, No Remorse: A Father’s Murderous Rage. She later went on to co-write another autobiography, Theo Fleury’s Playing With Fire in which he exposed his abuse at the hands of his coach. The book became a national bestseller and kick-started the second act of Fleury’s career as a country singer and right-wing podcaster. For her part, McLellan has followed up her big hit with many more collaborations with hockey memoirists.

It’s easy to dismiss Under the Mat based on its reputation as lurid, sleazy and badly written. You can save a lot of time that way. If you’re really stupid, you can do a lengthy exegesis on the Gothic horrors embedded in the text. Look here, I’ve placed a blue post-it note to flag up every instance of Gothic horror that shows up in this book: haunted houses, devil worship, death and degradation and suicide… taken together, the image becomes clear: Diana Hart is the woman running away from the ramshackle manor on a windswept moor.

With all of that in mind, pain is at the center of Under the Mat. It’s a memoir of trauma. From the very first page, Diana Hart talks about being raped and beaten by her husband. She talks about the history of mental illness and suicide in her family. She describes her nephew succumbing to flesh-eating bacteria with blood pouring out of his mouth as he dies. A woman is speaking about what she’s seen and experienced and suffered.

But to describe it like that doesn’t really explain what it’s like to read Under the Mat, which I found to be a disorientating experience. ‘I’m so dumb I didn’t know it was abuse,’ Diana Hart begins as she talks about drug-induced rape by her crack-addicted husband. She goes on to describe being literally, physically suplexed by him on the front lawn of that old Gothic manor, the Hart House. She knows this is not a normal experience. ‘But then I come from a long line of anything but normal,’ she explains. ‘How many kids can count Andre the Giant as one of their babysitters?’^[11]

It’s tonal whiplash; from confessing the unspeakable to casual, conversational name-dropping. And it’s one of the reasons that Under the Mat is such a frustrating text to deal with, and why so many readers and critics remain stupefied by the experience.

Under the Mat came out while publishing was already deep in the throes of what we now call the ‘memoir boom.’ Leigh Gilmore describes it thusly, in 1996:

“as the Dow soared high in a climate of speculation […] publishers expanded their lists to include memoir, more first books were marketed as memoir, and […] new English language volumes categorized as ‘autobiography or memoir’ roughly tripled […] to over 4000 between 1990 and 1996. […] While the economic boom has been characterized by unparalleled optimism, the memoir boom’s defining subject has been trauma.”^[12]

The weepiness of BookTok is well known to us now, and we’ve seen many scandals of misrepresentation in memoir come and go in the intervening years, but in 2001, James Frey hadn’t even been scolded on Oprah’s couch yet. No, Diana Hart was not the first or only person in history to play fast and loose with the facts of her own life, nor to be called to account for it.

In the years since the publication of Under the Mat’s publication, Diana Hart has distanced herself from her book. By the time she published her second book in 2016 she was ready to put it fully behind her as she told the Calgary Herald ‘it was an unsuccessful book. […] It isn’t something that I ever want to go through again.’^[13] Martha Hart denounced Under the Mat in her own book as ‘hate literature, plain and simple […] full of anger and factual errors’^[14] and in Bret Hart’s Hitman he makes reference to speculation that Diana was taken advantage of by her co-author.^[15] Years later, Art O’Donnell of the longtime institution WrestleCrap called Under the Mat a ‘non-stop barrage of insane allegations and third-hand stories,’ likening it to a Satanic panic memoir in its’ induction.^[16] Despite the litigation and public pillorying, the author bio on her second book still lists it, noting that Under the Mat ‘made Alberta’s top ten nonfiction best-seller list.’

Is it a fraud? A fake? A hoax? As Diana’s co-author specified to the Herald, the book was withdrawn, not retracted. And there’s certainly enough concordance with all the other accounts we have of the Hart family. Stampede historian Heath McCoy called it a ‘scandalous legal minefield of a book’ while acknowledging ‘not all of Diana’s book can be written off’ as much of it is corroborated by others^[17] — Davey was like that, Dynamite Kid was really like that, Bret was like that too, sometimes — that we can’t say that it’s not completely bereft of truth. Nor is Diana the first to get burned in this way.

