I Read Act Natural and Now I Feel Better about My Own Parenting, Ahem

Okay, if you’re just reading the reviews and you haven’t read Jennifer Traig's Act Natural yet and you’re wondering why so many people are griping that there’s a ton of talk of infanticide in this book--um, yes. There is a TON of talk of infanticide in this book. You might not have expected that if you were looking for a history of parenting, because, well, obviously, so here’s your friendly neighborhood trigger warning: there’s tons of talk of infanticide here!

But also… it’s super interesting! And also relevant! Like, Traig claims that the early medieval constant reference to “overlaying,” ie. rolling over onto your baby and accidentally smothering them while co-sleeping, was often a euphemism for infanticide. I would be very interested to know if there are any actual, verifiable stats on this, because I think it would be an insightful addition to the current co-sleeping controversy. How unhappy would that one already-unhappy NICU pediatrician have been when, in response to his lecture about the dangers of co-sleeping that he made me sit through before releasing my baby to my custody, I’d informed him that many of those historic references were actually murders? My baby would have been in a foster home by the end of the day!

Most of the infanticide discussion is in Chapter 1, the ancient history of parenting, and the context, then, is why there would be so much infanticide in a world without modern medical technology. The answer, in part? In a world without modern medical technology, you don’t have reliable birth control, and also don’t have the ability to get a reliable abortion. Combine that with the already abysmal infant survival rate, and I, at least, can see how entire cultures came to the idea that newborns weren’t exactly locked in on existence right at first. Just imagine me doing the little hand-gesture towards my brain and making the explody noise, because that blew. My. MIND!

Also exposing children to the elements, or to whatever animals might want to eat them or whatever other adults might want to snatch them up. And sending them to baby farms to be slowly starved to death out of sight and mind. Traig reports that in Paris in 1780, there were about 21,000 infants born. Seven hundred were nursed by their biological mothers. Three thousand had in-home wet nurses or were placed into Parisian “nursery homes.” SEVENTEEN THOUSAND were sent to baby farms elsewhere in the country. Oh, and also orphanages and foundling hospitals! People used orphanages WAY oftener than I thought they did. Traig reports statistics of over 40% of infants being abandoned to foundling hospitals in certain geographic areas over specific periods of time. I have since worked into my casual conversations the common surnames for foundling children: do you know anybody with the surname Columbo, Esposito, Vondeling, Temple, or Iglesias? If so, I have some bad news for you about one of their ancestors… You could tell Traig was high-key gleeful when spilling the tea about all the famous Western dudes we’re supposed to respect who actually dumped most or all of their kids off at orphanages. For instance, Jean-Jaque Rousseau had five children, and ABANDONED ALL FIVE TO FOUNDLING HOMES. Like, yikes!

I think I would have picked all of the above, though, over being a medieval European baby mummified in filthy swaddling for 24 hours at a go and hung on a hook or propped near an open fire where I was likely to burn to death. 
The one flaw in Traig’s book is that it is mostly a white European cultural history of parenting, and doesn’t much address other cultures than those. That’s fine, obviously, because otherwise the book would have to be nine times as long, but the lens isn’t specified in the title, so it would be understandable for a reader to be disappointed at the lack of other perspectives. 

Because Traig’s cultural history is necessarily too brief to thoroughly flesh out all the hot goss and scandalous tidbits that she drops, my favorite thing about her book is all her references to the historical works that I can now go find and read myself. I’m most interested in the craziest-sounding of the parenting tomes, so apparently I’ll be flipping through several early 20th-century parenting books and cackling about all the cocaine use. I’m also interested in the mid-1990s hippie birth and parenting books, especially when contrasted to the other extreme also coming around then: we’ve got both twilight sleep, which I already knew was a Whole Thing even before I watched that one Mad Men episode, and that stupid “your birth is not progressing” timetable that I am now learning was made up by one bored dude killing time by tracking a whopping total of 25 women over the course of one overnight work shift when he’d rather be elsewhere. 

