Journal articles on the topic 'Labyrinthine figures'

La empresa n&oacute;rdica de venta de mobiliario Ikea es mundialmente conocida por sus tiendas laber&iacute;nticas, aunque su estrategia de venta no es tanto un laberinto de pasillos como de rincones. La constataci&oacute;n de este fen&oacute;meno sirve para descubrir que los rincones son el origen del lugar de la enso&ntilde;aci&oacute;n de un habitar primordial largo tiempo olvidado. Precisamente se destaca aqu&iacute; esta dimensi&oacute;n antropol&oacute;gica y psicol&oacute;gica del rinc&oacute;n para constituir un primer resguardo elemental. En torno a esta enso&ntilde;aci&oacute;n se construye un texto especulativo sobre la vigencia del rinc&oacute;n y su presencia a la hora de adecuarla a la escala de sus habitantes, de ofrecernos un contacto alternativo con la materia de la habitaci&oacute;n, hasta descubrir su ausencia en el discurso de la modernidad salvo las respuestas ocasionales que ofrecen figuras como Jacobsen, Go Hasegawa, o la met&aacute;fora que nos brinda la escultura de Giacometti sobre &ldquo;la mujer cuchara&rdquo;. El presente escrito actualiza el tema del rinc&oacute;n desde los planteamientos conceptuales de la Escuela de los Annales, el apoyo en la metodolog&iacute;a de la Nueva Historia y el estudio de las estructuras de la experiencia subjetiva de la fenomenolog&iacute;a y la historia de las mentalidades. = <em>The Nordic furniture brand Ikea is known worldwide for its labyrinthine stores, although its real sales strategy is not so much a labyrinth of corridors as it is of corners. The verification of this phenomenon works as a starting point to discover that the corners are the origin of the place of the reverie of a primordial dwelling forgotten for a long time. Precisely this anthropological and psychological dimension of the corner is highlighted in the text to constitute the first quality of any elementary shelter. A speculative text is built around the validity of the corner and its current presence. Even though the corner adapts to the scale of its inhabitants, offering us an alternative contact with the matter of the room, we can verify its absence in the discourse of modernity, except for the occasional answers offered by figures such as Jacobsen, Go Hasegawa, or the metaphor that Giacometti&#39;s sculpture &ldquo;Spoon woman&rdquo; offers us. This paper updates the topic of the corner from the conceptual approaches of the Annales School, the support in the New History methodology and the study of the structures of the subjective experience of phenomenology and the history of mentalities.</em>

Dear Editor, We write this letter to highlight the scarcely recognised complexity associated with the unrecognised mental health needs of parents of children diagnosed with life-threatening or life-limiting illnesses. It has been widely established that parents of children with disabilities are at an increased risk of developing variants of mental diseases when compared to parents of children without such disabilities. Parents tend to alter their lives socially to acclimatize themselves as caregivers for their children, therefore adopting a role that becomes far more labyrinthine as both parent and caregiver. (1) Mental health in general, is a subject that is insufficiently addressed in societal and scholarly contexts, specifically in Pakistan, particularly among parents. Within the scope of parents acting as sole caregivers, stress is a prominent determinant contributing to their mental health. Stress can attenuate parents’ and children’s abilities to navigate these circumstances and diminish their capacity for problem-solving and coping. (2) There are a myriad of factors that contribute to the reported prevalence of mental health-related disorders among parents of children with disabilities. Mental health remains a stigmatised entity. Such disregard impedes the delivery of healthcare towards patients suffering from mental health illnesses. There is a noteworthy hindrance in individuals facing such factors when amalgamatinge into society. When considering parental figures of diseased children, this facet serves to isolate further and reinforce such mental health illnesses. The lack of quantifiable data on anti-stigma interventions in Low and Middle-Income Countries, including Pakistan, underscores the urgent need for research. (3) Parents of children admitted to the ICU have a near-pervasive struggle with mental health and an innate inability to disclose their requirements for support. Factors barricading such disclosure should be identified and broken down through interventions, facilitating access to vital mental health support. (4) Caregivers must establish coping strategies, and remain a steady pillar of support and comfort to their child. The Keeping Hope Alive Toolkit intervention was established, which worked on fostering emotional experiences, living in the moment, remembering self and supporting social preferences, this intervention provided a template for emotional support. (5) We hope this letter can underscore how important supporting parental disclosure of unmet mental health needs is – a rampant and insufficiently reported plight in Pakistan. The ability to recognise these emotions and rectify them is not highlighted in this region but is imperative to implement, to improve the provision of healthcare to diseased children and their parents alike.

The Figure of the Labyrinth between Philosophy, Art and Literature The aim of this article is to draw analogies between the Prisons by Piranesi and The Castle by Franz Kafka in the light of the figure of the labyrinth. In these specific cases, the architectonics (as a pseudo- arrangement of perspective planes) and the plot (as a factitious connection between action sequences) enclose the illusion of depth and the impression of duration in the vicious circles of the lines of rupture and of the missed events, respectively. The Piranesian atopic topic (from atopos, « out of place ») and the Kafkaesque apraxic practice (from apraktos, « inconclusive ») are both based on unsurpassable antinomies and, in this particular respect, seem to revive Zeno of Elea’s paradoxes of motion and Diodorus Cronus’ aporia of becoming, which Gottfried W. Leibniz considers to be two labyrinths.

In the present paper I read Marguerite Yourcenar’s autobiographical trilogy Le labyrinthe du monde through Kristeva’s concept of the imaginary father. My interpretation aims to trace the way the androgynous figure of the imaginary father acts in a liberatory way and also stimulates Yourcenar’s own work. The retroactive invention of an imaginary origin is associated with the figure of a loving father. Yourcenar traces her genealogy – on the one hand, she identifies with her familial lineage; on the other, she claims that the composition of her ancestry relates much more to her literary precursors and her fictional characters. Yourcenar’s identification appears not on the side of matricide and the powers of horror, but exactly the opposite – on the side of the imaginary father and creative potential.

Au Japon, l’anthropologie et l’archéologie sont profondément liées dans le contexte de l’après Deuxième Guerre mondiale qui voit naître l’idée d’une humanité autochtone à l’époque paléolithique. Nous proposons une analyse de la production des effets de sens anthropologiques à partir de l’exposition permanente du musée archéologique d’Iwajuku, fondé à Midori en 1992. L’institution muséale se situe sur le site de la fouille qui a permis de prouver, en 1949, l’existence d’un collectif supposé japonais venant d’un temps ancestral après qu’un archéologue amateur, Tadahiro Aizawa, eut découvert une pointe de lance en obsidienne taillée. Cet artéfact est devenu la référence du musée, bien qu’il ne soit entré dans les collections qu’en 2020. À partir d’une visite, complémentée par des documents annexes (vidéos promotionnelles, catalogues), nous montrons comment différentes strates anciennes et récentes de médiations institutionnelles ont produit quatre stratégies génératrices de représentations anthropologiques. En adoptant un modèle défendu par Jean Davallon, nous différencions un espace synthétique et un espace labyrinthique dans l’exposition, ce qui nous permet de décrire deux parcours possibles. Le premier consiste en une narration scientifique ; le second fait advenir un monde utopique par le visiteur. Enfin, nous décrivons deux figures attachantes liées à l’exposition : un archéologue amateur faisant une découverte majeure et une mascotte de mammouth dont le rôle est la promotion de la municipalité.

« Wandering is my heritage » The Labyrinth as a Figure of the Postcolonial Experience According to Enfants du lichen by Maya Cousineau Mollen The aim of the paper is to analyze Enfants du lichen, a book of poems by Maya Cousineau Mollen, an Innu poet born in 1975, in order to see if the labyrinth can be considered as a figure of the postcolonial Native American experience. Although the word « labyrinth » does not make its explicit emergence in the poems, their lexical field evokes a whole imagination which makes it emerge implicitly and allows us to believe that the figure of the labyrinth corresponds to the situation of the former colonized. Our contribution is divided into three parts. The first characterizes the postcolonial Native American experience, as described in the poems, and explains why it may be seen as a labyrinth. The second shows the exploration of the paths of possible escape and the last focuses on the exit, the « passage from darkness to light », which can be read as a new era in the life of Canadian Native Americans.

