Deconstructing Gothic. Voices and noises in two Argentine nouvelles from the late 19th century

Abstract

The haunted house was the major Gothic locus of nineteenth-century narrative. As a theater of supernatural apparitions, it is developed like an architectural uncanny (Vidler, 1992) usually located in a specific building structure on the periphery of the urban space. Two Argentine short novels, Mandinga (1895), by Enrique E. Rivarola, and La casa endiablada (1896), by Eduardo L. Holmberg, spread spiritualist technology and bibliography in their plots to clear up the enigma on the origin of noises in a house in Las Cañitas neighborhood and in another one in the south of the city of Buenos Aires. In both, the verosimilizing resources of modern genres such as the police novel, the psychic fantastic and the uncanny tale, through a trans-genres work, seek to naturalize supposed paranormal phenomena that nineteenth-century spiritualism tried to study, either to point out their material origin or to contrast them with others “noises”, less Gothic than political, such as those made by the Parque Revolution or Revolution of 1880. In these narrative processes, female bodies, pure materiality, are gotified and politicized.