I.1 The Rationale of this Element

Gothic Masculinities in the Victorian Age explores masculinity and the Gothic in the literature of the long nineteenth century, laying the ground for new critical reflections. The Element aims to fill in a gap we noticed at the time of its first conceptualisation, centring our discussion on the age’s representations of multiple masculine identities (or, rather, masculinities) specifically viewed through a Gothic lens. Exploring the complexities of these questions of identity in relation to a variety of masculine types gothicised in Victorian literature, we examine a range of literary texts. Selecting both canonical and understudied fictions published between the early century and the fin de siècle, we show how their portrayals of Gothic masculinities varied throughout the century and across genres.

Existing studies of masculinity and the Gothic tend to emphasise the idea that Gothic masculinity demonstrates what might seem to be a definitive and inevitable crisis in Victorian masculinity, proving it to be fractured and unstable. However, despite the gaps, the cracks, the falling and the failures, men and the patriarchal, familial, and social structures that uphold masculine dominance remain – if not firm, then at least still standing. The opening sentence of Cyndy Hendershot’s The Animal Within: Masculinity and the Gothic states: ‘The Gothic disrupts’ (Reference Hendershot1998: 1), and this dark disruption can provide alternative and vividly realised manifestations of ‘other’ types of masculinity: the criminal, the ghost, the mischievous expert, the queer, and the downright weird. We would like to posit the idea that marking Gothic masculinity only as ‘Other’ still leaves hegemonic masculinity as un-marked. In many discussions of Gothic masculinity, we see the same impulse to look at the ‘Other’ rather than at the actual construction of the centre, meaning that yet again ‘it has no need to spell itself out’ (Bourdieu, Reference Bourdieu and Nice2001: 9). Focusing on otherness entails accepting that ‘true’ masculinity is unified, whole, and already-defined, that it remains self-evident and taken-for-granted. It entails adopting masculinity’s view of itself and believing it to be an historic (unchanging, permanent, universal) truth. The discourse of masculinity’s otherness is a part of the discourse of masculinity itself: there is no Hyde without Jekyll. Gothic Masculinities argues that, instead of a discourse of hegemonic, white, heterosexual masculinity and its dark, subversive Other, perhaps we should be viewing them both as part of the same construction: their own Gothic doubles.

The Gothic genre itself is multiple, shifting and changing, and within this multifaceted and intertextual genre, there are significant differences in the types of masculinity depicted. Because of this, as well as looking at the myth and deconstruction of an idealised conception of one whole, unified, hegemonically powerful masculinity, this Element examines some of the many other identities available within the practices of masculinity. Expressions of certain types of masculinity that do not presuppose (or expect) unity with itself or binarism with an ‘Other’, that express fractured selves or doppelgangers are also explored. These expressions and practices of masculinity are, at least sometimes, empowered and enabled by the Gothic. Acknowledging that the Gothic can reinforce the patriarchal order, we also recognise that it has often allowed space for subversion and the unconventional and Gothic Masculinities explores and celebrates some unexpected representations of men and their many different and sometimes surprising forms of masculine identity.

I.2 Victorian Masculinities in Context

The Victorian period precipitated a gender division that is still recognised today (Tosh, Reference Tosh1999). Many Victorians shaped their identities in accordance with the separate-spheres ideology, which prescribed domestic roles for women while inviting men to pursue a career and become the family’s breadwinners. Bourgeois men, in particular, were encouraged to build a ‘character’ in line with Samuel Smiles’s doctrine of self-help (Reference Smiles1859), which emphasised industry, self-restraint and perseverance as keys to success. The rise of public school culture reinforced these values widening gender divisions, as boys were trained to compete in an all-male world distant from feminine influence and increasingly dominated by capitalistic imperatives. John Tosh observes that ‘The most telling characteristic of the public school is that it was effectively a men-only sphere’ and ‘in complete contrast with the atmosphere of the home and family they offered a crash course in manliness’ (Reference Tosh1999: 118). Tosh argues that the values of British public schools were actually at odds with the domestic:

And although Tosh argues that ‘marriage was still seen to be an essential stage in the attainment of full manhood’ (177), it was to be delayed and was often rejected altogether. The difficulty was that in order to attain an idealised form of masculinity, the feminine had to be rejected. Too close an attachment to home could itself lead to effeminacy and weakness (Davidoff and Hall, Reference Davidoff1987: 113), and John Beynon argues that narratives of empire written for boys ‘emphasized sports, sportsmanship, team spirit and a strong manliness determined against the “fragile” feminine’ (Reference Beynon2002: 32).

It is, of course, worth noting that no man could ever achieve the complete ideal. In fact, it was entirely impossible for some men who did not or could not fit this conception of masculinity (due to his body, his work, his lack of wealth, natural inclinations or desires) to get close to the white, wealthy, manly ‘ideal’. However, there were other models presented and this tough model of manliness was counterbalanced by one of these: the notion of gentlemanliness, which developed during the century. Derived from the high ranks of society and adapted to middle-class values, the gentleman ideal was characterised by sensitivity and graceful manners that were meant to counterweigh the muscularity and endurance promoted by public school training. This ideal gave shape to the highest aspirations of Victorian bourgeois men; yet, as Robin Gilmour (Reference Gilmour1981) demonstrates, it also proved to be a difficult objective for many. Members of the professional classes, among others, struggled to find a balance between contending models, due to the growing competitiveness of their occupational environment. Professional efforts to reconcile self-help with gentlemanly values are interestingly gothicised in sensation and late-century novels which, as we show, give voice to a crisis of bourgeois masculinity that increased after the mid-century, peaking at the fin de siècle. What these novels offer are disquieting variations of a Victorian literary form widely used to represent men’s negotiations of class and gender boundaries: the Bildungsroman, ‘often seen as a masculine form’ that ‘typically traces male social mobility and self-formation’ (Mallett, Reference Mallett2015: ix).

These few examples suggest that nineteenth-century writers employed different forms and modes, including the Gothic, to render men’s preoccupations and yearnings at a time of deep socio-economic transformations. In the 1830s, for instance, Thomas Carlyle voiced his anxieties about evolving gender roles by troping the early-century redefinition of masculinity in terms of spectrality: ‘The old ideal of Manhood has grown obsolete, and the new is still invisible to us, and we grope after it in darkness, one clutching this phantom, another that’ (Reference Carlyle1899: 29). The same period witnessed the rise of the Newgate Novel, which explored changing models of masculine behaviour by glamorising the deeds of criminals. Men’s identitarian challenges multiplied in subsequent decades. Literary responses to these challenges varied, but the Gothic was largely used to tackle gender dilemmas. In the mid-century, novelists wove criminal plots that sensationalised professional quandaries, raising important questions of conduct and ethicality. Triggered by contemporary redefinitions of professional standards, these plots encouraged a rethinking of priorities and values, even though they confirmed men’s hegemonic position in a public sphere that still marginalised or excluded women. More problematic was the denunciation of male violence in women’s writing. The ghost story form, in particular, was developed in subversive ways by women novelists, who used spectrality to expose the dark sides of Victorian patriarchy.

Pressures on men were also put by the imperial venture, which reached its peak at the turn of the century. Literary responses to these pressures were strongly gothicised, as evidenced by the proliferation of conceptions of monsters and savages in fin-de-siècle Imperial Gothic. A male-dominated genre, Imperial Gothic gave voice to late-century fears of what was considered regression, at the same time promoting a conservative ideology, as it reaffirmed race and gender boundaries that were meant to validate white men’s supremacy. Division of this kind was necessitated by the colonial adventure whereby definitions of ‘civilised’ culture and people (white, western) were created in opposition to ‘savage’ and inferiorised native cultures and people (Hall, Reference Hall1997), and ‘manly’ men were defined in opposition to women as well as often in relation to the ‘effeminate’ men of other cultures (Sinha, Reference Sinha1995). Stephen Whitehead suggests that ‘by the end of the nineteenth century [there was] an idealised version of masculinity—encompassing physicality, virility, morality and civility’ (Reference Whitehead2002). Yet, most men were unable to realise this conception of what constituted successful manliness. They continued to define their identity uniquely in opposition to individuals or groups categorised as Others, creating systems of interconnected discriminations that grew in the late century. Colonial relations bear evidence of these overlapping systems, as indigenous people were racialised by merging ethnocultural stereotypes with established categories of class and gender marginalisation.

I.3 Theory and Criticism

The complexity of this process of ‘othering’Footnote ¹ confirms that Victorian hegemonic masculinity was primarily constructed by giving visibility to, and rejecting, what was considered unmanly or not-wholly manly. In 1986, one of the pioneers of Masculinities Studies, Anthony Easthope, argued that ‘masculinity has stayed pretty well concealed. This has always been its ruse in order to hold on to power… . Masculinity tries to stay invisible by passing itself off as normal and universal’ (Reference Easthope1992: 1). Historically, masculinity has been a wide and powerful enough category that does not need to define itself in any uniquely specified way, as its definition relies on the much more rigid, defined and constrained classification of the ‘Other’ – the female and/or the non-white man. Pierre Bourdieu remarks that ‘it has often been observed that, both in social perception and in language, the masculine gender appears as non-marked’ (Reference Bourdieu and Nice2001: 9). Yet if hegemonic, patriarchal masculinity in the Victorian age was to be an aspirational ideal, it had to be seen in some ways. Stephen Whitehead in Men and Masculinities explains this apparent contradiction, specifying that he is not suggesting:

The argument goes that as white masculine power universalises so it obscures. It is the overwhelming presence of white, heterosexual, male power that makes it absent. The particularity of the white male position is universalised, normalised and obscured, and this enables white male power to remain invisible. If white masculinity is defined as normal, if it is spoken of as the human condition, other definitions, ways of living, or positions are defined as different from this central position. Questions of normalisation/differentiation, visibility/invisibility, are often addressed in Gothic Masculinities, which examines their relevance to Victorian representations of masculinity, suggesting that these crucial questions emerged long before their theoretical systematisation.

By reading masculinity specifically as/through the Gothic, the Element aims to ascertain the ideological complexity and the multifunctionality of the mode in relation to Victorian patriarchal norms. Besides exploring the gothicisation of those who were ‘othered’ by the norm, we give attention to the deconstruction of idealised conceptions of masculinity, showing how these conceptions were challenged in literary works that unveiled what was hidden at the centre. The analysis of both mechanisms adds nuances to previous criticism. What we suggest is that, if gothicised images of otherness undoubtedly prevailed in Victorian literature, hegemonic masculinity itself came to be perceived as Gothic by some writers, who struggled to disclose shadowy aspects of male power concealed by dominant ideology.

In much scholarship, Gothic masculinity is associated with non-hegemonic, less ‘successful’ manifestations that are most usually discussed as being fractured, unstable, and threatened. This fragmentation has been seen as one of the strengths of Gothic literatures and criticism: enabling and empowering different types of subversive and transgressive non-hegemonic masculinities to come to light. The Gothic has always, of course, its shadowy corners and locked rooms. However, for those men who reside half in the shadows, there can be liberation, validation, acceptance, and celebration of the alternative sides to masculinity.

These considerations explain why, in addition to exploring the fragmentation of gendered identities, Gothic Masculinities considers other types of representations of men in the Gothic genre including that oft-unseen centre. Many of the texts we analyse bring the established, the professional, the scholar, or the familial patriarch into the light. And while the Element uncovers some villains and criminals (and there are some excellent ones), it also examines professional men, fathers, and respectable members of society through a Gothic lens.

It is worth noting that there has been sustained and significant criticism of an acceptance of the Gothic mode as subversive, disruptive and radical. In 2012, Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall wrote a scathing critique of the unquestioning assumptions of the radicality and subversive nature of the Gothic. They claimed,

There is a strange reversal here whereby the ‘Gothic’ of both criticism and literature seemingly rebels against the centre. Yet, if the mode really is conservative, then the terror and fear it presupposes stem from the centre of its dominant ideology. If the Gothic upholds patriarchy, then middle class, white masculinity must be at the terrible heart of it.

In writing Gothic Masculinities, we have been conscious of the dangers of deciphering gender notions uniquely through the Gothic. Casting the Gothic net too widely might dissipate it as a concept and reduce any power it may have as a force for critique, disruption, and change. For this reason, we are not arguing that every manifestation of masculinity is Gothic. Rather we are examining all Gothic masculinities as being a part of the historical and mainstream creations of, and discourses about, masculinity. We argue that the idealised conception of patriarchal white masculinity in Victorian Britain is perhaps the most Gothic manifestation of all masculinities: based on power, control, patriarchal leadership, authority, and formed in opposition to a damaging and inflexible idea of the feminine and the non-white. This conception is neither benign nor unified. It is created through and by oppression, power, and ultimately violence. It is a dark ideal that can remain hidden and secret: hiding in the light.

In our proposal for Gothic Masculinities, we argued that the Gothic itself very often does not expect a triumphant, paternalistic patriarchy and there is little space for the type of men who might embody this masculine ideal in any untroubled or successful way. The Element as it stands now reinforces this argument and unpacks representations of that assured and central type of masculinity alongside its Gothic double. If the white, paternalistic, patriarchal centre of Victorian masculinity embodies the most Gothic of all conceptions of masculinity, then the Gothic mode can help to illuminate the centre, to unmask what is hidden and drag it into the light. Discussions of this central type of masculinity form an important part of the literary analyses provided in the four sections. Besides exploring how the Gothic can celebrate the weird and the unruly, and foresee alternative forms of masculinity, Gothic Masculinities also takes a hard look at the myth and idealised conception of one whole, unified, hegemonically powerful masculinity. The Element explores both those who occupy the centre (men as fathers, husbands, and ‘respectable’ professional citizens) and those who are ‘othered’ by the norm (non-white men, feminised men, dandies, and queer men). It examines different effects of the Gothic disruption of convention and stability, arguing that, while for some men this leads to a devastating deconstruction of gender norms, for others it reinforces the patriarchal structures and ideologies. This Element looks at traditional, patriarchal hegemonic masculinity itself as Gothic, not just as ‘Other’ to it, thereby attempting to radically deconstruct the conception of the male subject and of the whole male subject.

I.4 The Sections

The four sections of the Element, arranged in chronological order, deal with different types of British masculinity that became sources of anxiety in the long nineteenth century. Each section examines a literary genre in which these types were represented and problematised, delving into the shadows and contradictions of characters that swerved from hegemonic masculinity – from early-century criminals popularised in the Newgate Novel to Imperial Gothic figures of monstrosity and savagery that embodied fin-de-siècle fears of degeneration. Special attention is given to the Gothic paraphernalia used to portray British men in crisis or in danger. By offering insights into the disquieting characterisation of criminals, deceitful professionals, ghosts and monsters, the sections demonstrate how the Gothic contributed to the age’s redefinition of masculinity, as it was instrumental in raising thorny questions of class, gender, and ethnic identity. Another object of scrutiny is the spaces in which male characters live and act. By analysing some uncanny elements of these spaces and their evolution in the century’s literature, the Element confirms Robert T. Tally’s (Reference Tally2013) idea that literary cartographies are connected with the historical production of space and reflect changing views and preoccupations. An example is the shift from ‘homely Gothic’ to Imperial Gothic spatiality. If the gothicisation of domestic and public spheres in mid-Victorian literature questions ideals of male respectability upheld by the upper and middle classes, late-century depictions of exotic landscapes of fear in which British men live their adventures widen the limits of the age’s rethinking of gender models, raising new existential, ethical, and geopolitical questions.