In Ben Yagoda’s Memoir: A History, Yagoda details the long tradition of stretching the truth in autobiographical form, observing that highly-charged subjects often invite uproar and ‘effort to debunk or expose’, while other falsehoods go unnoticed or even tolerated in the interest of a good story.^[18] Delving into psychological research on memory, Yagoda explains how bias, suggestibility and the passage of time itself introduce gaps, distortions and even complete fabrications into the fibrous texture of memory.^[19] Whether it’s deliberate falsehood or the fault of memory, Yagoda draws a line between ‘untruths and untruths,’ saying:

“The key to a more nuanced view […] is putting them into a hierarchy […] as follows: inaccuracy is a problem to the extent a memoir depicts identifiable people, depicts those people in a negative light, (demonstrably) gets gists as well as details wrong, is poorly written, is self-serving, or otherwise wears its agenda on its sleeve. The more of these things it does and the more egregiously it does them, the bigger the problem it is.”^[20]

The French academic Philippe Lejeune articulated what he called the ‘autobiographical pact’ in an attempt to define and genericise the autobiography, policing the boundary between fact and fiction. This pact denotes the author’s ‘intention to honour his/her signature’ to the reader; that is, that there must be an ‘identicalness’ of the author, the narrator and the protagonist in setting out to tell their story.^[21] That is paired with the ‘referential pact,’ whereby the text must have some resemblance to the verifiable outside world with regard to both accuracy of information, and fidelity of meaning to the best of the author’s ability, allowing for subjective ‘distortions […] consubstantial with the elaboration of personal myth.’^[22] Thus, by putting their name to the work, an autobiography makes two pacts with the reader under Lejeune: ‘this is me,’ and ‘all this happened, more or less,’ putting the question of authenticity up to the scrutiny of the reader.

The theorist Paul de Man is critical of Lejeune’s approach, noting that attempts at generic definition of autobiography ‘founder in questions that are both pointless and unanswerable.’ He agrees that autobiography does hinge on a subject whose identity is ‘defined by name and signature,’ but is skeptical of its’ ability to represent the real world. ‘Autobiography […] is not a genre or mode, but a figure of reading or of understanding that occurs, to some degree, in all texts,’ he asserts, because the generic definition of autobiography leads to a ‘an undecideable situation’ with the impossibility of separating factual autobiography from fiction, which he likens to ‘being caught in a revolving door […] capable of infinite acceleration.’^[23]

And yet, for an observer of wrestling, this doesn’t feel particularly uncomfortable or untenable at all. Bret Hart comes down to the ring and he looks down the barrel of the camera and says how he, Bret Hart, really feels about ‘The Heartbreak Kid’ Shawn Michaels. He might even throw in some personally incriminating detail as a frisson. In this moment, the man who has ‘Bret Hart’ on his driver’s license, in the guise of the professional wrestler doing business as Bret Hart, is making a series of ‘I’ statements to explicate his feelings about his personal and professional rival, and we can verify the truth of some of these statements by looking in the dirtsheets. In terms of the autobiographical and referential pacts, he is holding up his end of the contract.

All of this is pretext to a match where Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels will engage in complete phony-baloney schtick, falling down and pretending to hit each other. The ‘signature’ in professional wrestling is used and abused constantly because any trope that’s at hand can be used to create heat — wow, these guys must really hate each other! — and because any personal feelings of animosity, real or imagined, can easily be overcome by the desire to make lots of money together.

This seems like a low-brow digression to make in this discussion of literary theory, but even Paul de Man himself is susceptible to some personal myth-making. If his name is familiar at all to you, it’s because he was a life-long con artist and a Nazi collaborator who went from writing antisemitic newspaper editorials to working alongside Jacques Derrida. A face turn par excellence. Kayfabe is everywhere.

