Contemporary Women's Gothic Fiction

Carnival, Hauntings and Vampire Kisses

Gina Wisker

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137303493
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Film e video

This book revives and revitalises the literary Gothic in the hands of contemporary women writers. It makes a scholarly, lively and convincing case that the Gothic makes horror respectable, and establishes contemporary women's Gothic fictions in and against traditional Gothic. The book provides new, engaging perspectives on established contemporary women Gothic writers, with a particular focus on Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison. It explores how the Gothic is malleable in their hands and is used to demythologise oppressions based on difference in gender and ethnicity. The study presents new Gothic work and new nuances, critiques of dangerous complacency and radical questionings of what is safe and conformist in works as diverse as Twilight (Stephenie Meyer) and A Girl Walks Home Alone (Ana Lily Amirpur), as well as by Anne Rice and Poppy Brite. It also introduces and critically explores postcolonial, vampire and neohistorical Gothic and women's ghost stories.

© The Author(s) 2016

Gina WiskerContemporary Women's Gothic FictionPalgrave Gothic10.1057/978-1-137-30349-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Gina Wisker¹

(1)

Centre for Learning & Teaching, University of Brighton, East Sussex, UK

End Abstract

Contemporary Gothic has made horror respectable. As a literary form studied in universities, enamoured of critics, when contemporary Gothic combines the edgy enlightenment of queer theory, and postcolonialism, with the multiple perspectives and angles of diversity of origin, sexuality and culture, this broad scope offers a disconcerting enrichment. Gothic is everywhere. Through its relentless questioning, it exposes dis-ease and discomfort, sometimes only to reinforce the complacencies it disrupts, but more thrillingly, very often leaving writers and readers more aware and less comfortable. As Marie Mulvey-Roberts comments, ‘Gothic life, like that of a giant poisonous plant with far-reaching tendrils, has found its sustenance by feeding off the credulities of its reader. This hot-house hybrid is constantly mutating, making new growths out of old as in its propensity for parody and pastiche. What remains consistent, according to Angela Carter), is the retention of “a singular moral function—that of provoking unease”’ (Mulvey-Roberts 1998, p. xvii).

So why do contemporary women write the Gothic? And what are the essential links between feminist perspectives and critiques, and the contemporary Gothic written by women?

I want this book to explore and celebrate contemporary women’s literary Gothic, the contradictions and the richness of ways in which contemporary women writers, both established and new, conventional and radical, use the opportunities afforded by the Gothic to engage with culture, imagination and their arguments. The Gothic undercuts and destabilises single readings, as it does its own conventions, and in this spirit I will question how we read them, draw attention to an ongoing dialogue between the texts and indicate what readings are offered by a growing body of critics, popular and academic. We need to appreciate the diverse panoply of the Gothic which has been seen perversely as both ubiquitous and negligible in contemporary society and contemporary writing.

So why is the literary Gothic the focus of this book? It is because it has designs upon us. The Gothic, at least in its literary form, shakes up and problematises tired ways of perceiving and expressing normality by disrupting the everyday world of residual compliance. It disturbs, upsets, ironises and parodies our deeply held beliefs and our safe but constraining narratives of, among others, progress, identity, power, family, safety and love. Many of those issues have a particularly nuanced meaning for, and effect on, women, and contemporary women writers of the Gothic are particularly concerned with those bedazzling and constrictive narratives of security, safety and collusion which society peddles and which the Gothic undercuts and queries. Dis-ease and uncertainty are key coordinates in Gothic literature. Like bees and wasps fertilising the garden, its disturbance is, I argue, ultimately good for us because it shakes us out of blinkered complacencies and encourages questioning. Even the unpalatable insights the Gothic serves us can be fruitful. However, like wasps in particular, it can pack a cruel sting, since defamiliarisation, instability and contradiction are often uncomfortable. As such, the Gothic can be transformative, since the act of destabilising can trigger critical or even promote new radical thinking. Not surprisingly, it might not be welcome in certain repressive regimes. Owing to this critical edge, it causes us to rethink and reconsider the world around us. Much of its current popularity, even necessity in terms of literary study, derives precisely from that sting, that disturbance which leads to transformative thinking.

There are several voices in this book. One is my own, because much of what I am discussing is my own response to the texts and authors I have chosen and my response to developments in contemporary women’s Gothic, based on my reading of texts and critics, and from discussions with students over the years. The word ‘we’ has been used to indicate how we are part of a readership with rights to comment on these texts, which facilitate our engagement with cultural and personal issues. I use ‘we’ too in recognition of the readers, critics and students who might find this book useful. An academic scholarly voice is focalised in the expectation that this book will be part of a useful, informed and ongoing critical discussion with other scholars in this rapidly growing field.