The Element opens with an investigation of the Newgate Novel, an early-Victorian genre that sensationalised the biographies of real criminals to satisfy the growing popular taste for crime. By focusing on two novels written in the 1830s, Jack Sheppard by William Harrison Ainsworth and Eugene Aram by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Section 1 explores a little studied aspect of the genre – its unorthodox representation of masculinity. The section shows how Ainsworth’s and Bulwer-Lytton’s novels use the Gothic to glamorise the dark nature of their criminal protagonists who, in addition to breaking the law, challenge multiple gender expectations. In Jack Sheppard, the eponymous protagonist transgresses both gender and ethical standards with his flamboyant dandyism and his amiable sides, which make him a lovable, partly feminised, rogue. The sympathy he elicits, despite his criminal deeds, is increased by comparison with the novel’s arch-villain, Jonathan Wild, a psychopathic man who inhabits a Gothic house that bears evidence of his perversions. Toxic masculinity is instead incarnated by the protagonist of Eugene Aram, who conceals his selfishness and destructive passions under a refined mask. As the section demonstrates, Ainsworth and Bulwer-Lytton offered to their readers fascinating studies of crime and transgressive masculinity, which unveiled some contradictions inherent in emergent gender ideals. Both novelists, moreover, experimented with literary genres in intriguing ways. By combining true crime with Gothic elements and early techniques of the psychological thriller, they developed a new form of the novel that marked a shift from the Romantic sublime, creating an interest in psychopathology that would increase in subsequent decades.

The convolutions of the criminal mind were represented in more depth in the Sensation Novel, a genre that reached its peak of popularity in the 1860s. Section 2 analyses a selection of sensation narratives centred on professionals who commit crimes, driven by aberrant desires. These narratives bear witness to the century’s curiosity for disorderly mental states, but they also shed light on the mid-Victorian evolution of the Gothic which, as theorised by Fred Botting (Reference Botting2005: 8), laid increasing emphasis on an excess emanating from within. This evolution is evident in the alienated professionals featured in the sensation genre, who are dominated by unbridled, destructive passions. As the section contends, many characters portrayed in the selected texts not only convey anxieties over the Victorian rethinking of professional principles and deontology; they also draw attention to the mid-century crisis of bourgeois masculinity, as they are upper- and middle-class men striving to redefine their identity and values in an increasingly materialistic and mobile society. By examining the Gothic characterisation of works by Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charles Reade, and Ellen Wood, the section demonstrates that these novelists had a keen interest in the aforementioned dynamics. A specific source of preoccupation were the trials of law and medicine practitioners who, governed by dangerous ambitions, could seriously harm people. These trials are most evident in portrayals of doctors and lawyers who betray their mission, blurring honesty/dishonesty boundaries. Medical men, in particular, often fall prey to avarice and monomaniac leanings, which lead them to commit heinous crimes, including the murder of patients entrusted to their professional care. Drawing upon the notion of ‘homely Gothic’, moreover, the section demonstrates that most violations of deontology take place in respectable homes and professional studios, which are provocatively turned into spaces of horror rather than safety.

Section 3 looks into perturbing images of masculinity created by the ‘Queen of Sensation’, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, who gave fictional shape to various traumas suffered by Victorian women as a consequence of patriarchal norms. Instead of Braddon’s well-known sensation fiction, however, the section explores three understudied ghost stories she wrote between 1867 and 1880, focusing on their gothicisation of gender relations, love, and marriage. The analysis of the three stories substantiates the contention that Victorian masculinity was no unified ideal and that the ghost story was an effective genre for articulating gender anxieties as well as for envisaging alternatives. In ‘Eveline’s Visitant’, which pivots around strong passions like jealousy and revenge, heteronormativity is challenged by the return of a male ghost who generates transgressive sexual desires in a woman, upsetting her life. ‘Her Last Appearance’ exposes the domestic miseries of another woman who, caught between two rival men, suffers the consequences of male selfishness and cruelty, becoming a ghost herself. In ‘The Face in the Glass’, finally, domestic space proves to be a place of haunting for the female protagonist who, unlike her husband, is killed by supernatural phenomena. Though different in its manifestations, spectrality unveils the brutal nature of patriarchy in the texts under scrutiny. The three plots of ghostly encounters unmask the traps of domesticity and the age’s gendering of violence, while the victimisation of female characters poses the question of rethinking masculinity in less aggressive terms. By unravelling the texts’ problematisation of these gender issues, the section recognises Braddon’s important contribution to the Victorian ghost story, proving that, in ways similar to other women writers, she refunctionalised Gothic tropes to denounce the persistence of dangerous gender inequalities.

Later evolutions of the Gothic are discussed in Section 4, which examines fin-de-siècle anxieties over a masculinity in crisis that takes hideous shapes in literature. The section identifies two Gothic figures recurrent in late-Victorian narratives, the monster and the ‘savage’, explaining how these figures came to embody fears of degeneration that were widely felt at the time. Though triggered by a variety of factors, these fears often revolved around the erosion of British masculine power, which was represented as a source of multiple dangers. Drawing upon established criticism, including Cindy Hendershot’s theorisation of the ‘animal within’ (Reference Hendershot1998), the section analyses forms of monstrosity in canonical works by R. L. Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Richard Marsh, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad and Henry Rider Haggard, showing how the bourgeois white men featured in these works are either persecuted by scary doppelgangers or destabilised by a process of doubling that makes their monstrous self prevail over their rational self. The collapse of boundaries experienced by these characters is not only read as a late-century aggravation of the professional crisis explored in Section 2; it is also interpreted in relation to geopolitical and ethnocultural concerns that came to haunt fin-de-siècle Britain, as evidenced by the contemporaneous development of Imperial Gothic, a genre in which most of the examined texts can be inscribed. The section tackles some contradictions of the genre’s racialisation of otherness, demonstrating that the troping of savagery was both a trigger of imperial panic and a means for reinforcing conservative ideologies. In either case, the Gothic was used to uphold the ideal of white male supremacy which, though in crisis, was defended against the antagonistic forces of an empire ready to strike back. Yet, Section 4 also points to alternative approaches to ethnocultural diversity that emerged in the late century. The analysis of an understudied Haggard novella, ‘Black Heart and White Heart’ (Reference Haggard, Haining and by Hammond Innes1896), proves that the author challenged some dominant stereotypes of his time, offering thought-provoking images of indigenous dignity and morality as opposed to white male deviance.

The innovative aspects of Haggard’s novella confirm the complexity of Victorian Gothic which, besides articulating anxieties that strengthened conservative attitudes, was also a vehicle for expressing rebellion and envisaging alternatives. This multifunctionality emerges in the four sections of Gothic Masculinities. Through an analysis of canonical and forgotten literary texts, the Element proves that Victorian masculinity became an object of multiple preoccupations and contending views, showing how a capacious mode like Gothic provided a space for expressing both fears of change and desires to explore non-hegemonic forms of gender identification.Footnote ²

1.1 Both Dandy and Manly: Jack Sheppard and the Male Body

Serially published in Bentley’s Miscellany from 1839 to 1840, Jack Sheppard is set in the early eighteenth century and closely follows the exploits of the real life Jack Sheppard: a gentleman highwayman and housebreaker. Jack was caught and escaped from Newgate prison four times, becoming a folk hero before being hung at Tyburn at the age of twenty-one. Jacobs and Mourão argue that

Jack’s nemesis is this evil ‘Thief Taker’, a truly memorable character. Jacobs and Mourão say that the Newgate phenomenon ‘reached its height of popularity with Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838) and Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard (Reference Ainsworth1839), whose overlapping serialisation in Bentley’s Miscellany launched a Victorian institution’ (Reference Dickens2011: 27). In fact, Jack Sheppard was even more popular than Dickens’s novel and Jesse Rosenthal claims that it ‘reached the levels of a full-scale cultural phenomenon’ (Reference Rosenthal2017: 42). There were stage adaptations and merchandising ‘such as the “Sheppard bags” of housebreaking tools offered at theatres staging adaptations of Jack Sheppard’ (Jacobs and Mourão, Reference Jacobs, Mourão and Gilbert2011: 28). However, the novel is transgressive and extremely violent – no punches are spared.

In relation to masculinity, Jack Sheppard still resides within late eighteenth-century sensibilities that encompass the more sensitive man, the genius and also the dark, violent, Gothic villain and there is an emphasis on the criminal male body. Xavier Aldana Reyes argues, ‘corporeal interest is seminal to the Gothic. [It is] inherently somatic and corporeal’ (Reference Aldana and Xavier2014: 12). The (transgressive) body is of primary importance to the Gothic mode. In terms of recognition, otherness, or desire, the body transcends its materiality even as the vulnerability of flesh is emphasised and often violated. The body in the Newgate genre is similarly of paramount importance (remember all the villains are hung – from Bill Sykes to Jack, Jonathan, and Eugene). Descriptions are numerous, detailed, and repeated, suggesting an almost obsessive interest in the physicality of criminal masculinity.

Yet, even beyond this, there is a relentless and surprising emphasis on Jack’s body. Following the pseudoscience of physiognomy, Jack’s appearance is described in extraordinarily detailed terms that align him with the criminal male body while simultaneously making him attractive:

This extraordinarily detailed description aligns Jack not only with the criminal but also with the more loveable figure of the rogue. Ainsworth’s reference to Murillo’s paintings elevates Jack’s criminality to the level of artistic subject matter and explicitly acknowledges the seductive appeal of transgressive masculinity. The novel’s exploration of Jack as aesthetic object reaches its climax when he is visited in Newgate by the historical figures John Gay (who did in reality pen ‘The Beggars Opera’, which is based on Sheppard’s life) and William Hogarth. On seeing Jack, Gay exclaims that he seems too slight, but Hogarth’s response reveals a complex dynamic of masculine appreciation:

There is a suggestion of muscular masculinity here that, although equated with the criminal, is not out of step with certain ideals of the muscular, active Victorian man. Jack is portrayed as being sexually attractive, and Hogarth’s admiring assessment that Jack is ‘all muscle and activity’ transforms criminal capability into aesthetic appreciation. To further emphasise his sexual appeal, we hear that Jack, ever popular with women, has two ‘wives’, the wonderfully named Edgeworth Bess and Poll Maggott. As Marie Mulvey-Roberts argues, Gothic bodies are often ‘seen as carriers of dangerous desires, inculcators for destabilising ideas or containers of counter-hegemonic ideologies, normally related to race, class, religion, gender or sexuality’ (Reference Mulvey-Roberts2016: 2). Jack’s whole physicality is dangerous and transgressive but also extremely attractive.

While Jack has the ‘perfect’ body for criminal enterprise, and while this might be seen as some sort of distorted manliness, the way he adorns his body transgresses all conventional masculine ideals. Jack challenges masculine norms through elaborate self-presentation. Here he is reappearing after one of his escapes:

Jack’s appearance is again sexualised and admired. This admiration, however, is somewhat out of step with the late 1830s. The dandy figure was in fact later than the lifetime of the real Jack Sheppard, and although revived later in the nineteenth century through the decadent movement, there was less emphasis on this type of flamboyance in the 1830s and into the hardships of the ‘Hungry 40s’.

Whilst the idealisation of the hard, morally upright figure of manliness had not coalesced into the very rigid form it would take later in the nineteenth century, this type of idle and flamboyant dandyism would still not have been seen as desirable. As Alison Younger observes, ‘In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the English gentleman was a Teutonic ideal composed of latter-day chivalry, neo-Spartan virility and active physicality; attributes which can be sharply distinguished from the uninterested languor and fastidious sartorial elegance of the dandies’ (2018: 138). Jack, however, mixes the two. He is lithe and muscular and extremely physically adept – escaping from almost impossible places again and again – but at the same time he affects the very height of dandyish fashion, anticipating the later modishness of this style. As Marie Mulvey-Roberts argues, ‘Gothic praxis achieves much of its sense of menace and drama from exposing anxieties arising from collapsing categories’ (Reference Mulvey-Roberts2016: 3). Jack’s gender-subversion, his mixing of the masculine and the perceived feminine (he escapes Newgate dressed as a woman at one stage), leads to a breakdown in conventional notions of masculinity and challenges definitions of who or what is manly.

1.2 Dark Criminal Masculinity: Jonathan Wild and the Gothic

In Jack Sheppard, alongside the transgressive figure of Jack himself, there is the arch-villain Jonathan Wild, (also a character based on a real person) who acts as Jack’s dark, Gothic double. As Jonathan himself says with grudging admiration, ‘Were I not Jonathan Wild, I’d be Jack Sheppard’ (Ainsworth, Reference Ainsworth2015: 127). Jonathan is the darkest of all the men in the novel – a pure Gothic villain. Ostensibly a figure authorised to catch thieves, Jonathan is a sadist whose power is unchecked and who haunts the lowest filthy dives of London while lording it over those of higher class, keeping them in his power and, in one memorable moment, murdering one of them.

Jonathan’s physical description emphasises his inhuman, predatory nature. We hear his eyes are,

Jonathan has none of the more feminine attributes that Jack possesses. He is extremely violent and shows none of the sympathy or empathy Jack demonstrates towards those who are more vulnerable.

One of the most striking aspects of Jonathan’s characterisation is his house, which Ainsworth describes in great detail, showing an environment that reflects his psychological corruption:

The house extends beyond mere resemblance to a prison; it becomes a Gothic labyrinth designed to confuse and intimidate. This architectural Gothic reflects Jonathan’s psychological state. Jonathan is an excessive and transgressive character, exhibiting a masculinity that is so dark it verges on the perverse. Rather than the Victorian ideal of home as moral sanctuary, Jonathan’s house becomes a monument to masculine violence, control, and excessive desire.

Underneath Jonathan’s Gothic house lies a black private museum, with cabinets of curiosity; perversions of masculine collecting and classification impulses. In them we hear Jonathan had collected

This macabre collection transforms violence into aesthetic objects, representing a Gothic masculinity that finds pleasure in cataloguing and preserving evidence of brutality. Jonathan’s careful curation of violence reveals the dark inner psychology of a mind that has transformed murder into art and death into intellectual curiosity. Ainsworth takes pains to gothicise Jonathan and everything around him. He is an extreme and compelling character, and when he is present in the novel, attention focuses on him. The tale would not have lasted so long in the public imagination without Jonathan Wild’s dark presence. Jack Sheppard, as the most popular of all the Newgate novels, presents us with a surprisingly un-Victorian vision of masculinity. Amalgamating the Romantic and the Gothic, celebrating Jack’s dandyism and Jonathan’s dark perversions, the novel revels in transgressive and outsider expressions of men and masculinity.

The novel’s most extreme Gothic sequence occurs when Jonathan lures Sir Rowland Trenchard into his house through a secret door: ‘Beyond was a narrow bridge, crossing a circular building, at the bottom of which lay a deep well. It was a dark mysterious place, and what it was used for no one exactly knew’ (157). Jonathan ambushes Sir Rowland; his accomplice flings a cloth over his face, and Jonathan:

This extreme violence is unusual in a popular Victorian novel, but not in the Newgate genre. Nancy’s murder in Oliver Twist is just as violent, and there is no turning away from the corporeal horror, the gore, or the actuality of such extreme violence. Jonathan’s accomplice is Jewish, a similar figure to Fagin. As Sir Rowland falls into the well and makes desperate, failing attempts to escape, Abraham begs Jonathan to end his misery, just as Fagin miserably pleads with Sykes not to be ‘too violent’ to poor Nancy. Neither voice of compassion is heeded; Nancy is beaten to death, while Sir Rowland is left to suffer agony and terror before his death as Jonathan refuses to show mercy, ‘“What’s the use of wasting a shot?” rejoined Jonathan, savagely, “he can’t get out”’ (159).

