In the first episode of the third season (1998–99) of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, titled ‘Anne’, Buffy has run away from her large suburban home and is working in a diner in a poor part of Los Angeles. In an exterior shot, Buffy leans out of the only window in her one-room apartment as the camera takes in the badly damaged pavement on the street below and a police car, siren blaring, passing through the nearby intersection. In the first diner scene, two homeless youths come in and dump out the coins they have collected to try to buy some food. The central homeless character of the episode is Lily, a young woman with a traumatic past who is constantly reinventing and renaming herself. Buffy too lives under a pseudonym, Anne, so her ‘watcher’ Giles and her mother cannot find her. The evildoers of the week are kidnapping homeless youths and putting them to work in a hell dimension where they are forced to repeat that they are ‘no one’. Kidnapped as well, Buffy eventually responds to the demand that she answer, ‘I am no one’, by cheerily replying, ‘I’m Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And you are?’ In one famous segment of the long fight scene that follows, she fights the demons with a hammer and sickle as the main demon yells in exasperation, ‘They don't fight back – that's how it works!’ She not only fights back, but Lily does too, reversing, for a moment, the excessive passivity and docility that the episode suggests is typical of young women pushed beyond the secure bounds of suburban domesticity.

Thus far, the episode's thinly Marxist critique is straightforward. But there is an odd moment about 16 minutes into the episode when the direction switches to documentary realism, as a series of dissolves depicting homeless youths are used as a visual bridge between Buffy gazing at the urban wasteland outside her window and her friends as they lounge on well-padded furniture at their favourite club. The direction takes viewers from ‘bare life’ to bar life in under a minute. After the focus returns to Los Angeles, Buffy frees some of the enslaved youths and then returns home to Sunnydale, after giving Lily her job, her apartment and her Los Angeles moniker, Anne.

This chapter explores romantic-era interest in the philosophy of mind, particularly in vitalism-influenced work by contributors to the Polite Literature section of the Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy: Robert Burrowes, William Preston, and Richard Stack. A medical theory that emerged in the mid-1700s, vitalism is concerned with bodily operations that are neither volitional nor recognisably mechanical – ‘involuntary motions’, as Robert Whytt termed them, such as breathing, reflexes (including ticklishness), and the pulse. Vitalism spoke to that which was outside conscious regulation, including reactions to stimuli, and so resonated with interests from the creative process and aesthetic response to public order. For the writers considered here, agency consists in the effort, supported by education and social networks, to manage an experience persistently complicated by involuntary impulses and external forces.

‘Gothic television’ is a contentious category, not least because it has no currency in the industry structures which organize, produce and market television series in the United States. In scholarship, the term is better established but controversial because it appears to be an oxymoron at the level of form: the gothic is associated with the fantastic, and television with verisimilitude (see Robson 2007: 242). In one of the earlier essays to wrestle with the subject, Lenora Ledwon suggests that gothic television grafts together these competing rubrics:

What such discussion overlooks, however, is the ways in which the gothic has, from its inception, responded to realism and its cognates: as David B. Morris notes of the first gothic novel, ‘The Castle of Otranto actively subverts the prosaic vision of the world implicit in novelistic conventions of probability and verisimilitude’ (Morris 1985: 301). Such arguments as Morris's paint the gothic as reactive, even formally parasitic, but they do provide context for the interdependence of gothic television series and realist forms: most American gothic series follow dramatic series convention in centring either on a home or a workplace, for instance. But the gothic is also focused on reaction in another sense – the response of characters and, tacitly by extension, audiences to the completely improbable and excessive. In what follows, I shall focus on these three aspects of American gothic television: first, the entwined relationship between realism and the gothic in early television; second, the focus of gothic series on probable characters in improbable situations; and, finally, the division of gothic television into conventional dramatic domestic and workplace forms, and their challenge to that dramatic division.

Realism, the Gothic and Production History

Gothic is, in formalist parlance, a mode, not a genre. It is a mood, a style (like the pastoral or the comic), rather than a structure (like the sonnet or the novel), and as a mode it can be deployed in combination with other modes and across genres.

Discussions of Irish Romanticism and gender have to date largely focussed on femininity, especially, for instance, in the recovery and canonization of such women writers as Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan, but also in discussions of Thomas Moore's depiction of women and orientalist representations of feminized men. But this focus on one pole of the binary construction of gender has occluded the problem of colonial masculinity in the decades after the Act of Union (1800) abolished the Irish parliament and with it the vestiges of official Irish sovereignty. Ireland was instead to be ruled from the British parliament with a newly added block of Irish seats, no longer to be governed (even nominally) through a native institution that might be reformed to include Catholic men — and decisively alienating the men of the Irish ruling class from the nation-state. This political sea-change is contemporary with a broad shift in literary writing about the nation that generally follows generic lines. In the 1790s, there was an ongoing radical project, led largely by the United Irishmen, to educate and involve the lower classes in political life, particularly through songbooks and affordable newspapers with political content; the United Irishmen also argued for an end to the Penal Laws which disadvantaged Catholics and Dissenters, and some of their materials were pitched at breaking down the linguistic divide in Ireland. The nationalist songs of the radical 1790s, disseminated particularly through the songbooks known as Paddy's Resource (published from 1795 to about 1803), invoked Thomas Paine and condemned Edmund Burke, generally featured lower-class (often bilingual) speakers, and circulated popularly through print and oral culture.

The epigraph above, from United-Irishmen lawyer John Philpot Curran, vividly encapsulates the post-Enlightenment representation of sensibility as inextricably linked to morality on a national and imperial level as well as a personal one. My aim in this chapter is to explore the relationship between sensibility and “national feeling” in Ireland around 1800 through a range of texts before focussing on Charles Hamilton Teeling's 1828 account of the 1798 Uprising which was led by the United Irishmen in concert with other nationalist groups. While Teeling's account has been read as bad history, I shall argue that it is rather a polemic which draws heavily on sensibility and nationalism not to relay historical facts but to change hearts and minds.

While the focus of the previous chapter was the use of the gothic to represent imperial territorial possessions as insensible, the texts considered in the present chapter use the narrative conventions of the gothic to represent colonial time as stultifying, repetitive, and fragmentary. In Morgan's “Absenteeism,” Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, and Denis Florence MacCarthy's “Afghanistan,” the insensibility, and general unresponsiveness, of imperial power and its agents forestalls the progress of colonized peoples. The romance structures of imperial history that were generally written from the metropole are reworked on terms commensurate with gothic conventions to subvert that history's ideological claims and tacit reassurances. Morgan takes a long view in her writings on Irish history to suggest, anticipating Jane Wilde, that English governmental practice “repeats itself from age to age” on terms that produce the same Irish “response in the hearts of the people” (see epigraph, above).

In the nineteenth century, the British Empire relied extensively on religion as a disciplinary mechanism in both the literal and the Foucauldian senses. In the literal sense of discipline, religious groups outside the Anglican or Christian fold were penalized in material terms, through incarceration and fines as well as a range of other punitive measures. In Ireland before 1829, for instance, Catholics could not hold political office or become lawyers, and various laws conspired to undermine their landholdings. In the Foucauldian sense of the term, those who were within the dominant religious fold were largely assumed to have internalized, along with their faith, a range of secular beliefs, including political values consistent with British hegemony. As R. Gregory Van Dussen notes of proselytization efforts in Ireland at this time, “Religious conversion, in other words, could be expected to produce political loyalty to the colonial regime. One is implied by the other, not through any theological necessity, but through the inner logic of imperial Protestantism.”