Abstract
Drawing on Freud’s essay “The Uncanny,” Renfroe argues that Davis uses Gothic tropes in “The Tragedy of Fauquier” to foreground the complicated role of memory in negotiating regional meaning. Set in antebellum Virginia but narrated after the Civil War by John Page, a lawyer and proto-detective, the novella presents a doubled perspective that undermines Page’s authority as a narrator. By invoking the antebellum past through a Gothic lens, Davis complicates definitions of region as geographic space, foregrounds the complicated role of memory in negotiating regional meaning, and reveals region as primarily a discursive space.
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Notes
- 1.
Page is the narrator of “The Murder of the Glen Ross” (November–December 1861), “The Locked Chamber” (January 1862), “The Asbestos Box” (March 1862), “A Story of Life Insurance” (June 1862), “My First Case” (August 1862), “The Egyptian Beetle” (November 1862), “Success” (October 1863), “The Second Sight” (December 1863), “The Daughter-in-Law” (February 1868), and the novella “The Tragedy of Fauquier” (April to August 1868). I follow other Davis scholars such as Sharon M. Harris and Jane A. Rose by using quotation marks for novellas that might also be considered long stories.
- 2.
My approach to region as a discursive space draws on Pryse and Fetterley’s Writing Out of Place. Also, it is important to note that Davis writes about other regions including the New Jersey coast and the Appalachian mountains of North Carolina.
- 3.
See Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Chiefly about War Matters by a Peaceable Man.” Atlantic Monthly, vol. 10, no. 57, 1862, pp. 43–61.
- 4.
As I argue elsewhere, with Page’s arrival in 1861, Davis is possibly the earliest American women writer to use a detective figure as a recurring character. While the unnamed narrator of Harriet Prescott Spofford’s “In a Cellar” (1859) may be the first detective created by an American woman writer, Page predates Spofford’s Mr. Furbish, who appears in “Mr. Furbish” (April 1865) and “In the Maguerriwock” (1868), by almost four years.
- 5.
Harris notes that the novella reflects contemporary medical debates about insanity (RHD 129).
- 6.
Harris points out that Davis’s thinking about spiritualism is somewhat contradictory, with some stories suggesting that she might be “more open to the possibilities than her medical colleagues” (RHD 235–36).
- 7.
For more on spiritualism in New Orleans, see Cox, Body and Soul.
- 8.
McGarry observes that both “Spiritualist and non-Spiritualist sources alike attest to the growth of the movement during the Civil War” (50). In his empirical study of Spiritualist newspapers, David K. Nartonis reports that the number of meetings “peak[ed] shortly after the Civil War” with the war adding several million new members according to some reports (366).
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Renfroe, A.M. (2021). “That Dim Abode”: Uncanny Region in Davis’s “The Tragedy of Fauquier”. In: Elbert, M., Bode, R. (eds) American Women's Regionalist Fiction. Palgrave Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55552-8_9
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