What Miss Grief Knew

This essay considers Constance Fenimore Woolson's "Miss Grief," Hawthorne's "The Birth-mark," James's The Beast in the Jungle, his 1880 essay on Woolson, and Elizabeth Maguire's The Open Door against the backdrop of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's theory of the paranoid gothic, a quasi-supernatural dynamic in which a male protagonist fears manipulation by an Other to whom his unconsciousness appears transparent. Through close reading of key figures, notably catachresis, I analyze the intertextual connections among these constellated texts and examine their allegorizing of the operation of tropology in relation to the paranoid gothic.