Presenter(s): Anika Nykanen
Faculty Mentor(s): Mark Whalan
Oral Session 1 SW
Children, who occupy a unique position as creatures of innocence in the American psyche, have haunted the pages of American Gothic literature from its inception, vulnerable figures in whom cultural and psychological anxieties find fecund ground. As such, they have featured critically in racial discourses as well, from slavery and abolition to Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement. Gothic literature’s exploration of the dark, antagonistic elements of the human mind enables Southern Gothic writers to examine the violent underbelly of the American dream—the removal of indigenous peoples, slavery, and white supremacy—with unique license. This project investigates how relatively underexamined Modern Southern Gothic works such as Eudora Welty’s “Delta Cousins” and Richard Wright’s “Big Boy Leaves Home” reimagine American Gothic’s traditional depiction of race in the South as “the specter of otherness”(Ellen Weinauer, Cambridge Companion to Gothic Literature) by portraying the racialization of children. From the foreclosure of black male childhood to the adopted innocence of white girlhood, Gothic children become a device by which the South’s history of racism, playing out in the lives of literary children, is critically explored. I will examine the work of these authors with a variety of lenses— gothic, historical, racial, and modernistic—looking at Teresa Goddu’s Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation, Fred Botting’s Gothic, Robin Bernstein’s Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, as well as the seminal Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison.