Table Of ContentGothic Fiction and the Invention
of Terrorism
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Gothic Fiction and the Invention
of Terrorism
The Politics and Aesthetics of Fear in the
Age of the Reign of Terror
Joseph Crawford
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction vii
1 Terror Before Terrorism 1
2 The Reign of Terror 37
3 The Secret Masters Walk Among Us 93
4 Popular Gothic 131
5 The Gothic Legacy 153
Epilogue: The Wars on Terror 189
Bibliography 199
Index 211
Acknowledgements
This book was researched and written over the course of a research fellowship at
Murray Edwards College, Cambridge. Without the support provided by this fellowship,
the writing of this book would never have been possible; and I wish to extend my
most sincere thanks to the college and its fellows for the extraordinary hospitality
and generosity which they extended to me throughout my two-and-a-quarter years
at Murray Edwards. In particular, I wish to thank my colleagues in English Literature,
Heather Glen, Raphael Lyne, Leo Mellor, and Oliver Wort, for the invaluable support,
advice, and encouragement which they unstintingly offered me during my time in
Cambridge. Thanks are also due, as ever, to my wife and family – Filipa, Richard,
Elaine, Rosa, Oliver, and Sophia – for tolerating my long immersion in the esoteric and
often gruesome material which forms the subject matter of this book. Finally, I wish to
thank my students at Cambridge, whose energy, enthusiasm, and intelligence made my
teaching work there a genuine pleasure. Shine on. Fear nothing.
Introduction
La Terreur est à l’ordre du jour.
Declaration of the National Convention, 5 September 1793
Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there . . .
President George W. Bush, televised address, 20 September 2001
As a graduate student, I once sat in upon an undergraduate lecture in which the lecturer
asked the students a question: judging from the Gothic fictions they left behind, what
was it that frightened the Victorians? The group was silent at first, but, gradually,
responses began to trickle in. They were scared of the old aristocracy: witness Count
Dracula. But they were also scared of the poor: thus the panic over the Ripper murders
in Whitechapel. They were scared of modern science: Frankenstein. But they were also
scared of ancient religions: The Beetle. They feared the city: Bleak House. They feared the
countryside: The Hound of the Baskervilles. They feared the very old: She. They feared
the very young: The Turn of the Screw. The past: Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. The
future: The Time Machine. Foreign invasion: The War of the Worlds. Inner corruption:
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Revolution. Despotism. Sex. Women. Industry. Art. Evolution.
Degeneration. Victorian Gothic, it seemed, demonstrated that the Victorians had been
afraid of virtually everything.
But had they been? Walking home past some of Oxford’s exuberantly Gothic
Victorian architecture, I found it hard to believe: the emotion I associated most with the
nineteenth century was a slightly manic sense of self-confidence. Had the Victorians
built their world-girdling empire, uprooting and exterminating entire peoples in the
process, because they were afraid? That hardly fitted with my own reading of Victorian
texts, fiction and non-fiction alike; and yet it was undeniably true that this blustering
empire had produced a literature of fear unparalleled in any earlier epoch of English
letters. But if Victorian Gothic was not an index of actual Victorian anxieties, then
what was it? If it was not the expression of the unprecedented fearfulness of its readers
and writers, then where had it come from? As I thought the matter over, it seemed
to me that the question was being asked backwards. It was not that Gothic fiction
was generated by the fears of its authors; it was that Gothic, as a form, provided a
methodology for writing about a subject – any subject – in such a way as to make
it seem fearful and threatening. Gothic was a network of tropes which, collectively,
served to either literally or metaphorically demonise its subject matter, whether that
subject was a person, a house, a social group, or an entire civilisation, by describing it as
though it was an object of numinous dread. The proliferation of Gothic fictions did not
necessarily demonstrate that the Victorians had felt more fear than their predecessors,
any more than the proliferation of Petrarchan sonnets in the early modern period
viii Gothic Fiction and the Invention of Terrorism
demonstrated that the men and women of the Renaissance had felt more love than
those before them; only that fear had become a topic of literary interest to their writers,
just as love had been three centuries before.
As I studied the matter further, I became increasingly struck by the speed with
which this Gothic rhetoric – whose hallmarks I took to be the description of human
wickedness and suffering in supernatural terms, an insistence upon the numinous,
incommunicable, incomprehensible quality of true evil, and an emphasis on the power
and significance of evildoers, often articulated in terms of the Burkean sublime of
terror, and their ability to fill their victims with feelings of helplessness and dread –
seemed to have become assimilated into English in the years on either side of 1800.
When eighteenth-century authors wrote about evil, violence, or fear – which they
often did – they generally did so in strikingly non-Gothic terms: the preferred idiom of
the British Enlightenment seemed to have been one of practical, matter-of-fact moral
realism, tempered with satirical scorn for the wicked and, later in the century, with
sentimental pity for the sufferings of the innocent. It was only at the very end of the
century that this Gothic rhetoric of evil appeared, but, once it did, it took hold rapidly
and thoroughly; a few decades later, it seemed to have become virtually the default
idiom for writing about evil in English. It has remained so ever since; even today, when
tabloid journalists or authors of popular fiction wish to write about the evil that men
do, they almost always use a recognisably Gothic rhetorical vocabulary to do so.
