Anything dead coming back to life hurts : Beloved, Bastard out of Carolina, and Gods in Alabama as contemporary female gothic.

Abstract

The contemporary Female Gothic is characterized by the highlighting of the monstrosities of patriarchal ideology's failures in order to point to a more positive space created by the agency of the female heroine and her community. Toni Morrison's Beloved, Dorothy Allison's Bastard out of Carolina, and Joshilyn Jackson's gods in Alabama contain the Gothic characteristics of supernatural and real monsters, of social realism, and of ruptured narrative, but use these tropes as a background to be overcome by the personal agency and community power of the feminine heroine. First the protagonists must rename themselves by accepting the responsibility of self-definition and ownership; they must create an identity for themselves, as the protagonists Sethe, Bone, and Arlene do, that is not defined by others or by their traumatic pasts. Secondly, these heroines must find the strength to narrate their own stories. This story must include the trauma of the past, must speak the unspeakable, and then must move beyond victimhood into the possibility of a future where the heroine is free to make her own choices, to write her own story. The narrative structure of each text reflects the uneven journey experienced by each heroine in her struggle for the ability to narrate her story. Finally, each protagonist must escape from the confines of the Gothic home, which may be a literal house but which also includes the intrusions of a grotesque culture into the family home, and must find a new home through connection with a female community that gives each heroine the power to live as her true self. Although no feminist utopia is promised by their endings, each novel uses the female heroine's painful triumph over the Gothic threats to her physical and psychological well-being to point to a more positive space beyond victimhood for the growth of the woman's true self.