Abstract
Oates’s novel, The Gravedigger’s Daughter (2007) tells the story of the Schwarts, a family of Jew immigrants fleeing Nazi Germany in 1936 and their inability to adapt themselves to American society. In different ways all the members of the
Schwart family turn into monstrous beings. All except the seemingly successful female protagonist, Rebecca, who surprisingly manages to endure the cruel and hideous atmosphere of her damp home near the graveyard and escape death in her childhood. In this paper I will try to analyse fear and monstrosity as it is found in
The Gravedigger’s Daughter . In doing so, I will identify the nature of monstrosity in the Schwarts and other less obvious cases of monstrosity. This will lead us to examining the reasons why Rebecca, the youngest and most vulnerable of the
Schwarts is the only member of the family who survives in such a cruel and hostile environment. Finally, Rebecca’s strategies for survival and their implication will be taken into consideration in an effort to try to understand the nature of her accomplishment in the context of Contemporary American History. It is patent that
Rebecca’s tactics have saved her from extinction and death yet they prove a failure in her attempts to eradicate her panic of returning to a world of domestic terrors.
The fact is that Rebecca’s repressed fears and monsters of the past haunt Rebecca’s existence as she grows into adulthood and a comfortable bourgeois life style.
Key Words: Gothic-postmodernism, fear, monstrosity, survival, self-alienation, hybridity, identity, liminal existence, Oates.
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1. Introduction
Although Gothic literature emerged as a reaction against the excessive strictures of the Enlightenment reaching its peak just after the French Revolution, the postmodernist age shares with that historical period and awareness of terror and death.
As we know, Gothic terror and anxiety relate to a fast changing reality defined by violence, confusion and meaninglessness. Many of the issues articulated in the
Gothic and terror novels–the distrust of power, the dangers of science, godlessness, social anarchy and privation–together with the sense self-alienation have consequently pervaded the arts throughout the 20 th century increasing their presence after the 1950’s and at crucial moments like our post-9/11 terrorised culture. In this culture of fear Gothic postmodernist fiction may be then said to

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__________________________________________________________________ function as ‘as an artistic response’ to the different kinds of terror that currently trouble our collective unconscious but also as our yearning to deal with the darker and indefinable regions of our observable reality.
Violence, death and terror prevail in Joyce Carol Oates’s production and in The
Gravedigger’s Daughter (2007) the American writer revisits themes of her earlier works: abuse, anti-Semitism, dysfunctional family life and women’s struggle for independence in a period that spans from 1936 to the late 1990’s. As Lee Siegel declares in a New York Times review of the novel: ‘Oates’s fiction courses around the twin poles of [our national] American existence: hybridity and fluidity’ 1 . And indeed, The Gravedigger’s Daughter tells the story of the Schwarts, Jew immigrants fleeing Nazi Germany and their failure to adapt themselves and be accepted by American society. Around the problematic issue of the immigrant hybrid identity in the multicultural scene of mid and late 20 th century in the USA, a number of apparently clear-cut oppositions (American/non-American, male/female, monstrous/ natural, human/inhuman) linked to the definition the self rise prominently in this novel to question own their validity.
The Gravedigger’s Daughter flashes back to 1936, when Rebecca’s Nazifleeing family arrives in New York where she ‘is born’ an ‘American’ in a putrid immigrant boat. Once settled in rural upstate New York Jacob Schwart descends from Math teacher in Germany to a despicable gravedigger in America. There he and his family strive desperately to make a living but they are ostracized and terrorized by vandals who paint tar swastikas and shout ‘ Gravedigger! Kraut!
Nazi!, Jew!
’ (59). The Schwarts subsist in extreme poverty and shrink grotesquely in an isolated and insalubrious cottage as the father gradually turns into an abject unforgiving being of deformed appearance. Humiliated by racial prejudice and his debased way of living, Jacob Schwart violently rejects American civilisation and starts tormenting his wife and children until he finally kills her and commits suicide in the face of her 13-year-old daughter. Although the event traumatises
Rebecca, she endures. Later, as an orphan Rebecca also breaks away from the overprotective care of an obsessive Christian woman, to end up in the hands of a mobster, Niles Tignor, an absent husband/father-figure who brutally beats up her and their 3-year-old son. Yet, once again she is able to avoid tragedy as she does at
23 when she escapes death by Hendricks, a serial killer, only out of her most primitive instincts. Determined on survival, Rebecca progresses from traumatised orphan, hotel chambermaid, numbed factory worker and abused run-away wife to single mother, and finally affluent wife of a successful jazz musician and media tycoon. In the meanwhile she has to assume a different identity, that of a ‘real’
American, Hazel Jones. But, does the new name imply the emergence of a new self?
The looping and fragmented narrative opens in 1959 when 23-year-old Rebecca
Schwart–now Mrs Tignor–a married woman and mother hears in her father’s