As Jack’s dark double, Jonathan’s extremity forms a binary with Jack as not so bad; as loveable rogue rather than psychopathic monster. The one allows for identification/sympathy with the other. Jack’s dandyism shows an ambivalence in relation to ‘pure’ manliness, yet his admirable control over himself and his protecting, loving care for his mother point to a manliness that would have been accepted and lauded by Victorian culture. Jonathan, however, breaks down in his control, the darkness overwhelms him and he too is hanged at Tyburn. Gothic masculinity shows a fracture in self-control.

1.3 Toxic Masculinity in Eugene Aram: The Failure to Transcend the Body

In contrast to the doomed Jonathan and the flamboyant Jack, the ‘manly’ man of the Victorian age was supposed to maintain rigid control over his (and often others’) body. Jack has unique control over his own body in relation to both his attire and his exemplary athleticism. While by no means stupid, he is almost all body. Jonathan too had control of a sort, albeit that he went too far in his use of violence as his main expression of emotion. Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s character Eugene Aram appears to have complete control at the start of the narrative; however, what is finally uncovered is a catastrophic failure to transcend the body. Eugene Aram presents a narrative of existential struggle over mind and body, exhibiting and recording the breakdown of both as Bulwer-Lytton makes an impressive attempt at a psychological study within the Gothic mode.

Unless they are familiar with the story, readers today may slowly come to the realisation that Eugene is a murderer, but contemporary early Victorian readers would know Eugene’s tale well as it was documented in the Newgate Calendar as well as in the very popular ballad by Thomas Hood, ‘The Dream of Eugene Aram’. Claggett explains that Aram was,

The real life Aram killed an associate, Clarke, for monetary gain and used the spoils to aid himself in his scholarly endeavours. In Bulwer-Lytton’s version, we encounter a romanticised hero. The real Eugene Aram had dealings with the Lytton family, as Bulwer-Lytton says in the 1840 preface, ‘Aram frequently visited at Heydon (my grandfather’s house), and gave lessons’ (Reference Bulwer-Lytton1891: n.p.). Eugene had been known to be learned, quiet, and kind, and Bulwer-Lytton suggests someone who made one single mistake that blighted his life. In reality, it was money and perhaps jealousy/adultery that drove Eugene to murder, with the pursuit of knowledge and scholarship coming later. In the novel, Eugene’s motive is money to pursue knowledge – a crucial distinction that makes Eugene’s crime appear more intellectually motivated.

There were three editions of Eugene Aram (1831–40), and in each Bulwer-Lytton makes increasing attempts to minimise Eugene’s culpability until in the third edition he says, ‘I have convinced myself that though an accomplice in the robbery of Clarke, he was free both from the premeditated design and the actual deed of murder’ (Reference Bulwer-Lytton1891: n.p.). Claggett calls this revisioning ‘an alteration of immense ethical significance that contradicted the historical record’ (Reference Claggett2016: 172). However, regardless of Bulwer-Lytton’s later attempts at rehabilitation, the original tale remains one of murder for pure gain, and the novel was and still is firmly positioned in the Newgate genre by critics, the public, and scholars. Perhaps in spite of himself, Bulwer-Lytton presents a tale of Gothic instability of masculinity and character, a dark tale of murder, violence, hypocrisy, and the abuse of the woman who loves the protagonist.

‘Few men perhaps could boast of so masculine and firm a mind, as, despite his eccentricities, Aram assuredly possessed’ (Bulwer-Lytton, Reference Bulwer-Lytton2015: 22). So says Bulwer-Lytton near the beginning of the novel, extolling the virtues of a phallic mind. Eugene is presented as much more belonging to the mind than the body, and this is seen as an important part of his masculinity. His physical description emphasises the dominance of intellect over corporeality:

There is a curious mixture here of bodily description with deep admiration for the intellect. The mind imposes itself on the body – ‘contemplation’ rather than ‘emotion’. This description establishes the crucial tension in Eugene’s character – a masculinity supposedly based on mental control over bodily impulses.

In the novel, Eugene lives in a secluded spot in a very beautiful part of England where the aristocratic but friendly Lester family also resides. The daughters of the family, Laura and Madeline, meet Eugene by accident, and a family friendship arises which leads slowly to love between Madeline and Eugene. The novel initially presents Eugene as embodying an idealised Romantic masculinity that combines intellectual achievement with social virtue and natural sympathy. Eugene is called ‘the Student’ in the novel, emphasising his scholarly identity above all other characteristics. As a Romantic male figure, he appreciates natural beauty and as he walks with Madeline he is, ‘Vividly alive to the influences of Nature, and minutely acquainted with its varieties, he invested every hill and glade to which remark recurred with the poetry of his descriptions’ (16). This connection to the sublime landscape initially positions him as a figure of Romantic sensibility rather than Gothic corruption.

However, beneath this appealing exterior lies a profound selfishness and misanthropy that Eugene reveals in his conversations about scholarly life. Speaking to Walter, (the Lester family’s cousin who is in love with Madeline), about his existence as a scholar, Eugene’s self-pity and isolation become apparent:

Eugene’s lament reveals not noble sacrifice for knowledge but self-pity and resentment. The scholar’s life becomes, in his telling, a form of living death that divorces him from all human connection and bodily pleasure. Yet, it is of course, not just the scholar’s life that necessitates this isolation, there is always the fact that he is a murderer and must evade detection.

Bulwer-Lytton makes the reader part to many of Eugene’s inner monologues, ostensibly to examine the criminal’s psychological musings. However, intentionally or not, they display a profound misogyny and a deep selfishness. While he might love Madeline, his thoughts are not about how unfair it would be for her to unwillingly marry a murderer, rather he seems to be worried about her possible surveillance of him:

A thoroughly unpleasant character, Eugene mistrusts Madeline and all women. Fickle, untrustworthy, weak, impulsive, Madeline as prying female might find him out. There is no thought here for Madeline who is extremely young and inexperienced. All thought and care is for himself as he resolves to cling to a masculinity that must destroy emotional capacity in order to maintain control.

Yet it is Eugene who gives in to his impulses. Despite his claims to rational superiority, despite his resolution to ‘chain up feeling and heart’, the novel reveals his complete lack of genuine self-control. Eugene allows himself to love and woo young Madeline. Bulwer-Lytton exonerates him as much as he can, and tells us,

Unlucky for eighteen-year-old Madeline, ‘the beauty and boast of the whole country’ (6). She has lived a very secluded country existence and is ripe to fall for Eugene’s ‘charms’. After a passage about her beauty we are told, ‘the peculiar tone of Madeline’s mind fulfilled the indication of her features, and was eminently thoughtful and high-wrought. She had early testified a remarkable love for study, and not only a desire for knowledge, but a veneration for those who possessed it’ (6). Eugene, a prolific and experienced scholar, at thirty-five, seems to present Madeline with a perfect love object and, despite his resolutions and intentions, Eugene cannot stay away. Passion and selfishness hold sway as self-control crumbles and the body gains mastery over the mind.

Eugene’s relationship with Madeline reveals the most disturbing aspects of his character – the way his apparent refinement masks fundamental selfishness and emotional violence. Despite his supposed love for Madeline, Eugene’s primary concern remains for himself:

Eugene’s ‘doom’ inevitably comes about in part because he has not got the courage to leave, in part because he finds Madeline too appealing, but mostly because he is, in fact, a murderer. Eugene killed his associate Clarke (finally found out to be cousin Walter’s estranged father) for money. His lofty scholarly pursuits ultimately mask a fundamental selfishness and pride that originates from violence. Eugene presents as quiet, dignified, and scholarly, and he is well respected in the neighbourhood. His company is encouraged by Madeline’s father, who thirsts for intellectual conversation, and he is seen (by most people) as a good, safe match for her.

Yet it was passion, emotion, greed, and desire that led to the murder. As he explains his motivation for the murder during his confession, he says, ‘Passion that has made the Demon of my life … heralded the love that now seized me—the love of knowledge … new desires opened upon me with new stores: I became seized, possessed, haunted with the ambition of enlightening my race’ (133). Completely overtaken and mastered by passion, Eugene is unable to control himself. This ambition of ‘enlightening’ his ‘race’ is emerging from an innate sense of superiority in a murderer. Even as he ‘justifies’ his initial crime he cries out:

Eugene’s justification reveals the extent of his pride and sense of entitlement. His claim that ‘self-preservation is an instinct more sacred than society, and more imperious than laws’ (134) represents a complete inversion of the masculine ideals of duty and self-sacrifice that Victorian culture would increasingly emphasise. Eugene’s dark, villainous, Gothic masculinity is perhaps hidden better than Jack’s or Jonathan’s but it is more insidious and thus all the more dangerous.

Eugene’s true dark nature is most apparent as it is echoed in the landscape that inexorably moves from Romantic to Gothic. He goes to meet his accomplice to the murder, Houseman, and considers whether to kill him too to save himself. The landscape reflects his dark thoughts:

This Gothic sublime mirrors Eugene’s internal state – a masculinity that appears refined and civilised but conceals moral death and corruption. The ‘dead, dark, eternal hue’ of the woodland echoes Eugene’s spiritual condition, while the ‘horror umbrarum’, a Gothic element specifically evoking the dark unconscious, suggests the psychological darkness he inhabits. It is the true Eugene who, after his arrest, when he hears of Madeline’s death darkly remarks, ‘I am reconciled. Better now than later’ (132).

1.4 Conclusion

Newgate novels present fascinating studies of crime and transgressive masculinities. These are novels of men who self-indulge, who give way to the desires and passions of the body. Whether thieving for selfish desire, murdering for pleasure or gain, or loving with no regard for the beloved’s well-being, the men in the Newgate novels discard duty and often morality. Jack may be the most heroic but remains misguided, merely following his own passions. Jonathan is, when all is said and done, a violent sadist. But Eugene Aram is perhaps the worst of all – a hypocrite and base murderer who has pretensions to the higher life of the mind and a veneer of selfless courtly love that destroys its object, Madeline. The gaslighting and abusive violence perpetrated against Madeline are ‘softer’ and couched in love language, but constitute violence nonetheless, and she dies because of Eugene’s selfishness and hypocrisy.

The Newgate novels have always been identified as male and masculine, with critics uniformly identifying the Newgate Novel as a male genre: written only by men, with male heroes, romanticised and glamorised male criminals. In effect, one could suggest that there are elements of an early Victorian ‘manosphere’ where women are, at best, secondary and at worst abused and murdered by ‘heroic’ criminals.Footnote ⁵ Through a mixture of true crime and early psychological thriller techniques, both Jack Sheppard and Eugene Aram delve into the dark, Gothic world of early Victorian criminal masculinity. They explore the physicality and psychology of criminal men, revealing the anxieties and contradictions inherent in emerging Victorian masculine ideals. The Gothic elements – the collapse of categories in Jack’s dandified criminality, the architectural psychology of Jonathan’s prison-house, the hidden hypocrisies of Eugene’s guilt, and the extreme violence of murder scenes – all serve to explore masculinity’s potential for both creative and destructive transgression.

The power of Gothic techniques to explore the darker possibilities of masculine identity remains as compelling today as it was for early Victorian readers who flocked to see the play of Jack Sheppard performed and purchased packs of ‘housebreaking tools’ as souvenirs. It is not surprising that the popularity of the Newgate novels rubbed salt into authoritarian wounds. None of these men provide fit role models for the reading public, but this concurs with the Gothic mode’s raison-d’être. The Gothic novel’s enduring capacity to generate controversy and fascination testifies to the continuing relevance of questions about masculine identity, moral authority and the relationship between transgression and compliance. The manosphere is filled with men with a sense of entitlement, a sense of the self as superior and an enabled justified self-indulgence. For these men it is their desires and emotions and gratifications that matter most. And for Jack, Jonathan, and Eugene, while there is self-indulgence there is also a fatal, unintended Gothic slippage that leads to a lack of self-control and finally to their destruction.

2.1 Victorian Professionalism and Sensation Fiction

The mid-nineteenth century was a period of intense rethinking of the professional ideal in Britain. Spurred by social mobility, the reshaping of this ideal was also influenced by the ideological contradictions of the class to which many professionals belonged, the bourgeoisie, whose socio-economic ethic comprised two opposing orientations: the entrepreneurial and the vocational. Although they set themselves as guardians of specialised knowledge and moral values, professionals were constantly attracted by entrepreneurial principles. Another source of tension was the rise of new occupational groups that challenged the exclusivity and homogeneity of traditional elite ranks. The pressures of these rising groups were exerted both intra- and interprofessionally. Old professional fields, such as law and medicine, were destabilised by the demands for recognition of the lower branches, who threatened the privileges traditionally enjoyed by elite groups. In other fields, such as journalism, literature, and the arts, the rise of occupational categories previously viewed as non-professional contributed to questioning traditional values and standards.

Sociologists have amply demonstrated that professionalism was an embattled site of socio-cultural redefinition at the mid-century (see Corfield, Reference Corfield1995; Elliott, Reference Elliott1972; Perkin, Reference Perkin2002; Reader, Reference Reader1966; Sarfatti Larson, Reference Larson and Magali1977). The press became an important forum for debates on occupations in the periodical and literary markets, as well as in the arts. Since these occupations lacked internal organisation and corporate norms, the creation of shared professional standards was fiercely discussed by journalists and writers, who strove to define new levels of quality and ethicality. Resistance against commodification was praised by orthodox critics, while other critics refused to measure professional status against the adherence to strict aesthetic principles. These conflicting attitudes reached their climax in the 1860s, when a diatribe over the Sensation Novel was launched by elite reviewers, who accused the genre of being vulgar and immoral. Sensation novelists defended their works praising their realism and liveliness, but they were also conscious of serving an increasingly commercialised marketplace. As Mariaconcetta Costantini observes, by portraying writers, journalists, editors, artists, and performers as ‘half-flawed, half-admirable professionals’, these novelists ‘expose[d] the weaknesses and points of strength of their occupational category’, revealing the complexity of their positioning in the Victorian cultural milieu (Reference Costantini2015: 20ff).

If these rising occupations were still in the making, the old professions went through internal restructuring from the 1850s. Important changes in deontological standards and upward mobility occurred in the legal and medical fields, where the lower echelons acquired more prestige and power. Though opposed by the upper echelons, reforms were passed to valorise expertise acquired through fieldwork, which gradually replaced traditional values such as education, gentility, and connection. Reforms like the 1858 Medical Registration Act imposed some order upon the medical profession, favouring the rise of surgeons, who embodied a ‘democratic’ practice of medicine defiantly opposed to ‘the élite medicine of an aristocratic world’ represented by physicians (Lawrence, Reference Lawrence1994: 63). Within the legal profession, the restructuring of roles reached its climax in 1874 when, by act of Parliament, solicitors were offered ‘new opportunities to practice courtroom advocacy’ (Pionke, Reference Pionke2013: 102), while barristers’ privileges were reduced. Rising groups influenced the corporate encoding of deontology, as their entrepreneur’s scale of values came to bear upon the gentleman’s. The injection of new values triggered a redefinition of professional oaths and codes of conduct; but it also raised concerns over the potential corruptibility of lawyers and doctors.