On the night of 31 August, 1888, Mary Ann ‘Polly’ Nichols was found murdered in Buck’s Row, her throat slashed and her body mutilated. She was followed by Annie Chapman on 8 September in the year of 29 Hanbury Street, Elizabeth Stride in Dutfield’s Yard and Catherine Eddowes in Mitre Square on 30 September, and finally Mary Jane Kelly in Miller’s Court, on 9 November. These five women, all prostitutes, were victims of an unknown assailant commonly referred to by the epithet ‘Jack the Ripper’, forming an official canon which excludes at least thirteen other cases around the same time. As the Ripper was never identified or caught, he has attained an almost supernatural status in London’s history and literature, immortalised alongside other iconic figures such as Sherlock Holmes. And his killing ground, the East End suburb of Whitechapel, has become notorious in its own right. In this article, I will discuss how Whitechapel developed as a Gothic location through the body of literature devoted to the Whitechapel murders of 1888, known as 'Ripperature'. I will begin by speaking to the turn of Gothic literature towards the idea of the city as a Gothic space, before arguing that Whitechapel's development into a Gothic location may be attributed to the threat of the Ripper and the literature which emerged during and after his crimes. As a working class slum with high rates of crime and poverty, Whitechapel already enjoyed an evil reputation in the London press. However, it was the presence of Jack that would make the suburb infamous into contemporary times. The Gothic Space of the City In the nineteenth century, there was a shift in the representation of space in Gothic literature. From the depiction of the wilderness and ancient buildings such as castles as essentially Gothic, there was a turn towards the idea of the city as a Gothic space. David Punter attributes this turn to Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The wild landscape is no longer considered as dangerous as the savage city of London, and evil no longer confined only to those of working-class status (Punter 191). However, it has been argued by Lawrence Phillips and Anne Witchard that Charles Dickens may have been the first author to present London as a Gothic city, in particular his description of Seven Dials in Bell’s Life in London, 1837, where the anxiety and unease of the narrator is associated with place (11). Furthermore, Thomas de Quincey uses Gothic imagery in his descriptions of London in his 1821 book Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, calling the city a “vast centre of mystery” (217). This was followed in 1840 with Edgar Allen Poe’s story The Man of the Crowd, in which the narrator follows a stranger through the labyrinthine streets of London, experiencing its poorest and most dangerous areas. At the end of the story, Poe calls the stranger “the type and the genius of deep crime (...) He is the man of the crowd” (n. p). This association of crowds with crime is also used by Jack London in his book The People of the Abyss, published in 1905, where the author spent time living in the slums of the East End. Even William Blake could be considered to have used Gothic imagery in his description of the city in his poem London, written in 1794. The Gothic city became a recognisable and popular trope in the fin-de-siècle, or end-of-century Gothic literature, in the last few decades of the nineteenth century. This fin-de-siècle literature reflected the anxieties inherent in increasing urbanisation, wherein individuals lose their identity through their relationship with the city. Examples of fin-de-siècle Gothic literature include The Beetle by Richard Marsh, published in 1897, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in the same year. Evil is no longer restricted to foreign countries in these stories, but infects familiar city streets with terror, in a technique that is described as ‘everyday Gothic’ (Paulden 245). The Gothic city “is constructed by man, and yet its labyrinthine alleys remain unknowable (...) evil is not externalized elsewhere, but rather literally exists within” (Woodford n.p). The London Press and Whitechapel Prior to the Ripper murders of 1888, Whitechapel had already been given an evil reputation in the London press, heavily influenced by W.T. Stead’s reports for The Pall Mall Gazette, entitled The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, in 1885. In these reports, Stead revealed how women and children were being sold into prostitution in suburbs such as Whitechapel. Stead used extensive Gothic imagery in his writing, one of the most enduring being the image of London as a labyrinth with a monstrous Minotaur at its centre, swallowing up his helpless victims. Counter-narratives about Whitechapel do exist, an example being Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, who attempted to demystify the East End by walking the streets of Whitechapel and interviewing its inhabitants in the 1860’s. Another is Arthur G. Morrison, who in 1889 dismissed the graphic descriptions of Whitechapel by other reporters as amusing to those who actually knew the area as a commercially respectable place. However, the Ripper murders in the autumn of 1888 ensured that the Gothic image of the East End would become the dominant image in journalism and literature for centuries to come. Whitechapel was a working-class slum, associated with poverty and crime, and had a large Jewish and migrant population. Indeed the claim was made that “had Whitechapel not existed, according to the rationalist, then Jack the Ripper would not have marched against civilization” (Phillips 157). Whitechapel was known as London’s “heart of darkness (…) the ultimate threat and the ultimate mystery” (Ackroyd 679). Therefore, the reporters of the London press who visited Whitechapel during and immediately following the murders understandably imbued the suburb with a Gothic atmosphere in their articles. One such newspaper article, An Autumn Evening in Whitechapel, released in November of 1888, demonstrates these characteristics in its description of Whitechapel. The anonymous reporter, writing during the Ripper murders, describes the suburb as a terrible dark ocean in which there are human monsters, where a man might get a sense of what humanity can sink to in areas of poverty. This view was shared by many, including author Margaret Harkness, whose 1889 book In Darkest London described Whitechapel as a monstrous living entity, and as a place of vice and depravity. Gothic literary tropes were also already widely used in print media to describe murders and other crimes that happened in London, such as in the sensationalist newspaper The Illustrated Police News. An example of this is an illustration published in this newspaper after the murder of Mary Kelly, showing the woman letting the Ripper into her lodgings, with the caption ‘Opening the door to admit death’. Jack is depicted as a manifestation of Death itself, with a grinning skull for a head and clutching a doctor’s bag filled with surgical instruments with which to perform his crimes (Johnston n.p.). In the magazine Punch, Jack was depicted as a phantom, the ‘Nemesis of Neglect’, representing the poverty of the East End, floating down an alleyway with his knife looking for more victims. The Ripper murders were explained by London newspapers as “the product of a diseased environment where ‘neglected human refuse’ bred crime” (Walkowitz 194). Whitechapel became a Gothic space upon which civilisation projected their inadequacies and fears, as if “it had become a microcosm of London’s own dark life” (Ackroyd 678). And in the wake of Jack the Ripper, this writing of Whitechapel as a Gothic space would only continue, with the birth of ‘Ripperature’, the body of fictional and non-fiction literature devoted to the murders. The Birth of Ripperature: The Curse upon Mitre Square and Leather Apron John Francis Brewer wrote the first known text about the Ripper murders in October of 1888, a sensational horror monograph entitled The Curse upon Mitre Square. Brewer made use of well-known Gothic tropes, such as the trans-generational curse, the inclusion of a ghost and the setting of an old church for the murder of an innocent woman. Brewer blended fact and fiction, making the Whitechapel murderer the inheritor, or even perhaps the victim of an ancient curse that hung over Mitre Square, where the second murdered prostitute, Catherine Eddowes, had been found the month before. According to Brewer, the curse originated from the murder of a woman in 1530 by her brother, a ‘mad monk’, on the steps of the high altar of the Holy Trinity Church in Aldgate. The monk, Martin, committed suicide, realising what he had done, and his ghost now appears pointing to the place where the murder occurred, promising that other killings will follow. Whitechapel is written as both a cursed and haunted Gothic space in The Curse upon Mitre Square. Brewer’s description of the area reflected the contemporary public opinion, describing the Whitechapel Road as a “portal to the filth and squalor of the East” (66). However, Mitre Square is the former location of a monastery torn down by a corrupt politician; this place, which should have been holy ground, is cursed. Mitre Square’s atmosphere ensures the continuation of violent acts in the vicinity; indeed, it seems to exude a self-aware and malevolent force that results in the death of Catherine Eddowes centuries later. This idea of Whitechapel as somehow complicit in or even directing the acts of the Ripper will later become a popular trope of Ripperature. Brewer’s work was advertised in London on posters splashed with red, a reminder of the blood spilled by the Ripper’s victims only weeks earlier. It was also widely promoted by the media and reissued in New York in 1889. It is likely that a ‘suggestion effect’ took place during the telegraph-hastened, press-driven coverage of the Jack the Ripper story, including Brewer’s monograph, spreading the image of Gothic Whitechapel as fact to the world (Dimolianis 63). Samuel E. Hudson’s account of the Ripper murders differs in style from Brewer’s because of his attempt to engage critically with issues such as the failure of the police force to find the murderer and the true identity of Jack. His book Leather Apron; or, the Horrors of Whitechapel, London, was published in December of 1888. Hudson described the five murders canonically attributed to Jack, wrote an analysis of the police investigation that followed, and speculated as to the Ripper’s motivations. Despite his intention to examine the case objectively, Hudson writes Jack as a Gothic monster, an atavistic and savage creature prowling Whitechapel to satisfy his bloodlust. Jack is associated with several Gothic tropes in Hudson’s work, and described as different types of monsters. He is called: a “fiend bearing a charmed and supernatural existence,” a “human vampire”, an “incarnate monster” and even, like Brewer, the perpetrator of “ghoulish butchery” (Hudson 40). Hudson describes Whitechapel as “the worst place in London (...) with innumerable foul and pest-ridden alleys” (9). Whitechapel becomes implicated in the Ripper murders because of its previously established reputation as a crime-ridden slum. Poverty forced women into prostitution, meaning they were often out alone late at night, and its many courts and alleyways allowed the Ripper an easy escape from his pursuers after each murder (Warwick 560). The aspect of Whitechapel that Hudson emphasises the most is its darkness; “off the boulevard, away from the streaming gas-jets (...) the knave ran but slight chance of interruption” (40). Whitechapel is a place of shadows, its darkest places negotiated only by ‘fallen women’ and their clients, and Jack himself. Hudson’s casting of Jack as a vampire makes his preference for the night, and his ability to skilfully disembowel prostitutes and disappear without a trace, intelligible to his readers as the attributes of a Gothic monster. Significantly, Hudson’s London is personified as female, the same sex as the Ripper victims, evoking a sense of passive vulnerability against the acts of the masculine and predatory Jack, Hudson writing that “it was not until four Whitechapel women had perished (...) that London awoke to the startling fact that a monster was at work upon her streets” (8). The Complicity of Gothic Whitechapel in the Ripper Murders This seeming complicity of Whitechapel as a Gothic space in the Ripper murders, which Brewer and Hudson suggest in their work, can be seen to have influenced subsequent representations of Whitechapel in Ripperature. Whitechapel is no longer simply the location in which these terrible events take place; they happen because of Whitechapel itself, the space exerting a self-conscious malevolence and kinship with Jack. Historically, the murders forced Queen Victoria to call for redevelopment in Spitalfields, the improvement of living conditions for the working class, and for a better police force to patrol the East End to prevent similar crimes (Sugden 2). The fact that Jack was never captured “seemed only to confirm the impression that the bloodshed was created by the foul streets themselves: that the East End was the true Ripper,” (Ackroyd 678) using the murderer as a way to emerge into the public consciousness. In Ripperature, this idea was further developed by the now popular image of Jack “stalking the black alleyways [in] thick swirling fog” (Jones 15). This otherworldly fog seems to imply a mystical relationship between Jack and Whitechapel, shielding him from view and disorientating his victims. Whitechapel shares the guilt of the murders as a malevolent and essentially pagan space. The notion of Whitechapel as being inscribed with paganism and magic has become an enduring and popular trope of Ripperature. It relates to