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Criticism 43.3 (2001) 360-365



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Book Review

A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction:
Mapping History's Nightmares


A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History's Nightmares by Robert Mighall. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. xxv + 312. {74.00 cloth. [End Page 360]

Reclining in a comfy La-Z-Boy, the remote ignition switch for the gas log tucked at our side, we're obviously far removed from the terrors of the Gothic; yet, we still experience a vicarious thrill, tiptoeing page by page behind a heroine as she negotiates a dark, portrait-lined corridor of a castle with no other protection than that of a faltering candle and her unwavering Victorian morals. With the Gothic, it is the tension between the real and the unreal, the 'natural order of things' and the supernatural, that draws us in; perhaps it is because of the genre's cult-ishness (as in B-movies, rather than the occult) that we feel more strongly the disparity between our own situation and the threats—those temporally and spatially displaced terrors—that haunt the characters of these novels. It is exactly this distancing, the transportation of character and reader to another place and time, which operates at the core of Robert Mighall's recent study of the Gothic. The ultimate premise of his book, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History's Nightmares, is that we are not so far removed from the source of these horrors as we might think. He posits that the Gothic re-constructed the time in which it was written—and informs us about the time in which it is 'read'—as much as it preyed upon readers' anxieties about the past. Much of the existing scholarship on the Gothic focuses on the psychological components of the genre, almost always exploring the meanings of the work with regard to its writers and their contemporary read-ers. But Mighall takes a different tack, pointing out that the Gothic strove to reassure Victorian readers of their distance, culturally and socially, from past evils and arguing that our theories about the Gothic, especially those that cite it as evidence of Victorian sexual repression, inform us more about who we are today. He argues that the "psychological, ontological and 'symbolic' approaches" (xix) overlook the historical and political nature of the times in which the Gothic first appeared and ultimately refuse to acknowledge what our scholarship on the genre reveals about our own insecurities. In essence, what is 'thrilling' about the medium, then and now, is the reader's unconscious understanding that something laid to rest, in this case the past, has come back to haunt the present.

Mighall starts from a claim that the genre is not as anachronistic as it might appear. Instead, he demonstrates that writers of the gothic purposely mixed temporalities in order to pit modernity against the past so that readers had evidence of the progressive nature of their own religious, political and social institutions. Using examples from non-fiction, such as Anna Laetitia Barbauld's "On Monastic Institutions," Mighall shows us how writers utilized Gothic conventions to "re-enforce the superiority of [their] own times and [their] gratitude that the 'Gothic' ages [were] no more" (2). While nothing in the Gothic is overtly political, Mighall claims that novels such as Montague's The Demon of Sicily and Radcliffe's A Sicilian Romance set conflict within an [End Page 361] "intra-familial sphere which is nonetheless arranged around historical and political oppositions" (10).

Mighall next analyzes travelogue passages evocative of the Gothic tradition alongside Radcliffe's The Italian to demonstrate how the "past . . . survive[d] into and threaten[ed] the present" (25) through the political and historical consciousness of both writers and readers. He posits that this allowed "England and Italy [to] exist in different temporal realms" (17) so that characters could be transported back in time, experiencing the horrors of yesterday, simply by venturing onto foreign soil. This convention, which reassured readers in England that they were doubly safe from past abominations— distanced by both...

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