Tangential shout-out to Channel to a New Life, the hippie birth film that I watched on VHS during one of my hippie birthing classes, and that I later walked my best friend over to watch with me at the hippie parenting center because I literally NEEDED him to experience this with me. It involves an outdoor water birth, of course, aided by one guy playing the drum and another guy holding a crystal that has had dolphin song channeled through it, and ends with the newborn’s preschool-aged sibling stripping nude and hopping into the bloody birth pool to play. The video was “lost” (I promise it wasn’t me!) long before the parenting center eventually shut down, and I’ve never found another copy. If you ever see one, pleasepleaseplease snap it up for me!

My other favorite thing about this book is the random miscellaneous factoids that Traig drops throughout. Such as: did you know that Dr. Spock has an Olympic Gold medal? Or that L. Ron Hubbard wrote a recipe for baby formula that some people still use?!? Or that the original edition of Aesop’s fables featured some VERY suss tales? Or that it was a terrifying evangelical children’s author, Favell Lee Mortimer, who invented both the flash card and the titling trope of [insert topic] Without Tears? I also really enjoyed finding connections to some of my other Special Interests--I already mentioned Dr. Sears, who I used to be OBSESSED with and would now actively enjoy gossiping about, but Traig also references the Satanic Panic scare of the 1980s that led to those messed-up accusations that the McMartin Preschool was conducting Satanic rituals with young children that led to the equally messed-up made-for-TV movie Do You Know the Muffin Man, which was released exactly in my unsupervised TV watching wheelhouse era. Here it is on YouTube:

I would have had an absolute cow if my own under-tens had been watching that on heavy rotation. Like, Good Lord, did my parents care about me AT ALL?!?

In conclusion, I guess I’m just really glad that I live in a time in which my obstetrician didn’t show up and dive right into my vagina with bare autopsy-hands…

Just kidding--I had a nurse-midwife, and actually she was super mean to me! That’s probably a future chapter of Traig’s, how the dummies of the early twenty-oughts were so obsessed with “natural” medicine that they’d choose a body-shaming midwife over a perfectly nice obstetrician. Sigh. But don’t worry--Traig also has a lot to say about Dr. Sears!

P.S. Find me on Goodreads, where I'm reading 104 books this year!

P.P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Tutorial: Quilt-As-You-Go Scrappy Bookmarks

I originally published this tutorial on Crafting a Green World.

Use up your scraps while making this cute and useful quilt as you go scrappy bookmark!

Y’all know how much I love myself a DIY bookmark! So when I decided that I wanted to give out a few Valentine’s Day gifts this year, it wasn’t hard to settle on these as my gift. I’d just spend a few minutes sewing each one, swing by the Half-Price Books Outlet and pick out a book each person would like, add in a little store-bought candy, write a note, and just like that, Valentine’s Day is won!

Tangent: it would have been cool if I’d decided to send out Valentine’s Day gifts more than 26 hours before I absolutely needed to put those gifts in the mail, but whatever. A manufactured emergency caused by procrastination happens to be my crafting sweet spot!

Being as I had a few hundred other things I needed to accomplish in that 26-hour window, ahem, I made the quickest and easiest bookmarks I could think of. Coincidentally, they’re also the absolute cutest, and happily, they’re also made ENTIRELY from scrap! I love how sewing with scraps lets me revisit my favorite fabrics in new scenarios. I am down to less than a fat quarter of that super cute pink skulls fabric, and so far there has not been a single square inch wasted.

The quilt as you go method is a terrific way to sew extremely quickly, and combined with how small these finished products are, you’ll be surprised at how soon you have an adorable bookmark in your hands. They sew up so quickly that I always make tons extra, because otherwise it’s barely worth the time it takes to set up my sewing machine!

Supplies

Here’s what you need to make your own scrappy bookmarks:

• backing fabric. I like something a little heavier/stiffer with no stretch for this. I used scrap Eco-fi polyester felt, but I also like denim, canvas, and interior design fabrics.
• front fabrics. Quilting cotton works best. I really like combining fussy cut novelty prints with solids, but you should do you!
• ribbon. I considered a few different ribbons, but then I discovered an entire package of vintage rickrack hiding in my bias tape bin!
• cutting/sewing supplies. Among other miscellaneous supplies, I used a gridded quilting ruler, a rotary cutter, my sewing machine with a universal needle, and a seam roller.

Step 1: Measure and cut the backs and the ribbon.

I think 2″x6″ is the perfect size for a bookmark, so I cut my felt to that size.

