This dissertation explores the reoccurrence of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein within twentieth-century American novels. While the inaccurate 1931 film version by James Whale remains the best known adaptation of Frankenstein, I argue that Willa Cather, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Chuck Palahniuk return to Shelley’s 1818 novel to critique racist and misogynistic responses to anxieties about gender and racial power in the age of industrial consumer culture. In doing so, I extend existing scholarship on the American Gothic to demonstrate that The Professor’s House, Invisible Man, Beloved, and Fight Club represent a specifically Shelleyan Gothic tradition in twentieth-century American literature. My project draws upon influential feminist and postcolonial readings of Frankenstein and on the theoretical work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and later critics who have developed her theory to show how the twentieth-century novels echo themes and motifs from Shelley’s novel to critique the destructive effects of male homosociality. Each novel contains a protagonist that resembles Victor Frankenstein and responds to historically specific anxieties about gender, race, and industrial technoscience by creating a doppelgänger who enables participation in a homosocial bond that is initially empowering but proves destructive to women, racial minorities, and eventually the creature and creator figures themselves. My reading reveals unexpected similarities between Cather’s The Professor’s House and Palahniuk’s Fight Club. Cather’s novel appears to glorify Tom Outland as the ideal masculine hero but ultimately reveals him to be a monstrous doppelgänger who acts out the Professor’s oppressive impulses; similarly, Fight Club seems to romanticize the male violence instigated by the doppelgänger figure Tyler Durden but actually echoes Shelley’s critique of male homosociality as monstrous. My reading also reveals previously overlooked similarities between Invisible Man and Beloved, both of which feature a black protagonist who surprisingly resembles Victor Frankenstein by creating a doppelgänger to challenge his or her disempowerment by the structures of white male homosociality but end up emulating the destructive homosocial structures they critique. My dissertation shows how all of these writers share Shelley’s critique yet move beyond it by offering alternatives to the destructive cycle of violence, embodied in each case by a female figure who resists or reclaims the position of the abject other in the homosocial triangle.

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Ce mémoire étudie les épitomés de la figure doppelganger en trois romans britanniques gothiques du XIXe siècle: Frankenstein de Mary Shelley, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde de Robert Louis Stevenson et Dracula de Bram Stoker. En utilisation avec les sources secondaires dont The Origin of Species et The Descent of Man de Charles Darwin, et The Uncanny de Sigmund Freud, je soutiens que le doppelganger symbolise les conventions sociales et les angoisses des hommes britanniques dans les années 1800. Grâce à un examen des représentations physiques et métaphoriques de la dualité et de la figure doppelganger dans la littérature primaire, je démontre que la duplicité était courante au XIXe siècle à Londres. En conclusion, les doppelgangers sont des manifestations physiques gothiques de terreur qui influencent les luttes avec bien séance, des répressions des désirs et des craintes de l'atavisme, de la descente et de l'inconnu dans le XIXe siècle. / This thesis investigates the representations of the doppelganger figure in three nineteenth-century British Gothic novels: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Using Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, and Sigmund Freud’s The Uncanny, I argue that the doppelganger symbolizes social conventions and anxieties of British men in the 1800s. By examining the physical and metaphorical representations of duality and the doppelganger figure in literature, I demonstrate that duplicity was commonplace in nineteenth-century London. I conclude that the doppelgangers are physical Gothic manifestations of terror that epitomize nineteenth-century struggles with propriety, repression of desires, and fears of atavism, descent, and the unknown.

The core question in this master thesis is: What happens to the essence of an object when it becomes out of date and is no longer in use? I am addressing the sense of dignity in once meticulously designed technical/mechanical items that now has become obsolete. The intention has been to investigate how to give new meaning to obsolete items and find new eligibility for their existence.  The investigation was conducted through the development of a method: collection, analysis, deconstruction, investigation and resurrection of a number of O.T.M.I. (Obsolete Technical Mechanical Items).   The resurrection process consisted of the (re-)writing of the objects’ narratives. These stories along with the objects’ parts, spaces and sounds created a frame for a scenography, a soundtrack and characters to act in a film to tell the story. As interior designers we have the opportunity to transform space and fill it with stories. Imagination is an important tool: We benefit from having the ability to imagine, for instance, how different surfaces will reflect sound and light. Our imagination is highly visual. So I have transformed my imaginary world of Obsolete Technical Mechanical Items to visual and audial elements that support the content and values of a story through researching the objects, finding how to clarify and support the story. The Re-Story.

Syftet med denna uppsats är att undersöka och jämföra Djävulens funktion i dagens mest lättillgängliga och populära mediagenrer. I studien redogörs hur bilden av Djävulen uppstått med nedslag i Gamla testamentet fram till upplysningen. Mot denna bakgrund tolkas och analyseras hur och om denna gestalt återfinns i dagens mediasamhälle, med inriktning på filmerna Terror på Elm Street och 2012, tv-serien Lost och romanen Frankenstein av Mary Shelley. Huvudresultatet visar på att en kamp mellan det goda och det onda troligtvis all­tid kommer att förekomma och medan djävulsgestalten i och med upplysningen tappar infly­tande i kristendomen återfinns denne i diverse film, böcker och serier.