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__________________________________________________________________ haunting voice a sentence that hovers in her mind since she was a child: ‘In animal life the weak are quickly disposed of.
’ The words reverberate as a nagging refrain at crucial moments in Rebecca’s life followed by ‘ So you must hide your weakness,
Rebecca. We must.
’ Jacob’s faith in the crude Darwinian dogma helps Rebecca to react when threatened, when she will be chased by her terror of death. In that first episode Rebecca is being followed by a strange-looking man in a panama hat who, in spite of his harmless exterior, turns out to be–so we learn at the very end–a serial killer. But persecution is a constant motive in the novel for not only bears relevance on the personal (Rebecca running away from her abusing husband) and historical (the Nazi genocide that forces their exile), but also on the more symbolic level since the archetypal myth of the Wandering Jew emerges in Tignor’s speech:
“Your race, Rebecca. You are wanderers.” “Race? What race?” “The race to which you were born.” (233), when she complains they are ‘always on the move ’ (248) lacking permanent dwelling and in the fact of Rebecca’s ‘ keeping-going ’(386) escaping her oppressor and a certain death.
But in order to fully appreciate the gothic implications of this novel let me first consider in what ways this postmodernist piece by Oates should be considered as a good example of Gothic postmodernist fiction.
2. Gothic fiction in the era of postmodernism
The Gothic has long provided an outlet for the expression of fears relating to terror and terrorism while also playing a significant role in the creation of terror itself 2 . In a historical sense Fred Botting notes that the Gothic is ‘a writing of excess […] which shadows the despairing ecstasies of Romantic idealism and individualism and the uncanny dualities of Victorian realism and decadence’ 3 . For other critics like Robert Miles the Gothic is neither a genre nor a style characterised by a set of well known conventions but ‘a discursive site, a carnivalesque mode for representations of a fragmented subject.’ 4
Even if we must not overlook those devices traditionally associated to the
Gothic, I personally agree with Beville that in dealing with Gothic-postmodernism
‘it is necessary to look beyond traditional conventions and stereotypes and to recognise the discourses, themes and sublime excesses that maintain the relevance and value of the Gothic aspects of the genre’ 5 . What is then the value of Gothic nowadays? Among the broad spectrum of literary works that may be identified as
Gothic-postmodernist, there are a number of traits they share. We could mention among them, the ability of Gothic-postmodernist texts to explore the subjective experience of terror allowing us to grasp what Baudrillard would call ‘the real’.
Secondly, these texts take the concept of objectified horror to the internal unstable core of the individual human subject. Thirdly, they work to destabilise conventional oppositions such as self/other and good/evil, normal/abnormal, civilized/uncivilized focusing the Gothic imaginary on the postmodernist approach to reality as boundless and immeasurable, and in so doing they expose the gender,

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__________________________________________________________________ sexual and racially-based prejudices of our postmodern society. And finally, in
Gothic-postmodernism these prejudices are exposed by amalgamating Gothic and metafictional literary devices such as sensationalism, the supernatural, mystery, suspense and the fabulous 6 .
As is well-known, Edmund Burke claimed in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) that ‘terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently, the ruling principle of the sublime.’ 7 The concept of the sublime had an essential role in the construction of
Gothic aesthetics in the 18 th century and it directed the attention toward the dark side of human subjective experience. In Gothic literature then the sublime experience must also be present for it extends the domain of the perceptible. And this has implications on the role of terror in postmodernist literature. I will then follow Beville in the conviction that ‘Terror, in its deepest sense of experience is a fundamental preoccupation of Gothic-postmodernism, so much so, that it could be defined as a guiding principle.’ 8
Now turning to Oates’s The Gravedigger’s Daughter , I invite you to consider it in the light of Gothic-postmodernism as in my view the text explores the experience of terror as it relates to the central problem of subjectivity and being.
As I hope to demonstrate the issue of identity and knowledge (epistemology) and existence (ontology) of the self are problematised in
The Gravedigger’s Daughter
.
The identified self of the heroine, Rebecca Schwart, is always ‘an-other’– You are one of them. Born here , says her father.
9 As Rebecca changes names from Schwart to Tignor to Hazel Jones and Hazel Gallagher, she mutates her social identity and but deep inside the conflict about the nature of her ‘true’ self (half German, half
American, one of us, one of them) increases, transforming itself in an unattainable object of knowledge and to the point of becoming inexistent.
3. Monstrosity
Violence and threat pervade Oates’s fiction as it is apparent from her early days as a writer. Indeed, her first short story–‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You
Been?’ published in 1966–was based on the Tucson serial killer and she has not only written gothic tales and novels but has compiled and edited American Gothic
Tales (1996).
In The Gravedigger’s Daughter the gothic setting is ubiquitous. It is manifest in the ruined, dark smelling cottage at the Christian graveyard but also in most other places where Rebecca’s early life elapses–the putrid boat of her birth, the hell-hole of the assembly line at Niagara Tubbing factory where workers erupt as ‘bats out of hell’, the falling house at Poor Farm Road where she is battered or the desolate towpath by the canal where she is ‘tracked’. In Oates’s novel the gloomy castle turns out to be the cottage by the graveyard and the bleak house where Tignor has

