Abstract
Gothic fiction is noted for its atmospheric description of rural and urban locations—and contemporary queer Gothic texts, as this essay illustrates, are especially rich in references of this kind. Maryse Condé’s I Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (1992) and Elizabeth Knox’s The Vintner’s Luck (2000) create vivid depictions of both areas. In exploring the queer erotic attachments that the protagonists form, both writers focus on mixed relationships. Condé, interrelating the slave narrative with the witch story and recasting features from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, depicts the inter-racial attachments Tituba forms with certain white women. Knox, on the contrary, moving into the realm of paranormal fantasy, focuses on the inter-species relationship that the young Vintner Sobran forms with the fallen angel Xas whom he unexpectedly encounters in the fields at harvest. In discussing the two novels, I elucidate their literary context, explore their treatment of Gothic motifs including the spectrality, the monster and witch, and comment on their utilisation of queer theoretical concepts.
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Palmer, P. (2020). ‘Queer’ Representations of Rural and Urban Locations. In: Bloom, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_16
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