an obscure theory that drawing lines between the locations of the first four Ripper murders created Satanic and profane religious symbols, suggesting that they were predetermined locations for a black magic ritual (Odell 217). This theory was expanded upon most extensively in Alan Moore’s graphic novel From Hell, published in 1999. In From Hell, Jack connects several important historical and religious sites around London by drawing a pentacle on a map of the city. He explains the murders as a reinforcement of the pentacle’s “lines of power and meaning (...) this pentacle of sun gods, obelisks and rational male fire, within unconsciousness, the moon and womanhood are chained” (Moore 4.37). London becomes a ‘textbook’, a “literature of stone, of place-names and associations,” stretching back to the Romans and their pagan gods (Moore 4.9). Buck’s Row, the real location of the murder of Mary Ann Nichols, is pagan in origin; named for the deer that were sacrificed on the goddess Diana’s altars. However, Moore’s Whitechapel is also Hell itself, the result of Jack slipping further into insanity as the murders continue. From Hell is illustrated in black and white, which emphasises the shadows and darkness of Whitechapel. The buildings are indistinct scrawls of shadow, Jack often nothing more than a silhouette, forcing the reader to occupy the same “murky moral and spiritual darkness” that the Ripper does (Ferguson 58). Artist Eddie Campbell’s use of shade and shadow in his illustrations also contribute to the image of Whitechapel-as-Hell as a subterranean place. Therefore, in tracing the representations of Whitechapel in the London press and in Ripperature from 1888 onwards, the development of Whitechapel as a Gothic location becomes clear. From the geographical setting of the Ripper murders, Whitechapel has become a Gothic space, complicit in Jack’s work if not actively inspiring the murders. Whitechapel, although known to the public before the Ripper as a crime-ridden slum, developed into a Gothic space because of the murders, and continues to be associated with the Gothic in contemporary Ripperature as an uncanny and malevolent space “which seems to compel recognition as not of this earth" (Ackroyd 581). References Anonymous. “An Autumn Evening in Whitechapel.” Littell’s Living Age, 3 Nov. 1888. Anonymous. “The Nemesis of Neglect.” Punch, or the London Charivari, 29 Sep. 1888. Ackroyd, Peter. London: The Biography. Great Britain: Vintage, 2001. Brewer, John Francis. The Curse upon Mitre Square. London: Simpkin, Marshall and Co, 1888. De Quincey, Thomas. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields, 1850. Dimolianis, Spiro. Jack the Ripper and Black Magic: Victorian Conspiracy Theories, Secret Societies and the Supernatural Mystique of the Whitechapel Murders. North Carolina: McFarland and Co, 2011. Ferguson, Christine. “Victoria-Arcana and the Misogynistic Poetics of Resistance in Iain Sinclair’s White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings and Alan Moore’s From Hell.” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 20.1-2 (2009): 58. Harkness, Mary, In Darkest London. London: Hodder and Staughton, 1889. Hudson, Samuel E. Leather Apron; or, the Horrors of Whitechapel. London, Philadelphia, 1888. Johnstone, Lisa. “Rippercussions: Public Reactions to the Ripper Murders in the Victorian Press.” Casebook 15 July 2012. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.casebook.org/dissertations/rippercussions.html›. London, Jack. The People of the Abyss. New York: Lawrence Hill, 1905. Mayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor, Volume 1. London: Griffin, Bohn and Co, 1861. Moore, Alan, Campbell, Eddie. From Hell: Being a Melodrama in Sixteen Parts. London: Knockabout Limited, 1999. Morrison, Arthur G. “Whitechapel.” The Palace Journal. 24 Apr. 1889. Odell, Robin. Ripperology: A Study of the World’s First Serial Killer and a Literary Phenomenon. Michigan: Sheridan Books, 2006. Paulden, Arthur. “Sensationalism and the City: An Explanation of the Ways in Which Locality Is Defined and Represented through Sensationalist Techniques in the Gothic Novels The Beetle and Dracula.” Innervate: Leading Undergraduate Work in English Studies 1 (2008-2009): 245. Phillips, Lawrence, and Anne Witchard. London Gothic: Place, Space and the Gothic Imagination. London: Continuum International, 2010. Poe, Edgar Allen. “The Man of the Crowd.” The Works of Edgar Allen Poe. Vol. 5. Raven ed. 15 July 2012. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2151/2151-h/2151-h.htm›. Punter, David. A New Companion to the Gothic. Sussex: Blackwell Publishing, 2012. Stead, William Thomas. “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.” The Pall Mall Gazette, 6 July 1885. Sugden, Peter. The Complete History of Jack the Ripper. London: Robinson Publishing, 2002. Walkowitz, Judith R. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London, London: Virago, 1998. Woodford, Elizabeth. “Gothic City.” 15 July 2012. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://courses.nus.edu.au/sg/ellgohbh/gothickeywords.html›.

Introduction The city is one of the most common iconographies associated with film noir, particularly at night. For several noir critics, the city is an inseparable and determining element in the definition, narrative structure, and aesthetic of film noir. However, while urban spaces dominate classic imagery, noir has also engaged significantly with rural and small-town settings. These spaces challenge the presumed centrality of the city, revealing noir’s capacity to explore moral decay, isolation, and violence beyond the urban landscape. This article examines the role of rural and small-town spaces in noir, centring the television series Mare of Easttown (2021) as an example of “small-town noir”. Set in a working-class town in Pennsylvania, the series illustrates how noir narratives adapt to non-urban landscapes, using these environments to explore themes of entrapment, generational trauma, and social disintegration. Unlike the anonymous and sprawling cityscapes of traditional noir, Mare of Easttown situates its story in a close-knit yet fractured community, where the relationships change the meaning of the crime and the dynamic of the investigation. Through the analysis of Mare of Easttown, this article focusses on how television has become a significant platform for the evolution of noir, offering space to explore narrative complexities and spatial diversity. The setting of Mare of Easttown asserts that noir’s essential characteristics—moral ambiguity, disillusionment, and entrapment—are not bound to the city but can also resonate in small-town settings. Noir beyond the City It is hard to separate film noir from the urban space; in fact, most studies place the city as a central and determining element in its aesthetics and in the construction of the narrative itself. James Naremore states that noir evokes a series of generic and stylistic characteristics, one of which is the urban setting, particularly diners, decadent offices, or stylish nightclubs (1). Regarding noir's relationship with the city, Nicholas Christopher states that the city is an essential element of noir. He adds that the “two are inseparable” since the vast American metropolis, with its dynamic mix of greatness and decadence, serves as the perfect backdrop for noir (37). The inseparability between urban space and noir is also mentioned by Andrew Dickos. The author states that one of the determining structural elements of noir is the existence of an urban setting or at least the existence of an urban influence (6). For Imogen Sara Smith the importance of the city in noir is intrinsically linked to one of the main antagonisms that arises in this type of film: the conflict between the values of individual freedom and community security. The author adds that “film noir is about people who break the rules, pursuing their own interests outside the boundaries of decent society, and about how they are destroyed by society – or by themselves” (2). Thus, faced with the impossibility of standing up to the magnitude of society, the protagonists of noir are driven to despair, feeling an intense need to escape. For this reason, one of the central motifs is precisely the idea that there is no escape. Therefore, noir is about characters struggling to survive and, ultimately, to escape what Lewis Mumford calls the megalopolis. The city functions as a perfect metaphor for imprisonment and is decisive in the construction of the very narrative structure of noir. As Eddie Muller points out: as in every noir, these folks will carom through a story line with a structure reflecting the city itself. Unexpected intersections. Twisted corridors. Secrets hidden in locked rooms. Lives dangling from dangerous heights. Abrupt dead ends. The blueprints were drawn up by a demented urban planner. (21) A possible reason for this emphasis on the importance of the city may be related to the attempts to conclusively categorise noir. One of the arguments pointed out by Smith is related to the need for many authors to try to define film noir as a genre. The use of the city as an element that somehow supports their theories is justified by the fact that one of the ways of defining a genre is through the setting or subject manner. This is the case for the Western with its strong connection to the American West, or the war films, which tend to take place on the battlefield, and so on, whereas film noir is too diverse to be classified in such a precise way. Noir is far too complex to be classified so distinctly since it embraces other genres such as the gangster, the heist, the melodrama, and even the Western. It is therefore easier to understand it by assuming film noir as “a mood, a stance, an attitude. It is defined not by any single element but by a combination of content, style and theme” (Smith 4). Another aspect that may be brought to the Smith argument is the fact that, although the representation of urban space is more consistently associated with noir than other elements, the reality is that there are several films whose action takes place in rural spaces or small towns. For example, in On Dangerous Ground (1951), the protagonist is transferred from New York City to a rural community upstate in the hope that a less chaotic environment will have a healing effect. In Out of the Past (1947), Jeff Bailey takes refuge in the small town of Bridgeport in an attempt to escape his criminal past. However, the examples are not restricted to the classic noir period. In contemporary times, these locations are also central to some noir-influenced narratives, namely Fargo (1996), Winter's Bone (2010), Cold in July (2014), or Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), just to name a few. Nevertheless, the differences between noirs set in urban areas and those set in rural areas or small towns are not restricted to a simple change of location. Although most small-town noirs deal with the same themes, using similar character types, their specificity lies in the fact that they offer a series of social, spatial, and visual readings of the American landscape. In this respect, Smith characterises the small towns of film noir as places dominated by oppressive forces, where the police serve their own interests or those who have more power, rather than strictly following the law (83). As a result, certain illegal activities take place in plain sight, without any consequences. In turn, anyone who destabilises the harmony of the small town quickly becomes a target, and sooner or later they suffer the repercussions of their intrusion. Consequently, these places are apparently peaceful and perfect, but behind this false cover, they hide dangerous secrets, violence, or fanaticism. In short, they are spaces where everyone knows each other and where it is almost impossible to get away from assumptions and from the past (Smith 83). On the complexity of the small towns, Imogen Sara Smith notes: small towns are sentimentally cherished in American culture, but they also stand for complacency; their inhabitants are typed as narrow-minded, conservative, ignorant, self-righteous, and distrustful of outsiders. The nosy, judgmental, trouble-making gossip who spies on her neighbors and broadcasts their perceived failings is a ubiquitous type in classic Hollywood films. (83) The concept of the small town that the author draws is explored by noir through the representation of communities that tend to restrict freedom and incite intolerance. Accordingly, the more closed the community seems to be, the more vulnerable it becomes to being corrupted. The decline in morality is shared by the whole community, which remains in silence, while violence and money replace justice and law in the small-town structure. While in thematic and narrative terms small-town noir tends to explore the idea of a small, innocent, and fragile community, these are places highly marked by corruption and violence. Regarding the formal aspects of small-town noir, Jonathan F. Bell (230) notes that there are significant differences from urban noir. In urban noir, the opening shots are usually images of a huge, labyrinthine city, as in Side Street (1950) or To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), but in small-town noir, the wide-open spaces are the visual counterpoint: for example, the first moments of Affliction (1997) or No Country for Old Men (2017). The landscape conveys an apparent sense of freedom and control, as it allows a complete understanding of the space through the gaze. Nonetheless, these formal devices are used within this landscape to create claustrophobic environments similar to those found in the city, such as dark, decaying bars or typical small-town police stations. Upon entering these spaces, the shadows and dead ends typical of urban noir take on a new aspect, proving