In discussing contemporary women’s Gothic writing, I begin with some general thoughts regarding assumptions about the Gothic, its reception and sets of definitions. I am also arguing for the value of the Gothic as a contemporary mode of expression and exploration and its penchant for articulating concerns which really matter. First, there is an issue concerning the characteristics of contemporary women’s Gothic writing, plus the nuances that women writers might bring to the Gothic, whether they are using it as a crucial, critical vehicle to explore issues which beset us, or just as a popular fictional mode of choice. The latter might suggest frivolity, which is not applicable to the works I am dealing with here, which engage with issues of particular concerns to women and men, for whom gender interacts with power, culture, society and the self, both with and through representation. While I mention and explore some writers who produce a rather conventional version of Gothic in their works, I am more concerned with women writers who engage with confusions, transformations, troublesome paradoxical experiences and challenges to their way of being. Through a set of general definitions, the continuities of the Gothic will emerge, alongside some of its new emanations. For this there will be an interaction between the familiar and that which undergoes change in terms of context, location, time and perspective.

After the general introductory discussion, the book continues by exploring the work of established figures who have received a great deal of critical attention, including Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter and Toni Morrison. It suggests ways in which these highly respected writers, who are cornerstones of contemporary women’s writing of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, use and develop forms and expressions provided by the literary Gothic in order to argue their points about power, identity, relationships, culture and history. At the same time, they offer a combination of established and new perspectives, new versions of reality and sometimes potential new futures. I also introduce some newer writers who are worthy of greater appreciation and who revive familiar Gothic forms often for different ends. Several are from postcolonial contexts, including Shani Mootoo, Nalo Hopkinson, Erna Brodber, Ana Lily Amirpour, Helen Oyeyemi and Beth Yahp. Some have developed that favourite genre for women writers, the ghost story, as do Susan Hill, Kate Mosse, Helen Dunmore and Catherine Lim. Others use the figures of the vampire or the werewolf to explore lesbian relationships, question definitions of normativity and undercut beliefs about mothering, along with other conventional behaviours for women.

Just a couple of weeks ago, a non-literature colleague asked me, ‘What do you mean by the Gothic?’ I remember asking myself, where does one begin, since Gothic is actually so many different things, crossing numerous disciplines, such as architecture, art and film, discourses and even lifestyle choices.

As Catherine Spooner puts it when considering fashion and music, ‘Like a malevolent virus, Gothic narratives have escaped the confines of literature and spread across disciplinary boundaries to infect all kinds of media, from fashion and advertising to the way contemporary events are constructed in mass culture’ (2006, p. 8). The rich variations of Gothic influence on culture, clothes, furniture and music are sometimes shown in fashion choice, or elsewhere in deliberate challenge to more prosaic conventional forms, and sometimes both of these together. These versions are also enacted through the exploration of Gothic subcodes of a broad range of alternative sexualities (particularly queer Gothic), and occasionally exploratory, celebratory, even dangerous sexual exchanges moving into and/or exposing sado-masochism and pornography. These include many of Angela Carter’s short stories, and her The Sadeian Woman (1978), as well as some radical lesbian Gothic vampire tales, some heterosexual erotic vampire romance and so on. The Gothic has proved itself to be more than a reflection of social anxieties, though it does engage with our secret fears and ‘provides a language and a lexicon through which anxieties both personal and collective can be narrativized’ (Spooner 2006, p. 9). Undoubtedly, Gothic is engaged with the past, since it is so fascinated by revivals and revenants. This is equally true of the architecture, as with the figures in literature, so the eighteenth-century resurgence of Gothic architecture was followed by the Victorian Gothic revival. In literature and film, many Gothic monsters are revenants, which return from the dead, such as the vampire, ghost or zombie. Joanne Watkiss takes this notion of endless return into the textual, arguing that rewriting returns the ‘chaotic creativity of intertextuality and uncanny repetition’ (2012, p. 3).

Ubiquitous Contemporary Gothic

We live in Gothic times. (Carter 1974, p. 122)

Monstrosity shadows millennial change. (Botting 2014, p. 498)

The quotations above were written forty years apart. Each focuses on the contemporary Gothic, each emphasising the ways in which we experience and read our times as Gothic. However, not everyone has found the Gothic as contemporary and engaged as Botting and Carter. Arguing that reading and writing through the lens of the Gothic is replicating ‘a boring and exhausted paradigm’ (1991, p. 289), Fredric Jameson apparently mistook for a temporary fad a richly morphed way of understanding and depicting the concerns of our times. The Gothic is far from worn out, dissipated, merely popularist trimmings and trappings. It is now mainstreamed. Zombies and vampires are the figures of choice for some TV advertisements, motifs on children’s clothing and tourist paraphernalia, as well as a consistent frame of reference from horror to dystopian fantasy, crime and romance films and fictions. Yet might this not trivialise its cutting comment on contemporary ways? Alternatively, should this be seen as part of a continuum, embracing lifestyle and media representation at one end and cultural critique at the other? In the hands of women writers, the contemporary Gothic often has a deliberately comic, parodic and popularist edge which does not undervalue its critique. Simultaneously, it has a radical aesthetically inventive edge which problematises ways in which women are represented, controlled and considered in contemporary society.

