The 15Th International Gothic Association Conference A
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The 15th International Gothic Association Conference Lewis University, Romeoville, Illinois July 30 - August 2, 2019 Speakers, Abstracts, and Biographies A NICOLE ACETO “Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut”: The Terror of Domestic Femininity in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House Abstract From the beginning of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, ordinary domestic spaces are inextricably tied with insanity. In describing the setting for her haunted house novel, she makes the audience aware that every part of the house conforms to the ideal of the conservative American home: walls are described as upright, and “doors [are] sensibly shut” (my emphasis). This opening paragraph ensures that the audience visualizes a house much like their own, despite the description of the house as “not sane.” The equation of the story with conventional American families is extended through Jackson’s main character of Eleanor, the obedient daughter, and main antagonist Hugh Crain, the tyrannical patriarch who guards the house and the movement of the heroine within its walls, much like traditional British gothic novels. Using Freud’s theory of the uncanny to explain Eleanor’s relationship with Hill House, as well as Anne Radcliffe’s conception of terror as a stimulating emotion, I will explore the ways in which Eleanor is both drawn to and repelled by Hill House, and, by extension, confinement within traditional domestic roles. This combination of emotions makes her the perfect victim of Hugh Crain’s prisonlike home, eventually entrapping her within its walls. I argue that Jackson is commenting on the restriction of women within domestic roles, and the insanity that ensues when women accept this restriction. By emphasizing Eleanor’s desire for freedom, and her powerlessness to achieve such freedom, Jackson exposes just how horrifying the conventional American dream can be for women. Biography Nicole Aceto holds a Masters in Literary History from Ohio University, and is a third-year PhD student at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her scholarly interests are in late 18th century and 19th century British novels, especially focusing on the afterlives of the Gothic and monstrosity in contemporary popular culture. 1 ENRIQUE AJURIA IBARRA Who Dies? What Returns? Witchcraft, Horror, and the Undead in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina Abstract Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (CAOS) offers a new look at the classic Archie Comics character with a darker, more Gothic twist. In CAOS, Sabrina, half-witch and half-human, can become one of the most powerful witches in Greendale, but only if she offers her soul to the Devil. Amidst these dark dealings, Sabrina must face painful loss of family and loved ones. In the comic series, Sabrina’s boyfriend Harvey is killed by the coven for witnessing their ceremonies. Madam Satan brings him back to life, but Harvey’s body returns possessed by the soul of Sabrina’s father, Edward Spellman. In the TV series, Sabrina tries to amend the death of Harvey’s brother Tommy. But what comes back is not quite Tommy: a dark spirit has possessed his body, causing unease and horror at the Kinkle household. In CAOS, what elicits dreadful horror is not who has died, but, actually, what has returned. Sabrina’s spells do not recover lost lives; on the contrary, they bring back unexplainable evil that threatens the rules of the coven – a set of strict symbols that provide meaning and cohesion to the community – and Sabrina’s desire for recognition, love, and redemption. Sabrina’s hubris also threatens to dissolve this social structure into a chaos of unknown proportions. The purpose of this paper is to explore in CAOS the tensions witches must confront when faced with the horrors revealed by the undead. The real horror for Sabrina and her friends is not the canny power of the Devil, but real forces that are always beyond their grasp and recognition. Biography Enrique Ajuria Ibarra is Assistant Professor at Universidad de las Américas Puebla, Mexico. He has previously published several articles and book chapters on Mexican horror cinema. He is the editor of the peer-reviewed online journal Studies in Gothic Fiction, and is currently preparing a book on the relationship between movement, Gothic, and the horror film. ALESSANDRA ALBANO Re-reading the Gothic: The Science of Degeneration and Vulnerability of the Mind in Stoker's Dracula and Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau Abstract By articulating a common language employed in both scientific and literary texts, the object of this paper is to illustrate how the Gothic genre at the fin de siècle became a creative space for dissecting scientific theories and critiquing society. It examines the paradoxical implications of certain scientific theories such as Cesare Lombroso’s theory of criminal atavism and Max Nordau’s theory of degeneration in Stoker’s Dracula and Well’s The