On Native Grounds

This dissertation explores the reoccurrence of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein within twentieth-century American novels. While the inaccurate 1931 film version by James Whale remains the best known adaptation of Frankenstein, I argue that Willa Cather, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Chuck Palahniuk return to Shelley’s 1818 novel to critique racist and misogynistic responses to anxieties about gender and racial power in the age of industrial consumer culture. In doing so, I extend existing scholarship on the American Gothic to demonstrate that The Professor’s House, Invisible Man, Beloved, and Fight Club represent a specifically Shelleyan Gothic tradition in twentieth-century American literature. My project draws upon influential feminist and postcolonial readings of Frankenstein and on the theoretical work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and later critics who have developed her theory to show how the twentieth-century novels echo themes and motifs from Shelley’s novel to critique the destructive effects of male homosociality. Each novel contains a protagonist that resembles Victor Frankenstein and responds to historically specific anxieties about gender, race, and industrial technoscience by creating a doppelganger who enables participation in a homosocial bond that is initially empowering but proves destructive to women, racial minorities, and eventually the creature and creator figures themselves. My reading reveals unexpected similarities between Cather’s The Professor’s House and Palahniuk’s Fight Club. Cather’s novel appears to glorify Tom Outland as the ideal masculine hero but ultimately reveals him to be a monstrous doppelganger who acts out the Professor’s oppressive impulses; similarly, Fight Club seems to romanticize the male violence instigated by the doppelganger figure Tyler Durden but actually echoes Shelley’s critique of male homosociality as monstrous. My reading also reveals ii

https://www.ruor.uottawa.ca/bitstream/10393/24370/1/Frampton_Sara_2013_thesis.pdf

“I Bid My Hideous Progeny Go Forth and Prosper”: Frankenstein’s Homosocial Doubles and Twentieth Century American Literature

Felicitous Space: The Imaginative Structures of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather

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Bildungskonzepte im nordamerikanischen Universitätsroman

From a "Stretch of Grey Sea" to the "Extent of Space": The Gaze Across Vistas in Cather's The Professor's House

Coetzee and Some Variations on the Writer's Responsibility.\" Ariel 19.4 (1988): 55-72. Post, Robert M. \"Oppression in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee,\" Critique 27.2 (1986): 67-77. Van Lierop, Karin. \"A Mythical Interpretation of J. M. Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K.\" Commonwealth: Essays & Studies 9.1 (1986): 44-49. Wright, Derek. \"Chthonic Man: Landscape, History and Myth in Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K.\" New Literatures Review 21 (1991): 1-15.

Michael Leddy

Papers

The Professor's House and the Professor's Houses