- Szczecin University, Department of English, Faculty Memberadd
- Neo-Victorianism, Neo-Victorian fiction, Neo-Victorian studies, 'the Other' in Neo-Victorian novel, Madness In Neo Victorian Literature, Neo-Victorian lesbians and cross-dressers, and 28 moreNeo-Victorian Literature, Neo-Victorian women, Adaptation and Appropriation Theory, Biofiction, Film Adaptation, Palimpsests, Contemporary British Literature, Contemporary Literature, 19th Century British novel, Victorian sensation fiction, Victorian Literature, Charlotte Brontë, History Of Madness And Psychiatry, Madness and Literature, Gothic Literature, Gothic Studies, Hauntology, Crime fiction, Pastiche Historical Crime Fiction, Feminist Theory, Feminist Disability Studies, Women's Studies, Queer Studies, Trauma Studies, Female Gaze, Masculinity Studies, Masculinities, and Popular Culture(Neo-Victorian Literature, Neo-Victorian women, Adaptation and Appropriation Theory, Biofiction, Film Adaptation, Palimpsests, Contemporary British Literature, Contemporary Literature, 19th Century British novel, Victorian sensation fiction, Victorian Literature, Charlotte Brontë, History Of Madness And Psychiatry, Madness and Literature, Gothic Literature, Gothic Studies, Hauntology, Crime fiction, Pastiche Historical Crime Fiction, Feminist Theory, Feminist Disability Studies, Women's Studies, Queer Studies, Trauma Studies, Female Gaze, Masculinity Studies, Masculinities, and Popular Culture)edit
- Assistant Professor in English at the Institute of Literature and New Media, University of Szczecin, Poland. My resea... moreAssistant Professor in English at the Institute of Literature and New Media, University of Szczecin, Poland. My research interests are, above all, Neo-Victorian literature and adaptation, gender and queer studies, hauntology, gothic fiction, and adaptation and transmedia. I am currently working on a monograph on female insanity motifs in selected Victorian and Neo-Victorian novels. In years 2010-2015 I was Conference Leader for the "Femininities & Masculinities" Global Project at Interdisciplinary.Net.(Assistant Professor in English at the Institute of Literature and New Media, University of Szczecin, Poland. My research interests are, above all, Neo-Victorian literature and adaptation, gender and queer studies, hauntology, gothic fiction, and adaptation and transmedia. I am currently working on a monograph on female insanity motifs in selected Victorian and Neo-Victorian novels. In years 2010-2015 I was Conference Leader for the "Femininities & Masculinities" Global Project at Interdisciplinary.Net.)edit
- Prof. Ilona Dobosiewiczedit
Edited collection of essays to appear in Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This collection of essays on selected texts in literature, film and the media is driven by a shared theme of contesting the binary thinking in respect of gender and... more
Edited collection of essays to appear in Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
This collection of essays on selected texts in literature, film and the media is driven by a shared theme of contesting the binary thinking in respect of gender and sexuality. The three parts of this book – “contesting norms”, “performing selves” and “blurring the lines” – delineate the queer celebration of difference and deviance: pinpointing the limitation of assumed norms and subverting them, revelling in the fluid and ambiguous self that springs from the contestation of those norms, and then repeatedly transgress and, as a result, obscure the limits that separate the normal from the abnormal. The variety of texts included here ranges from a discussion of queer subjects represented in film, television and literature to that of a representations of other non-normative figures – like a madwoman, a freak or a prostitute, and to gender-role contestation and gender-bending practicing evidenced in the press, theatre, film, literature and popular culture.
This collection of essays on selected texts in literature, film and the media is driven by a shared theme of contesting the binary thinking in respect of gender and sexuality. The three parts of this book – “contesting norms”, “performing selves” and “blurring the lines” – delineate the queer celebration of difference and deviance: pinpointing the limitation of assumed norms and subverting them, revelling in the fluid and ambiguous self that springs from the contestation of those norms, and then repeatedly transgress and, as a result, obscure the limits that separate the normal from the abnormal. The variety of texts included here ranges from a discussion of queer subjects represented in film, television and literature to that of a representations of other non-normative figures – like a madwoman, a freak or a prostitute, and to gender-role contestation and gender-bending practicing evidenced in the press, theatre, film, literature and popular culture.
Research Interests:
Brill 2019, ISBN: 978-90-04-40876-0 This volume offers an insight into a selection of current issues of embodiment and other related aspects, such as identity, gender, disability, or sexuality, discussed on the basis of examples from... more
Brill 2019, ISBN: 978-90-04-40876-0
This volume offers an insight into a selection of current issues of embodiment and other related aspects, such as identity, gender, disability, or sexuality, discussed on the basis of examples from contemporary culture and social life. Inspired by Donna Haraway's concept of the cyborg as a transgressor of boundaries, the book examines fluidity of post-human bodies-from cyber relations to others and to self, enabled by the latest technologies, through fragmented, prostheticised, monstrous or augmented body of popular culture and lifestyles, to the dis/utopian fantasies offered by literary texts-showing how diffcult it still is in current culture to let go of the stable boundaries towards the post-gender world Haraway imagines.
This volume offers an insight into a selection of current issues of embodiment and other related aspects, such as identity, gender, disability, or sexuality, discussed on the basis of examples from contemporary culture and social life. Inspired by Donna Haraway's concept of the cyborg as a transgressor of boundaries, the book examines fluidity of post-human bodies-from cyber relations to others and to self, enabled by the latest technologies, through fragmented, prostheticised, monstrous or augmented body of popular culture and lifestyles, to the dis/utopian fantasies offered by literary texts-showing how diffcult it still is in current culture to let go of the stable boundaries towards the post-gender world Haraway imagines.
Research Interests:
Gender performativity, its variances depending on their historical, social and cultural contexts, and the rituals, representations and institutions involved in gender performances are some of the issues the authors addressed in this... more
Gender performativity, its variances depending on their historical, social and cultural contexts, and the rituals, representations and institutions involved in gender performances are some of the issues the authors addressed in this collection. Gender under Construction takes a non-essentialist view of gender and provides illustrative examples of gender constructive processes by pursuing them in various contexts and by means of diverse methodologies. In so doing, the book demonstrates that it is unfeasible to consider gender as a fixed biological trait. Instead, the authors propose to look at gender performance as ongoing ongoing processes in which femininities and masculinities enter multiple and dynamic intersections with a myriad of categories, including those of nationality, ethnicity, class, sexuality and age.
Research Interests:
This work investigates various markers of identity, which, if ignored, may harm the development of the healthy identity of cultural groups at the cost of a progressively instable unity. This is made clear when looking at various areas of... more
This work investigates various markers of identity, which, if ignored, may harm the development of the healthy identity of cultural groups at the cost of a progressively instable unity. This is made clear when looking at various areas of linguistics, particularly translation and socio-linguistics, but also when studying cultural and political developments. This book, therefore, constitutes a rich repository for linguists, especially of minority languages and specifically in translational studies and sociolinguistics, and for scholars of cultural and political, as well as literary studies.
Research Interests:
‘Who am I?’ The answer to this question is one of the most important issues a human being has to address in life. This is a question about possessing the continuous self, about the internal concept of oneself as an individual. The... more
‘Who am I?’ The answer to this question is one of the most important issues a human being has to address in life. This is a question about possessing the continuous self, about the internal concept of oneself as an individual. The self-defining process, the discovery of the self takes place in the context of culture and society. The impact of social experience is felt across the whole life-span. Socialization exerted by parents, family and friends, acculturation to stereotypes and limited and limiting roles, inheritance of local identity and cultural myths, acknowledgement of the legacy of history contribute to the formation of poly-identity comprised of personal, racial, national, group or gender identities.
Unity in Diversity. Cultural Paradigm and Personal Identity is a collection of essays by scholars of multicultural experience who, by employing different interpretative strategies indicative of their different backgrounds and interests, explore the issues of difference and otherness, inclusion/exclusion and of multiple ethnic, cultural, gender, and national identities.
Offering literary, cultural, social, and historical perspectives the collection will be of interest to readers studying contemporary literature, (popular) culture, gender studies, sociology, and history.
Unity in Diversity. Cultural Paradigm and Personal Identity is a collection of essays by scholars of multicultural experience who, by employing different interpretative strategies indicative of their different backgrounds and interests, explore the issues of difference and otherness, inclusion/exclusion and of multiple ethnic, cultural, gender, and national identities.
Offering literary, cultural, social, and historical perspectives the collection will be of interest to readers studying contemporary literature, (popular) culture, gender studies, sociology, and history.
Research Interests:
This article examines the nature of neo-Victorianism as a heterotopia and heterochronia, that is, situatedness where the relationship between the past and the present is paradoxically concurrent and palimpsestic. This is done via a... more
This article examines the nature of neo-Victorianism as a heterotopia and heterochronia, that is, situatedness where the relationship between the past and the present is paradoxically concurrent and palimpsestic. This is done via a discussion of the cemetery as a governing metaphor to describe neo-Victorianism, as it is a highly heterotopic and heterochronic space. A hauntological approach is applied to interpret the attempt to bury the spectre of Victorianism in Michel de Certeau’s “scriptural
tombs” as the main project of neo-Victorianism. Two neo-Victorian novels, Tracy Chevalier’s Falling Angels (2001) and Audrey Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry (2009), are selected as illustrations of this phenomenon, as they both focus on Highgate Cemetery in London as a key element of their narratives. Both these texts show that neo-Victorianism, conceptualised as a cemetery, is a heterotopic
and heterochronic archive of the spectres that rarely stay buried in their narrative tombs.
tombs” as the main project of neo-Victorianism. Two neo-Victorian novels, Tracy Chevalier’s Falling Angels (2001) and Audrey Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry (2009), are selected as illustrations of this phenomenon, as they both focus on Highgate Cemetery in London as a key element of their narratives. Both these texts show that neo-Victorianism, conceptualised as a cemetery, is a heterotopic
and heterochronic archive of the spectres that rarely stay buried in their narrative tombs.
Research Interests:
The Borden murders committed in 1892 in Fall River, Massachusetts, have sparked a number of neo-Victorian textualisations. From the perspective of the 'lethal lesbian' trope known in queer cinema, this article discusses the famous suspect... more
The Borden murders committed in 1892 in Fall River, Massachusetts, have sparked a number of neo-Victorian textualisations. From the perspective of the 'lethal lesbian' trope known in queer cinema, this article discusses the famous suspect in this case, Lizzie Borden (1860-1927), as depicted in Lizzie (2018, dir. Craig Macneill). It shows that the titular character (Chloë Sevigny) is queered in this filmnot just by her lesbian relationship with the maid, Bridget Sullivan (Kristen Stewart), but also as a madwoman and a spinster who repeatedly refuses to adhere to social and gender codes of nineteenth-century New England. The article examines these various facets of queer disruption of Victorian norms, complicating the discussion by employing an intersectional perspective which points out more nuanced aspects of power relations between characters and the ethical implications of casting female criminals as neo-Victorian, feminist, and/or queer heroines.
