Uncanny Youth

Childhood, the Gothic, and the Literary Americas

Suzanne Manizza Roszak

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781786838667
• eBook ISBN: 9781786838681
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria dei generi gotico, romantico e horror

A literary study of childhood in the American Gothic.Childhood in Gothic literature has often served colonialist, white supremacist, and patriarchal ideologies, but in Uncanny Youth, Suzanne Manizza Roszak highlights hemispheric American writers who subvert these scripts. In the hands of authors ranging from Octavio Paz and Maryse Condé to N. Scott Momaday and Tracey Baptiste, Gothic conventions critique systems of power in the Americas. As fictional children confront shifting configurations of imperialism and patterns of gendered, anti-queer violence, their uncanny stories call on readers to reckon with intersecting forms of injustice.

1

Haunting Perennial Girlhoods

I want to begin this book about Gothic youth in a place that might at first glance seem to be counterintuitive: with the grown-up Gothic heroine. The pride of place in Gothic texts has often been assigned to these beleaguered women, with ‘the threatened and conquered female body’ functioning in the English Gothic tradition, for instance, as a common ‘substitute for national identity’ (Wester 2012, 7). As Diane Long Hoeveler has argued in her explorations of the ‘Female Gothic’, Gothic depictions of women’s disempowerment in the work of earlier writers like Ann Radcliffe are complex in that they facilitate ‘the female author’s careful manipulation of the masochistic pose’ as her heroines ‘act out, overdo, and hyperbolize’ accepted ‘codes’ for women’s behaviour, only to ‘triumph’ in the end (1998, 113–14, 110). Yet there is another strand of the Gothic – particularly the hemispheric American Gothic – that functions differently in its approach to the figure of the entrapped and struggling woman protagonist. In works by nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers from the United States to Mexico, Martinique, and beyond, the male anti-hero’s forcible, successful, and unending infantilization of women constitutes a kind of textual obsession, a horrific form of figurative and sometimes literal imprisonment with pointed sociopolitical implications. These texts centred on the hauntingly forced perennial girlhoods of grown women offer an initial point of entry into the diverse significations of uncanny youth in the Gothic literature of the Americas, establishing patterns of meaning that will tend to re-emerge later in gothically inflected representations of experiences extending from very young childhood through the end of adolescence.

Readers have long viewed Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ as an exemplar of US Gothic fiction, one whose ‘imprisoned’ narrator and ‘dark, demonic male’ villains make it feel intimately familiar (Perry and Sederholm 2009, 32; Anolik 2019, 23). If late-twentieth-century feminist critics once neglected the story’s gothicism in favour of its sociopolitical heft, failing to ‘account for the Gothic and uncanny elements present in the text’ or contriving to ‘ignore the uncanny altogether’ (Jacobus 2013, 98–9), a whole generation of later scholars has instead shown in exacting detail how the story’s play with Gothic conventions and its critique of patriarchal systems ‘function together in the narrative’ (Perry and Sederholm 2009, 24). In this continuing conversation, which has persistently built on Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s initial work to ‘reintroduce’ the narrative ‘into the history of the literary woman’s struggles, disabilities, and self-liberation’ (Federico 2009, 11), one of the most captivating components of Gilman’s political Gothic has become the haunting ‘process of infantilization’ that famously plagues her narrator-protagonist (Seitler 2008, 185). The image of Gilman’s narrator as a crawling baby has captivated readers like Carol Margaret Davison, who describes the ‘final complex and horrific vision of the senseless and crawling, infantile narrator’ as ‘literaliz[ing] … women’s position in America’ (2004, 48, 66). The scene, of course, is only the culminating moment in a larger, deeply gendered experience of entrapment, in which the narrator’s post-partum depression threatens to ensnare her in a never-ending nightmare of artificially imposed girlhood. As the narrator is confined in a ‘nursery’ and treated as a helpless dependant in need of protection by a purportedly all-knowing husband (Gilman 2009, 168), she finds herself subjected to a suffocatingly gendered extension of the ‘age-based hierarchies and … paternalistic attitude’ (Taft 2019, 147) that characterize the patriarchal model of ‘male dominance over … children’ themselves (Lerner 1986, 239), reflecting quite troubling and problematic cultural constructions of both children’s and women’s identities. Before the publication of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, gothically infantilized women in varying permutations had appeared in earlier English Gothic narratives by women writers from Ann Radcliffe to the Brontës, as well as in stories by contemporaries of Gilman’s such as Edith Nesbit. Later, these suffering women would continue to permeate US literary production, kept alive by writers like Shirley Jackson and ‘vampire novelist’ Anne Rice.¹ In the meantime, Gilman’s efforts to propose a newly ‘sex-neutral medical model’ for understanding women’s post-partum experiences (Thrailkill 2002, 529) relied on her savvy deployment of this trope.

