'I Might Just Split a Seam': Fabric and Somatic Integrity in the work of Tim Burton

Andrew Smith and William Hughes (2014) begin the introduction of their companion to Gothic literature with a quote from A Christmas Carol (Dickens 1843). Dickens describes the ghost of Christmas past as a figure without a clearly defined ontological form, a vision of ‘dissolving parts [that] fluctuated in its distinctness’ (in Smith and Hughes 2014: 1). This is an effective introduction, according to Smith and Hughes, to the Gothic preoccupation with fragmented bodies and psyches. Dickens’s account thus provides a useful starting point for this chapter, which investigates Tim Burton’s reconfigurations of Gothic discourses on ‘dissolving’ embodiment.