‘Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom. I have known so many sick women all my life. Women with chronic pain, with ever-gestating diseases. Women with conditions. Men, sure, they have bone snaps, they have headaches, they have a surgery or two, yank out a tonsil, insert a shiny plastic hip. Women get consumed.’[1]

It is the consumption of women that pervades Gillian Flynn’s excellent first novel Sharp Objects. The novel uses Gothic devices and themes to expose the often precarious nature of women’s lives in the twenty-first century. This is most obviously evident in the fate of two young girls, the disappearance of which brings the protagonist, Chicago reporter Camille Preaker, back to her small-town home, Wind Gap. However it is the depiction of Camille’s own family that explores the true precarity experienced by women at the mercy of toxic masculinity and abusive parenting.

There is toxicity at the heart of the Wind Gap community and particularly Camille’s family, a toxicity that becomes physically manifest in the bodily trauma experienced by the novel’s female characters. The murder victims are mutilated in a very specific way, referencing the harm that they themselves may have done to others. Camille also embodies the damage that such toxicity can do. Since the death of her younger sister, Marian, when Camille was thirteen, she has self-harmed, carving her own narrative in single words upon her body. This self-harm is juxtaposed with the harm that Camille experiences at the hands of others. One of her earliest sexual experiences, as a teenager, is a gang rape at the hands of male fellow students, and throughout her childhood and adolescence her mother emotionally rejects Camille. Flynn’s use of the family in this way locates Sharp Objects firmly in Gothic fiction’s traditional ambivalence towards the family. In his essay ‘Technogenealogies: Family Secrets’ David Punter explores Gothic fiction’s engagement with ‘the family’. He concludes that ‘the “family” is not, in fact, a stable unit; rather it is the soul of uncertainty.’ Punter thus argues that ‘the notion of the family is (…) being continuously remade, reshaped, and often according to social variation and political expediency.’ As a consequence the ‘Gothic is absorbed with the family (…) with its habits, with its disruptions, with its development. But above all (…) with its secrets.’[2]

It is from such toxic family secrets that Sharp Objects derives its power to unsettle and unnerve the reader. Camille’s stepfather, Alan, is a disinterested figure lacking agency and influence, in common with nearly all of the novel’s male characters. Camille’s biological father is absent; she is an outsider even within her own family. Camille’s mother, Adora, represents the centre of the Preaker family. Flynn, by placing such emphasis upon the novel’s mother figure, evokes Sigmund Freud’s analysis of what constitutes the ‘realm of the frightening, of what evokes fear and dread.’[3] Freud uses the term ‘uncanny’ or the German unheimlich (unhomely) to identify a particular kind of fear, one that permeates Gothic fiction. For Freud ‘the uncanny is that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar.’[4] Traditionally motherhood is supposed to represent the most heimlich or homely quality we ever encounter. It is thus Flynn’s complex and compelling characterization of Camille’s mother that gives Sharp Objects its uncanny core. The suggestively named Adora seeks adoration at all costs. As a consequence in Sharp Objects the soft, comforting edges of maternity are instead sharp and give pain. It this central Gothic device that is sustained throughout the novel, ensuring that the novel unremittingly unsettles the reader and exposes the precarity experienced by those whose protectors become their abusers.

[1] Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, [2006] 2010), p. 262.

[2] David Punter, The Gothic Condition: Terror, History and the Psyche (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2016), pp. 87-88.

[3] Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in The Uncanny, trans. by David McLintock (London: Penguin Books, 2003), pp. 121-162, (p. 123).

[4] Freud, p. 124.

“Burnings are the work of men. They have always burned us. Now we are burning ourselves. But we’re not going to die; we’re going to flaunt our scars.”

Mariana Enriquez’s short stories hurt. They unsettle and disconcert. They are frightening, at times disgusting. They get under the skin. Bodies are dismantled and maimed. The stories put us, the reader, in the place of those whose lives are made precarious as a result of government corruption, toxic masculinity, poverty, mental illness and sheer misfortune.

This is Gothic fiction weaponised in the cause of social justice.

‘Something bad is coming.

And there’s no way to stop it.’

S J I Holliday’s novel ‘The Lingering’ is a fine addition to the current wave of Gothic novels.

Repressed secrets permeate, always just about to break through and disturb the fragile present. In this novel the past is always with us, inescapable and relentless.

The narrative has a visceral, discomforting quality. The senses are overwhelmed by terrors that lie at the edge of perception. The main protagonists are well drawn and compelling, although I would have liked a little more description of the commune’s other residents.

All in all, a great read for the lengthening nights of autumn: chilling, claustrophobic and seductive.