As familiar as it may already be, the Gothic conceit of women’s entrapment in a sort of nightmarish perennial childhood takes on new resonance when it is viewed from a perspective that is more transnational, translinguistic, and diachronic in its reach. Read in this way, Gilman’s story becomes freshly interesting: we are invited to ‘move beyond “The Yellow Wallpaper”’ not just to ‘other, lesser-known work’ of Gilman’s (Tuttle and Farley Kessler 2011, 7) but to a whole suite of hemispheric American texts.² All of these literary works centre on figures of domineering men and horrifyingly subjugated young women: by turns a young wife or mother, a young lover, or sometimes a sheltered young person whose only meaningful relationship is with the father who controls her. Such women have populated stories ranging from Rosario Ferré’s very famous ‘La muñeca menor’ and Carlos Fuentes’s ‘La muñeca reina’, with its ‘dead image of eternal childhood’ (Alcalá González and Bussing López 2020, 11), to newer texts like Daína Chaviano’s short story ‘Estirpe maldita’. Both Ferré’s and Fuentes’s works have increasingly been read as employing – and crafting their own distinct versions of – the twentieth-century Gothic. For its own part, ‘Estirpe maldita’ comes from a collection that Chaviano herself has referred to as an exemplar of Caribbean Gothic writing.³ Then there are examples from the realm of drama, including Octavio Paz’s rewriting of Hawthorne’s ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’ and Aimé Césaire’s Une tempête, both of which revolve around gothically repressed and infantilized daughter figures with a symbolic resonance, and which harness the experience of live theatre in bringing these meanings to life. Rather than reading this textual family as a product of earlier Anglo-American influences, I see them, as Casanova-Vizcaíno and Ordiz suggest of the Latin American Gothic more broadly, as being reflective of a set of shared, often interconnected but nevertheless locally particularized conditions.

The gothicism of the plays has not been much remarked on, perhaps precisely because they are works of drama rather than works of fiction and thus have been subject to the same ‘critical reticence’ that continues to shape the typical response to ‘the Gothic on the modern stage’ (Jones, Poore, and Dean 2018, 4). There is also a tendency to yoke works like La hija de Rappaccini and Une tempête irrevocably to their earlier iterations, ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’ and The Tempest, so that reading the newer works together with other Anglophone texts becomes a rare and strange-seeming exercise. For both of these reasons, in this chapter I would like to think through what might happen if we place a now-canonical work like ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ into conversation with Paz and Césaire’s reworkings of canonical English and United States literary production. While they pull diversely from a Gothic literary history that is multicultural and transnational, all three of these texts are also united by the haunting figures of women who are infantilized and imprisoned by men. Taken together, they suggest a number of questions. What do writers, readers, and audiences get out of these perennial girls? How do they connect to one another? If, as I argue in this book, the construct of Gothic childhood has proven itself to be a particularly evocative tool for literary activism in the Americas, then how does this more figurative way of representing Gothic youth – a forced ‘childhood’ that is imposed on grown women – fit into that larger textual matrix?

It may be helpful if, in beginning to address these issues, we acknowledge the evolving and varied sociopolitical significations of these haunting, unending girlhoods in a longer literary-historical context. This history offers multiple rationales for the literary endurance of the infantilized Gothic heroine in the space of the Americas, not just as a ‘stand-in for cultural anxieties’ (Jones, Poore, and Dean 2018, 6) but also more revolutionarily as a tool for uncovering and rejecting flawed and oppressive paradigms and structures. Hoeveler has handily demonstrated how, for writers like Radcliffe, a Gothic heroine’s pretence to a supposedly childish helplessness or innocence might function as a strategic and extremely effective appropriation of gender stereotypes – not to mention stereotypes of childhood itself – for the purpose of vanquishing a male enemy. In Gilman’s hands, Gothic infantilization functions rather differently: rather than operating as a posture assumed by women for strategic purposes, it is an inescapable state that persists through a final scene in which the story’s narrator remains physically imprisoned in the space of the nursery. Even in interpretations of the story’s ending that stress the liberation of the narrator’s ghostly double, the literal fact of the narrator’s continuing entrapment counterbalances any resulting aura of ‘triumph’. The final product is a gut-punching portrait of the gendered mistreatment and stigmatization of mental illness from the fin-de-siècle middle-class US home to the offices of doctors like Silas Weir Mitchell – a portrait whose explicitly stated purpose, as Gilman would later describe it, was to disrupt and reshape approaches to women’s mental health. While Judith A. Allen encourages us to consider that perhaps ‘the rest cure itself is overemphasized [in Gilman scholarship] as the genesis of Gilman’s feminism and work as a public intellectual’ (2009, 24–5), the lasting reverberations of the story’s textual argument and its conversion of Mitchell into an ‘infamous’ figure (Sevick 2005, 193) gesture toward its continuing effectiveness in achieving Gilman’s self-identified aim. In other words, the events of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ may not have shaped Gilman into the writer and activist she became, but Gilman’s narrative indelibly shaped the discourse on the ‘rest cure’ – and, in the process, generated a compelling testament to the appeal and the rhetorical effectiveness of its particular brand of gothicism.

