Severing skin from cultural kin: The gothic mode of circus in culture, texts, and films (Stephen Crane)

This dissertation explains why circus goes gothic in many circus-centered texts and films. Drawing upon William Veeder's explanation of gothic's wounding/healing cycle, I argue that the circus figure in selected works evokes a cycle of wounding and healing that can be traced back to two key historical developments in circus wherein the body/text and family/marketplace ‘splits’ are construed as ‘naturally’ in binary opposition. First, in the 18th century, the modern circus emerges as its own cultural institution in a climate wherein visuality and multi-sensory modes of knowing are eclipsed by textuality as the dominant mode of knowing in the Western world. Second, in the 19th century, the American circus is further reshaped (‘spectacularized’) when circus plays into the cultural construction of the ‘priceless’ child, who emerges when family is further severed from marketplace. In my circus-centered texts and films, mother, child, or some unsightly ‘Other’ returns to the site of wounding to ‘heal’ this unnatural ‘severing.’ Informed by Luce Irigaray's notion that, for the Western world, woman is commodity traded among men, my dissertation argues that circus, as an embodied Other to Western culture's textual hegemony, problematizes gender and racial relations in real circuses, texts, and films. To carry out readings of the wounding/healing cycles of literary and filmic expressions of circus, I use historical, feminist, and psychoanalytic approaches. Since this wounding/healing cycle persists in representations of circus in texts and films and in some modern-day shows and ‘true confessions’ about circus's allure, this dissertation's connection of circus and gothic sheds light on tensions that continue to shape the circus genre.; Responding to Paul Bouissac's Circus and Culture and Naomi Ritter's Art as Spectacle, this dissertation interrogates their implied notion of circus as a ‘universal’ expression that offers ‘transcendence’ from the material world. Bouissac and Ritter's ahistoricity ironically privileges textuality over multi-sensory modes of knowing when the circus genre emerges in the 18th century partly in response to textual hegemony. Historicizing the analysis of circus, texts and films, my dissertation revises the long-accepted circus historians' account of how the circus was born as its own cultural institution.