‘So, why not pass the hours with some story-telling? The perfect thing for a late October evening.’

As autumn progresses and the nights draw in, our primal fears reassert themselves, no longer suppressed by the sun filled, light filled summer.

Elly Griffiths’ latest novel, The Stranger Diaries, plays on these fears in an intoxicating mix of the modern crime novel and the traditional Gothic tale of terror.

Following two phenomenally successful crime novel series, the Dr Ruth Galloway mysteries and the Stephens and Mephisto mysteries, it may seem that Griffiths has taken a risk by writing her first standalone crime novel.

There is no risk. The Stranger Diaries is representative of an author writing at the peak of their powers. In setting, characterization and narrative structure the novel relentlessly confronts the reader with an unsettling juxtaposition of modern and everyday preoccupations, from social media to Strictly Come Dancing, with the innately Gothic, as previously repressed secrets and desires break through to undermine the comfort and security to be derived from the modern and the everyday.

In taking this approach Griffiths is following in the footsteps of the greats of Gothic literature, notably M R James and Wilkie Collins. In particular it is Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White that provides the most evident influence. From the violation of Marian Halcombe’s diary by Count Fosco to the use of a narrative structure that is evocative of compelling judicial testimony, Griffiths takes Collins’s domestication of the Gothic and gives it a twenty-first century edge. Her evocation of M R James’s ghost stories is more subtle but equally important and effective. Griffiths creates her own version of James, R M Holland, to remind us of the power of stories. It is Holland’s tale of terror, The Stranger, that underpins the novel’s narrative structure and creates an uncanny sense of the inevitable as fact mimics fiction, as the accumulating murders mirror the fictional deaths. This simple yet relentless device ensures that the novel’s tension never dissipates.

Ultimately The Stranger Diaries is a celebration of literature and stories, and of the power of what lies beneath. As Griffiths reminds us, Wilkie Collins once wrote ‘nothing in this world is hidden forever.’ This simple yet inescapable maxim stands as a manifesto for all great crime fiction and for the Gothic genre as a whole.

‘The novel matters because it punches little holes in the wall of indifference that surrounds us. Novels have to swim against the tide. And this was never more clear than it is today.’[1]

Elif Shafak, 2018

 

On the 26^th September 2014 a group of students from the Ayotzinapa teacher training school were travelling to Mexico City to commemorate the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre when they were intercepted by local police.  On that autumn night, local, state and federal security forces confronted and then opened fire on the unarmed students.  As a consequence six people were shot and killed, many were injured, and forty-three students disappeared, all under the direct supervision of the Mexican Army.  John Washington, in his introduction to investigative reporter Anabel Hernández’s A Massacre in Mexico, comments that

After the disappearance – as news of the slaughter began to break across the world – the government tampered with evidence, fabricated stories, lied to the international press, and brutally tortured the innocent men and women on whom it tried to pin the attacks.[2]

Hernández’s book exposes not only the corrupt nature of the government investigation that followed the students’ disappearance, but crucially that the government itself is culpable for the students’ kidnapping and assumed murder. Hernández confirms that the students had inadvertently commandeered coaches bearing substantial narcotics shipments, lucrative shipments that were being made by Mexico’s drug cartels in collusion with the Mexican authorities. It was a combination of the students’ political activism and their inadvertent encounter with the Mexican Government’s corrupt collusion with Mexico’s drug cartels that made the students’ lives precarious.  Put simply they became ‘othered’ and marginalised purely because they posed a threat to a corrupt and oppressive regime.

This incident is just one example of the precarity experienced by a vulnerable group whose lives depend upon an innately hostile and often anonymous oligarchy. In the face of such a phenomenon we have to answer the question posed by Judith Butler as to ‘what form political reflection and deliberation ought to take if we take injurability and aggression as two points of departure for political life.’[3]  It is my contention that literature has an essential role to play in this process of political reflection and deliberation.  It is also my contention that Gothic fiction specifically has a critical, although not unproblematic, role to play in exposing the precarity experienced by those ‘othered’ by hostile regimes of power and authority, reflecting Gothic fiction’s historical engagement with the anxieties of social and political orders in perceived crisis.

