What does anyone think about a paper analyzing Frances Hodgsen Burnett's A Little Princess and/or The Secret Garden in relation to the Gothic in its more colonialist guises? Does that sound reasonable?
I'm really thinking of A Little Princess, with its imagined talking doll (automaton. uncanny), its Montoni-like Evil Headmistress, its angelic heroine's sudden slide into horrific imprisonment from a life of princess-like ease, its preoccupation with absent fathers, and its explained-supernatural mystery (Indian Gentleman).
The colonial/imperialist part is clear too, of course: the Indian Gentleman; a brain fever caused by excessive colonial exploration; the danger of foreign speculation/importation -- although in this case we eventually find out that all that comes from India is in fact good, if viewed correctly (i.e., with childish trust and belief in magic).
But there's no actual supernatural in this text, and Miss Minchin isn't a monster or Montoni, but a real, English schoolmistress -- a Jane Eyre gone wrong.
I don't really know if I can swing this as a paper. It might be stretching things a little. Thing is, you can see Gothic legacy almost anywhere you look. Anywhere that has to do with genre fiction, that is. And almost everywhere I look has to do with genre convention because I love genre convention.
I'm kind of aimless in my Gothic fiction class. I know I'm sort of talking at random, because I'm not really good enough to actually guide the discussion when it isn't going anywhere, so I just offer sort-of-insights that seem to be dead ends.
I did get some response today, though, by asking why it is that Frankenstein, which is, in my opinion, a little too canonized right this second, is such a perfect...um...fertile repository...for virtually every modern critical paradigm. This time through the novel, I just started marking MPaNE everywhere. You pronounce it "Mm...PAAAAAIN!!!!" (like the Horta off Star Trek), but it stands for Most Psychoanalytic Novel Ever.
Which it is. I mean, really. He makes a monster out of a dead (male) body to try and resurrect his mother/lover, while at the same time becoming both her (incubator of life) and his father (creative Genius). MpaNe. PaaaaaaaNe!
By the way, when I looked up the episode with the Horta to make sure I was spelling it right, I accidentally took this for a free-verse tribute poem:
The injured Horta
Kirk on Janus VI
Kirk and Spock encounter the Horta
Spock mind-melds with a Horta.
But it was just a list of photos. And also by the way, I have just realized that that episode, "Devil in the Dark," is in fact a rewriting of Frankenstein in some ways, in that it is an encouter with an abjected or rejected Other who turns out in fact to be representative of a thwarted maternal impulse -- only in this version, Spock, a far better colonial parent than Victor Frankenstein, is actually able to listen to the Monster and understand that beneath its ugly exterior is a family-loving, tabula rasa human soul.
I'm really thinking of A Little Princess, with its imagined talking doll (automaton. uncanny), its Montoni-like Evil Headmistress, its angelic heroine's sudden slide into horrific imprisonment from a life of princess-like ease, its preoccupation with absent fathers, and its explained-supernatural mystery (Indian Gentleman).
The colonial/imperialist part is clear too, of course: the Indian Gentleman; a brain fever caused by excessive colonial exploration; the danger of foreign speculation/importation -- although in this case we eventually find out that all that comes from India is in fact good, if viewed correctly (i.e., with childish trust and belief in magic).
But there's no actual supernatural in this text, and Miss Minchin isn't a monster or Montoni, but a real, English schoolmistress -- a Jane Eyre gone wrong.
I don't really know if I can swing this as a paper. It might be stretching things a little. Thing is, you can see Gothic legacy almost anywhere you look. Anywhere that has to do with genre fiction, that is. And almost everywhere I look has to do with genre convention because I love genre convention.
I'm kind of aimless in my Gothic fiction class. I know I'm sort of talking at random, because I'm not really good enough to actually guide the discussion when it isn't going anywhere, so I just offer sort-of-insights that seem to be dead ends.
I did get some response today, though, by asking why it is that Frankenstein, which is, in my opinion, a little too canonized right this second, is such a perfect...um...fertile repository...for virtually every modern critical paradigm. This time through the novel, I just started marking MPaNE everywhere. You pronounce it "Mm...PAAAAAIN!!!!" (like the Horta off Star Trek), but it stands for Most Psychoanalytic Novel Ever.
Which it is. I mean, really. He makes a monster out of a dead (male) body to try and resurrect his mother/lover, while at the same time becoming both her (incubator of life) and his father (creative Genius). MpaNe. PaaaaaaaNe!
By the way, when I looked up the episode with the Horta to make sure I was spelling it right, I accidentally took this for a free-verse tribute poem:
The injured Horta
Kirk on Janus VI
Kirk and Spock encounter the Horta
Spock mind-melds with a Horta.
But it was just a list of photos. And also by the way, I have just realized that that episode, "Devil in the Dark," is in fact a rewriting of Frankenstein in some ways, in that it is an encouter with an abjected or rejected Other who turns out in fact to be representative of a thwarted maternal impulse -- only in this version, Spock, a far better colonial parent than Victor Frankenstein, is actually able to listen to the Monster and understand that beneath its ugly exterior is a family-loving, tabula rasa human soul.
Labels: bodies, books, nerd power, reading, writing
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