Industrial Gothic: Workers, Exploitation and Urbanization in Transatlantic Nineteenth-Century Literature by Bridget M. Marshall (review)

How much can the highly fictionalized Gothic mode teach us about the real horrors of capitalist oppression? In her impressively argued and meticulously researched Industrial Gothic: Workers, Exploitation and Urbanization in Transatlantic Nineteenth-Century Literature, Bridget Marshall examines the political affordances and constraints of literary terror. She coins the term “industrial Gothic” to capture a subgenre that, both in Britain and the United States, “provided an existing framework through which writers could explore and readers could comprehend the disruptions that industrialization was causing that weren’t always visible to all” (8). A mode based on monstrous excess, the Gothic transformed factories into dungeons and prisons, female mill workers into endangered heroines, and industrial machines into monsters in search of fresh victims. These connections invited a broad middle-class and working-class readership to reinterpret capitalism as a site of pervasive terror that disrupted dominant progress narratives. At the same time, however, this particular usage of horror came at the risk of “‘gothicizing’ the lived traumas of real people” and of normalizing oppression and suffering as unavoidable: “By framing industrialization as a Gothic monster, we suggest its inevitability and surrender hope of controlling or changing it” (173, 175).

As a genre, the Gothic is often as difficult to categorize as the creatures that wander through its pages. Marshall helpfully outlines five elements she considers central to this mode, which were hybridized into literary texts seeking to balance reform and entertainment: “the form of the novel, the fate of a woman in peril, the condition and experience of imprisonment, the appearance and creation of monsters, and the importance of landscape and architecture to setting the Gothic mood” (26). Starting with the first chapter, which examines the emergence and development of the industrial Gothic as a transatlantic phenomenon, Marshall persuasively examines the ways in which these characteristics emerge in fictional and nonfictional texts. In the second chapter, she argues that representations of British and American mill and factory girls drew from the domestic Gothic. Government reports, fictional narratives, and broadside poems depicted these female figures as sites of gendered contradiction: “Mill girls were presented sometimes as victims, sometimes as heroines, but in all cases, as sexually endangered and often sexually dangerous” (61). She proceeds to explore carceral imagery in the third chapter, which positions factories and mills as modern manifestations of the “Gothic’s more traditional castles and monasteries” (27). Bodies and monstrosity are the subject of chapter 4, which argues that narratives including Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life (1848) and Rebecca Harding Davis’s “Life in the Iron Mills” (1861) deployed images of physical difference and disability. Once again acknowledging the limits of the subgenre, Marshall writes that, “With searing images of ruined bodies, the industrial Gothic sought to awaken readers to the ‘monster’ that industrialization itself was, at the same time that it suggested that workers, whether gathered in collective action or with damaged and deformed bodies, were new monsters created by this system” (142). The final chapter strategically draws from ecocriticism to explore the at once sublime and artificially uncanny landscapes of the industrial Gothic as found, for example, in John Ruskin’s The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century (1884) and the Scottish poet Janet Hamilton’s writings. These and other texts, Marshall writes, “transformed the foundational Gothic concept of the sublime, shifting its focus from terror and awe in the face of nature to a new-found sense of the terrifying size, scope and power of the human-built industrial world” (166).

In my opinion, the third chapter is the strongest in the book, both for the depth of its research and the reach of its conclusions. It offers fascinating connections between images of industrial imprisonment—the “carceral Gothic”—and the imperial and racial frameworks of the cotton industry. Marshall traces the image of the “white slave” in both British and American contexts, which...