Abstracts for 7th Annual Graduate Student Conference
Below are the abstracts for the 7th Annual Graduate Student Conference: “Tracing the Goth/ic: Viewing Culture through the Lens of Barbarity.”
“Gothic Currents of Barbaric Sexuality in George Lippard’s Quaker City”
Heather Barrett, BU, Dept of English
As America’s best-selling novel prior to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), George Lippard’s Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall (1844-5) held immense appeal because it utilized the familiar tropes of the British Gothic novel to offer incisive commentary on a range of controversial social issues in antebellum America. While scholars have explored how the novel’s Gothic elements reflect its engagement with racial prejudice, class tensions, the expansion of empire, and religious intolerance, no substantive work has been done to illuminate its Gothicized observations about gender and sexuality. This oversight persists because most critics interpret the novel’s overt eroticism in light of Lippard’s ostensible moral, namely, that “the assassin of chastity and maidenhood is worthy of death by the hands of any man, and in any place” (2). My paper will challenge the prevailing belief that this novel carefully regulates its depictions of sexual desire in line with its professed moral. Instead, I will argue that sexuality functions as a de-civilizing force that provides readers with opportunities to engage imaginatively in a range of barbaric erotic fantasies outside of monogamous and heterosexual norms. To develop this claim, I will analyze the Gothic tropes that inform Lippard’s characterization of the titular structure of Monk Hall and its deformed and maniacal owner Devil-Bug. These Gothicized characterizations, I will argue, encode an anarchic erotic force that proliferates throughout the text and prevents it from neatly resolving its anxieties about gender roles and sexual desire.
“Asexual Reproduction and the Threat of Extinction”
Jessica Melendy, Dept of English, UMassBoston
Asexual reproduction, amidst chaos, is a common theme throughout Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez’s The Blair Witch Project. The female protagonists, Mina and Heather, in these stories take on a masculine, nontraditional role as they operate the only tools available for recording history: the typewriter in Dracula and the cameras in The Blair Witch Project. Because both women use these machines to produce history, rather than life, the intellectual uncertainty of the technology that they use is specific to the uncanny nature of the message. The critique then becomes the question as to whether or not history can be trusted when delivered through the lens of women. Is it naturally coming into fruition or is it being tainted by the most unnatural act of a female using machinery to reproduce it? These stories indicate that the world cannot be free from turmoil as long as women deviate from traditional gender roles by failing to partake in the sexual transaction that produces life, but rather controlling how history is perceived and learned. In an attempt to save society from the terror that ensues as a result of this dichotomy, Stoker makes Mina a mother at the end of Dracula and Myrick and Sanchez murder Heather in a way that is not visually or audibly recorded. Destroying the unnatural by reclaiming masculine authority over history is the only way that these stories can be resolved and order can be restored.
“Knights of the Dining Room Table: The quest for a medieval life in the English Victorian home”
Michelle Wilson, Dept of Art history, BU
In the nineteenth century, early British historians and antiquarians, spurred by the flowering of Romantic Gothic literature and archaeological discovery alike, became fired with a passion and nostalgia for the medieval past. With this fascination grew a demand for the creation of a material culture that could bring to life their visions of life in the Middle Ages. For decades, the market was flooded with a unique class of wares that closely mimicked the appearance of ancient arms and armor and integrated heraldic devices into the fabric of the Victorian home as this largely male class of antiquarians found themselves drawn to the fantasy of the gruesome heroicism and titillating savagery of this barbaric, but chivalrous, world. Yet the application of martial culture into the world of nineteenth-century ornament, no matter the level of integrated historic detail, was a conspicuous attempt to keep the true medieval, with its inconveniences and discomforts, at bay. Through an analysis of this group’s historical publications and participation in physical medieval reenactment, I will explore how the application of illusory authenticity heightened the educational and imaginative experience for the medieval enthusiast. The objects under discussion, though related to tournament culture and to the display of weapons in warrior-aristocrat homes, are relegated through diminution, modernization, and/or functionalization to clever and sometimes humorous souvenirs: aids to a sort of medieval armchair time travel. While consciously playing the medieval lord at home, the consumer still retains the benefit of his position as nineteenth-century historian and commentator and reconciles past and present through a clever integration of fantasy and reality.
