Session 3: Gothic Locality
2nd Global Conference
Monday 16th May – Wednesday 18th May 2011
Warsaw, Poland
Gothic Spaces in Fantasy Fiction: The Creation of Place in Nix’s Sabriel
Nicola Alter
The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
Setting is paramount in fantasy literature, and contemporary authors are faced with the challenge of creating vibrant worlds without indulging in lengthy, tedious descriptions of their fictional landscapes. As a result, contemporary works of fantasy and Gothic fantasy often draw on a repertoire of the Gothic to create worlds that are at once familiar and unfamiliar to a readership, evoking dynamic and unsettling spaces without the need for exhaustive description. These works tap into a shared knowledge of imagery, themes and ideas from Gothic fiction and architecture that allows readers to fill out the half-formed fictional places alluded to on the page. ‘Sabriel’ – a work of Gothic fantasy by Australian author Garth Nix - draws heavily on this repertoire to paint the frightening and vivid world of The Old Kingdom in which the dead roam free and feed on the living, and where the power of modern weaponry is rendered useless by magic. This paper discusses how the use of a repertoire of the Gothic enhances the sense of place in this novel, and promotes the active engagement of the reader in imagining the dark world of The Old Kingdom.
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The Postcolonial Indian Gothic in Roy’s An Atlas of Impossible Longing
Lydia Saleh Rofail
University of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
This paper explores how Postcolonial Indian women’s writing reconfigures traditionally held Romantic notions of the Gothic and moves towards a unique Indian Postcolonial Gothic perspective. As with Romantic Gothic literature, these contemporary Indian texts expose the underlying chaos that threatens apparent societal order. When viewed through the lens of the Postcolonial Gothic, these texts reveal a new political critique and vision for modern-day India. This vision is littered with apocalyptic inferences, abnegation and annihilation of self as contemporary Indian societal anxieties are uncovered and female and lower-caste oppression are critiqued.
In the ‘An Atlas of Impossible Longing’ by Anuradha Roy, the Gothic attributes which lie beneath the surface of Indian suburban lives can be read as a metaphor for modern-day Indian anxieties and pre-occupations as well as a critique on the restrictions placed on women and the lower castes. Pervading alienation, self-imposed exile, mad women shut away in upstairs rooms, crumbling houses, decaying landscapes littered with architectural ruins, ghosts and haunting/s all feature in the book, lending it a supernatural air. The quiet desperation of lives languishing in loneliness haunts the novel with a mood of pervasive sadness. The river, the colour of darkening sepia exists as an apocalyptic symbol of the ever- menacing threat of extinction and submergence of the self.
In the words of TS Eliot, “Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended/ Are removed destroyed, restored”. In Roy’s imaginative rendering of time however there is no real restoration, no retribution, no exhalation of relief. Beneath humdrum existences in suburban mansions, there are ‘Drowned Houses’, ruined forts and encroaching insanity. Exiled psyches shrivel alongside malnourished bodies, and women die in childbirth. All attempts at real human connection and abiding love are thwarted by circumstantial loss, human ineptitude and loneliness.
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Italian Gothic Literature: The Case of Fogazzaro’s Malombra
Maria Parrino
University of Bristol, UK
Despite the fact that Italy has been widely used as a geographical setting of many gothic novels, little interest has been devoted to the Italian gothic novel itself, and if any it has mostly been manifested by English scholars (David DelPrincipe). Among the few Italian “gothic” writers is Antonio Fogazzaro, whose novel Malombra was published in 1881. Fogazzaro, who was an admirer of the English writers Colllins, Dickens, Thackeray, C.Bronte, Bulwer, Reade, Mrs Wood and Disrael, had his 500-page novel translated in English in 1896.
Malombra is set in a castle where a mysterious count and his niece live, and where a young writer is invited to write the story of the family. The information gathered includes the cruel treatment of Cecilia, the count’s father’s first wife, who was segregated and then killed in the castle because of adultery. The niece, Marina di Malombra, finds a letter of the dead woman and convinces herself that she is the reincarnation of Cecilia. Obsessed with the need to take revenge, Marina involves the writer in her fixation.
The people in the castle, all but the count, visit the Orrido, a gorge where the most revealing part of the story takes place. Here nature is animated, has anthropomorphic aspects and is inhabited by suffering spirits. Nature is seen as a female creature, a devilish figure able to capture and transform the body. Despite the remoteness and the unfamiliarity of the setting, the characters express their admiration for the “horrid magnificence of the place”. On the other hand, the castle is where the count is proud to live, “out of the world” surrounded by the company of his “society”, the books in the library.
As B.Corrigan (1961) and A. Hallamore Caesar (2007) have pointed out, the novel recalls many of the events in Wilkie Collins’ Woman in White.
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