There is an extensive and flourishing critical literature on Gothic, which has
generally placed the genre’s origins a few decades earlier – in the mid-eighteenth
century, rather than at its end – with Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry (1757) and Walpole’s
The Castle of Otranto (1764) as its founding documents. One popular explanation for
its rise, found in Punter and Hogle, among others, attributes the existence of Gothic
fiction to the anxieties of the newly dominant British middle classes.1 The middle
classes, the account goes, were surrounded by reminders of the old aristocratic and
ecclesiastical social order they had displaced, in the form of ruined monasteries and
castles; these locations thus became sites of anxiety for them, reminders both that their
social dominance was historically recent and that it had been born out of the violent
seizure of wealth and power from their previous possessors. The Gothic narrative,
with its evil monks, wicked barons, and falling castles, enacts the foundational myth
of the middle classes, first demonstrating the moral bankruptcy of the old order – and
thus the necessity of its destruction – and then representing its fall into oblivion, and
its replacement by a new and virtuous generation whose values are in closer accord
with those of the contemporary bourgeoisie.2 It is a persuasive account, and it maps
fairly neatly onto the handful of Gothic texts which have tended to be most studied by
literary scholars: Walpole’s Otranto, Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, Lewis’s The
Monk, and Stoker’s Dracula. But it has two chief problems: its chronology, and its range
of reference.
The account is chronologically problematic insofar as it does not appear to actually
map onto the social history it purports to describe. The British gentry in Walpole’s
day had benefited enormously from the dissolution of the monasteries, and the
subsequent transfer of monastic estates into private hands; but these events had taken
place in the 1530s, over two centuries before the birth of Gothic fiction.3 Likewise,
Introduction ix
the growing importance of the House of Commons had increased the political power
wielded by the land-owning gentry of the period, while the political significance of
the British monarchy and aristocracy had waned since the days of the Tudors; but
the major battles in this long political struggle had been fought in the seventeenth
century, crucially in the War of Three Kingdoms and the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
If Walpole’s contemporaries passed a ruined abbey, it was likely to have been ruined by
Henry VIII; if they visited a ruined castle, it was likely to have been ruined by Oliver
Cromwell. Why should the middle classes of the 1760s, heirs to three generations of
relatively untroubled political and economic success, have felt so much more anxious
about their historical origins than their ancestors, who had actually seized their wealth
and power at the expense of the church and king in the first place? And if they were
so troubled by their origins, and so keen to establish their own legitimacy, then why
was the mainstream political writing of the mid-eighteenth century characterised by
respect and deference for the church and aristocracy, rather than the defiance which
such an account would lead us to expect?4
The second problem with this explanation is its range of reference: simply stated,
the more Gothic fiction one examines, the less persuasive it appears. As James Watt has
pointed out, most early Gothic fiction actually defends monarchy and aristocracy rather
than critiquing them; for every work which, like Walpole’s Otranto or Sophia Lee’s The
Recess, presents the old order as both doomed and not worth saving, there is another,
such as Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron or William Hutchinson’s The Hermitage,
which endorses and celebrates the value of the old aristocracy.5 Furthermore, studying
the Gothic fiction of the 1760s, 1770s, and 1780s rapidly indicates that most of it does
not express such cultural anxieties, less because it was not concerned with class or
history than because it was not really a literature of anxiety at all. The idea of a single
Gothic literature of terror, stretching continuously from the 1760s to the present day,
imposes a false unity on these early works, which were referred to as ‘Gothic stories’
only because they were set in the ‘Gothic ages’ (i.e. the medieval or early modern
period) rather than the present day, and were more likely to be sentimental romances
than tales of terror; the preoccupation with evil, fear, and violence, which is the defining
characteristic of later Gothic literature, did not become a prominent part of the genre
until the success of Radcliffe’s later novels in the 1790s. I thus became increasingly
convinced that, although works referring to themselves as ‘Gothic’ had existed since
the 1760s, the true roots of the Gothicised rhetoric I had observed in the nineteenth
century were to be found not in the anxieties of the mid-eighteenth-century middle
classes, but a generation later; in the fearful decade at the century’s end.
It was in the 1790s that Gothic fiction and rhetoric first became truly popular in
Britain; it was also in these years that Britain, like the rest of Europe, was struggling
with the consequences of the French Revolution. Correlation does not equal causation;
but it did not seem accidental that this new literary fascination with fear and violence
should have arisen in the same decade that witnessed the Reign of Terror, and the
consequent adoption of the words ‘terrorist’ and ‘terrorism’ into English. Several
critics, such as Ronald Paulson, Robert Miles, and Leslie Fiedler, have already written
on the relationship between the French Revolution and the rise of Gothic fiction, but
they have tended to articulate this relationship in terms of an already-existing genre
