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Sara Wasson Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, 224pp, cloth, $84.00, ISBN 978-0-230-57753-4
‘There are problems’, states Sara Wasson, ‘with using psychoanalysis or its derivatives to explain Gothic, not least the fact that psychoanalysis is arguably itself a Gothic fiction, albeit a hundred years late to the party’ (pp. 25–26). Then, employing a critical gaze through a range of wartime literary texts, she carefully sets out her strategy for deploying aspects of psychoanalytic theory embedded in attention to the sociohistorical context of World War II as experienced in London. Wasson is an adept writer who implements psychoanalytic tropes well to lay bare the uncanny at the core of wartime writers and artists. These authors knowingly created a cognitive dissonance in their texts to capture the familiar-yet-strange that was present in wartime London – a sense of subversive otherness that was not tamed by dominant redemptive stories of national triumph or stoic Blitz unity. Wasson shows that, as always, there are strangers and dark secrets hidden in the shadows of London's streets, domestic spaces, hospitals, morgues, factories, internment camps and psychiatric hospitals. An inhospitable, unhomely Gothic-like homeland for some …
Critical analysts of the Gothic have regularly turned to psychoanalytical models in recent years; the theories of fragmentation, repression, ambivalent desire and disgust that Freud and his successors interrogated so provocatively have cast new light on the shadowy world of Gothic fiction. As established analysts of Gothic literature have long observed, from its eighteenth-century manifestations through to the late twentieth-century revivals of Gothic fiction through postmodernism, the Gothic tropes of a