"A jubilee of rot": Degradations of the dead and mourning in twentieth-century United States American gothic literature

Abstract

This thesis investigates representations of the dead and dying body in American gothic literature from 1917 to 1999, specifically the violence enacted upon it and its often-ignored physicality. It demonstrates how modern U.S. society uses such bodies to mediate social anxieties about death, including the treatment of the dead/dying body, the experience of death, and society's ability to 'manage' death and negotiate the acceptable level of closeness to or distance from the dead which is expected to be maintained by the living. Bringing together gothic literature and thanatology, it produces close readings of novels and short stories with reference to scholarship in gothic and death studies as well as etiquette manuals, medical and funerary developments, and death-centric incidents in contemporaneous U.S. culture. It interrogates how death is positioned as fundamentally 'un-American' and how this induces anxiety. The gothic figure of the necrophile provides an excellent lens for interrogating the position of the corpse as subject or object and determining what constitutes 'inappropriate' death, grief, mourning, and treatment of the corpse; a broader understanding of what constitutes necrophilia, beyond its generally accepted but restrictive conception as a sexual behavior, will also be established throughout this study. This thesis aims to establish the dead/dying body as a source of special anxiety in modern American culture and gothic texts due to a social investment in 'triumphing over' rather than 'sharing in' the suffering of others. The gothic texts investigated include: H.P. Lovecraft's "Herbert West—Reanimator" (1922), C. M. Eddy Jr.'s "The Loved Dead" (1924), William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" (1930), Ray Bradbury's "There Was an Old Woman" (1944) and "The Coffin" (1947), Robert Bloch's Psycho (1959), Michael Avallone's The Coffin Things (1968), Harlan Ellison's "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs" (1973), Stephen King's Pet Sematary (1983), and Poppy Z. Brite's Exquisite Corpse (1996).