Abstract
This thesis argues that Gothic literature's recurring emphasis on uncertainty, contradiction, and unresolved tension makes it particularly well suited for cultivating habits of critical inquiry in lower-level undergraduate classrooms. By placing Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic (2020) in conversation, this project traces how Gothic conventions are continually reworked to interrogate shifting constructions of race, gender, and power, while asking students to confront unstable categories such as human and monster, sanity and madness, and self and other. Drawing on Kevin Gannon’s concept of “not-yetness” and bell hooks’s engaged pedagogy, the thesis positions the Gothic as both an object of study and a pedagogical tool. The project unfolds across three sections, each centered on a text that represents a different moment in the evolution of the Gothic. Frankenstein introduces the instability of humanity and monstrosity, “The Yellow Wallpaper” relocates the Gothic to the domestic interior and interrogates gender and authority, and Mexican Gothic confronts colonial histories, scientific racism, and the legacies of eugenic thinking that haunt the genre. Together, these texts demonstrate how the Gothic evolves while consistently resisting interpretive closure. Ultimately, this pedagogical approach creates a classroom in which uncertainty is not resolved but practiced, enabling students to develop their own interpretations, tolerate ambiguity, and engage more critically with complex texts.
