Session 4: Gothic Appropriation of the Past
2nd Global Conference
Monday 16th May – Wednesday 18th May 2011
Warsaw, Poland
Reality, or the Illusion of the Secret: Gothic Fictions of Masculinity
Katarzyna Więckowska
English Deaprtment, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń, Poland
As numerous critics claim, the gothic is a mode particularly suited for expressing repressed desires and socially unacceptable behaviours: obsessed with the pleasures of the illicit, it violates social norms only to (seemingly) restore and reinforce them by the end of the narrative. As David Punter claims, in “gothic we are brought to see our abjection”, both with respect to individual identity and to the larger cultural field, and therefore a gothic text makes it almost impossible to distinguish between reality and illusion, desire and perversion, the double and the self, and, perhaps most importantly, between the natural and the cultural. If the main interest of gothic fiction is otherness, however multifaceted, the image of reality that is represented there stresses not its structured mechanism of laws and prohibitions, but its relational and inherently arbitrary character. To put it differently, the gothic does not supply us with a neat division into illusion and reality, but rather forces us to see what Slavoj Žižek calls “the reality in the illusion.”
This paper focuses on the representation of male characters in 19th and 20th century male-authored gothic fiction and examines the ways in which the structure of the gothic text captures some contemporary findings regarding the nature of male gender identity. By offering an overview of some well-known gothic heroes, such as those presented R. L. Stevenson, B. Stoker, or J. Conrad, I show how and why the gothic represents the war that is fought within the anxious male subject. As the male body plays an important role in the destabilization of the notion of stable masculinity, the paper combines the examination of psychic processes and textual conventions with an analysis of the gothicized body. The critical perspective used in the paper is psychoanalysis (S. Freud, J. Lacan and S. Žižek) and contemporary men’s studies (M. Cohen, E. Kosofsky-Sedgwick, M. Breitenberg).
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Spatialized Gothic Masculinities in Fin-de-Siécle Suburbia
Tanya Pikula
York University, Toronto, Canada
My study links the rapid growth of middle-class suburbia in the late-nineteenth-century Britain to the popularity of Gothic fiction in fin-de-siècle literature. While I read the rise of suburbia as the means by which the bourgeoisie spatially affirmed its class identity and heteronormativity, I explore how a democratization of this ideal and influx of lower-middle and working class citizens into suburbia generated anxiety about readability of human identity, especially as represented by the figure of a mobile, suburban male. The suburbs were increasingly characterized in literature of the period as spaces of ‘becomings,’ in which ontology, epistemology, and ethics intersected in ways that were potentially destabilizing to accepted categorizations of gender, class, heternormativity, and ‘normalcy.’ The aim of my paper is to reassesses the connections between the growth of suburbia and an increasingly spatialized understanding of gender and class: I identify a largely ignored fin-de-siècle literary concern with spatially-involved masculinities, and analyze how destabilizing interplays of gender and urban decentralization were repeatedly elaborated in Gothic short stories of Arthur Conan Doyle and Arthur Machen.
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I Am the Monster’s Mother: Aesthetic Strategies of Monstrous Creation in Contemporary Gothic Narrative
Anya Heise-von der Lippe
Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
“The monster’s body is a cultural body”, as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen points out (Cohen, 1996): Gothic monstrosity is a framework which allows us to explore what we otherwise suppress. The monster is a shape-shifter. Its adaptability reflects changing cultural fears, which often remain unnamable, or can only be expressed in the metaphorical language of Gothic monstrosity. The monstrous body is a patchwork of cultural issues revolving around different concepts of alterity. Gothic criticism has long established the monster as a central image of deviant corporeality. Like few other concepts, it draws attention to the discursive boundaries which underlie distinctions of the human and its others, as well as the cultural mechanisms employed to reiterate and reinforce these boundaries. Moreover, in a quite literal, Frankensteinian way, the monster also makes visible the stitches with which it has been patched together from various body parts. The monstrous body, by drawing attention to the monstrous process of its creation, works as a narrative structuring device.
In Mary Shelley’s prototypical Frankenstein (1818) the monster’s own narrative account is embedded within a complicated framework of narrative voices revolving around the deviant circumstances of its creation and corresponding questions of creative authority. Monstrosity has become an important feature in the Gothic tradition as well as its more recent medial manifestations. Structural parallels between body and text may be one of the secrets of the monster’s success – especially in film (but also in other media like graphic novels or hypertext). The parallel structure of stitched-together, monstrous body and fragmented text draws attention to the mechanisms of “making monstrous” (Botting, 1993). My paper undertakes to trace these mechanisms by examining the narrative, aesthetic and cultural strategies surrounding the construction of monstrous body and monstrous narrative through a number of textual, filmic and hypertextual manifestations of the Frankenstein myth.
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