Uncanny Youth: Childhood, the Gothic, and the Literary Americas

By Suzanne Manizza Roszak

A literary study of childhood in the American Gothic.
　
Childhood in Gothic literature has often served colonialist, white supremacist, and patriarchal ideologies, but in　Uncanny Youth, Suzanne Manizza Roszak highlights hemispheric American writers who subvert these scripts. In the hands of authors ranging from Octavio Paz and Maryse Condé to N. Scott Momaday and Tracey Baptiste, Gothic conventions critique systems of power in the Americas. As fictional children confront shifting configurations of imperialism and patterns of gendered, anti-queer violence, their uncanny stories call on readers to reckon with intersecting forms of injustice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: May 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781786838681

Suzanne Manizza Roszak

Suzanne Manizza Roszak is assistant professor of English at the University of Groningen in the north of the Netherlands. She is author of Uncanny Youth: Childhood, the Gothic, and the Literary Americas.

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Introduction

Stories of Gothic youth have long had a unique power, both within and far outside the world of children’s and young adult literature. From infancy to adolescence, young people faced with unthinkable horrors tend to exercise an affective pull on readers – so much so that the literary figure of the gothically maligned child has often served as a sort of tool for cultural propaganda, advancing colonialist, white supremacist, and patriarchal ideologies. Meanwhile, the imagined figure of the gothically monstrous child has turned out to have her own kind of persuasiveness within these oppressive systems, instrumentalized in attempts to justify the exercise of power over purportedly threatening bodies. It is no wonder that, amid this literary history, modern and contemporary Gothic literature by hemispheric American writers would refigure uncanny youth in forms that have inverted these cultural scripts, using both the horrific injuries done to child and adolescent characters and their own subversive, resistive forms of Gothic power to disrupt the othering impulses of the Euro-American Gothic canon – as well as to critique a whole range of pathological structures of power in the space of the Americas. This book takes up the stories of some of these literary voices, writers ranging from Octavio Paz and Maryse Condé to N. Scott Momaday and Carmen Maria Machado.

Of course, it is impossible to really talk about the modern and contemporary Gothic today without recognizing its complex and transnational constellation of origins, as the neat narrative of the Gothic’s start in Europe and its appropriation by a string of writers from colonized and formerly colonized places has increasingly given way to a much more complicated history. With the title of her essay ‘Is There an Indigenous Gothic?’, Michelle Burnham posed a question that invited readers not just to consider the point of reading contemporary Indigenous American literatures through a Gothic lens but also to re-examine the fiction that the original roots of the Gothic lie ‘firmly in eighteenth-century Britain’ and developed ‘in response to the European Enlightenment’ (2014, 225). Burnham’s answer and the answers of other readers who have asked similar questions have proven meaningful to our understanding of the Gothic within a broad range of multi-ethnic US, hemispheric American, and global literatures. In reaffirming the existence of both a modern and contemporary Indigenous Gothic tradition and a robust ‘indigenous prehistory of the Gothic’ (2014, 234), voices like Burnham’s have recast the project of Gothic reading in itself as a way of reclaiming the genre from Eurocentric ways of thinking. Meanwhile, working in the context of the Latin American Gothic, Sandra Casanova-Vizcaíno and Inés Ordiz have laboured to disrupt ‘the consideration of the Gothic as a colonizing discourse’ and the conceptualization of the genre as ‘a uniquely European mode’ incompatible with ‘representation[s] of Latin American reality free of outside (colonizing) influences’, suggesting that ‘a global perspective on literary history’ necessitates a different view (2018, 3–4). For Casanova-Vizcaíno and Ordiz, it is vital to consider that ‘responses to modernity similar to what the West has named Gothic have emerged elsewhere, even if differently modulated by other historical and cultural conditions’ (Byron 2012, 370). Such a perspective liberates us to recognize the actually anti-Eurocentric impulses of the Latin American Gothic – or, more broadly, the hemispheric American or even the global Gothic – and to understand these Gothic modes as having distinct lineages that reach beyond ‘the shadows of European and North American rationalism’, springing instead from their own contextually driven sets of sociopolitical and cultural concerns (Casanova-Vizcaíno and Ordiz 2018, 3).