Island of Dr. Moreau. Such theories justified a supposed racial hierarchy while reflecting the societal fear of a regression of human kind due to contact with foreign others. Consistent with scientific theories of degeneration, Dracula is a foreign criminal characterized as a primitive human entity who possesses a partially developed brain and divergent physical qualities. In Well’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, the power of the scientist to select desired traits reflects society’s concern with the evolution of the human species and raises questions about the origin of reason and human morality. Although the connections between degeneration theory and these novels have been previously analyzed, this paper takes this phenomenon a step further by examining its relevance to the resurgence of the Gothic and its implications for society. This paper argues that the instability of the Gothic genre allowed for the manipulation of abstract scientific theories to enhance literary innovation at the fin de siècle. At the crux of these socio-scientific theories is a major social paradox: if certain social classes possess characteristics which make them superior to degenerates and lower classes, then why is it possible to identify such characteristics among acceptable members of society? Beneath the surface of this paradox lies the haunting fear of the susceptibility of all individuals to degeneration despite their social positioning, posing a threat to the stability of social hierarchy. This profound fear of physical degeneration and societal 2 regression resonates with central themes of decay and terror essential to the Gothic. Although such scientific theories are suffused with inaccuracies, this paper invites readers to consider the potential stagnancy of literature if writers did not incorporate the scientific understanding of the mystery of human life into the resurgence of the Gothic at the fin de siècle. Biography Alessandra Albano is pursuing a master’s degree in English and American Literature at New York University. Her current academic interests include the Gothic, the depiction of race in 19th-century literature, literature and science, and 19th-century print culture. ANTONIO ALCALÁ Fears of Degeneration in the Works of William Hope Hodgson and H. P. Lovecraft Abstract The fears of degeneration experienced during the fin de siècle emerged from accumulated anxieties about the risk of a human fall from being the rational summit of the evolutionary ladder into a dark state of animalistic existence. This feeling resulted from the effect created on the collective mind by the combination of various arguments from scientific research, mainly around the degradation of matter, and the evolutionary past of humanity plus its hereditary future. The Gothic literature from that time (the last two decades of the nineteenth century) portrays such fears through the presence of hybrids whose presence horrifies those who confront them by alluding to the mere possibility of human devolution. Since then, the Gothic has remained full of monsters that have become depositaries of that devolutionary anxiety which has not abandoned us at all. The objective of this paper is to focus on two examples of the permanence of this fear in the early decades after the fin-de-siècle Gothic. The analysis will highlight the presence of monstrous creatures in Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland and The Nightland, as well as in Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth”. The final aim will be to explore how the horror produced by such creatures illustrates the position taken by each of these writers towards the feeling that humanity may not be the top in the evolutionary scheme on Earth. Biography Antonio Alcalá González is researcher and professor of contemporary literature at Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico City, and also lecturer on Gothic Literature at UNAM. One of the pioneers in the recent raise of interest for the Gothic in Mexico, he is founder of the International Gothic Literature Congress which has been held biennially at UNAM since 2008. XAVIER ALDANA REYES The (Lost) Origins of Gothic Cinema: Reconstructing the Old Dark House Mysteries Abstract The significance of early-twentieth-century cinema to contemporary understandings of the Gothic has been largely overlooked, partly because the Gothic has become somewhat divorced from one of its defining aesthetic cues: retrojected archaic temporal settings, often taking the chronotopic form of the medieval or ‘Gothic’ castle. This paper, and the research project it is attached to, seeks to redress this oversight by drawing attention to a crucial yet overlooked aspect of the history of cinematic Gothic: the old dark house mysteries (c. 1910–1930). These films, many of which are obscure and critically unknown today, gradually moved the trappings of the Gothic castle to the modern manor house, suggesting the possibility of the archaic within present times and returning the mode to the suspense/comedy/terror formula of the early Gothic romances of Ann Radcliffe.