Coming out of the castle: Renegotiating gender and sexuality in eighteenth-century Gothic fiction

Although a dissertation about Gothic fiction, this project challenges the very idea of the Gothic as a unified subject for study. I argue that many critical approaches to Gothic fiction have essentialized this complex and diverse genre and caused the marginalization, if not the effacement, of the wide-ranging constructions of gender and sexuality explored by Gothic writers. This dissertation examines Gothic writing through a large number of novels and fragments, insisting that only by considering the genre in its full messiness can we tease out its complex identity-politics. This study suggests that the outing of late eighteenth-century novels requires a rethinking of both genre and narrative closure. My introductory chapter, This Genre Which is Not One, provides suggestions for conceptualizing Gothic fictions that actively resist binary thinking. I use Lewis\u27 The Monk and Lathom\u27s The Midnight Bell to demonstrate how the application of contemporary gender and sex binaries to novels ahistorically reify the very social constructs that the genre challenges and destabilizes. Chapter 2, Commandeering the Past: History, Historical Gothic, and the Reconstruction of Gender, brings Gothic studies out of the much-studied 1790\u27s and explores the historical Gothic, a genre extremely popular in the 1780\u27s that was instrumental in the evolution of Gothic fiction. I examine how many writers challenged the patriarchal elitism of historiographers by rewriting the past and reconstructing gendered identities. Chapter 3, Global Gothic: History, Empire, and Gender, considers these romances outside the confines of the European castle and insists that gender is not constructed in isolation from other social institutions. Rather, our understanding of the relationship between the novel and gender requires an examination of the subject in the context of British imperialism. My final chapter, Sexual Chaos: Genre and the Politics of Complexity, examines narrative strategies employed by Gothic writers to challenge the heteronormative closure of romances. Through a consideration of chaos theory, I argue that Gothic fictions reveal a politics of complexity that undermines romance convention and explodes limiting definitions of gender and sexuality