Research Interests: Gay And Lesbian Studies, Lesbian Studies, Neo-Victorian Literature, Neo-Victorian fiction, Neo-Victorian lesbians and cross-dressers, and 8 moreQueer/Gay film, Neo-Victorianism, Neo-Victorian studies, Queer History, Biofiction, Adaptation and Appropriation Theory, Lesbians in film, and Lizzie Borden
Niniejszy artkuł stanowi krótki przegląd dyskursów melancholii, mając na szczególnym względzie omówienie obecności i roli kobiet w tym dyskursie. Autorka artykułu omawia m.in. książkę Urszuli Chowaniec Melancholic Migrating Bodies in... more
Niniejszy artkuł stanowi krótki przegląd dyskursów melancholii, mając na szczególnym względzie omówienie obecności i roli kobiet w tym dyskursie. Autorka artykułu omawia m.in. książkę Urszuli Chowaniec Melancholic Migrating Bodies in Contemporary Polish Women’s Writing (2015), rozpatrywaną jako tekst w pewnej mierze inspirowany własnymi przeżyciami, w której przedstawiona została współczesna polska literatura kobieca, a szczególnie motywy ciał nomadycznych, melancholijnych i „zrujnowanych”. Artykuł podsumowano przedstawiając pokrótce propozycję Judith Butler dotyczącą melancholii płci jako alternatywny dyskurs dotyczący kobiecej melancholii.
Słowa kluczowe: melancholia, ciało, proza kobieca po 1989, melancholia płci.
Słowa kluczowe: melancholia, ciało, proza kobieca po 1989, melancholia płci.
Research Interests:
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is one of the most adaptable and adapted novels of all time, spurring countless renditions in film, television, comic books, cartoons, and other products of popular culture. Like a meme, this story... more
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is one of the most adaptable and adapted novels of all time, spurring countless renditions in film, television, comic books, cartoons, and other products of popular culture. Like a meme, this story adapts itself to changing cultural contexts by replication with mutation. This article examines the adaptive and appropriative features of two recent examples of such renditions in the form of television series, Penny Dreadful (2014-2016) and The Frankenstein Chronicles (2015). It discusses palimpsestic appropriations used in these shows, their depiction of Frankenstein and his Creatures, and above all, the themes and their meanings which these twenty-first-century appropriations of Frankenstein offer.
Research Interests:
Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1997), a neo-Victorian classic biofictional novel about a nineteenth-century murderess, is interpreted in this chapter as a narrative of a madwoman, that is, a narrative which undercuts a possibility of a... more
Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1997), a neo-Victorian classic biofictional novel about a nineteenth-century murderess, is interpreted in this chapter as a narrative of a madwoman, that is, a narrative which undercuts a possibility of a coherent representation of the self. Her “inability to speak”—fragmentation, instability and incompleteness of her narrative—is what makes it queer; its queerness is based in its refusal to be within the doctor-listener’s/reader’s grasp. Grace’s (mad) story, via its narrative “failure” to offer a linear, coherent account, becomes the epitome of queer subversiveness. The chapter also discusses the television adaptation of Atwood’s novel the to examine alternative techniques used in the adaptive medium to express the instabilities and the incoherence of the self, and to examine if Grace Marks of the television show is also, indeed, a (queer) madwoman.
Research Interests:
In her Gender Trouble (1990), Judith Butler recognizes the figure of a drag as a disruptive presence within the heterosexual matrix—one that pinpoints the performativity of gender via parody and excess. Such identities which destabilise... more
In her Gender Trouble (1990), Judith Butler recognizes the figure of a
drag as a disruptive presence within the heterosexual matrix—one that pinpoints
the performativity of gender via parody and excess. Such identities which
destabilise the seeming coherence of sex, gender expression, gender identity and
sexual orientation as prescribed by the heterosexual matrix, built on the principle
of male/female, masculine/feminine and the heterosexual/homosexual binaries, are
named “unliveable” by Butler in Bodies That Matter (1993). I would like to
propose a reading of Butler’s theory which allows to see the figure of the
madwoman as a possible addition to Butler’s assortment of queer, unliveable
bodies, as she constitutes a destabilising potential for the heterosexual matrix due
to her parody of feminine gender and female social role, and the excess which is a
constitutive part of female madness motif. On the example of a sensation novel
Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, the following chapter
will discuss how a Victorian madwoman is linked to queerness and drag in the
heterosexual matrix, and how the main characters (both male and female) of
Braddon’s novel disrupt gender binaries of Victorian society and thus constitute
subversive, queer presences in the heterosexual matrix.
drag as a disruptive presence within the heterosexual matrix—one that pinpoints
the performativity of gender via parody and excess. Such identities which
destabilise the seeming coherence of sex, gender expression, gender identity and
sexual orientation as prescribed by the heterosexual matrix, built on the principle
of male/female, masculine/feminine and the heterosexual/homosexual binaries, are
named “unliveable” by Butler in Bodies That Matter (1993). I would like to
propose a reading of Butler’s theory which allows to see the figure of the
madwoman as a possible addition to Butler’s assortment of queer, unliveable
bodies, as she constitutes a destabilising potential for the heterosexual matrix due
to her parody of feminine gender and female social role, and the excess which is a
constitutive part of female madness motif. On the example of a sensation novel
Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, the following chapter
will discuss how a Victorian madwoman is linked to queerness and drag in the
heterosexual matrix, and how the main characters (both male and female) of
Braddon’s novel disrupt gender binaries of Victorian society and thus constitute
subversive, queer presences in the heterosexual matrix.
Research Interests:
To be published on 26 Sept 2019 in: "Bodies in Flux: Embodiements at the end of Antropocentrism", Hanan Muzaffar and Barbara Braid, eds. Amsterdam: Brill, 2018. Controversies surrounding Lady Gaga include not only her fashion choices,... more
To be published on 26 Sept 2019 in: "Bodies in Flux: Embodiements at the end of Antropocentrism", Hanan Muzaffar and Barbara Braid, eds. Amsterdam: Brill, 2018.
Controversies surrounding Lady Gaga include not only her fashion choices, but also her representation of the (female) body: sexually objectified, commodified, subject to violence, battered and disabled. In the following chapter the author examines the body imagery used in Gaga’s music and videos, especially images of disabled, modified, and/or monstrous body, as Gothic aesthetic is often used in Gaga’s oeuvre. The subversive potential of faux disability drag used by Lady Gaga, and of the female Gothic conventions present in her art is suggested as a way to represent the blurring of the lines between the Self and the Other. However, the power of Lady Gaga’s work lies not in its political message, but in the artistic one. The author goes on to prove that the images of disabled bodies are used by Lady Gaga to exemplify a wider idea of a queer body and of a fluid, performative identity, which Lady Gaga represents in her artistic persona.
Keywords: Lady Gaga, gothic body, disabled body, female Gothic, performance, fluid identity, queer
Controversies surrounding Lady Gaga include not only her fashion choices, but also her representation of the (female) body: sexually objectified, commodified, subject to violence, battered and disabled. In the following chapter the author examines the body imagery used in Gaga’s music and videos, especially images of disabled, modified, and/or monstrous body, as Gothic aesthetic is often used in Gaga’s oeuvre. The subversive potential of faux disability drag used by Lady Gaga, and of the female Gothic conventions present in her art is suggested as a way to represent the blurring of the lines between the Self and the Other. However, the power of Lady Gaga’s work lies not in its political message, but in the artistic one. The author goes on to prove that the images of disabled bodies are used by Lady Gaga to exemplify a wider idea of a queer body and of a fluid, performative identity, which Lady Gaga represents in her artistic persona.
Keywords: Lady Gaga, gothic body, disabled body, female Gothic, performance, fluid identity, queer
Research Interests:
Barbara Braid w rozdziale Queerowanie Frankensteina: motywy inności i nienormatywności w serialu Dom grozy [Penny Dreadful] proponuje interpretację adaptacji postaci potworów Frankensteina, przedstawionych w serialu Dom grozy, z punktu... more
Barbara Braid w rozdziale Queerowanie Frankensteina: motywy inności i nienormatywności w serialu Dom grozy [Penny Dreadful] proponuje interpretację adaptacji postaci potworów Frankensteina, przedstawionych w serialu Dom grozy, z punktu widzenia teorii queer. Queer zostaje tu zdefiniowany jako szerokie spektrum nienormatywności i inności, zawierające w sobie tożsamości i zachowania destabilizujące to, co stałe i normatywne. W rozdziale autorka zwraca uwagę na związki pomiędzy teorią queer a gotykiem, które pozwalają interpretować postaci potworne, nieumarłe, budzące abiekcję – Inne – jako reprezentacje nienormatywności. W świetle takich założeń przedstawiona została analiza trzech stworzeń Frankensteina oraz samego Wiktora Frankensteina jako postaci połączonych nienormatywnymi związkami, tworzącymi queerową quasi-rodzinę. Analiza ta poparta jest również porównaniem adaptacji zaproponowanej przez Dom grozy z tekstem powieści Mary Shelley oraz z wybranymi przykładami adaptacji filmowych Frankensteina.
Postać potwora Frankensteina ze względu na samą swoją naturę – jako nieumarłego, stworzonego z fragmentów trupów – jest abiekcyjna, wstrętna, reprezentując ekstremalną inność. Wiktor w tej serialowej adaptacji tworzy aż trzy takie postaci. Są one w relacji do siebie w ciągłym napięciu: pierworodny John Clare zabija drugiego stwora, Proteusza, z nienawiści do ich wspólnego „ojca”, Wiktora; trzecia postać przez niego stworzona to Lily, nawiązująca do filmowej narzeczonej Frankensteina, stworzonej dla potwora, ale pożądanej przez Wiktora. Staje się jednak ona groźnym monstrum, femme castratrice, która pragnie zaprowadzić na ziemi nowy ład, podporządkowując sobie śmiertelną ludzkość. Te dwie postaci Innego, stworzonego przez Frankensteina – Lily i John – reprezentują dwie różne postawy w stosunku do swojej odmienności. John Clare pragnie normatywności i próbuje ją osiągnąć poprzez stworzenie rodziny z ludzką kobietą; Lily, jako demoniczna kobieta fatalna, przeraża go. Lily z kolei wiąże się z podobnie nienormatywnym Dorianem Gray’em w celu zaprowadzenia potworno-queerowego porządku świata. Oboje jednak doświadczają porażki i zostają osamotnieni. W rozdziale zaproponowano zatem wnioski, które podważają jednoznacznie subwersywną rolę motywów nienormatywności w serialu Dom grozy.
*
In the chapter Queering Frankenstein: the motifs of otherness and non-normativity in “Penny Dreadful”, Barbara Braid offers an interpretation of Frankenstein’s creatures presented in the series from the perspective of queer theory. The queer is understood here as a wide range of non-normativity and difference, including subjectivities and actions which subvert stabilities and norms. The author identifies the links between queer theory and the gothic, which allow to see the characters which are monstrous, undead, abject – or simply Other – as representations of difference. In this light, the presented analysis shows the three creatures made by Frankenstein and Victor Frankenstein himself as characters related to each other in non-normative ways, creating a queer quasi-family. This discussion is also contextualized by references to Mary Shelley’s original novel and some of its classic film adaptations and their comparison with Penny Dreadful.
Frankenstein’s creature is, due to its nature as the undead made of fragments of corpses, an abject thing, an embodiment of Otherness. In the series, Victor creates three beings, which are in a constant tension with each other. The firstborn John Clare murders the second creature, Proteus, out of hatred for their “father” Victor; the third being is Lily, another embodiment of the Bride of Frankenstein, destined to be with the creature, but desired by Victor. She becomes a dangerous fiend, femme castratrice, who desires a new world order and subordination of human beings. These two surviving Others – John and Lily – represent two different attitudes to their otherness. John Clare yearns normality and tries to achieve it by establishing a family with a human woman; Lily, a demonic man-eater, terrifies him. On the other hand, Lily strikes a relationship with Dorian Gray, equally non-normative, in order to achieve a queer monstrous supremacy over the world. However, both Frankenstein’s creatures fail and become alone. Therefore, the chapter is concluded with suppositions that question whether the motifs of otherness play an unequivocally subversive role in Penny Dreadful.
Postać potwora Frankensteina ze względu na samą swoją naturę – jako nieumarłego, stworzonego z fragmentów trupów – jest abiekcyjna, wstrętna, reprezentując ekstremalną inność. Wiktor w tej serialowej adaptacji tworzy aż trzy takie postaci. Są one w relacji do siebie w ciągłym napięciu: pierworodny John Clare zabija drugiego stwora, Proteusza, z nienawiści do ich wspólnego „ojca”, Wiktora; trzecia postać przez niego stworzona to Lily, nawiązująca do filmowej narzeczonej Frankensteina, stworzonej dla potwora, ale pożądanej przez Wiktora. Staje się jednak ona groźnym monstrum, femme castratrice, która pragnie zaprowadzić na ziemi nowy ład, podporządkowując sobie śmiertelną ludzkość. Te dwie postaci Innego, stworzonego przez Frankensteina – Lily i John – reprezentują dwie różne postawy w stosunku do swojej odmienności. John Clare pragnie normatywności i próbuje ją osiągnąć poprzez stworzenie rodziny z ludzką kobietą; Lily, jako demoniczna kobieta fatalna, przeraża go. Lily z kolei wiąże się z podobnie nienormatywnym Dorianem Gray’em w celu zaprowadzenia potworno-queerowego porządku świata. Oboje jednak doświadczają porażki i zostają osamotnieni. W rozdziale zaproponowano zatem wnioski, które podważają jednoznacznie subwersywną rolę motywów nienormatywności w serialu Dom grozy.
*
In the chapter Queering Frankenstein: the motifs of otherness and non-normativity in “Penny Dreadful”, Barbara Braid offers an interpretation of Frankenstein’s creatures presented in the series from the perspective of queer theory. The queer is understood here as a wide range of non-normativity and difference, including subjectivities and actions which subvert stabilities and norms. The author identifies the links between queer theory and the gothic, which allow to see the characters which are monstrous, undead, abject – or simply Other – as representations of difference. In this light, the presented analysis shows the three creatures made by Frankenstein and Victor Frankenstein himself as characters related to each other in non-normative ways, creating a queer quasi-family. This discussion is also contextualized by references to Mary Shelley’s original novel and some of its classic film adaptations and their comparison with Penny Dreadful.
Frankenstein’s creature is, due to its nature as the undead made of fragments of corpses, an abject thing, an embodiment of Otherness. In the series, Victor creates three beings, which are in a constant tension with each other. The firstborn John Clare murders the second creature, Proteus, out of hatred for their “father” Victor; the third being is Lily, another embodiment of the Bride of Frankenstein, destined to be with the creature, but desired by Victor. She becomes a dangerous fiend, femme castratrice, who desires a new world order and subordination of human beings. These two surviving Others – John and Lily – represent two different attitudes to their otherness. John Clare yearns normality and tries to achieve it by establishing a family with a human woman; Lily, a demonic man-eater, terrifies him. On the other hand, Lily strikes a relationship with Dorian Gray, equally non-normative, in order to achieve a queer monstrous supremacy over the world. However, both Frankenstein’s creatures fail and become alone. Therefore, the chapter is concluded with suppositions that question whether the motifs of otherness play an unequivocally subversive role in Penny Dreadful.
Research Interests:
Jeśli skusimy się na zaprojektowanie Nowej Kobiety na XXI wiek, następczyni Sary Grand i jej towarzyszek, zapewne miałaby to być kobieta wolna od lęku i melancholii, od niezabliźnionej rany kobiecości, która, jak pisze Luce Irigaray, nie... more
Jeśli skusimy się na zaprojektowanie Nowej Kobiety na XXI wiek, następczyni Sary Grand i jej towarzyszek, zapewne miałaby to być kobieta wolna od lęku i melancholii, od niezabliźnionej rany kobiecości, która, jak pisze Luce Irigaray, nie pozwala zapomnieć o braku, odcięciu od matki i innych kobiet . Czy taka kobiecość jest możliwa i czy nadal byłaby kobiecością, czy czymś innym? Czyż kobiecość bez winy, wstydu i zakazu/nakazu nie byłaby tożsamością nową, poza binarnością władzy i podwładności, w której ta pierwsza należy tylko do jednej płci? I czy taka wizja Nowej Kobiecości nie byłaby utopią? W swojej powieści "W powietrzu" (2014) Inga Iwasiów proponuje postać, która, chociaż niezupełnie wolna od melancholii i straty, oswaja ją i akceptuje, otrzymując w zamian władzę nad swoją seksualnością. Jest to Nowa Kobieta która, jak przystało na tożsamości po-Butlerowskie, przekracza binarność i w ten sposób dokonuje przynajmniej częściowej subwersji heteroseksualnej matrycy.
Research Interests:
A psychoanalyst and a detective share a common goal and methods: they interpret covert clues to reveal the truth(s). Some neo-Victorian detective novels show an awareness of this commonality when they combine psychiatry and detection.... more
A psychoanalyst and a detective share a common goal and methods: they interpret covert clues to reveal the truth(s). Some neo-Victorian detective novels show an awareness of this commonality when they combine psychiatry and detection. Yet, what is also apparent in these novels is a certain degree of anachronism: what we know about forensic psychiatry today is applied to fin de siècle contexts. The chapter provides a discussion of three texts—Caleb Carr’s The Alienist (1995), Frank Tallis’s Mortal Mischief (2005), and Jed Rubenfeld’s The Interpretation of Murder (2006)—focusing on the figures of psychiatrist detectives who represent an anachronistic antipatriarchal and egalitarian perspective on the marginalised and impoverished classes in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century society.
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Performativity is at times a crucial component of serial murder. A specific positioning of the body and accompanying scenarios, settings, props or costumes all serve to boast, to leave a mark and to communicate the murderer’s twisted... more
Performativity is at times a crucial component of serial murder. A specific positioning of the body and accompanying scenarios, settings, props or costumes all serve to boast, to leave a mark and to communicate the murderer’s twisted message to the onlookers. Such theatricality of serial crime made it one of the favourite themes for popular culture. The latest example is “Hannibal” (2013- ), a television series created by Bryan Fuller for NBC. It is loosely based on the novels by Thomas Harris and the accompanying films. The characteristic feature of the series is the grotesqueness of the murders: female bodies pierced by antlers; a throat cut open to shove a violin bridge through; a human totem on the beach made of old and new pieces of victims – the list is long and appalling.
In this book chapter the extremely bizarre nature of the presented crimes and their function are discussed. The performativity theory is used to look at how the murders, with their outlandish and extreme brutality, become metonymy for creating one’s identity. The serial killers in the show attempt to establish their own unique identity through their signature bizarre crimes; yet, these crimes are constantly repeated with a twist by Hannibal, who in this way both steals the other killers' identity and establishes his own. The series seems to illustrate the nature of identity as performative, unstable and changeable, especially in the light of the clash between sanity and insanity, which is one of the leitmotifs of the series. The main character of the show, Will Graham, is a forensic consultant whose greatest talent, through observation, is to momentarily "become" the murderer in order to understand the perpetrator's hidden agendas. This gift – again, stealing the murderer’s identity – leads him to the brink of madness, where he doubts who he is and what he is capable of. Paradoxically, Hannibal, the psychopath who eats his victims, is Will’s psychologist, whom Will believes to be the epitome of sanity. Thus, the shocking aspects of the show illustrate the core questions posed by it: what is identity, if it can be blurred by madness, be stolen, imposed or pretended?
In this book chapter the extremely bizarre nature of the presented crimes and their function are discussed. The performativity theory is used to look at how the murders, with their outlandish and extreme brutality, become metonymy for creating one’s identity. The serial killers in the show attempt to establish their own unique identity through their signature bizarre crimes; yet, these crimes are constantly repeated with a twist by Hannibal, who in this way both steals the other killers' identity and establishes his own. The series seems to illustrate the nature of identity as performative, unstable and changeable, especially in the light of the clash between sanity and insanity, which is one of the leitmotifs of the series. The main character of the show, Will Graham, is a forensic consultant whose greatest talent, through observation, is to momentarily "become" the murderer in order to understand the perpetrator's hidden agendas. This gift – again, stealing the murderer’s identity – leads him to the brink of madness, where he doubts who he is and what he is capable of. Paradoxically, Hannibal, the psychopath who eats his victims, is Will’s psychologist, whom Will believes to be the epitome of sanity. Thus, the shocking aspects of the show illustrate the core questions posed by it: what is identity, if it can be blurred by madness, be stolen, imposed or pretended?
Research Interests:
Since Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), the Victorian outlook on female insanity has been questioned in the neo-Victorian novel, of which Rhys’s work is the earliest example. Her rewriting of Charlotte Bronte’s Bertha of Jane Eyre... more
Since Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), the Victorian outlook on female insanity has been questioned in the neo-Victorian novel, of which Rhys’s work is the earliest example. Her rewriting of Charlotte Bronte’s Bertha of Jane Eyre (1847) points out two important premises on the basis of which the main character of her novel was deemed non-normative and, eventually, mad: her sexuality and her race. Other neo-Victorian novels published in 1990s and later follow Rhys’s diagnosis of the Victorian society as marginalizing non-normative identities by means of budding psychiatric discourses.
The proposed chapter aims at looking more closely at the motif of a Victorian lunatic asylum and prison, interpreting them as metaphors of marginalization of identities deemed precarious due to their nationality or ethnicity, sexuality, gender performance and class. Ultimately, these subjects become metaphorically exiled from the mainstream Victorian society, institutionalized and hidden away. The chapter will look at two novels by Sarah Waters: Fingersmith (2002) and Affinity (1999) to examine the motif of incarceration and the resulting disappearance and subsequent re-appearance of marginalized identities.
The proposed chapter aims at looking more closely at the motif of a Victorian lunatic asylum and prison, interpreting them as metaphors of marginalization of identities deemed precarious due to their nationality or ethnicity, sexuality, gender performance and class. Ultimately, these subjects become metaphorically exiled from the mainstream Victorian society, institutionalized and hidden away. The chapter will look at two novels by Sarah Waters: Fingersmith (2002) and Affinity (1999) to examine the motif of incarceration and the resulting disappearance and subsequent re-appearance of marginalized identities.