I would argue Diana Hart got burned for a few of these reasons, not least of which because of how close she got to ethical lines. Writers of memoir have an obligation to the people they write about just as much as to the reader. As Leigh Gilmore notes, the concerns raised by how one might be represented are not limited to fakes and frauds but are ‘are intrinsic to any autobiographical narrative’ that may transgress norms relating to ‘privacy, decorum and tact,’ which leads her to ask the question: ‘Where do manners, social norms and ethics diverge […] in the representation of trauma?’^[24]

It’s a germane question because its heart, Under the Mat is a trauma memoir. Cathy Caruth draws on Freud when she says that the ‘language of trauma and stories associated with it […] simultaneously defies and demands our witness.’^[25] Gothic works, too, are often characterized by their fragmentary nature because, as Punter says, ‘they deal in psychological areas which […] do not come out right, they deal in those structures of the mind which never properly see the light of day.’^[26]

Roger Luckhurst elaborates on how trauma complicates the autobiographical pact as ‘trauma is not necessarily a stable or straight-forwardly evidential or narratable event, but might be mobile, subject to all kinds of transformation and revision.’^[27] Or, as Heath McCoy put it, ‘it is the truth as an emotionally hurting Diana Hart sees it.’^[28]

I submit for your consideration the example of Augusten Burroughs. Burroughs’ 2002 memoir Running with Scissors was a New York Times bestseller and was later adapted into a film. The memoir details Burroughs’ youth and upbringing when his parents separate and his mother abandons him to live with her psychologist. Though he changed the name of the family and obfuscated the location of the story, in the post-James Frey recriminations of memoirists, the family sued Burroughs for defamation of character and invasion of privacy.

When the case was settled, the acknowledgement section of the book was amended to read: ‘I would like to thank the real-life members of the family portrayed in this book […] I recognize that their memories of the events described in this book are different than my own.’ However, the cover of the book would still be labelled ‘memoir.’ Burroughs would describe the settlement as ‘a personal victory […] for all memoirists,’ maintaining that he had not exaggerated or fictionalized any of the details therein, and that it was ‘entirely accurate.’^[29] Remember what McLellan was so adamant to point out: Under the Mat was withdrawn, not retracted, and there is a difference.

Donna Lee Brien links the Gothic to what was dismissed as ‘misery memoir’ — ‘overly dramatic, self-absorbed and narcissistic narratives with little link to reality, written for their shock value and indulged in by voyeuristic readers.’ Using the Gothic as the frame to view these works validates these works as more than middle-brow literature, but legitimate narratives dealing with the very stuff of the Gothic — the taboo, the macabre and the grotesque appearing as the past haunts the present.^[30]

Furthermore, Erica Moore uses the controversy surrounding Running with Scissors to introduce the Gothic to the memoir form, linking it to Freud’s uncanny. As she puts it, ‘memory resides in the uncanny’; she continues that ‘ambiguity of identity and events’ links the Gothic and memoir through the ‘threat of the inauthenticity of personal memory.’^[31] Fact and fiction become indistinguishable. That is to say, it’s all just a work.

I bring all this theory and background to your attention because I want to make it clear that the question of autobiography is far from settled, and the aura of middle-brow gossip and scandal that surrounds Under the Mat might belie something more complicated and mysterious. This gives us a lot more room to manoeuvre, since most reviews of Under the Mat don’t really get past scandal and revulsion.

I know it’s a big ask, but try to hold these two contradictory notions in your mind at once as we read Under the Mat. Firstly, that this is Diana Hart’s autobiography, in which she recounts her experiences and states the truth to the best of her recollection and the best of her ability. Secondly, that Under the Mat can also be read as a Canadian Gothic horror-romance. The elements of the Gothic are so thick on the ground in Under the Mat it invites a deeper investigation, but moreover, reading and understanding Under the Mat as pure Canadian Gothic can make clear what the distortions of personal myth-making obfuscate.

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The Gothic

‘Gothic’ seems like a straightforward enough concept, to the point that the word immediately conjures up visions in your mind. Since you are reading an essay about a wrestling memoir, you are probably imagining 90s vampire wrestler Gangrel walking to the ring — fangin’ and bangin’ — in a blood-stained frock. Gangrel is cool and all, but for the sake of our inquiry we should try to define our terms so that we can all be on the same page. That is to say: what is the Gothic?