that the dark forces of the genre are also widespread in rural areas (Bell 230). The author uses as an example the films The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), in particular the scene in which Cora Smith (Lana Turner) is forced to climb the cliff through a narrow channel in a rock, creating a claustrophobic and acrophobic environment, and Gun Crazy (1950), specifically the final scene in which almost all visual resources are eliminated, focussing only on the two main characters who, exhausted, take refuge in the midst of a dense swamp (Bell 232). More contemporary films Blood Simple (1984) and Winter's Bone (2010) also use these visual resources. In the first, in the scene in which Marty (Dan Hedaya) tries to kidnap Abby (Frances McDormand), the light cut by the shutters, typical of noir, is present throughout the scene, creating a threatening and enclosing atmosphere. In the second, when Merab (Dale Dickey) takes Ree (Jennifer Lawrence) to the middle of the lake so that she can see her father's body, the dim lighting and blue tones of the scene highlight the protagonist's state of restlessness and uncertainty. Other visual resources used are the images of long roads that cross the vast natural territory, with no sign of buildings or human presence. Ironically, this imagery can also represent a certain claustrophobia. The almost endless road towards the horizon carries a symbolic weight, representing in these films the only possible path or predetermined destination, from which there is no escape (Bell 232). Like the future of the protagonists, when you look at these roads, you can see nothing but the continuous landscape. In the opening scene of the film Key Largo (1948), the tar road is the only route to the Florida Keys and, consequently, the only means by which the divergent characters will meet (Bell 233). In Fargo (1996), the opening scene sets the mood and pace of the film when the black screen turns white, slowly revealing a car driving along a road completely covered in snow and seemingly with no end in sight. Through these examples, we can conclude that the themes and visual conventions that were established in urban noir have been reproduced in rural and small-town spaces. Big cities were ideal for crime since they allowed a certain level of anonymity. In small towns, the more familiar and intimate environment increases the likelihood of the criminal being known by all the residents, making these actions even more disconcerting (Short 27). Hence, small-town noir allows for readings of the decaying American landscape, emphasising one of the main messages of noir: there is nowhere safe to go anymore. The approach of film noir to the spaces beyond the big city is largely related to more contemporary forms of noir, particularly through television series. These narratives have become a fruitful space for the development of noir-inspired stories that explore rural areas or small towns and their particularities far from large urban centres. Some examples include the series True Detective (2014-), Fargo (2014-), Ozark (2017-2022), and Sharp Objects (2018), among others. What they have in common is that they represent communities which, the more compact they are, the more deeply corruptible they become. As Smith states, in these places, “racketeering doesn’t only affect the hidden realm of government; it’s a shared, unspoken secret among all citizens”. Consequently, “truth itself is warped as people agree to accept the validity of lies” (92). Ultimately, justice and the law are dictated by money and violence in the structure of those societies. Taking this reading of the noir space in suburban areas of the USA as a starting point, this analysis explores how Mare of Easttown, from a contemporary perspective, draws inspiration from noir representations of the small town. Additionally, we will examine how space plays a decisive role in shaping the narrative and defining the characters, while embracing traditional noir themes. Mare of Easttown as Small-Town Noir The HBO series Mare of Easttown (2021) is a quintessential example of how contemporary noir narratives can explore the complexities of small-town life in suburban America. Through its noir-influenced storytelling, dark visual aesthetics, and morally ambiguous characters, Mare of Easttown delves into the socio-economic struggles, generational trauma, and intertwined personal histories that characterise the town of Easttown, Pennsylvania. In doing so, the series not only adheres to classic noir conventions but also redefines the genre by emphasising community and intimacy in ways that amplify the small-town setting. The series is built on the investigation of a teenage mother’s death, which turns into three different investigations into crimes against women. Two of them are related to the kidnapping and rape carried out by an outsider in the context of the small town. The third one, that of the young teenage mother, ends up being classified as domestic violence. The investigations are led by detective Mare Sheehan (Kate Winslet), a woman trying to find balance between family life and her work, but more than that, as a mother figure, Mare carries the weight of loss and guilt. This portrait of Mare as both protector and outcast emphasises the noir's interest in flawed heroes who operate in morally grey areas, divided between duty and personal demons. As a crime drama, the series explores the limits of the police's ability to break cycles of violence against women. In addition, it also examines how the community and family structures of those who live in the small town of Easttown can hide patterns of violence. In this regard, the small town presents itself as a familiar social environment, while at the same time it replicates some elements of the “big city”. For this reason, as Michael Dango points out: Mare of Easttown also figures a social environment that is both family and city at once, making it impossible to disentangle stranger rape and forms of acquaintance, date, or intimate partner rape – and therefore impossible to locate the problem of rape as one of crimes to be solved by the police; or one of ordinary heterosexuality, requiring more radical cultural transformation. (3) These patterns of violence and the intertwining of the intimate and the foreign are set against the backdrop of a community debilitated by deindustrialisation and loss of hope. Easttown is beset by issues like unemployment, addiction, and declining economic opportunities. These struggles contribute to the pervasive sense of hopelessness among the town’s residents, a mood reminiscent of classic noir’s fatalistic worldview. The series suggests that these economic pressures exacerbate human flaws, leading to violence and betrayal that often result from characters' efforts to escape or cope with their realities. Moreover, in Easttown, resignation replaces political anger, and it is individual failure rather than corporate greed that Mare's investigation reveals. The failures are mainly associated, but not exclusively, with the father figure. As Sue Thornham states, the several imperfect parental figures who appear in the series are interconnected by their inability to fulfill their duties as fathers or community leaders. Despite their anger, they are not necessarily tied to corruption or damaging expressions of masculinity (Thornham 4). In Mare of Easttown individual failure is, therefore, the failure of the community. This permanent sense of failure relates to the noir tradition of the pursuit of a derailed American Dream, but also to the idea of home and personal and social relationships being jeopardised in the face of weakness and desire. Similarly, the so-called societal institutions (family, marriage, law) and the idea that hard work is enough to overcome economic difficulties end up failing, leading to the consequent destabilisation of the community. In this regard, the series aligns with the noir critique of systemic inequalities, showing how a small town, although idealised as community-centred and healthy, can also be a place where hope is suppressed, and dreams turn to bitterness. The instability of the community is also related to the spatial restriction of the small town. If everyone knows each other and everyone has some kind of access to the privacy of the family, violence within the family not only becomes more “accessible”, but also more shocking. As one of the detectives in the series says during an interrogation: “Is there anybody you’re not related to?” The small town in Mare of Easttown allows for a uniquely noir exploration of interconnected lives and inescapable pasts. The relationships are multi-generational, which means that each action has a chain effect on the whole community. Secrets, past grudges, and untold stories influence present actions, with crimes and personal vendettas emerging as expressions of long-held resentments. This thematic focus is particularly effective in a small-town setting, where proximity and shared history intensify the characters’ entanglements. In noir, the protagonist often tries to escape a dark past or a corrupt urban landscape, but Mare's journey is the opposite: she is irrevocably linked to Easttown, a place that symbolises both her losses and failures and her loyalty and resistance. This portrait highlights the noir concept of “entrapment” while emphasising the small town as a space where the faults of the past endure, and the possibility of renewal or escape are limited. Conclusion Mare of Easttown can be understood as an insightful look at some of the main problems that haunt suburban and rural areas in the United States. It highlights issues such as the opioid crisis, insufficient health care, precariousness, and low-paying jobs, but also the desire of younger people to get out of their small town as quickly as possible. Crime in Easttown, in general, seems to be more related to the desperation of people obliged to subsist on less, than to pure malice. In addition, Mare of Easttown differentiates from other series by focussing on mundanity amid tragedy and by representing grief, sorrow, and forgiveness as a collective rather than an individual process. Moreover, all these processes are presented as part of everyday life and not just as an exception for dramatic effect. Crime, violence, pain, mourning, and forgiveness are consequences that do not affect just one character, but an entire community that needs to come together to heal. Through series like Mare of Easttown, despite the “hyperreal status and diffusion in popular culture”, as Lindsay Steenberg puts it, television offers the possibility “for the reconstitution of noir as a useful theoretical concept” (63), especially through the way it explores rural and suburban areas. Continuing the long tradition of noir, Mare of Easttown echoes Andrew Spicer's view that noir explores the “dark underside of the American dream. Because that dream forms the core mythology of global capitalism” (xlix). Noir, especially through series like Mare of Easttown, continues to be an important cultural phenomenon that is constantly evolving, a “crucial vehicle through which that mythology can be critiqued and challenged” (Spicer, xlix). References Affliction. Dir. Paul Schrader. Lions Gate Films, 1997. Bell, Jonathan F. “Shadows in the Hinterland: Rural Noir”. In Architecture and Film. Ed. Mark Lamster. Princeton Architectural Press, 2000. 222-234. Blood Simple. Dirs. Joel Coen and Ethan Coen. Circle Films, 1984. Christopher, Nicholas. Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir &amp; the American City. The Free Press, 1997. Cold in July. Dir. Jim Mickle. IFC Films, 2014. Dango, Michael. “Post-Procedural Form and Rape Ambiance: Policing Sexual Violence in Mare of Easttown.” Television &amp; New Media 25.5 (2024): 463-479. Dickos, Andrew. Street with No Name: A History of the Classic American Film. UP of Kentucky, 2002. Fargo [movie]. Dirs. Joel Coen and Ethan Coen. PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, 1996. Fargo [TV series]. Created by Noah Hawley. FX, 2014-. Gun Crazy. Dir. Joseph H. Lewis. United Artists, 1950. Key Largo. Dir. John Huston. Warner Bros, 1948. Mare of Easttown. Created by Brad Ingelsby. HBO, 2021. Muller, Eddie. Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir. Running Press, 2021. Mumford, Lewis. The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations and Its Prospects. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1961. Naremore, James. More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts. U of California P, 2008. No Country for Old Men. Dirs. Joel Coen and Ethan Coen. Miramax Films, 2017. On Dangerous Ground. Dir. Nicholas Ray. RKO Radio Pictures, 1951. Out of the Past. Dir. Jacques Tourneur. RKO Radio Pictures, 1947. Ozark. Created by Bill Dubuque and Mark Williams. Netflix, 2017-2022. Side Street. Dir. Anthony Mann. MGM, 1950. Sharp Objects. Created by Marti Noxon. HBO, 2018. Short, Sue. Darkness Calls: A Critical Investigation of Neo-Noir. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Smith, Imogen Sara. In Lonely Places: Film Noir beyond the City. McFarland &amp; Company, 2011. Spicer, Andrew. Historical Dictionary of Film Noir. Scarecrow Press, 2010. Steenberg, Lindsay. “The Fall and Television Noir.” Television &amp; New Media 18.1 (2017): 58-75. The Postman Always Rings Twice. Dir. Tay Garnett. MGM, 1946. Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri. Dir. Martin McDonagh. Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2017. Thornham, Sue. “Breathing Spaces? The Politics of Embodiment, Affect, and Genre in Mare of Easttown and Happy Valley.” Feminist Media Studies 23.5 (2023): 2254-2268. To Live and Die in L.A. Dir. William Friedkin. MGM, 1985. True Detective. Created by Nic Pizzolatto. HBO, 2014-. Winter’s Bone. Dir. Debra Granik. Roadside Attractions, 2010.

