This thesis presents a socio-legal approach of the rhetoric of law and the rhetoric of forgiveness in bodies legally mandated with reconciliation in post-conflict contexts of South Africa and Rwanda. Through a qualitative engagement with literature, the aim is to ascertain whether the law has the authority to grant forgiveness to a perpetrator on behalf of a victim? This question is premised on an understanding of reconciliation as occurring between two individuals in the presence of a third party in view of a specific political outcome, whereas forgiveness is personal, occurring without a specific political outcome and only between two individuals. It is argued that there exists a rhetorical gap between those who speak the language of the law on reconciliation, and those who speak the everyday language of forgiveness informed by a Judaeo-Christian rhetorical frame. It is argued that the gap is addressed by public deliberation or “live rhetoric”, allowing for a divided citizenry in post-conflict contexts to create a transformation (metanoia) and sameness of intent (homonia) in their community that prevents stasis – a reciprocal threat of civil war due to a difference of opinion. “Live rhetoric” functions to keep everyone bound in the process towards reconciliation, and this thesis seeks to highlight that live rhetoric is significant not only for the maintenance of peace and democracy in post conflict contexts at the level of the state, but also allows processes of reconciliation and possibly forgiveness to continue among individuals beyond the confines of bodies legally mandated with reconciliation.

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This thesis explores the relationship between the desire for the "good life" and the Gothic. The haunted house is a feature familiar to the Gothic because of its reversal of the comfort a home usually brings. The haunted houses in the Gothic provide a physical space that exemplifies the psychological and emotional disorientation that results from seeking unattainable ideals of domestic happiness and fulfillment. This thesis analyzes the haunted houses of three first-person-narrated gothic novels: Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (1898), Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca (1938), and Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger (2009), arguing that each novel portrays the ruinous consequences of the narrator's desires within the gothic home. Sarah Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology (2006) and Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism (2011) provide a theoretical grounding for exploring how the haunted house as a physical space can illuminate the disorientation of desire. I argue that in each novel, the desire the outsider-narrator feels for the home, the good life, is destructive, and while the destruction varies for each story, the outsider remains hopeful amidst the chaos. The inescapable past and the hope of the future collide in all three novels, and with this collision comes a sense of disorientation, of terror even, for both the first-person narrator and the reader alike.

This thesis aims to answer the following questions: how do speculative and supernatural fictions of the late-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries imagine women's agency concerning motherhood? How do these novels challenge the ideas of stereotypical, domestic femininity? I explore these questions by analyzing pieces of non-realist fiction written by both men and women, which feature powerful, and often monstrous, mothers: Mary E. Bradley Lane's speculative feminist utopian novel, Mizora (1890), Bram Stoker's gothic horror novel, Dracula (1897), Frank Herbert's sweeping science-fiction epic, Dune (1965), and Angela Carter's feminist dystopian fiction, The Passion of New Eve (1977). I argue that feminist ideas emerging concurrent with the first and second waves in the 1890s and the 1960s–70s influence the novels' portrayals of women, as each novel imagines liberating and terrifying versions of motherhood that exceed the social norms of their day. Chapter 1 explores anxieties about motherhood concerning the figure of the New Woman. Both Dracula and Mizora represent women who are dissatisfied with traditional maternal roles. Although not speculative fiction, Dracula creates a space to imagine the "what if'' of the New Woman: what if women did reject their traditional roles, what if they pursue their desires? Chapter 2 examines two science-fiction novels of the 1960s–70s that offer fully realized, powerful maternal figures. Dune and Passion of New Eve, responding to the same social upheavals as second-wave feminist writers and activists were, envision possible worlds in which supernaturally powerful mothers are political and social leaders and gender roles have been more or less transformed.

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