Uncanny Youth: Childhood, the Gothic, and the Literary Americas by Suzanne Manizza Roszak

Abstract

Reviewed by: Uncanny Youth: Childhood, the Gothic, and the Literary Americas by Suzanne Manizza Roszak Michele Daniele Castleman (bio) Uncanny Youth: Childhood, the Gothic, and the Literary Americas. By Suzanne Manizza Roszak. University of Wales Press, 2022. Roszak's monograph Uncanny Youth is a close examination of Gothic texts that focus upon child and teen characters navigating the damage and recovery from Colonialism in the Americas. Roszak intentionally included literature, plays, and short stories from multiple countries and regions of the Americas to highlight the "patterns of representation that are localized and that simultaneously transcend those borders" to reveal literary resistance to the European features of Gothic literature (3). Roszak's work is geared toward exploring a "decolonizing view of hemispheric American Gothic literary childhoods" and examining how these works chronicle recovery from trauma (7). Although the majority of the sample consists of works intended for adults, this study is a necessary examination of how black, feminist, and indigenous authors use Gothic elements. In the introduction, Roszak asserts "hemispheric American writers have borrowed Euro-American Gothic conventions and given them new meaning" and adds they are "inventing new ways of defining what is horrific, terrifying and nightmarish in the lives of characters who have not yet reached adulthood, and across these more localized contexts within the Americas, they often echo one another" (6). The monograph includes five categories of focus, emphasizing the age-related and gendered experiences of the young characters. Only the final chapter, "Writing Gothic Scenes for Young Readers" and the conclusion discuss young adult and children's literature. The chapter "Haunting Perennial Girlhoods" focuses upon adult heroines for the purpose of examining how male anti-heroes have infantilized them through forms of literal or figurative imprisonment. Roszak pairs a canonical work like Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" with the plays La Hija de Rappaccini by Paz and Une Tempête by Césaire to draw out their sociopolitical implications. Examining the three female protagonists within these works, Roszak argues that Gilman's narrator's experience is limited and examining her with Paz's Beatriz and Césaire's Miranda provides an "intertextual through line" (25). She asserts the trope of infantilized and imprisoned women is "a way of resisting established paradigms and mobilizing for change" (45). The following chapter, "Cursed Pregnancies and Uncanny Children," draws upon Condé's La Migration des Coeurs and Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother to explore the shadow death casts upon pregnancy, birth, and early childhood. Roszak asserts these retellings provide opportunities to "scrutinize the persistence of colonial injustice and to envision rebellions against it" (49). To do this work, Roszak compares each text to the Gothic elements within Brontë's [End Page 422] Wuthering Heights and explores the Gothic doubling of Kincaid's characters and how her and Condé's works "dismantle and disempower imperialist ideologies" (74). In "Gothic Boyhoods and Adult Betrayals," Roszak uses Naipaul's Guerrillas to demonstrate how Gothic whiteness is revealed through the white character of Jane and her well-intentioned racism and fetishizing of Black, male bodies. Roszak asserts that the character of Bryant experiences the body horror of self-loathing because of colonialism and neo-colonialism. This chapter also examines Mamaday's play The Indolent Boys and the Gothic elements within the history of boarding schools for Indigenous children while also destabilizing the American exceptionalist mythology within the history of the United States of America. The play uses dialogue to contribute to the Gothic elements and lends agency to the boys to resist the Imperialist messages they received at the school while also deconstructing the "Euro-American understandings of what might be conceived of as Gothic" (104). Roszak discusses how the use of a ghostlike chorus of children to sit in judgment of the play's events encourages contemplation of the settler colonialism that continues to threaten the lives of indigenous young people. Chapter 4, "The Teen Girls Aren't Alright," explores Gorriti's short story "La hija del mashorguero" and Loynaz's modernist novel Jardín. The texts reveal how teenaged, female characters endure loneliness while also revealing the political contexts of colonialism and how European, patriarchal family structures have been imposed within...