Gothic Economies: Global Capitalism and the Boundaries of Identity
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University of New Hampshire University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository Doctoral Dissertations Student Scholarship Winter 2002 Gothic economies: Global capitalism and the boundaries of identity Robert Adrian Herschbach University of New Hampshire, Durham Follow this and additional works at: https://scholars.unh.edu/dissertation Recommended Citation Herschbach, Robert Adrian, "Gothic economies: Global capitalism and the boundaries of identity" (2002). Doctoral Dissertations. 118. https://scholars.unh.edu/dissertation/118 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Scholarship at University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. ProQuest Information and Learning 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 USA 800-521-0600 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. GOTHIC ECONOMIES: GLOBAL CAPITALISM AND THE BOUNDARIES OF IDENTITY BY ROBERT HERSCHBACH B.A., University of Virginia 1987 M.F.A., University of Iowa 1992 DISSERTATION Submitted to the University of New Hampshire in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English December 2002 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number: 3076338 ___ ® UMI UMI Microform 3076338 Copyright 2003 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. This dissertation has been examined and approved. Dissertation Director, James Krasner, Associate Professor of English S ■ ______ Monica Chiu, Assistant Professor of English Martin McKinsey, Assistant Professor of English Charles Simic, Professor of English Mary E. Rhiel, Associate Professor of German C L. Date Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. DEDICATION To my parents and to my wife for their love and support iii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. James Krasner, for his support and encouragement throughout the process o f writing this dissertation. I am greatly indebted to Dr. Krasner for his insights and guidance. I would also like to thank the members of my thesis committee - Dr. Charles Simic, Dr. Monica Chiu, Dr. Martin McKinsey and Dr. Mary Rhiel - for their input and support, and for the many intellectually stimulating discussions along the way. For his advice and encouragement during the formative stages of this project, and for his valuable suggestions concerning critical approaches to Him theory. 1 would like to acknowledge Dr. Peter Mascuch. To my parents, Dennis and Mary Herschbach. I would like to express my gratitude for encouraging my academic endeavors, for your confidence in me. for listening patiently to my doubts and complaints, and for your love, guidance and support, without which I could not have finished this thesis. My grandparents. Michael and Alice Pittas, gave me much inspiration, love and encouragement. 1 would like to thank my sisters. Alissa McElreath and Elisabeth Herschbach. for their love and understanding. Thanks also to my brothers in law, Scott McElreath and Qiuhua Zheng, and to my sister- in-law. Chunxue Shi. And to my wife, Yihua Zheng-Herschbach, my deepest love and appreciation for her unflagging patience and support from the earliest stages of this dissertation to its completion. iv Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION........................................................................................................................iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS..................................................................................................... iv ABSTRACT............................................................................................................................ vi CHAPTER PAGE INTRODUCTION....................................................................................................................1 I. FAMOUS IMPOSTERS: THE VICTORIAN METROPOLIS.......................................40 II. DRACULA AND THE CRISIS OF SUBJECTIVITY................................................... 67 III. ELIOT AND THE GOTHIC..........................................................................................93 IV. VAMPIRE CULTURE: GIBSON AND THE GLOBAL AESTHETIC.................. 118 V. BABES IN THE GARDEN: THE SUBURBAN IDYLL........................................... 143 BIBLIOGRAPHY.................................................................................................................169 v Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ABSTRACT GOTHIC ECONOMIES: GLOBAL CAPITALISM AND THE BOUNDARIES OF IDENTITY by Robert Herschbach University of New Hampshire, December, 2002 Since Dickens and Mary Shelley, the Gothic has provided a rubric for literary conceptualizations of modernity. Dickens' depictions of industrial London characterize it as a labyrinth of temptations and horrors, haunted by monstrosity and by personal and social demons: the monster in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is the disfigured byproduct of science and technology. Bram Stoker’s Dracula , perhaps the most effective "global" narrative to come out of the Britishfin de siecle, grafted elements of a pre-Enlightenment atavism onto the tum-of-the-century liberal metropolis. In our own era, the literature of the postmodern technopolis - the fiction of William Gibson, for example - has continued to borrow Gothic motifs and devices. This dissertation is a study of literary representations of technology, capitalism and the modem metropolis - representations based in the anxieties and desires that accompany middle-class self-fashioning. The Gothic, in its original guise, depicts the corruption and ruination of the estate, often by economic and cultural forces emanating from the city and associated with capitalism and modernity; thus, to invoke the Gothic is also to reference middle class guilt and doubts about legitimacy. At the same time. Gothic allusions allow the middle class to retell its foundational myth of a struggle for liberation from feudal constraints. vi Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Much 19,h and 20th literature, both popular and highbrow, entertains an ambiguous and complicated relationship to the city - the site of economic, political and cultural forces which are both liberating and traumatizing. Though capitalism and technology drove its ascendancy, the middle class has traditionally seen the city as a place both of opportunity and danger, of allure and revulsion or horror - a set of mixed emotions which tends to suggest an insecure, unstable or divided subjectivity. This complicated relationship to the city provided much of the impetus for the quest to build a "bourgeois utopia" - a refuge located at the fringe of the city in which the equilibrium of a romanticized pre-urban order is recovered. But because the contradictions within middle class identity can never be fully resolved, the "utopia" always harbors the potential to become a haunted grove, visited by that which has been repressed or abjected in the process of creating modernity. vii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. INTRODUCTION GLOBAL LABYRINTHS: CITIES, TECHNOLOGIES AND THE GOTHIC The American eighties and nineties have drawn a number of comparisons to the equivalent period a century earlier. One reason for this was overtly political. The cultural and political conservatives who took office in 1980 referenced what they saw as a purer form of economic liberalism - the "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps" entrepreneurialism of Horatio Alger - as well as celebrating the ethos of