Research Interests: Neo-Victorian Literature, Neo-Victorian fiction, Neo-Victorian Novel, Women and Madness, Madness and Literature, and 11 moreNeo-Victorianism, Victorian prisons/ imprisoning spaces, Insanity, Sarah Waters, Madness, Neo-Victorian studies, Victorian Insanity, Panopticon, Affinity, Fingersmith, and Lunatic Asylums
The second film made by the duo Steve McQueen (director) and Michael Fassbender (actor), Shame (2011) shows several weeks from the life of a white urban-dwelling and professionally employed American male called Brandon. Brandon divulges... more
The second film made by the duo Steve McQueen (director) and Michael Fassbender (actor), Shame (2011) shows several weeks from the life of a white urban-dwelling and professionally employed American male called Brandon. Brandon divulges in excessive sexual practices and struggles with his sister’s unexpected intrusion into his carefully orchestrated life. Shame has been generally marketed as a cinematic representation of sexual addiction. The phenomenon of addiction shares some characteristics with the highly fragile and problematic construct of heteronormative masculinity that is, like addiction, in constant need of confirmation and steeped in the fear and shame of forever ‘not being enough’. An ongoing compulsion to commit to a vicious circle of need → temporary fulfilment → need characterises both addiction and the ongoing quest to attain and maintain a certain form of masculine being. The chapter focuses on Brandon’s construction of masculinity and the constant struggle involved in its performance in relation to others. The theoretical foundation of the analysis is based on Raewyn Connell’s work on hegemonic masculinity and particular cultural analyses of visual representations of masculinity. The chapter emphasises the main character’s sexual practices and his emotional withdrawal as symptomatic to his everyday performance of masculinity. It highlights the ways that Brandon’s hegemonic masculinity is established by way of both professional and sexual competition with other men, and the sexual control and submission of women. His sister Sissy is demonstrated as representing the feminine Other, as characterised by emotionality, fragility and dependency that he rejects as incompatible in the cultivation of hegemonic masculinity, but manages to incorporate into his masculinity performance towards the end of the film. The chapter includes a short exploration of the opening scene of full frontal nudity as it constitutes both an intra-diegetic as well as extra-diegetic comment on hegemonic masculinity. The final scenes of the film where Brandon reconciles with Sissy are argued as representing both the failure of hegemonic masculinity as ideal, and the need for more heterogeneous forms of masculinity that can incorporate traditional feminine characteristics of vulnerability, sensitivity and emotionality as they are embodied by his sister.
Key Words: Shame (2011), Steve McQueen, hegemonic masculinity, representation of masculinity, male sexuality, full frontal nudity, cinema, addiction
Key Words: Shame (2011), Steve McQueen, hegemonic masculinity, representation of masculinity, male sexuality, full frontal nudity, cinema, addiction
Research Interests:
Since its premiere in September 2011 at Venice Film Festival, Shame (dir. Steve McQueen) has been interpreted as a cinematographic illustration of sexual addiction. Set in contemporary New York, it presents Brandon Sullivan, a... more
Since its premiere in September 2011 at Venice Film Festival, Shame (dir. Steve McQueen) has been interpreted as a cinematographic illustration of sexual addiction. Set in contemporary New York, it presents Brandon Sullivan, a professional in his early thirties, as he indulges in sexual excess and pornography. The arrival of his sister Sissy, a needy and neurotic artist, shakes his carefully constructed routine and forces him to face his compulsions. But a much more subversive aspect of this film is provided by the problematic relationship between Brandon (Michael Fassbender) and Sissy (Carey Mulligan); it has become the subject of a heated debate among the film’s viewers, who ponder on the possible traumatic source of the characters’ mental disturbances as well as a conceivable past and/or present incestuous desire. However, their corresponding first names (Brandon/brother and Sissy/sister) would suggest a possibility of a more symbolic nature of the conflict between the siblings, one which would posit these characters as metaphorical representations of a heteronormative masculinity and femininity immersed in the concrete jungle of the patriarchal context. Brandon’s objectification of females through his male gaze and avoidance of all intimacy correspond to R. W. Connolly’s concept of hegemonic masculinity, a preferred gender performance for males in a patriarchal society. Sissy, on the other hand, represents femininity, understood as those aspects of one’s identity which are externalised and rejected by hegemonic masculinity. Together, Brandon and Sissy represent two binaries, each other’s doppelgängers at a war with each other. Brandon’s instantaneous attraction and repulsion toward Sissy may symbolically signify the crisis in which hegemonic masculinity (Brandon) finds itself, threatened and engendered by femininity (Sissy). Only when Brandon engages in an extreme sexual objectification of himself is he able to accommodate the female vulnerability into his identity. The female gaze the film seems to apply by an extensive display of Michael Fassbender’s body underlines the message that once masculinity incorporates a possibility of “female” elements in its identity performance, it will be able to free itself from the demands of patriarchy.
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The themes recurring in neo-Victorian fiction are the burning issues typical for the Victorian era, such as imperialism, science, religion, gender, national identity, spiritualism and class. The choice of characters represents those... more
The themes recurring in neo-Victorian fiction are the burning issues typical for the Victorian era, such as imperialism, science, religion, gender, national identity, spiritualism and class. The choice of characters represents those themes. It has often been said that neo-Victorian fiction gives an opportunity to the marginalised groups of the Victorian era to gain a subjectivity their own epoch denied them. It is, however, equally possible that what the neo-Victorian fiction reflects is the contemporary vision of the Victorians. Thus, at a first glance, the motif of female madness present in neo-Victorian novels seems to illustrate an obvious feminist criticism of the gender agenda of 19th century psychiatry. Still, if we consider neo-Victorian novel to be a novel about ourselves rather than Victorians, the question arises: what is it the female madness motif tells us about our contemporaries? The proposed paper ventures to answer this question, offering an analysis of the motif present in Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (2002), interpreting the role of the madwoman as the one who subverts the established heterosexual and normative performances of gender, on the basis of Judith Butler’s gender performativity theory.
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In her article on the lesbian gothic, Paulina Palmer notices the excess as the element both the lesbian and the gothic share. The function of excess in the gothic is to question the stability of known reality and show its conventional... more
In her article on the lesbian gothic, Paulina Palmer notices the excess as the element both the lesbian and the gothic share. The function of excess in the gothic is to question the stability of known reality and show its conventional nature, while the lesbian excess disrupts the compulsory heterosexuality inscribed in culture and shows the performative nature of gender identity. This follows the Butlerian idea of subversion, where homosexual desire paired with strategies such as parody or play are used to point at the fantasied nature of gender identity. The proposed paper is going to discuss such strategies applied by lesbian characters in Sarah Waters’ neo-Victorian novel Affinity, where gothic motifs such as madness, ghostly visitations and mistaken identities are employed as subversive schemes aiming at a disruption of the gender norm prescribed by the heterosexual matrix.
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"Although an interaction between male celebrities and female fandom in terms of a female gaze or an outlet for female sexual expression is not a new concept, the shifts in the ideals of masculinity that this relationship favors may... more
"Although an interaction between male celebrities and female fandom in terms of a female gaze or an outlet for female sexual expression is not a new concept, the shifts in the ideals of masculinity that this relationship favors may constitute an interesting example of more general transformations in a given culture. The commodification of certain ideals of masculinity is not only a form of tapping into the desires and expectations of female spectators, but also serves as an indicator of a range of the accepted gender performances in the mainstream culture. In the 1990s and early 2000s such an example of a desired embodiment of masculinity was metrosexuality, with David Beckham as a chosen representative. Today, however, there seems to be a new ideal emerging in pop culture.
In the proposed presentation I would like to discuss one example of such a new performance. A breaking-through A-list actor of German-Irish roots, Michael Fassbender, serves as an example of a celebrity whose performance (including his roles, interviews and the visual material) and its interaction with Fassinators (that is, his fans) creates a space where this new representation of masculinity is performed. The definition and discussion of the new performance of masculinity is set against the term of hegemonic masculinity, which is, I argue, contested by this new gender performance, where the female gaze plays also an important role. The presentation will propose a short introduction into Michael Fassbender’s fandom (on the basis of personal accounts and narratives among the members of online communities of Fassinators) and an illustration of chosen aspects of Michael Fassbender’s persona – representing inclusive masculinity – which appeals to the heterosexual female spectatorship. "
In the proposed presentation I would like to discuss one example of such a new performance. A breaking-through A-list actor of German-Irish roots, Michael Fassbender, serves as an example of a celebrity whose performance (including his roles, interviews and the visual material) and its interaction with Fassinators (that is, his fans) creates a space where this new representation of masculinity is performed. The definition and discussion of the new performance of masculinity is set against the term of hegemonic masculinity, which is, I argue, contested by this new gender performance, where the female gaze plays also an important role. The presentation will propose a short introduction into Michael Fassbender’s fandom (on the basis of personal accounts and narratives among the members of online communities of Fassinators) and an illustration of chosen aspects of Michael Fassbender’s persona – representing inclusive masculinity – which appeals to the heterosexual female spectatorship. "
Research Interests:
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Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly (1990), a reworking of the Victorian gothic classic Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886) has been variably categorised by the critics as neo-Victorian or neo-gothic fiction... more
Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly (1990), a reworking of the Victorian gothic classic Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886) has been variably categorised by the critics as neo-Victorian or neo-gothic fiction and postmodern historiographic metafiction. Marie-Louise Kohlke (2008) claims that neo-Victorian novel is a post-traumatic genre, where traumas can be both personal, i.e. “disease, crime and sexual exploitation,” (Kohlke 7) as well as collective, including military conflicts or racial and class oppression. The re-writing of these traumas in a form of historiographic metafiction might be an indication that our own century is not entirely free from similar ordeals and attempts to exorcise them through “liberatory repetitions with a difference” (Kohlke 10). A personal, familial traumatic experience is at the heart of the plot in Mary Reilly. The proposed chapter offers an interpretation of the core relationship of the novel, the romantically charged friendship between Dr Jekyll and his servant Mary Reilly, as an example of working through a childhood trauma. The paper shows how travelling back to traumatic memories of the past influences the main character’s present identity and relationships; moreover, it corresponds to the metafictional construction of the novel.
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Disability studies is a new academic discipline which aims at examining the representation of disabled people in various contexts. Its branch, feminist disability studies, is based on an assumption that disability is invariably linked to... more
Disability studies is a new academic discipline which aims at examining the representation of disabled people in various contexts. Its branch, feminist disability studies, is based on an assumption that disability is invariably linked to other social contexts, like race, class, gender, sexual orientation, etc., and therefore proposes a closer look at disabled women. In this view, an impaired body is perceived as disabled because it transgresses the norm, and the norm is embedded in a social, cultural and political context, hence the link between disability and other aspects of ‘otherness.’ In her extraordinary article, “The Corpus of the Madwoman,” Elizabeth J. Donaldson proposes to look at the issue of female madness from the point of view of feminist disability studies. Firstly, this proposal is based on the assumption that a madwoman is not an avatar of a rebellious feminist as Gilbert and Gubar first suggested in "The Madwoman in the Attic"; and secondly, that female insanity has to be corporealised, that is, studied as a mad female body. Still, as Donaldson said, “bodies are not simply born, but made,” thus the proposition to see in the female madness an impairment that through social discrimination and misunderstanding becomes a disability. In the proposed paper the aforementioned feminist disability studies will become a tool to analyse the representation of female insanity in one neo-Victorian novel, "The Crimson Petal and the White" by Michel Faber (2002), where one of the main characters in the novel, Agnes Rackham, is perceived by society as mad, but what seems to be madness in the Victorian society turns out to be a cry of a tormented and discriminated female body.
