'Horrors, horrors, horrors,': reading gothic eruptions and soul murder trauma in 19th century African American literature
Date
2022
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
This dissertation analyzes recurrent patterns of gothic eruptions that persistently show up in a broad range of non-gothic works by African American and white American writers throughout the 19th-century. Specifically, it examines how Black authors used the gothic as a discourse of trauma to articulate experiences of significant psycho-spiritual abuses or soul murder traumas caused by enslavement and other forms of white racial violence. Resisting scholarly impulses to read the gothic metaphorically, as representing fictional or distorted versions of reality, the study argues for a literal reading of the gothic and shows how Black authors deployed the gothic to express experiences of soul murder trauma, the dire spiritual implications of slavery, and to narrativize the incoherent world slavery created, a world ruled by the moral insanities of white supremacy and its unspeakable violence that resist representation. Tracing recurrent patterns of gothic eruptions in Austin Reed’s prison narrative, slave narratives by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson, and Hannah Craft, and fictional works by Douglass and Pauline Hopkins, as well as works by Charles Brockden Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville, the study argues that contours of a gothic shadow narrative begin to emerge within each text that details each writer’s spiritual battle for soul survival. It reveals how the system of slavery and the white power white supremacy promised to enslavers relied upon soul murder as a way to gain possession of the consciousness and souls of African Americans. This realization reconfigures the 19th-century slave world, white supremacy, and the lived realities of African Americans in dramatic and powerful ways. It illustrates how the system of slavery and white hegemonic power were inherently gothic, adhering to an ethos of evil that bore grave and long-term spiritual, moral, and historical consequences for both Black and white people.
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Keywords
African American literature, Gothic, History, Race, Soul murder, Trauma