‘“Cribb’d, Cabined and Confined”: Fear, Claustrophobia and Modernity in Richard Marsh’s Urban Gothic Fiction’

Abstract

In an article on "Nervous Diseases and Modern Life", published in the Contemporary Review in 1895, T. Clifford Allbutt explores the contemporary notion that "affections of the nervous system are on the increase". Allbutt lists a number of "nervous maladies" that contemporaries connected with modernity, including "nervous debility", "hysteria", "neurasthenia", "fretfulness", "melancholy" and "unrest"all of which were supposedly resulting from "living at a high pressure, the whirl of the railway, the pelting of telegrams, the strife of business, the hunger for riches, the lust of vulgar minds for coarse and instant pleasures, the decay of those controlling ethics handed down from statelier and more steadfast generations". Allbutt concludes his bitterly sarcastic commentary on the "outcry of the modern neurotic" by rejecting such concerns over the mental, moral and physical health of the nation. "Rich and idle people", he states, "run, as they always did, after the fashionable fad of the day; what was "liver" fifty years ago has become "nerves" today ." Nervous ailments, he contends, are characterised by the sufferer"s "restlessness, quackishness and craving for sympathy", and "the intellectual acuteness of many of these sufferers, the swift transmission of news by the press, and the facilities of modern locomotion all favour the neurotic traffic." Nervous illness, thus, has become a fashionable diagnosis with the "inquisitive and peremptory generation" of the fin de siècle: "our neurotics have begun like ghosts to walk, and we exclaim that the earth is full of them!" (Allbutt 210, 214, 217, 218). While Allbutt is concerned with criticising contemporary medical and social discourses on the degenerative and enervating impact of modernity, the comparison of neurotics to ghosts is intriguing. As David Trotter notes, medical men often used Gothic terminology to discuss psychological, particularly phobic, experiences in the nineteenth century. Moreover, in his analysis of phobic discourse in canonical Victorian and Modernist fiction, Trotter also argues that agoraphobia is commonly described in nineteenth-century fiction before Carl Otto Westphal named the condition in 1871: that, in effect, a fiction writer"s "diagnosis" of spatial phobia is not dependent on the existence of a preceding medical diagnosis (Trotter 464-70). To a certain extent literary texts thus provoked nosological classification. This essay will extend Trotter"s suggestive claim that fin-de-siècle medical debates and urban Gothic fiction share a common cultural context. It traces the ways in which phobic discourses are present within Richard Marsh"s urban Gothic novels The Beetle: A Mystery (1897) and The Goddess: A Demon (1900). Both novels are located within the contexts of modernity, the urban experience, and chronic fear, and their plotlines detail the plight of British protagonistsall somehow weak or wantingwho fall prey to foreign influences in a fin-de-siècle London that plays its own monstrous part in the novels. In The Beetle, a grotesque shap...