From the Riven Man to the Chthonic Narrative: The Schizoid Male Protagonist and Sentient Hybridised Space in the American Gothic, 1798 to the present

Gorrill, Kerry Ann (2025) From the Riven Man to the Chthonic Narrative: The Schizoid Male Protagonist and Sentient Hybridised Space in the American Gothic, 1798 to the present. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

This thesis identifies the emergence of a particular iteration of the modern and contemporary American haunted house narrative that features an ontologically insecure, white, heteronormative, middle-class male protagonist. This ‘schizoid’ protagonist enters a domestic setting which responds to his presence to become a sentient labyrinth; a space which forces him into an existential, psychic break. In close reading this character type, I define ‘ontology’ according to R.D. Laing’s understanding of ontological uncertainty and draw from Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space in my analysis of the symbolic function of domestic architectural spaces. Gothic criticism, such as that of Kate Ferguson Ellis (1989) or Gero Bauer (2016) for example, has often focused its analysis on female and queer protagonists. In particular, extended studies of the American Gothic have neglected the history and function of what I term the schizoid protagonist and failed to observe his developing relationship with sentient domestic settings. My research also tracks the historical origins of this new American Gothic male protagonist from his historical origins in seventeenth-century England, Scotland and America through to the Gothic romance and beyond into modern and contemporary fiction. In so doing, my argument identifies the political, social and economic factors that have shaped the representations of this fragile masculine identity from the ‘riven man’ of Protestant Gothic to contemporary horror. I describe these narratives as ‘chthonic’ given their semblance between the protagonists’ experience of sentient space and classical journeys into the underworld. Close readings of a range of primary texts by authors such as Stephen King, Bret Easton Ellis, Mark Z Danielewski, Steve Rasnic Tem and Jon Padgett exemplify the development of this chthonic narrative, many of which have not previously undergone critical analysis. Moving beyond a Freudian approach, I have chosen to apply R.D. Laing’s work on the schizoid subject, connecting this new Gothic protagonist to the ‘riven man’ of early Gothic. Combined with this consideration of his representation, I will also apply Gaston Bachelard’s taxonomy of literary architectural spaces to examine the form and function of the sentient home and its impact on the protagonist’s ontological security. Strauss and Howe’s theory of historical cycles has been used to 3 identify key events to which the form has responded in three recognisable waves of development from the 1970s to the present day. An unexpected outcome has been discovering expressions of anxieties in these texts that go beyond those concerned with loss of masculine identity and status to embrace fears about death and the meaning of human existence. Overall, I demonstrate that the development of the chthonic narrative is closely linked to recurring historical cycles.