I eyeballed the rick rack, but all of my pieces were about 10″ long.

Step 2: Begin the quilt as you go method.

Fold the ribbon in half and place it towards the top of the backing fabric, with the ends overlapping the backing fabric by at least 1″ and the loop coming off the top.

Choose your first fabric scrap and place it at the top of the bookmark, sandwiching the ribbon between the fabric scrap and the back. I like to line up the top of the scrap with the top of the back to save myself trimming it later.

Stitch across the top of the bookmark, backstitching over the ribbon. You can stitch off the bookmark back on both sides, as you’ll definitely be trimming that extra scrap fabric away. Don’t worry about backstitching, because you’ll edge stitch this entire bookmark later, and that will lock these stitches.

Step 3: Continue to quilt as you go.

Choose another fabric scrap, and place it right side together with the first scrap. Stitch across the bookmark to sew it down.

Fold the scrap fabric back so that the right side faces up and the seam is hidden, then press down with the seam roller or an iron (don’t forget to lower your heat if you’re also sewing with felt!). If you prefer, you can trim the excess fabric away every time you sew a new scrap, or you can wait and trim the entire bookmark at one time.

Continue to add new scraps to the bookmark by placing them facedown on a previous scrap, sewing them together, and then unfolding and pressing. Feel free to play with your placement by setting scraps at fun angles, and to fussy cut novelty prints to show off your favorite elements.

Step 4: Edge stitch to finish the bookmark.

When you’ve covered the entire bookmark back with quilted fabric, edge stitch around the perimeter of the bookmark.

My favorite thing about these particular bookmarks is how easy it is to make them all look completely different. I didn’t think I even had that many pink fabrics, but look how many different pink bookmarks I made!

I’m already mentally compiling my list of green fabrics that I might have kicking around my scraps bin, because don’t you think that all the kids in my Girl Scout troop would also love their own quilted bookmark as a Bridging gift?

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Kid-Free in New York City: Day 3 is When We Go to the Library!

This whirlwind trip was, indeed, a whirlwind! Still reeling with excitement from Hadestown, the Rangers game, doughnuts, bagels, Van Gogh, karaoke-singing waitresses, and the view from the High Line, we got up early, checked out of the Republican stronghold, and set out for just a few more precious hours in New York City.

Even on a random Wednesday morning in February, all the other tourists in the city had the same idea, and so we all met up at Rockefeller Center:

Then all the tourists in New York City all headed over to FAO Schwartz together. My partner basically had to run a deprogramming campaign on me to convince me not to buy these SHOCKINGLY expensive and TINY stuffies for the kids, but I doubt it's going to stick since now I have the store's web address. Yes, this keychain-sized stuffed dragon IS LITERALLY THIRTY DOLLARS, but it's so freaking soft. This croissant purse is forty dollars, but it is a Croissant Purse. I don't even know what to tell you if you don't think that is worth dipping into your retirement savings for.

Ah, well. Stymied for the short-term, I let myself be dragged bodily from FAO Schwartz, and instead we, along with all the other tourists in New York City, headed for someplace that was actually free:

In its smartest move yet, the New York Public Library just went ahead and made an entire permanent exhibition out of its coolest stuff. As soon as we stepped inside, my partner and I essentially abandoned everything else on our to-do list for the morning (Sorry, Hamilton! I'll go check out your grave another time!) and stayed here until we absolutely had to leave for the airport. 

Beethoven's sheet music in his own handwriting

Manuscript page of The Secret Garden in Francis Hodgson Burnett's own handwriting

The real Winnie-the-Pooh and friends

Finally, some celebrities that I CAN meet and take selfies with!

I love their sweet little faces! I am devastated to tell you, though, that Roo was lost in an apple orchard...

Please pay special attention to my precious Eeyore. I took a lot of notice, when I was a kid, of how he wasn't afraid to show that he was sad, and how the creatures around him never seemed annoyed by that:

I love how well-loved they all look. I just wish that every now and then, maybe once a year or so, they'd get to come outside their box and play with some real kids again. 

Noah Webster's spelling book

He's why we spell things weird here in America!

manuscript copy of Ptolemy's Geographica

On this map of Greece there's a label for Hades, so apparently they knew where that was!

