This lecture explores the use of Gothic tropes and plots in two short novels by award-winning author Toni Morrison – Love (2003) and A Mercy (2008). Less well known than her earlier works, especially The Bluest Eye (1970), Beloved (1987), or Paradise (1998), these two later novels deserve greater attention, not least for their striking reworking of Gothic images of villainy, imprisonment, and haunting as vehicles for dramatizing the dark history of race relations in the United States. While Love examines the collateral damage of economic boom-and-bust cycles in the Southern states in the early decades of the twentieth century, A Mercy is set in seventeenth-century Virginia, on a farm established by a Dutch colonist who believes that he can own enslaved people without participating fully in the abuses of the system. In both novels, vulnerable female characters must navigate worlds operated by wealthy and powerful men, a dynamic that has been central to the Gothic novel since the late eighteenth century. To what extent they are successful in doing so will be the subject of this lecture

Dara Downey lectures in literature and film in Trinity College Dublin and the Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design, and Technology. She is the author of American Women's Ghost Stories in the Gilded Age (2014) and editor of The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies (https://irishgothicjournal.net/). She is currently writing a book about Shirley Jackson, and is also working on a project on domestic service in American gothic fiction and popular culture.

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