Abstract
This essay offers a first critical reading of American author Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson’s short story “The Warlock’s Shadow” (1886), asserting that the tale appropriates historical traumas in order to navigate, and transgress, boundaries of genre and gender. The strangeness of the text’s Central Californian setting, to the narrator, precipitates a series of Gothic metamorphoses, and “The Warlock’s Shadow” engages with this transformation via a concept that this essay defines as the “Californian Uncanny”. The latter framework is a result of the specific, layered indigenous and colonial identities of post-Gold Rush California coming into contact with the unstable subjectivities of the Gothic genre. “The Warlock’s Shadow” manifests the Californian Uncanny primarily through the relationship between the home, the environment, and the “unassimilable” inhabitant. Stevenson’s text illustrates, through these images, the ways in which late-nineteenth-century American Gothic fiction has allowed the white feminine subject to negotiate her own identity, complicating the binary distinctions between Self and Other which underpin American colonialism both internally and externally. The phenomenon of the Californian Uncanny in “The Warlock’s Shadow” reflects these gendered and geographical anxieties of American identity, confronting the ghosts of the nation’s westernmost region.
Highlights
Between the years of 1878 and 1899, American author Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson published nine short stories in magazines such as Belgravia, Lippincott’s, and Scribner’s
The dualities of man and nature, in opposition to women and domesticity, are disrupted by the presence of women in the American West, and I, suggest that the existence of texts such as Stevenson’s, and phenomena such as the Californian Uncanny, indicates a space at the crossroads of the Gothic mode and the literature of American internal colonization which allows those same women writers and female protagonists to reckon with their own historical positions and identities in the face of historical anxieties
The “abnormality” of the environment noted by Egli and the recurring prophetic, sibylline imagery which Showalter suggests both identify a conflict in the local color tradition between history and future, femininity and masculinity, as well as the usual and the unusual, and that discord manifests in Stevenson’s story as the Californian Uncanny
Summary
Between the years of 1878 and 1899, American author Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson published nine short stories in magazines such as Belgravia, Lippincott’s, and Scribner’s. Much like the Settler Gothic and the Frontier Gothic, which have both been identified as literary aesthetics of (usually) North American internal colonization, the Californian Uncanny of Stevenson’s tale features a “cultivation of often-unstable border zones, of hazy demarcations between self-reliance and self-delusion, between the humane and the monstrous” The dualities of man and nature, in opposition to women and domesticity, are disrupted by the presence of women in the American West, and I, suggest that the existence of texts such as Stevenson’s, and phenomena such as the Californian Uncanny, indicates a space at the crossroads of the Gothic mode and the literature of American internal colonization which allows those same women writers and female protagonists to reckon with their own historical positions and identities in the face of historical anxieties. Shadow” through images of the home, the environment, and the unassimilable inhabitant
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