ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the first novel, Amour, narrated by a bourgeoise named Claire Clamont, who is in many ways a classic Gothic "madwoman": she cradles a doll in her room, fantasizes about being her brother-in-law's wife, plots the killing of her sister and stabs a cat to practice murder. From a world-ecology perspective, the processes shaping the capitalist world-system involve not only the exploitation of labor-power, but also the appropriation of the unpaid work and energy of human and extra-human natures, or "Cheap Natures". It argues that Marie Vieux Chauvet's novel helps us to highlight the ways in which the Gothic mode registers, and is animated by, not only the processes of exploitation but also those of appropriation. The chapter focuses on Chauvet's representation of the relation between the violence against women and the violence of an increasingly unequal world-system that develops through the downgrading and exploitation of natural resources.