These explorations build meaningfully on a robust tradition that has documented the politically important and necessary gothicism of texts by many of the writers in this book. Readers’ responses to novels like Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother or Elizabeth Nunez’s Prospero’s Daughter have shown us how, in their invocations of the Gothic, these writers have weaponized quintessentially European features of the genre against those whom some once uniformly credited with originating it, generating a ‘complex interplay’ between their books and those of their ‘English and continental counterparts’ (Paravisini-Gebert 2002, 233). What I would like to add to this conversation is a more sustained focus on representations of Gothic youth within this complex set of relationships. In the modern and contemporary hemispheric American Gothic, stories of childhood and adolescence emerge as a literary way toward scrutinizing intersectional currents of social injustice that violently threaten young people and the communities that surround them. As child and teen characters confront persisting colonial and neo-imperialist architectures, grapple with the everyday ramifications of white supremacist thinking, and navigate rigged systems of economic and class power, the uncanny and the often nightmarish in their Gothic lives stand to painfully upset the emotional equilibrium of readers. Girls especially see their bodies become objects of Gothic violence, and queer, disabled, and working-class girlhoods turn out to be intensely perilous. Young people’s own gothicism – the uncanny resistive power that they sometimes are revealed to hold – too often proves fleeting and ineffectual. In the end, however, both gothically injured and gothically, subversively resilient children and adolescents function textually to engage realities of injustice, forcing reckonings with and calling for resistance to these pathological systems. Importantly, these layers of signification are accomplished without perpetuating monolithic constructions of childhood victimization that threaten to erase children’s agency, including their capacity for both ‘public’ and private, internal forms of resistance (Alexander 2015, 122).

Whereas much of the existing literature on the hemispheric American Gothic addresses a single national, regional, or ethnic literary tradition, this book deliberately crosses boundaries to consider patterns of representation that are localized and that simultaneously transcend those borders. Thinking gothically in reading N. Scott Momaday, Maryse Condé, or Mariana Enriquez means engaging with particularized histories and experiences, from the US’s history of genocide against Indigenous people to the Spanish American War as a ‘North American war of conquest’ (Fumagalli 2009, 57) and the economic assault on the Argentine middle class that occurred beginning with the ‘last of many coups … and the military dictatorship it installed’ in the years following Enriquez’s birth (McDowell 2017, 199). Yet the repeating Gothic tropes that these writers invoke also invite us to recognize the ways in which such histories and experiences tend to be linked, as ‘dictatorship, imperialism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, neoliberalism, and border militarism are all dictatorial modes of control’ that have functioned and continue to operate as ‘simultaneously interlocking systems of power’ within the various spaces of the Americas (Harford Vargas 2018, 22). Individual chapters of this book recognize these inherent links by bringing together writers who have taken on these diverse systems and issues within diverse ethno-national contexts, reinforcing the place of the Gothic, and Gothic youth in particular, in a wide-ranging set of sociopolitical conversations. The deliberately broad range of texts included here is not intended as a comprehensive introduction to every modern and contemporary writer in the literary Americas who has harnessed Gothic childhoods in this way, but it is intended to illustrate how ‘interlocking’ and ultimately quite similar systems have provoked comparable modes of literary resistance across an array of communities.

