Abortion Gothic in American literature and law

This dissertation steps outside the legal and political abortion debates in America and examines the extensive record of how America's literary imagination, which speaks other than in the mode of argument and debate, treats the subject of abortion. That imagination, I argue, exhibits tends inevitably to employ the rhetorical and representational strategies of the American Gothic when textualizing abortion, and this is so, I further argue, not because of any conscious authorial draw on a literary tradition but because the subject of abortion in America is a quintessential gothic concern. The understanding of the American Gothic on which I rely, as developed by Eric Savoy and informed by Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection and Freud's notion of the uncanny, posits that the function of the gothic is to help us confront that which we fear and cannot confront directly, most especially middleness and ambiguity, and about which our conflicts are extreme and irreconcilable. Abortion in such a subject, especially in America, where the topic today is almost wholly defined by a body of constitutional law plagued by contradictions and repression which has, in a quintessentially gothic hermeneutical gesture, located abortion in the shadows of the Constitution.