Suburban Ghost Story: Pre-feminist Self Writing Practices and the Gothic in Must Read After My Death

• Main Author: Papagena Robbins
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Montreal Monstrum Society 2019-06-01
• Series: Monstrum
• Subjects: Gothic documentary; gothumentary; Must Read After My Death; proto-feminism; feminist horror; documentary; self-writing; archive; patriarchy; 1960s; home movies; Gothic
• Online Access: https://www.monstrum-society.ca/uploads/4/1/7/5/41753139/robbins_-_must_read_-_monstrum_2.pdf
• ISSN: 2561-5629

Looks at the proto-feminist call for personal redemption and critique of patriarchal forces in the voice recordings of a 1960s wife and mother in the experimental Gothic documentary Must Read After My Death. The essay situates Dews' film's critical power within the Gothic mode's willingness to expose the "key epistemological impasses around the auto/biographical, female agency, and the evidentiary mediums themselves."