My Initial Post: The Gothic trope that I found interesting in “The Anatomy of Desire,” was the idea of the archetypal “parasite” in John L’ Heureux’s short story because of the passage that quotes, “Hanley put on the skin of the saint. His genitals fitted nicely through the gap he had left and the skin at his neck matched hers exactly. He walked the corridors and for once left no bloody tracks behind. He stood before mirrors and admired himself. He touched his breasts and his belly and his thighs and there was no blood on his hands.” In this quote we find out that Hanley was actually not the victim but the murderer in possession of the saint or the passive female victim called “the saint.”
Hanley is likened to a “parasite” because we recognize in J…’s presentation and the article from last week that Hanley himself is like Buffalo Bill in the film where he lives off of wearing peoples’ skin to feed his desires. The “parasite” is in this case, of American Gothicism, is a person or thing that feeds off of others and lives off of what is or was a living being in order to feed off of others to feed a desirous need to feel something other than the need to live. The parasite is a good Gothic archetype for L’ Heureux’s story because Hanley is feeding his desires by killing “the saint,” and by wearing her skin. He is therefore a parasite because he wants to be loved but finds out that wearing her skin is not enough to be loved and knows now that it was out of his desire that it was his passion to wear her skin by scalping it off of her through first an incision down her shoulders, arms, sides, legs, and feet. The parasite helps me to appreciate, or understand the story because by my understanding, Hanley is a parasite that feeds his desires through the pain of others by wearing the skin of human beings. The story itself helps me understand other issues like the fact that Hanley is a criminal and a madman because he desires to be loved or to be possessed by “the saint” and by possession, he means that he wants or desires her therefore becoming possessed unnaturally by utterly killing her and wearing her skin out of obsession with the desire to be loved. He desires to be loved so badly, that he murders “the saint” by cutting her alive and then wearing her skin.
Works Cited
L’ Heureux, John. “American Gothic Tales (William Abrahams).” The Anatomy of Desire, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, Edition Unstated, Plume, 1996, pp. 339–348.
My Response To a Colleague:
Hi V…! The Gothic motif of “projection” which is where the outside reflects the inside in Carver’s “Little Things” can be found in a number of the stories we have read, but can also be found in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” where she writes as the narrator, ““I’ve got out at last,” said I, “in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!”” Therefore, this quote amongst others fits the idea that the woman in the wallpaper had become her because the narrator in the story is revolted by the wallpaper so much that it becomes clear that she has to take it down on the outside to reveal her true self or her inner psyche. In other words, the outside of the wallpaper reflects what is inside the narrator’s mind because it bothers her so much to see apparitions in the yellow wallpaper that she tears it down and suddenly becomes the woman in the wallpaper which is what is inside of her head as we speak. Her inner psyche is then projected by the apparition of the woman trapped in the yellow wallpaper because the narrator herself is also trapped inside the confines of the yellow wallpaper that revolted her. Almost, it seems that the narrator also escalates the more the wallpaper stays there and so, her mentality cannot take it any more so, she tears the wallpaper down from the wall. John and the narrator can also be seen as selfish because the narrator and John also have a toxic or hostile environment in the home and a relationship where John is always in control of the situation and the narrator goes crazy over a wallpaper that is yellow which is also an example of individualistic materialism.
