In Romanticism and the Painful Pleasures of Modern Life (2008), Andrea K. Henderson has described the mainstream of Romantic aesthetics as riven by fascinations with ‘suspenseful, idealizing, and self-abnegating desire’ for pain and submission (Henderson 2008: 6). Seeing in this tendency not only a proto-Masochistic claim that ‘the keenest pleasures are allied to pain’ (Henderson 2008: 7), but also a tension between the desires for domination and the powerful democratic and even radical claims that many of the Romantics advanced, Henderson asks, ‘how is it that a body of literature renowned for its articulation of new ideologies of equality could also be characterized by a fascination with willing submission?’ (Henderson 2008: 2), before arguing that ‘In essence, much Romantic-era writing aestheticizes one of the primary contradictions of industrial culture, recasting it in the form of a thrilling, if also painful, private psychodrama’ (Henderson 2008: 3).

For Henderson, this apparent paradox emerges from the social ruptures of a new credit economy: ‘Artists such as Hogarth, Joseph Addison, and Daniel Defoe claimed that finance capitalism taught men to revel in suspense and emotional extremes, and to take new pleasure in a powerful and independent female sexuality. Thus did the gendered metaphors of political rhetoric become a potent means for understanding modern sexuality’ (Henderson 2008: 46). Without challenging the economic grounding of her readings, I would argue that what Henderson has uncovered is the striking interdependence of the strands of Gothic and Romanticism in the early nineteenth-century articulation of a theory and politics of gender and sexuality. Indeed, we can see in the terms of Henderson's analysis of Romantic production a rhetorically Gothic shadow, not only in the reference to ‘the dangers of desire’ (Henderson 2008: 3) and ‘pleasure in pain’ (Henderson 2008: 7), but also in her observation that this self-consciously modern group of artists and theorists frequently relied on the aesthetics and settings of an anachronistic medievalism: for Romantic-era literature, she points out, ‘Medieval romance provided a highly suitable template for representing and rendering aesthetic the affective challenges of modern society’ (Henderson 2008: 5).

This is the same medievalism (or false medievalism) with which Jerrold E. Hogle has opened his account of the rise of Gothic fiction in England: ‘Gothic fiction’, he observes, ‘is hardly “Gothic” at all.

Executive Summary

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Published in the same year as Bram Stoker's Dracula, Walter Walsh's attack on Catholicism uses the imagery of the Revelation of St. John the Divine to make of the Roman Church a type of vampire. Unlike Stoker's protagonist, Walsh's vampiric Church is feminine rather than masculine, and the metaphor is motivated not only through reference to the Gothic trope of “infernal Inquisition” but also through allusion to sexual deviance: in Revelation the “woman drunken with the blood of the saints” is the infamous Whore of Babylon:

Catherine Morland's inauguration into rational adulthood, and indeed into the economy of marriage, depends, in Jane Austen's parodic vision of the last years of the eighteenth century, upon an understanding of the fundamental foreignness of the Gothic. Having mockingly instructed her in the use of language (“A faithful promise! – That puzzles me. – I have heard of a faithful performance. But a faithful promise – the fidelity of promising!” [171]), Henry Tilney now turns to instruct her taste and understanding of literature. The ostensible terms of Henry's dismissal of the Gothic are nation and religion; and in “the country and the age in which we live,” the fundamental dichotomy of religion is not so much the Christian and the non-Christian world but Protestant and Catholic Europe. “The visions of romance” having been dispelled, Catherine herself, still desirous of maintaining a Gothic presence somewhere, roughly traces this boundary:

As my preceding chapter has argued, the novels of Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, and (to some extent) Charles Maturin displaced the sexual and religious transgressions represented by the Gothic onto the Catholic Continent; it is precisely the absurdity of the idea of those transgressions appearing in the Midlands of England that Jane Austen's Henry Tilney mocks. The religious controversialists of the mid-nineteenth century, however, brought that Gothic rhetoric firmly into England. Freeing the Gothic from its coffin of dead generic tropes, they breathed new life into the ideological structures of Gothic discourse, making that discourse a staple of historical as well as fictional cultural production. On the one hand, this represents a certain kind of evangelical hysteria, an increasingly desperate warning that Catholics in England are aiming for a radical new imposition of the medieval perversions of the Inquisition and the Papal courts. On the other hand, it is precisely through this sort of attack that anti-Catholic evangelicals themselves ironically provide the discourse necessary for imagining and theorizing what the presence of Catholics (Roman or ritualist) – and, for that matter, persons of nonnormative sexualities – might mean for England.

In his posthumously published autobiography, Montague Summers, who with The Gothic Quest, The Vampire: His Kith and Kin, and other works moved the Gothic into the realm of literary scholarship, described his admiration of the mid-nineteenth-century sensation novelist Mary Elizabeth Braddon as a type of “fascination”: “She knew how much I admired her novels, and she knew that I was sincere. In fact, once or twice she gently bantered me about heroine worship. She was indeed one of the most fascinating women whom I have ever met.” In turning to the language of “fascination,” Summers invokes a trope not only fundamental to the Gothic depiction of the hypnotic seductions of Catholic deviances that I have already described but one that is also central to Braddon's sensation-novel aesthetic.