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__________________________________________________________________ abandoned her, while the labyrinth has been transformed into a ‘culvert opened into a fetid marsh’, and in the path where ‘the horizon was unnaturally close’.
But apart from that stock device of the setting, one of the most conspicuous traits in this novel related to Gothic fiction is the presence of grotesque monsters.
Following Stephen Asma ‘the label of monster […] is usually reserved for a person whose actions have placed him outside the range of humanity’ 10 . And a careful examination of all the members of the Schwart family reveals that they possess to certain extent traits of inhumanity. They are alienated and gradually transform themselves into beasts unfit to survive in an apparently more civilised, superior world that the one they belong to–the graveyard–and back in the Old World, Nazi
Germany. All except the resilient Rebecca, who surprisingly manages to escape death by her maddened father in her childhood, seem to possess abject qualities.
Monstrosity comes at first to be associated to the low animal-like instincts developed in the Schwarts. Yet, this straight-forward view of the notion of monstrosity will be challenged by Oates as she depicts other characters that, underneath an ‘ordinary’ or ‘civilised’ appearance, hide all sorts of deviations from humanity.
Hence, it is probably Jacob who stands out as the most conspicuous case of monstrosity:
A troll-man, Jacob Schwart was. Like a creature who has emerged from the earth, slightly bent, broken-backed and with his head carried at an awkward angle so that he seemed always to be peering at the world suspiciously, from the side. He’d torn ligament in his knee and now walked with a limp, one of his shoulders was carried higher than the other. (126)
Jacob even sounds diabolical and is generally identified with the cunning reptile:
Jacob Schwart was always grinning when the word ‘God’ popped out of his mouth like a playful tongue. Pa would say, for instance, “God chases us into a corner. God is stamping his big boot-foot, to obliterate us. And yet there is a way out.
Remember, children: always there is a way out. If you can make yourself small enough, like a worm.” (146)
Socially he is seen as a proud outsider, unable to speak without a German accent, prone to violent outbursts of anger, suspicious of the others. Being by birth a Jew, he hates the Nazis back in the Old World but also the Americans who humiliate him having to tend a Christian cemetery. And in the privacy of his home bitter, Jacob is cruel–forbidding his family to speak their native German or to listen to the radio–aggressive and aloof. He is especially vicious to his wife, whom he

