Gothic impurity: Race, sex, and the uncanny in American literature, 1895--1905 (Charles Waddell Chesnutt, Pauline E. Hopkins, Sarah Barnwell Elliott)

In the dissertation, I examine gothic depictions of African-Americans during the Progressive era, specifically analyzing how uncanny elements in texts by white and African-American authors participated in larger cultural discussions about race and sexuality during this time. The period between Reconstruction and World War I was a time of virulent racism against African-Americans, when the rights afforded after the Civil War were eroded through legislation, scientific racialism, and widespread racial violence. Additionally, the turn-of-the-century saw massive immigration and U.S. imperialistic ventures which contributed to the nation's questions about who an American was or should be. While literary criticism has traced the American gothic from its earliest incarnations with Charles Brockden Brown to the southern gothic of O'Connor and Faulkner and late twentieth-century texts such as Morrison's Beloved, scholars are just beginning to re-examine turn-of-the-century fiction through this lens. Additionally, there has been critical attention paid to gothic representations of race in American fiction, but the focus has been primarily on the first half of the nineteenth century. By opening up an examination of gothic treatments of African-Americans in fiction of this period, traditionally labeled realism or naturalism, we are able to trace a thread from the earliest works of American literature, through the early 20th century, and into the present day. My project is unique because it will address the gothic as a strategy responding to the particular racial concerns of the Progressive era. I argue that the use of gothic elements during the Progressive era forms a major part of the literary response to pervasive cultural concerns about heredity, sexual and racial purity, and national identity. Focusing on texts by Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, Stephen Crane, and Sarah Barnwell Elliott, each chapter of the dissertation examines how the gothic mode allows authors to respond to the discourse surrounding miscegenation anxiety, scientific theories of race, and racially-motivated violence.