Open AccessThe Catastrophic Grief of De Quincey's 'Lost Girls': The Subversive Females of Confessions and Suspiria
Author(s) -
Tamie Dolny
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
pivot
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2369-7326
DOI - 10.25071/2369-7326.40257
Subject(s) - grief , dream , emotive , agency (philosophy) , psychoanalysis , power (physics) , literature , psychology , gender studies , philosophy , art , sociology , epistemology , physics , quantum mechanics , neuroscience , psychotherapist
Depicted as hallucinations, hauntings, ghosts and dreams, the females of De Quincey's most controversial prose texts function as proto-feminist entities, where they usurp patriarchal linguistic structures by creating entirely new language systems. De Quincey's delirious dream sequences present a trifecta of female emotive power: analyzed through the feminist lens of de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex," this essay demonstrates how De Quincey's 'lost girls' exceed Gothic supernatural conventions to control the agency of a female-dominated dreamscape.