Abstract
Abstract : This dissertation explores how conventional Gothic elements are represented in three contemporary British novels by examining the liminality of spectres, madness, and vampires. Throughout my dissertation, I apply Victor Turner’s theory of liminality to determine how each Gothic symbol named above may be considered liminal. Liminality positions initiates on the margin between two different states of existence: spectres occupy the world between the living and the dead; madness oscillates between sanity and insanity in that lucidity is variable; vampires are caught between the realms of “human” and “monster”. I will evaluate liminality as a theoretical framework that characterises the liminal state forming part of rites of passage; additionally, I will relate this threshold to the Gothic elements including spectres, madness, and vampires that I have identified above. I argue for the resurfacing of the Gothic in the work of Neo-Victorian and twenty-first century British writers’ novels. This analysis is carried out through close readings of Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black (1983), A.N. Wilson’s A Jealous Ghost (2005), and David Mitchell’s Slade House (2015). This close reading examines the ways in which, and to what extent, the texts align with and depart from the Gothic genre in their unique representation of Gothic symbols. My discussion evaluates the spectre in The Woman in Black in relation to the manner in which the novel addresses gender inequality. The novel explores society’s treatment of young unwed mothers during the Victorian era while presenting a plot in which the traditionally gendered roles of victim and villain in the Gothic novel are subverted: instead of the conventional, naïvely represented ‘damsel in distress’, the novel’s victim is a male solicitor while the ‘villain’ is presented as a female spectre. My discussion then moves to A Jealous Ghost, in which the representation of madness is strongly entangled with gender and linked to femininity. Here, the familiar Gothic trope of the protagonist as an unfamiliar, arguably uncanny, character to herself is presented. This aspect of the novel is strengthened in relation to its intertextual references to Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898), and here the female protagonist is characterised as storyteller, victim and villain. I then turn my attention to the vampiric characters presented in David Mitchell’s Slade House, a novel re-evaluating the shortcomings of the present through a postmodern lens while addressing and redressing history and its representations of the vampire figure. Finally, I argue that the texts under study represent the Gothic’s resurfacing in twenty-first century British novels as a means to redress unresolved matters of the past and that their inclusion contributes to our understanding of contemporary Gothic fiction.
M.A. (English)