The Birdcatcher and Jackal: The Oppression of Black Women Via Madness.

Contemporary African American women's novels The Birdcatcher and Jackal contain gothic elements that become elucidated through critical readings that apply Elaine Showalter's theory of white Victorian madness to Black horror theory. In Gayl Jones's republished The Birdcatcher (1986), the gothic motif of doubling identifies the oppression that Black women face under patriarchal domination through the characters of Amanda and Catherine. Erin E. Adams enacts the gothic through Liz Rocher's journey home to Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in Jackyl (2022) where she enacts an antithetical Great Migration through leaving New York to revisit a site of repressed trauma. Liz's movement away is a response to both racism and white patriarchal oppression. These women fracture white supremacist normativity as constructed as Victorian madness by confronting the men in their lives, as is the case with Amanda and Catherine, or by directly challenging white patriarchal violence, as Liz undertakes in Johnstown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]