Renee Foss

Date of Award

2013

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Wallace, Miriam

Keywords

Gothic, Victorian, Latin American

Area of Concentration

Literature

Abstract

This thesis explores two novels, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) and Rosario Castellanos's The Book of Lamentations (1962). These novels accord with the traditional Gothic literary canon (1764-1870) through their invocation of the past and preoccupation with racial and women's sexual difference. These racial and sexual anxieties manifest most strongly through the violent power relations between members of key families of both novels. I open my first chapter, "Victorian Anxiety and Repression in Wuthering Heights," by explaining how the novel's multiple frame structure and unreliable narrators invite the reader to approach the narrative with suspicion and uncover the latent racial and sexual anxieties of the novel. Haunting also signifies repressed anxieties. Heathcliff's introduction into the Earnshaw family and eventual usurpation of Wuthering Heights from the legitimate heir bring to the fore Victorian anxieties regarding the racial other. Cathy Earnshaw's transgressive desire for power manifests t rough her claiming Heathcliff as the "whip" who carries out her revenge against her patriarchal oppressors; she also claims him as her very "soul" and destines him to share with her an afterlife of ghostly exile on the moors. In my second chapter, "Sins of the Past and the Return of the Repressed in The Book of Lamentations," I expand on the notion of haunting by introducing the notion of the transgenerational ghost whose endured traumas carry on into the lives of its ancestors. The central trauma of the novel begins with the rape of an Indian woman, Marcela, by a Castilian landowner and tyrant, Leonardo. This rape metaphorizes the Spanish conquest of land and native female bodies. The plethora of female characters in the novel inherit Marcela's trauma and also channel various feminine figures embedded in Mexican history, particularly Malinche and The Virgin of Guadalupe. These women attempt to purge themselves of the trauma through interpolation of the attitudes of the conquistadors, by rendering others' their "whips," and also through struggle for control of the narrative through mythmaking.

Rights

This bibliographic record is available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication. The New College of Florida Libraries, as creator of this bibliographic record, has waived all rights to it worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.

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