The papers in “Gothic Childhood” investigate interactions between the Gothic and childhood from a rich mix of theoretical approaches including Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, feminist theory, pedagogical theory, visual culture studies and critical race theory. They address historical contexts ranging from British Victorianism to the contemporary U.S., across genres and media including fiction, poetry, children’s literature, television adaptation, and young adult fiction. How have figures of gothic childhood been used to bolster and/or challenge structures of race, nation, gender, sexuality, class, or religion? How does the child haunt theories of subjectivity and desire, psychoanalytic and otherwise? What accounts for the prevalence of the gothic in specific historical contexts, including contemporary children’s and YA literature?
The panel will begin with a consideration of the rhetorical and pedagogical function of Gothic tropes in Victorian children’s literature. Professor Christie Harner will in her paper analyze four canonical and lesser-known children’s stories, written and published in either Britain or Australia, that employ the Gothic uncanny to interrogate binaries between the self and other, to forestall the child’s conscious recognition of what is happening, and uneasily blur the lines between dream and reality, life and death. Yet, Professor Harner argues, rather than invoking fear, the stories use the Gothic scenario as a space of education. Bridging contemporary theorizations of the Gothic with histories of nineteenth-century pedagogy, her paper therefore asks what it means to define an educational experience as one that is also fundamentally uncanny.
In the mid-twentieth-century Leslie Fiedler famously argued that the American Gothic expresses the nation’s “special guilt” regarding Native American extermination and African American slavery. Building on Robin Bernstein’s work on “racial innocence” and Megan Boler’s concept of a “passive empathy,” Professor Maude Hines delineates a twenty-first century reconfiguration of this theme in three young adult novels, wherein young (white) protagonists uncover familial or geographical connections to a slavery past through Southern Gothic plot devices that create racial, generational, perspectival, and temporal distance from that past. Rather than evoking the present past (as Sheri-Marie Harrison has recently argued does the "New Black Gothic"), in these novels bridges to the past are crossed and burned, granting absolution for characters (and, by extension, young readers), leveraging empathy as an alternative to justice, and portraying a past laid to rest, obscuring the legacy of slavery’s ideologies that continue to haunt us.
Professor Michael Harwick traces contemporary developments of a third prominent thread in Gothic studies: theorizations informed by psychoanalysis. Using Mike Flanagan’s 2018 ten-episode Netflix reconfiguration of Shirley Jackson’s 1959 staple of Gothic horror, The Haunting of Hill House, as an exemplar text, Harwick suggests that such contemporary Gothics depend upon audiences’ knowledge of the basics of psychoanalysis—the pop-ified filtration of Freud, Jung, and (especially) attachment-based theories of child development into the cultural consciousness of the 21st-century streamer. Whereas Jackson’s novel memorably and abruptly ends with a wholesale refusal of sisterly, familial, or any legible erotic attachment, the Netflix series suggests a family therapy alternative, offering a cathartic, even optimistic, conclusion, positing how a “Gothic childhood” might be productively outgrown.
In conversation, these papers underline and newly configure the intertextual nature of both the Gothic and the child, and explore provocative new theorizations based on both canonical and contemporary texts. We expect that the resulting dialogue with be equally provocative and productive. Papers will be limited to 18 minutes each, leaving ample time for a discussion of our session’s guiding questions, over Professor Katherine Henninger will preside.