LITR 4328 American Renaissance Research Posts 2015 (research post assignment) Research Post 2

Rachel Morris

2 May 2, 2015

The Contemporary American Gothic and Women Writers: Adapting the Genre

When I think of the gothic in our modern age the first images that come to mind are of angst-ridden teens in black clothes and too much eyeliner. I also think of vampires: Anne Rice, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and, as much as it pains me, Twilight. However, the literary tradition of the gothic in America has so many subgenres that it can be hard to pin down what it is, and specifically where it is going.  While researching to learn where the American gothic novel is going, I encountered a separate category of American gothic novelists: women. Of the authors whose names appeared in the research, I was familiar only with Flannery O’Connor, having read her work in previous literature classes. What I have learned is that each female American gothic writer has her own style and idea of what the Gothic is.

I have learned that the gothic genre is especially adaptable for women writers as it functions to help women to “deal with the problematic figures in their lives” through exploring their primary familial relationships (Szalay 183). Critic Edina Szalay argues that the gothic form is particularly well suited for women writers in creating their own female bildungsroman.  She cites four American gothic novels written by women as evidence for this: Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women (1971), Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle (1976), Gail Godwin's Violet Clay (1978), and Joy Williams’ Breaking & Entering (1981) (Szalay 183).  Each of these novels consists of a heroine struggling with her own self-image, the looming mother figure in the background, and emphasizing the reasoning capabilities of women as the only escape from the antagonist (Szalay 184-85).  Szalay also states that the most important shift that these four novels embody is that the main conflict occurs between the mother and the daughter, and not between the woman and her lover, father, or husband, thus creating the female bildungsroman (194).

Flannery O’Connor, known as a southern gothic writer, also focuses on the mother-daughter relationship. As Louise Westling points out, this relationship is a focal point in many of O’Connor’s works, such as Mrs. Hopewell and her daughter Hulga-Joy “Good Country People,” Mrs. Cope and her daughter Sally Virginia in “A Circle in the Fire,” and Lucynell Crater and her daughter of the same name in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” (510-12).  In these stories O’Connor uses the mother-daughter relationship to examine issues of misogyny and sexual confusion (Westling 513). Another factor to O’Connor’s work is her use of the grotesque as a gothic form.  O’Connor uses three kinds of grotesque characters in her work, each coordinating with their ability to be redeemed: physical grotesques, who have the potential for redemption because of their grotesqueness, spiritual grotesques, who have salvation through violence to the world, and secular grotesques, who seek redemption by destroying the spirit to save the body (Shinn 60-62).

An interesting subgenre I learned about during my research on contemporary female gothic novelists is the idea of the immigrant gothic. In her article, Tanya Gonzalez argues that the Latin American genre of “magical realism” can be considered gothic (118). For example, she cites Cuban American immigrant Christina Garcia as a prime example. Garcia’s novel, The Aguero Sisters focuses on the relationship between sisters and their murdered mother, as contemporary female gothic often does, as well as a focus on the grotesque and violent as seen in its “femicidal” plot (Gonzalez 118).  Gonzalez’s article demonstrates that the contemporary gothic is beginning to expand into immigrant cultures as the country becomes increasingly diverse.

In conclusion, what I have learned through my research is that contemporary female gothic novelists have developed many ways of bending and conforming the traditional gothic modes to suit their styles and topics. They have gender-bent the traditional bildungsroman, changed the protagonist-antagonist relationship to reflect the female gender, and  as a whole have adapted many conventions to suit both their needs as female authors and the needs of their female audiences.

Works Cited

Gonzalez, Tanya. "The Gothic in Christina Garcia's ‘The Aguero Sisters’" MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. 37.3 (2012): 117-39. Project MUSE [Johns Hopkins UP]. Web. 30 Apr. 2015.

Shinn, Thelma J. "Flannery O'Connor and the Violence of Grace." Contemporary Literature9.1 (1968): 58-73. JSTOR [JSTOR]. Web. 29 Apr. 2015.

Szalay, Edina. "Gothic Fantasy and Female 'Bildung' in Four North-American Women Novels." Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 6.2 (2000): 183-96. JSTOR [JSTOR]. Web. 23 Apr. 2015.

Westling, Louise. "Flannery O'Connor's Mothers and Daughters." Twentieth Century Literature 24.4 (1978): 510-22. JSTOR [JSTOR]. Web. 30 Apr. 2015.