Hunt-Lenox globe

This globe's claim to fame is that it's one of only two from the Medieval OR Renaissance eras to include the label "Hic sunt dracones!" 

marketing materials for the Montgomery Bus Boycott

I'm so excited that I got to see this--this is the first time that I've ever seen real-life primary source materials from the Montgomery Bus Boycott in person! The handwritten ride-share flyer, in particular, is such a precious artifact.

typewritten poem "Malcolm X" by Gwendolyn Brooks

I've never seen this wealth of primary source material before. So many manuscript pages and works in progress! I'd be very interested to know if this was Gwendolyn Brooks' own typewriter, or if she had an assistant who did her typing. Either way, I'm fascinated by the noticeable wear on some of the letters--the "g", especially--showing their frequency of use.

Shakespeare First Folio

I used to work in a Special Collections library, so there were a few items here--the double elephant folio of Audobon's Birds of America, for instance, and this Shakespeare first folio--that I'm already acquainted with. But that just means that I could greet them with not the excitement of novelty, but the happiness of again spotting a well-loved old friend.

cuneiform

Here's another old friend--y'all KNOW how much I love cuneiform!

manuscript copy of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring

This makes me wish that I HAD made time to bring my now-collegiate environmental scientist here the last time we were in New York City, because she would have freaked out with excitement to see this. But I did get immediately onto my public library's website and put a copy of Silent Spring on hold to read when I got back.

first edition of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

I didn't catch why, but the NYPL has an AMAZING Mary Shelley collection, including materials about/by her famous mother, Mary Wollstonecraft.

portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft

This painting, a copy of one that hung in baby Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's family parlor, was commissioned by AARON BURR(!!!) for his daughter, Theodosia.

Gutenberg Bible

Another old friend! The Special Collections library where I once worked also had a life-sized model of a Gutenberg printing press that my kids could probably draw with their eyes closed, I've made them look at it so many times over the years.

handwritten manuscript of "Transformation," by Mary Shelley

I've never read this Mary Shelley work! I was so interested to see her handwriting and all of her in-text edits.

Frankenstein first edition

This was one of only 500! Not shown here but also on display: literal fragments of Percy Bysshe Shelley's skull(?!?).

the Green Book

Another primary source first for me! My teenager has been so interested in African-American history during her AP US History study this year that I wish she could have seen some of these materials in person, too.

SO MANY COOL THINGS!!!! In the end, only my horror of not showing up at the airport far too early for my flight got me out of that library. 

After dragging myself, weeping, out of the NYPL, my partner and I bought some bagels to take home (once again, we did not check our order before we left the store, and once again WE GOT SHORTED BY A BAGEL?!?!), rode the subway to the train and the train to the airport, got screamed at and patted down only a little at security, and then made our way back home to chickens, cats, dog, and one teenager who in our absence had kept up with her schoolwork and ballet, maintained the house and pets in excellent condition, and tbh did not seem super excited to have her quiet haven wrecked by our noisy excitement and cluttery luggage.

She was happy to see the New York bagels, though!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

I Read Twelve Years a Slave, and Now I'm Going to Go Spit on Edwin Epps' Grave

I read a bunch of these one-star Goodreads reviews to the family, and we were simultaneously horrified and howling with laughter. People are so hilariously awful!

Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

My teenager and I have been listening to this book together as part of her AP US History study, usually listening for an hour or so at a time... but this last time, we listened to two and a half hours together, all the way to the end, in the audiobook equivalent of not being able to put it down because it was so exciting!

The teenager chose this book over both Uncle Tom’s Cabin and other possible slave narratives because, frankly, it was the shortest. I'd never read it before, and neither of us have seen the film, so we both came to it fresh. I was interested to see what each of us thought about it, she who's read several children's fictional accounts (shout-out to Addy Walker!) and YA histories about US slavery but nothing this graphic or wrenching, and me who's read fairly widely on the subject, but almost entirely in college classes. We've taken a lot of road trips to Civil War sites, but shamefully few to sites where we could learn about the enslaved. 

Spoiler Alert: OMG this book is EPIC. It is INCREDIBLE. It is distressing, and action-heavy, and suspenseful, and sad. It has vivid characters who I can't get out of my head, villains whose graves should be spat upon, heroes who should have statues made and scholarships founded in their honor, and victims who bring to life the vile nature of enslavement.