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__________________________________________________________________ despises for being a weak helpless female. It was all an unexpected end for him, for with a university degree, Jacob had had a comfortable living in Germany, had read Hegel, who believed ‘that there is ‘progress’ in the history of human kind’
(85), Schopenhauer without succumbing to his pessimism, Feuerbach’s savage critique of religion and Marx. Yet, little by little his speech gives way to grunts, animal sounds and silences. In short, Jacob gradually loses all faith of redemption in humankind and with it all his humanity. He blames the Nazi Holocaust and believes in an American conspiracy against them:
Set beside Hitler’s rantings, and Hitler’s demon logic, how flimsy, how merely words were the great works of philosophy!
How merely words the dream of mankind for a god!
Among his enemies here in the Chautauqua Valley, Jacob
Schwart would not be hypotized. He would not be unarmed.
History would not repeat itself.
He blamed his enemies for this, too: that he Jacob Schwart, a refined and educated individual, formely a citizen of Germany, should be forced to behave in such a barbaric manner.
He, a former math teacher at a prestigious boys’ school. A former respected employee of a most distinguished Munich printing firm specializing in scientific publications
Now, a gravedigger. A caretaker of these others, his enemies.
(156)
His two sons grow as ignorant, brutish and unadjusted children and that causes people to reject them. Herschel, the oldest, is an impulsive brawler who revenges on those who insult the Schwarts, ‘a one-quarter Seneca Blood ’ (139). He will disappear as a dangerous fugitive at 21. August is slow and his father humiliates and batters him too. Both of them vanish forever before Rebecca’s traumatic orphanage.
Similarly the mother, Anna Schwart, undergoes a process of dehumanisation.
She recoils in horror at the grim prospects of her life in America with a resentful husband, who thinks of her as a curse. Although she is not dangerous, Anna
Schwart gradually drowns in her fear of being poisoned and attacked by others, in the terror of her tyrant husband hurting her or her children. Rebecca’s mother becomes a sort of spectral figure, absent most of the time, silent, almost an unobtrusive shadow. She virtually ceases to exist long before she is killed. Anna’s relatives, as refugees of the Nazi genocide, also share that spectral and liminal existence: ‘Or, if these Morgenstern existed, they were but strangers in photographs, a man and a woman in a setting dried of all colour, beginning to fade like ghosts.’ (105).

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Yet Rebecca’s case is slightly different. Under the cynical authority of the gravedigger and by analogy with her family, Rebecca takes a little after her father and suffers an alienated childhood and youth. She behaves in a distrustful and rebellious manner against their unusual civilities and niceties. Her father explains to her: ‘
You are one of them. Born here
.’ So that makes her unlike the other
Schwarts. Yet in the eyes of neighbours, acquaintances and her first husband, she is the gravedigger’s daughter, and thus a Jew, a Gypsy-girl:
She was not a shy young woman, and she was not weak. Not in her body, or in her instincts. She was not a very feminine woman.
There was nothing soft, pliant, melting about her; rather she believed herself hard, sinewy. She had a striking face, large deepset very dark eyes, with dark brows heavy as a man’s, and something of a man’s stance, in confronting others. In essence she despised the weakness of women, deep in her soul. She was ashamed , infuriated. For this was the ancient weakness of women, her mother Anna Schwart’s weakness. The weakness of a defeated race. (11)
Apart from Jacob, an abject homicidal monster, Niles Tignor, Rebecca’s first lover, is next to him the most obvious source of terror in the novel. After leaving
Miss Lutter–the girl’s guard after her parents’ death–Rebecca is seduced by this dark mysterious businessman who makes her belief they have got married. From the very beginning Tignor’s double face–physically attractive and popular but brutally aggressive and self-possessed–is wrongly interpreted by inexperienced
Rebecca as signs of love:
Niles Tignor had rescued her. Niles Tignor was her hero. He’d taken her from Milburn in his car, they’d eloped to Niagara Falls.
Her girlfriends had been envious. Every girl in Milburn adored
Niles Tignor from afar.
Yet months later Rebecca realizes she has been deceived and understand she has fallen under the grip of a terrifying monster that batters her even when pregnant:
Since Rebecca’s miscarriage, and the fever she’d had for days afterward, the feeling between her and Tignor had changed, subtly.
Tignor was not so jovial any longer, so loud-laughing. […]For
Rebbeca had caused the miscarriage, with her reckless behaviour.
Talking about Tignor with the chambermaid! Helping a

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__________________________________________________________________ chambermaid make up the room! When she was Mrs. Niles Tignor, and should have had dignity. (293)
Examples of monstrosity and evil abound in Rebecca’s grim world. However, we find a less patent case in the character of Byron Hendricks, the man in panama hat who chases Rebecca on her way home on the pretext of taking her for Hazel
Jones.
He did seem harmless. Hardly taller than Rebecca, and wearing brown oxford shoes covered in dust. The cuffs of his creamcolored trousers were soiled, too. Rebecca smelled a sweet cologne or aftershave. As he was a young-old man, so he was a weak-strong man, too. A man you misjudge as weak, but in fact he is strong. […] Long ago Rebecca’s father Jacob Schwart the gravedigger of Milburn had been a weak-strong man, only his family had known of his terrible strength, his reptile will, beneath the meek-seeming exterior. Rebecca sensed a similar doubleness
[emphasis mine] here, in this man. He was apologetic, yet not humble. Not a strain of humility in his soul. He thought well of himself obviously. He knew hazel Jones, he’d followed Hazel
Jones, He would not give up on Hazel Jones, not easily (23).
We are used to interpreting civilised ways, politeness and rationality as symptoms of reliability and human kindness but Rebecca’s experience shows that under that neat surface may hide a monster, a psychopathic killer who threatens her with extinction. As a result, the mystifying and sometimes dangerous duplicity of characters emerges here as one of the Gothic devices Oates resorts to in order warn us of the existence of hidden counter-currents that lie repressed. This is aimed at increasing the readers’ awareness of danger and to deflate the readers’ convictions on stable categories to understand this meaningless, brutish reality. In support of this idea, I would like to pin down a few telling images and symbols whose role is to give insight into the ambiguous nature of things as they are presented to us. In
Oates’s novel the subjective playfulness of meaning comes to the fore, blurring the frontiers between opposite notions as is one of the essential hallmarks of postmodernist fiction.
It is precisely in this sense that the radio emerges an ambivalent object which may paradoxically stand both for good and evil, depending on the subjective interpretation of each character. In 1940 the gravedigger buys a second-hand
Motorola to be informed, but only to his own despair as he listens to the horrifying reports about World War II. Then, enraged at the terror the news coming out from