At the time of the eighteenth century, ‘Gothic’ was a derogatory term that called to mind the superstitions and barbarism of the medieval past. This, after all, was the age of the Enlightenment, which privileged rationalism and empiricism.^[32] The architecture of the medieval period, with its flying buttresses and intricate grotesques, was seen as emblematic of a Dark Age cultural wasteland, chaotic and excessive compared to the straight lines and forms of the Classical period.^[33] As the century progressed, though, people started to reject the rigidity of the Enlightenment world and began to look back to the past again for passion, beauty and the transcendent.^[34] This movement in art and culture would come to be known as Romanticism.

The Gothic represents the inversion of this Romantic turn. The search for the sublime leads to the implicit threat of indescribable horror as we become transfixed by that which is grotesque and macabre, violent or painful.^[35] And contrary to the Enlightenment ideal that this world can be studied and understood, the Gothic represented the forbidden and unknowable, with all the awe and terror it instills.^[36]

The Gothic novel as a literary form is generally agreed to begin with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto in 1764. As Devendra Varma puts it, ‘the effective romantic setting, the continuous spell of horror, the colour of melancholy, awe and superstition’ converge for the first time in his novel;^[37] what once was considered barbarous became a source of awe, filled with powerful archetypes and symbols like ‘the feudal tyrant […] the forlorn but virtuous damsel’ up to ‘the castle itself’ and its ‘gloomy dungeons.’^[38]

The embrace of the Gothic found its inflection point in Otranto, but the novel merely brought together trends that were already happening in architecture, art and poetry, specifically in England, as writers and artists looked back to the past. Horace Walpole famously built a Gothic castle, Strawberry Hill. Some land-owners went to the extent of creating fake Gothic ruins on their grounds, inventing history. Far from being barbaric and uncouth, the past and its alien values seemed to offer some sort of salve for modern-day anxieties that the modern world could not.^[39]

The Gothic endures, diffusing through our culture, to this day. The lightning-lit castles atop fog-shrouded moors adapted to the modern, becoming unhappy family homes in dark and dirty cities. Setting aside the laundry list of tropes and stock figures, however, the feeling of the Gothic endured. Botting cites two main features, excess and transgression. Everything is in excess: an excess of emotion, excess of passion, excess of violence. Transgression comes in many forms as well: transgression of morals and taboo, transgression of reason or meaning, the past intruding on the present, the alienation and degradation of the physical body.^[40] Then, as now, we are instilled with terror by the presence of that which is simply too much to comprehend.

But for what purpose? Punter suggests that the literature of terror provokes one ‘towards an understanding, often precisely by drawing images direct from a […] connection with the social unconscious and showing them to us, inescapably, inexorably.’^[41] That is to say, it provides us with a set of symbols and images that we can use to try and make sense of what is happening to us, confronting the real terror which is otherwise unnameable or indescribable.

It seems appropriate that Walpole’s Castle of Otranto was inspired by his fascination with his own residence, Strawberry Hill, a house built in the Gothic style to ‘realize [his] own visions.’ He would look at the house in his reverie and see it start to change:

“The flimsy materials that surrounded him: the fretted wood, the fine traceries, the painted windows, assumed new dimensions and propensities. The narrow staircases and intricate chambers of Strawberry swelled into the echoing vaults and sombre galleries of Otranto.”^[42]

I’m not being entirely facetious when I suggest Diana Hart came under a similar spell recalling the Hart House in Under the Mat.

Fall of the House of Hart

“What was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher?” — Edgar Allen Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher

‘This is where all the trouble happened with all the fighting and scrapping and wrestling and playing. Nobody ever slept in that room, never,’ Bret Hart says as he gestures to an upstairs window of the model house below him. An unseen interlocutor asks him what he misses about the house. ‘I think all of us, as a family, always felt very protected there and very safe there and it was always what a house should be. It’s always to me been a house of warm memories and all good memories.’

Then he turns his attention to a side door at the basement level. ‘And this room would have been the Dungeon over here, and that’s probably the most amazing room in the house. […] There was a lot of wrestlers that honestly ran out of there that thought my dad was insane and maybe he was. I don’t know.’^[43] Bret Hart is showing to the camera a model of Hart House.

