ENG 4934 Fall 2020 Ward

As Markman Ellis observes in History of the Gothic, Great Britain’s position as the dominant slave trading nation during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries exerted a clear influence on the development of gothic fiction. In this course, we will read a variety of texts that demonstrate the intersections between the gothic and the “horrors” of slavery—works published before and after the abolition of that institution in the Anglo Caribbean. Texts to be covered include “Isle of Devils” and excerpts from Journal of a West India Proprietor by Matthew Lewis, author of one of the most famous eighteenth-century gothic novels, The Monk; the little known Caribbean novel, Hamel, the Obeah Man (1827), which deals with colonial anxieties over African religious practices and slave insurrections; Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, the author’s creole reply to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, with its (creole) madwoman in the attic; The White Witch of Rosehall (1929), a persistently popular twentieth-century Jamaican gothic potboiler; Pauline Melville’s Migration of Ghosts, a collection of short stories whose gothic overtones reflect the haunting legacy of slavery and colonialism; Erna Brodber’s Myal, an exploration of the process and cure of the processes of “zombification” and “spirit thievery” in post-slavery Caribbean culture; and, finally, Marlon James’s historical novel describing an uprising on an eighteenth-century Jamaican sugar estate, The Book of Night Women, described in the New York Times Book Review as an “experiment in how to write the unspeakable—even the unthinkable” realities of life during slavery and all the modes of resistance to them.

In examining the ways that slavery and race informed and “Gothicized” popular conceptions of the Caribbean, we will draw on a number of theoretical approaches—e.g., postcolonialist, feminist, and materialist theories—found in the critical conversations surrounding these primary texts.