Mountaineer Undergraduate Research Review
Document Type
Article
Abstract
This essay asserts that gothic pandemic literature is a vital source for recording a history of collective traumas and psychological responses to events of mass contagion. I will first discuss the close historical relationship between the gothic genre and early medicine to convey that the entwining of the scientific and supernatural allows gothic literature to express mass hysteria and abstract fear tangibly. Then, I analyze the work of Daniel Defoe, Edgar Allan Poe, and Carmen Maria Machado, using them as representatives of three distinct historical eras of pandemics. I consider each author’s merging of their respective medical realities with the mystifying nature of gothic concepts. First, I describe the authors’ usage of setting to defamiliarize the real world. Then, through analysis of examples in each text, I consider the gothic’s ability to depict contagion as a personified, villainous entity. Finally, I relate these factors to the contemporary era and the COVID-19 pandemic, where gothic tropes remain prevalent as coping mechanisms to weather the crisis of mass contagion. Throughout history and in the present, gothic literature is a vital resource to preserve and express records of anxiety; this is vital to a full understanding of our place in history, and our indisputable connection to the crises of the past.
Recommended Citation
Smith, Cassi
(2023)
"The Psychology of Contagion: Representations of Historic Pandemics in Gothic Literature,"
Mountaineer Undergraduate Research Review: Vol. 8, Article 10.
Available at:
https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/murr/vol8/iss1/10