The Resident Evil video game series is especially notable for engaging with uncanny nature and monstrous reproduction, often facilitated through viral contamination. These third-person games usually feature an outbreak of some kind, instigated by a shadowy organisation, and star a member of law enforcement or the military as the protagonist. However, the seventh and eighth games of the franchise were different. While they explored many of the same themes and conventions as their predecessors, the technologies by which they evoked fear and suspense had become further immersed in the survival horror genre and ecoGothic affect. Survival horror video games, which often exploit anxieties surrounding uncanny motherhood to produce feelings of dread, use the processes and spectacle of reproduction, gestation, and childbirth as the locus of player fear. The ecoGothic, that is the non-human ecology rendered uncanny, monstrous, and sublime, permeates survival horror spaces and has the potential to empower these malevolent matriarchs. In Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (Nakanishi) and Resident Evil VIII: Village (Sato), player-protagonist Ethan Winters is under constant attack from female antagonists. From unexpected onslaughts from his rapidly transforming wife Mia at the beginning of Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, to his heart being wrenched from his body by the overarching villain Mother Miranda in Resident Evil VIII: Village, Ethan’s life is under constant threat from women and girls infected by a parasitic fungus. These monstrous females, through their corporeal forms and means of control, blur the boundaries between the human and the non-human. Furthermore, they represent the perceived degradation of the human form and delegitimisation of man's dominion over nature. These women—who have merged with the non-human ecosystem—have become creatures that challenge our conception of what it is to be human. It is this intersection of ecophobia and the perceived transgression of gender roles that make up the anatomy of the female and non-cis-masculine presenting videoludic monster. Using Resident Evil 7: Biohazard and Resident Evil VIII: Village as my primary examples, in this article I unpack the implications of these fungus-infested women, and explore how family and trauma play a role in their narratives. EcoGothic Origins In defining the ecoGothic it is important to acknowledge its origins as a response to the idealised ecologies of the nature writing of the Romantic period (Smith and Hughes 2). Rather than sweeping through the green pastoral valleys of the Romantic novel, the ecoGothic lurks in the shadows of labyrinthine forests and stands awestruck before sublime wonders. The ecoGothic shatters the illusion of human control, confronting the audience with their fears and anxieties. The ecoGothic monsters of Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (referred to here as Resident Evil 7) and Resident Evil VIII: Village (referred to here as Village) represent deep-seated anxieties about the boundaries between the human and the non-human. Whilst Gothic narratives have traditionally expressed fears about the loss of control to nature, Estok notes that this loss of control is a real and present threat in the environmental crisis of the Anthropocene (Estok 29), lending these modern ecoGothic monsters additional relevance and potency. The ecoGothic challenges human corporeality through transformation, hybridity, and invasion, destabilising our ideas of the human as separate from, and superior to, the greater ecology. It is vital to interrogate assumptions associated with the false dichotomy between humans and nature to demonstrate the anxieties at play within these manifestations of female eco-monstrosity. As Tidwell notes, ecohorror narratives are “fundamentally predicated upon a relationship between humanity and nature that does not allow for their interconnectedness” (539). These games, through the compromised, infected form of the protagonist, problematise the dichotomy between the good of humanity and the evil of the non-human. However, they still weaponise anxieties about human specificity and depict hybridity as monstrous and unstable. The patriarchal fear of transgressive female power is similarly weaponised through the female antagonists. These monstrous female antagonists are used to police boundaries of acceptable womanhood and their fates demonstrate the dangers of transgressing those boundaries. Through an ecofeminist lens we can examine the interplay between anxieties surrounding gender and anxieties surrounding the wildness and unpredictability of the ecology. As the intersection between ecocriticism, which is interested in the interconnectedness of ecologies, and feminism, which is interested in the “social analysis” of power structures and systems of domination (Carr 160), ecofeminism allows us to analyse the subjugation, exploitation, and demonisation of the feminine and the broader ecology. Part of what makes a female monster so threatening is that she transgresses two societal modes of categorisation. She is a predator rather than prey, no longer fitting the submissive female archetype, and she has become a hybrid form closely associated with the animal. Krzywinska highlights the role of this altered power relationship as being a potent manifestation of the Gothic in video games (33). This common expression of transgressive and monstrous female power draws on the traditional role of the Gothic in facilitating the male experience of fear and vulnerability with impunity (Krzywinska 33). Resident Evil as a video game series has an inconsistent history of depicting women and female-presenting entities, both antagonists and protagonists alike. MacCallum-Stewart asserts that the series’ shift towards more problematic and monstrous female representation coincides with a move from action-adventure to survival horror (170). The series has long been preoccupied with monstrous inheritance and legacy, but Resident Evil 7 and Village represent a new move towards female villains, abandoning patriarchal dynasties like the Weskers. The female ecoGothic monsters of Resident Evil 7 and Village transgress gender and species norms, signifying a move further into the ecoGothic realm of the uncanny. The Technology of Ecohorror The Resident Evil series uses science fiction conventions to explain the mystery that lies at the centre of its horrific spectacles. Despite the distinctly ecoGothic affect of Resident Evil 7 and Village, the ’scientific’ explanation provided in-game for these supernatural occurrences is a mutated fungus with psychotropic and self-replicating properties. The Cadou (Romanian for “gift”) is a fictional fungus developed from a fungal root under the village, and altered to create bioweapons by a shadowy organisation, The Connections. Known as the megamycete in the English script (not used in the Japanese script), the fungus has various effects including controlling its host, retaining and replicating genetic information, and rapid growths capable of focussed movement. A second fungal root was established in Louisiana, under the Baker House of Resident Evil 7. As a locus of human anxiety, fungal bodies are inherently unstable and defy characterisation, thus queering ideas of the corporeal body (Bishop et al. 220). Bishop posits that in the human consciousness fungus is closely linked to the animal as they live on “dead or decomposing matter”. Some fungal species reproduce asexually “through the release of spores that produces new organisms that are genetically identical to the parent organism” (Bishop et al. 204). This asexual reproduction means that fictional fungal bodies are representative of a reproductive process that runs contrary to the human-sanctioned sexual reproduction and established gendered power dynamics. Reproduction through tiny spores allows the site of reproduction to go undetected, opening the possibility within the human imagination for the invasion and violation of the human form. Bishop also notes that fungal bodies “are hardly contained organisms; they form complex systems of mycorrhizae, symbiotic underground relationships with other fungal and vegetal life” (Bishop et al. 204). It is this resistance to categorisation is an emergent theme as we define the parameters of these female eco-monsters. Whilst the fungal properties of the Cadou are behind the malevolent forces at work within Resident Evil 7 and Village, the mould and associated slime are a looming presence in the bulk of the gameplay. It clings to the walls in the Baker house and lurks in the shadows of the Village. It exists within the interior and exterior of the human body, threatening to control, corrupt, and engulf. The invasive presence of the mould in the Old House places the phenomenon firmly in the domestic sphere, in the space to which the matriarch of the family, Marguerite, is bound (McGreevy et al. 254). Hurley notes that slime “constitutes a threat to the integrity of the human subject” (35), due to its lack of fixed identity and form. Slime represents a challenge to the human understanding of the body as a closed system that is impenetrable and self-contained. Estok posits that slime’s resistance to categorisation and refusal to fit within male delineated boundaries creates an association with the feminine (33). Slime is unstable and resists control, making it a culturally pervasive expression of fears about the loss of established systems of power that reinforce sexism and misogyny (Estok 31). This theory of the gendered significance of slime brings new meaning to use of the mould and slime forms of the Cadou for the purposes of unnatural reproduction and the exercising of psychological control. The abhuman, or not-quite-human (Hurley 3), spectacles of Resident Evil’s Cadou infected antagonists are able to be at once tragic and disposable. While the player is required to kill vast hordes of amorphous “molded”, emaciated “thralls” and degenerated “lycans”, the humanoid bosses or key antagonists complicate human claims to exceptionalism and specificity. Tidwell notes that “this breakdown of the animacy hierarchy and of separations between human and nonhuman emphasizes materiality itself and de-emphasizes consciousness or sentience” (546). It is implied that we are to think of the zombie-like hordes of non-player combatants as non-sentient, as under the complete control of the non-human, therefore entirely expendable. This othering of non-player combatant is a staple of the survival horror genre as it offers monstrosity as both motive and mitigation. As Perron notes, the monsters of videoludic horror are constructed from “mundane” player anxieties, allowing the player to kill that which they fear (11). The Scientist and the ‘Broodmother’ The dangerous potential of the grieving mother is demonstrated in the actions of Mother Miranda, whose loss of her daughter Eva serves as the catalyst for the Cadou narrative arc of Resident Evil 7 and Village. Miranda, through her experimentation with the mould and her pathological determination to resurrect her child, becomes a monstrous maternal spectacle. Miranda forces both children and adults to become infantilised, deferential hosts to the Cadou, attempting to create a “vessel” to carry her daughter’s DNA and consciousness. As Paxton notes, such monstrous and destructive maternal behaviour is “pathologized as unnatural and identified as the seamy underside of woman’s nature” (170). This depiction of unnatural maternal behaviour is compounded by her means of reproduction and the multitudes of “children” she has produced. Stang notes that “the monster polices the borders of what is permissible” and Miranda’s status as the “Broodmother”, through her complex combination of asexual reproduction and infection, represents transgressions of those borders that circumvent patriarchal processes (235). Killing Miranda is the culmination of a two-game arc that requires the player-character to kill her “false children”. The similarities between the unnatural birth of Frankenstein’s creature and the unnatural birth of Miranda’s children are significant. Facilitated by science and societal transgression, they are constructed from death and ultimately result in parental rejection. Miranda cements her status as the monstrous mother by revealing that the player has been doing her bidding in killing her children: "you've fulfilled your purpose, Mr. Winters. You disposed of my false children and awakened the glorious Megamycete” (Sato). In creating these “children” and then casting them aside, Mother Miranda fashions a hierarchy of hybrid entities, desperate for her approval and under her thrall due to the controlling properties of the Cadou. The player-character’s mission to kill Miranda as the monstrous maternal figure