Research Interests: Feminist Disability Studies, Neo-Victorian Literature, Historiographic Metafiction, Neo-Victorian fiction, Neo-Victorian Novel, and 6 more'the Other' in Neo-Victorian novel, Neo-Victorian women, Madness In Neo Victorian Literature, Women and Madness, Madness and Literature, and Neo-Victorian studies
The paper proposes a study of the motif of female madness in the 19th century literature with the use of Judith Butler’s gender theory. On the example of Charlotte Brontё’s Villette, it will be shown that in the Victorian society the... more
The paper proposes a study of the motif of female madness in the 19th century literature with the use of Judith Butler’s gender theory. On the example of Charlotte Brontё’s Villette, it will be shown that in the Victorian society the madness discourse was a part of the regulating practice of gender. Judith Butler’s theory of gender performance and performativity can be used to analyse the paradox of the female madness motif: on the one hand, a faithful gender performance according to the gender regulations of the Victorian culture could lead to hysteria, as mental instability was a part of the prescribed female gender; on the other, female madness was often a result of an act of performativity (pronouncing mad), as gender is. In Brontё’s novel, the motif of madness will be presented in relation to Lucy’s gender performance and sexuality, especially its trangressive aspects. The regulative power of madness discourse in the context of gender performance will be also discussed, with attention paid to Lucy’s relationship with men - Dr John, who pronounced Lucy hysterical, and M. Paul Emanuel, who represents the social regulative power.
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The latest novel by Sarah Waters, published in 2009, received critical acclaim for its realistic representation of post-war Britain, its affiliation with great gothic classics, such as The Turn of the Screw or The Fall of the House of... more
The latest novel by Sarah Waters, published in 2009, received critical acclaim for its realistic representation of post-war Britain, its affiliation with great gothic classics, such as The Turn of the Screw or The Fall of the House of Usher, and above all, its ambiguous ending. However, it is a bit of a ‘shorthand’ to call the novel gothic, as has been admitted by the author herself in a video interview taken by Rebecca Lovell in May 2009. Instead, Waters calls the book ‘a haunted house novel.’ The unanswered question of the novel is, what is it that haunts Hundreds Hall? The proposed paper makes an attempt to provide one possible answer to this question, focusing on the idea of transgression. Of course in any gothic work of fiction the occurrence of a supernatural element signals a crossing of the borderline between the possible and the impossible. A fantastic entity questions the stability of this frontier. In Waters’ novel, however, the transgression of the real signals another crossing of boundaries. The unreliable narrator of the novel is the crux of its interpretation. The enigmatic events in the house coincide with Dr Faraday’s growing attachment to the Ayres family. He is an educated man who, on one hand, no longer belongs to the working class of his parents, but still, due to his origins, feels insecure in the upper class to which the inhabitants of Hundreds Hall belong. His constant roaming of the class boundaries holds the key to the haunting mystery. The paper is going to analyse different images and symbols of transgression in the novel to show the connection between the issue of class and the gothic elements in the novel and to provide a possible interpretation of its equivocal ending.
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Disability studies generally aim at an analysis of how an impairment becomes a disability due to the society’s definitions of normativity which do not encompass less-than-perfect bodies. Ever since its appearance in 1990s disability... more
Disability studies generally aim at an analysis of how an impairment becomes a disability due to the society’s definitions of normativity which do not encompass less-than-perfect bodies. Ever since its appearance in 1990s disability studies has focused on cultural and social contexts, thus going beyond the medical and biological discourse of disability. Consequently, a natural step in its development has been to combine disability studies with issues of race, class, gender and sexuality. Such agendas of disability studies as denaturalisation of disability and inclusion of dismissed (disabled) bodies give disability studies and feminism a common ground, thus leading to an emergence of feminist disability studies. Its focus on both feminine and disabled body as a source of identity and a struggle with stereotypes of the female disabled are the most often discussed aspects. The issue of mental disability, however, has not been as yet thoroughly researched. As a theory used for the study of literature, it has been proposed and applied by Elizabeth J. Donaldson. In her “The Corpus of the Madwoman” (2002) she put forward a hypothesis that a madwoman is not an avatar of a rebellious feminist but a corporealised reality. This view has been backed by Andrea Nicki in her paper “The Abused Mind” (2001), where she searches for a trauma, especially a bodily and a sexual one, to explain female insanity and fight with its stereotypes. This view will become the starting point for the analysis of the theme of female madness in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace. Using feminist disability studies, this paper will discuss Grace Mark’s relation to her body and her femininity as well as traumas in her past to examine the function of the motif of madness in Atwood’s novel and its role in the overall interpretation of the book.
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The latest trend in postmodern literature which receives great critical acclaim as well as a wide readership in Anglophone societies is the reborn historical novel, and in particular the Neo-Victorian literature. The genre seems to focus... more
The latest trend in postmodern literature which receives great critical acclaim as well as a wide readership in Anglophone societies is the reborn historical novel, and in particular the Neo-Victorian literature. The genre seems to focus on those aspects of Victorian life and society which were either omitted by the original Victorian writers, or were presented by them in a stereotypical way, usually putting those taboo characters in a position of the misapprehended and abjected Others. This article aims at presenting one such stereotype, the female domestic servant, and discuss its representation in neo-Victorian novel.
The stereotype of the female domestic servant in the English-speaking cultures (the USA, Britain and Canada) will be first described as it was perceived by the Victorians – her duties, position in society, education, social mobility, and her relationship with her betters. The Otherness of the female domestic servant will be discussed – both from the point of view of her social class as well as her gender. The Victorian stereotype will be contrasted with the neo-Victorian representation of three characters: Mary in Mary Reilly (1990) by Valerie Martin, Grace in Alias Grace (1996) by Margaret Atwood, and Ruth in Affinity (1999) by Sarah Waters. Their Otherness is not constituted solely by their gender and class, but also by their involvement in spiritualism and the supernatural (Grace and Ruth), unusual and sexually charged relationships with their masters/mistresses (Ruth, Mary), education and insight (Mary, Grace), transgression of gender roles (Ruth) and, last but not least, crime (Grace). Therefore, ironically, by transgressing the borderlines of the real/ the supernatural, the female/ the male, the homosexual/ the heterosexual, life/death, etc., they subvert the traditional stereotype of the female domestic servant as meek, modest, obedient and simple.
The conclusion the article will propose is not only the transcendence of the stereotype of the female domestic servant in the aforementioned novels, but also the role of the Victorian Other in the Neo-Victorian novel. On the example of the female domestic servant, it will be concluded that the postmodern Neo-Victorian literature aims at representing those who were under-represented in the 19th century culture and consequently to give the Other the voice and the story to ‘de-otherize’ them.
The stereotype of the female domestic servant in the English-speaking cultures (the USA, Britain and Canada) will be first described as it was perceived by the Victorians – her duties, position in society, education, social mobility, and her relationship with her betters. The Otherness of the female domestic servant will be discussed – both from the point of view of her social class as well as her gender. The Victorian stereotype will be contrasted with the neo-Victorian representation of three characters: Mary in Mary Reilly (1990) by Valerie Martin, Grace in Alias Grace (1996) by Margaret Atwood, and Ruth in Affinity (1999) by Sarah Waters. Their Otherness is not constituted solely by their gender and class, but also by their involvement in spiritualism and the supernatural (Grace and Ruth), unusual and sexually charged relationships with their masters/mistresses (Ruth, Mary), education and insight (Mary, Grace), transgression of gender roles (Ruth) and, last but not least, crime (Grace). Therefore, ironically, by transgressing the borderlines of the real/ the supernatural, the female/ the male, the homosexual/ the heterosexual, life/death, etc., they subvert the traditional stereotype of the female domestic servant as meek, modest, obedient and simple.
The conclusion the article will propose is not only the transcendence of the stereotype of the female domestic servant in the aforementioned novels, but also the role of the Victorian Other in the Neo-Victorian novel. On the example of the female domestic servant, it will be concluded that the postmodern Neo-Victorian literature aims at representing those who were under-represented in the 19th century culture and consequently to give the Other the voice and the story to ‘de-otherize’ them.
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The idea that in the patriarchal world men overpower and limit women’s freedom is so obvious that has become a cliché. However, a closer look at the mother-daughter relationship, following the seminal works of such feminists like Adrienne... more
The idea that in the patriarchal world men overpower and limit women’s freedom is so obvious that has become a cliché. However, a closer look at the mother-daughter relationship, following the seminal works of such feminists like Adrienne Rich, Phyllis Chessler and Luce Irigaray, enables us to change the focus from male-female power struggle to the one within female genealogy, where mothers become not just the victims, but also the wardens of the patriarchal prison and perpetrators of the ‘punishment,’ thus leading the daughters either to ‘matrophobia’ or engulfment by the mother. The three neo-Victorian novels on which the paper will be focused represent three examples of deeply ambiguous and often hostile relationships between mothers and daughters. Firstly, in her novel Affinity Sarah Waters presents the world of a Victorian lady visitor in Millbank prison, who seems to be imprisoned by hostile and menacing femininity motherhood, and whose matrophobia makes her an easy target of Selina Dawes’ manipulation. Secondly, in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, Grace’s mother is herself a stereotypical victim of gender roles and patriarchal oppression, becoming an anti-model for her daughter and preparing a foundation for a real mother-figure in Grace’s life, Mary Whitley. In this case, Grace becomes engulfed by her second ‘mother.’ Thirdly, Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White presents an example of an abusive mother-daughter relationship and the resulting ‘matrophobia’ of the main character. All of these mother figures are shown from a perspective of their impact on the main characters’ female identity as well as their own attitude to other women later in life. In its conclusion, the paper will touch upon the issue of neo-Victorian novel as a genre which as its aim has the preservation of female genealogy.
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The Neo-Victorian novel seems to focus of several compelling themes, literal or/and metaphorical imprisonment among them. The objective of this paper will be to portray these images of prison or restriction as metaphors of imprisonment... more
The Neo-Victorian novel seems to focus of several compelling themes, literal or/and metaphorical imprisonment among them. The objective of this paper will be to portray these images of prison or restriction as metaphors of imprisonment which the main protagonists of the novels experience due to their gender, sexuality and class.
Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly starts with an image of imprisonment: young Mary is locked by her father in a closet with a rat. Such images of confinement are recurrent in the novel, significantly in connection with working-class females. The significance of the garden in the yard will be also discussed, as a middle ground between two polar opposites, the house (domesticity, female space and its imprisonment) and the laboratory (transgression and male independence).
Sarah Waters’s Affinity is about a literal prison – Millbank – as well as the limitations of a society in which lesbian desire does not exist. The female inmate, Selina, will be presented in contrast to Margaret, an educated lady who invariably is imprisoned in the house, where her mother becomes a warden, and her crimes are her spinsterhood, intellectualism, depression and homosexuality.
Images of space –predominantly houses, but also prison cells, rooms, closets, etc., represent a deeper imprisonment than the confinement of walls and ceiling. It is a limitation of a relationships and social roles that the Other has to live in, and, successfully or not, try to escape from.
Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly starts with an image of imprisonment: young Mary is locked by her father in a closet with a rat. Such images of confinement are recurrent in the novel, significantly in connection with working-class females. The significance of the garden in the yard will be also discussed, as a middle ground between two polar opposites, the house (domesticity, female space and its imprisonment) and the laboratory (transgression and male independence).