Like, seriously. I was shocked at how good this book is! Because it's for my teenager's history course I was prepared to read it even if it was dry or boring or we just didn't enjoy it--I mean, it's school, that's kind of what it's known for! So I was shocked and thrilled that this book is genuinely good, genuinely exciting, genuinely interesting. I saw some people in other reviews griping about having to learn all about how to pick cotton in the book and they didn't like learning about it and thought it was boring. I mean, though... it's high-key NOT?!? If you don't pick cotton right, or don't pick enough of it, you get your ass kicked! And then get your ass kicked more the next day when you can't pick even that much on account of you're injured from getting your ass kicked! And if you're female, you're also getting raped on the regular, and then when the enslaver's wife finds out that her husband is serially raping you, you get your ass kicked for that, too. That... doesn't feel boring to me. It feels uncomfortable, which I'm guessing is what the negative reviewers are actually not liking about Northup's memoir.

Everyone should read this book, and I'd say that ideally they should read it in high school. It's pretty graphic, but the graphic scenes are terrible in the way that graphic scenes ought to be, in that they're in service of telling a very important story. It's not boring, unless you're just completely uninterested in learning about any type of life different from your own. And it's a living testament to the value of human life and the importance of those who give service to help others.

Under the theme of Some People are Incredible but Other People are Terrible, here is a gross bit of backlash to Northup's memoir: 163 years after the publication of Twelve Years a Slave, a person unaffiliated with any academics at all wrote and published a book (through the small press that she owns and serves as the editor, designer, and proofreader for) entitled 200 Years a Fraud, in which she claims that Northup lied about the events of the book? That does make some of the other one-star reviews that were a lot more racist, revisionist, and conspiracy theory-forward make more sense. Here's an excellent series of rebuttals to that very weird book, including some primary source evidence of its veracity.

I was so invested in this book that after the teenager and I finished it, I went on a deep-dive to learn more about Northup's life afterwards. Unfortunately, by all accounts, Northup did not cope well with his trauma upon his return to freedom. His mother had died during his incarceration, and the seven-year-old daughter he'd left greeted him as a 19-year-old woman who introduced him to the newborn son she'd named "Solomon." Northup spent time as a speaker on the abolitionist circuit, and, of course, helping author his book, and became famous enough that during the Civil War, Union soldiers who traveled through that Louisiana area sometimes sought the plantations were Northup had been held. They sent back news of this in their letters, so happily we know that Patsey, the woman who'd been repeatedly raped, and at least once beaten almost to death, by Epps, had left earlier in the war and so had at least survived long enough to achieve freedom. 

I wish we also knew what happened to the small child Emily, daughter of Eliza, who had also been held with Northup in Washington, DC. She wasn't sold onward to Louisiana but was instead retained to be forced into sex work. 

Census records tell that Northup and his wife often separated, and eventually official record loses track of him entirely. It was rumored that he suffered from alcoholism, and was likely often unhoused, as Anne Northup's obituary refers to him as a "worthless vagabond." I am so sad that this was not a happy ending!

This is a better ending: The Hollywood Reporter collected portraits of 46 of Solomon Northup's direct descendants. I LOVE this!

There are two more happy stories: that of Dr. Sue Eakin, the historian responsible for publishing a new edition of Northup's memoir and bringing his biography into prominent academic light, and that of Samuel Bass, the Canadian who successfully got actionable information to Northup's family and lawyer and was directly responsible for Northup's rescue. When my teenager and I listened to this book together, one of our favorite parts is when Bass is discussing why he'd put himself in so much danger to help Northup. He says that he wants to do this good deed so that later in life he can think about what he did and feel good about it. I mean... FAIR! 

We don't know what happened to Northup at the end of his life, but we know the entire biographies and final resting places of his enslavers (because of COURSE we do, sigh...). You can actually still visit the house that Northup was forced to help build for Edwin Epps--it's currently on the LSUA campus! I high-key love how people are using the memorial page for Epps' Find a Grave entry to roast him, and I'm definitely not NOT going to make a point of looking him up and spitting on his grave if I ever happen to be in the area, although I will probably gag myself trying and then end up barfing all over his grave because spitting is so nasty.

I guess barfing would be better anyway?