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__________________________________________________________________ that object inspire, Jacob forbids his family to listen to the radio, as if the malignant influence of the outer world could contaminate and destroy them:
This radio is mine. This news is mine. I am the father, all facts are mine. All knowledge of the world outside this house of sorrow is mine to keep from you, my children (47).
Not even listening to music is allowed. However, Anna Schwart listens secretly to classical music, the melodies she used to play at her piano when she was young and attractive in the Old World:
Rebecca saw how the radio dial glowed a rich thrumming orange like something living. Out of the dust latticed speaker emerged sounds so beautiful, rapid yet precisely rendered, Rebecca listened in amazement. A piano, was it? Piano music?
Rebecca’s mothers glanced toward her as if to ascertain this wasn´t Jacob
Schwart, there was no danger. (127)
The radio is here endowed of living attributes, precisely those features the
Schwarts, figuratively buried alive in their graveyard, have completely been deprived of in their profound alienation from American life. Yet, after her parents’ death, Rebecca gets irritated when overhearing the radio, filling the house in unwanted intrusion with the animated voices of advertisers and, above all, with jazz. In time, Rebecca will enjoy this music–‘cool, moody jazz. Seductive’– a sort of ‘marginal’ language hybrid characters in the novel will love. Thus Niles Jr. or
Zach–as he is renamed to escape Tignor’s revenge–will be fascinated by jazz. This music reaches him through the radio and will prove a positive influence in the boy’s life. It will be that music he will eventually learn to perform from
Rebecca’s/Hazel’s admirer, Chet Gallagher, who will rescue her from terror by marrying her and adopting her son. Later in life Zach Gallagher, Rebecca’s son, will see success as an accomplished pianist in an international piano contest performing Anna Schwart’s favourite piece, Beethoven’s ‘Appasionatta.’ In the course of events music is additionally revealed as an alternative mode of communication for some characters. Thus, when Rebecca’s mother sinks into silence she still hums and enjoys listening to classical music, the only means to express what she cannot say in German or in the foreign language, English.
Likewise, for Rebecca’s son music will become his first language: ‘His music was a strange way of speaking. For never did he feel that any music was his.’ (383).
As for the (mis)use of language and its association with identity, there are several instances in the novel which suggest that language creates reality instead of representing it, a view held by poststructuralist and deconstructive theorists such as

