Thesis (M.A.)--Ohio State University, 1982. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 113-118).

The plays of James Boaden, an author all too often forgotten in the pages of theatre history, are usually dismissed by scholars as mercenary adaptations of popular Gothic novels for the stage. Boaden’s plays of the 1790s—Fontainville Forest (1794), The Secret Tribunal (1796), The Italian Monk (1797), Cambro-Britons (1798) and Aurelio and Miranda (1799)—were certainly popular successes in their own time, but this should not discount them from serious consideration as aesthetic and ideological objects. In fact, these plays are intelligently wrought, using popular Gothic conventions to further a conservative ideology that was not originally associated with this genre. This fact has gone unrecognized by scholars partly because these plays have not been previously analysed for their dramaturgical structure as adaptations: Boaden borrows conventions from the Gothic, to be sure, but he also borrows dramaturgical techniques from Shakespeare. In so doing, Boaden harnesses both popular appeal and theatrical legitimacy to write Tory propaganda at a time when the stage was a key tool in the ideological war against France and French sympathizers in Britain. Political threats, both domestic and foreign, were of ongoing concern in Britain in the years following the French Revolution. Immediately after 1789, the Gothic was ideologically charged in ways that promoted revolutionary thinking. Boaden’s adaptation of the Gothic form responds to the revolution and the Reign of Terror by replacing the genre’s iconoclasm with a strongly nationalist orientation, drawn, in part, from eighteenth-century Shakespeare reception, itself often strongly nationalist in tone. Boaden’s plays are reactionary in that they comment on the current political situation, using allegory to play on the audience’s emotions. In his first phase, Boaden depicts the demise of a villainous usurper, a scapegoat figure, but his second phase reintegrates the villain into domestic and social harmony. In so doing, Boaden serves as a case study in the shifting attitude towards Britain’s revolutionary sympathizers, the Jacobins, and illustrates the important use of the Gothic mode for conservative purposes. Boaden emerges, in this study, as a figure whose relevance to theatre history in this fraught period requires reassessment.

In this thesis, I examine the domestication of the Gothic hero-villain in Charlotte Brontës Jane Eyre, Emily Brontës Wuthering Heights, and Anne Brontës The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Each of these novels features a powerful Gothic figure who finds himself physically and emotionally subject to the heroine. This subjection is closely linked to the passing away of that hero-villains Gothic masculinity and his conversion to or replacement by domestic, middle-class masculinity. I argue that the larger social shift from gentry and aristocratic authority in eighteenth-century British society to the entrenchment of domestic, middle-class ideology in the Victorian period and the accompanying shift from an elite to a bourgeois model of masculinity are largely responsible for the subjection, and conversion or supplanting, of these Gothic hero-villains. <p>This social-historical framework also allows me to examine these male characters from a masculinist perspective. Much recent Brontë criticism has been feminist in nature, and these analyses fail to do justice to the novels male characters, usually examining them only in relation to the heroine or indeed casting them as feminized figures, especially when their masculinity is perceived to be unconventional. By looking at effects of the shift from elite to domestic masculinity, I offer a more nuanced analysis of these male characters and how they navigate changing expectations of masculinity. <p>I conclude that though these novels follow a similar pattern, which seems to reify domestic ideology, each Brontë supports this ideology to a different degree. This problematization of ideology has a long tradition in the Gothic novel, which is frequently ambivalent and can be used for either revolutionary or reactionary ends. Charlotte and Anne Brontë defeat the Gothic and gentry masculinity of their hero-villains, making way for the domestic man. Along the way, Charlotte Brontë creates a marriage that is both domestic and radically equal; Anne Brontë critiques the dictates of domestic ideology before finally reifying it. Most interestingly, Emily Brontë allows Heathcliff to die unrepentant and haunt the closing pages of Wuthering Heights. Of the three sisters, Emily Brontë most strongly resists domestic ideology and masculinity in her treatment of the Gothic hero-villain.

At the turn of the nineteenth century in England, the Gothic novel was extremely popular for its stories of ghosts, mysterious circumstances and of course, the “damsel in distress”. These novels depicted such women as virtuous heroines, women whose chastity, perseverance in the face of adversity (often brought about by a threatening male figure) and innocence made them models for female readers. However, such depictions of female virtue encouraged readers to associate positive female behaviour with suffering. Charlotte Dacre choose to challenge these beliefs by writing about heroines who attempted to understand and control their sexuality and their lives, regardless of societal mores. However, while Dacre writes of such women, her heroines always end up punished in some way, condemned to a life apart from the outside world by being shut away in convents, or succumbing to death. Comparing Dacre’s work to novels by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis reveals her important contribution to English literature from a feminist perspective; however, it is conceded here that Dacre ultimately cannot envision women who can free themselves from accepted beliefs of virtue. Her heroines’ destinies seem the same as those of her contemporaries: to suffer. Still, her courage in writing about such heroines makes her a remarkable writer, and important to a feminist study of Gothic literature. / February 2006