Sarah Waters’s Affinity is about a literal prison – Millbank – as well as the limitations of a society in which lesbian desire does not exist. The female inmate, Selina, will be presented in contrast to Margaret, an educated lady who invariably is imprisoned in the house, where her mother becomes a warden, and her crimes are her spinsterhood, intellectualism, depression and homosexuality.
Images of space –predominantly houses, but also prison cells, rooms, closets, etc., represent a deeper imprisonment than the confinement of walls and ceiling. It is a limitation of a relationships and social roles that the Other has to live in, and, successfully or not, try to escape from.
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published under the maiden name: Rychlińska, Barbara, in: Kędra-Kardela, Anna and Leszek S. Kolek. The Craft of Interpretation: The English Canon. Chełm: Państwowa Wyższa Szkoła Zawodowa, 2007, 55-76.
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Published under the maiden name Rychlińska, Barbara, in: Homo Loguens Zeszyty Naukowe NKJO, Zeszyt I, Szczecin 2005, 113 – 123.
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Presented at the conference: "Urban Weird 2018," University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, 6-7 April 2018. Jack the Ripper myth has inspired, or coincided with, the classic gothic texts of late Victorian London: from Strange Case of Dr... more
Presented at the conference: "Urban Weird 2018," University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, 6-7 April 2018.
Jack the Ripper myth has inspired, or coincided with, the classic gothic texts of late Victorian London: from Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, adapted to stage in London the same summer the Whitechapel murders shook the capital, to 1897’s Dracula, Bram Stokers own vision of a bloodthirsty presence haunting its streets. The countless accounts, theories, and fictions harking back to Jack the Ripper figure have followed. One of them is the crime series Whitechapel (Carnival Films, 2009 and ITV, 2010-2013), which in its first season depicts a contemporary case of Jack the Ripper copycat, murdering women in Whitechapel exactly 120 years after the original Victorian killings. The proposed presentation will look at the series as depicting a contemporary urban context haunted by the Victorian past. This in itself is a gothic pursuit: the purpose of haunting in gothic fiction is to lay bare the past secrets and unresolved traumas; the haunting offers a repetition of a past event, like a traumatic memory. Yet, when this repetition occurs with a difference – a new ending of an old event – it helps resolve the trauma. In the series, the copycat purposefully, via detailed reconstruction and a cunning and elaborate enactment of the Victorian original events, performs a role of a ghost visiting the original sites of Whitechapel murders to repeat the crimes. Yet, this offers the detectives a chance to resolve the old trauma by catching the killer in his contemporary incarnation. Thus, as a neo-Victorian adaptation of a Victorian event, the series provides a comment to the contemporary urban hauntings. Here, the past urban and cultural trauma is Jack the Ripper case, not only due to its brutality. The Whitechapel murders revealed the gender and class politics of the late-nineteenth century urban society, both in their victimology as much as in the investigation itself. It will be examined, therefore, how Victorian ideologies were adapted in Whitechapel series as a comment to contemporary urban anxieties.
Jack the Ripper myth has inspired, or coincided with, the classic gothic texts of late Victorian London: from Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, adapted to stage in London the same summer the Whitechapel murders shook the capital, to 1897’s Dracula, Bram Stokers own vision of a bloodthirsty presence haunting its streets. The countless accounts, theories, and fictions harking back to Jack the Ripper figure have followed. One of them is the crime series Whitechapel (Carnival Films, 2009 and ITV, 2010-2013), which in its first season depicts a contemporary case of Jack the Ripper copycat, murdering women in Whitechapel exactly 120 years after the original Victorian killings. The proposed presentation will look at the series as depicting a contemporary urban context haunted by the Victorian past. This in itself is a gothic pursuit: the purpose of haunting in gothic fiction is to lay bare the past secrets and unresolved traumas; the haunting offers a repetition of a past event, like a traumatic memory. Yet, when this repetition occurs with a difference – a new ending of an old event – it helps resolve the trauma. In the series, the copycat purposefully, via detailed reconstruction and a cunning and elaborate enactment of the Victorian original events, performs a role of a ghost visiting the original sites of Whitechapel murders to repeat the crimes. Yet, this offers the detectives a chance to resolve the old trauma by catching the killer in his contemporary incarnation. Thus, as a neo-Victorian adaptation of a Victorian event, the series provides a comment to the contemporary urban hauntings. Here, the past urban and cultural trauma is Jack the Ripper case, not only due to its brutality. The Whitechapel murders revealed the gender and class politics of the late-nineteenth century urban society, both in their victimology as much as in the investigation itself. It will be examined, therefore, how Victorian ideologies were adapted in Whitechapel series as a comment to contemporary urban anxieties.
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Presented at the conference: "Performing America", the Annual Polish Association for American Studies Conference, Szczecin, 18-20 October 2017 In his book Palimpsests Gerard Genette defines the titular phenomenon as “a relationship of... more
Presented at the conference: "Performing America", the Annual Polish Association for American Studies Conference, Szczecin, 18-20 October 2017
In his book Palimpsests Gerard Genette defines the titular phenomenon as “a relationship of co-presence between two texts or among several texts; (…) the actual presence of one text within another,” pointing at such postmodern practices as intertextuality, plagiarism or allusion as its examples. Recently the renaissance of the term has been observed, as it had been used by Linda Hutcheon to discuss adaptation in her 2006 book Theory of Adaptation. An adaptation, she argues, is an experience of a number of texts which co-exist, mutually influencing each other’s reading. Thus, if neo-Victorian novel is one instance of a postmodern adaptation, it represents both the Victorian and the contemporary period – it is a palimpsest of two temporal plains, and constitutes an adaptation of Victorianism and its performance for contemporary consumption. The paper proposes a discussion of two neo-Victorian crime novels set in late nineteenth-century New York – Caleb Carr’s The Alienist (1994) and Jed Rubenfeld’s The Interpretation of Murder (2006) – where double fin de siècle is experienced, as the novels were written a hundred years after their respective temporal settings. The paper shows how the nineteenth-century setting is confounded by contemporary anachronisms and meta-fictional references, creating a text which is neither fully historical nor contemporary, but palimpsestically both.
In his book Palimpsests Gerard Genette defines the titular phenomenon as “a relationship of co-presence between two texts or among several texts; (…) the actual presence of one text within another,” pointing at such postmodern practices as intertextuality, plagiarism or allusion as its examples. Recently the renaissance of the term has been observed, as it had been used by Linda Hutcheon to discuss adaptation in her 2006 book Theory of Adaptation. An adaptation, she argues, is an experience of a number of texts which co-exist, mutually influencing each other’s reading. Thus, if neo-Victorian novel is one instance of a postmodern adaptation, it represents both the Victorian and the contemporary period – it is a palimpsest of two temporal plains, and constitutes an adaptation of Victorianism and its performance for contemporary consumption. The paper proposes a discussion of two neo-Victorian crime novels set in late nineteenth-century New York – Caleb Carr’s The Alienist (1994) and Jed Rubenfeld’s The Interpretation of Murder (2006) – where double fin de siècle is experienced, as the novels were written a hundred years after their respective temporal settings. The paper shows how the nineteenth-century setting is confounded by contemporary anachronisms and meta-fictional references, creating a text which is neither fully historical nor contemporary, but palimpsestically both.
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Presented at the conference: "From Queen Anne to Queen Victoria. Readings in 18th and 19th century British literature and culture", Warsaw, 25-27 September 2017 Set in 1894 Somerset countryside, the BBC neo-Victorian gothic drama The... more
Presented at the conference: "From Queen Anne to Queen Victoria. Readings in 18th and 19th century British literature and culture", Warsaw, 25-27 September 2017
Set in 1894 Somerset countryside, the BBC neo-Victorian gothic drama The Living and the Dead (2016) has been clearly inspired by Thomas Hardy’s and M. R. James’s prose, as well as their 1970s television adaptations, as it has been admitted by its creator Ashley Pharoah in her interview for The Telegraph. Thus the series becomes partly an adaptation of adaptations, being at the same time an original neo-Victorian script. The motif of the main character, a pioneering psychologist and a rationalist, whose inheritance puts him and his wife in a position of lord and lady of the manor, haunted by the past of his village – and his own tragic memories – presents itself as another rendition of a well-known gothic motif. Yet the series contains a time-travelling twist, in which the key ghostly figure haunting the manor is actually a twenty-first century woman holding a tablet. Such a palimpsestic juxtaposition of the past and the present raises questions about the natures of haunting, memory and the mutual influences of the past and the present in neo-Victorian cultural texts. The paper discusses the neo-Victorian genre from a perspective not only of a cultural revenant, an afterimage of the nineteenth-century past in our contemporary present, but also a genre which is itself haunted by our twenty-first century traumas and anxieties. Hauntology and trauma theory are used as methodologies for this study, and the BBC show The Living and the Dead is analyzed as a potent example of the way in which this double haunting is performed and commented upon.
Set in 1894 Somerset countryside, the BBC neo-Victorian gothic drama The Living and the Dead (2016) has been clearly inspired by Thomas Hardy’s and M. R. James’s prose, as well as their 1970s television adaptations, as it has been admitted by its creator Ashley Pharoah in her interview for The Telegraph. Thus the series becomes partly an adaptation of adaptations, being at the same time an original neo-Victorian script. The motif of the main character, a pioneering psychologist and a rationalist, whose inheritance puts him and his wife in a position of lord and lady of the manor, haunted by the past of his village – and his own tragic memories – presents itself as another rendition of a well-known gothic motif. Yet the series contains a time-travelling twist, in which the key ghostly figure haunting the manor is actually a twenty-first century woman holding a tablet. Such a palimpsestic juxtaposition of the past and the present raises questions about the natures of haunting, memory and the mutual influences of the past and the present in neo-Victorian cultural texts. The paper discusses the neo-Victorian genre from a perspective not only of a cultural revenant, an afterimage of the nineteenth-century past in our contemporary present, but also a genre which is itself haunted by our twenty-first century traumas and anxieties. Hauntology and trauma theory are used as methodologies for this study, and the BBC show The Living and the Dead is analyzed as a potent example of the way in which this double haunting is performed and commented upon.
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In Michel Faber’s novel published in 2002, The Crimson Petal and the White, Sugar and Agnes seem to represent the typical division in Victorian society: women can be either whores (monsters) or ladies (angels). However, the author of the... more
In Michel Faber’s novel published in 2002, The Crimson Petal and the White, Sugar and Agnes seem to represent the typical division in Victorian society: women can be either whores (monsters) or ladies (angels). However, the author of the novel presents and then subverts those binary oppositions in his construction of female characters. It seems that Sugar, the prostitute and William Rackham’s mistress, is the fallen angel, whereas Agnes, his delicate and beautiful wife – the ideal angel in the house.Still, Agnes is not as angelic as she seems to be at a first glance and the demonic Sugar starts to show her more emotional and more compassionate side. The labelling of Sugar and Agnes as angels or monsters is a result of William’s ‘male gaze, but it is not only William’s – the implied reader is seduced into the world of the novel. The female characters of the novel do not only escape William’s categorisation in terms of a Victorian female ideal, but they also break free from the world of the novel, and as a result, from the gaze of the reader as well.
