Sunshine is a graphic novel about the problem of memory. The protagonist, Geraldine, is trying to tell her life story, only to find that she cannot discern fact from fiction with certainty; she recalls dreams, lies, family secrets, incidents that are half-remembered or that have been embellished over time, and a close childhood friend who may or may not have existed. Geraldine is primarily occupied with one event, the year she spent in a preventorium, a type of tubercular hospital for children. Her memories from that year are so peculiar that she feels almost convinced she made them up. Preventoriums, now an all-but-forgotten chapter in the history of American medicine, existed from 1909 to 1970 and were designed to combine "the best elements of a school, sanatorium, and middle-class American home" (Connolly, 54). Children deemed at-risk for tuberculosis--typically the children of working-class or immigrant families--were sent to stay in these institutions. There they received nutritious food, fresh air, and instruction on proper hygiene. Their education also tended to include a heavy emphasis on middle-class Protestant values. My maternal grandfather, Chandler Franks, stayed in the Magee, Mississippi Preventorium in from 1929 to 1930. His stories from that period were the original inspiration for Sunshine. I have since interviewed and read memoirs by other former residents of the Magee facility. The events that take place in Sunshine, however, are fictional; for the most part, I have used interview material only to add verisimilitude and sensory detail. Neither Geraldine's home town of Green Pond, Florida, nor the Sea Haven Preventorium where she is sent, bears any resemblance to real places. Geraldine's struggle to reconstruct her past begins when she tries to start drawing her dreams in a journal. Several panels show Geraldine drawing events that occur later in the novel, complicating the reader's experience with the text. Some panels show only her hand holding a pencil, from the same perspective as if the reader were looking down at his or her own hand, putting the reader in Geraldine's position. Geraldine's story is sometimes humorous, sometimes horrific. The combination of humorous and gothic elements draws inspiration from the work of Kelly Link and more recently from Florida State University's "Cute & Creepy" exhibition. Link's stories are often funny and unnerving at the same time "The Specialist's Hat," my favorite in the collection, involves two young girls who are menaced by a grotesque, living hat that once belonged to a magician. The hat is both terrifying and ridiculous. Similarly, the works included in the "Cute & Creepy" show combine images of death and decay with elements such as cartoon animals, flowers, smiling children, and toys. Humor and horror are two sides of the same coin, both stemming from the irrational, and when both are present in the same work, each intensifies the other. The aesthetic of Sunshine combines the cute and the creepy. Geraldine confronts ghosts from her past--both literal and figurative--while also putting up with her sister's irksome obsession with self-help literature. The drawings, which I have rendered in soft graphite, are both gloomy and comical. Some graphic novels that inform my own project include Sloth by Gilbert Hernandez, Black Hole by Charles Burns, and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. All three feature stark, black and white drawings, each story makes heavy use of surreal imagery, childhood memories, and dream sequences. In Sloth, a teenager named Miguel Serra wills himself into a coma. When he wakes up, he struggles to rejoin the real world and becomes obsessed with investigating a haunted lemon orchard. Black Hole borrows tropes from black and white B horror movies to tell its story. In it, a sexually-transmitted plague is causing horrific mutations in teenagers all over America. They begin growing horns, tails, fur, or extra body parts. Those affected are forced to live in the woods, away from society--an apt metaphor for teenage alienation. Sloth and Black Hole helped inspire the writing of Sunshine because of their nuanced exploration of the unconscious. Persepolis, Satrapi's memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamist Revolution, is a work of nonfiction, but it was still instrumental in shaping my original concept for Sunshine, since it takes the form of a memoir in places. I also admire Satrapi's drawing style, which recalls German expressionism. The graphic novel is the ideal genre for this story because of its liminality. Comics are neither a wholly visual nor wholly literary art form, but something in between; the boundaries between visual art and literature are blurred. As David Carrier writes in The Aesthetics of Comics, "We expect the world to fit our preconceived stable categories, and so what falls in between is easily felt, depending upon our temperament and politics, to be either exciting or menacing. Hence the fascination with, and fear of, cross-dressing, androgyny, people of `mixed-race,' comics, and other forms of in-betweenness" (70-71). In Sunshine, the instability of the art form mirrors the instability of the narration. The boundaries between fact and fiction, horror and humor, are blurred, and Geraldine's story happens in the margins, in the white space between panels. The graphic novel also offers a more complex mode of storytelling. Hélène Cixous writes, "I would like to write like a painter. I would like to write like painting" (104). Cixous refers to the immediacy offered by visual media. The viewer absorbs an image before having the chance to apply any other filters to it. Or, as Alain Robbe-Grillet explains, "In this future universe of the novel, gestures and objects will be there before being something" (21). In a graphic novel, images exist in the reader's mind before they signify anything else. As the reader takes the images together with the written text, the objects on the page begin to give way to ideas, but "only provisionally, and [they] will accept the tyranny of significations only in appearance--derisively, one might say--the better to show how alien they remain to man" (Robbe-Grillet, 22). I believe that the graphic novel is the perfect example of the "new novel" the Robbe-Grillet was searching for. It simultaneously creates a solid world of objects and people and an ephemeral world of ideas. By using this form, I hope to tell a story whose images will lodge in the reader's mind long after the novel has ended. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester, 2012. / June 11, 2012. / Florida, graphic novel, preventorium, tuberculosis / Includes bibliographical references. / Diane K. Roberts, Professor Directing Dissertation; Adam Jolles, University Representative; Elaine Treharne, Committee Member; Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Committee Member.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_183540 |
| Contributors | Burgess, Katherine (authoraut), Roberts, Diane K. (professor directing dissertation), Jolles, Adam (university representative), Treharne, Elaine (committee member), Stuckey-French, Elizabeth (committee member), Department of English (degree granting department), Florida State University (degree granting institution) |
| Publisher | Florida State University, Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, text |
| Format | 1 online resource, computer, application/pdf |
| Rights | This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). The copyright in theses and dissertations completed at Florida State University is held by the students who author them. |
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