The Man with Two Brains: Gothic Novels, Popular Culture, Literary History

Abstract

This essay centers on the Gothic novel's status as an impassioned, and hence suspect, subliterary form. The traditional division of the Gothic by gender into two supposedly equal generic strands is somewhat misleading, since the majority of Gothic novels were written (as well as read) by women and since Gothic novels were feminized—disparaged in gender-specific ways—by a critical establishment outraged by both the passion and the popularity of the form. Because the debate over the Gothic also concerned the boundaries between high and low literature, the polemicists' use of gender clarifies how literary argumentation participated fully in larger cultural issues. Both the controversy surrounding the Gothic novel in the 1790s and the furor over prostitution in the 1840s focused on a potentially disruptive female passion, and understanding the connections between these debates sheds light on the evolution of Britain's literary and cultural identity and on the current dialogue over literary history.

Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary, 1780–1820

“…he also attacked Lewis's Castle Spectre (Drury Lane, 1797) as "Schiller Lewisized, " and Maturin's Bertram (Drury Lane, 1816) as "modern jacobinical drama" in his Biographia Literaria, ii:200, but his criticisms of the drama need to be understood in light of the fact that Drury Lane had recently refused to stage a revival of his own gothic drama Remorse. For an overview of Coleridge's ambivalence toward the gothic, see Mudge (1991) and Christensen. Wordsworth's gothic-inflected drama, The Borderers, was rejected by Covent Garden in 1798 just as Matthew Lewis's Castle Spectre was enjoying a hugely profitable run at Drury Lane (in fact, it was so popular that it was being parodied in 1803 by a three-act romance entitled The Tale of Terror; or a Castle without a Spectre!).…”