The selection of authors represented in this book also reflects the increasing interest in rereading writers as Gothic who were initially assigned to other genres. Works like Silvina Ocampo’s ‘Las fotografías’ today are read as Gothic as well as magical realist with the understanding that, as Lucie Armitt suggests, the Gothic differs from magical realism in declining to normalize the extraordinary within the everyday world of the real. ‘Where magical realism embraces the foreign, whether spiritual or extraterritorial’, Armitt suggests, ‘the Gothic fights to keep the stranger at bay but fails, intimating a cultural failure that Western cultures have perhaps found it easier to identify with than to overcome’ (2014, 225) but that also has its own insistent resonance in Gothic writing outside the Euro-American tradition. To recognize this strand of thinking in the work of authors such as Ocampo – who, together with her co-editors, chose ‘to omit Gothic narratives’ as a literary category ‘in their influential Antología de la literatura fantástica [The Book of Fantasy]’ (Casanova-Vizcaíno and Ordiz 2018, 1) – is an act of reading with its own somewhat counterintuitive political implications. In particular, it disrupts an externally imposed, monolithic narrative of Latin American literary production that has come to peddle the ‘connection between magical realism and Latin American reality’ (2018, 3) to an audience of foreign readers as ‘an artifact of cultural exportation’ (Volek 1990, 11). Locating the gothicism in a work also doesn’t preclude us from seeing its other genre allegiances, and often the texts that appear here straddle multiple realms, drawing on conventions of science fiction, fantasy, fairy tales, and a host of other genres that overlap productively with Gothic ways of writing, just as the works selected for Ocampo’s Antología de la literatura fantástica ‘contain literary motifs typically associated with the Gothic’ (Casanova-Vizcaíno and Ordiz 2018, 1) even if they were not labelled as such. At other times, we might be reminded of Jodey Castricano’s distinction between texts that are wholeheartedly or systemically Gothic and ones that selectively ‘deal … in the Gothic’ (2006, 808), often in a resistive manner, and especially in thinking through imperialism, slavery, and whiteness as they shape experiences of childhood and coming of age within the Americas. In Momaday’s The Indolent Boys, for instance, racialized and Eurocentric ways of defining what is horrific are invoked and problematized alongside the actual nightmare of the settler colonialist project for Indigenous children and adolescents. What remains consistent across these variegated textual approaches is the works’ reliance on figurations of Gothic youth to uncover and resist injustice.

There is a similar diversity among the literary forms that matter to the hemispheric American Gothic, which have included poetry and drama as well as novels and short fiction. Alison Rudd’s Postcolonial Gothic Fictions from the Caribbean, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand scrutinizes poetic works like Lloyd W. Brown’s Duppies, while Antonio Alcalá González and Ilse Bussing López’s edited collection Doubles and Hybrids in Latin American Gothic draws attention to plays such as Álvares de Azevedo’s Macário. This multivalent approach is critical to understanding how Gothic representations of childhood and adolescence function across literary borders, including in cases where individual writers like Momaday have themselves produced Gothic works in multiple forms. Of especial importance are the impacts of literary mediums on the various ways that Gothic childhoods are deployed toward political ends: how the embodied presence of a ghost-child on stage can intensify the gothicism of a scene, how simply experiencing the ‘element of sound’ onstage as it is ‘meant to be heard’ can amplify that emotional power (Momaday 2007c, vii), or how the Gothic quality of a single image in a short poem can contagiously inflect the verse that surrounds it. Understanding how broadly the Gothic has permeated the literary space of the Americas requires reckoning with these various shapes that portrayals of uncanny youth can take.

The Euro-American Gothic has its own transnational history of presenting childhood as a flashpoint for sociopolitical challenges and critiques. Fraught childhoods and experiences of adolescence figure prominently in Gothic texts coloured by anxieties about the French Revolution, Catholic identities and their influence, religious fanaticism, and European despotism as well as by racist and colonialist ideologies. From canonical examples such as Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland to more recent fictions like Adelaida García Morales’s El sur, this literary-historical association of Gothic writing, childhood, and sociopolitical thought has an extensive diachronic and geographic reach within British, North American, and continental European contexts. Working against this contextual backdrop in constructing Gothic representations of children and teenagers, hemispheric American writers have borrowed Euro-American Gothic conventions and given them new meaning. Many have edited or inverted the most recognizable and unsettling Gothic tropes – for instance, making whiteness rather than Blackness the allegorically horrifying force within the world of a narrative. They also tend to draw on distinct cultural and ethno-national perspectives in inventing new ways of defining what is horrific, terrifying, or 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 as much as or more than they echo their European counterparts. Registering these authors’ distinctly fresh expressions of the Gothic impulse while identifying their subversive acts of appropriation is necessary to a decolonizing view of hemispheric American Gothic literary childhoods.

