ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Cord-Christian Casper further expands on the socio-historical milieu that gave birth to the Elliotts by situating the uncanny family of ghouls within the larger, global political context of the post-war period. In doing so, Casper also connects Bradbury’s Elliott Family stories to more recent tales of monstrous clans in an attempt to interrogate the relationship between the “Family Gothic” and migrant narratives.
Different, persecuted, and barred from re-entering Europe: on occasion, the reality effect of the Monster family becomes tenuous, and post-war allegory looms. In addition to being monsters, mummies, and vampires, the Elliotts are also immigrants, both literally persecuted and metaphorically associated with a whole host of diasporic movements. In this chapter, Casper argues that such a negotiation of migrant and refugee identity is a feature of the subgenre of the “Family Gothic”. The narration of the tribulations of the Elliott Family will be shown to enable a double negotiation of immigration: difference is (1) ascribed from outside and (2) affirmed by the family itself. By considering the “Family Gothic” as a genre in its own right, Casper traces two intertextual networks: (very slightly) backwards to the old-world Gothic of the Addams’ New Jersey and forwards to Alan Moore’s comic The Bojeffries Saga. Moore’s family of working-class, immigrant monsters makes a (non-)living in a Northampton council house. Like the Elliotts, the Bojeffries gleefully act out fears of unassimilated, monstrous immigrants sticking to their ways—even if, in the Bojeffries’ case these ways involve bat-fishing and werewolf-transformations rather than the mosques and segregated areas of British anti-immigrant discourse. The comparison between the Elliotts and the Bojeffries shows that the Family Gothic offers a migrating generic frame. In both cases, the form produces isomorphic perspectives on the respective, allegedly normative mainstream society. The narration of double difference—ascribed and maintained—structurally vacillates between metaphorical resonance and the necessity to affirm its diegetic reality. The latter is crucial since, as a set of fantastic stories, the Elliott Family saga enjoins its readers to “pretend that things that you know to be impossible are not only possible but real” (Miéville). That the Elliotts are actually monsters enables a precise literary negotiation of diaspora by means of the Gothic, with the family at one and the same time literally and figuratively “‘different’ from the average family unit, either physically or in the strange talents they possess” (Joshi). What if, the Family Gothic provocatively asks, they are not like us, to such an extent that any “us” appears attenuated and unworthy of narration whatsoever? Throughout the chapter, Casper shows that the possibility of narrating the Family Gothic is very much in question within Bradbury’s and Moore’s works themselves: whether the Gothic can (or should) become familiar is set up as a generic parallel to the question of whether the diaspora can (or should) conform to its adopted society.