expresses a “revulsion and fear towards female fecundity” and a “potent fear” of “female reproduction without male input” (Stang 238). The damage perpetuated by Miranda’s unnatural motherhood is far reaching, with one of her “failed vessels”, Eveline, becoming the source of the Louisiana Cadou infestation from Resident Evil 7. Eveline was originally created as a bioweapon (or B.O.W.) using the DNA of Miranda’s dead daughter and a sample of the Cadou mould. Manifesting as a ten-year old girl, Eveline has an insatiable drive to create a family which motivates her manipulation and infection of the Bakers, Mia, and the play-character Ethan. "I don't want to live at the lab anymore. I want a house. And I want you to be my mommy" says Eveline to Mia (Nakanishi). Eveline’s ability to reproduce and infect is even more monstrous and abject than that of her “Broodmother” as she is ostensibly a young girl. Her status as an uncanny, abhuman “mother” is not a means of empowerment and comes at a tremendous cost. As Stang writes the ecoGothic mother’s reproductive power “is often the result of infection, contamination, or mutation and causes abject transformations, madness, and, eventually, death at the hands of the protagonist” (238). Therefore, with each one of these abject mothers Ethan kills he is completing the patriarchal narrative of the dangers of unnatural reproduction and matriarchal power structures. The Abhuman Mother Resident Evil 7 antagonist Marguerite Baker is already a mother when the Cadou, brought into her home by Eveline, establishes fungal growths on her brain. She and Jack take in Eveline and Mia out of a genuine human concern and compassion which has completely disappeared by the time Ethan arrives in the home. Soon Eveline’s drive for a family kicks in and she begins to insidiously control the Bakers, worming her way into their psyche and infecting them with the mould. From this point on Marguerite begins to mutate into a maternal monster, referring to spiders and insects as her babies. Not only does her nurturing begin to transgress species, but she begins to feed her human family human flesh, creating grotesque parodies of the nurturing and nourishing mother: "I'll feed you to my babies and fertilize the garden with what was left" Marguerite to Ethan (Nakanishi). As Marguerite begins her homicidal pursuit of Ethan, the ecohorror of her monstrous body is revealed. She transforms becoming progressively less human. Her “monster” form, with its elongated limbs and mutated vulva, becomes more closely aligned with a female arthropod or arachnid. McGreevy et al notes that “Marguerite’s transformation mirrors the impact of mycoestrogens, such as zearalenone, which the body treats as a high dose of estrogen … . The infection thus amplifies feminine traits to a dangerous level, as the female body is abject: horrific and alluring” (261). The insects that are birthed from her genitals have an intrinsic association with death and decomposition, playing a key role in the process of disarticulating the human form (Shelomi 31). From this association we might infer that the fear and disgust the player feels at Marguerite’s association with insects and her mutated arachnid form goes beyond anxieties of ambiguity between the human and the non-human. The Eastern European castle and snow-capped peaks of Village offer a different type of female monstrosity to that found on the bayou in Louisiana. Whilst not a vampire through the traditional transmission mode of Dracula and his ilk, Alcina Dimitrescu’s vampirism is necessitated by an inherited blood condition and invites discussion of matriarchal lines of reproduction. The inhabitants of the Castle Dimitrescu play into the same ecoGothic conventions as that have been employed in female vampire narratives. These narratives play into anxieties about unnatural reproduction, in this case reproduction without the men or masculine forces. Paxton in their exploration of Le Fanu’s Carmilla draws connections between female vampirism and parasitic ichneumon wasps, resonating with the depiction of Cadou infestation in Resident Evil (170). Like fungus vampirism is depicted as parasitic and a disruption to the patriarchal lineage through its potential for asexual reproduction. Not unlike the structure of infection, psychic control, and reproduction that we see in vampire fiction, Mother Miranda operates as matriarchal head of an expansive hivemind that mimics a family like structure. Alcina Dimitrescu is a sexualised spectacle whose rejection and suspicion of men reinforces her role as a transgressive woman. Alcina and her daughters determine the fates of their victims by gender, with men being consumed and women being enslaved and drained of blood for the production of wine. She further transgresses normative expectations of the mother through the animalism associated with vampirism (Paxton 178) and her stature. She is an imposing nine feet tall with rapidly growing claws due to the effects of the Cadou, making her difficult to dominate through brute strength. Further compounding her threat to patriarchal power structures, she explicitly expresses hatred for men during her attacks. Her voice lines demonstrate a powerful drive to protect her daughters from patriarchal power and masculine violence: “You ungrateful, selfish wretch! You come into MY house—You lay your filthy man-hands on MY daughters”—Alcina Dimetrescu to Ethan (Sato). Depicted as a beautiful, elegant lady, the vampiric body of Alcina Dimitrescu, transforms into a grotesque dragon-like creature, providing visual confirmation of her underlying status as non-human. The abhuman as the covert and deceptive non-human monstrosity plays into her late-stage transformation reinforces her disconnect from the human, legitimising her death. Mother Miranda’s daughter Donna Beneviento poses a deeper psychological threat to the player, stepping further away from the action-adventure genre with which Resident Evil has previously been associated. Like Marguerite, her house manifests her psychological state, reflecting her trauma and implied mental illness. This trauma manifests externally, turning the Beneviento mansion into an extension of her psychic agency. She achieves this through the use of secreted fungal hallucinogens activated by pollen allowing her to manifest and prey on the anxieties of her victims. Donna Beneviento’s relationship to her Cadou infested and their uncanny animation echoes the unnatural reproduction of Mother Miranda. Throughout the Beneviento mansion motifs of parenthood and childbirth play out in increasingly grotesque forms, culminating in a giant foetus monster emerging from the shadows, wailing and giggling. Donna Beneviento is playing with Ethan expressing her status as child, despite the reality of her adulthood. Donna is infantilised, crafting dolls in an expression her loneliness and desire for family in a manner similar to Eveline’s misguided attempts to construct a family. The Sanctioned Mother and the Good Daughter The counterpoint to these spectacles of female monstrosity are female characters who manage to maintain the appearance of human specificity and adherence to societal norms. Marguerite’s daughter Zoe remains relatively unaffected by the Cadou and retains her humanity, aligning herself with the player-character. She is the good daughter, the sanctioned and acceptable human daughter. Ethan’s wife Mia is intermittently affected by the same fungal infestation as Marguerite, yet her initial monstrous manifestation and frenzied chainsaw attack on Ethan at the beginning of the game is all but forgotten through her subsequent ability to maintain the appearance of human specificity. By the beginning of Village Mia is depicted as an ideal picture of rehabilitated motherhood and femininity. Positioning herself as the “good” in the good/bad mother dichotomy, she is cooking, wearing soft fabrics and colours, and is nurturing her baby (Digioia 15-16). But this figure of the socially sanctioned mother has been replaced by the “bad” Mother Miranda. This raises further questions about the illusory and performative qualities of maternal affection in the Resident Evil series. After being kidnapped, Ethan’s baby Rose is dissected into four parts and given to four main antagonists of Village. It is only through her integration with the Cadou and the resurrection procedure of Mother Miranda that she is revived. Rose’s resurrection is an obscured and noncorporeal affair, unlike the resurrection of Alcina Dimatrescu’s daughters Bela, Daniela, and Cassandra, which is documented in scientific detail. As a discarded “Insect observation journal” notes, their corpses became covered in carnivorous insects that “vigorously consume meat”, morphing and mutating to recreate their resurrected human forms (Sato). The visceral descriptions of this process and their subsequent ability to control hordes of insects are reminiscent Marguerite’s monster form. Like Mia and Zoe, Rose’s acceptability and status as the good daughter is predicated on her ability to adhere to societal norms and patriarchal categorisations. Conclusion In depicting female antagonists as ecoGothic monstrosities, Resident Evil 7: Biohazard and Resident Evil VIII: Village position the player character in vain defence of human specificity and supremacy. It is telling that, as a figure who has been unknowingly infected with the Cadou, Ethan Winters has already lost the battle against the parasitic invasion of his own corporeal form. By tapping into ecophobic anxieties about fungus and slime that defy categorisation, Resident Evil is able to challenge the player’s human specificity and agency. This lack of specificity and agency is only accentuated by the monstrous and transgressive presence of the unnatural mother and the dangerous female. It is this loss of control and vulnerability that is common to both the ecoGothic and the survival horror genre. By contrasting examples of the monstrous feminine with sanctioned feminine figures like Mia, Rose, and Zoe, Resident Evil 7: BioHazard and Resident Evil VIII: Village establish policeable boundaries for female behaviour and a means of justifying the killing of abhuman bodies. While the powerful monstrous female antagonists of the games are able to exert a phenomenal amount of agency when compared to their monstrous peers, their construction still plays into destructive misogynist and ecophobic ideas of the female and the non-human world. References Bishop, Katherine E., David Higgins, and Jerry Määttä. Plants in Science Fiction: Speculative Vegetation. Cardiff: U of Wales P, 2020. Carr, Emily. “The Riddle Was the Angel in the House: Towards an American Ecofeminist Gothic.” Ecogothic. Eds. Andrew Smith and William Hughes. United Kingdom: Manchester UP, 2016. 160-176. DiGioia, Amanda. Childbirth and Parenting in Horror Texts : The Marginalized and the Monstrous. Bingley: Emerald, 2017. Estok, Simon C. “Corporeality, Hyper-Consciousness, and the Anthropocene ecoGothic: Slime and Ecophobia”. Neohelicon 1 (2020). 27 Aug. 2021 &lt;https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11059-020-00519-0&gt;. Hurley, Kelly. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. Krzywinska, Tanya. “The Gamification of Gothic Coordinates”. Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural 1 (2015). 26 Aug. 2021 &lt;http://www.revenantjournal.com/contents/the-gamification-of-gothic-coordinates-in-videogames/&gt;. McGreevy, Alan, Christina Fawcett, and Marc A. Ouellette. “The House and the Infected Body: The Metonomy of Resident Evil 7.” 2020. 28 Aug. 2021 &lt;https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/english_fac_pubs/155/&gt;. Paxton, Amanda. “Mothering by Other Means: Parasitism and J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla”. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 1 (2021). 2 Aug. 2021 &lt;https://doi-org.ezproxy-f.deakin.edu.au/10.1093/isle/isz119&gt;. Perron, Bernard. The World of Scary Video Games: A Study in Videoludic Horror. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018. Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. Dev. Koshi Nakanishi. Capcom 2017. Resident Evil Village. Dev. Morimasa Sato. Capcom, 2021. Shelomi, Matan. “Entomoludology: Arthropods in Video Games”. American Entomologist 2 (2019). 28 Aug. 2021 &lt;https://doi.org/10.1093/ae/tmz028&gt;. Smith, Andrew, and William Hughes. Introduction. In EcoGothic. Manchester University Press, 2015. Stang, Sarah. “The Broodmother as Monstrous – Feminine – Abject Maternity in Video Games.” 42 (2019). 28 Aug. 2021 &lt;https://doi.org/10.7557/13.5014&gt;. Tidwell, Christy. “Monstrous Natures Within: Posthuman and New Materialist Ecohorror in Mira Grant’s ‘Parasite’.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 3 (2014). 27 Aug. 2021 &lt;https://www.jstor.org/stable/26430361&gt;.

