Department of English

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Browsing Department of English by Author "Botes, Christan Nancy"

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    The haunted house/haunted mind as a gothic trope in Mike Flanagan’s The haunting project and source texts : a comparative analysis
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2024-03) Botes, Christan Nancy; Ellis, Jeanne, 1962-; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The haunted head as a haunted house trope, which is the focus of this thesis, has long been a staple of the Gothic genre, appearing in seminal Gothic works such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). The haunted head as a haunted house trope was once again revitalised in renowned horror director Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting Project (2018-2020). Multiple screen adaptations of Gothic haunted-house texts have been created over the last century, often tackling the difficulty of portraying the haunted head as a haunted house trope using visual and auditory language. This study aims to examine how two seminal Gothic haunted-house texts, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898) and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), use the trope to explore the social anxieties surrounding female mental illness and the mother figure of their respective periods, as well as how Flanagan re-contextualises those social fears and re-presents the trope in his adaptations of the source texts for his project. In 2018, Flanagan adapted Jackson’s 1959 novel into a ten-episode long series that would form the first instalment of The Haunting Project, a horror anthology for Netflix. James’s famous novel received the same treatment in 2020, wherein Flanagan once again demonstrated his unique style of adaptation and homage to his source texts. This thesis examines the concept of the uncanny and its relationship with the haunted house and how the haunted head as a haunted house trope is utilised as a tool through which the Gothic explores underlying social anxieties surrounding the perceived sanctity of the domestic home, the threat that female mental illness poses to the structure of the household and the effect that patriarchal ideology has upon the feminine-coded space of the home and subsequent enactment of patriarchal oppression through the maternal figure. In my examination of James’s The Turn of the Screw and Flanagan’s The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020), I will use Sigmund Freud’s theory of “The Uncanny” (1919) to read how both the source text and its adaptation confront the underlying concerns of their respective periods by employing the haunted head as a haunted house trope. I will further use Gaston Bachelard’s theory of the oneiric home (The Poetics of Space 1958) as a lens through which Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Flanagan’s 2018 adaptation of the same name utilise the same trope to explore the social fears of their respective contexts. This study aims to compare how the source texts use the trope to explore the social anxieties of their time with how Flanagan employs the trope in his adaptations as a means to re-present the concerns explored in his source texts to a contemporary audience whilst also addressing how those past anxieties have been translated into the present’s fears.