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In his book Palimpsests Gerard Genette defines the titular phenomenon, in reference to literature, as “a relationship of co-presence between two texts or among several texts; (…) the actual presence of one text within another,” pointing... more
In his book Palimpsests Gerard Genette defines the titular phenomenon, in reference to literature, as “a relationship of co-presence between two texts or among several texts; (…) the actual presence of one text within another,” pointing at such postmodern practices as intertextuality, plagiarism or allusion as its examples. Yet the term is used in various fields – including history and architecture – to metaphorically (or literarily) signify the co-existence of the past and the present. Reading the past of a city – like the one offered in Caleb Carr’s The Alienist (1994) – allows a combination of three spaces (textual space, urban space and psychological space) in which a multidimensional palimpsest is possible. Carr’s novel is an example of neo-Victorian crime fiction, set in New York in 1896, which puts the historical figure of Theodore Roosevelt, the police superintendent at the time, in a fictional plot of a chase after a serial killer of the city’s impoverished children. Nineteenth-century realism in the representation of the city – with meticulous reconstruction of its both existing and long-demolished landmarks – and the social mores of the period are mixed with very anachronistic description of police work and the profiling skills of Roosevelt’s partner, Dr Laszlo Kreizler. The proposed paper focuses on the palimpsest in terms of the historical fabric of the novel, but also in terms of the urban structure and its relation to the psyche of the serial killer, whose past traumas coexist with the present desire to murder and mutilate. The theories of hauntology and trauma are used for this analysis, in order to show how the past layers of the psychological, urban and literary palimpsest hide the essence and the understanding of the present.
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Presented at the conference: "From Queen Anne to Queen Victoria. Readings in 18th and 19th century British literature and culture", Warsaw, 23-25 September 2015 Neo-Victorian novel is embedded in contemporary theory, serving as an... more
Presented at the conference: "From Queen Anne to Queen Victoria. Readings in 18th and 19th century British literature and culture", Warsaw, 23-25 September 2015
Neo-Victorian novel is embedded in contemporary theory, serving as an illustration of certain concepts which are typical for our deconstructive and postmodernist approach to discourse, culture and history. It is, therefore, highly feminist, among other things, laying bare the patriarchal structures of both the Victorian era as well as 20th and 21st century. By the same token, the motif of a Victorian madwoman is often shown as it had been interpreted by the feminist critics: either as a symbol of female rebellion against stifling gender roles of the nineteenth century, or as representation of silent submission to patriarchy and female victimisation.
In the proposed paper, however, I would like to propose a different approach to this motif. I apply Judith Butler’s gender performativity theory and her concept of heterosexual melancholy in my reading of a neo-Victorian novel, namely Sarah Waters’ Affinity (1999), in order to interpret a madwoman as a disruptive figure in the heteronormative setting. Margaret Prior’s labelling as a hysteric, in the light of the Victorian medical discourse, is not only a means to victimise a rebellious woman, but it also indicates the madwoman’s disruptive potential in a heterosexual matrix. Margaret’s gradual realisation of the queer desire coincides with her rejection of a rational discourse, ending in self-annihilation. Insanity discourse becomes the expression of Margaret’s non-normative desire. Finally, I would like to examine why a Victorian hysteric appears to be a fitting vehicle to discuss contemporary sexualities.
Neo-Victorian novel is embedded in contemporary theory, serving as an illustration of certain concepts which are typical for our deconstructive and postmodernist approach to discourse, culture and history. It is, therefore, highly feminist, among other things, laying bare the patriarchal structures of both the Victorian era as well as 20th and 21st century. By the same token, the motif of a Victorian madwoman is often shown as it had been interpreted by the feminist critics: either as a symbol of female rebellion against stifling gender roles of the nineteenth century, or as representation of silent submission to patriarchy and female victimisation.
In the proposed paper, however, I would like to propose a different approach to this motif. I apply Judith Butler’s gender performativity theory and her concept of heterosexual melancholy in my reading of a neo-Victorian novel, namely Sarah Waters’ Affinity (1999), in order to interpret a madwoman as a disruptive figure in the heteronormative setting. Margaret Prior’s labelling as a hysteric, in the light of the Victorian medical discourse, is not only a means to victimise a rebellious woman, but it also indicates the madwoman’s disruptive potential in a heterosexual matrix. Margaret’s gradual realisation of the queer desire coincides with her rejection of a rational discourse, ending in self-annihilation. Insanity discourse becomes the expression of Margaret’s non-normative desire. Finally, I would like to examine why a Victorian hysteric appears to be a fitting vehicle to discuss contemporary sexualities.
Research Interests:
Many critics of gothic fiction (e.g. Cvetkovich 1992, Hughes 1980, Millbank 1992) have pinpointed the descendancy of the Victorian sensation novel of 1860s from the eighteenth-century gothic fiction. The similarities between the two... more
Many critics of gothic fiction (e.g. Cvetkovich 1992, Hughes 1980, Millbank 1992) have pinpointed the descendancy of the Victorian sensation novel of 1860s from the eighteenth-century gothic fiction. The similarities between the two genres comprises the themes, such as criminality, sexual taboos, secrecy, and irrationality, as well as labirynthian and incarcerating settings, female heroines as the main focus, and anxiety as the desired effect on the reader. One of the motifs occurring both in the gothic and in the sensation fiction is that of madness. However, while in the gothic novel insanity motif helped to illustrate the dichotomies of rationality and irrationality, the sensation fiction relied on other discourses, which claimed insanity to result from excess or deficiency of these passions and faculties, which, when in balance, are integral to normal life. Thus, following Showalter, I argue that Victorian sensation fiction uses motifs of madness and/as excess to undermine the certainties of bourgeois discourses, in opposition realism, which reinforced the middle-class values, and I will focus mainly on those concerning gender. Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s "Lady Audley’s Secret" (1862) is the perfect example to show the radical power of sensation novels in this respect. The paper discusses the Victorian ideology of insanity and its links to excess, a latent, hidden danger, undistinguishable to the untrained eye, and combines it with the motif of madness as presented in Braddon’s "Lady Audley’s Secret" to show how this gothic motif examines and undermines the gender politics of the Victorian society.
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In their overview of the academic discussion on the representation of masculinity in popular media, Jim McKay, Janine Mikosza and Brett Hutchins claim that presenting men as passive and nude objects of pleasurable and/or erotic gaze has... more
In their overview of the academic discussion on the representation of masculinity in popular media, Jim McKay, Janine Mikosza and Brett Hutchins claim that presenting men as passive and nude objects of pleasurable and/or erotic gaze has been a strong taboo, as it poses “a threat to the visual power of heterosexual men” (2005: 271). In their reference to Full Monty (1997), which, in spite of being a film about male striptease, fails to put full frontal nudity on camera, they claim that “the time when we see a front-on pan of a row of ‘full monties’ in the popular media is still some way off” (McKay, Mikosza and Hutchins 2005: 285). True as it may be when it comes to full frontal nudity, we are witnessing a growing number of casual male nudity in mainstream film and other popular media. On the example of recently shot films – the newest installments of the James Bond series, especially Casino Royale (2006), Magic Mike (2012) and Shame (2011) – and using seminal analytical works on the topic of male representation in visual culture, I discuss selected scenes from the aforementioned films when it comes to depiction of a nude male body in the contexts which suggest their role to be for the pleasure of female (or gay male) viewers. The article recognizes the means by which hegemonic masculinity of the male objects of the gaze is preserved in those films, in spite of the apparent passivity and erotic availability of the male nudes.
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Research Interests: Irish Studies, Translation Studies, Languages and Linguistics, Celtic Studies, Irish linguistics, and 25 moreWelsh, Welsh linguistics, Nationalism, Celtic Linguistics, National Identity, Language and Identity, Cymraeg - the Welsh language, Linguistics, Celtic History, Translation, Celtic Languages, Literary translation, Rhotics, Film Translation, Polish Language, Irish language, Warlpiri, Cultural and Linguistic Competency in Healthcare, Polish Linguistics, Taboo Words, Polish Phonetics and Phonology, Whisky, Linguistic Identity, Linguistic Insecurity, and Linguistic Identities(Welsh, Welsh linguistics, Nationalism, Celtic Linguistics, National Identity, Language and Identity, Cymraeg - the Welsh language, Linguistics, Celtic History, Translation, Celtic Languages, Literary translation, Rhotics, Film Translation, Polish Language, Irish language, Warlpiri, Cultural and Linguistic Competency in Healthcare, Polish Linguistics, Taboo Words, Polish Phonetics and Phonology, Whisky, Linguistic Identity, Linguistic Insecurity, and Linguistic Identities)
(Welsh, Welsh linguistics, Nationalism, Celtic Linguistics, National Identity, Language and Identity, Cymraeg - the Welsh language, Linguistics, Celtic History, Translation, Celtic Languages, Literary translation, Rhotics, Film Translation, Polish Language, Irish language, Warlpiri, Cultural and Linguistic Competency in Healthcare, Polish Linguistics, Taboo Words, Polish Phonetics and Phonology, Whisky, Linguistic Identity, Linguistic Insecurity, and Linguistic Identities)
This is a short review of the volume of essays "The Streaming of Hill House: Essays on the Haunting Netflix Adaptation" (ed. K. J. Wetmore, McFarland, 2020).
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The following review discusses the recent book by Marie Mulvey-Roberts, Dangerous Bodies: Historicising the Gothic Corporeal (Manchester UP, 2016), which offers a historical perspective on gothic literary and cultural texts. In the book,... more
The following review discusses the recent book by Marie Mulvey-Roberts, Dangerous Bodies: Historicising the Gothic Corporeal (Manchester UP, 2016), which offers a historical perspective on gothic literary and cultural texts. In the book, Mulvey-Roberts examines how gothic fiction represents the bodies of the Other – the Catholic, the slave, the woman, the Jew, and so on – on which the history cannibalistically feeds itself; a meticulous historical research allows her to shed new light on both canonical as well as more marginal gothic texts. This review offers an overview and a brief comment on this significant addition to gothic studies.
Keywords: gothic body, the Other, historical approach, Mulvey-Roberts
Keywords: gothic body, the Other, historical approach, Mulvey-Roberts
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Research Interests:
This article examines the nature of neo-Victorianism as a heterotopia and heterochronia, that is, situatedness where the relationship between the past and the present is paradoxically concurrent and palimpsestic. This is done via a... more
This article examines the nature of neo-Victorianism as a heterotopia and heterochronia, that is, situatedness where the relationship between the past and the present is paradoxically concurrent and palimpsestic. This is done via a discussion of the cemetery as a governing metaphor to describe neo-Victorianism, as it is a highly heterotopic and heterochronic space. A hauntological approach is applied to interpret the attempt to bury the spectre of Victorianism in Michel de Certeau’s “scriptural tombs” as the main project of neo-Victorianism. Two neo-Victorian novels, Tracy Chevalier’s Falling Angels (2001) and Audrey Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry (2009), are selected as illustrations of this phenomenon, as they both focus on Highgate Cemetery in London as a key element of their narratives. Both these texts show that neo-Victorianism, conceptualised as a cemetery, is a heterotopic and heterochronic archive of the spectres that rarely stay buried in their narrative tombs.