Until the mid 1980s, Bordo writes, anorexia was considered only in pathological terms (45-69). Since then, many theorists such as Malson and Orbach have described how the anorexic individual is formed in and out of culture, and how, according to this line of argument, eating disorders exist in a spectrum of “dis-order” that primarily affects women. This theoretical approach, however, has been criticised for leaving open the possibility of a more general pathologising of female media consumers (Bray 421). There has been some argument, too, about how to read the agency of the anorexic individual: about whether she or he is protesting against or operating “as if in collusion with,” as Bordo puts it (177), the system of power relations that orients us, as she writes, to the external gaze (27). Ferreday argues that what results from this “spectacular regime of looking” (148) is that western discourse has abjected not only the condition of anorexia but also the anorectic, which in practical terms means that, among other measures, the websites and blogs of anorectics are constantly being removed from the Internet (Dias 36). How, then, might anorexia operate in relation to itself?In the clinical fields the subjectivity of the anorectic has become an important area of study. Norwegian eating disorder specialist Skårderud has discussed what he calls an anorectic’s “impaired mentalisation,” which describes a difficulty, as a result of transgenerationally transmitted attachment patterns, in regulating the self in terms of “understanding other people’s mind, one’s own mind and also minding one’s own body” (86). He explains: “Not being able to feel themselves from within, the patients are forced to experience the self from without” (86). While a Foucauldian approach to eating disorders like Bordo’s might be considered a useful tool for analysing this externalised aspect of the anorexic predicament, anorectics’ difficulty with feeling “themselves from within” remains unexamined in this model. Ferreday has described the efforts, in more recent discourse, to engage with the subjective experience of “anorexic embodiment” (140). She is conscious, however, that an enduring preoccupation with “the relation between bodies and images” has made the relations between embodied selves “almost entirely under-theorized”, and an understanding of the lived experience of eating disorders too often reduced to the totalising representations of “abject spectacle” or “heroic myth” (153). In this context Ferreday has welcomed the publication of Warin’s ethnographic study Abject Relations: Everyday Worlds of Anorexia for providing a point of access to the subjective experience of anorectics. One important aspect of Warin’s findings, though, remains unremarked upon in Ferreday’s review: this is Warin’s astonishing conclusion from her investigations that anorexic practices successfully “removed the threat of abjection” for her participants (127). It is exactly at this point in the current debate about eating disorders and subjectivity, and the role of abjection in that subjectivity, that I wish to draw upon the Gothic. As Hogle maintains, abjection has a significant role to play in the Gothic. Like Warin, he refers to Kristeva’s notion of the abject when he describes the “throwing off” whereby we might achieve, in Hogle’s paraphrasing of Kristeva, “a oneness with ourselves instead of an otherness from ourselves in ourselves” (“Ghost” 498-499). He describes how the Gothic becomes a “site of ‘abjection’” (“Cristabel” 22), where it “depicts and enacts these very processes of abjection, where fundamental interactions of contrary states and categories are cast off into antiquated and ‘othered’ beings” (“Ghost” 499). This plays out, he writes, in a process of what he calls a “re-faking of fakery” that serves “both to conceal and confront some of the more basic conflicts in Western culture” (“Ghost” 500). Here, Hogle might be describing how the abject anorexic body functions in the “spectacular regime of looking” that comprises western discourse, as Ferreday has portrayed it. Skårderud, however, as noted above, has suggested that the difficulty experienced by those with eating disorders is a difficulty that involves a regulation of the self that is understood to occur prior to the more organised possibility of casting off contrary states onto “othered” beings. In short, the eating disordered individual seems to be already an embodied site of abjection, which suggests, in light of Hogle’s work on abjection in the Gothic, that eating disordered experience might be understood as in some way analogous to an experience of the Gothic. Following Budgeon, who has stressed the importance of engaging with individual “accounts of embodiment” as means of moving beyond the current representation-bound impasses in our thinking about eating disorders (51), in this paper I will be touching briefly on “pro-ana” or pro-anorexic Internet material before proceeding to a more detailed analysis of Marya Hornbacher's Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia. Punter, drawing on trauma theorists Abraham and Torok through Derrida, writes that “Gothic tests what it might be like to be a shell […] a shell which has been filled to the brim with something that looks like ourselves but is irremediably other, to the point that we are driven out, exiled from our home, removed from the body” (Pathologies16). In response, I will be suggesting that the eating disordered voice enacts the Gothic by dramatising “what it might be like to be a shell” since that embodied voice finds itself to be the site of abjection: the site where behind its distractingly visible “shell”, the ego, using anorexic idealisation, is compelled to use anorexic practices that “throw off” in an effort to achieve an ever-elusive sense of oneness. Due to Punter's long familiarity and shared vocabulary with a wide range of post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory, I will be particularly referring to his evocations of the Gothic, which he has characterised as a “kind of cultural threshold” (Introduction 9), to demonstrate how an examination of eating disordered experience alongside the Gothic might promise a more nuanced access to eating disordered subjectivity than has been available hitherto. Marya Hornbacher maintains in her memoir Wasted that anorectics, far from hating food, are in fact thinking about it constantly (151). If anorectics always think about food, the visual content of their Internet sites might seem to suggest otherwise: that their thoughts are mostly occupied by bodies—particularly thin, emaciated bodies—which form the material that these sites call “thinspiration” for the “pro-ana” writer and reader. Thinspiration, although not yet recognised by the Oxford English Dictionary, is understood to designate inspiring words or images of thinness that, further to Hornbacher's observations, might be understood as helping the food-obsessed anorectic to manage that obsession. Many pro-ana sites have their own thinspiration pages which, aside from the disturbing frame of the pro-ana verbal content that can include specifying dangerous techniques for abstaining, vomiting and purging, might be little more distressing to a viewer than any readily accessible fashion imagery. On the pro-ana site, however, whether mixed among the seemingly ordinary images or in a section all on its own,the spectre of the walking dead will often intrude. A “pro ana thinspiration” Google image search might yield, similarly, a small cadaverous corner to the purportedly inspiring imagery. It might also yield a tweeted response, from a pro-ana tweeter, to what might have been similar images of thinspiration which, far from affording inspiration, seem to have prompted intense anxiety: “I see the pictures I put up, then I see the morning thinspo everyone tweets, and I just feel gross ..[sic]”. This admission of despair sends a fearful, anxious affect loose among the otherwise serene uniformity of the “thinspo” imagery from which it had ricocheted, apparently, in the first place. Thinspiration, it seems, might threaten just as often as it assists the eating disordered subject to achieve self-regulation through their anorexic practices and, as this screen shot suggests, the voice can offer the researcher a small but potent insight into the drama of the eating disordered struggle.Psychologists Goldsmith and Widseth have stated that Hornbacher’s Wasted “gives the reader a feel for what it is like to live in an anorexic client’s head” (32). Although the book was a bestseller, newspaper reviews, on the whole, were ambivalent. There was a sense of danger inherent in the turbulent, “lurid” details (Zitin), and unresolved nature of the narrative (MacDonald). Goldsmith and Widseth even refer to Hornbacher's reported relapse and rehospitalisation that followed a “re-immersing” in “the narrative” of her own book (32). Kilgour has observed that the Gothic is a space where effects come into being without agents and creations prosper without their creators (221). While Radcliffe's novels might tend to contradict this claim, it is important to note that it is at the borders between explication and a seeming impossibility of explication that the Gothic imaginary draws its power. Miles, for example, has argued that Radcliffe is concerned not so much with dispelling the supernatural per se but with “‘equivocal phenomena of the mind’” (99-102). In Wasted, Hornbacher writes of her fear of “unsafe” foods whose uncanny abilities include the way they “will not travel through my body in the usual biological fashion but will magically make me grow” (20). Clearly, Hornbacher is not referring here to reasoned premises. Her sense, however, of the ambiguous nature of foodstuffs bears an important relation to Radcliffe's “equivocal phenomena”, and indeed the border-defying aspects of Kristevan abjection. In Abject Relations, Warin discovered that her anorexic participants shared what seemed to be magical beliefs in the ability of foodstuffs to penetrate the body through skin or through the nose via smells (106-127). The specific irrationality of these beliefs were not at issue except that they prompted the means, such as the washing of hands after touching food or shoving towels under doors to impede the intrusion of smells that, along with the anorexic practices of starving, purging and vomiting, served to protect these participants from