It is Gothic fiction’s engagement with the social marginalisation experienced by ‘the Other’ that constitutes the primary focus of this research proposal, and in particular Gothic fiction’s engagement with the precarious state of all those ‘othered’ by the various forms of oppression in the twenty-first century.  There is increasing academic interest in social marginalisation.  Within this context the concept of precarity has come to represent ‘the politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks (…) becoming differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death.’[4]  As Jennifer Shaw and Darren Byler argue, when

systems of care and support are fragmented by the uneven impacts of capitalism and global forms of racism and exploitation, precarity emerges as an acute expression of precariousness [of life]. Precarity is thus fundamentally concerned with politics.  It describes the way that the precariousness of life is exploited, how the lives of underemployed minorities, their struggles and suffering, are rendered abject and meaningless.[5]

Therefore a central element of this research proposal will be the interrogation of Gothic fiction’s capacity to lay bare, to scrutinise and challenge the precarity of ‘the Other’ in the twenty-first century.

This approach recognises Gothic fiction’s traditional pre-occupation with ‘the Other’ and in particular evokes Sigmund Freud’s concept of the unheimlich or uncanny, the idea that ‘something should be frightening precisely because it is unknown and unfamiliar.’[6] Precarity, by its unsettling nature, is uncanny.  As Ruth Bienstock Anolik writes, ‘[t]he Gothic is marked by an anxious encounter with otherness, with the dark and mysterious unknown.’[7]  As Anolik goes on to state, ‘[t]raditionally, the Gothic represents the fearful unknown as the inhuman Other: the supernatural or monstrous manifestation, inhabiting mysterious space, that symbolizes all that is irrational, uncontrollable and incomprehensible.’[8]  However in the twenty-first century ‘otherness’ is often the state projected on to those who do not comply with the normative constrictions of authoritarian regimes.  Such ‘others’ include women, those of a different race or nationality, the disabled, members of the LGBTQ+ community, intellectuals, and all those that challenge such regimes of oppression and terror.

This is a far from straight-forward matter, as Gothic fiction’s engagement with otherness can often be problematic. Gothic fiction’s ambivalent response to power and authority, and its inclination to often ‘delight in transgression’[9] can fatally undermine its capacity to scrutinize the experiences of those who are victims of such transgression.  As Mark Edmundson claims, ‘[a] deep ambivalence about authority lies near the heart of our culture of Gothic.’^[10] It is this innate ambivalence that can undermine the Gothic’s capacity to both positively critique the oppression of ‘the Other’ that characterises regimes and systems of oppression and abuse and to offer compelling counter narratives from the perspective of those ‘othered’.  In addition, a similar ambivalence is present in Gothic fiction’s portrayal of ‘the Other’.  In Gothic fiction ‘the Other’ is often simultaneously visible and invisible[11], the subject of both repulsion and attraction, transgressors as well as transgressed, evoking Kenneth Graham’s arguments concerning the prominence of deviant behaviour in Gothic fiction.[12]

Indeed Gothic fear is often ‘relocated onto the figure of the racial and social Other, the Other who replaces the supernatural ghost or grotesque monster as the code for mystery and danger.’[13]  As Anolik goes on to argue:

many canons and cultures are attracted to the always anxious and transgressive Gothic as a ready medium for expression of racial and social anxieties, and are drawn to the horrifying and monstrous figure of the Gothic Other as a ready code for the figuration of these anxieties.[14]

Therefore a key aspect of this research will be an assessment of the extent to which twenty-first-century Gothic fiction can transcend this traditional figuration of ‘the Other’ and instead create empathy with those oppressed and ‘othered’ by such social and political crises, to thereby use ‘the “experience” of alterity [to] challenge and refashion the concept of experience itself’^[15], arguably the primary purpose of all works of literature. As Catherine Spooner argues, ultimately the more effective ‘Gothic counter-narrative (…) is one in which the tastes of women, children, teenagers, queer and subcultural communities are of particular significance.’^[16] It is the aim of this proposed research to determine whether such Gothic counter-narratives, the counter-narratives of ‘others’, are evident in Gothic fiction’s engagement with the precarity of ‘the Other’ in the twenty-first century.

It is my contention that such counter-narratives have never been more important. When novelist Elif Shafak considered the current socio-political importance of the novel she concluded that ‘[t]he world is frighteningly messy today, but a world that has lost its empathy, cognitive flexibility and imagination will surely be a darker place.’[17] It is my argument that, notwithstanding the genre’s innate ambivalences, Gothic fiction has the capacity to stimulate such ‘empathy, cognitive flexibility and imagination.’[18]  Shafak makes the case that

[t]he novel matters because it connects us with the experiences of people we have never met, times we have never seen, places we have never visited. The novel matters not only because of the stories it brings alive, but also the silences it dares to explore.[19]

