“Oh, I was a rebel”: The Limits of Transgression in Ottessa Moshfegh’s Gothic Fiction

Abstract

In this thesis, I argue that two novels by Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen and My Year of Rest and Relaxation, are contemporary iterations of the Gothic genre, specifically the Female Gothic. Ultimately, I argue that Moshfegh creates a new strain of the genre fitting for the twenty-first century American moment. Beginning with an examination of the genre’s history and formal elements, Moshfegh’s novels and protagonists prove to be in close alignment with traditional Gothicism. In the Female Gothic genre, Moshfegh enters a tradition characterized by transgression as a means of uprooting patriarchal limitations upon women. As such, the heroines of her novels, self-absorbed and self-destructive women, are imbued with the power to act as transgressive feminist figures; however, this analysis uncovers the ways in which they fail to uphold this genre expectation by examining the women’s relationships with beauty standards, labor, cycles of abuse, and female corporeality. The novels employ formal elements of the genre to construct a Gothic framework, but the heroines’ actions diverge from those of their predecessors in line with the social cultural moment of a neoliberal Trumpian America. The hopelessness in which the heroines revel and their lack of transgression against the conditions that have led to such an environment of despair are indicative of Moshfeghian Gothicism’s response to the futility of transgression in the twenty-first century American moment.