Browsing by Subject "Gothic"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Gothic heroines and cultural trauma in 20th Century literature and film
    (2015-01) Brownell, Eric
    Analyzes how 20th Century British writers and Hollywood filmmakers have adapted common features of the Gothic literary tradition - the imperiled but investigative heroine, the attractive but coercive villain, and the portrait of a female predecessor - to address massive traumas that have been repressed by, but which continue to affect, modern cultures. Argues that, in each case, the text "acts out" the repressed cultural trauma underlying its narrative through the heroine's narcissistic over-identification with a portrait of a female predecessor. However, through scenes that disturbingly mirror the heroine and the villain, each work portrays the consequence of that repression: an irruption of traumatic past violence in the present. While the works I consider thereby address the shortcomings of public narratives that strive to evade or redeem collective trauma, they also foreground Gothic ambiguity and excess to acknowledge the limits of their own representational responses.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Judicious Improbable as Critique: The Brontës’ Possible Fictions and Their Reception
    (2022-01) Crain, Samantha
    This dissertation examines how the Brontës augment natural fiction with Gothic and sometimes folklore in their novels and how these augmentations serve their critiques and affect the novels’ reception, through the formation of a judicious probable. Charlotte Brontë attempted to eschew other genres in favor of natural fiction in The Professor, using an ethos of fiction learned from Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine but the book failed to secure a publisher. The first chapter explores the complexities of Brontë’s first-written novel and its reception as an unsatisfying precursor to her later works. Charlotte had learned her lesson with Jane Eyre, incorporating Gothic and folklore to craft the autobiography of a young governess consistently misread by authority figures as a changeling in a novel that asserts Jane’s right to depict her own experiences without external corroboration. The second chapter juxtaposes Charlotte’s evolving ethos with reviewers’ objections to its improbability and controversial subject matter. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights differently combines natural fiction with Gothic and folklore, centering the text on the unreliable accounts of two primary narrators whose loyalty to middle-class rationality cannot hold up in the regional world of the text. They demonstrate the necessity of an expanded view of the possible in their ideologically motivated readings of Cathy, Heathcliff, and Linton Heathcliff as changelings. The fragmentation of the text’s Gothic prevents the text from overstepping the possible and allows the novel’s primary characters to dramatize a proto-polyamorous love ethic and the author’s own mysticism. The third chapter posits links between the novel’s ethos and its vexed critical reception. Anne Brontë eschews folklore but employs a domestic Gothic alongside her natural fiction by enclosing her heroine’s diary account within the first-person narrative of the novel’s hero. Gilbert Markham initially demonstrates his incompleteness and then experiences Helen’s domestic Gothic alongside the reader and is emotionally educated thereby. Anne’s novel asserts not only Helen’s right to depict her own experiences but to use those experiences didactically to instruct others—both men and women. The final chapter marks how Anne’s decision to stay firmly within the mundane possible made her immediate reception if anything more caustic than those of her sisters’ preceding novels. In each of these novels, the Brontës judiciously employ the improbable in order to expand natural fiction, refusing to be relegated or dismissed. Their efforts were popular but often disputed by reviewers who found the improbability and coarseness of their novels undermined their claims to seriousness. This dissertation shows how the Brontës depiction of uncommon experiences by combining genres suggests how exclusionary probable fiction is and explores the implications of that exclusion by refusing to replicate it.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Po Mo: modernism and the politics of Gothic adaptation.
    (2010-06) Curtright, Lauren
    This dissertation demonstrates that images of Edgar Allan Poe have shaped his position in the literature and popular imaginary of the United States, that Poe's writings evidence his interest in photography and anticipate cinema, and that Poe's function as a technology has enabled politically diverse, international adaptations of his works and themes. To evaluate the politics of works of "Poe modernism," I interpret their engagement with what Walter Benjamin famously identified as the dual potential of technological reproducibility, or the ways in which photographic imaging has been alternately used to serve reactionary or progressive ends. At the turn of the twentieth century, American journalist Thomas Dimmock and film directors D. W. Griffith and Charles Brabin used technologies of reproducibility to remake Poe from his tarnished image. Narrative accounts of photographic images of Poe published in The Century Magazine and romanticizations of Poe in the films The Avenging Conscience, or 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' and The Raven transform Poe into a model of white, middle-class masculinity. Tracing the etiology of this reconstruction of Poe to the work of William Abbott Pratt, a Gothic Revivalist architect and daguerreotypist, who served as Confederate emissary to England, I historicize and theorize the reproduction of racism within a largely unacknowledged strain of the Southern gothic. Into his fiction, Poe incorporates techniques modeled on the first form of photography. Like other nineteenth-century writers, Poe characterized the daguerreotype as both more "magical" and more "truthful" than previous media. He took advantage of this paradoxical conception of photography to equivocate about the reality of race. Poe's stories suggest that daguerreotypy increased anxiety about the tenability of racial categories in the United States at the same time as they indicate that this arguably protocinematic technology was used to reconfigure a racial hierarchy based on invisible properties. Poe's recognition of the significance of photography to ideology ensured attention to his works by filmmakers committed to social critique. European émigrés Robert Florey and Edgar G. Ulmer adapted Poe's writings to counter both Nazism and American racism. Similarly, reconfigurations of Poe in modern Japan link imaging technologies to constructed hierarchies of nation, race, gender, and sexuality. Specifically, I analyze Poe's influence on Japanese gothic from ero guro nansensu (erotic grotesque nonsense)--specifically, Midori Ozaki's fiction--to Ishiro Honda's Gojira to Nagisa Oshima's Max mon amour to the contemporary Ring cycle, adapted from Koji Suzuki's novel series. Finally, I consider the consequences of the modernist fascination with instantaneity as manifested in, among other texts, Poe's "The Man of the Crowd" and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum's multimedia exhibits on the first atomic bombing. The Peace Museum adapts gothic tropes to represent the horrific instantaneity of nuclear attack and to resist the racism that informed the United States' rationalization for deploying atomic bombs on Japan. In sum, this dissertation places Poe within a nexus of creators of textual and visual media all of whom are concerned with technology's effects on human life, perception, and representation.