The Haunted Muse: Gothic and Sentiment in American Literature

ISBN-10: 1443892807
ISBN-13: 9781443892803
Category: Literary Criticism
Pages: 150
Language: English
Published: 2016-04-26
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Author: Richard M. Magee

Description

The Salem witch trials, and the many narratives based on them, both contemporaneous and subsequent discussions, have had a powerful influence on the American national psyche, informing the nation’s political debates and propelling its fears. Perhaps one of the major reasons for the importance of the trials is how they conceive of and present a narrative of danger. The horror grows in and seems to threaten not just the body politic, but, perhaps more importantly, the domestic sanctuary. The home and hearth become a contested ground where good and evil fight for the souls of the inhabitants, or an infection that threatens to spread to other homes and, eventually, the entire community. The fear of witchcraft or demonic possession reveals not just a religious mania, but also a level of misogyny. Much has been made of the connections between witchcraft accusations and midwifery, homeopathy, and other, usually female, pursuits. The link between midwifery and witchcraft is especially interesting here, however, as it suggests an anxiety linked to notions of creation and procreation. This book proposes a link between the fears of usurped procreation elicited by the trials and fears of misdirected or usurped creativity. In many Gothic stories, the authors imagine their literary creations as children who have been transformed by malignant forces, much as the Puritans of 1692 feared that the devil was transforming their actual children. The home in the Gothic story becomes a warped version of the sacred domestic space of sentimental literature, and it transforms from refuge to place of terror. The authors examined here include Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Rose Terry Cooke, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, and Ira Levin.

Get the book

Similar books

Virginia Woolf and the Great War
By Karen L. Levenback
I owe special thanks to Bruce Martin and Evelyn Timberlake ( at the Library of Congress ) ; Philip Milato and Steve Crook ( at the Berg Collection ) ...
In Search of Elena Ferrante: The Novels and the Question of Authorship
By Karen Bojar
... Alice: “In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens” 157 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 38 Wertenbaker, Timberlake 21 Wilson, Emily (trans.
Native American Verbal Art: Texts and Contexts
By William M. Clements
HENRY TIMBERLAKE'S CHEROKEE WAR SONG 1. That Timberlake's memoir contains the first English translation of the words of a Native American song seems to have ...
Playing in the Shadows: Fictions of Race and Blackness in Postwar Japanese Literature
By William H Bridges
“Justin Timberlake, 'The 20/20 Experience': Is There a Visual Preference for Whiteness?” Interview with Marc Lamont Hill. HuffPost Live, 27 March 2013.
Shakespeare's Edward III
By William Shakespeare
Thompson , E . in Pollard 1923 . Thompson , J . Shakespeare and the Classics , 1952 . Tillyard , E . Shakespeare ' s History Plays , 1944 . Timberlake , P ...
The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents
By Laura Frost
In The Problem with Pleasure, Frost draws upon a wide variety of materials, linking interwar amusements, such as the talkies, romance novels, the Parisian fragrance Chanel no. 5, and the exotic confection Turkish Delight, to the artistic ...
The Alice Books and the Contested Ground of the Natural World
By Laura White
Similarly, he deplored the picturestories of A. B. Frost in his Stuff and Nonsense ... When he'd eaten eighteen, He turned perfectly green, Upon which he ...
Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century
By Laura Brown
Renew'd by ordure's sympathetic force, As oil'd with magic juices for the course, ... William Frost (1953; reprint, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, ...
Questions of Authority: Italian and Australian Travel Narratives of the Long Nineteenth Century
By Laura Olcelli
D'Albertis, Luigi. New Guinea: What I Did and What I Saw. 2 vols. London: S. Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1881. First published 1880.
A Concordance to Conrad's The Arrow of Gold
By Paul L. Gaston, Todd K. Bender
... i ge 3 let S deal ing ge a lings ge at t Joe a f J & at n ce at h-ced ge at hly ue to 3 sec ge is a te debit de cap it a t e u ge c e it ful ge c e i ve ...