Sensation novelists gave voice to these concerns in multiple ways. They represented the plights of low-rank professionals humiliated and impoverished by high-rank competitors perceived as a privileged ‘addendum to the nobility and gentry’ (Elliott, Reference Elliott1972: 143). They also responded to anxieties over the increasing greed of law and medical practitioners by concocting thrilling plots of deviation from ideals of probity and service, which involved both rising and elite professionals.

Another target of criticism was the old concept of gentility appropriated by the upper echelons. Sensation fiction unveils the sham of the gentlemanly pose adopted by elite professionals, many of whom prove to be as profit-oriented as the low-rank orders. Less numerous are characters of both ranks that offer positive models of masculine professionalism by combining honesty with generosity and civility. Juxtaposed with their dark doppelgangers, these characters make the former’s dishonesty come to fore by contrast. In most narratives, however, principled professionals play secondary roles while their villainous doubles are given centre stage. The next sections, which analyse both well-known and understudied texts, show that sensation novelists were less interested in offering paragons of virtue than in exploring the hidden perversions of lawyers and doctors, whose class, gender, and professional ideals were put to a hard test at the time.

2.2 The Deceptions of the Law

Truth-telling was a habit seldom attributed to legal professionals, who traditionally aroused the suspicion of the lay public. Popular distrust grew after the Prisoners’ Counsel Act was passed in 1836. By allowing the defence counsel to tailor a defensive story that countered the prosecutor’s story, the Act ‘disrupted the presumed links between law and truth and law and morality’ (Judge, Reference Judge, Baker and Womack2002: 127), casting a dark shadow on the conduct of leading professionals. Alongside this reform, nineteenth-century lawyers had to cope with the aspirations of the rising branches, whose entrepreneurial spirit threatened to increase stereotypes of falsity and unworthiness as opposed to gentlemanliness.

Mid-Victorian literature responded to popular concerns by characterising lawyers who used rhetorical tricks to defend clients whom they believed to be guilty. Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope famously used irony to fictionalise the crafty manipulation of the law, while expressing moral indignation over lawyers’ breach of trust and abuse of power. Sensation novelists were similarly lured by the quandaries of the legal profession and gave shape to its agonistic forces, even though they avoided overt moralisation. Rarely portrayed as villains or heroes, their law practitioners are chiaroscuro figures caught in ethical dilemmas, whose professional duties are not always fulfilled in the interests of justice. Forced to defend all sorts of clients, including guilty ones, these practitioners also betray an ambiguous admiration for skilful criminals, thereby contributing to what John Kucich calls the ‘Victorian blurrings of the honesty/dishonesty distinction’ (Reference Kucich1994: 1), although they seldom commit violent crimes themselves.

Wilkie Collins offers compelling depictions of the aforementioned dilemmas. Having been trained for the Bar, Collins developed a strong interest in the legal profession, which he represented in its lights and shadows. Most lawyers featured in his works pursue professional honesty, but they also justify moral relativism in specific circumstances. An ironic portrayal, among others, is that of Mr Pedgift Senior, who plays a secondary role in Armadale (Reference Collins and John Sutherland1864–6). A solicitor ‘risen in the law’ (Collins, Reference Collins and John Sutherland1995: 361) who offers his services to the protagonist, Allan Armadale, Pedgift is a skilful man who has learned rhetorical tricks to convince his clients to follow his advice. Although he uses these tricks to help Armadale, his manipulative power makes him potentially dangerous. Another worrying trait is his admiration for two criminals: Lydia Gwilt, a femme fatale who murdered her first husband and attempts to kill Armadale, and the corrupted Dr Downward (alias Dr Le Doux). When he warns Armadale against Lydia, Pedgift compares her to a ‘wild beast’ and a ‘tigress’ (364), but he nonetheless praises the woman’s plotting mind and rhetorical skills:

Pedgift’s ‘profound admiration’ for Lydia underlines his affinity with the woman’s deceptive personality, suggesting that, in other circumstances, he might misuse his manipulative skills for wicked goals. The gender reference increases the irony of the quotation. Besides highlighting her missed opportunities, the if-clause implies that, if she had been a man, Lydia could have entered the legal profession and hide her criminal leanings under a veneer of respectability.

The aforementioned affinity uncannily anticipates a passage of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Reference Stoker1897), in which Jonathan Harker confesses that Count Dracula leaves him ‘under the impression that he would have made a wonderful solicitor’ (Reference Stoker1994: 44). In ways similar to Stoker, who highlights the lawyering skills of a vampire troped in terms of bestiality, Collins describes the tigerish Lydia as a potentially successful lawyer, thereby casting a dark shadow on legal professionals. The anxieties raised here by Collins would increase at the fin de siècle when, as shown in Section 4, all professions would become also vehicles of fears of moral and behavioural degeneration.

Pedgift’s ambivalence is confirmed in a letter he sends to his son, embedded in the novel’s Epilogue. The letter describes Dr Downward as ‘one of our rising men’ ‘in an age eminently favourable to the growth of all roguery, which is careful enough to keep up appearances’ (Collins, Reference Collins and John Sutherland1995: 673). An abortionist who becomes enmeshed with Lydia’s murderous plots but escapes punishment, Downward is partly stigmatised, partly admired by Pedgift, who similarly belongs to the rising branches of his profession and offers his services to affluent people. Despite its ironic undertones, the solicitor’s comment on Downward conveys circulating concerns over the potential corruptibility of legal and medical professionals who, like the criminal doctor, might misuse their skills to achieve social and financial success while keeping up appearances.

Many lawyers and doctors featured in sensation fiction are unscrupulous men who betray their ideal of service, often acting in league to achieve their objectives. A bitter denunciation of the complicity between law and medicine is found in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (Reference Braddon and Skilton1861–2). Serialised three years before Armadale, this novel describes an abuse of power committed by an upper-class barrister and an eminent physician, who join forces to confine the eponymous Lady Audley to a Belgian asylum. Although she is not proved to be mad, the woman is incarcerated in the mental hospital by her nephew Robert Audley, an upper-class ‘lazy, care-for-nothing fellow’ inscribed in the barristers’ list (Braddon, Reference Braddon and Skilton1987: 32). Introduced as a privileged, non-productive young man, Robert becomes an amateur detective driven by a monomaniac curiosity for his aunt, whom he resolves to punish after discovering her disguised identity and crimes. Revenge and the wish to avoid his family’s exposure are the main reasons for his persecuting actions which are performed secretly, without involving law institutions. Robert’s conflict of interest is complicated by his violation of professional norms, as he plays several incompatible roles, ‘as detective, judge, prosecutor, and prison guard of Lady Audley’ (Turley Houston, Reference Houston, Gail, Tromp, Gilbert and Haynie2000: 21).

Robert’s abuse of power is reinforced by the help he receives from Dr Alwyn Mosgrave. A physician who recognises that there is ‘no evidence of madness’ (Braddon, Reference Braddon and Skilton1987: 377) in the lady’s behaviour, Mosgrave nonetheless contributes to her internment, using a language imbued with aporias to justify his unprofessional conduct. ‘“The lady is not mad, but she has the hereditary taint in her blood. She has the cunning of madness with the prudence of intelligence … She is dangerous”’ (379) is the doctor’s diagnosis which, in D. A. Miller’s view, revolves around contradictory propositions that are proofs of his manipulative powers (Reference Miller1988: 169–71). Although he pretends to be doing ‘a service to society’ (Braddon, Reference Braddon and Skilton1987: 381), Mosgrave is conscious of condemning the woman to ‘live burial’, as he admits in a conversation with Robert: ‘“If you were to dig a grave for her in the nearest churchyard and bury her alive in it, you could not more safely shut her from the world and all worldly associations”’ (381). A Gothic image repeated in the title of Section 37, the prospect of being ‘Buried Alive’ is evoked again by Lady Audley when she arrives at the asylum. In a passage imbued with pathos, the woman gives vent to her fear and despair, accusing Robert of condemning her to a terrible fate: ‘“You have brought me to my grave, Mr. Audley”, she cried; “you have used your power basely and cruelly, and have brought me to a living grave”’ (391). Her accusation not only gothicises their gender roles, configuring Robert as the ruthless persecutor of a lady in distress; it also underlines the unethicality of the barrister and his medical accomplice who, instead of bringing the matter before law authorities, use their power ‘basely and cruelly’ to incarcerate a criminal, but presumably sane, woman.

2.3 Greedy Doctors

Like Braddon, Charles Reade denounced the dangerous connivance of lawyers with doctors in Hard Cash (1863), a sensation novel pivoting around the misadventures of Captain Dodd, whose money is stolen by a deceitful banker, Richard Hardie, and the troubles of Hardie’s son Alfred, who is locked up in an asylum by his villainous father. A main target of the novel’s critique is the Lunacy Commission established by Parliament in 1845, a board consisting of doctors, lawyers, and honorary members who are portrayed ‘as generally corrupt or incompetent’ (Fantina, Reference Fantina2010: 73). Other passages of Hard Cash confirm Reade’s distrust of legal and medical practitioners. Alfred is in fact betrayed by various professionals who, instead of helping him, increase his sufferings. ‘Lawyers fatten by delays of justice, as physicians do by tardy cure’ (Reade, Reference Reade1895: 560), argues the narrator, suggesting that both professional groups increase their profit by adopting strategies of postponement that damage their clients.

If the moral degeneration of lawyers becomes evident in the final lawsuit, the corruptibility of doctors is exposed by the Gothic characterisation of three medical specialists who act in league with Alfred’s father, wrongly diagnosing the protagonist’s madness: Dr Osmond, Dr Wycherley, and Dr Wolf. All portrayed as persecuting villains, the three doctors exert their brutal power over their patients, while the asylums in which they work are modern versions of the castles predominant in early Gothic fiction. Scenes of torture and humiliation abound in the representation of the brutalising actions committed by asylum attendants, whose abuses are covered up by medical men:

The quotations’ meticulous attention to the corporeal effects of torture operates within a distinctly Gothic register, wherein the suffering body becomes a site upon which asymmetrical power relations are inscribed. As Michel Foucault argues in Discipline and Punish (Reference Foucault and Sheridan1975), the body constitutes a primary locus for the exercise of disciplinary power. In Reade’s novel, this dynamic converges with the institutional, or ‘expert’, authority of corrupt doctors, who exert control over vulnerable subjects entirely subjected to their will.

In addition to these scenes of torture, violations of the Hippocratic Oath are exemplified by Dr Wolf’s administering of morphine to his patients ‘to coax the reason away out of the head’ (Reade, 1895: 444). The doctors’ criminal psychology also offers glimpses into their monomaniac leanings. Dr Wycherley, in particular, is portrayed as exhibiting symptoms consistent with monomania – ‘the doctor had a bee in his own bonnet’ (440) – which is well concealed beneath his gentlemanly façade. Discovered by Alfred, who is sane despite his certified insanity, Wycherley’s mental disorder adds another layer of meaning to the troubling concept of madness, which the novel uses to unmask the perversions and pretensions of the medical class.

The immorality of Dr Osmond, Dr Wycherley, and Dr Wolf is counterbalanced by the honesty of Dr Alexander Sampson, a low-rank medical man who vehemently denounces the greed and incompetence of his elite colleagues:

A vehicle for the author’s bitter critique of dishonest professionals, Sampson configures high-rank doctors as rapacious, unscrupulous, and incompetent, as evidenced by the word ‘SCUM’ and the suggestion that ‘the money-makingest’ are only apparently ‘Th’ ablest’. Although he is too eccentric and too unrefined to provide a fully imitable model, he is nonetheless instrumental in Reade’s exposure of greedy and rascal doctors, which caused much stir at the time of the novel’s serialisation.Footnote ⁶

The immorality of the three specialists is highlighted by their dangerous alliance with Alfred’s father, a rapacious banker who epitomises the untrustworthiness of the world of finance. Like Reade, other sensation novelists explored the harmful intersections between finance and medicine, showing how the monied interests of bankers and speculators might induce doctors to betray their mission. A novelist who dealt with these problematic themes was Ellen Wood. As Costantini demonstrates (Reference Costantini2015: 325–9), Wood represents the insidious penetration of financial values into the medical profession in Oswald Cray (Reference Wood1864) and Bessy Rane (1870), two sensation novels that focus on the corruptibility of doctors in a market economy. Oswald Cray, in particular, revolves around the questionable figure of Mark Cray, a young surgeon who moves between the medical profession and the world of financial speculation, damaging people in both fields but always escaping punishment. Driven by greed rather than vocation, Cray not only ruins investors with his business enterprise; he also kills one of his patients during surgery by administering too much chloroform.

If Cray’s manslaughter is committed out of negligence, other doctors featured in sensation fiction are responsible of wilful murder. In Birds of Prey (Reference Braddon1867), for instance, Braddon sensationalises the link between medicine and finance by portraying the roguish Philip Sheldon, an unprincipled surgeon-dentist who murders a patient for money before becoming a successful stockbroker. One of the swindlers troped as ‘birds of prey’ in the novel, Sheldon commits utterly despicable crimes, as he breaches people’s trust in the healing function of medicine.

Introduced as a ‘gentleman’, ‘eminently respectable’, who lives in a respectable house in Bloomsbury and looks as polished and neat as his abode, Sheldon is a man fond of work, with ‘industrious habits’ (Braddon, [Reference Braddon1867]: 1, 4, 12) in line with the ideal of industrious gentlemanliness developed by Samuel Smiles in Self Help (Reference Smiles1859). His beautiful, regular features add to his respectable look, as confirmed by the adverb ‘eminently’ in the following quotation: ‘Mr. Sheldon was a handsome man—eminently handsome, according to the popular notion of masculine beauty; … His features were regular; the nose a handsome aquiline; the mouth firm and well modelled’ (Braddon, [1867]: 11–12). A few lines later, however, his respectability is unmasked as fake by the ironic suggestion that the dentist’s ‘artfully-arranged masses that passed for curls’ hide ‘the secrets of Mr Sheldon’s organisation’ from ‘the eye of a phrenologist’ (12). This early hint at his deceitfulness and potential criminality is reinforced in subsequent pages. By using a common stereotype of Jewish moneylenders, the narrator exposes the forged nature of Sheldon’s home and wealthy status: ‘Those neighbours and passers-by who admired the trim brightness of the dentist’s abode had no suspicion that the master of that respectable house was in the hands of the Jews’ (16–17).

As the narration unfolds, the deconstruction of Sheldon’s façade acquires darker connotations, as he kills a man entrusted to his professional care. The victim of his crime is Tom Halliday, a former acquaintance and rival in love, who falls ill while visiting Sheldon, is treated by the dentist and dies in his host’s house. Clues to Sheldon’s guilt are offered to the reader who, unlike most characters, soon becomes aware of the dentist’s double violation of the law of hospitality and the Hippocratic Oath. The awful implications of this violation are enhanced by Braddon’s use of ‘homely Gothic’ paraphernalia, as the crime is committed within the walls of Sheldon’s home studio, turned into a place of horror rather than safety. Well hidden under his gentlemanly comportment, his monstrous personality echoes Sigmund Freud’s notion of the uncanny (Reference Freud, Haughton and McClintock1919), in which the familiar becomes frighteningly unfamiliar, thereby destabilising the reader’s sense of domestic security and exposing the latent horrors that lurk beneath seemingly ordinary social façades.

