Erin Jayes

Date of Award

2013

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Wallace, Miriam

Keywords

Queer, Gothic, Uncanny

Area of Concentration

English

Abstract

This thesis focuses on how the word "queer" helps us understand why Gothic fiction is so fluid, indeterminate, and unsettling. I designate a broad definition of the word "queer" based on non-normative sexualities and genders to illustrate the word's flexible definition. I chose novels that have a physical connection between characters that is marked as erotic and dangerous to good British social order. I use Freud's theory of "the uncanny" as a tool to identify the queer elements in these works because it is interested in the repressed, the disoriented, and the rediscovered. The uncanny describes the feeling of disorientation in the face of something forgotten that turns out to be already known. This is what makes the uncanny so congruent with the queer, for these fears are "unspeakable," and the language of the unspeakable produces an uncanny recognition. The uncanny nature of Gothic literature makes possible and demands a queer reading. In "Chapter 1: The Queer Double in Edgar Huntly and Frankenstein," I investigate how queerness manifests itself through the uncanny double or "doppelgänger" in Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly, or Memoirs of a Sleepwalker (1799) and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818). Homosociality between male doppelganger pairs illustrates how bonds between men supersede that of man and woman. These interdependent pairs are projections of each other's fears, desires and possible identities. Ones understanding of the self can only happen through the other. "Chapter 2: The Queerness of Uncanny Addiction in The Monk and Zofloya" argues for a connection between queering and addiction in Matthew Gregory Lewis's famous The Monk (1795) and Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya; or, The Moor (1806). These novels figure characters who are inherently queer in that their status is fluid and their identities shift in all directions—from an ideal pious monk to an incestuous rapist and demon-lover, from a male novice to a sexually adept woman who looks like the Virgin Mary, to one of Lucifer's favored demons, and from a subservient and exotic black servant to a dominating and demonic figure. Queered characters disrupt these novels' narratives of addiction, revealing that their protagonists are addicted to desire itself, rather than obtaining their desires. In "Chapter 3: Monstrous Mothers, Deadly Femininity, and Reproduction Without Men in Carmilla and She: A History of Adventure," I draw on the post-Freud object relations theories of Melanie Klein and D.W. Winnicott to discuss the protagonists' queer and uncanny relationship with the fatal mother figure in Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla (1872) and H. Rider Haggard's She: A History of Adventure (1887). In conclusion, I consider what the uncanny act of queering means for literature and contemporary culture – reiterating that we must hang on to the full richness of "queer" and "queering" to avoid devolving into more acceptable gender/sex identities.

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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