In Romanticism and the Painful Pleasures of Modern Life (2008), Andrea K. Henderson has described the mainstream of Romantic aesthetics as riven by fascinations with ‘suspenseful, idealizing, and self-abnegating desire’ for pain and submission (Henderson 2008: 6). Seeing in this tendency not only a proto-Masochistic claim that ‘the keenest pleasures are allied to pain’ (Henderson 2008: 7), but also a tension between the desires for domination and the powerful democratic and even radical claims that many of the Romantics advanced, Henderson asks, ‘how is it that a body of literature renowned for its articulation of new ideologies of equality could also be characterized by a fascination with willing submission?’ (Henderson 2008: 2), before arguing that ‘In essence, much Romantic-era writing aestheticizes one of the primary contradictions of industrial culture, recasting it in the form of a thrilling, if also painful, private psychodrama’ (Henderson 2008: 3).

For Henderson, this apparent paradox emerges from the social ruptures of a new credit economy: ‘Artists such as Hogarth, Joseph Addison, and Daniel Defoe claimed that finance capitalism taught men to revel in suspense and emotional extremes, and to take new pleasure in a powerful and independent female sexuality. Thus did the gendered metaphors of political rhetoric become a potent means for understanding modern sexuality’ (Henderson 2008: 46). Without challenging the economic grounding of her readings, I would argue that what Henderson has uncovered is the striking interdependence of the strands of Gothic and Romanticism in the early nineteenth-century articulation of a theory and politics of gender and sexuality. Indeed, we can see in the terms of Henderson's analysis of Romantic production a rhetorically Gothic shadow, not only in the reference to ‘the dangers of desire’ (Henderson 2008: 3) and ‘pleasure in pain’ (Henderson 2008: 7), but also in her observation that this self-consciously modern group of artists and theorists frequently relied on the aesthetics and settings of an anachronistic medievalism: for Romantic-era literature, she points out, ‘Medieval romance provided a highly suitable template for representing and rendering aesthetic the affective challenges of modern society’ (Henderson 2008: 5).

This is the same medievalism (or false medievalism) with which Jerrold E. Hogle has opened his account of the rise of Gothic fiction in England: ‘Gothic fiction’, he observes, ‘is hardly “Gothic” at all.