In my thesis I will discuss Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” in relation to the expectations that scholars have of the gothic genre. I will break this project into four chapters, along with an introduction: (Ch.1) a critical review of scholarship on Poe’s “Usher” that will demonstrate the difficulty in coming to a critical consensus on the tale, (Ch.2) a discussion of Brown’s outline of Gothic conventions, (Ch.3) a look at Poe’s “The Philosophy of Composition” juxtaposed with Aristotle’s Poetics to illumine aspects of Poe’s approach to writing and how it has been informed, and (Ch.4) a close reading of Poe’s “Usher.”

This thesis is an examination of the Gothic elements present in a selection of works by Canadian playwright Judith Thompson. The Gothic genre is marked by continual flux and adaptation, ensuring that its ability to inspire terror, as well as its relevance as a form of cultural critique, remains undiminished. Gothic texts seek to uncover the anxieties and uncertainties that societies would prefer to repress, and then forcing a confrontation with those elements. Frequently this pattern of repression and return takes the form of various kinds of hauntings, as well as the monstrous. As this emphasis on the “return of the repressed” would suggest, psychoanalysis will figure prominently in my analysis of Thompson’s work and is woven throughout the four chapters. Chapter One concentrates on establishing a working definition of the Gothic, its history and development, and the three subcategories of the genre that I will be focusing on in the subsequent chapters: the postmodern Gothic, the feminist Gothic and the Canadian Gothic. All three Gothic subgenres share their affinity for translating late twentieth-century anxieties into the language of the Gothic. They also share a resistance to closure or solutions of any kind, even if such solutions would seem to be advantageous to the author’s putative ideological stance. The works by Thompson I have chosen evidence her preoccupation with postmodern, feminist and contemporary Canadian concerns. She expresses these concerns in a unique style that blends contemporary literary techniques with the more timeless elements of the Gothic tradition.

In this thesis, I examine the domestication of the Gothic hero-villain in Charlotte Brontës Jane Eyre, Emily Brontës Wuthering Heights, and Anne Brontës The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Each of these novels features a powerful Gothic figure who finds himself physically and emotionally subject to the heroine. This subjection is closely linked to the passing away of that hero-villains Gothic masculinity and his conversion to or replacement by domestic, middle-class masculinity. I argue that the larger social shift from gentry and aristocratic authority in eighteenth-century British society to the entrenchment of domestic, middle-class ideology in the Victorian period and the accompanying shift from an elite to a bourgeois model of masculinity are largely responsible for the subjection, and conversion or supplanting, of these Gothic hero-villains. <p>This social-historical framework also allows me to examine these male characters from a masculinist perspective. Much recent Brontë criticism has been feminist in nature, and these analyses fail to do justice to the novels male characters, usually examining them only in relation to the heroine or indeed casting them as feminized figures, especially when their masculinity is perceived to be unconventional. By looking at effects of the shift from elite to domestic masculinity, I offer a more nuanced analysis of these male characters and how they navigate changing expectations of masculinity. <p>I conclude that though these novels follow a similar pattern, which seems to reify domestic ideology, each Brontë supports this ideology to a different degree. This problematization of ideology has a long tradition in the Gothic novel, which is frequently ambivalent and can be used for either revolutionary or reactionary ends. Charlotte and Anne Brontë defeat the Gothic and gentry masculinity of their hero-villains, making way for the domestic man. Along the way, Charlotte Brontë creates a marriage that is both domestic and radically equal; Anne Brontë critiques the dictates of domestic ideology before finally reifying it. Most interestingly, Emily Brontë allows Heathcliff to die unrepentant and haunt the closing pages of Wuthering Heights. Of the three sisters, Emily Brontë most strongly resists domestic ideology and masculinity in her treatment of the Gothic hero-villain.