Amid their various divergences, what brings together all of these representations of uncanny youth – and what distinguishes them from otherwise similar texts that do not feature in this book – is their Gothic depictions of distinctive, specific categories of childhood and adolescent experience that are particularly powerful in their rhetorical effects. One early chapter examines Gothic early childhoods and the pained experiences of pregnancy and labour that precede them, which, in the hands of writers like Condé and Kincaid, facilitate a trenchant critique of both European colonial history and US neo-colonial practices in an array of Caribbean contexts. The spaces subject to these conditions include a range of still-colonized territories that are sometimes forgotten when the term ‘postcolonial’ is treated as synonymous with ‘post-independence’ rather than as referring to ‘all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day’ (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 1989, 2). Here, the starkness of young children’s experiences of pain and resilience proves fundamental to the sociopolitical implications of the Gothic, so that while Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother transports readers from its protagonist’s early childhood through her late adulthood, it is the narrative’s scenes of youth that prove to be in some sense the most arresting. Later on, we begin to see how contemporary Gothic stories are shaped by older boys’ experiences of traumatic exploitation and injury by adult figures in communal living environments, as in V. S. Naipaul’s Guerrillas, or by pre-teen and teenage girls’ experiences of alienation and isolation from the adult world, as in some of Enriquez’s most haunting stories. In both cases, the spectre of Gothic adolescence in particular, with all its fraught attempts at social exploration and identity formation, facilitates trenchant forms of critique.

Finally, these authors are united by their participation in projects of literary, historical, and sociocultural rewriting. Many of their books are close re-envisionings of canonical texts, especially in chapters 1 and 2, which include Octavio Paz’s, Aimé Césaire’s, and Maryse Condé’s rewritings of Hawthorne, Shakespeare, and Brontë. Later chapters feature looser definitions of rewriting that intervene instead in established narratives of specific historical events. Momaday’s The Indolent Boys, for instance, excavates a story of trauma and death visited on three ‘Kiowa boys’ at an ‘Indian school’ in the late-nineteenth-century United States (2007a, 5). Later still, other narratives offer rewritings of received sociocultural notions on a broader scale, as Machado’s stories do in interrogating pathological visions of girls’ and women’s bodies and their relation to anti-queer attitudes. What most impressively emerges from this wide-ranging suite of texts is the function of Gothic youth in facilitating these re-envisionings of both literary artefacts and faulty cultural mythologies. This is also true in children’s and young adult literature itself, which is the focus of the final chapter of this book, and where the literary politics of Gothic childhoods turn out to be similarly strategic.

The productively complex interplay between these different types of texts is on display in chapter 1, which begins not with literal depictions of childhood but with another, more figurative form of uncanny youth. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, the uncanny emerges when readers begin to recognize that her protagonist, who herself has recently given birth to a baby, is trapped in a Gothic nightmare of perennial girlhood stemming from her husband’s patriarchal attitudes and unwillingness to recognize her agency as an adult woman. This trope, which allows Gilman to critically revise the cultural assumptions underpinning the now-infamous ‘rest cure’, is not exclusive to works penned by US writers. On the contrary, similar conceits have appeared in Latin American narratives by a range of writers that has included Rosario Ferré, Carlos Fuentes, and, more recently, Daína Chaviano. What I am particularly interested in unearthing here, however, is a similar strand of Gothic thinking that emerges not in fiction but in hemispheric American drama. In Paz’s La hija de Rappaccini and in Césaire’s Une tempête, both re-envisonings of canonical western texts that were published in the middle decades of the twentieth century, this figure of the infantilized woman or the perennial girl recurs with a vengeance – although, unlike Gilman, both Paz and Césaire reveal and critique how this figure has been deployed to consolidate Euro-American colonial and neo-imperial power in the Americas. Césaire’s rendering draws focused attention to the mythology of the infantilized, virginal white woman as it has been weaponized against African diasporic communities, particularly Black men in Caribbean spaces. Meanwhile, Paz’s play exposes the fissures in a positivist narrative of western cultural superiority founded in false ideas of science and logic: a mythology that has dramatically influenced both European imperialist dogma and the US neo-colonial impulse in Latin America. In grappling with the spectre of youth more than its actuality, chapter 1 creates a gateway to later chapters that dig into Gothic representations of actual, physical childhood.

