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Suicide, spectral politics and the ghosts of history in Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian
- Source: Horror Studies, Volume 6, Issue 1, Apr 2015, p. 19 - 37
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- 01 Apr 2015
Abstract
This article examines Elizabeth Kostova’s 2005 Gothic novel The Historian, a vampire novel that undermines its fantasies of a wholly accessible past by repeated assurances that history is always fabricated. The novel in fact presents not just Dracula but the past itself as a ghostly amalgam of absence and presence. This spectralization of the past is a symptom of the narrator’s own traumatic past, and Dracula becomes a mask for a repressed family narrative of suicide. In Kostova’s handling, however, the Gothic also becomes a way of engaging larger societal traumas when the novel presents Dracula as a figure for the suicidal terrorist. This post-9/11 novel ultimately points to and represses the fears and complexities surrounding terrorism since 9/11, especially the overwhelming fear that US efforts at counter-terrorism are turning America into the very thing it is trying to fight.