Queer Others in Victorian Gothic: Transgressing Monstrosity by Ardel Haefele-Thomas, and: The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion ed. by Andrew Smith and William Hughes (review)

There may be something innately gothic about the role played by the Victorians in our contemporary culture. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it seems as though the Victorian dead will not do the decent thing (for Britain, for the Empire) and lie down. Instead, they return, wheezing through the pipes, clambering up from the sewage system, descending from the most unlikely of aircraft: behold the advent of steampunk, the resuscitation of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999), the improbable recovery of all those heavily bearded and moustachioed explorers, doctors, men of business, and imperialists, replete with their strange remedies, their bizarre improvements, their addictions and fantasies.

These two books attempt to answer the question of why and how the Victorians were so gothic by way of a shared focus on gothic writing. In this approach, they sidestep the usual interpretation of Victorian gothic, which is, above all, an architectural term. After all, in Britain we are still ruled by the gothic; we have, as numerous historians of the law from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first have said, a constitution gothic in its metaphorical architecture; but more obviously we appear proud to have our laws made and our lives governed from a gothic palace, the Palace of Westminster, also known as the “Mother of Parliaments.”

But indeed “gothic” is also a literary term, and it is elements of the Victorian textuality of the gothic that Ardel Haefele-Thomas addresses in Queer Others in Victorian Gothic. The first thing that needs to be said about this book is that it is very well-written: sharp, intelligent, and lucid. There is no (Victorian) clutter. There are five chapters (broadly speaking on Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, H. Rider Haggard, Sheridan Le Fanu/Florence Marryat, and Vernon Lee, but this is to simplify a more sinuous argument) and the book is organized around what meanings and uses we might find for the term “queer” in inspecting these fictions.

The answer again depends: in this case, on what we mean by “queer,” and here we come up against what interests me in the book’s subtitle, Transgressing Monstrosity. Does this allude to a kind of monstrosity which transgresses? Surely not, for what other kind of monstrosity could there possibly be? So it must allude to a scenario in which even monstrosity itself (as conventionally recognized) is further transgressed: a redoubling of the queer.

This is entirely plausible, and is supported by an excellent analysis of The Woman in White (1859–60) as well as a fascinating revisionary chapter on Haggard’s She (1886–87). Gaskell, we are told, speaks of how her texts were “invaded” by the gothic (49); this speaks to a host of metaphors, working in more than one direction, about the relation between the gothic and invasion: of the body, of sexual relationships through false and violent means to attempt to ensure heteronormativity, and by non-native species (and again there the entire rhetoric is open to serious questioning). All of these invasions were, of course, celebrated and feared by the Victorians.

All of this is quite queer; this book demonstrates that there is something queer going on in the very lap of Victoria, brought out nowhere better than in Haggard’s un-self-conscious imagining of a new white queen in the heart of Africa. I was left with a number of questions after reading this book, but I have space here to list only three of them. The first is whether the notion of the oneiric horizon, a term which repeats through the book and might be best defined as the farthest...