“Hovering Between”: Louisa May Alcott’s Sensational Gothics, The Governess and Women’s Work
Lauren Wilwerding, Dept of English, Boston College
Over the years, scholarly treatment of Louisa May Alcott’s posthumously discovered thrillers–by Madeline Stern, Judith Fetterley, Karen Halttunen and others– has often been concerned with charting a transition in Alcott’s career, in Stern’s words, From Blood and Thunder to Hearth and Home. In other words, to become a serious author, Alcott was said to have repudiated her early Gothic enthusiasms. These arguments, however, overlook what was in fact a continuous concern in Alcott’s sensational Gothics and her domestic fiction: the plight of the “poor gentlewoman” and her work. In this paper, I read Alcott’s thriller “Behind a Mask,” alongside the more domestic Little Women and Work as a reflection on the contradictory expectations Victorian America imposed on such working women, looking specifically at contemporary cultural constructions of the governess, who (as Mary Poovey argues in Uneven Developments) was expected to be both the artless mother surrogate and the working class seductress. Rather than representing a lost Gothic phase in Alcott’s career, the sensational emerges as a tool that allows for a depiction of the double bind of women’s work, illustrating through the plight of the governess the plight of many women tainted by the need to enter the economy. This lens suggests a new reading for the infamously problematic conclusion to “Behind a Mask,” in which the governess marries her Lord: perhaps marriage concludes Alcott’s story not because it erases her own Gothic past, but because coverture removes her heroine from the impossible position of the working girl.
“The Gothic as “monstrous mother”: Using Bram Stoker’s Dracula to examine the Gothic/reader relationship”
Stephen Tsai, Dept of English, UMassBoston
How can we use the Gothic as a lens to see the world? This paper will argue that using the Gothic as a lens to see the world will raise insights, and yet the Gothic itself will work to keep its readers from pursuing those insights by acting as a “monstrous mother” to its readers. As defined by psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, the monstrous mother first creates a sense of safety and establishes a “primal connection” with the child, and then holds close to the child in order to prevent the child from ever “abjecting”.
This paper will examine the mother/child imagery in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and propose a three-step process that builds on scholars’ notion of the contemporary Gothic. Specifically, this paper explores how Dracula presents progressively and increasingly monstrous imagery in order to create a feeling of safety, and also as a means of visually “arresting” its readers. These visually arresting images provide the reader with a safe alternative to “abjecting” and gaining “autonomous subjectivity” (Steven Bruhm, Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction) from the text.
This paper will argue that such “abjection” could be accomplished by considering more serious and potentially unsettling questions raised about the mother/child relationship.Finally, this paper will examine the ways in which the example of Dracula may provide a model for the relationship between the Gothic as a genre and its readers.
“Redefining the Sounds of Horror: The Musical Legacy of Hitchcock’s Psycho”
Rose Bridges, BU musicology
Composer Bernard Herrmann described his string-orchestra original score for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) as a “black-and-white score” to fit a black-and-white film. The quote suggests his choice is obvious, when in fact, it was the opposite: strings had been previously associated in films with romance, while horror films typically used shrieking woodwinds and ominous timpani rolls. He defied the traditional logic and, in doing so, destroyed it. The impact of Psycho in creating the modern horror film has been analyzed endlessly by film critics and scholars, but while its score is acknowledged as a masterpiece, there has been less exploration of how Psycho redefined and expanded the sonic possibilities of horror movie scores. This paper will examine the influence of Psycho’s score on the horror genre by not only analyzing the unique musical features of the score itself, but also comparing and contrasting scores for horror films which preceded and followed Psycho. It will also detail how Psycho as an entire work redefined what counted under the horror genre’s fascination with the monstrous and the Other, and how the role of music in the film played into these elements. Psycho blew the door open on what musical features could be used to indicate the emotions and ideas associated with horror, and this ties in with how the film also expanded the narrative and thematic confines of the genre.
“Dominus exaudiet cum clamavero ad eum”: The Monumentalization of Faith, Sound, and the Proxemics of Space
John Forrestal, BU musicology
The recent phenomena of sound recording –– the capturing and recreating of audio through a recorded medium –– has created the problematic of “imagined space,” in which the listener immerses themself into an imaginary world through the perceptions of distance and reverberation in sound. This problematic has become both an exploited and an avoided aspect of recording technology; for some, it has led to the creation of imagined spaces otherwise impossible (in the cases of ambient music and experimental electronic music). For others, it has become the contested point of artistic and historical falsehood. It conflates the boundaries of historical reality, shapes the listener’s interpretation of the physical, and influences our emotional and metaphysical relationships with sound and space.
In this paper, I am arguing against the phenomena of fabricated space in recordings of the Notre Dame School. As a case study, I examine the 1989 ECM recording Pérotin by the Hilliard Ensemble, and in particular the creation of an imagined space through the use of gratuitous reverberation. I argue that the sound-world of this album is historically incorrect, and in fact a cultural fabrication that may stem from the fetishizations and romanticizations of the Medieval and Gothic aesthetic. Through the examination of acoustics, I will relate these to a humanistic, anthropological point of view through Edward Hall’s “proxemics”. I will relate both religion and architectural history to the trajectory of musical traditions, drawing parallels between them and their continual growth, culminating with the musical traditions at the Notre Dame cathedral.
