| Undertaken by insiders and outsiders to the academy alike and embodied both in literature and in academic discourse, the Schoolhouse Gothic draws on Gothic metaphors and themes---sometimes unacknowledged---in representing and interrogating contemporary Western education and those to whom it is entrusted. In this phenomenon, curses take two forms: persistent hierarchies and power inequities (of race, gender, class, and age) and---rather ironically---the Enlightenment itself. In the literature of the Schoolhouse Gothic, including works like Stephen King's Carrie, Rage, Apt Pupil, and "Suffer the Little Children"; Flannery O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Away; Toni Morrison's Beloved, and David Mamet's Oleanna, school buildings, classrooms, and/or offices, function as traps---analogues to the claustrophobic family mansions, monasteries, and convents of old. In contrast, contemporary Gothic scholarship offers a metaphorical trap: academic objectivity, viewed as an institutional ideology of concealment that blinds the scholar to his or her own prejudices and renders the most well-meaning complicit with unfair power structures. The combination of curse and trap produces paranoia, violence, and monstrosity. In Schoolhouse Gothic literature, the school produces psychopaths and machines, usually from the raw material of the student. The scholarship is chiefly concerned with the production of discourse, which appears as a record of monstrosity, something that freezes and reifies the epistemic violence perpetrated by the academy. When this scholarship discusses actual students, it usually presents them as automatons: pre-programmed modern subjectivities produced by an academy that resembles an assembly line. Viewing this literary and academic discourse together suggests---at the very least---that people have become increasingly uneasy about the role of the academy, increasingly mistrustful of its guardians, and increasingly convinced that something sinister lies behind its officially benign exterior. |