In La hija de Rappaccini and Une tempête, the perennial girl fares no better than Gilman’s narrator; she never manages to unshackle herself from her condition in any unequivocal way. The horrifying persistence of this dilemma across Paz and Césaire underscores the transnational perils of a patriarchal system in various permutations, creating echoes of Gilman in both works. All three texts engage assertively with problematics of gender that were normalized and reinforced by Shakespeare’s and Hawthorne’s original renderings. Yet Paz and Césaire also force a reckoning that Gilman’s text pointedly avoids: a confrontation with the ways that white women’s chronically gendered subordination has been intertwined with transnational American discourses and systems of white supremacy, slavery, colonialism, and neo-imperialism. In the process, Paz’s and Césaire’s plays offer a kind of template for reading many of the other texts in this book, which not only employ distinctive and culturally specific Gothic tropes but also appropriate typically European or US conventions toward subversive ends, using them to critique the cultures with which – again, unfairly – the dawn of the Gothic is still often most closely associated. Through the Gothic figure of Beatriz and the nightmarish end that she meets in her father’s sequestered Paduan garden, Paz’s play exposes the fissures in a positivist narrative of western cultural superiority founded in false ideas of science and logic, a mythology that has dramatically influenced both Latin American colonial history and US neo-imperial aggression while threatening the safety of an entire world haunted by the fear of a nuclear apocalypse. Paz’s allegorical manoeuvrings suggest a sinister role for white women in these cultural developments, one that is borne out by real histories in the Americas. Meanwhile, in his Gothic reimagining of The Tempest’s Miranda and her relationship to a monstrous father, Césaire devastatingly critiques the mythology of the infantilized, virginal white woman as it has been weaponized against African diasporic communities and Black men specifically in the Atlantic world. While postcolonial readers will be familiar with this strand of thought in Une tempête, what is worth considering more closely here is how Césaire instrumentalizes the trope of the Gothic perennial girl toward this end.

In pursuing these ideas, Paz and Césaire critically extend the conversation that Gilman invited late-nineteenth-century US readers to join and that her contemporary admirers have continued. Horror-laden renderings of infantilized women under figurative and sometimes literal lock and key are central to their meaning-making projects, reaffirming the multi-layered political relevance not only of this specific trope but of Gothic youth more generally, which writers of colour and those working beyond the geo-cultural realms of the white Euro-American Gothic have continued to aesthetically and thematically reshape to reflect a complex matrix of concerns. Read side by side, Gilman, Paz, and Césaire offer up potent examples of the shifting literary significations of protracted Gothic girlhoods – their relevance to issues of race and colonialism as well as to questions of gender and mental health. In the urgency of their themes, these evocations of uncannily unending youth also anticipate a host of other modern and contemporary hemispheric American Gothic works that will take the construct of childhood more literally in unleashing similar arguments.

Gilman’s ‘Little Girl’

Accounts of the specifically Gothic process of infantilization that takes place in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ tend to emphasize the most concrete manifestations of that experience as its most horrifying ones, dwelling understandably on the story’s terrifying climax and its image of the ‘creeping’ narrator (Gilman 2009, 181).⁴ In truth, however, it is not just these moments – in which the narrator most closely resembles an actual, crawling infant – that yoke the Gothic with the figure of Gilman’s protagonist.⁵ Instead, even at times when the narrator’s infantilization is more figurative or subtler, it is gothically shaded in ways that horrify and haunt. The metaphysical imprisonment of a forced unending childhood, one designed according to patriarchally suffocating constructions of both children’s and women’s supposed natures, becomes a spellbindingly awful variation on the trope of the imprisoned Gothic heroine. Taken in the context of a historical moment when a sizeable body of women was subjected to the treatment that plagues Gilman’s beleaguered protagonist, this trope assumes increasing urgency as a method of both intellectually and viscerally confronting readers with the realities of that form of abuse.

