Known for its wanton and subversive embrace of all things taboo, transgressive and sublime, the Gothic leaves no dark, enclosed, silent or otherwise decaying and forgotten spaces unexplored by orphaned heroines beset by unwanted suitors and their lascivious disregard for sexual propriety. This enthusiasm for skeletons in the closet makes the gothic a genre ripe for the exploration of gender, sexuality and one's relationship to society, both when it reached its height in the late 18th century with the publications of Ann Radcliffe and its continued influence into the present. But until now, no single work has been able to account for the popularity of gothic writing, which slips into even contemporary work to stoke the fires of cultural imagination.
George E. Haggerty's Queer Gothic is a must-read for any scholar of gender, feminist or queer theory. Haggerty, a professor of English in southern California specializes in the Gothic and LGBTQ studies. He argues that the defining feature of the 18th century is the codification of modern gender and sexuality constructs and that the "cult of gothic fiction" reaches its apex during this period. Gothic fiction, in other words, is "queer" because it, in no way, simply contributes to the social order, and in some cases stridently challenges the way(s) in which Western Culture constructs gender and sexuality organize and control social schema. Beginning with the publication of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, which set up genre conventions that were to resonate through the next three centuries, Haggerty works to show the ways in which the gothic insists on challenging and undermining all (hetero)normative constellations of human interaction.
This book is divided into three sections: gothic sexuality, gothic culture and gothic fiction and the queering of culture. Part one investigates the works of Matthew G. Lewis, Ann Radcliffe and Charles Robert Maturin to theorize an erotics of loss and transgressive sexuality, much of which is based on the writing of Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler, among others. Part two on gothic culture expands the discussion to deal with issues of broader social significance such as the construction of spectacle, Catholicism and horror in 18th Century. Haggerty also examines gothic treatments of history that surface a "fear of moving outside historical time." In part three, "Gothic Fiction and the Queering of Culture," he traces the effects of gothic writing and sensibilities into more modern works, including Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw," and Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House.
Scholars of popular culture and American cultural studies may find Haggerty's last chapter particularly useful as it examines the rise of the vampire in the last thirty years of popular literature. Focusing primarily on Anne Rice's contributions to vampire literature, he argues that to understand The Vampire Chronicles one must read them as gay because their relations can only be understood "in terms of male-male desire." This last chapter provides the reader with some current context for what the relationships between a text and its producing culture can look like, and applying that framework throughout Haggerty's text is very rewarding as he highlights the long history of homosociality and vampires.
Haggerty draws on the idea that patterns in books reflect important patterns and ideas that occupy the minds of the producing culture. He is careful to historicize the works he discusses, but instead of looking "back" through the work of Freud and other sexologists, he looks forward from the 18th Century "to understand how gothic fiction gave sexuality a history in the first place."
This book revels in doing the hard work of interrogating how and why the Gothic is so connected to sexuality, and specifically to queer sexualities. Haggerty's text will be helpful to anyone doing scholarly work on the topic as well as to anyone interested in the connections between how we love and how we express that love.
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