UC Riverside

“The Postmodern Family Gothic: Bodies of Narrative,” analyzes postmodern novels that use feminist-gothic narrative strategies to disrupt ideologies of family. Within the context of late twentieth and early twenty-first century laments over the “broken” family, I argue that ideological manifestations of family security, the home and financial stability in particular, actually damage family health from the inside out. Novels such as Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Jeffery Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides all demonstrate how family dysfunction is temporal, specifically because in attempting to conform to the ideal Family, who lives in a house and is economically stable, families disavow past trauma, which only comes to haunt the structures of security. Using the sociological and historical work of authors such as Judith Stacey and Susan Faludi, I argue that the popular conception of the “ideal” family is always founded on some rejection of trauma that continues to haunt families through bodily traces, as seen in novels such as Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop and Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love. Healing from trauma requires a disruption, not to family, but rather to the narrative structures that promise freedom from past pain. Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, Chuck Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters, and Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible present healing from past family trauma as a commitment to flexible storytelling, metaphorized in the family road trip and performed in family spiritual ritual. Gothic tropes such as haunting, monstrosity, and the grotesque are used to manifest the significance of the past and become less traumatizing as the family narrative shifts from linear to constellatory. The disruption to family narrative also makes for an uncanny reading experience as the forms of the novels unsettle linearity and exposition, ultimately incorporating the reader into the literary drama. In drawing together cultural histories of objects, like the car and the home, economic theories of family, and feminist critiques of readership and the body, I challenge the typical focus on postmodern literature’s emphasis on the individual and abstraction.