Date of Award

2026

Document Type

Thesis (Master's)

Department or Program

Master of Arts in Liberal Studies

First Advisor

Melanie B. Taylor

Second Advisor

Rebecca Clark

Third Advisor

Barbara Kreiger

Abstract

The United States of America is haunted by its past. Be it the institution of slavery, the lack of gender equality, or the violent annexation of Native land, its ghosts are plentiful and undeniable. Still, though, questions of whether to venerate our nation’s history or condemn it pervade society. Now, then, is the time for the gothic.

For all of its existence, the gothic has served to shed light on the past, often casting on its dusty visage an ambivalence that weighs its good with its bad. Nowhere is this land more fertile than with American history, which is simultaneously revered and yet-to-be reckoned with. Following the tradition of the gothic in criticizing Enlightenment ideals, this thesis intends to turn a critical eye to the neoliberal values that have come to be associated with the Enlightenment, as espoused in works like Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now, by showing the effects of unfettered capitalism. This is achieved by shifting the typical paranormal trappings of a gothic novel away from an origin point of science skepticism and towards a place of the looming specter which haunts American life, and has done so since the country’s founding: capitalist-colonialism. As such, this project is inspired, in part, by the seminal gothic works of Ann Radcliffe, what with her meditations on domesticity and the explanations behind seemingly supernatural events. While certainly inspired by the Southern Gothic tradition, this project seeks to primarily be a meditation on the structures governing America as a whole.

Themes of the former will accompany those of feminist plights, specifically insofar as the novella depicts a matrilineal family line. Women—who are both the bearers of early capitalist-colonialist disenfranchisement as well as of children who are born and fed into that exploitative system—form the role of the central character in the myth. The haunted house, then, is the domestic sphere, the womb, the spirit realm. What ghosts linger inside?

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