This exploration of ‘silences’ is evident in many contemporary novels that deploy Gothic forms and devices in order to give a voice to those ‘othered’ and as a consequence live precarious lives. Shafak’s own novel The Bastard of Istanbul (2007) engages with the Gothic preoccupations of repressed family secrets and the shadow of past transgressions, in this case the Turks’ massacre of Armenians in 1915, to explore how the past conditions the present and to examine specifically the precarious lives of foreigners living in a hostile country.  Carmen Maria Machado’s collection of short stories Her Body & Other Parties (2017) and Leni Zumas’ novel Red Clocks (2018) offer some indication of how Gothic devices can be deployed to expose the precarious nature of the lives of women oppressed by patriarchy and toxic masculinity.  In her novel Sing, Unburied, Sing (2018) Jesmyn Ward juxtaposes the transgressive acts of otherwise good men and women with the presence of the ghosts that haunt them in order to expose the alterity of ordinary people living lives of precarity as a result of racial oppression.  Mariana Enriquez’s collection of short stories Things we lost in the fire (2017) uses the Gothic device of severe bodily trauma to symbolize the precarity experienced by those made vulnerable as a result of male violence, poverty and the legacy of dictatorship in twenty-first-century Argentina.

In 1974 Angela Carter wrote that ‘we live in Gothic times.’[20] Some forty-four years later it is evident that the Gothic qualities of the twenty-first century have already surpassed those of the post-war era of which Carter wrote.  As we survey our current cultural and political condition, we observe profound socio-political monsters and crises emerging relentlessly from the manifold failures in extant social and political orders, notably global financial breakdown, a loss of faith in and respect for established political regimes, the environmental catastrophes that result from climate change, and a rejection of the fundamental truth-based principles of an enlightened society in favour of the emotional and the irrational. In such contexts it is evident ‘how easily human life is annulled.’[21] Ultimately, at the centre of my interrogation of Gothic fiction’s capacity to lay bare precarity is Judith Butler’s assessment of the enduring importance of Levinasian constructions of the relationship between ‘self’ and ‘other’ and in particular her contention that ‘Emmanuel Levinas offers a conception of ethics that rests upon an apprehension of the precariousness of life, one that begins with the precarious life of the Other.’[22]  Thus the disappearance of forty-three Mexican students on an autumn night in 2014, as directed by a corrupt and oppressive government, an incident that is rich in Gothic characteristics, transcends its status as forty-three personal tragedies and becomes symbolic of the precarious lives lived by all of those ‘othered’ by authoritarian and abusive regimes of power.  In this context it is Gothic fiction’s purpose to ‘rehumanise those who have been dehumanised’[23], to lay bare the precarity experienced by many in the twenty-first century.

[1] Elif Shafak, ‘Why the novel matters in the age of anger’, The New Statesman [online] (3 October 2018) https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2018/10/why-novel-matters-age-anger [accessed 11 November 2018] (para 18 of 26).

[2] John Washington, ‘Introduction’, in A Massacre in Mexico, by Anabel Hernández, trans. by John Washington (London: Verso, 2018), pp. xi – xix, (p. xi).

[3] Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, [2004] 2006), p. xii.

[4] Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), p.25.

[5] Jennifer Shaw & Darren Byler, ‘Precarity’, Social Anthropology [online] https://culanth.org/curated_collections/21-precarity [accessed 12 October 2018] (para 1 of 4).

[6] Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in The Uncanny, trans. by David McLintock (London: Penguin Books, 2003), pp. 121-162, (pp. 124-125).

[7] Ruth Bienstock Anolik, ‘Introduction: The Dark Unknown’, in The Gothic Other: Racial and Social Constructions in the Literary Imagination, ed. by Ruth Bienstock Anolik and Douglas L. Howard (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2004), pp. 1-14 (p.1).

[8] Anolik, p.1

[9] Andrew Smith, Gothic Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), p. 3.

[10] Mark Edmondson, Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism and the Culture of the Gothic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 21.

[11] This evokes Freud’s ‘notion of the hidden and the dangerous (…) so that heimlich acquires the sense that otherwise belongs to unheimlich.’ Freud, p. 134.

[12] Kenneth W. Graham, Gothic fictions prohibition/transgression (New York: AMS Press, 1989).

[13] Anolik, p. 2.

[14] Anolik, p. 2.

[15] Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004), p. 19.

[16] Catherine Spooner, Contemporary Gothic (Trowbridge: Reaktion Books, 2006) p. 187.

[17] Shafak, (para 26 of 26).

[18] Shafak, (para 26 of 26).

[19] Shafak, (para 6 of 26).

[20] Angela Carter, ‘Afterword’, Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (London: Quartet Books, [1974] 1976), p. 122.

[21] Butler, 2006, p. xvii

[22] Butler, 2006, pp. xvii-xviii

[23] Shafak, (para 16 of 26).