Like Judas Iscariot, whose betrayal of Jesus is evoked by a Gospel quotation (46),Footnote ⁷ the unprincipled dentist betrays his patient’s trust to solve his own financial troubles, as he gets Halliday’s money and the premium of some life insurances by marrying his widow, Georgina. His attraction for the entrepreneurial principle is confirmed by his later change of profession. After a successful investment of the money, Sheldon enters the world of finance as stockbroker and spends all his energies in business pursuits, showing that his actions are still driven by greed. What he develops, in the course of the narration, is a real obsession with money-making resulting from his overwhelming dread of poverty, which is gothicised by the use of two snake metaphors: ‘a rattlesnake’ met by travellers and ‘a cobra de capello’ that makes ‘foreign fellows feel their blood stagnate and turn to ice at sight of the cold slimy-looking monster’ (Braddon, [1867]: 321).

Haunted by this dread, Sheldon plots a second murder in a moment of financial crisis narrated in Charlotte’s Inheritance (Reference Braddon1868), the sequel to Birds of Prey. The new selected victim is his stepdaughter Charlotte, whom he persuades to take out a life insurance, thus epitomising the Gothic archetype of the tyrannical father – an oppressive male figure that specifically manipulates and oppresses those vulnerable to his authority. In order to pocket the premium, Sheldon slowly poisons the young woman, using his medical authority to diagnose a ‘natural’ physical decline. In ways similar to her biological father, Charlotte is thus endangered by a man she trusts both personally and professionally. In both cases, moreover, Sheldon misuses his medical expertise for criminal reasons: he draws information on the poison from the Lancet and provides a false diagnosis. His devilish portrayal confirms William Hughes’s claim that, in Victorian medical Gothic, the role of villain shifts from the traditional Satanic tempter to ‘the astute but irresponsible secular medical practitioner’, who challenges the integrity of the patient’s body with ‘dis-order and dis-ease’ (Reference Hughes, Smith and Hughes2012: 188). Although Charlotte is finally rescued by her fiancé, her victimisation reinforces the pressing deontological questions raised in Birds of Prey. As Nicki Buscemi astutely argues, the two novels not only question ‘the belief that doctors should be implicitly trusted’; they also invert Victorian assumptions on women’s susceptibility to dangerous reading, as they show ‘the potential danger to the professional, male reader whose specialized, supposedly objective, medical reading gives him the tools to perpetrate a crime’ (Reference Buscemi2010: 152, 154).

Another gender stereotype questioned in the two novels is the nineteenth-century distrust of female poisoners which, nourished by causes célèbres like the notorious trial of Madeleine Smith in 1857, was reinforced by medical assumptions on women’s unrestrained impulses. Instead of adopting such stereotypes, Braddon portrays a rational medical man who, driven by greed, coldly poisons his patients without feeling any sting of remorse. Probably inspired by real cases of murderous doctors, such as the infamous William Palmer executed in 1856, Sheldon’s characterisation challenges professional and gender convictions of the age, while the ominous links between medical and financial activities unveiled by his double career point to the risks of replacing humanitarian values with monetary values.

2.4 Gothic Obsessions

Sheldon’s betrayal of his professional duties is not only the result of materialistic drives; his urge to make easy money also acquires monomaniac connotations:

Instead of being a means to achieve comforts and luxury, money becomes a source of ‘ecstasy’ for Sheldon; it is a goal desired for its own sake, a mania that turns him into a ‘domestic enigma’ even for his wife. The obsessive nature of his greed bears evidence of an evolution of nineteenth-century Gothic which, as Botting suggests, increasingly laid stress on the psychology of individuals:

An ‘inscrutable creature’ guided by unbridled desires, Sheldon comes to embody a strain of Gothic excess that upsets the gender and professional model he is supposed to set. By drawing attention to the dark recesses of his psyche, Braddon associates disturbing forms of pleasure with the urban and domestic spaces in which the dentist lives and practices his profession. If Sheldon’s neat home studio is corrupted by his secret crimes, the heart of London in which it is located becomes ‘a locus of real horror’, in line with the mid-century gothicisation of bourgeois spatiality: ‘Domestic, industrial and urban contests and aberrant individuals provided the loci for mystery and terror’ (Botting, Reference Botting2005: 7, 80).

Murder, masculinity, and medical practice are similarly connected in Ellen Wood’s Lord Oakburn’s Daughters (Reference Wood1864), in which Dr Lewis Carlton is driven to crime by his unrestrained passions. A handsome young surgeon, Carlton looks as gentlemanly as Sheldon, even though some of his features – like his ‘impassive’ face and his ‘thin and closely-compressed lips’ – are rather unpleasant and anticipate the physiognomy of the habitual murderer type classified by Cesare Lombroso a few years later:Footnote ⁸

The son of a surgeon who ‘had been rather given to sins and recklessness’, Carlton is similarly described as ‘a man of wayward passions’ who gets into ‘various dangers and difficulties’ in London (109, 36). His liability to wild emotions is confirmed by his ‘powerful and impassionate love’ for Laura Chesney (109), whom he meets after moving to a country town. This strong passion drives him to wilfully poison a patient, Mrs Crane, who is later discovered to be his secret wife in disguise and Laura’s runaway sister. In defiance of the Hippocratic Oath, Carlton uses his medical authority and knowledge to kill a patient, turning the house where Mrs Crane is hosted into a gothicised space. After marrying Laura, moreover, his obsessive inclinations take new shapes. Exactly because it is ‘wild and passionate as a whirlwind’, his love for Laura wanes soon (335) and he falls prey to adulterous passions, spurring a jealousy that becomes instrumental to the final discovery of his crime. ‘Perhaps few men living were more inclined by nature to transgress social laws than was Mr Carlton’ (334), observes the narrator, highlighting the surgeon’s difficulty to escape his tendency to deviance and excess.

By exploring the two doctors’ obsessions, Braddon and Wood not only gave voice to anxieties over the Victorian redefinition of professional codes of conduct; they also staged a crisis of bourgeois masculinity, as their protagonists cunningly hide their aberrant longings beneath a mask of gentlemanliness. In both cases, moreover, the Gothic is internalised, as the uncanny that disturbs the familiar originates from the psychic states of individuals who act against social expectations.

Sensation novelists continued to explore disquieting states of mind when the genre’s golden age was over. In Heart and Science (Reference Collins and Farmer1883), for example, Collins blends realism with Gothic paraphernalia to offer an impressive psychological study of Dr Nathan Benjulia, a physician specialised in nervous pathologies who betrays his mission to pursue knowledge and fame. Besides practising animal vivisection, Benjulia uses a young woman, Carmina, as a guinea-pig for his research, by consciously endorsing the wrong treatment of her nervous breakdown. His criminal plan symbolically turns Carmina into a human equivalent of his animal victims. The woman is finally rescued by her fiancé, Ovid Vere, a surgeon who also specialises in mental disorders. Ovid returns from Canada, where he was recovering from overwork, and he saves Carmina’s life by using a providential cure learned from an anonymous Canadian doctor met on travel. The novel closes with the two lovers’ wedding, while Benjulia dies by suicide. His self-inflicted death is consequent on Ovid’s publication of his successful treatment, which shatters the rival’s unbridled ambitions: ‘“You have taken something from me, which was dearer than life”’ (Collins, Reference Collins and Farmer1996: 320).

Though gratifying for Victorian readers, the matrimonial happy ending offers no convincing solutions to the ambiguous characterisation of medical men. Ovid undoubtedly shows a vocational attitude, even though some traits he shares with Benjulia obfuscate his portrayal, such as his bent for excessive work and his aspiration to fame, as he publishes the Canadian doctor’s work in his own name (318). More upsetting are the ambition and thirst for knowledge displayed by his dark doppelganger, which acquire a decidedly monomaniac quality. Though belonging to medical upper echelons, Benjulia violates his deontology and loses control, because he falls prey to one overwhelming passion: the yearning for making a great scientific discovery. ‘“I am in such perpetual terror of being forestalled by my colleagues”’, he confesses to his brother, connoting his pursuit of ‘Knowledge for its own sake’ as a dangerous pathology:

This pathologisation is increased by Benjulia’s admission that, although he sometimes pities his animal victims, he continues to torture them to pursue his ‘glorious cause’ (191).

The complex characterisation of Benjulia, who blends callousness with compassion, rationality with monomania, did not escape notice at the time of the novel’s publication. An Reference Collins and Farmer1883 unsigned review in The Spectator underlined that, though morally deplorable, Benjulia escaped traditional categories of villainy and compelled pity for his tragic fate (Reference Collins and Farmer1883: 680). By portraying a physician-scientist mastered by aberrant desires, Collins not only confirmed his curiosity for the unfathomable depths of the human psyche; he also told a corruption optimi pessima story that cast a shadow onto dominant professional and gender models.

A last element worth noticing is that, as a Faustian figure who conducts his violent experiments in the secrecy of his laboratory, Benjulia foreshadows Robert Louis Stevenson’s Gothic characterisation of Dr Jekyll in the eponymous novel published two years later, whose protagonist likewise engages in clandestine scientific practices. Both Collins and Stevenson deploy Gothic motifs – obsessive inquiry, demonic hubris, and the sinister laboratory – to dramatise a growing crisis of expert knowledge, transforming the ostensibly austere and rational domain of science into a dark arena of violence and moral degeneration.

2.5 Conclusion

In ways similar to other professional figures examined in this section, Benjulia is driven by yearnings that make him misuse his expert knowledge in dangerous ways. His characterisation confirms that, even after the 1860s, sensation novelists continued to use Gothic paraphernalia to voice apprehensions over the challenges faced by professional men at a time of redefinition of their gender and occupational models. If read in view of Stephen Whitehead’s idea that ‘professional practice’ is ‘a form of ontological validation of the “masculine/managerial” subject’ (Reference Whitehead2002: 136), Benjulia’s betrayal of his mission invalidates both his high-ranking professional role and his masculine integrity, as the oppressive power he exerts contrasts with the ideal of gentlemanliness he should incarnate.

A last noteworthy aspect is Benjulia’s exoticisation. Despite his British manners, the doctor has a foreign sounding name and physical traits that evoke racial difference, such as his ‘gipsy-brown’ complexion and his ‘straight black hair’, compared to ‘the hair of an American Indian’ (Collins, Reference Collins and Farmer1996: 95). A dark double of Ovid, governed by ambitions that stifle his vocation, Benjulia upsets British models of masculinity and professionalism also with his non-British features, which reinforce his swerving from social norms and expectations. On a generic plane, moreover, his unorthodox figure casts light on the evolution of the Gothic in the literary shift from mid-century realism to fin-de-siècle romance. Though still described realistically, his racialising traits foreshadow late-century fantasies of exoticised, monstrous doppelgangers. As will be shown in Section 4, these monstrous doppelgangers frightfully haunt professionals, raising anxieties of degeneration and nativisation that complicate prevailing conceptions of masculinity and professionalism.

3.1 ‘Eveline’s Visitant’

We turn first to the ‘shocking’ ‘Eveline’s Visitant’, a story which Kate Krueger says ‘illustrates how fragile the symbolic space of the home and the expectations regarding spousal felicity really are’ (Reference Krueger2014: 77). The story begins with our narrator Hector and his cousin André quarrelling at a fancy dress ball over a woman: a ‘beautiful viper’ (Braddon, Reference Braddon and Buzwell2019: 22). Hector strikes André and we hear, ‘the welt raised by my open hand was crimson upon his fair womanish face as he stood opposite to me’ (24). The result is a deadly blow to André’s masculinity, a fatal insult to his honour and a duel to the death. As he lies dying, André curses Hector crying out,

Despite being beaten, despite his ‘womanish’ face, despite the fact he is dying, André has an ‘iron will’ and will return from beyond the grave. This is a theme in other ghost stories, notably E. Nesbitt’s ‘John Charrington’s Wedding’ (1891) where John will return to wed his love even if he is already dead and his return kills her. André’s return is for revenge though rather than a skewed idea of love. And it is from outraged honour, incandescent rage, pride, and jealousy that he wrenches his soul from his body in order to return to ruin Hector’s life. In The Victorian Male Body, Ruth Heholt explored ephemeral, weak male phantoms versus ‘the iron will of the dead man which is expressed in the manifestation of his phantom body’, a specifically ‘hyper-masculine figure whose spirit entirely masters both his own body and the laws of nature’ (Reference Heholt, Parsons and Heholt2018: 149, 164). André is far from hyper-masculine in body, ‘but there are those who remember the brief manhood of André de Brissac, and who can bear witness to the terrible force of that proud nature’ (Braddon, Reference Braddon and Buzwell2019: 25). This force of nature transcends into something that overcomes the natural and moves into the ‘super’ natural.

Hector inherits his cousin’s estate, living unhappily as the uncanny double of his murdered cousin; ‘sitting alone in the solemn midnight by the hearth where he [André] had sat, pacing the corridors that had echoed his footfall’ (27–8). Eventually, Hector is saved (it seems) by Eveline, who manages to change ‘the gloomy lord of the chateau into a loving husband and a gentle master’ (27). They are not however alone and the peace and security of a heterosexual marriage is shattered as André returns to get his revenge. Appearing as he was, ‘young and handsome’ (29), André constantly visits Eveline – never leaving her in peace until she begins to wilt and fail. And as she describes him to Hector, ‘a young man with a fair, womanish face, very pale and rendered remarkable by a crimson scar, which looks like the mark of a blow’ (33), he knows ‘that André de Brissac had kept his word, and that in the hour when my life was brightest, his shadow had come between me and my happiness’ (33). André literally comes between them, and Eveline who is becoming more and more ill tells her husband, ‘He comes between us, Hector. He is standing between us now. I can see his face with the red mark upon it plainer than I see you’ (34). The ghost with the ‘womanish’ face has completely unmanned Hector the ‘rough soldier’: André is the existential threat that he cannot even see. And there is more. Eveline describes how she tried to shun and outrun the ghost but,

André’s revenge is to make Eveline love his ghost and she is dying of both lust and guilt. She yearns to see André, instead of the usual/expected plea of ‘save me’. She desires a ghostly body, not her husband’s, and both the betrayal and the revenge come from Eveline’s erotic desire for the ghost of André.

Ardel Haefele-Thomas in Queer Others in Victorian Gothic argues that, ‘“The queer” is bound to function within heteronormative culture while at the same time this figure calls the idea of “the norm” into question. Gothic is also “different” because it, like “the queer”, straddles the boundary between “acceptable” and “troubling”’ (2012: 14). ‘Eveline’s Visitant’ subverts the ‘acceptable’ – the heteronormative marriage – and destroys any conception of it at all. The story presents one of the most transgressive of all desires in any Victorian ghost story – André is not Eveline’s husband, and he is already dead. Paulina Palmer in The Queer Uncanny says one meaning ‘that the ghost acquires on account of its connection with ideas of return and repetition is that of the double or copy’ (Reference Palmer2012: 66). André is a ‘copy’ or substitute for Eveline’s lover; Hector’s uncanny and totally taboo uncanny double. And while Eveline only ever sees André outside, there is a portrait in the house. Emma Liggins says, ‘Concealed behind a curtain, like Dorian Gray’s evil image, the picture symbolically hides the male line of descent and the aggressive virility of the male hunter’ (Reference Liggins and Bloom2021: 115). And the hunted is Eveline – not for her own sake, but as an instrument of a revenge plot that has Hector in sight.

