At the heart of the Gothic genre since its origins in the eighteenth century have been invisible forces that give rise to and facilitate monstrosity and monstrous behavior. These may be the invisible forces of patriarchy and classism, for example, that allow unscrupulous aristocrats free rein to pursue vulnerable young women in classic Gothic novels; alternatively, these may be forces of social expectation and convention that alienate and render monstrous those whose appearances or identities are deemed deviant; or the force in question may be capitalism, breeding relationships of exploitation and abuse. The four presentations included as part of the “Gothic Invisibilities” paper session will explore how invisible forces give rise to Gothic themes and possibilities in literary and cinematic works from the nineteenth century to the present.
Leading off the session will be Christian Lewis, adjunct assistant professor of English at Vassar. His presentation, “’Remarks on the Peculiar Position of Blind Women’: Uncanny Eyes and the Gothic (Un)visible,” centers on the gendered politics of Freud’s connection between the uncanny and blindness. Noting that the nineteenth century saw the spread of cataract surgeries, the development of Braille, and an increase in literary depictions of blindness, Lewis proposes to read two Victorian Gothic texts, Wilkie Collins’ Poor Miss Finch (1872) and Charles Dickens’s The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), using disability studies and gaze theory to demonstrate how blind women, and/like their uncanny eyes, both represent and upend our accepted ideas about the Gothic.
Lewis will be followed by Aileen Farrar, Associate Professor of Literature at Nova Southeastern University, who in “Spectral Science: I Will Believe It When I See It” extends Lewis’s examination of blindness and the uncanny in the nineteenth century to a consideration of conceptualizations of science more generally. Western knowledges, she notes, have often privileged visuality as not just a way of knowing but the entirety of knowing. With attention to nineteenth-century scientific Gothic romances including Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science (1882), Marie Corelli’s Romance of Two Worlds (1886), and H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man (1897), Farrar proposes to explore how Gothicism and scientific romances partnered to present science as a seemingly disembodied and godly force, disembodying or apotheosizing others in turn.
Turning to our contemporary moment, Assistant Professor of English at Boston University Maia Gil’Adi, in “Solid, Viscous, Dissipating,” will examine how Carmen Maria Machado’s short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties (2017), reimagines the tropes of Gothic fiction, presenting the female body as a speculative arena through which self-abnegation and refusal are explored. Gil’Adi argues that, through its depictions of gendered violence, Her Body and Other Parties shows how Gothic and speculative tropes can illuminate the Latinx elements in the text, pushing them onto three forms of embodiment: the solid, the viscous, and the dissipating. These forms of embodiment, she concludes, reveal practices of negation and resistance in the face of heteropatriarchal domination and reading practices.
Rounding out the the session will be Gregory Brophy, Associate Professor of English at Québec’s Bishop University, whose attention will be focused on Leigh Whannell’s 2020 film, The Invisible Man. Brophy notes that the “invisible style” of most Hollywood productions effaces the role of the camera. By contrast, continues Brophy, Whannell’s film invokes the traditions of Gothic horror in its persistent concern to sensitize views to acts of looking. The invisible camera becomes the invisible man, charged with ominous presence—weighted by body-mounted camerawork, mask shots, and unmotivated camera movements that exploit the indistinguishability of third-person lens and first-person POV shots. These tricks train viewers, concludes Brophy, to connect sight to insight, asking what cultural conditions make certain actions and actors socially invisible when it comes to a violence that is ideologically hidden.