Disoriented Desire: The Haunted Good Life in the Gothic House

This thesis explores the relationship between the desire for the good life and the Gothic. The haunted house is a feature familiar to the Gothic because of its reversal of the comfort a home usually brings. The haunted houses in the Gothic provide a physical space that exemplifies the psychological and emotional disorientation that results from seeking unattainable ideals of domestic happiness and fulfillment. This thesis analyzes the haunted houses of three first-person-narrated gothic novels: Henry James\u27s The Turn of the Screw (1898), Daphne Du Maurier\u27s Rebecca (1938), and Sarah Waters\u27 The Little Stranger (2009), arguing that each novel portrays the ruinous consequences of the narrator\u27s desires within the gothic home. Sarah Ahmed\u27s Queer Phenomenology (2006) and Lauren Berlant\u27s Cruel Optimism (2011) provide a theoretical grounding for exploring how the haunted house as a physical space can illuminate the disorientation of desire. I argue that in each novel, the desire the outsider-narrator feels for the home, the good life, is destructive, and while the destruction varies for each story, the outsider remains hopeful amidst the chaos. The inescapable past and the hope of the future collide in all three novels, and with this collision comes a sense of disorientation, of terror even, for both the first-person narrator and the reader alike

Behavior of Tissue-Engineered Skin: A Comparison of a Living Skin Equivalent, Autograft, and Occlusive Dressing in Human Donor Sites

OBJECTIVE To compare the behavior of a tissue-engineered living skin equivalent (LSE) with an autograft in acute donor site wounds. DESIGN Paired-comparison, randomized control trial. SETTING A university dermatology service. PATIENTS Three donor sites were created on the anterior thigh of each of 20 patients requiring split-thickness skin grafts. INTERVENTION For each patient, the donor sites were randomly assigned to be treated with meshed LSE, meshed autograft, or a polyurethane film (PUF) occlusive dressing. Blood and biopsy samples were taken for immunologic and histological studies. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Toxic effects or clinically apparent rejection, humoral and cellular immune responses, clinical take, healing time, pain, and 1-month histological appearance. RESULTS There was no toxic effect or clinically apparent rejection of LSE. Results of humoral and cellular studies were unchanged from baseline. The average time to healing for LSE with clinical take was 7.3 days (SD,±0.8 days); for autograft, 7.6 days (SD,±1.1 days); and for PUF, 9.5 days (SD,±1.8 days). The difference between LSE or autograft and PUF was statistically significant at the .001 level. Pain was experienced by 1 patient, no patients, and 10 patients at the LSE, autograft, and PUF sites, respectively. Histologically, LSE had the thickest epidermis (P=.02), PUF had the greatest degree of fibrosis (P=.02), and autograft had the least degree of increased inflammation (P=.004) and vascularity (P=.01). CONCLUSIONS In acute donor site wounds, LSE appeared to clinically take and to be a safe and usable form of tissue therapy.Arch Dermatol. 1999;135:913-918--