Wronging Wrongs: The Haunting Transmotion of the Enchanted Gothic in John Keats's Lamia

In this article, I argue that Gerald Vizenor's theory of 'transmotion' and C. Ree and Eve Tuck's theory of haunting in western narratives help us understand why John Keats thought Lamia to be his best gothic poem. Scholars have traditionally thought Lamia to be one of Keats's worst poems, chafing at its ambiguity. However, by piecing together Keats's uses of the gothic over his career and then examining Lamia's narrative structure and colorful visual imagery through the lens of transmotion and Ree and Tuck's theory of haunting, I argue that Lamia foregrounds traditionally western expectations of narrative satisfaction and then frustrates them in order to haunt the reader through what I call the 'enchanted gothic.' In this way, Lamia can transform the ways in which western readers interpret monsters and patriarchal societal structures. This article joins an ongoing project of interpreting art by way of Vizenor's ideas and adds new considerations on the role of the gothic and the application of transmotion.
JOHN KEATS'S TWO-PART NARRATIVE POEM LAMIA is the hypnotic, cyclical story of a colorful snake-woman turned human-woman who vanishes when revealed to the humans of Corinth as a snake. Lamia [...]