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.

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.

Cyberpunk's attempt to imagine the futures that the expanding communications networks will shape, as explored in Sterling's Islands in the Net and Stephenson's The Diamond Age, discovers that the boundaries between the machine and human, the natural and artificial, and the past and present have never been as clear as the modern realist schematic has drawn them. Gothic literature represents transgressions of these boundaries as threatening to the self, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is the node where the gothic is dismembered and sutured into science fiction, and the modern self faces its monstrous double. Yet if boundaries are represented as sites of interface, gothic threats become opportunities for growth and generation. Individual texts, even realist ones, have always sutured together intertextual ingredients. Jane Eyre offers an alternative model for constructing the subject through sorting texts, a technique which emerges through cyberpunk as the essential survival skill of the future self.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Göttingen. / Bibliography: p. xvi-xxii.

Stuttgart, Universiẗat, Diss., 2008.

Thesis (M.A.)--Liberty University, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of St Andrews, July 2007. / Restricted until 25th June 2008.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 251-268).

Zugl.: Münster (Westfalen), Univ., Magisterarbeit, 2005

Zugl.: Hannover, Univ., Diss., 2004 / Literaturverz. S. 345 - 367