The joy of a Gothic fable: form, didacticism, and 'happy-ness' in Sonya Hartnett's The Ghost's Child and Jennifer Kent's The Babadook

Craven, Allison

Abstract

In this article, the novel The Ghost’s Child and the film The Babadook are discussed as extended fables in which the didacticism of the fable form is expressed in Gothic modes. While the Gothic is traditionally associated with disturbance, despair and fragmentation of identity, these works are striking for the joyful key in which they conclude and the optimistic messages that accompany the resolutions. Both are therefore related to Catherine Spooner’s (2017) concept of post-millennial “happy Gothic” which offers an alternative to the traditional view of Gothic. The happy-ness of these works is anchored in the fable form of the narratives, and examination of the form contributes to Spooner’s allied project to examine both what Gothic “is” and what it “does”. The happy-ness of these fables also inflects their connection to domestic traditions of Australian Gothic and the wider Gothic influences they exhibit. These are traced in the range of Sonya Hartnett’s uses of Gothic in her personal oeuvre, and the traces in The Babadook from European art film and the paranoid woman’s film of the mid-twentieth century.

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Aeternum: The Journal of Contemporary Gothic Studies

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2324-4895

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