My teenager and I listened to this book together as inter-disciplinary work for her AP US History and AP English Literature and Composition studies. For a high school student, there are some excellent extension activities to add more meat and rigor for these studies, in particular. For students who need more practice writing about literature, or in using close reading as evidence for implications, I really like the reading/writing prompts at Edsitement. 

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries (where I promise I NEVER spit on graves!), handmade homeschool high school studies, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Homeschool High School English: Gothic Literature, The Haunting of Hill House, and Why Teenagers Should Watch Rocky Horror Picture Show

Our 2023 pumpkin army is a vision of Gothic decrepitude!

If you know me AT ALL, you will be so surprised to learn that I think that you should watch The Haunting of Hill House Netflix series with your teenagers before you read the book!

It's really good, first of all, and it stars one of the guys from Leverage, which is another teenager favorite around here, and it's so genuinely scary that my one chicken teenager actually noped out of the experience, and it's a terrific set-up to the Gothic literature genre, especially the idea of the decrepit old house as a representation of the darkness inside ourselves... AND it's completely different from The Haunting of Hill House book in every important way, BUT has enough nods to the book that when you read it with the teenagers afterwards, they can discover all the little connections for themselves as an aid to interest and an encouragement for close reading.

The only thing to be wary of is that my teenager loved the Netflix series so much that she was Big Mad that the book was completely different, and therefore decided that she Did Not Like the Book, which is a shame because it is so good, just... different. So if your teenager, like mine, is spiteful and loves herself a grudge, maybe rethink this order.

For all the other teenagers, it's 1) the TV series, then 2) the book!

https://www.tumblr.com/brutaliakhoa/722303965399859200/what-if-the-house-was-haunted-what-if-the-house

Genre studies are very good for high schoolers, because a genre study gives them a lot of practice picking out themes from different artifacts and doing a lot of comparison/contrast, all supported with lots of evidence and that good flow of logic that connects evidence to conclusion. 

Gothic literature makes an excellent high school genre study for a few reasons:

1. It's not exactly horror, so it shouldn't actually scare off the scaredy-cats, but it IS horror-adjacent, and has a kind of aesthetic that really appeals to a lot of teens. Even kids who aren't super emo tend to appreciate Gothic vibes!

2. It's a genre that's covered a lot of ground, historically, so it gives teenagers more practice reading and analyzing older works than they're often used to. A lot of the teenagers that I've worked with get so fussy when asked to read anything with challenging language/syntax, including just about anything that's not completely contemporary. But they'll work harder for something that they find genuinely interesting, and I have a lot more luck making Frankenstein interesting than I do Romeo and Juliet!

3. Speaking of Frankenstein... there are so many excellent female authors within the Gothic literature genre, and this study is a great chance to focus on Mary Shelley, Shirley Jackson, Toni Morrison, Anne Rice, and other important female authors within the canon. Gothic literature is, as far as I know, entirely Eurocentric, but there are plenty of Black voices to add, especially if you delve into one of my favorite sub-genres, Southern Gothic. Researching to find works by other POC or authors across the sex/gender spectrum or other continents (now I'm thinking that some Japanese horror could also work?) would make an excellent final project for a teenager!

https://www.tumblr.com/angrylittleburd/730460890258980864/spatial-horror-isnt-i-am-in-a-scary-place-so

For our The Haunting of Hill House study, I got my teenager's buy-in because that Netflix series was so good. After we finished, I asked if she would want to read and study the book version next.

Reader, she did!

After that, I'd planned to go on a whole Shirley Jackson deep-dive with her, doing some short stories (including "The Lottery" of course!) and then my own personal favorite Jackson book, We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Alas that she didn't love the book version, because it caused me to scrap those plans, but to be honest, broadening the study out to cover other authors over a larger time period was more academically sound, anyway. 

For a semester-long, in-depth study that you could put on your kid's transcript as its own English course, I suggest reading several entire novels together. A lot of very early Gothic is super messed up, though (*cough, cough* The Monk *cough*), sooo... pre-read! But even without the most messed-up stuff, though, you've got Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, etc. I don't usually like to get too invested in authorial intentionalism, but author studies of Mary Shelley and Oscar Wilde would make good rabbit trails if your teenager seems especially interested in their works. Or utilize those author studies in their history course to add more inter-disciplinary work. 

