Date of Award

2026

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

English

First Advisor

Marta Werner

Abstract

American gothic works that center the affect of horror explore themes of abjection, inhumanity, and monstrosity that impede a coherent expression of American identity. By approaching these works through the lens of horror rather than only as Gothic works, a picture ofa visceral, embodied becoming takes shape: America is a monstrous birth in the most literal sense of the word, a sign and demonstration that unity and uniformity are not the same, that wholeness does not require conformity, and that political choices are paid for in flesh. In short, American horror fiction is the head of Medusa, an apotropaic sign that warns us against forgetting the parts of our cultural memory we long to cast aside in shame, only to gaze upon it once more in jouissance. Horror fiction grows out of the Gothic like the roots of the giant wistaria grew out of the bones of the Puritan woman in Charlotte Gilman Perkins’s “The Giant Wistaria.” It centers the dark and the subversive and engages in the arousal of art-horror without requiring an aspect of voyeurism or titillation. Its main affect is revulsion rather than subversion, though both may be present. It challenges our definitions of the borders of humanity by asking us how much inhumanity we may tolerate in ourselves. It points to the rot in the house of Usher and asks if we will bury Madeline alive or treat the infected root. It asks us if this American project will founder on the sand bars of our unrepented past, or if we will bare our scarlet letter emblazoned on our chest and acknowledge all of our history as ours. There is a body of American fiction written in the long 19th century that uses the poetics of horror to explore the limits of American subjectivity. These works, written by both white women and men, are driven by a pulsating anxiety and nausea surrounding issues of race and gender. This group of 19th-century American horror fiction texts are part of a larger tradition of American Gothic fiction that develops out of the European Gothic tradition. These books were widely read and imitated in America at the end of the 18th century and well into the 19th, where they eventually differentiated themselves from the English Gothic tradition and began exploring more overtly American subjects By re-reading these works as horror rather than Gothic, I am focusing on abjection rather than suppression/repression/subversion and moving away from a Freudian or Jungian reading to a more Kristevan framework. I will argue that horror fiction is a tool of national identity formation by playing in the troubled boundaries and “crises of categorization” of American subjectivity.

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