André’s revenge is complete. Hector is put in the most feminised/dishonoured position as he is physically rejected by Eveline, who is enthralled by André. He has no physical agency – he cannot fight, touch, or even see his rival. In effect, Hector’s body is of no use to him at all. Hector may be a soldier in the material plane, but ‘the iron will of André de Brissac was strong enough to do battle with Death’ (Braddon, Reference Braddon and Buzwell2019: 25). In Queering the Gothic, William Hughes and Andrew Smith say that the Gothic challenges ‘conventional moralities and identities’ and can produce ‘hints of pleasures still unrealised or unavailable but now known. Known and experienced, even vicariously, they become now a temptation, now an alternative’ (Reference Hughes and Smith2009: 1–2). André offers both temptation and alternative – an alternative to conventional Victorian masculinity, Eveline’s wifehood, and a completely alternative way of being – a sexual life after death. Hector says ‘at the very last she told me, sobbing and affrighted, that he was by her side’ (Braddon, Reference Braddon and Buzwell2019: 35). In the end, Hector is bested by Eveline’s queer desire for the ‘womanish’, ethereal, ghost-body of André. The text blurs both identity and sexual orientation lines. All notions of patriarchal, Victorian male heterosexual authority are completely evaporated. Hector loses his own battle to an expression of Gothic queer desire.

3.2 ‘Her Last Appearance’

In the previous story, Eveline was used as an instrument of revenge. Her own desire and sexuality were fatally manipulated and terrifyingly, even after death she was claimed by André. Our next tale is also one of the abuse and manipulation of a woman who falls in the middle of a terrible quarrel between two men. Barbara Stowell is the new fêted genius of the stage, but she has a secret: she is married to a ‘tyrant and a ruffian’ (124). Fresh from the country, Barbara was visiting an aunt in London when she became dazzled by a second-rate actor, Jack Stowell, who ‘had the art of being sentimental on occasion, could cast up his eyes to heaven and affect a mind all aglow with honour and manly feeling’ (125). Barbara falls for the trappings and masculine appearances of ‘honour’ and ‘manly feeling’. However, Stowell’s infidelities are infamous, he gambles, and as time goes on, he beats his wife. He is coarse, drunk, and violent, but worse is to come.

Barbara’s domestic miseries are eventually discovered by the young, rich, romantic Sir Philip Hazlemere, ‘a young man of fashion and fortune—neither fob nor fribble, but a man of cultivated mind and intense feeling’ (128). He first sees Barbara acting and then night after night Sir Philip gazes at Barbara from his theatre box: ‘He had never touched her hand, never spoken to her, but he had lived for the last six months only to see and hear her, and it seemed to him that he knew every thought of her mind, every impulse of her heart’ (129). But Barbara is an actress playing in tragedies and dramas in Covent Garden, ‘a spacious charnel-house for the exhibition of suicide and murder’ (137). Sir Philip does not see Barbara, he sees the wonderful, melodramatic parts she plays. There is danger in a man who has never met her thinking he knows ‘every thought of her mind, every impulse of her heart’ (129). And when he finds out her miserable situation, he takes advantage, ‘taking hope from all that made her life hopeless, [he] flung honour to the winds and determined to win her’ (128). Sir Philip perceives that she is ‘the darling of an idle, gaping crowd—scorned and neglected at home, where a woman should be paramount’ (128–9). Barbara is a superb actress, but Sir Philip does not seem to approve of the ‘gaping crowd’ (albeit that he is part of it) and, as he watches her act, he dreams of taking her away from the theatre: ‘She would shine as a star still, but only in the calm heaven of home’ (138). Sir Philip dreams of taking Barbara from her public life and her art and, in line with Victorian domestic ideology, he plots to remove her to the private realm of the ‘heaven of home’. The ideal of ‘home’ and a woman’s place in the home is strong in Sir Philip’s mind. In this tale this is (at least at first) presented as Romantic and an example of high chivalry. In a section looking at Braddon’s ghost stories, Liggins says that,

And in relation to this ‘darker side’, in these idealised romantic notions of home and femininity the woman herself is often left unseen and unheeded. As Berger remarks, ghost stories ‘disturb the idea of the domestic space as a site where men bolster their masculinity’ (Reference Berger and Anna2025: 54). As part of the shift from the Romantic mode to the Victorian Gothic, Sir Philip appears to exemplify chivalric, Romantic masculinity, but in Braddon’s ghostly world this means utter erasure for women. His ideas of a ‘calm heaven’ of a home ‘where a woman should be paramount’ are entirely unattainable. The Romantic turns into the Gothic as murder and death follow this ‘cultivated’ man of ‘intense feeling’. Home is not calm; Barbara is not paramount. And as Eveline faded, so too does Barbara.

Sir Philip’s chivalry reaches its height when he discovers that Stowell has been hurting Barbara. He boldly declares ‘I will not see you again till you are free’ (Braddon, Reference Braddon and Buzwell2019: 132). But in this case ‘freedom’ for Barbara means murder. Sir Philip seeks out Jack Stowell in the disreputable tavern where he drinks and gambles. Plying Stowell with drink, Sir Philip deliberately goads him into a fight he cannot win and stabs him, telling the dying man, ‘When I saw the mark of your fist on your wife’s forehead this morning, I swore to make her a widow tonight’ (135). The men fought for ‘honour’ and jealousy and grand ideas of righteousness and revenge. In none of this was Barbara consulted or even really thought of. She did not ask to be made a widow.

After he has murdered her husband, Sir Philip keeps his distance from Barbara; ‘a restraining delicacy made him keep aloof while the actor’s corpse lay at his lodgings, and the young widow was still oppressed with the horror of her husband’s death’ (137). But what kind of ‘delicacy’? Philip has murdered in order to gain possession of Barbara completely without her knowledge or permission. In his musings, he assumes that Barbara is filled with horror, ‘agitated and overwhelmed’ (137), but he also assumes that the ‘sense of her release from [Stowell’s] tyranny would soon give her hope and comfort’ (137). These appalling assumptions are, in the end, the opposite of romantic. And when he goes back to see Barbara act, Sir Philip feels, ‘what a potent change in both their destinies had fallen since their last meeting! He could look at her now with triumph and delight’ (138). The idea of a ‘change in destiny’ seems to assume an idea of inevitability, of chance, rather than a cold blooded, carefully plotted murder that wrenches Barbara out of her marriage in an act of dreadful violence. Sir Philip feels a sense of triumph. He has won.

Barbara’s last appearance on stage is as Duchess of Malfi who is described as ‘the innocent, helpless victim of hard and bloody men’ (138). As Eveline is the victim of the jealous rage and violence between her husband and André, so Barbara is also a victim of the ‘hard and bloody men’ in her life. And as Eveline fades and dies, so does Barbara who is knowingly dying of consumption as she acts her last part. Philip watches the play, ‘hung with rapt attention’ (138), impatient to whisk her away, but as the curtain falls, she sees,

Barbara dies twice – once on stage as the ill-fated Duchess and as Philip sees her, she is a ghost – she died as the curtain fell. And although he interprets her last look as one of ‘ineffable love and pity’, she backs away from him with a shiver and the final line of the story tells us that ‘Barbara’s troubled soul had winged its flight skyward’ (141). She has escaped in a way that poor Eveline could not. Both Barbara and Eveline are caught between jealous murdering men. The ghosts are the consequence of male violence, yet although André and Jack Stowell are murdered, the real victims are the women caught, as the Duchess of Malfi was, between ‘hard and bloody men’. The declarations of love, the chivalry, the manipulation come to naught. For the men in the stories it is their own feelings and actions that count – their decisions, their violence, and their jealous interactions with another man. Yet Sir Philip feels himself justified and views himself as a brave knight come to save the beaten and oppressed wife of a brute. Liggins says that in Barbara’s tale, Sir Philip ‘seems little better than her drunken husband’ (Reference Liggins and Bloom2021: 111). In fact, this ‘man of cultivated mind and intense feeling’ (Braddon, Reference Braddon and Buzwell2019: 128) is worse. It is Philip who plans and murders in cold blood. He has forced control, he has asserted his masculinity as dominant over both Stowell and Barbara, but, as the Gothic always disrupts and erupts any sense of whole, unified, purely dominant heterosexual masculinity, he like Hector, has in fact lost.

3.3 ‘The Face in the Glass’

The scholarly consensus seems to be that Braddon knew what she was writing about, particularly in relation to gender: women’s place in society, the expectations put on them, and male confidence, entitlement, and power. As Liggins points out, ‘Spectral encounters always comment on gender and class inequalities in Braddon’s stories’ (Reference Liggins and Bloom2021: 114). The stories discussed in this section are in chronological order, from 1867 to 1880, and from this small selection it seems that the man of feeling, the man-of-sensibility, the ‘gentleman’, becomes the most excoriated of the abusive, violent, and controlling men Braddon presents. The last story considered here has a young husband who is, or appears to be, the most sensitive and feeling of our Gothic men. In ‘The Face in the Glass’, a young newly married couple, Hugh and Ruth, inherit an old, Gothic house, said to be haunted by the spirit of a drowned relative of Hugh’s whereby, according to the housekeeper, ‘whenever there were storms out at sea, the wind used to howl and wail down the long passages like a soul in pain, and … a dreadful sound of dripping water always was to be heard in the room where the poor body was laid’ (Braddon, Reference Braddon and Buzwell2019: 169). Ruth, the new lady of the house, takes the more usually masculine position in relation to the ghost and ‘indeed, professed herself most anxious to see one of the wonderful ghosts; but then she was strong-minded, and actually thought nothing of going to bed alone in the dark’ (170). There is one room purported to be haunted where the drowned man lay and where all Hugh’s dead ancestors were laid to rest. In a relatively familiar Gothic twist, family legend has it that in that room there is a glass that shows the face of any family member who is going to die within twelve months of their reflection being seen. The glass shows the Gothic double and foretells the fate of the seer. Hugh and Ruth discover the room but find it empty apart from a bed in the middle and a mirror above the mantelpiece. As Ruth looks around, she hears a loud bang as Hugh faints. As the servants rush up and carry him out Ruth sees ‘in the moonlight that now flooded the room, the pale shadow of a coffin on the bed’ (175). Hugh comes to, ‘but the moment he saw his wife, the remembrance of the horror came back to him, and he nearly fainted again’ (175). While Ruth is the brave one, Hugh is the sensitive one: it is he who is emotional and overwhelmed, and Ruth thinks his plea not to go back into the room is ‘absurd superstition’ (176). From the outset the usual ghost story gender balances are reversed. Or almost … As she roams the house, Ruth ‘would visit the haunted chambers and walk about the passages at night until the servants almost believed she must be a ghost herself’ (170). It is the servants who have sight of Ruth’s future; the class of domestic worker who, Eve Lynch has influentially suggested, are ‘analogous to the spectral apparition that haunted [the house]: like the ghost, the servant was in the home but not of it’ (Reference Lynch, Tromp, Gilbert and Haynei2000: 237, emphasis in original). Ruth is the outsider – she has married into the family. As the servants observe and even perhaps anticipate, she haunts the ancestral home.

Hugh receives the devastating news that his sister-in-law has died suddenly. Feeling sad, but also relieved because he thinks it must have been her face he saw in the glass, not his wife’s, Hugh goes to his grieving brother, leaving Ruth in the house. But even at his brother’s house, as he prepares for bed he sees, ‘the dreadful face of the night before. This time the eyes were opened, and seemed to look in an imploring and appealing manner into his own as if urging some action upon him’ (Braddon, Reference Braddon and Buzwell2019: 179). And again in the morning, he saw that in the mirror ‘the sad grey eyes meeting his, was the face of his wife’ (179). He calls out asking what she wants, ‘The pale lips opened as if to speak. No words came from them, but in the room echoed, like the strain of distant music brought from afar on a soft breeze, the words, “Too late! Too late!” and then the vision vanished’ (180). Hugh is rendered powerless. It is not superstition; it is not an illusion. He is being urged to act, but he cannot. The ghost-figure of his wife is ‘imploring and appealing’ to him. She raises her hand, but even by then it is ‘too late’ and by now Hugh is ‘Utterly miserable, utterly unstrung’ (180). Discussing Braddon’s and Rhoda Broughton’s ghost stories, Krueger notes that, ‘Victorian women writers engage with normative representations of gender by dramatizing the vulnerability of the boundaries of the house and, consequently, the marital relationship’ (Reference Krueger2014: 58). Ruth is locked into the very fabric of the ancestral house and locked into a fatal marriage, yet her presence is echoed through numerous mirrors. Krueger continues:

This is true for both Eveline and Barbara, yet what wrong has been done to Ruth? She is a newly married wife, and while Hugh will abandon her, despite her pleas, to go and comfort his brother, there is no actual, manifest wrongdoing on his part. Ruth is caught by the house itself, by a masculine, ancestral history that far precedes her and goes far beyond her. She tries to communicate through echoes, doubling, and reflections through the mirrors, but the weight of patriarchal lineage crushes and traps her into a house that she can never leave.

Ruth had visited the haunted chamber while Hugh was away and ‘she was found in the old room upstairs, having gone up thither to see what had so alarmed Hugh’ (Braddon, Reference Braddon and Buzwell2019: 183). She lives long enough to say goodbye to Hugh, who finally returns to her. He finds her calling for him. ‘The moment she saw him she stopped, looked fondly at him in the same sorrowful manner that the ghost did’ (183). She tells him she was waiting for him – ‘I went three times to see you, but I wanted you at home. There is a ghost upstairs. I saw myself laid out on that dreadful bed, and it killed me. The doctor always said any shock would. And it nearly killed you. I am only waiting to kiss you before I go’ (183, emphasis in original). Hugh, the sensitive who was ‘unstrung’, who saw the ‘ghost’ so many times, nearly dies again: ‘For days and nights Hugh lay between life and death’ (183). He does not die. Ruth sees her own ghost and she dies ‘merely’ one might say because of her marriage and her residence in the inherited, ancestral home. Perhaps too bold and independent, too headstrong and brave. ‘The Face in the Glass’ posits both the home and marriage as Gothic, socially conservative, and deadly. But it also points to a relentless persistence of both. We hear that for Hugh, ‘it was not until another wife and half-a-dozen noisy children had been given to him that he was known to smile again [but] he never could be got to tell the story of the face in the glass’ (183). The room is destroyed, but the glass is not. It is kept with a sort of ‘superstitious reverence’ (183) but no one looks in it again because, as the housekeeper says in the last lines of the tale, for the family, ‘it would be dreadful … if they saw their own faces looking at them out of the glass’ (184). As Eveline and Barbara, Ruth is ghostly/turned ghost by a controlling and dominant masculinity that literally crushes the life out of them. Ruth is the one who took on the masculine ‘let me at them’ attitude to ghosts. This however is tempered by the servants foreseeing her as a ghost herself as she trawls the corridors of the house hunting for ghosts: but the ghost that she finds is her own. Through her own iron will she projects herself to her husband three times but to no avail. In the end, it does not matter that she died: the patriarchal line is continued. Barely a ripple is left by Ruth’s passing, and the domestic social order is in no way disrupted. There is a ‘new wife’ and ‘half a dozen noisy children’ to bring the smile back to Hugh’s face, and the devastating Gothic mirror, and the terrible death are both contained and turned back into ‘superstition’ and a sad story that no one will tell.