This thesis, drawing from the Gothic paradigm, attempts to complicate and supplement the revisionist reading of Patrick McCabe¡¦s The Butcher Boy (1992). The novel tells the murder story of Francie Brady, a troubled Irish boy who slaughters his Anglicized neighbor like a pig. Critics have aligned the novel with the revisionist attempt to debunk nationalist meta-narrative. They have also associated the sensational plotline and grotesque imageries in the novel with the Gothic tradition. Revisionism and Gothicism, therefore, are two established reading strategies to The Butcher Boy. Both ideas, however, are used by critics with certain unease, for both terms are under much critical debate. Moreover, in the end of the novel, McCabe astutely eschews moral judgment on Francie¡¦s horrific deed. Francie¡¦s first-person narrative also allows the reader to sympathize with the young murderer. In this regard, McCabe keeps a sympathetic undertone in the murder story, which a simplistic revisionist reading cannot fully account for. This thesis, bringing the two critical paradigms together, argues that McCabe¡¦s use of Gothicism is crucial to understanding his complicated re-visioning of Ireland in the 1960s. Through historicizing the Gothic fiction, the thesis underlines the idea of ¡§antiquarianism¡¨ to explicate the historical background of the novel¡XIreland at the turn of the 1960s when the Republic underwent a transformation of national ethos, from conservative nationalism to modernization. I contend that while the novel is critical of the waning nationalism, it is also suspicious of Ireland¡¦s relentless modernizing project. From a cultural dimension of the Gothic, the thesis foregrounds the relation between Gothic imagination and racial discourse. In this light, I intend to demonstrate that the recurrent image of ¡§pig¡¨ in the novel is a Gothicized racial stereotype of the Irish people. Through Francie¡¦s struggle with the pig image, the thesis examines Irish people¡¦s negotiation with their often derogatory racial stereotype. Finally, resorting to the Gothic device of ¡§double bind,¡¨ I attempt to expound McCabe¡¦s underlying sympathy for the homicidal and suicidal boy, who is depicted as both victim and murderer, both pig and butcher.

This dissertation considers the future convergence between gothic studies and humanism in the age of posthumanism and proposes “cyborgothic” as a new literary genre that heralds that future. The convergence under consideration is already in progress in that an encounter between human and non-human consistently inspires the two fields, questioning the nature of humans and the treatment of such non-human beings as cyborgs. Such questioning, often conducted within the boundary of humanities, persistently interprets non-human beings as either representing or helping human shortcomings. Accordingly, answers are human-orientated or even human-centered in many cases, and “cyborgothic,” generated out of retrospective investigation into gothic studies and prospective formulation of posthumanism, aims to present different, nonanthropocentric ways to view humans and non-humans on equal terms. The retrospective investigation into gothic studies focuses on Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful to retrieve a gothic aesthetics of the beautiful, and in the second chapter, examines Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein against Kant’s aesthetics to demonstrate how this gothic aesthetics becomes obsolete in the tradition of the sublime. This dissertation then addresses Bram Stoker’s Dracula along with Bruno Latour’s Science in Action to reveal problems in fabricating scientific knowledge, especially focusing on sacrifices made in the process. In the forth chapter, I examine Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith with William James’s pragmatism, and consider the question of how moral complications inherent in science have been handled in American society. The last chapter proposes Marge Piercy’s He, She and It as a same cyborgothic text, which tries to develop a way to acknowledge the presence of the cyborg—one that is at once aesthetical and ethical—so as to enable humans and cyborgs to relate each other on equal terms. Thus, “cyborgothic” is being required as a literary attempt to present the age of posthumanism that is no longer anthropocentric.

This dissertation proposes ?ghost writer? as a new critical term for the ?author? in accordance with what Roland Barthes calls the ?death of the author.? For this purpose, the dissertation conjoins current gothic criticism, modern authorship theories, and studies of nineteenth-century American literature. Current gothic critics, in their endeavors to re-define the gothic as a serious genre that represents social, cultural, and historical anxieties and terrors, have obscured gothic authors? presence. This indistinct, ghostly authorial existence within gothic criticism becomes relevant to modern authorship theorists? reflection on the end of eighteenth-century sovereign and autarchic authorship due to the ever-interpretable text and ever-interpreting readers, by means of the self-effacing gothic writers in nineteenth-century America. American literary scholars agree on contemporary readers? increasing power to assess writers? performance. Gothic writers, especially susceptible to this power since the ambiguities of the gothic necessitate readers? active constructions, composed their texts without selfassumed authorial intentions. This dissertation considers how the century?s five most representative gothic writers re-configure the author as a ghost that should come into being by readers? belief in what it writes. Chapter I examines the common grounds between the aforementioned three fields in further detail and illuminates the exigency of the ghost writer. Chapter II discusses Charles Brockden Brown?s prototypical expos� in Wieland of Edward Young?s typically romantic formulation of the originary and possessive author. Chapter III shows Edgar Allan Poe?s substantiation of Brown?s expos� through his conception of the author as a reader-made fiction in Arthur Gordon Pym. Chapter IV applies Poe?s author-fiction to Frederick Douglass and Louisa May Alcott, and investigates how those two marginalized writers overcome their spectrality with the aid of readers? sympathetic relation to their texts, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and ?Behind a Mask,? and subsequent validation of their author-ity. Chapter V explores the author?s willing self-transformation into the ghost writer in James?s The Turn of the Screw, and ponders how the ghost writer goes beyond the author?s death. By introducing the ghost writer, this dissertation ultimately aims to trace the pre-modern shift from the autonomous author to the heteronomous author.