The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion

273 Pages·2012·1.043 MB·English

by  Andrew Smith (editor), William Hughes (editor)

The
VICTORIAN
GOTHIC
An Edinburgh Companion
(cid:1)
Edited by
Andrew Smith and William Hughes
The Victorian Gothic
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For Marie Mulvey-Roberts
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The Victorian Gothic
An Edinburgh Companion
Edited by
Andrew Smith and William Hughes
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© in this edition Edinburgh University Press, 2012
© in the individual contributions is retained by the authors
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
22 George Square, Edinburgh
www.euppublishing.com
Typeset in 10.5/13 pt Sabon
by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7486 4249 6 (hardback)
ISBN 978 0 7486 5497 0 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 0 7486 5499 4 (epub)
ISBN 978 0 7486 5498 7 (Amazon ebook)
The right of the contributors
to be identifi ed as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction: Locating the Victorian Gothic 1
Andrew Smith and William Hughes
1. Victorian Realism and the Gothic: Objects of Terror
Transformed 15
Martin Willis
2. Sensation Fiction: A Peep Behind the Veil 29
Laurence Talairach-Vielmas
3. Victorian Gothic Pulp Fiction 43
Jarlath Killeen
4. Victorian Gothic Drama 57
Diane Long Hoeveler
5. Victorian Gothic Poetry: The Corpse’s [a] Text 72
Caroline Franklin and Michael J. Franklin
6. The Victorian Ghost Story 93
Nick Freeman
7. Victorian Gothic and National Identity: Cross-Channel
‘Mysteries’ 108
Avril Horner
8. The Victorian Gothic and Gender 124
Carol Margaret Davison
9. Queer Victorian Gothic 142
Ardel Thomas
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vi Contents
10. Victorian Gothic Death 156
Andrew Smith
11. Science and the Gothic 170
Kelly Hurley
12. Victorian Medicine and the Gothic 186
William Hughes
13. Imperial Gothic 202
Patrick Brantlinger
14. Fin-de-siècle Gothic 217
Victoria Margree and Bryony Randall
Bibliography 234
Notes on Contributors 251
Index 255
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank all those who have given their support
both to this volume and to the two editors during the course of its com-
missioning and production. Thanks are due, fi rst and foremost, to the
individual contributors, and to Jackie Jones and Rebecca Mackenzie
at Edinburgh University Press. The editors would also like to thank,
at Bath Spa University, Colin Edwards, Tracy Brain, Elizabeth Wright,
Catherine Robinson, John Newsinger, and Jo Dahn; and at the
University of Glamorgan, Martin Willis and Alice Entwistle. We are also
grateful to Anna Oxbury for her close copy-editing of the typescript.
This book has benefi ted, in all sorts of ways too numerous to describe,
from our teaching of the Victorian Gothic over nearly two decades and
so we owe a debt of thanks to our students.
Finally, thanks are due, as ever, to Gillian Wheeler and Joanne Benson
for their love and support.
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Introduction: Locating the Victorian
Gothic
Andrew Smith and William Hughes
. . . its belt sparkled and glittered now in one part and now in
another, and what was light one instant, at another time was
dark, so the fi gure itself fl uctuated in its distinctness: being now
a thing with one arm, now with one leg, now with twenty legs,
now a pair of legs without a head, now a head without a body:
of which dissolving parts, no outline would be visible in the
dense gloom wherein they melted away.
A Christmas Carol (Dickens, 1985: 68)
Here too was all the work by which man has been made
repeated before my eyes. I saw the form waver from sex to sex,
dividing itself from itself, and then again reunited. Then I saw
the body descend to the beasts whence it ascended, and that
which was on the heights go down to the depths, even to the
abyss of all being. The principle of life, which makes organism,
always remained, while the outward form changed.
The Great God Pan (Machen, 2006: 63)
Dickens’s account of the manifestation of the ghost of Christmas past and
Machen’s description of the decomposition (and odd recompositions) of
his fi n-de-siècle femme fatale Helen Vaughan bear telling similarities and
revealing differences. The sense of identity as potentially protean, unsta-
ble and incoherent suggests that these two models of the subject (which,
given their dates of publication – 1843 and 1894 – are close to bookend-
ing the Victorian Gothic) capture an essential aspect of the Gothic form
of the period: undecidability. Indeed this most Derridean of terms has
played a key role in recent criticism on nineteenth-century Gothic.
Julian Wolfreys explored the diversity of the Gothic in his preface to
his co-edited collection Victorian Gothic (2000) where he argued that
it was the function of the Gothic to evade the limits of form, so that
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