Abstract
Resonating with these pandemic times, Catherine Spooner has described the Gothic as a ‘malevolent virus’. In my paper, I will propose that the haunted house narrative, so central to American Gothic, has itself mutated in response to a backdrop of post-millenial social, political and financial collapse in a manner quite different to developments in the rest of the Gothic literary world. The narrative strand which has emerged, presents the reader with a new form of the Gothic male protagonist, whom the British psychologist R.D Laing in The Divided Self (1960), would describe as a ‘schizoid’ subject. Fragile, failing and fragmenting, he escapes a failing career, marriage and parenthood by removing his family to a quasi-domestic space which promises repair. House or hotel, these ‘haunted houses’ are different from the earlier ‘hungry houses’ identified by Gothic writer Stephen Graham Jones in his introduction to Robert Marasco’s classic haunted house novel, Burnt Offerings. This new quasi-domestic space, often combining work and home, rises up to meet the male schizoid, not merely as the traditional Gothic setting, but as a sentient being; a monster in its own right. His entrapment in this new Gothic labyrinth that is constantly shifting, expanding and shrinking, provides a performative stage on which the schizoid male is forced into an existential crisis beyond that of the trauma of spousal and parental failure, ultimately forcing him to confront what it is to exist in space and time. A reaction to the rise of neo-liberalism and toxic masculinity, this important strand to American Gothic embraces the multiplicity of the Gothic’s new forms and is evident in texts such as Steve Rasnic Tem’s, Deadfall Hotel, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, Thomas Liggotti’s, The Town Manager, Jac Jemc’s, The Grip of It and Shaun Hamill’s A Cosmology of Monsters. Developing from their deeper roots in the Calvinist Gothic tradition of Hawthorne, Brockden Brown and Poe via the mid-century works of Stephen King and Robert Marasco, these new post- millennial narratives provide a space in which notions of masculine subjectivity are fundamentally challenged.
Highlights
In this article, I propose that the haunted house narrative, so central to American Gothic, has itself mutated in response to a backdrop of post-millennial social, political and financial collapse in a manner quite different to developments in the rest of the Gothic literary world
The switch in gender of the protagonist might be more directly tracked alongside the transference of this particular strand of the Gothic to its New World setting, shifting as it does from the labyrinthine castles of the mode’s European origin in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), to the middle-class houses to be seen in the works of writers like Charles Brockden Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, reflecting the more egalitarian, post-revolutionary political foundations of a newly established American nation
This expresses a fundamental collapse of American masculinity so extreme, that these entrapped, troubled men are left with few options except to consider their very existence
Summary
The haunted house has always existed at the heart of the Gothic mode, first as castles and country houses and latterly as suburban homes, prisons, asylums and hotels, providing a liminal space in which the protagonist is confronted by the supernatural. In this article I will be presenting a new iteration of the haunted house narrative in which the male protagonist is presented, not merely as unstable or insane, but as a subject in a more complex state of insanity Most importantly, this subject finds himself in a hybridized setting, part domestic (in that it serves some or all of the functions of a home) and part workplace (either as a hotel, prison, asylum or where the character works from home). More importantly for my argument, the 1970s sees the emergence of a new kind of male protagonist and a novel strain of the haunted house motif referred to by the Gothic writer Stephen Graham Jones as the “hungry house” in his introduction to Robert Marasco’s novel, Burnt Offerings (200) This new expression of the “haunted house” narrative reflects ongoing changes in the way that domestic architectural space is conceived and inhabited. Shaun Hamill’s A Cosmology of Monsters (2020) is set in the protagonist’s home, which is where he and his family plan and build their family business, a haunted house attraction
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