The Contemporary Female Gothic: Hauntings From the Home to the Colonial Landscape
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Authors
Wolf, Katie
Issue Date
2024
Type
Dissertation
Language
Keywords
Alternative Title
Abstract
This dissertation explores how hauntings can refer to a troubling national and colonial history that goes beyond original conceptions of the haunted home in the Gothic genre. I look at the tradition of the Gothic genre in U.S. literary history, acknowledging its significance to first-wave feminist discussions of madness as a response to societally imposed domestic roles, and then at works that focus on intersectionality and hauntings that occur beyond the Gothic's limited fixation on white domesticity. This analysis thus incorporates psychological theorizations as well as theorizations of space, place, and empire in order to analyze the mental, emotional, and physical constraints that women writers portray in the Gothic genre. My dissertation focuses on novels by contemporary authors from the mid-20 th century to present, including Shirley Jackson, Gillian Flynn, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Toni Morrison, and Louise Erdrich. I discuss how the female Gothic genre, including both woman-authored texts and texts centered around women protagonists, has transformed over time to critique social issues beyond singular representations of white women in the home. While the history of the Gothic genre portrays women in the domestic space and often entraps them within it, including classic works by authors like Edgar Allan Poe and William Faulkner, the female Gothic genre has also historically touched upon the theme women in the home who experience psychological distress. Later adaptations, however, focus their depictions on the haunted, national landscape that is rooted in a history of American violence often predicated upon notions of vulnerable white women. This project therefore comments on the shift from a genre that is invested in the home as site of gendered repression to a genre that comments on the generational, collective impact of colonial history that exists outside of just a nuclear family home�"a model of the home which has its own roots in colonial idealizations of womanhood.