Frightening Masculinity: Gothic Affect and Antebellum Manhood
Open Access
- Author:
- Neff, Brian
- Graduate Program:
- English
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- July 30, 2010
- Committee Members:
- Christopher Dean Castiglia, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Christopher Dean Castiglia, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Hester Maureen Blum, Committee Member
Sean X Goudie, Committee Member
Amy S Greenberg, Committee Member - Keywords:
- manhood
masculinity
american gothic
fear
gender - Abstract:
- This project engages novels and short stories written by Herman Melville, Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, George Thompson, Theodore Winthrop and Julia Ward Howe. It elucidates the ways that these authors addressed changing notions of masculine anxiety during the antebellum period. As several factors challenged contemporary notions of masculinity, including the violent rejection of patriarchy in the Revolutionary War, the changing position of the father in the family, and the pressures of the rising market economy, the inability to successfully adapt to gender conventions became a source of intense anxiety for people struggling to be masculine. Recognizing the efficacy of Gothic rhetoric for understanding and explaining this anxiety by translating it into fear, these authors used Gothic literature to critique masculine structures and the relationship between masculinity, the body, and desire. More generally, the project brings together discussions of gender formation, antebellum male affect, and Gothic literature to argue that in order to understand fully the role of affect in the formation of masculinity, we need also to understand the importance of negative affects common to Gothic literature. Of particular importance is the way that these authors recognized that fear, instead of being simply debilitating, could be a productive source of masculine identity. Ultimately, this project argues for the centrality of gender to American Gothic literature while expanding our understanding of the role emotion played in the antebellum period and suggesting the importance of all gender practices—normative and non-normative—in the formation of the canon.