Meg Weber

Date of Award

2015

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Reid, Amy

Keywords

Novels, Colonialism, Hauntings, Gothic, Magical Realism

Area of Concentration

Literature

Abstract

In this thesis, I examine portrayals of ghosts and haunting in the following contemporary novels from Mexico, the Caribbean, and the southern United States: Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, Carlos Fuentes’s Aura, Rosario Castellanos’s The Book of Lamentations, Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Informed by trauma theory and contemporary readings of the Gothic and Magical Realism, I argue that the hauntings described in these novels reflect the persistent legacies of the colonial encounter in the Americas. My first chapter focuses on how the haunted narratives unsettle notions of linear time in Pedro Páramo, Aura, and The Book of Lamentations. Representations of time in these novels challenge European notions of progressive history and insist that the events of the past continue to haunt the present. My second chapter investigates the haunting of physical spaces in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Beloved, and Pedro Páramo. I argue that the haunted houses and homelands in these novels serve to illustrate how the violent legacies of the colonial encounter disturb notions of home. These hauntings made physical also give lasting, external reality to the effects of the traumas, allowing them to persist in both time and space. My final chapter discusses portrayals of storytelling in Beloved and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. These novels insist that the acknowledgment and transmission of the traumatic past offers the potential for more effective engagement with the present and future. I conclude the thesis by arguing that the hauntings in these novels serve to haunt the reader, implicating us in the process of critical engagement with traumatic histories and their lasting (if unseen) effects in the present.

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