Critically, David Punter led the way in exploring how, following the French and American revolutions, the Gothic emerged as a radical response to Enlightenment discourses which undermined and marginalised the working class, cultural difference and the powers of the imagination (Punter 1996). Gothic expresses the contradictions and ironies of the contemporary worlds in which we live. Its history is one of revealing hidden, silenced and subordinated voices and subtexts. Now the exposure of and often celebration of contradiction, performance and the dangerous investment in everyday complacencies is more than a subversive subtext—it is the necessary experience of everyday life (Punter 1996). While Gothic has been seen initially as having a radical edge, not every critic agrees that its energies enable and maintain that edge. Teresa Goddu commented as early as 1997 that while it may seem rebellious and radical, often it maintains a comfortable relationship with official narrative, de-energising its powers of change so ‘gothic may unveil the ideology of official discourse, but its transformative power can be limited’ (1997, p. 11). Commenting on the often conservative, even racist energies of an imperial Gothic that characterises the Other as a creature of horror, Johun Hoglund notes that ‘the gothic can be seen to simultaneously embrace and disturb modernity and empire’ (Hoglund 2014, p. 7). What is intended as radical might be read as parodic or conformist; what was once used for critique can be used and seen as advertising trappings and little more than Disney entertainment. Even that essential Gothic characteristic of return, repeat and rediscovery can seem mere dull repetition. Intention, context, self-critique, self-awareness and reader or audience response are crucial in the mix. You can laugh, cry or scream at The Duchess of Malfi (Webster 1614), Dracula (Stoker 1897), Dawn of the Dead (2004) and The Shining (2008).

Something that is so ubiquitous and popular in the contemporary has antecedents now rediscovered and remade at every opportunity, particularly in film (I Frankenstein, 2014; TV Dracula, and a Dracula every two or three years) and novelistic mash-ups (Seth Grahame-Smith, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, 2009, and Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter, 2010). The Gothic has a perpetually haunting presence; it exhibits a fascinatingly confusing desire to replay and reconfigure, to see anew and differently at every twist and turn. Familiar Gothic characters and the cultural and personal issues are constantly revisited through its mix of playful, performative and cutting critique and exposure of serious, ongoing concerns. These might include identity, wholeness of self, domestic security, a whole range of values, borderlines between good and bad, living and dead, as well as human and animal. The Gothic enables us to question what is taken for granted and is fundamental to what it is to be human, often through its engagement with the liminal.

Contemporary Women’s Gothic: Convention and Haunting

It is important at this point to introduce arguments which run throughout the book concerning the use of Gothic tropes, such as ghostings and hauntings, and the familiar, morphing functions of vampires and were-creatures, whose presence troubles surface complacencies. As such, they open up debate about the satisfactory nature of the narratives with which we live our lives and offer continued critiques of and challenges to comfort, order and compliance. The Gothic, its settings, creatures, atmosphere, tropes and narratives are put to work by contemporary women Gothic writers, to expose the horror in the domestic, oppression in the everyday, as well as the cultural and imaginative constraints perpetuated in forms as broad as romantic fictions, folk and fairytales, popular fictions and grand meta-narratives.

A consideration of some of the key theorists is useful here. Women’s Gothic writing deals with the domestic, with sex and sexuality, spaces, places, behaviours and norms which oppress women, the body as a site for reproduction, and terror, technological control and power relations. Ellen Moers (1976) developed the term ‘female Gothic’, arguing that ‘women’s concern with their physical appearance colludes with their self-denigration’ (p. 90). Much women’s Gothic shows an awareness that the female body is frequently represented as monstrous, as abject, for as Karen Stein puts it, ‘it is precisely this male disgust with woman’s sexuality, the male hatred and fear of woman’s awful procreative power and her “otherness,” which lies at the root of the Female Gothic’ (1983, p. 125). Moers (1976) characterises female Gothic texts as ‘a coded expression of women’s fears of entrapment within the domestic and within the female body’ (p. 000). Contemporary women’s Gothic writing points to ‘a space where the absent mother might be’ (Wolstenholme 1993, p. 151), and Suzanne Becker (2012) talks of the ways in which Gothic texts by women haunt each other, both in concerns and forms, reminding and revisiting the more tradition...