Over the past ten years, prominent scholars in neo-Victorian studies have noticed that the tropes of nineteenth-century Gothic–among them spectrality, monstrosity, and haunting–are often reworked in neo-Victorian literature. In the introduction to Victoriana: History, Fictions, Criticisms (Edinburgh UP, 2007), Cora Kaplan draws on Freud’s concept of the uncanny to explain that we feel both pleasure and unease in reading neo-Victorian works. Judith Johnston and Catherine Waters’s introduction to Victorian Turns, Neo-Victorian Returns (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008) states of the prefix “neo” that when “used in conjunction with a genre, the implication is rather a new, modified, or more modern style, as in Neo-Gothic for instance.” Scholars have elucidated the influence of nineteenth-century Gothic works on this “new” genre in several monographs and collections of essays: Tatiana Kontou’s Spiritualism and Women’s Writing: From the Fin de Siècle to the Neo-Victorian (Palgrave, 2009); Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction, edited by Rosario Arias and Patricia Pulham (Palgrave, 2009); Neo-Victorian Gothic: Horror, Violence, and Degeneration in the Re-Imagined Nineteenth Century, edited by Christian Gutleben and Marie-Luise Kohlke (Rodopi, 2012); and Julian Wolfreys’s Haunted Selves, Haunting Places in English Literature and Culture: 1800-Present (Palgrave, 2018).
This panel will contribute to the emerging conversation about the neo-Victorian Gothic by offering a range of critical perspectives on the dialogue between the dead Victorians and living postmodernists. It features scholars from different stages in their careers and a wide variety of expertise in television adaptions, the female Gothic, World War I, and Victorian childhood. The speakers will extend the current scholarship on neo-Victorian Gothic as they examine diverse media forms: a TV show, horror movies, a Japanese manga series, and women’s literature. The panelists hope to show that neo-Victorian Gothic works encompass a wider assortment of genres, styles, and tropes than academics have recognized due to their narrow focus on literature. These papers inspect the intersection between the Victorian past and present in works that combine what Kaplan calls the “gothic effects of the historical imagination” with contemporary anxieties about children, teenagers, adults, and women. The panelists’ analysis of sexuality, romance, childhood, and war portrayed in the Victorian and Edwardian eras will demonstrate how we reinvent the past through the lens of our own fears.
To illustrate the rich breadth of the neo-Victorian Gothic, we have selected four panelists who will be strictly limited to 15-minute papers by the presider, Indu Ohri. The first panelist, Gill Jamieson, will investigate the criminal couplings throughout the three seasons of the neo-Victorian TV show Penny Dreadful (2014-2016). She draws on Marie-Luise Kohlke’s concept of “sexsation” as a preoccupation of neo-Victorian fiction, a fascination with the sensationalism of the erotic. The rhetoric of eroticism is a familiar aspect of this multi-stranded narrative, encompassing the representation of criminality and the various liaisons of the principle characters. In the revisionist Gothic world of Penny Dreadful, the remarkable intensity of these sex scenes is evident in their staging and the emotional consequences for the characters involved.
In keeping with Jamieson’s analysis of the appeal of sexsation, Indu Ohri will explore how REM’s manga adaption of Gail Carriger’s YA paranormal romance Soulless (2009-2012) restricts the identity and free will of the heroine, Alexia Tarabotti. While Alexia displays traits of the modern independent heroine as an occult detective and later agent of Queen Victoria, her autonomy is circumscribed by her marriage to a chauvinistic werewolf leader. Ohri will delve into the political dimensions of the manga series and consider Alexia’s role in the clash between human and supernatural interests. Ultimately, the manga series’s emphasis on the romantic subplots over the political ones reinscribes Alexia into the traditional Victorian role of wife and mother.
Mary Gryctko will inspect the neo-Victorian Gothic aesthetic in contemporary horror films, specifically the repeated imagining of child ghosts as in some way “Victorian.” The child ghost trapped in a Victorian Gothic set piece is marked by its helplessness and victimhood, placing it in opposition to the modern evil children in horror films. Gryctko will look at child ghosts marked as “Victorian” through setting and clothing in The Shining (1980), The Others (2011), The Awakening (2011), and The Woman in Black (2012). She will extend Kathryn Bond Stockton’s notion of “outsourcing” childhood to examine how contemporary audiences seek imagined figures of innocent childhood in the past, when these figures have become increasingly difficult to overlay onto the bodies of real children in the present.
Finally, A. Irene Mangoutas will think about the postmodern Gothic conversation between an officer and a vampiress occupying different registers of death in Angela Carter’s “The Lady of the House of Love” (1979). The vampiress, in her eternal state of undead life, is a being from the Gothic imagination, intruding on the officer’s logical, Edwardian worldview. She embodies the dead–and yet, so does the officer, whose “exemplary fate” has already been written: he is fated to die in the trenches of France during World War I. Building on Kate Mitchell’s definition of neo-Victorian texts as re-constructions of the past, Mangoutas will argue that the officer and the vampiress are the re-embodied dead, talking back, to, and about each other and their respective worlds.
In probing how these works enable contemporary readers, authors, and critics to “talk back to the dead,” all four papers will advance the critical conversation on the “new” genre of the neo-Victorian Gothic in ways that may very well haunt future scholarship.