Table Of ContentPALGRAVE STUDIES IN LITERATURE,
SCIENCE AND MEDICINE
Embryology
and the Rise of the
Gothic Novel
Diana Pérez Edelman
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
Series Editors
Sharon Ruston
Department of English and Creative Writing
Lancaster University
Lancaster, UK
Alice Jenkins
School of Critical Studies
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, UK
Jessica Howell
Department of English
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX, USA
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Diana Pérez Edelman
Embryology and the
Rise of the Gothic
Novel
Diana Pérez Edelman
University of North Georgia
Oakwood, GA, USA
ISSN 2634-6435 ISSN 2634-6443 (electronic)
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
ISBN 978-3-030-73647-7 ISBN 978-3-030-73648-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73648-4
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To James and Robert Young, my little monsters
A
cknowledgments
This book project has been developing since I was in the PhD program at
the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill while pregnant,
ironically, with my first child, who is now nineteen years old. I have stepped
away from the project for years at a time—rearing human children while
putting the intellectual ones on hold. The project narrowed from one
about Romanticism and its connections to embryology and obstetrics
more broadly to its current focus on embryology and the Gothic. I have
many, many friends, colleagues, and institutions to thank for helping me
bring it to its current form.
I am so grateful to Professor Jeanne Moskal at UNC-Chapel Hill for
her guidance and direction when this project was initially conceived; she
challenged me and made me a better thinker and writer. Thanks, also, to
Elizabeth Stockton, a colleague at UNC, who recommended that I free
write about my ideas, which signaled a turning point in my thinking. To
this day, I tell that story to my students to convince them that free writing
works. My dissertation writing group was instrumental in encouraging me
to make “big” claims about the relevance of obstetrics to the period—Amy
Weldon, Kathryn Wymer, Tom Horan, and Gena Chandler (now Chandler-
Smith). I am also grateful to Professor Robert Mitchell at Duke University,
who generously read the manuscript and suggested narrowing to the
Gothic; perhaps more importantly, he helped me shift the focus of the
work by recommending Helmut Müller-Sievers’ book, Self-Generation.
After a long hiatus, I returned to academia and participated in an NEH
Summer Seminar with Professor Stephen Behrendt in Lincoln, Nebraska,
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
in 2013. This six-week seminar reignited the project, moving it to the next
stage. The encouragement of Professor Behrendt, who generously com-
mented on the manuscript, and the support of the life-long friends I made
that summer enabled me to return to the project with new direction. I
would like to thank Yohei Igarashi for recommending Stephen Gould’s
work and Brian Rejack for recommending Denise Gigante’s Life:
Romanticism and Organic Form. Kellie Donovan-Condron has been
instrumental in supporting the project from afar as we have been account-
ability partners since our time at NEH. Thank you, Chris Washington, for
reading several versions of the final proposal and helping me get it to its
final state. James Rovira has always been a cheerleader and supporter in
many ways (too many to count), and for that I am thankful.
I am grateful to my home institution, the University of North Georgia
(UGA), for offering financial support for parts of this project. In 2015, I
won two internal awards: the Presidential Semester Scholar Award and the
Presidential Summer Scholar Award. My gratitude also goes to Mary
Carney and my WriteIN faculty writing group, including Steve Pearson,
Michael Rifenburg, and Leigh Dillard, for reading and commenting on
drafts of the proposal for this award. During those months of research
leave, I was able to conduct research at the Wellcome Library, Archives &
Special Collections at the University of Glasgow, and the Royal College of
Surgeons of England. A special thanks to Kelly Ball at Emory University,
who provided me with archival research training before my trips.
A significant portion of my gratitude for bringing the project to its final
state goes to the anonymous readers of the first two proposals that I sent
to Palgrave and to Professor Anne Williams at the University of Georgia.
The first two rounds of the reader’s comments were most generous and
encouraging and significantly helped me reframe the project. And thank
you to Professor Williams, my former MA thesis advisor at UGA, for
encouraging me to write a chapter on Walpole and to rethink and reframe
the introductory material. She has read the manuscript twice in the last
two years. Furthermore, well before this project was even on my radar, she
ignited my love for the Gothic in the mid-1990s, and her book Art of
Darkness has been enormously influential.
And, thank you, dear Friends and Family, for listening to me talk about
this book for years and years and years, always believing in me, and encour-
aging me even when I wanted to give up. You know who you are.
Praise for Embryology and the Rise
of the Gothic Novel
“Foregrounding some of the most canonical and widely studied Gothic and
Romantic texts, offering readings that are at once vibrant and new while still some-
how familiar in the best possible way, Edelman makes it clear just how fundamental
a concern with generation is to any understanding of the period. This work is
deeply learned and wonderfully accessible—and profoundly urgent.”
—James Robert Allard, Brock University, Canada, and author of Romanticism,
Medicine, and the Poet’s Body (2007)
“Edelman argues that contemporary theories of embryology (not yet an empirical
science) debate often contradictory concerns about origins, identity, hybridity, and
the potential for an infinite number of forms. Gothic narratives express similar
anxieties, adapting to popular and high art, changing historical circumstances, and
media unimaginable at their birth. Reading the evolution of Gothic in the context
of inherently contradictory theories of embryology illuminates the literature’s own
contradictions. (Is it conservative or revolutionary? Feminist or misogynist?)
Edelman’s learned and cogent exposition of this unexpected biological context
will engage not only students of the Gothic tradition, but also the growing audi-
ence discovering the material and scientific roots of Romanticism.”
—Anne Williams, Professor of English Emeritus, University of Georgia, USA,
and author of Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (1995)
c
ontents
1 Conceiving the Gothic; or, “A New Species of Romance” 1
“Seeds of Poetry and Rhyme” 7
“Modes of Perception”; Or, Eighteenth-Century Embryology 20
The Gothic: Preformationist or Epigenetic? 32
Internal Sources of Identity 33
Monstrosity, Hybridity, Endless Narration 36
References 40
2 “A Very Natural Dream”; or, The Castle of Otranto 45
Origin Stories: The Dream and the Prefaces 47
The Houses of Manfred and Alfonso 52
The Statue as Symbol of Epigenesis 59
References 63
3 “The Liberty of Choice”; or, the Novels of Ann Radcliffe 65
Radcliffe and Science 67
Individual Passion versus Parental Control 71
Family Resemblance 76
The “Explained Supernatural” 79
The Miniature 82
Endless Narration 84
References 85
xi
