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Psychoanalysis and the Gothic
Abstract
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El presente artículo trata de descubrir las reminiscencias del gótico posmoderno que perviven en los cuentos de la escritora catalana Cristina Fernández Cubas. A través del análisis de alguno de los mismos, queda demostrado cómo los personajes, tras haber sufrido determinadas experiencias traumáticas, experimentan en la conformación de su personalidad un conflicto entre aceptar su parte abyecta, y perder su “yo” social, o fundirse con la sociedad, anulando así la parte más oscura de sí mismos. En este trance el género gótico actuará con toda su imaginería a modo de mecanismo para salvar el obstáculo antitético que se produce en la mente de los personajes.
In formulating a test for determining the defendant’s state of mind at the time of an offence, criminal courts have struggled to maintain a coherent and consistent approach. Located in the context of Law and Literature, which uses literary tools in analysing, understanding and shaping legal thought and action, my research explores problems of proof in criminal law, and the law’s relationship with the internal mind, through the literary figure of the double. Specifically, I will be looking at doubles in Gothic fiction from the nineteenth century, a time which struggled to understand the guilty psyche and personified the internal mind as an external being.
By utilising Gothic doubles as a new way of reading doctrinal and theoretical debates regarding mens rea, my thesis aims to prove that doubles in Gothic fiction, specifically in Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus and The Picture of Dorian Gray, can be read as external manifestations of the internal mind; as representations of the criminal law of the nineteenth century which was in the process of developing mens rea. Ultimately, my research aims to provide new and unique ways of engaging with concepts of gender, character and the divide between subjective and objective approaches in cases of recklessness
Exploring the links between Speculative Realism, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism, this article examines OOO’s entanglement with the ‘uncanny’. Reading OOO against three notable treatments of the concept - Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay “The ‘Uncanny’”, Ernst Jentsch’s 1906 paper “On the Psychology of the Uncanny”, and Martin Heidegger’s discussion of uncanniness in his Introduction to Metaphysics (1953) - it argues that OOO reconfigures the ‘uncanny’ as a profoundly ontological concept premised on aesthetic enstrangement. Using E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short story “The Sandman” as a case study, it assesses what the consequences of this reconfiguration are for literary criticism and, in particular, the study of the Gothic. By splicing OOO into the history and practice of Gothic scholarship, this article traces the outline of an “object-oriented uncanny”, pushing the ‘uncanny’ out of Freud’s shadow and into the “great outdoors”.
Critics tend to view the Gothic as a means of fulfilling trauma theory’s ethical imperative of evoking in readers an empathic identification with the Gothic/psychoanalytic subject. Doing so, however, relies on problematic assumptions about the inevitability of ethical responses from writers and audiences alike. This monograph re-evaluates the link between trauma and the Gothic through six British novels: Martin Amis’s London Fields (1989), Margaret Drabble’s The Gates of Ivory (1991), Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001), Pat Barker’s Regeneration (1991) and Double Vision (2003), and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005). Over the course of these texts, a progression emerges towards greater awareness of the ethical contradictions existing within literary trauma studies, which are brought to light by the Gothic conventions appearing in these narratives.
Revisiting the American Gothic via Julia Kristeva's theory of "the abject" demonstrates how Gothic strategies expose the historical contradictions of race in works by Mark Twain, Charles W. Chesnutt, and Toni Morrison. As theorized by Kristeva in Powers of Horror, the archaic process in which the subject attempts to constitute itself as homogeneous by casting off or "abjecting" all that cannot be assimilated to the self-same necessarily opens the way to repeated returns of the abject(ed) and the "horror" it provokes. Because the Gothic enacts the return of the abject, it was itself abjected from the literary canon until recently. In American literature, especially since Reconstruction, Gothic horror subverts and reverses the process through which the new subject-nation mythologized itself as blameless by abjecting the African presence and the nightmarish history of slavery. Twain's The Tragedy of Puddn'head Wilson, Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman, and Morrison's The Bluest Ey
e and Beloved all deploy Gothic strategies to give voice to the unspeakable experiences associated with slavery and contest the rationalist discourses that enforce and legitimate racism. Twain's narrative celebrates the subversive Gothic storytelling of the slave Roxana but ultimately betrays the author's ambivalence toward racial identity. Chesnutt's use of the Gothic more decisively reverses racist abjection through the encounter between the ex-slave Julius, with his conjure tales, and the white Yankee investor John, who tries to understand Julius but cannot. In the twentieth century Gothic narratives by black writers focus on internalized racism. In Morrison's The Bluest Eye Claudia's abject-writing exposes the deadly effects of mainstream mythology and internalized abjection in Pecola's destruction. In Beloved Morrison uses the Gothic to create an alternative world and suggest a means of healing the effects of slavery through the ghostly figure of Beloved. These narratives exemplif
y the increasing power of Gothic to create an alternative perspective on the racist history and culture of America.
DeLamotte's book begins from the premise that the major conventions of the Gothic romance involve boundaries or barriers, which the Gothicist uses to play simultaneously on the fear of separateness and the fear of unity with some alien Other. She explores this question in the works of English and American writers, including Henry James, Mary Shelley, Herman Melville, Hawthorne, Emily Bronte, and Charlotte Bronte.
Readers familiar with Dracula and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde may not know that dozens of equally remarkable Gothic texts were written in Great Britain at the end of the nineteenth-century. This book accounts for the resurgence of Gothic, and its immense popularity, during the British fin de siècle. Kelly Hurley explores a key scenario that haunts the genre: the loss of a unified and stable human identity, and the emergence of a chaotic and transformative 'abhuman' identity in its place. She shows that such representations of Gothic bodies are strongly indebted to those found in nineteenth-century biology and social medicine, evolutionism, criminal anthropology, and degeneration theory. Gothic is revealed as a highly productive and speculative genre, standing in opportunistic relation to nineteenth-century scientific and social theories.
Gothic Origins: The Haunting of the Text The Gothic and the Law: Limits of the Permissible Laws which Bind the Body: The Case of the Monster Re-enactments of the Primal Scene: The Example of Zastrozzi Regimes of Terror: From Robespierre to Conrad Identification and Gender: The Law of Ligeia A Descent into the Body: Wuthering Heights Psychopathology: Contamination and the House of Gothic Laws of Recollection and Reconstruction: Stephen King The Body Sublime: Liu Suola's King of Singers Gothic After/Words: Abuse and the Body Beyond the Law
Upon its first publication, Loving with a Vengeance was a groundbreaking study of women readers and their relationship to mass-market romance fiction. Feminist scholar and cultural critic Tania Modleski has revisited her widely read book, bringing to this new edition a review of the issues that have, in the intervening years, shaped and reshaped questions of women's reading. With her trademark acuity and understanding of the power both of the mass-produced object, film, television, or popular literature, and the complex workings of reading and reception, she offers here a framework for thinking about one of popular culture's central issues. This edition includes a new introduction, a new chapter, and changes throughout the existing text.
Melmoth the Wanderer / Charles Maturin Note: The University of Adelaide Library eBooks @ Adelaide.
The Mysteries of Udolpho / Ann Radcliffe Note: The University of Adelaide Library eBooks @ Adelaide.
The Monk / Matthew Lewis Note: The University of Adelaide Library eBooks @ Adelaide.
In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism, and the Gothic
- Michelle A. Massé
“Deserts, ruins and troubled waters: female dreams in fiction and the development of the Gothic novel.”
- Doody Margaret Anne
Gothic Fictions: Prohibition/ Transgression
- David Punter
Gothic (Re)Visions: Writing Women as Readers
- Susan Wolstenholme