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The Borden murders committed in 1892 in Fall River, Massachusetts, have sparked a number of neo-Victorian textualisations. From the perspective of the 'lethal lesbian' trope known in queer cinema, this article discusses the famous... more
The Borden murders committed in 1892 in Fall River, Massachusetts, have sparked a number of neo-Victorian textualisations. From the perspective of the 'lethal lesbian' trope known in queer cinema, this article discusses the famous suspect in this case, Lizzie Borden (1860–1927), as depicted in <em>Lizzie</em> (2018, dir. Craig Macneill). It shows that the titular character (Chloë Sevigny) is queered in this film – not just by her lesbian relationship with the maid, Bridget Sullivan (Kristen Stewart), but also as a madwoman and a spinster who repeatedly refuses to adhere to social and gender codes of nineteenth-century New England. The article examines these various facets of queer disruption of Victorian norms, complicating the discussion by employing an intersectional perspective which points out more nuanced aspects of power relations between characters and the ethical implications of casting female criminals as neo-Victorian, feminist, and/or queer heroines.
Research Interests: Gay And Lesbian Studies, Lesbian Studies, Neo-Victorian Literature, Neo-Victorian fiction, Neo-Victorian lesbians and cross-dressers, and 8 moreQueer/Gay film, Neo-Victorianism, Neo-Victorian studies, Queer History, Biofiction, Adaptation and Appropriation Theory, Lesbians in film, and Lizzie Borden
The following review discusses the recent book by Marie Mulvey-Roberts,<br> Dangerous Bodies: Historicising the Gothic Corporeal (Manchester UP, 2016), which<br> offers a historical perspective on gothic literary and cultural... more
The following review discusses the recent book by Marie Mulvey-Roberts,<br> Dangerous Bodies: Historicising the Gothic Corporeal (Manchester UP, 2016), which<br> offers a historical perspective on gothic literary and cultural texts. In the book,<br> Mulvey-Roberts examines how gothic fiction represents the bodies of the Other<br> – the Catholic, the slave, the woman, the Jew, and so on – on which the history<br> cannibalistically feeds itself; a meticulous historical research allows her to shed<br> new light on both canonical as well as more marginal gothic texts. This review offers<br> an overview and a brief comment on this significant addition to gothic studies.
A psychoanalyst and a detective share a common goal and methods: they interpret covert clues to reveal the truth(s). Some neo-Victorian detective novels show an awareness of this commonality when they combine psychiatry and detection.... more
A psychoanalyst and a detective share a common goal and methods: they interpret covert clues to reveal the truth(s). Some neo-Victorian detective novels show an awareness of this commonality when they combine psychiatry and detection. Yet, what is also apparent in these novels is a certain degree of anachronism: what we know about forensic psychiatry today is applied to fin de siecle contexts. The chapter provides a discussion of three texts—Caleb Carr’s The Alienist (1995), Frank Tallis’s Mortal Mischief (2005), and Jed Rubenfeld’s The Interpretation of Murder (2006)—focusing on the figures of psychiatrist detectives who represent an anachronistic antipatriarchal and egalitarian perspective on the marginalised and impoverished classes in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century society.
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Research Interests: Art()
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The review offers a summary and comment on Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben's "Neo-Victorian Humour" (2017).
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Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1997), a neo-Victorian classic biofictional novel about a nineteenth-century murderess, is interpreted in this chapter as a narrative of a madwoman, that is, a narrative which undercuts a possibility of a... more
Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1997), a neo-Victorian classic biofictional novel about a nineteenth-century murderess, is interpreted in this chapter as a narrative of a madwoman, that is, a narrative which undercuts a possibility of a coherent representation of the self. Her “inability to speak”—fragmentation, instability and incompleteness of her narrative—is what makes it queer; its queerness is based in its refusal to be within the doctor-listener’s/reader’s grasp. Grace’s (mad) story, via its narrative “failure” to offer a linear, coherent account, becomes the epitome of queer subversiveness. The chapter also discusses the television adaptation of Atwood’s novel the to examine alternative techniques used in the adaptive medium to express the instabilities and the incoherence of the self, and to examine if Grace Marks of the television show is also, indeed, a (queer) madwoman.
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Since its premiere in September 2011 at Venice Film Festival, Shame (dir. Steve McQueen) has been interpreted as a cinematographic illustration of sexual addiction. Set in contemporary New York, it presents Brandon Sullivan, a... more
Since its premiere in September 2011 at Venice Film Festival, Shame (dir. Steve McQueen) has been interpreted as a cinematographic illustration of sexual addiction. Set in contemporary New York, it presents Brandon Sullivan, a professional in his early thirties, as he indulges in sexual excess and pornography. The arrival of his sister Sissy, a needy and neurotic artist, shakes his carefully constructed routine and forces him to face his compulsions. But a much more subversive aspect of this film is provided by the problematic relationship between Brandon (Michael Fassbender) and Sissy (Carey Mulligan); it has become the subject of a heated debate among the film’s viewers, who ponder on the possible traumatic source of the characters’ mental disturbances as well as a conceivable past and/or present incestuous desire. However, their corresponding first names (Brandon/brother and Sissy/sister) would suggest a possibility of a more symbolic nature of the conflict between the siblings, one which would posit these characters as metaphorical representations of a heteronormative masculinity and femininity immersed in the concrete jungle of the patriarchal context. Brandon’s objectification of females through his male gaze and avoidance of all intimacy correspond to R. W. Connolly’s concept of hegemonic masculinity, a preferred gender performance for males in a patriarchal society. Sissy, on the other hand, represents femininity, understood as those aspects of one’s identity which are externalised and rejected by hegemonic masculinity. Together, Brandon and Sissy represent two binaries, each other’s doppelgängers at a war with each other. Brandon’s instantaneous attraction and repulsion toward Sissy may symbolically signify the crisis in which hegemonic masculinity (Brandon) finds itself, threatened and engendered by femininity (Sissy). Only when Brandon engages in an extreme sexual objectification of himself is he able to accommodate the female vulnerability into his identity. The female gaze the film seems to apply by an extensive display of Michael Fassbender’s body underlines the message that once masculinity incorporates a possibility of “female” elements in its identity performance, it will be able to free itself from the demands of patriarchy.
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To be published on 26 Sept 2019 in: &quot;Bodies in Flux: Embodiements at the end of Antropocentrism&quot;, Hanan Muzaffar and Barbara Braid, eds. Amsterdam: Brill, 2018. Controversies surrounding Lady Gaga include not only her... more
To be published on 26 Sept 2019 in: &quot;Bodies in Flux: Embodiements at the end of Antropocentrism&quot;, Hanan Muzaffar and Barbara Braid, eds. Amsterdam: Brill, 2018. Controversies surrounding Lady Gaga include not only her fashion choices, but also her representation of the (female) body: sexually objectified, commodified, subject to violence, battered and disabled. In the following chapter the author examines the body imagery used in Gaga’s music and videos, especially images of disabled, modified, and/or monstrous body, as Gothic aesthetic is often used in Gaga’s oeuvre. The subversive potential of faux disability drag used by Lady Gaga, and of the female Gothic conventions present in her art is suggested as a way to represent the blurring of the lines between the Self and the Other. However, the power of Lady Gaga’s work lies not in its political message, but in the artistic one. The author goes on to prove that the images of disabled bodies are used by Lady Gaga to exemplify a wider idea of a queer body and of a fluid, performative identity, which Lady Gaga represents in her artistic persona. Keywords: Lady Gaga, gothic body, disabled body, female Gothic, performance, fluid identity, queer
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Disability studies generally aim at an analysis of how an impairment becomes a disability due to the society’s definitions of normativity which do not encompass less-than-perfect bodies. Ever since its appearance in 1990s disability... more
Disability studies generally aim at an analysis of how an impairment becomes a disability due to the society’s definitions of normativity which do not encompass less-than-perfect bodies. Ever since its appearance in 1990s disability studies has focused on cultural and social contexts, thus going beyond the medical and biological discourse of disability. Consequently, a natural step in its development has been to combine disability studies with issues of race, class, gender and sexuality. Such agendas of disability studies as denaturalisation of disability and inclusion of dismissed (disabled) bodies give disability studies and feminism a common ground, thus leading to an emergence of feminist disability studies. Its focus on both feminine and disabled body as a source of identity and a struggle with stereotypes of the female disabled are the most often discussed aspects. The issue of mental disability, however, has not been as yet thoroughly researched. As a theory used for the study of literature, it has been proposed and applied by Elizabeth J. Donaldson. In her “The Corpus of the Madwoman” (2002) she put forward a hypothesis that a madwoman is not an avatar of a rebellious feminist but a corporealised reality. This view has been backed by Andrea Nicki in her paper “The Abused Mind” (2001), where she searches for a trauma, especially a bodily and a sexual one, to explain female insanity and fight with its stereotypes. This view will become the starting point for the analysis of the theme of female madness in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace. Using feminist disability studies, this paper will discuss Grace Mark’s relation to her body and her femininity as well as traumas in her past to examine the function of the motif of madness in Atwood’s novel and its role in the overall interpretation of the book.
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The latest novel by Sarah Waters, published in 2009, has received critical acclaim for its realistic representation of post-war Britain, its affiliation with great gothic classics, such as The Turn of the Screw or The Fall of the House of... more
The latest novel by Sarah Waters, published in 2009, has received critical acclaim for its realistic representation of post-war Britain, its affiliation with great gothic classics, such as The Turn of the Screw or The Fall of the House of Usher, and above all, its ambiguous ending. However, it is a bit of a ‘shorthand’ to call the novel gothic, as has been admitted by the author herself in a video interview taken by Rebecca Lovell in May 2009. Instead, Waters calls the book “a haunted house novel.” The unanswered question of the novel is, what is it that haunts Hundreds Hall? The paper makes an attempt to provide one possible answer to this question, focusing on the idea of transgression. Of course in any gothic work of fiction the occurrence of a supernatural element signals a crossing of the borderline between the possible and the impossible. A fantastic entity questions the stability of this frontier. In Waters’ novel, however, the transgression of the real signals another crossing of boundaries. The unreliable narrator of the novel is the crux of its interpretation. The enigmatic events in the house coincide with Dr Faraday’s growing attachment to the Ayreses family. He is an educated man who, on the one hand, no longer fits into the working class of his parents, but still, due to his origins, feels insecure in the upper class to which the inhabitants of Hundreds Hall belong. His constant roaming of the class boundaries is the key to the haunting mystery. The paper is going to analyse different images and symbols of transgression in the novel to show the connection between the issue of class and the gothic elements in the book and to provide a possible interpretation of its equivocal ending.
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In Michel Faber's novel published in 2002, The Crimson Petal and the White, Sugar and Agnes seem to represent the typical division in Victorian society: women can be either whores (monsters) or ladies (angels). However, the author of... more
In Michel Faber's novel published in 2002, The Crimson Petal and the White, Sugar and Agnes seem to represent the typical division in Victorian society: women can be either whores (monsters) or ladies (angels). However, the author of the novel presents and then ...
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Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is one of the most adaptable and adapted novels of all time, spurring countless renditions in film, television, comic books, cartoons, and other products of popular culture. Like a meme, this story... more
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is one of the most adaptable and adapted novels of all time, spurring countless renditions in film, television, comic books, cartoons, and other products of popular culture. Like a meme, this story adapts itself to changing cultural contexts by replication with mutation. This article examines the adaptive and appropriative features of two recent examples of such renditions in the form of television series, Penny Dreadful (2014-2016) and The Frankenstein Chronicles (2015). It discusses palimpsestic appropriations used in these shows, their depiction of Frankenstein and his Creatures, and above all, the themes and their meanings which these twenty-first-century appropriations of Frankenstein offer.