3.4 Conclusion

In the Introduction to a special issue of Victoriographies entitled ‘Haunted Men’, Heholt wrote that during the Victorian age:

We would like to put a slight nuance on this statement in relation to Braddon’s mid-to-late Victorian ghost stories. In these, Gothic masculinity comes to the fore and increasingly it seems, it wins. While Hector’s life is devastated by the queer-Gothic love purposely used as a revenge tactic by the ghost of André, he is left alive. Sir Philip too is left still young and prosperous after ‘Her Last Appearance’ and Hugh goes on to happiness and a solid continuation of the ancestral family line. So, while conventional forms of masculinity may be ‘pushed to the limit’, it appears that they are not pushed beyond. Eve Lynch says that, as time went on, Braddon’s ghost stories featured ‘more vividly constructed apparitions while at the same time sharpening the focus of her social criticism that lies in wait behind those shadows’ (Reference Lynch, Tromp, Gilbert and Haynei2000: 244). Interestingly, the criticism becomes less sensational, more ‘ordinary’, and more sharply focussed on the concept of marriage and the possession of women. As Liggings suggests, ‘Women are not only haunted by shadows but become shadowy figures themselves, fading, insubstantial, in the face of male control, cruelty, sexual possession and violence’. (Reference Liggins and Bloom2021: 115). Our three ghostly women become more and more ethereal until each one of them dies. Liggins says that ‘The shadowliness of the woman close to death, an unearthly figure drained of vitality, will become a familiar motif in Braddon’s supernatural fiction’ (111). Each of the women in the stories examined wilt and die weighted under the expectations of patriarchal marriages. Lucie Armitt sums up Vanessa Dickerson’s idea that ‘the Victorian woman became a ghost in social terms, not simply through her shadowy public existence, but in coming to inhabit a state of “in-between-ness”’ (Reference Armitt and Smith2025: 115, emphasis in original). For each of our leading ladies, marriage is a death sentence. As Berger says, ‘Braddon shows that one can be just as easily damned as saved by the union of marriage’ (Reference Berger and Anna2025: 72). Each story shows a privileging of masculine relationships over marital ones – where the males, even in enmity trump the women every time. Jealousies, secrets, murderous intent, and skewed ancestral loyalties smash through both marriages and wives as the self-centeredness of men drains the life out of the women who depend on them. Yet, the worst of them are the ‘sensitive’ ones who appear to care, who offer sanctuary, equality, and love. Writing about the reading of more than one ghost story together, Berger suggests that ‘the individual traumas of these short fictions reveal, in this historical moment, a collective wound’ (63). Marriage is the ‘collective wound’ and in this way, for Braddon, the trauma inflicted by masculinity is endemic in its gothicity rather than extraordinary. In Braddon’s ghost stories, the potential Gothic nature of the whole spectrum of masculine behaviour and all patriarchal social systems and institutions are exposed as always having been a deadly spectral presence – hiding in plain sight.

4.1 Monstrous Doubles and Invaders

Sociological and scientific discourses had a significant impact on the literature of the period. In R. L. Stevenson’s novella, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Reference Stevenson and Letley1885), the crisis of male professionalism staged by the doubling of the eponymous doctor intermingles with anthropological worries generated by late-century fears of devolution. Although he aims to ‘rid man of his animal past through scientific means’ (Hendershot, Reference Hendershot1998: 106), Jekyll ultimately proves unable to control Hyde, the monstrous doppelganger unleashed by his potion, whose appearance on the scene ‘uncovers the destructive man lurking beneath the exterior of the respected positivist’ (69). By releasing a terrifying figure associated with perversion and atavism, Jekyll validates, rather than exorcises, circulating fears of degeneration to a more primitive stage. From a gender perspective, moreover, the novella conveys the idea of masculinity in crisis. The uncanny link with Hyde’s depravity casts a shadow onto Jekyll’s gentlemanly values, questioning the masculine bourgeois ethos that the doctor’s professional class is supposed to incarnate. The threat of internal decay epitomised by Hyde – as ‘the animal within’ middle-class male professionalism – is coupled with the external danger of ‘reverse colonisation’ evoked by some exotic elements of his characterisation. In ways similar to indigenous characters featured in late-Victorian literature, Jekyll’s doppelganger is racialised in terms of savagery and animalesque behaviour, as evidenced by many textual references to his violent inclinations and simian traits.Footnote ⁹

The racialisation of Hyde adds another layer of meaning to the central theme of degeneration. In addition to dramatising the decline of established structures of class and gender at home, Stevenson foreshadows potential threats from abroad by representing an agent of chaos that attacks London. The novella is not fully classifiable as Imperial Gothic – the late-Victorian and Edwardian genre famously defined by Patrick Brantlinger as a ‘blend of adventure story with Gothic elements’ (Reference Brantlinger1988: 227). Yet, Stevenson uses some paraphernalia of this genre to characterise a savage creature that endangers the assumed superiority of British citizens. A dark figure embodying unrestrained impulses and desires, Hyde resembles how indigenous people are portrayed in Imperial Gothic with his neither/nor identity, which uncannily blends the human with the animal. As Hendershot observes, moreover, Hyde blurs gender boundaries in horrific ways. His unruly behaviour evokes ‘Darwin’s personified feminine nature’ (Hendershot, Reference Hendershot1998: 107) and, as such, it challenges the model of masculine respectability and rationality associated with Dr Jekyll and two other professionals characterised in the novella, Dr Lanyon and Mr Utterson.

A source of multiple anxieties, Hyde is finally killed by Jekyll, whose self-annihilation puts an end to the crimes committed by his bestial double. Tragic though it is, the doctor’s suicide amounts to a victory of bourgeois masculinity over an agent of chaos that, in addition to breaking down class and gender demarcations, had infected the heart of the Empire with his disturbing primitivism.

The Gothic characterisation of Hyde is in line with the portrayal of other monsters featured in fin-de-siècle narratives. As scholars have amply demonstrated, these narratives not only engage with theories of degeneration that foreground situations of social and psychic instability; they also use Gothic paraphernalia to convey fears of reverse colonisation. Two telling cases are Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Richard Marsh’s The Beetle. Both published in 1897, the two novels pivot around the invasion of an eastern monster that starts to undermine the social and moral foundations of Britain. In both texts, moreover, colonial revenge is intertwined with a pathologisation of gender scripts that endangers British masculinity. In Marsh’s novel, the Oriental Beetle-Woman that invades London is marked by an ‘unspeakability result[ing] as much from her racial difference and her species fluctuability as her metamorphic sexual identity (particularly as this identity violates norms of femininity)’ (Hurley, Reference Hurley1996: 125). Her abhuman body, which blurs lines of gender, race, and species, troubles the sexual identity of the novel’s male characters. Besides showing that masculinity is an unstable construct, the Beetle threatens a specific category of men, British male professionals, as evidenced by her persecution of Paul Lessingham, a politician on whom she aims to take revenge. Seduced by the Beetle and subjected to her hypnotic powers, Lessingham undergoes what Kelly Hurley defines ‘a symbolic castration’, as he is feminised by a monstrous, ‘ultra-masculine woman’ (144) who troubles gender boundaries and societal norms.

A conflation of similar anxieties is found in Dracula, an Imperial Gothic narrative centred on a Transylvanian vampire who attacks and infects British citizens. By characterising Count Dracula as a racial outsider, Stoker voiced fears of reverse colonisation and miscegenation. Yet, the horrific transformation of the Count’s victims into vampires also raises scientific and sociological concerns. From a medical and anthropological perspective, the contagion spread by Dracula foregrounds concerns over the potential ‘enervation of the Anglo-Saxon “race”’ (Arata, Reference Arata1996: 116), as well as preoccupations over the effects of alcoholism and addiction in Britain (Hughes, Reference Hughes, Smith and Hughes2012: 195). Other threats posed by Dracula are to social and gender stability. A foreign aristocrat, the Count challenges class demarcations as he endangers the health and safety of the British dominant class: the bourgeoisie. Gender boundaries are blurred by the sexualised elements of his predation. If women like Lucy Westenra are turned into unfeminine, lascivious monsters that evoke the New Woman, bourgeois men like Jonathan Harker are feminised by their contact with the powerful vampire. In the novel’s conclusion, the instability provoked by Dracula is counteracted by the actions of a group of male professionals who become vampire hunters. By destroying Dracula and Lucy, these hunters not only reaffirm the power of their professional class; they also create a homosocial bond that restores ideals of masculine health and authority against the confusion of gender roles produced by the vampire.

The conservative ending of Dracula bears witness to the complexity of fin-de-siècle Gothic literature, which represents masculinity as an object of both critique and restorative nostalgia. These contradictions are especially evident in Imperial Gothic narratives set in the colonies, which are analysed in more detail in subsequent pages. The protagonists of these narratives are British men who travel to the margins of the Empire as explorers or colonial agents. Largely inspired by the Muscular Christianity movement, the gender norm they set ‘encompass[es] physicality, virility, morality and civility’ (Whitehead, Reference Whitehead2002: 14) and is specifically defined by contrast with racialised figures that swerve from that norm both physically and in their supposedly uncivil, immoral customs. This racialising strategy is evident in the frequent characterisation of indigenous people as foils to the white protagonists, whose assumed qualities stand out by contrast.

Recurrent in Imperial Gothic texts, the division of characters into mutually exclusive binaries drew upon contemporary anthropological assumptions that humans were divided into higher and lower, progressive and nonprogressive races, and that civilised races like the British ought to govern, and even supplant, uncivilised ones. These assumptions not only developed within late-century anthropology, which institutionalised mid-century conceptualisations of white supremacy; they also drew strength from pseudoscientific theories like eugenics and Social Darwinism, which offered ‘scientific justifications for genocide as well as for imperialism’ (Brantlinger, Reference Brantlinger1988: 186).

From a literary viewpoint, moreover, Imperial Gothic binaries of race and civilisation perpetuated stereotypes used by earlier novelists like Frederick Marryat, whose white heroes hold out manfully against indigenous people represented as savage and unmanly. Unlike Marryat, however, late-century novelists could not avoid contradictions in representing white male supremacy. As Brantlinger notices, ‘the relatively naïve racism of the early decades of the century’ (39) disappears in Imperial Gothic, which gives voice to fears of degeneration that affects both fair- and dark-skinned characters. With a few exceptions, indigenous people are no longer portrayed as noble savages but tend to the bestial, while imperialists are shown to be at risk of contamination and backsliding.

4.2 White Men in Danger

In narratives of demonic invasion like Dracula and The Beetle, the danger of assimilation is embodied by monsters that attack white British citizens. As we have seen, these narratives often end with the defeat of the abject invader, whose agency is neutralised by the representatives of a white masculinity that is still dominant at the heart of the Empire. More vulnerable is, instead, the position of the white protagonists in narratives set in the tropics. Their confrontation with racial otherness is complicated by their engagement with a foreign landscape which, in ways similar to indigenous people, is represented as savage and hostile. Although they attempt to tame colonial space through a process of ‘worlding’Footnote ¹⁰, white imperialists are constantly in danger of succumbing to the lure of the wilderness. In line with imperial rhetoric, moreover, novelists often sexualise the conquest, using metaphors of male seduction and rape to represent the imperialists’ penetration and domination of territories troped as feminine. These metaphors convey a double-bind message. On the one hand, they validate colonial power as they evoke images of muscular white men capable of conquering and controlling imperial outposts. On the other hand, they reveal the contradictions of imperial men’s ‘colonial desire’ (Young, Reference Young1994) – a perturbing blend of repulsion for, and fascination with, exotic space and creatures. Often associated with corporeal abjection and tabooed sexuality, this desire blurs the boundaries on which white masculinity is founded, triggering a process of backsliding or nativisation that reveals some failures and excesses of British imperialism.

The complex interaction of colonial power and desire is fictionalised in H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau (Reference Wells and Philmus1896). Set on an imaginary island that becomes a microcosm for colonial experience, this novel revolves around the horrific experiments conducted by a vivisectionist, Dr Moreau, who attempts to transform animals into humanised beings called the Beast People. Besides exploring the ethical implications of scientific experimentation, Wells gothicises colonial relations by portraying Moreau as an imperial governor who exerts his violent power over natives represented by the Beast People. The latter are not only racialised as uncanny creatures that resist forced ‘civilisation’; they are also gendered by references to the ‘perverse sexuality’ of female specimens, which evokes stereotypes of ‘non-European female sexuality’ (Hendershot, Reference Hendershot1998: 127, 137). The female puma that attacks and kills Moreau epitomises this complex stereotyping, as she symbolises a feminised nature that takes revenge over the doctor’s masculine power.

The episode of Moreau’s death reflects fin-de-siècle anxieties over the instability of gendered models of professionalism and imperial power. This idea is substantiated by the fact that, in addition to the external aggression of the Beast People, the novel attributes the crisis of white masculinity to the type of internal factors we have seen throughout this Element. Unrestrained ambition and violent mastery lead Moreau to self-destruction, as he misuses his professional and colonial position of authority. Like him, other white men show symptoms of what might have been regarded as regression. A lethal inclination towards vice and addiction is exhibited by Moreau’s assistant, Montgomery, while Edward Prendrick reveals an inner weakness that triggers his psychological and moral deterioration. An upper-class gentleman shipwrecked on Moreau’s island, Prendrick is initially critical of the doctor’s violence but, when the Beast People rebel, he is forced to confront his own capacity for violence. Partly infected by Moreau’s brutal power, Prendrick also goes through a transformation that finally makes him physically and mentally akin to the Beast People. His self-description confirms that he perceives himself as slipping down the ladder of evolution: ‘My hair grew long, and became matted together. I am told that even now my eyes have a strange brightness, a swift alertness of movement’ (Wells, Reference Wells and Philmus1993: 82) connoting a type of animality. The fragility of the western notion of ‘civilisation’ is a leitmotif of late-century Gothic narratives. As in the cases of Prendrick and Moreau, this fragility is not only the result of a contaminating encounter with otherness; it is also shown to inhere in the personality of white men, who tend to conceal their flaws under a veneer of civilisation. Challenged by a bestiality that is both external and internal, white male supremacy becomes an ambivalent ideology in late-Victorian fictions, which frequently combine racist fears of otherness with self-critical hints at ‘the animal within’.

This combination is evident in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (Reference Conrad1899), which merges conflicting views of gender, race, colonialism, and morality together. As Chinua Achebe claims in his controversial essay ‘An Image of Africa’ (Reference Achebe1978), this novella is marked by racial stereotyping: ‘Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as “the other world,” the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man’s vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant beastiality’ (3). Conrad adopts a number of Gothic paraphernalia to demonise the African continent and its inhabitants, as evidenced by the constant troping of indigenous people as ‘savages’, ‘criminals’, and ‘cannibals’.Footnote ¹¹ Yet, the novella also conveys a subtle critique of imperialism that counterbalances its undeniable racism. This schizophrenic dynamic emerges in significant passages where the protagonist-narrator, Charlie Marlow, challenges the imperial and racist discourses of the age. When he is navigating up the Congo River, for instance, Marlow denies the utter inhumanness of his Congolese crew, using litotes to question dominant racist stereotypes:

The provocative hint at their ‘remote kinship’ blurs racial boundaries, but it does not elevate Africans to the level of ‘civilised’ beings, as confirmed by the reference to the crew’s ‘wild and passionate roar’. What is foreseen is, rather, a potential downgrading of white imperialists to the level of ‘savages’ – a prospect of going native which the adjective ‘Ugly’ connotes in frightful terms.

