The Monstrous Ordinary : the erasure of the women of Weird Tales and the implications for monster theory
Abstract
[EMBARGOED UNTIL 12/1/2024] My dissertation offers a new approach to monstrosity, called the Monstrous Ordinary, which articulates monstrosity not as something new, different, or aberrant, but originating from the normal, the ordinary, the everyday--the positions almost universally theorized by contemporary monster theory as being under threat. The Monstrous Ordinary, built from the marriage of the Freudian Uncanny and affect theory, is a departure from previous work on monsters and the monstrous that centers the experience of those usually designated as monsters. This dissertation further argues that the oversights of monster theory in its current incarnation are only made possible by the radical erasure of the work of the women of the pulp speculative magazine Weird Tales, which is considered the birthplace of our modern understanding of speculative fiction. By locating my argument here, I articulate the ways this erasure is key to several critical oversights of contemporary monster theory. As an example of the function of the Monstrous Ordinary in literature, I turn to the figure of the Gothic tyrant as written by neglected American women authors who published extensively in Weird Tales, specifically C.L. Moore, Margaret St. Clair, Allison V. Harding, Mary Elizabeth Counselman, Dorothy Quick, Everil Worrell, and Eli Colter. This dissertation also furthers the timeline of the Gothic tyranny by demonstrating that these authors rewrote the Gothic tyrant to fit the contours of their changing world, splitting him into two paradigms, the patriarch and the patriot.
Degree
Ph. D.