Linda Bayer-Berenbaum writes that ‘Gothic scenes never seem complete without their share of crumbling architectural remains, rotting old houses, ancient relics and even decrepit, senile people.’^[44] The house is significant because, as Botting puts it, ‘as both building and family line, it became the site where fears and anxieties returned in the present.’^[45]

The red brick building we now know as Hart House occupied 30 acres on a hill above the Bow River valley overlooking the city of Calgary. It was built originally by the local brick magnate Edward Henry Crandell, later occupied by an orphanage, a Red Cross hospital, and then the Judge H.S. Patterson and his family. For decades, it stood there alone above the city until the sprawl of Calgary crept westward and up the hills.

On the grounds there was a mansion, servants’ quarters and a carriage house. The house was capped by three chimneys and multiple voluminous gables, with two levels of veranda encircling the structure. It contained twenty-two rooms, including two master bedrooms with their own fireplaces. Stu Hart decorated this Victorian manor with gold leaf trim around the ceiling, huge Persian carpets and all manner antiques, including sets of encyclopedias to fill the glassed-in library shelves. The place was crowned with six opulent chandeliers, each one given a woman’s name.^[46] He called them his ‘girls.’

Diana writes: ‘In the 1920s and during World War I, the Red Cross used the building as a hospital. […] I’m sure the house is haunted due to all the soldiers who died there […] At night, the chandeliers will sometimes rock and doors will slam. Ellie has watched curtains blowing although the windows were closed and a lot of us have had the same dreams at night. Now, since Owen and Dean have died, I can feel their presence.’^[47]

When times were good, Stu Hart had started replacing the windows and plotted out space for a swimming pool surrounded by rose gardens. But with the cyclical nature of wrestling, business turned for Stampede and plans were scrapped. All that remained of the pool was a pile of rocks and dirt. The empty windows were covered with plastic and cardboard. For want of repair, soon the yard began to fill with rusted Cadillacs that were beyond servicing.^[48]

And, for the most part, it stayed that way. Throughout the various family memoirs the Hart house is almost always described in a way that emphasizes its state of near ruin: Diana talks about ‘plaster sprinking down’ whenever doors were slammed^[49] and the overpowering smell of cat pee that pervaded every room. In Bret’s book he describes the environs: ‘Our backyard was an obstacle course littered with old cars, ancient farm equipment, wrestling rings and junk.’^[50] Diana continues: ‘Mom and Dad always took in strangers and animals. […] People have moved in and my parents are too polite to ask them to leave.’^[51] The house, once a symbol of the prosperity the Hart family enjoyed, becomes a decaying Gothic ruin where people and animals alike come and go freely.

Keith Hart describes it to Heath McCoy in terms of Steinbeck: ‘we went from the family that had everything, to the Joads almost overnight. […] It was a fight to survive after that.’^[52] The Grapes of Wrath may be a fair point of comparison but it may be more apt to draw on another staple of high school English courses:

“Its principal feature seemed to be that of an excessive antiquity. The discoloration of ages had been great. Minute fungi overspread the whole exterior, hanging in a fine tangled web-work from the eaves. […] An air of stern, deep and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all.”^[53]

Edgar Allen Poe’s House of Usher, that ‘dreary tract of country’, shares more than superficial similarities with Hart House: the siblings living inside are in a curiously degraded mental state and quick to betray each other. What Poe brought to the Gothic was creating a landscape that reflects the ‘projection of a particular psychological state’^[54] — that is to say, that the features of the house are reflective of its inhabitants. Remember Luckert’s observation that famous families take on a ‘peculiar glow of overdetermined trauma’ as they experience tragedy in the public consciousness; in The Fall of the House of Usher the house, the family and the individuals within all share a common soul that overdetermines their shared fate. A similar sense pervades Under the Mat, to the extent that it’s not difficult to imagine the Hart House cracked in half and sinking down into the Bow river valley.

