‘She wouldn’t even harm a fly’: American Gothic, antiheroes, and the ethics of the villainous voice

 

Dr Matthew Foley

 

Maisha Wester has observed that the figure of the Gothic antihero, while  “threatening”, is represented often as “an outsider, suffering persecution. Though seemingly wicked, he is rarely the source of evil in the texts” (2012, p.6). Drawing from critical understandings of the Gothic antihero such as Wester’s, my talk seeks to explore and question the nature of villainy in  texts in which uncanny or monstrous voices compel an individual towards committing transgressive – often “evil” – acts. I argue that by reading closely instances of ventriloquism or disembodied voices in a series of important American Gothic texts – such as Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798), Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” (1843), Robert Bloch’s Psycho (1959), and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971) – a complex ethics of culpability emerges that exploits readerly identification or “pity” with the Gothic antihero and, too, places in question Stephen T. Asma’s formulation of the “accidental” monster: that is, “a creature or person who is dangerous to us, but not intentionally so” (2011, p.13). Resisting merely reading these voices as perversely super-egoic, this talk explores the duplicity of the villainous voice, which is evident, for instance, in Norma(n) Bates’ infamous declaration that they “wouldn’t even harm a fly”. In so doing, my argument seeks to construct an ethical framework through which to read these troubling and often malign oralities that echo throughout – and in their adaptations, beyond – the pages of the American Gothic.

 

Wester, Maisha L. 2006. African American Gothic: Screams from Shadowed Places (New York: Palgrave Macmillan)

Asma, Stephen T. 2011 [2009]. On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (Oxford: University Press)

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Matt Foley is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Manchester Met. He has a broad range of research interests in the fields of modernist and Gothic studies. The author of Haunting Modernisms (Palgrave, 2017), he is currently writing on the acoustics of Gothic literature and on the fiction of Patrick McGrath. As well as being a member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies, he is also the administrator of the IGA’s Allan Lloyd Smith Memorial Prizes, and part of the organizing committee for the forthcoming IGA 2018 conference ‘Gothic Hybridities'.