Subversion, seduction, and the culture of consumption: The American gothic revisited in the work of Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, and Anne Rice

This study revisits the American gothic through an examination of the work of Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, and Anne Rice. My analysis engages the underlying currents that define American culture as one of consumption, currents brought to the surface in Morrison's, Oates's, and Rice's revisioning of canonical works within and outside the gothic genre.; The direction of this inquiry attempts to historicize a genre whose socio-economic implications have been dressed/repressed in the form of gothic décor. Drawing upon the work of Jacques Lacan and Jean Baudrillard, this investigation traces a history of social and cultural experience conducted at the level of the commodity-form wherein subjectivity has emerged as contingent on commodity signs: through the historical ownership of plantation and slaves, through dispossession as a consequence of race and gender, through a subversion of relationships into an economics of reproduction, and finally, through a subversion of ontological certainty that destabilizes the concept of subjectivity itself.; Revisioning and repositioning the texts of Hawthorne, Poe, James, and Faulkner through the prism of the contemporary gothic is simultaneously subversive and complicit. The subversive tendencies of Morrison, Oates, and Rice grow from a preoccupation with the seductive, on one level out of step in the context of a frontier psyche where the productive and quantifiable are the guarantors of survival and success. However, within modern capitalism, the co-optation of the seductive is aligned with the gratification that marks material consumption. The seductive in the contemporary gothic underscores the uncertainty and dislocation of the self, the true terror of existence manifested in the touchstones of a commodified culture. In essence, this study situates the American gothic within an economic context in which the genre paradoxically both reproduces and resists the ideology in which it is inscribed.