John S. Hill interprets the ending of the Poe story as a hallucination; that Roderick Usher has gone completely mad when he sees hiis sister Madeline force her way into the room, having escaped her premature entombment. ‘Since the facts prove Madeline is dead,’ he writes, ‘she must strictly reappear as a hallucination. And the narrator not only sees the apparition, he flees from it as well.’^[55] In a similar way, Under the Mat brings us into the Hart House to see through Diana’s eyes, distorted as it may be.

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Stu & Helen

With the weight of all this family and social history embodied in it, perhaps even better than The Fall of the House of Usher as a point of Gothic comparison would be William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!. As Elizabeth Margaret Kerr writes, the ‘haunted castle’ of Absalom, Absalom!, the Sutpen house, comes into being ‘in the primeval wilderness […] created by brute force directed by indomitable will’ then ‘gradually [falls] into ruin’^[56] that, like the House of Usher (or the Hart House), mirrors the trajectory of the once-great family that built it.

However, Absalom, Absalom! (and, as we’ll see, Under the Mat) is more concerned with domestic matters, family lineage and inheritance, setting aside the house as a broad symbol for what takes place within. Punter and Byron identify the family unit as a site of horror as part of the ‘domestication of the Gothic,’ with motifs like family curses, family secrets, and family scandals all playing a role in the way the past intrudes on the present.^[57] Faulkner specifically Gothicized the history of the South, with the ‘continuing pressures of the past upon the present’ being reflected in how social history of ‘dispossessed Southern aristocracy’ played out within these family units.^[58] In a similar way, Diana Hart’s retelling of the Hart family history plays out over the historical background of the settlement of the Canadian West, with the Klan and the War both influencing the family’s direction.

Diana Hart begins enumerating her family history in Under the Mat by talking about her maternal grandfather, Harry Smith. He was an Olympic long-distance runner, but troubled by depression. ‘I have noticed that trait in so many people in my family,’ Diana observes. When his attempt to hang himself from a light fixture fails, he says ‘I can’t even do that right.’^[59] She mentions a distant cousin on this side who is descended from Nathan Bedford Forrest, founder of the Ku Klux Klan, for some reason.^[60]

Like her father, Helen Hart is described as a troubled woman. Diana describes having to walk on eggshells with her as ‘mom was threatening to kill herself all the time. Mind you she had threatened to do this since I was little.’^[61] Much like her father, Helen is depressed and taken to drinking. Diana describes her as an alcoholic, drinking to the point that she would fight with her husband ‘from morning ‘til night. You wake up, you hear it, you go to sleep, you hear it.’^[62] The habit worsens as the family is struck by one tragedy after another. After her son Dean and grandson Matt die, she ‘started drinking more and more at family get-togethers. She would sometimes rise to her feet, fist raised and rail at the ceiling, “Dean and Matt we miss you!”’^[63] This trauma is passed down directly, as Diana states it plainly: ‘All these crazy fears that she has, are now mine.’^[64]

Going into her father, Stu Hart’s background, she talks about his parents, Edward and Elizabeth Hart. As a child growing up on a farm outside of Saskatoon, Stu’s only toy was a ball made of rags and string. His father took the ball away from him, saying there was no time for toys on a farm.^[65]

Martha Erb elaborates on his background in her own book: Edward Hart had travelled to Saskatchewan as a boy with his family seeking out a tract to settle in the bountiful west. But tragedy was quick to strike as Edward’s father John succumbed to pneumonia, leaving his widow to raise their eight children alone. When he grew up, he set out to settle a farm on his own and tragedy struck again. Before setting out for Alberta, the family was waylaid by whooping cough and scarlet fever. Too sick to tend to their livestock, cattle they had mortgaged for the tract in Alberta wandered into a snowstorm and died. By the time they arrived in Tofield, Edward Hart was told his tract had already been resold.^[66]

As Diana tells it, ‘squatters burned their farmhouse down, driving the family into a tent on the outskirts of the property. They stayed in that tent through the harsh Saskatchewan winter of 1929 […] The harsh conditions were too much for Elizabeth who suffered from diabetes and died that winter.’^[67] Her telling is slightly distorted — the Harts arrive in Tofield in 1925 and spent several years in that tent, as the squatter themselves on their property that had been resold. Erb describes a level below even Dickensian privation:

