The Dangers of Gothic Sexuality in Crimson Peak and Penny Dreadful

Michel Foucault determined that the repressive hypothesis was evident in the Victorian era, but I argue that it continues today in specific fields of Neo-Victorian texts, not as a statement on Victorian ideals as they were, but as we imagine them to be. In their creation of Victoriana for the screen, writers and directors must pander, in no small way, to the expectations of the audience. The titillation both the movie Crimson Peak and the television show Penny Dreadful present their audiences in terms of sexual "deviance" and repressed feelings demonstrates a specific attention to Gothic tropes: a woman in danger, not from sexual predators as in the eighteenthand nineteenth-century versions, but rather, from her own sexual desires. Therefore, this paper argues that the addition of the Gothic elements to these two texts rewrites the Gothic genre for a specifically twenty-first-century audience that still desires to see women punished for their sexual urges. In these gothic texts, however, the supernatural and sexuality come to stand in for the danger we have come to expect from the foreign villain of the Gothic novel.