Neo-Gothic Phantasms: Parodies of “Deranged Imagination” in Contemporary Fiction. Clare Clark’s The Nature of Monsters (2007)
Neo-Gothic Phantasms: Parodies of “Deranged Imagination” in Contemporary Fiction. Clare Clark’s The Nature of Monsters (2007)

Summary/Abstract: This paper targets a narrative of monstrous births “rewritten” in the Neo-Gothic vein. Like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) or A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990), Clare Clark’s The Nature of Monsters (2007) pursues an ever-shifting referent of Gothic phantasms: the perpetually deferred, constantly craved-after origin of monstrosity, whether corporeal or psychological, or both. Clark’s narrative thus revisits one of the cultural constants of teratological discourse, namely maternal imagination, which has for centuries been indicted as a cause of deformed births, and dislodges it from its traditional frame of interpretation, shifting the agency of monstrous genesis from the naturally canny birthing processes onto the uncanny Frankensteinian figure of a madly obsessed scientist.

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