Father, Don’t You See That I Am Dreaming?: The Female Gothic and the Creative Process

Abstract

In the course of reading and teaching literature for many years, I have been impressed with the ways that literary works attempt to disguise the fact that they are often coded personal sagas, angst-filled daydreams committed to paper and shared with the reading public. Obviously, literary works are also ideological statements, historical documents, and aesthetic productions, but they still remain in essence the work of individual human beings, all of whom have a personal history, a childhood, parents, and loved ones who have supported or betrayed them, or, most likely, some combination of the two. And yet critics are hesitant to discuss, let alone analyze, the personal content in literary works, while authors are often all too quick to conceal, obfuscate, and deny any autobiographical materials in their works. Some artists have, however, over the years spoken sensitively about these matters, and I cite a very few here to frame this chapter. The first is Richard Wright, the African American novelist, who, in an unpublished essay entitled “On Literature,” observed: “All writing is a secret form of autobiography” (6). The second example is an observation by the early twentieth-century artist Georges Braque, who noted: “Art is a wound turned to light” (3). And the third statement is from D. H. Lawrence, who noted that “one sheds one’s sicknesses in books—repeats and presents again one’s emotions, to be master of them” (90). Mastering trauma through artistic production, transforming the wounds of life by converting them into recognizable phantasies—these gestures would appear to form the core of writing as well as reading visual and verbal creativity.