On March 22, 2024, I presented a paper at the Supernatural Studies Conference, held at Marist College. My presentation, titled “The Cat Came Back: Subverting the Gothic Romance in Florence Stevenson’s Ophelia,” took a look at one of my favorite pulp authors of the 60s and 70s. Read the abstract below:
In the 1960s and 1970s, the gothic romance was a frighteningly popular genre for American paperback publishers. Aimed at a readership of middle-class women, the typical gothic paperback promised moody atmosphere, fiendish passion, thrills, chills, and the suggestion of the supernatural. Gothic romances were often formulaic, with plots and resolutions that ran counter to the aims of the era’s second wave feminist impulse and instead depicted helpless heroines who accept psychological and physical abuse as romantic affection. But not all gothic romance authors fell into this trap of retrograde gender politics. Florence Stevenson, who penned over a dozen gothics between 1968 and the early 1980s, laced her work with playful feminist critiques of the form. Case in point: her 1968 novel Ophelia, a bewitching tale of revenge from beyond the grave.
In the character of Ophelia, Stevenson creates a heroine who is not a young woman at the mercy of sinister forces, but rather a house cat who has inherited the home and fortune of her eccentric owner. The novel’s villain (a pewter tableware-coveting lawyer) has no patience for Ophelia to live out her nine lives and so cuts them short by tossing her down a dank well on the property. But the mysterious appearance at the well’s bottom of a human woman—one who suffers from amnesia though insists her name is also Ophelia—initiates a chain of events that sees our villain become the subject of a reincarnated feline heroine’s peculiar brand of psychological torment. Stevenson’s Ophelia is a small masterpiece of genre subversion, one that uses the gothic’s supernatural trappings to upend conventions and enact a knowing feminist parody of the form.
The next weekend, on March 30, 2024, I once again attended the wonderful Poughkeepsie Book Festival with Kayla Miller, signing copies of our books alongside approx. 100 other authors and illustrators. It’s a wonderful event and one I always look forward to attending.
Jeffrey Canino 