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Derrida. Let me just mention a few examples to illustrate this. Learning and having a good command of English allows Rebecca to be appreciated at school and get at least academic reward. Yet, when Jacob Schwart discovers that his daughter has won a
Webster’s
Dictionary at the spelling bee he can only point at the
“accidental” spelling mistake on her middle name printed in bold ‘Rebecca Eshter
[Esther] Schwart.’ Similarly, the prohibition of speaking German and the
Schwarts’ inability to get a good command of English to retain a heavy foreign accent, except for Rebecca, already highlight the connections between language, identity and existence.
4. Strategies for survival
Closely related to those crucial notions of language, identity and existence is the idea of survival. As paradoxical as it might seem, it is only helpless Rebecca
Schwart, who in spite of her weakness, manages to survive and make the American dream come true if we consider that getting social and economic stability later in her life and being the proud mother of an acclaimed pianist are indicative of success and personal achievement. If we temporarily agree on the view, we must still take into consideration that in order to survive Rebecca Schwart has to ‘erase’ her personal history and undergo a symbolic death. In adopting the name of Hazel
Jones, someone who is actually dead, the victim of the cold-blooded serial killer, she avoids being killed by sadistic Niles Tignor. Yet by means of this conscious strategy to save her life she reveals an unconscious shame and her desire to reject her humble origins as a destitute and wandering female Jew in a racially-prejudiced
America. It is when she becomes desperate in the face of death when she starts fantasising with the idea of adopting a new name, an ‘American’ identity, more feminine, more seductive, and appealing to men like Chet Gallagher. So in order to make herself “real” she manages to get new birth certificates for herself and her son, whom she then calls Zach Jones. It can be clearly seen that naming is a device for the creation of identity, allowing existence. So, when Rebecca stars suspecting
Tignor has only deceived her into believing they are married she tries to find the certificate of marriage as a proof. Yet, unable to find it because it never existed she says ‘I am. I am Mrs. Niles Tignor. The wedding was real’ (36) in a gesture to reassure herself of her new identity as a married woman. By the same token notnaming creates the illusion of absence and non-existence. Thus in her apprehensive wish to make Tignor disappear from their lives Rebecca reflects: ‘ He, him was the danger. His name unspoken he had become strangely powerful with the passage of time. […] He, him . This was Daddy-must-not-be named.’ (386-87).
5. Conclusion
I will conclude by insisting on the idea that through the Schwarts saga Oates explores the complex nature of hybrid beings and the hard process of

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__________________________________________________________________ understanding one’s own identity: historical (educated German Jewish), national
(non-American/American), social (ignorant-poor/ affluent bourgeois; subordinated/ independent daughter-wife-widow-mother) and self identity (Rebecca Schwart-
Tignor/Hazel Jones-Gallagher). Faced with the impending presence of death, the protagonist undergoes an arduous process of negotiation with her multiple selves.
Oates forces the character and the readers to glimpse at the complexity of liminal existence (an in-between real and irreal life) which so typical characterises the post-modern condition and some of the most effective postmodernist fiction. For
Rebecca is neither foreign Jew nor completely American, her alter-egos switch endlessly in an excessive accumulation of multiple names, identities and alternate versions of herself. In this sense the novel explores a long-standing Gothic obsession: the unsteady nature of one’s self. As we have seen the heroine’s identity is unstable and resists permanent categorization not only because of the passage of time makes her grow and develop but because she is simultaneously different beings. This ontological multiplicity subverts our well-established frame of mind as it is based on a set of opposing notions about reality that seem no longer valid to grasp it in the post-modern condition we live in.
In my view, it is patent that Rebecca’s tactics save her from physical extinction yet they prove a failure in her attempts to eradicate her sense of alienation and her fears of not-being. The fact is that Rebecca’s repressed fears and monsters of the past haunt her existence as she grows into adulthood and a comfortable bourgeois life style because she has a hidden “shameful” past and an identity she does not want to reveal. Hers is a story full of silence that is dramatically voiced in the letters she exchanges in the “epilogue” with her long lost cousin Fryeda, whom eventually survived concentration camps in Germany and escaped to America to become a successful Anthropology Professor.
1 Lee Siegel, ‘A History of Violence’ review of The Gravedigger’s Daughter , by
Joyce Carol Oates, New York Times 17 June 2007, Sunday Book Review.
2 Maria Beville, Gothic-postmodernism: Voicing the Terrors of Postmodernity ,
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 33.
3 Fred Botting, Gothic, (London: Routledge, 1996),1.
4 Robert Miles, Gothic Writing 1750-1820: A Genealogy, (Routledge: London,
1993), 28.
5 Beville, Gothic-postmodernism , 39.
6 Ibid., 59.
7 Edmund Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful , (London: Penguin, 1998),101.

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8 Beville, Gothic-postmodernism , 34.
9
10 Stephen T. Asma, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 205.
Stephen T. Asma, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears ,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Beville, Maria. Gothic-postmodernism: Voicing the Terrors of Postmodernity ,
Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009.
Botting, Fred. Gothic. London: Routledge, 1996.
Burke, Edmund. Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful . London: Penguin, 1998.
Miles, Robert. Gothic Writing 1750-1820: A Genealogy.
Routledge: London, 1993.
Oates, Joyce Carol (ed.) American Gothic Tales , New York: Plume, 1996.
–––, The Gravedigger’s Daughter. New York: Harper Perennial, 2008.
Maria Luisa Pascual Garrido is Lecturer of English at the University of Cordoba
(Spain) and she is interested in the history of Gothic fiction. Her current research is now devoted to utopian literature and the feminist writings of Mary Astell.