Chapter 2 begins to scrutinize Gothic early childhoods as they are more literally imagined in hemispheric American spaces, starting with the experience of birth itself and even with conception, both of which are framed as events shadowed by an inescapable constellation of Gothic horrors. This effect is especially visible in contemporary novels like Condé’s La migration des coeurs and Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother, both recent narratives that have been interpreted as rewritings of Wuthering Heights but that also draw on and reflect the persistence of a larger, more multicultural Gothic literary tradition – among hemispheric American writers more broadly as well as in contemporary Caribbean fiction. In their renderings of sexual violence, doomed pregnancies, and motherless infancy and early youth, Condé and Kincaid appropriate and edit Gothic conventions to dramatic effect, highlighting painful, persisting ramifications of the colonial project under slavery and in its wake. Gothic youth also simultaneously functions as a site of resistance, highlighting the subversive potential of childhood to dismantle imperialist ideologies and the systems they uphold. In doing this work, Condé and Kincaid meaningfully extend an existing literary conversation about pregnancies and early childhoods that have been gothically shaped by white supremacy, echoing some of the most recognizable contemporary novels of the Anglophone Americas, from Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea to Toni Morrison’s Beloved, in their strategies for engaging these impacts of pathological whiteness.

Communal environments controlled by untrustworthy adults form a terrifying backdrop for youth in chapter 3, which reads Naipaul’s Guerrillas alongside Momaday’s The Moon in Two Windows and The Indolent Boys. Recent readings of Naipaul’s novel have perceptively reconsidered the text in light of aesthetic preoccupations ranging from its political uses of description to its ‘postcolonial naturalism’ (Smith 2017, 372). The novel’s forsaken boys, who inhabit a socially marginal space shaped by persisting neo-colonial forces, also tend to play a peripheral role in conversations about the narrative’s political implications. This chapter sets out to excavate the experience of boyhood in Guerrillas, which Naipaul paints as gothically nightmarish in its entrapment of boy characters of colour. As the moral dissipation and casual cruelty of the novel’s white liberal Londoners assume an equally Gothic cast, Naipaul suggests an answer to the question of where adolescent boyhood suffering really arises from in this textual world, complicating the narrative’s purported rejection of radical politics. Unearthing historical events that pre-date the initial production of The Indolent Boys by a full century, Momaday’s play and screenplay vivify the infliction of traumas with similar sources on Indigenous children living at boarding schools intended to strip them of their personal and cultural identities in the service of US settler colonialism and its genocidal impulses. Reading these three works together reveals a shared Gothic sensibility at the core of their exploration of traumas collectively inflicted on the experience of pre-teen and teenage boyhood in communal spaces. Within the broader scope of the Americas, this Gothic kinship also gestures toward the interconnectedness of systems of European imperialist and US settler colonialist power, oppression, and violence.

Chapter 4 returns to the form of the short story and turns to the hybrid form of the lyric novel, considering a range of US Latinx and Latin American women writers whose fictions have given life to Gothic horrors of hemispheric American adolescence across temporal and national boundaries. The chapter begins with three earlier Argentine and Cuban writers, Juana Manuela Gorriti, Dulce María Loynaz, and Silvina Ocampo, whom scholars like Ashley Hope Pérez and Catherine Evans Davies read as identifiably Gothic. Crafting uncanny renderings of isolated, lonely girls whose gendered experiences of alienation serve as bellwethers for a broad array of sociopolitical issues, these earlier writers anticipate the gothicism of more recent Argentine and Cuban American works like Enriquez’s Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego and Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties: two short story collections in which, unlike the boys who inhabit chapter 3, adolescent girls are repeatedly envisioned as creatures on their own. Much like their Gothic forebears, Machado and Enriquez imagine these fictional girls either living in Gothic isolation or forging pathological communities apart from the equally disturbing adult worlds that threaten them. Whether they become villains themselves or simply lose themselves as they become submerged in Gothic horror, girls’ identities in these short narratives become a pained and painful manifestation of ills ranging from self-effacing notions of body image and traumatizing displays of anti-queerness to the economic turmoil that gutted Argentina’s middle class beginning in the mid-1970s and the intertwining currents of bigotry reflected in the election of Donald Trump as US president.

Much of the material presented in this book is purportedly ‘adult’, so serious and so horrifying that it is incompatible with stereotypical notions of what children themselves should know and what they should read in order to learn it. However, if we understand anything about socially engaged children’s books, it is that such texts routinely challenge this vision of what writing targeted to young audiences can accomplish and what it should look like. Often, Gothic elements become a vehicle for these incursions – and with that in mind, chapter 5 turns away from representations of childhood and adolescence in