At the simplest level of interpretation, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is about a woman’s desperation in the face of social control. Unhappily settled for the summer in an old country house in a remote location ‘quite three miles’ from the nearest village, the story’s narrator has recently given birth to a child and has been instructed to treat her post-partum depression by ceding to the control of her physician husband.⁶ We learn that he ‘hardly lets [her] stir without special direction’, emphasizing ‘perfect rest’ and ‘air’ along with ‘cod liver oil and lots of tonics and things’ and that all-important hallmark of the ‘rest cure’: copious amounts of food (Gilman 2009, 167–8, 173). The narrator is also accordingly barred from socializing with ‘stimulating people’ and even from writing, which she must do surreptitiously when the housekeeper is away (2009, 170). All this is quite factually accurate in that it accords with the protocol recommended by Silas Weir Mitchell, who treated Gilman for her own post-partum depression. Mitchell prescribed ‘a meat-rich diet and weeks or months of bed rest’ for ‘nervous’ women while advocating ‘prolonged periods of cattle roping, hunting, roughriding and male bonding’ as a ‘method of treating nervous men’ (Stiles 2012). In Gilman’s fictionalization of these details, the discomfort of Gilman’s narrator with Mitchell’s approach is further intensified by the room to which she is confined, which offers up multiple, increasingly troubling layers of meaning. While it is bad enough that the narrator may have been installed in what she believes is a playroom for children, with all the paternalistic significance that this would imply, some have speculated that the room instead ‘may have been – or is – a room in an asylum’ (Perry and Sederholm 2009, 30). As the narrator’s psychological condition predictably deteriorates in the wake of her confinement in the foreboding space, and as her feelings of frustration escalate, so too do the new mother’s visions of another woman or women trapped in the room’s wallpaper.

Gothic elements from the haunted house to the self-harming heroine play an essential role in these scenes, deepening the visceral terror of the narrator’s position. While these details will likely be very familiar to those of us who know the story well and especially to those of us who study Gothic literature, it is worth rehearsing a few nuances that will also turn out to be particularly central in Paz and Césaire, intensifying all three writers’ depictions of horrifying perennial girlhood. Not only does the property chosen by the story’s dangerously confident husband turn out to be a predictably sprawling and desolate ‘ancestral hall’ (Gilman 2009, 166); it is also simultaneously an old house in itself and a new house to the family, allowing for the possibility of long-suppressed secrets within its walls and for the possibility that the house’s new inhabitants will discover them as they get to know the place. These two conventions are equally recognizable: the Gothic secret often serves to ‘disrupt … the continuity or unity of the self’ in Gothic texts, while ‘the gloomy old house or castle’ is well-suited to the genre’s interest in ‘the sublime’ in its both US and European permutations (Brinks 2003, 69; Crow 2012, 129). In ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, the secret will never become perfectly clear. Is the property indeed a former asylum haunted by the ghosts of its past inhabitants, who themselves would have faced gothically horrific forms of mistreatment given the stigmatization of mental illness and of neurodiverse identities in the nineteenth-century United States? Although the question may be impossible to answer definitively, in posing it, the narrative spotlights and anticipates the historical and arguably continuing predisposition of US mental health treatment architectures to ‘segregate, isolate, and punish’ – a tendency that in this period had been intensified by factors including social Darwinist thought and ‘genetic determinism’ as well as by sexist notions of supposed female hysteria (Hinshaw 2007, 67–8). A new mother like Gilman’s narrator would not have been equally subjected to all of these forces; after all, the medical expectation was that her condition was temporary rather than genetically persistent, so that she would eventually recover and resume her domestic responsibilities with success. Yet the spectre of the possible former asylum, in haunting the narrative, gestures toward the problem of the ‘rest cure’ as inseparable from this larger landscape of stigmatization and mistreatment. Meanwhile, on a more individual scale, the narrator’s confident assertion that there is something unsettling about their underpriced rental will give way to decided disturbances of her sense of herself. Whether her visions are a symptom of post-partum psychosis or an experience of literal haunting, the coherence and ‘continuity’ of the narrator’s self-concept hang in the balance.⁷

Such ambiguity can be characteristic of the Gothic, which so often ‘is sited in a twilight borderland between familiar and strange’ (Crow 2012, 129). Either interpretation is also compatible with the idea of the ghostly figure or figures as quintessential Gothic doubles, ones that for Cynthia Murillo represent ‘the New Woman, the triumphant alter-ego to the slowly fading “True Woman” at the fin de siècle’ (2013, 756) – although readers need to be careful here, lest they fall into the trap of reading ‘mental illness or disability’ as ‘a metaphor’, which Laura R. Kremmel reminds us is ‘a dangerous and … outdated move when reading disability in literature’ (2020, 454). Although other ‘Female Gothic’ narratives sometimes work more concretely with the concept of the double, confronting readers with eerie scenes populated with twins and namesakes, Gilman’s version is equally convinc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Haunted Perennial Girlhoods
• 2. Cursed Pregnancies and Uncanny Children
• 3. Gothic Boyhoods and Adult Betrayals
• 4. The Teen Girls Aren’t Alright
• 5. Writing Gothic Scenes for Young Readers
• Conclusion: Resistance, Resilience, and the Gothic Happy Ending
• Notes
• Works Cited