“Living in a pup tent in sub-zero weather without a stove was no picnic for Elizabeth, Stu and his sisters. […] The wind whistled around them, attacking any loose bit of canvas, relentlessly giving the occupants the uncomfortable sense [the tent] might blow away at any moment. […] The roof of the tents were covered in pinhole burns from sparks from the campfire, and on wet days they leaked. […] As a young boy, he could do nothing but watch as his hard-working decent parents sank deeper and deeper into abject poverty.”^[68]

As for the burning down of the property — it was burnt to the ground by the RCMP to deal with the so-called trespassers, squatting on their own land.^[69]

Stu Hart suffered through all this, and eventually grew up to be an elite athlete. His aspiration became to make the Canadian Olympic team in wrestling in time for the 1944 Olympics, but the second World War thwarted the best-laid plans of another generation of the Hart family and Stu ended up enlisting in the Canadian navy.

Diana describes his Navy experience: ‘He had witnessed some horrific events. One of the worst was watching a man decapitated on D-Day.’ ^[70] It’s not immediately clear if this is intentionally misleading; Erb’s book does not make reference to this specific incident but points out that Stu Hart’s navy service was primarily as an athletic director in Edmonton coaching a baseball team in the All-Service League. He later transfered to CFB Cornwallis in Nova Scotia hoping for sea duty but ended up serving on the shore patrol.^[71] Diana continues:

“The guy got drunk the night before and was terribly hung over. He belonged to the shore patrol. The next day they were making their rounds in the shore patrol car and he stuck his head out the window and started vomiting. He drove too close to the shore where the lifeboats were parked on the water […] There was a hook on one of the boats hanging off a long pole. It was sharp and sturdy, strong enough to hold a thousand pounds. It caught him around the neck as he drove past and pulled his head right off.”^[72]

Other than that it happened on D-Day (but, seemingly, not at D-Day), Diana Hart offers no further detail — neither where it was, nor where her father was to witness the incident. Was he in the car? On the lifeboat? We can never know. By the next paragraph, she’s done talking about his war experiences entirely. It’s just one of an indeterminate number of ‘horrific events,’ a self-contained vignette of violent Gothic horror that appears out of nowhere.

Stu’s own experience during the Depression influenced his view of success. As a boy, he picked up a job delivering newspapers in Edmonton. He sold the Advertiser and the Journal, but the biggest-selling paper was the Edmonton Liberator. Owned and published by the local Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, John James Maloney, the Liberator was wildly popular in the way that it stoked anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant passions; Stu made seven cents a piece selling five hundred copies at a time for a total of fifteen dollars. It’s not clear if any of the content made an impression on Stu, though, Erb says ‘Stu remembers seeing [Maloney] arrive at a gathering […] in a shiny black Cadillac, complete with a driver and a bodyguard. […] The sight of that Cadillac would stick in Stu’s mind for many years as a symbol of prosperity.’^[73]

Compared to Helen, Stu was more passive, more retentive of his feelings, and gifted with what Marsha Erb calls ‘an almost incongruent kindness’ in spite of what he had endured, though that kindness was ‘just as much a part of Stu Hart as his ability to inflict pain.’^[74] ‘The pure unadulterated exercise of inflicting pain to overcome another man’ in the practice of submission wrestling ‘was a thrill he could never really explain.’^[75] After leaving the navy, he was broken into wrestling and became an expert in this dark art. And to that end, his Gothic castle needed a dungeon.