abjection. When Hornbacher describes her experience of bulimia, the force, textures and sheer weight of the food that she eats in unimaginable, enormous quantities so that it bursts the sewer and floods the basement as vomit (223) become all the more disconcerting when the disgusting effects, whose course through the sewer system cannot be ignored, are preceded by evocations of occasions when she anxiously searches for, buys, consumes and vomits or purges food: “one day you find yourself walking along, and you impulsively stop in a restaurant, order an enormous dinner, and puke in the woods” (120-1). Hornbacher’s eating disorder in fact is figured as an insidious double: “It and I live in an uncomfortable state of mutual antagonism. That is, to me, a far cry better than once upon a time, when it and I shared a bed, a brain, a body” (4). This sense of the diabolical double is most evident when the narrative is traversed by the desperation of an agitated protagonist who seems to be continually moving between the constricted upper spaces of dormitories, rooms and bathrooms, and gaping, sewerage filled basements, and whose identity as either the original or the double to that original is difficult to determine. For Hornbacher, even at the end of her memoir when she is presented as almost recovered from her eating disorders, the protagonist not only continues to be doubled, but also exists in fragments: she speaks to herself "as if [she] were a horse", speaking "severely to [her] heart" who will pull her down "by the hair" into a nightmarish sleep (288-289). Punter has elaborated on the way dream landscapes in the Gothic open space into paradoxically constricted but labyrinthine infinities that serve to complicate what he has referred to as the two dimensions of our quotidian experience (Pathologies 123). In Wasted, beds give way to icy depths of watery sleeps, and numerous mirrors either fragment the body into parts or alienated other selves, or yield so that the narrator might step, suddenly, into “the neverworld” (10). Out of the two in the doubling, it is not so much the eating disorder—the “It”—but the “I” that becomes most monstrous as occasionally this “I” escapes onto the empty streets where, glimpsed crouching, anxious and confused in a beam of headlights, she reminds us of Frankenstein’s creature on the mountainsides or in the wastes since, as her capacity to articulate is lost in that moment, she becomes an “othered” object in the landscape (173). When, one winter, Hornbacher develops an obsession with running up and down the hall at her school at five am, she sprouts fine fur all over her translucent white skin and begins “to look a bit haunted” (109); later, in a moment of horrifying self-awareness, she realises that she “looked like a monster, most of [her] hair gone, [her] skin the gray color of rotten meat” (266). Punter writes that it is in the “dizzying heights and depths” of the Gothic that such agitation can become frantic: “in vertigo, the sense that there is indeed nowhere to go, not up, not down, and also that staying where you are has its own imponderable but terrible dangers” (Pathologies 10). Hornbacher states that the “worst night of [her] entire life” was spent with “the old familiar adrenaline rush pumping through [her] [….] running through the town, stopping here and there and eating and throwing up in alleyways and eating and blacking out” (273). This ceaseless, anxious, movement, where it is not clear who or what is doing the pursuing, but clear that it is a flight from the condition of abjection, is echoed in the very structure of Hornbacher’s memoir, which moves back and forth in time, seemingly at random, always searching for the decisive event that might, at last, explain or give a definitive beginning point to her disorders. Not only is the “beginning” of the disorders—an ultimate explanation or initiating event—sought but never found, but the narrative also concludes with an Afterword in which the narrator is, demonstrably, yet to recover, and even as she lies in bed next to her husband, is unable to rest (289). As Punter writes: “In Gothic, we do not directly ask, What happened? We ask, Where are we, where have we come from—not in the sense of a birth question, but as a question of how it is that we have ‘come adrift’” (Pathologies 209)—a question which, as Hornbacher finds, she is unable to answer, but nonetheless is obsessed with pursuing—to the point where the entire narrative seems to participate in the very pursuit that comprises the agitated perambulations of her eating disordered body. Although the narrator in Hornbacher’s Wasted, is strikingly alone—even at the end of the memoir, when she is represented as married, her husband is little more than a comforting body—throughout the text she is haunted by the a/effects of others. Hornbacher’s family is shown to be a community where the principle of nurturing is turned on its head. The narrator’s earliest evocation of herself presents a monstrous inversion of the expected maternal relationship: “My mother was unable to breast-feed me because it made her feel as if she were being devoured” (12). The mother’s drive to restrict her own eating is implicated in the narrator’s earliest difficulties with food, and the mother’s denials and evasions make it all the harder for the narrator to make any sense of her own experience (156). A fear of becoming fat haunts all of the family on her mother’s side (137, 240-1); the father, conversely, is figured in terms of excess (22). When the two grandmothers care for the narrator, behind their contradictory attentions towards the young Hornbacher—one to put her on a diet, the other to feed her up (24)—lies a dearth of biographical material. The narrator’s attempts to make sense of her predicament, where her assertion, “there were no events in my life that were overly traumatic” (195), sounds the edges of this void and only serves to signal that this discomforting contested empty space is traversed, as Punter might suggest, by “the hidden narrative of abuse” (Pathologies 15). Certainly the vague awareness of a great-grandmother who, “a hefty person, was mocked” (98) hints at the kind of emotional trauma that might be considered too abject to be remembered. Punter observes that in the Gothic we are in the wake of the effects of events that we cannot know have even happened (Pathologies 208), and the remains of history that assault us “are not to be obviously or readily learned from; for they are the remains of the body, they are the imaginary products of vulnerability and fragility, they are the ‘remains’ of that which still ‘remains to us’; or not” (Pathologies 12). Hornbacher’s sense of disassociation from her self as a body, and the specificity of her own feelings, which she is only ever able to describe as “pissed or fine” (203), evokes an over-smooth shell, like the idealised images of thinspiration that both belie and reveal their anxious nether sides. Even at the conclusion of the memoir, the narrator still does not “yet” know what it might mean for her to be “well” or “normal” (283). Hornbacher writes: “I always had this mental image of me, spilling out of the shell of my skin, flooding the room with tears” (25). In eating disorders, the self, which has never been whole and entire, or self-regulated in Skårderud’s terms, struggles to self-regulate against the ever threatening encroachment of the abject in a way that suggests essentially Gothic scenarios; in eating disordered self-narratives like Hornbacher’s Wasted, this struggle is evident in the very Gothic dynamics of the text. Without the Gothic, which affords us a means of perceiving eating disordered subjectivity in all of its detailed and dramatic dimensions—a subjectivity that theorists to date have found difficult to grasp—neither the abjection inherent in the “spilling” nor the anxious idealisation of the very somatic sense of the ego in the “shell” in Hornbacher's statement can be, I would suggest, sufficiently understood. ReferencesAbraham, Nicolas, Maria Torok, and Nicholas T. Rand. The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis. Tr. Nicholas T. Rand. Vol. 1, Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994. Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993. Bray, Abigail. “The Anorexic Body: Reading Disorders.” Cultural Studies 10.3 (1996): 413-29. Budgeon, Shelley. “Identity as an Embodied Event.” Body and Society 9.1 (2003): 35-55. Dias, Karen. “The Ana Sanctuary: Women's Pro-Anorexia Narratives in Cyberspace.” Journal of International Women's Studies 4.2 (2003): 31-45. Ferreday, Debra. “Anorexia and Abjection: A Review Essay.” Body and Society 18.2 (2012): 139-55. Goldsmith, Barbara L., and Jane C. Widseth. “Digesting Wasted.” Journal of College Student Psychotherapy 15.1 (2000): 31-34. Hogle, Jerrold E. “‘Cristabel’ as Gothic: The Abjection of Instability.” Gothic Studies 7.1 (2005): 18-28. Hogle, Jerrold E. “The Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit and the Progress of Abjection.” A New Companion to the Gothic. Ed. David Punter. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012: 496-509. Hornbacher, Marya. Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1998. Kilgour, Maggie. The Rise of the Gothic Novel. London: Routledge, 1995. MacDonald, Marianne. “Her Parents Always Argued at Meal Times. So, Perched in Her High Chair, She Decided Not to Eat. At all. Marianne MacDonald reviews Wasted: Coming Back from an Addiction to Starvation.” The Observer: Books, 22 Mar. 1998: 016. Malson, Helen. “Womæn under Erasure: Anorexic Bodies in Postmodern Context.” Journal of Community &amp; Applied Social Psychology 9.2 (1999): 137-53. Orbach, Susie. Bodies. London: Profile Books, 2009. Orbach, Susie. Hunger Strike: The Anorectic’s Struggle as a Metaphor for Our Age. New York: Norton, 1986. Punter, David. Gothic Pathologies: The Text, the Body and the Law. Houndsmill: MacMillan P, 1998. Punter, David. Introduction. A New Companion to the Gothic. Ed. David Punter. Chichester: Wiley- Blackwell, 2012: 1-9. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (the 1818 Text). Ed. James Rieger. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974. Skårderud, Finn. “Bruch Revisited and Revised.” European Eating Disorders Review 17.2 (2009): 83-88. Warin, Megan. Abject Relations: Everyday Worlds of Anorexia. New Brunswick: Rutgers U P, 2010. 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