More modern Gothic choices could include Shirley Jackson, Ira Levin (Rosemary's Baby is the more obvious choice, but The Stepford Wives plays with the theme of place in the Gothic genre in some interesting ways that your high schooler can use for their compare/contrast paper), Anne Rice, and Toni Morrison. If you do Interview with the Vampire, consider contrasting it with Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, which is just as schlocky as it sounds, but actually has some interesting things to say about enslavement. 

Here's a New York Public Library list with even more Gothic literature books.

If you don't have an entire high school semester-long course to dedicate to Gothic literature, I also like the idea of covering the same ground via short stories. This list of Gothic short stories has Shirley Jackson, Edgar Allen Poe, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner on it, and also includes "The Yellow Wallpaper," mandatory reading, in my opinion, for any Liberal Arts major in the making.

Here's a list of Black authors of Gothic fiction that I've put on my own must-read list. I read Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl back in undergrad as a slave narrative only and I've only read Octavia Butler's post-apocalyptic Parable of the Sower, so I'm very interested in reading/re-reading the works from this list through a Gothic lit lens! 

https://www.tumblr.com/string-star-lights/691764710603980800/rocky-horror-picture-show-asks-what-would-happen

I'm trying very hard not to raise a bunch of hopelessly unemployable Lit majors like myself, so even with high school English, and EVEN with high school AP English Literature and Composition, which is the teenager's current study, I like to extend the analyses beyond just written text to a wide variety of other cultural artifacts, and the work beyond just reading and writing to a wide variety of other intellectual explorations. 

Fortunately, movies, music, and theatre are all very easy to incorporate into a literature study, because you can use many of the same analytical processes with them. They tend, especially movies and theatre performances, to hit the same plot and thematic beats in much the same way as literature does, so it doesn't feel like a big stretch for a teenager to write about them while writing about literature. But you can then help your student notice the parts that ARE different, like costume and setting and acting choices and audience, and adding those analyses helps them deepen their thinking on their topic. 

As part of this study, we watched The Rocky Horror Picture Show, both at a family-friendly live show and (because the teenager fell asleep during it, lol) at home. Especially if your student has already studied Frankenstein, The Rocky Horror Picture Show is semiotically rich with its overtly mad scientist and self-aware Frankenstein's monster and heroine who is required to choose between man and monster. If you watch a live show, you also get to add in the audience as further cultural artifact; the concept of a self-aware, non-consensually modified character has a lot of appeal to a lot of people, and witnessing an audience seeing the experience as a celebration instead of a taboo is enriching. 

I also recommend The Hunger and Pan's Labyrinth as semiotically rich Gothic horror films, although Pan's Labyrinth scares the snot out of me! 

For a more in-person folklore/social history/anthropology element, and depending on how scaredy your own teenagers may be, it can be very fun and intellectually rewarding to visit a haunted house (in October), or attend one of those paranormal/ghost hunting excursions that a lot of cities have. Even my own corn-fed Indiana locale hosts several such events. Place semiotics is easy to see during these activities, and although analysis of a first-person event can be extremely challenging for this age range, it's a useful skill that teenagers should start developing.

Other hands-on activities for this study include creating one's own Gothic art (take a rabbit trail down the path of Gothic art for a day or two first, because that's another whole entire fascinating exploration!); DIYing a model haunted house that fits into some of the themes you've explored (if you do this, add in some extra STEM skills by incorporating this Pepper's Ghost element); or, of course, writing one's own Gothic short story or poem. If you've got a bit of a reluctant writer, or just one who gets writer's block, it's fun and low-stress to first have them write themes, elements, characters, etc. on notecards to pick at random to be included in the work, or even to write a circular story, in which every five minutes you pass your stories back and forth and collaborate on all of them.

And in my family, we end essentially every study with a themed family dinner and movie night. Is the most Gothic dinner food bloody finger breadsticks, or is it mummy head meatloaf? 

You're all wrong. It's mashed potatoes carefully unmolded from my skull pan, with pats of butter melting in the eye sockets.

P.S. Want even more high school lit studies? My kids really love the Gothic vibe, and we've done full studies on both Frankenstein and Dracula!

P.P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, handmade homeschool high school studies, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!