A typical Imperial Gothic theme, nativisation becomes evident in the characterisation of the two white protagonists, Marlow and Kurtz. Though portrayed as a brilliant and talented man, Kurtz is associated with an idea of degeneration that deflates his heroism, deconstructing the ideal of white male supremacy he should incarnate. The anxieties raised by his downfall are reinforced by the ambiguous characterisation of Marlow as Kurtz’s doppelganger. Represented in terms of obsession, Marlow’s fascination for the enigmatic Kurtz becomes a fascination for the deviant and violent leanings of his double which, pathologised in terms of moral madness,Footnote ¹² suggest a combined crisis of imperial and masculine values.

Conrad’s interest in the problems of white men only is confirmed by his flat characterisation of Congolese people who, either vaguely portrayed or caricatured, are racialised in accordance with fin-de-siècle stereotypes. Their racialisation is enhanced by the gothicisation of the landscape in which they live. A gloomy landscape of fear (Tuan, Reference Tuan1979) with no clear toponyms, Congo is associated with an undefined wilderness that both fascinates and repels imperial men like Marlow and Kurtz, making their hidden ambiguities and perversions come to the fore.

The lure of the wilderness is rendered by a plethora of Gothic references to disgust and monstrosity, including the phrase ‘The fascination of abomination’ (Conrad, Reference Conrad1990: 140) and hints at Kurtz’s unrestrained appetites conjured up by his mouth.

A symbol of the greed of European imperialists, who were historically ‘swallow[ing] all the earth’, Kurtz’s voracity is also an emblem of cannibalism, a tabooed practice frequently associated with indigenous cultures (Malchow, Reference Malchow1996: 6ff). By exposing white rapacity through a stereotype used to racialise non-white people, the narrator challenges the supposed superiority of Europeans, although he never dispels the allegations of savagery against Africans.

4.3 Race and Masculinity in Henry Rider Haggard

The complex symbolism of Africa in Heart of Darkness is strengthened by the novella’s titular metaphor. In addition to racialising the Dark Continent, the ‘heart of darkness’ tropes the journey to Africa as a journey into ‘the unknown regions of the self’ (Atwood, Reference Atwood1972: 113), which unveils some brutal leanings of supposedly ‘civilised’ imperialists. Similar experiences are dramatised in late-century novels by Henry Rider Haggard, who gave fictional shape to the South African colony where he had served as administrator in the 1870s. Although he enriched his settings with realistic details based on first-person observation, Haggard projected onto South Africa many anxieties of his age and, like Conrad, he tended to represent the colony as an imaginative space that posed multiple threats to white imperialists.

Scholars agree on the idea that Haggard’s romances narrate introspective voyages to Africa that make Europeans aware of their ‘animal within’. Norman Hetherington claims that these romances reveal the collective unconscious of British gentlemen, who encounter their own ‘prehistoric or racial past’ in the African continent (Reference Hetherington1978: 84). Lindy Stiebel argues that Haggard ‘used the African landscape of his early manhood years in South Africa to create … “a country of the mind”’ onto which he ‘projected his contradictory imperialistic impulses, his intense and fearful sexual desires, his misgivings on some of the central issues of the age, such as civilisation and barbarism, and cultural relativity’ (Reference Stiebel2001: xi). The idea that Haggard unconsciously transposed ‘mixed feelings concerning empire’ onto his African settings is also held by Gregory Luke Chwala (Reference Chwala2018: 79). Inspired by queer ecologies and transgothic studies, Chwala’s article focuses on multiple anxieties raised in the novel She (Reference Haggard and Karlin1887), with a special attention for those generated by the blurring of gender and sexual boundaries. In examining these anxieties, Chwala mentions Haggard’s tendency to stigmatise heterodoxy and reaffirm transgressed boundaries; but he also claims that She ‘refashions the Gothic to explore new possibilities of what is “natural” or “unnatural” about the human body, human sexuality, and human relationships with the land’ (69). This assertion suggests an interesting shift in scholarly approach. By demonstrating that She breaks down and refashions categories to form new ontologies, Chwala reveals the innovative potential of Gothic themes used by Haggard, pointing to new lines of scholarly enquiry.

Like Chwala, we contend that Haggard’s oeuvre bears evidence of an interesting refunctionalisation of Imperial Gothic. As will be shown, however, the innovative aspects of his writing are most evident in texts that question racial stereotypes by exalting the qualities of exceptional indigenous people. In She, instead, imperial propaganda tends to overshadow the transgressiveness of African characters, who are associated with an abject femininity that upsets white men, triggering counteractions that restore normativity.

Mostly set in a fictionalised South Africa, She depicts three dangerous exotic spaces: an area of fever-haunted marshes, the lost city of Kôr, and the underground caves that allow access to the city. These spaces are gothicised by their association with disease, mortality, violence, and barbarous customs, which threaten the physical and moral safety of the two British protagonists, Leo Vincey and Horace Holly. As often in Imperial Gothic, the novel sexualises the travellers’ relations with Africa. This sexualisation is evidenced by the womb-shaped caves penetrated by Vincey and Holly as well as by the feminisation of indigenous power, epitomised by Ayesha and the Amahagger women. The ruthless queen of Kôr, Ayesha is an immortal woman of Arabian origins, endowed with learning and amazing beauty, who exerts a magnetic influence on Vincey and Holly. ‘[T]he very diablerie of the woman, whilst it horrified and repelled, attracted in even a greater degree’ (Haggard, Reference Haggard and Karlin1991: 146), confesses Holly, hinting at the dangerous ‘colonial desire’ he feels for the queen. Despite her beauty, Ayesha is gothicised as a violent, necrophiliac monster that blurs age, ethnic, gender, and moral boundaries. Monstrous femininity is also incarnated by the female members of the Amahaggers, an African tribe of matrilineal descent that performs cannibal rituals. Aggressive and sexually free, these indigenous women reinforce the model of abject femininity set by Ayesha, providing a racialised version of the New Woman transposed from Britain to colonial space. Confronted by uncanny figures that threaten his masculinity, Holly gives voice to a gynophobia tinged with racism,Footnote ¹³ while striving to reinforce his homosocial bond with Leo. The novel ends with a conservative image of the two protagonists back in Britain. Although they are still haunted by memories of their perturbing African experience, Holly and Vincey are living again in a reassuring normative system, while the return of the repressed embodied by Ayesha is postponed to a vaguely imagined future.

The conclusion of She reaffirms groups of opposites recurrent in late-Victorian literature, which superimposed gender binaries on opposites like natural/unnatural, healthy/sick, national/alien, white/black (Easthope, Reference Easthope1992: 105). These pairings are both challenged and re-established in Haggard’s works to produce combined effects of deconstruction and restorative nostalgia. By gothicising the second concept of each binary, Haggard creates monstrous figures like Ayesha, whose neither/nor identity temporarily weakens the imperial and masculine ideals incarnated by his white heroes. Confronted by scary hybrids, imperial men catch glimpses of their ‘animal within’ but, unlike Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, they overcome the risk of what is perceived as nativisation, reasserting the ‘naturalness’ and ‘healthiness’ of white male supremacy at the end of their adventures.

This dynamic of crisis and restoration suggests that Haggard was less oppressed by colonial guilt than Conrad, whose novella exposes the horrors of Belgian colonisation. Another difference with Conrad is the deep curiosity Haggard betrays for the Zulus, whom he learned to admire in his South African years. Whereas Conrad typifies Congolese people to externalise the hidden savagery of imperial men, Haggard provides remarkable portrayals of Zulu men, using them as mirrors for British heroism. Modelled on real indigenous fighters in the 1879 Anglo–Zulu War, his fictional Zulu warriors provide an imitable model for white imperialists, as their valour exorcises late-century fears of effeminacy and emasculation.

Early traces of this admiration for Zulu men are found in King Solomon’s Mines (Reference Haggard and Butts1885). This widely studied novel narrates the adventures of three white protagonists who embark on a treasure hunt in the interior of South Africa. Guided by a map that feminises and sexualises the exotic landscape, the trio reach the fictional Kukuanaland, inhabited by people who share physical and cultural attributes with the Zulus. The characterisation of Kukuanas proves the author’s oscillation between conflicting racial views. Haggard racialises many indigenous figures, using Gothic ingredients to make them more appalling. In addition to their ignorance, he underlines their savagery, as shown by the ferocious portrayal of their tyrannical king, Twala. If the latter embodies villainous masculinity, his adviser, Gagool, is a monkey-like, wizened witch-doctoress, whose grotesque body evokes a monstrous femininity linked to primitivism and bestiality (Ching-Liang Low, Reference Low and Gail1996: 63). The negativity of these characters is, however, counterbalanced by the bravery and dignity of Ignosi. The rightful heir to the Kukuanaland throne, Ignosi guides the white protagonists under the assumed identity of Umbopa, revealing his true identity only before the battle to overthrow Twala. A handsome black man endowed with a magnificent body, Ignosi mirrors the athleticism of Sir Henry Curtis, the strongest man of the white trio. The similarity of the two is enhanced in battle scenes. Besides wearing a native costume that makes him look as ‘splendid’ as Ignosi, Curtis moves like a ‘wild cat’, killing enemies and emerging ‘all red with blood’ (Haggard, Reference Haggard and Butts1989: 200, 236, 226). The wild and gory images of the battlefield evoke stereotypes of native savagery that temporarily question the supposed ‘civilisation’ of the white man, but the effects they produce are energising, rather than destructive. Inspired by his black doppelganger, Curtis learns to fight like indigenous warriors and manages to kill Twala. In the novel’s conclusion, however, the white/black doubling is cancelled by a new separation of the two characters along racial and national lines. Whereas Ignosi ascends to the throne of Kukuanaland, Curtis returns to British ‘civilisation’ after contributing to restoring lawfulness in the African country.

What is offered in King Solomon’s Mines is an interesting variation of the ‘going native’ plot. Haggard racialises many Kukuanas, suggesting that their savagery might infect and destabilise his British heroes. Yet, he also uses the doppelganger theme to highlight the exceptionality of indigenous men like Ignosi, whose qualities reinvigorate white masculinity. These apparent contradictions suggest that, while adopting dominant racial stereotypes, Haggard also employed the Gothic to question these stereotypes, thereby paving the way to new views of Africa.

4.4 Innovative Models in Black Heart and White Heart

Only glimpsed in King Solomon’s Mines, the interchangeability of a white protagonist with an imitable black double is developed in innovative ways in Haggard’s Black Heart and White Heart (Reference Haggard, Haining and by Hammond Innes1896). Set in South Africa just before the outbreak of the Anglo–Zulu War, this understudied novella tells the stories of three people who become involved in a love triangle built across racial lines: Philip Hadden, a villainous white adventurer, and two young Zulus engaged to be married: the beautiful Nanea and the valorous warrior Nahoon. Contrasted by malevolent suitors, the union of Nanea and Nahoon is also endangered by Hadden who, driven by his lust for the woman, acts as an Iago figure, hatching a cruel plot that almost kills the two lovers. Though introduced as a handsome man of gentle birth, Hadden is no gentleman. Early references to the ‘cloud’ under which he emigrated to Natal and the ‘vague distrust’ he inspires to people (Haggard, Reference Haggard, Haining and by Hammond Innes1981: 68) unveil his criminal disposition, which comes fully to the fore in his love rivalry with Nahoon. The climax of this rivalry is the duel in which the two men engage during the Anglo–Zulu War. Their wild struggle ends with Hadden’s death but, with a plot twist, Haggard makes Nanea kill the villain. Instead of playing the role of damsel in distress, the black heroine rescues her wounded fiancé and avenges their wrongs, paving the way to a happy matrimonial life with Nahoon.

Both portrayed as handsome, muscular men, Hadden and Nahoon offer a thought-provoking variation of the white/black doubling activated in King Solomon’s Mines. Nahoon sets a similar model of ‘noble savage’ as Ignosi, which is interestingly rendered by the oxymoron ‘savage gentleman’:

Unlike Curtis, however, Hadden is an evildoer driven by bestial instincts. In addition to challenging a British sexual taboo with his desire for a black woman, Hadden proves to have a ‘black heart’ that makes him morally inferior to his ‘white-hearted’ Zulu rival. Reversed in its ethical assumptions, the titular metaphor makes the crisis of white masculinity more upsetting, as it connotes an imperial man as a white savage not even redeemable by indigenous valour. The gap between the two men is widened by Haggard’s unconventional elaboration of the warrior and the lover archetypes. If read in view of Jack Kahn’s theorisation of the archetypal energies of these two masculine types (Reference Kahn2009: 59–62), the characterisation of Nahoon and Haggard questions racial stereotypes. While the Zulu man balances his energies in playing both roles, Hadden is dangerously unbalanced, as he proves to be a sadistic warrior and a selfish lover.

Besides reconfiguring masculine identity, the novella challenges established models of femininity. If Nanea evolves from sweet victim into masculinised avenger, another Zulu woman, the Bee, fulfils a provocative function. A witch-doctoress endowed with divination skills, the Bee not only perceives the reversed morality of the two rivals; she also challenges Hadden’s sceptical materialism, proving the reliability of her esoteric powers. Her gothicisation reinforces, rather than weakens, her authoritative figure. Though surrounded by horrific symbols of death – such as, the deadly live snake around her neck and the human bones that decorate her hut (Haggard, Reference Haggard, Haining and by Hammond Innes1981: 80–1) – the Bee is not a monstrous figure like Gagool in King Solomon’s Mines. She is rather described as ‘a finely-shaped woman’ (81) who unmasks the villainy of the white protagonist, affirming the superiority of indigenous spiritual knowledge.

Unlike in She, the unconventional femininity embodied by Nanea and the Bee is not decried in terms of abjection. Though associated with Gothic elements, the two women play positive roles in the novella, as they help an honest indigenous man to withstand the aggression of his demonic white double. This provocative reshaping of race and gender roles is proof of the author’s refunctionalisation of some Imperial Gothic stereotypes. By portraying a British man dominated by wild instincts, Black Heart and White Heart undoubtedly responds to anxieties over the late-century crisis of masculinity and related fears of imperial decline. Yet, the novella does not represent Hadden’s ‘animal within’ as a result of his contact with racial otherness. His bestiality is instead shown to inhere in his personality, while Nahoon embodies a new model of noble savagery.

4.5 Conclusion

While never questioning the righteousness of British imperialism, Haggard drew thought-provoking portrayals of indigenous men, who hold up mirrors to weakened ideals of white masculinity. These portrayals challenged Imperial Gothic stereotypes, revealing some innovative elements of his writing. In ways similar to Rudyard Kipling, whose Anglo-India provided ‘a space for the exercise and propagation of virtues which had been desiccated by modern life in the West’ (Arata, Reference Arata1996: 159), Haggard reimagined South Africa as a scene of potential regeneration for imperial men, who could grow through action but also draw inspiration from indigenous virtues. Only glimpsed in his 1880s novels, which are more couched in imperial propaganda, this potentiality is compellingly expressed in Black Heart and White Heart, whose white/black doubling calls into question Victorian assumptions of white male supremacy.

In ways comparable to Stevenson, Marsh, Stoker, Wells, and Conrad, Haggard responded to fin-de-siècle fears of degeneration and gender instability by characterising white men in crisis, oppressed by perturbing doppelgangers that upset their values and certainties. Racialised as savages or exotic monsters, these doppelgangers also embody late-century imperial anxieties, as evidenced by the fictions of ‘reverse colonisation’ examined in this section. Although he used some racial stereotypes, Haggard laid more stress on the ‘animal within’. He represented the crisis of British masculinity as triggered by internal factors, such as Hadden’s perversions, and he limited the gothicisation of the ethnic Other by portraying indigenous characters that provide refreshing models of dignity and morality.