Type
Text
Type
Thesis
Advisor
Scheckel, Susan | Robinson, Benedict
Date
2016-12-01
Keywords
Edgar Huntly, Gothic, Recapitulation, Tarzan | English literature
Department
Department of English
Language
en_US
Source
This work is sponsored by the Stony Brook University Graduate School in compliance with the requirements for completion of degree.
Identifier
http://hdl.handle.net/11401/77500
Publisher
The Graduate School, Stony Brook University: Stony Brook, NY.
Format
application/pdf
Abstract
Slavery is often put forward as the crucial horror that haunts the nation, and is touted, as Leslie Fiedler noted, as “the proper subject for American Gothic†. This thesis does not dispute a historical location for the American Gothic, but it argues for a different starting place for the self-consciously Gothic impulse in the literature of the nation. It is not the original sin of slavery that underpins the American Gothic, but the original anxiety experienced by an infant nation as it first distances itself from its ancestral country, and then asserts its independence and superiority. It is an anxiety of growing up; an anxiety by the new country seeking to match itself against the thousands of years of history of the parent that it abandons, and realizing that it not only lacks history, but inherits from its civilized parent characteristics that are insufficiently adequate for the new realities the people of the infant nation must confront. Beginning with America’s first gothic novel, Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly, some authors have attempted to relieve this “haunting influence of anxiety†by creating fictional scenes of racial recapitulation. The descendant of pioneers is placed in a primeval landscape, transformed into a beast, and then made to repeat the evolutionary process, as he becomes, once more, a civilized European-American gentleman who, in Nietzschean terms, supersedes his former self. This thesis begins by examining the suitability of the gothic form for creating textual sites in which templates for the remaking of man can be constructed. After introducing the historical conditions that shaped the cultural anxieties over the physical vitality of the European male, this thesis will conclude by reading Edgar Huntly and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes as gothic spaces of transformation in which the vitality and robust masculinity of the savage are recalled to the body of the Anglo-Saxon male. | 51 pages
Recommended Citation
Bacchus, Ian Anthony, "Shrouded in the Womb of a Savage, Cradled in the Arms of An Ape: Gothic Scenes of Racial Recapitulation in the Making of the American Ãœbermensch | Shrouded in the Womb of a Savage, Cradled in the Arms of An Ape: Gothic Scenes of Racial Recapitulation in the Making of the American Übermensch" (2016). Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions). 3312.
https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/stony-brook-theses-and-dissertations-collection/3312