GLOBAL CAPITALISM AND THE BOUNDARIES OF IDENTITY
by Robert Herschbach
University of New Hampshire, December, 2002
B.A., University of Virginia 1987
M.F.A., University of Iowa 1992
INTRODUCTION....................................................................................................................1
I. FAMOUS IMPOSTERS: THE VICTORIAN METROPOLIS.......................................40
II. DRACULA AND THE CRISIS OF SUBJECTIVITY................................................... 67
III. ELIOT AND THE GOTHIC..........................................................................................93
IV. VAMPIRE CULTURE: GIBSON AND THE GLOBAL AESTHETIC.................. 118
V. BABES IN THE GARDEN: THE SUBURBAN IDYLL........................................... 143
BIBLIOGRAPHY.................................................................................................................160
ABSTRACT
Since Dickens and Mary Shelley, the Gothic has provided a rubric for literary
conceptualizations of modernity. Dickens' depictions of industrial London characterize it
as a labyrinth of temptations and horrors, haunted by monstrosity and by personal and
social demons: the monster in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is the disfigured byproduct of
science and technology. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, perhaps the most effective "global"
narrative to come out o f the British fin de siecle, grafted elements of a pre-Enlightenment
atavism onto the tum-of-the-century liberal metropolis. In our own era, the literature of
the postmodern technopolis - the fiction of William Gibson, for example - has continued
to borrow Gothic motifs and devices.
This dissertation is a study of literary representations of technology, capitalism
and the modem metropolis - representations based in the anxieties and desires that
accompany middle-class self-fashioning. The Gothic, in its original guise, depicts the
corruption and ruination of the estate, often by economic and cultural forces emanating
from the city and associated with capitalism and modernity; thus, to invoke the Gothic is
also to reference middle class guilt and doubts about legitimacy. At the same time. Gothic
allusions allow the middle class to retell its foundational myth of a struggle for liberation
from feudal constraints
Much 19,h and 20th literature, both popular and highbrow, entertains an
ambiguous and complicated relationship to the city - the site of economic, political and
cultural forces which are both liberating and traumatizing. Though capitalism and
technology drove its ascendancy, the middle class has traditionally seen the city as a
place both of opportunity and danger, of allure and revulsion or horror - a set of mixed
emotions which tends to suggest an insecure, unstable or divided subjectivity. This
complicated relationship to the city provided much of the impetus for the quest to build a
"bourgeois utopia" - a refuge located at the fringe of the city in which the equilibrium of
a romanticized pre-urban order is recovered. But because the contradictions within
middle class identity can never be fully resolved, the "utopia" always harbors the
potential to become a haunted grove, visited by that which has been repressed or abjected
in the process of creating modernity.
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