The Late Victorian Gothic: Mental Science, the Uncanny, and Scenes of Writing (review)

Periodizing the Gothic is a necessarily complicated task for at least two reasons. A key part of what marks genre-fiction or para-literature generally is a strong sense of generic conventionality: the detective will be hard-boiled, the femme will be fatale, the ghost will come back. It is never easy to articulate the specific traits and functions of any such genre in one historical period, to explain the way that they both distinguish the genre at that moment from other moments, and yet remain within the conventions of the genre as a whole. The task is further complicated for the Gothic in particular, since it is a genre in which the past persists into the present, in which the central generic feature is the refusal to allow the present to comfortably set itself apart from the past. To claim that Gothic texts of a particular historical moment are importantly distinct from earlier moments of the genre’s history, then, is in a sense to deny that they are really gothic at all.

The “Gothic Revival” of the late-Victorian moment includes key works by Stevenson, Stoker, Wilde, and Wells. Certain formal features seem either new or at least newly central to the texts of this moment: anxieties about dual or multiple selves; about the relationship between individual and national or imperial identity; about civilizational decay; about science. All sorts of socio-historical causes can account for these specificities: imperial decline, decaying bourgeois norms, new developments in publishing and reading, and in the psychological, psychical, or biological sciences.

At this large-scale conceptual level, Grimes’s book is puzzling for two reasons. First, the characteristics it offers as specific to this moment are, in fact, the most persistent and ordinary features of the Gothic throughout its long history. “Writers and mental scientists of the fin de siècle,” begins Grimes’s conclusion, “were facing a new kind of Gothicism in which they were radically conflicted between a desire to police the boundaries of science, identity, and writing itself and, conversely, to experience the ecstasy of engaging with the supernatural” (161). But the Gothic has always been about firm-but-porous boundaries, between terror and delight, between science and the supernatural, and about the pleasures and punishments of transgression; from Anne Radcliffe on it has been concerned with the role and status of women and of writers, and especially of women writers; the uncanny has long been one of its central mechanisms; and it has always been fixated on the instabilities of identity. The second puzzle is the book’s failure to offer any contextual reasons—material, literary, epistemological—for the (supposed) specificity of the late-Victorian Gothic. Addressing texts that are explicitly “gothic” in genre, as well as non-Gothic texts in which gothic themes and tropes are deployed, the book points to the widespread appearance of the gothic in the period, without explaining why that would be.

Grimes’s book offers a series of readings of texts both canonical (Henry James) and marginal (Sarah Grand, George Paston), high (Vernon Lee), middlebrow (Conan Doyle), and low (Du Maurier), demonstrating that they share a coherent set of concerns. The book “argues that a Gothicism specific to the end of the century emerged which is concerned with instances of the uncanny within a text. These uncanny moments are connected with the destabilization of the self during scenes of writing and in interactions with technologies of writing like the typewriter and the telegraph” (3). Along the way, Grimes asks consistently important questions, about such things as the function of technological innovations on the production and reproduction of identity, about the relationship between “New Woman” authors and the Gothic, and about the function of Gothic metaphor for scientistic writers and of scientistic metaphors for Gothic writers.

And yet the book consistently fails to provide interesting or compelling answers to these questions. Two basic problems seem at the root of the...