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Entering the Dungeon

The Hart Dungeon is considered one of the finest wrestling schools in the history of the business because of the talent that came through Calgary, though with no ring and no ropes, there’s only so much one can be taught. It looms large in the wrestling imagination, but Diana’s description sounds downright Spartan: next to the ‘incinerator room,’ steep iron stairs lead down to room with ‘a 17-by-17 foot wrestling mat covering the floor’ wedged between workout equipment home-made from rusting cast iron and PVC piping, complemented with monogrammed ‘HART’ barbell plates.^[76] Bret goes into a little more detail: the Dungeon was ‘a cramped room with sweat-and-blood soaked canvas mats covering a thinly padded floor [with] big holes in the ceiling made by the heads and feet of wrestlers’^[77] with a ‘low ceiling […] no ring, ring posts or ring ropes.’^[78] This is where Stu would break in his wrestlers, as Bret says, ‘squeezing hard enough that the screams of his victims would echo eerily through the rest of the house.’^[79] This was the core of the training in this dungeon: the belief was that pain would instill discipline and respect for the business. This created the enduring reputation that Bret sums up thusly: ‘If this room could talk — nah, if this room could scream…’^[80]

Because of the central role pain plays in pro wrestling, in the public display and performance of it, it weighs heavily on the mind of the performers. In his ethnographic study of pro wrestlers’ responses to pain, R. Tyson Smith categorizes their ‘shared understandings’ that he classifies as denial, authenticity, solidarity and dominance. Denial is characterized by a ‘romantic image of pain’ that is seen as ‘central to a wrestler’s development’ — that is, taking your lumps is seen a a sign of courage, endurance and self-discipline. Authenticity is the display of marks and bruises in a ‘sado-masochistic fashion’, like the lingering red marks of bruised blood vessels left by a stiff knifehand chop to the chest like the red badge of courage. Solidarity is the responsibility for other wrestlers’ safety and protecting ones’ opponent from pain and injury in performance, and dominance is the assertive use of pain to regulate hierarchy and instill respect, whether that be issuing a ‘receipt’ to a wrestler who is too stiff, or ‘breaking in’ new wrestlers, as is done in the Dungeon.^[81] Thus we see that pain, in being experienced and being inflicted, is a totalizing influence that shapes the world of the professional wrestler.

Pain is a prurient interest to the Gothic as well. In the same way that Romanticism sought out experiences of the transcendent and the sublime, the inversion of that was a fascination with pain. The Marquis de Sade is one of the forebears of this, when he said ‘there is no doubt that we are much more keenly affected by pain than by pleasure […] for pain’s telling effects cannot deceive, and its vibrations are more powerful,’^[82] in his Philosophy in the Bedroom. Sade collapsed pain and pleasure into aesthetic. Steven Bruhm summarizes it thusly: ‘for Sade, pain is syllogistic: aesthetics validate feeling; the greater the feeling, the more aesthetic the experience; pain is the most intense of all feeling; therefore, pain is the most aesthetic experience we can have.’^[83] And it was Lord Byron who said that ‘the great object of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even though in pain.’^[84] You might be starting to understand at this point why professional wrestling has such a stranglehold on the psyche.

Bruce Hart describes Stu Hart’s work in the dungeon thusly:

“My dad — a benign version of Cerberus, the three-headed dog at the gates of hell — would usually start the proceedings by putting the neophytes over, alluding to their awe-inspiring physiques or their vaunted reputations […] Once they did get on the mat, my dad […] would allow the overzealous trainees to push him all over […] All of a sudden, though, my dad would turn the tables on the unsuspecting wrestlers and in a flash, they’d find themselves trapped in some excruciatingly painful submission hold […] Being put through the wringer, as my dad used to call it […] wondering what this sadistic psychopath had in mind next. During the course of their introduction to wrestling, the rookies abandoned most of their dignity — as well as, might I add, assorted bodily fluids.”

The young Bruce Hart is awed and horrified by this display. ‘It was sinister, a Jekyll and Hyde thing.’^[85]

Think of pain in terms of macrocosm and microcosm. In the small world of professional wrestling, as Smith notes, pain is used as a tool of social organization that teaches respect for the business and keeps people in line. Now expand that to a social unit like a family, a country, a society. In Gothic fiction, Bruhm writes, ‘pain […] is that apocalyptic moment of revelation and understanding when one moves from naiveté into knowledge.’^[86] But for all our writing and theorizing about it, when the body hits the mat for real, ‘pain is still a phenomenon that remains […] anti-intellectual [and] anti-humanist.’^[87]

That is to say, there’s no reasoning our way out of this one. We have no hope of getting out of this Dungeon through words alone.

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