Graduation Year
Spring 2012
Document Type
Open Access Senior Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
English
Reader 1
Cheryl Walker
Reader 2
John Peavoy
Terms of Use & License Information
Rights Information
© 2012 Elizabeth Lain Lyon
Abstract
Within Gothic literature, the mother is frequently missing. In Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly, Edgar Allan Poe’s “Morella,” “Ligeia,” and “Eleonora,” and Edith Wharton’s “Bewitched,” men are left without parents, and they attempt to recuperate a mother-figure. To do so, the men in these texts psychologically project the role of their mother onto other women. Wives, sisters, and daughters all have the potential to become mothers to these men. This is a catastrophe for the women involved, for male perception fails to distinguish females as autonomous, unique beings. By conflating roles in the family structure, men destroy women and thus are left without the nurturing mother-figure – or indeed any female – they desperately need.
Recommended Citation
Lyon, Elizabeth Lain, "Mothers, Sons, and the Gothic Family in Brown, Poe, and Wharton" (2012). Scripps Senior Theses. 67.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/67
