1.18 - Gothic and the History of Sexuality

Summary

Across a variety of discursive practices, this chapter examines how anxieties about a post-Enlightenment sexuality generate regulation. It explores this effect on late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Gothic narrative, which consistently depicts and dramatises non-normative sexualities, acts and characters (producing pathology and perversion), yet ultimately condemns and punishes these potentials and possibilities in order to re-establish the dominant, heteronormative practice. The aim is to demonstrate that, from a Foucauldian perspective, transgressive sexualities encountered in the Gothic embody both liberatory and restrictive potentials, and that non-heteronormative desires and acts are simultaneously the product and limit of biopower. Through a reading of such fictions as Vathek, The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Monk and Zofloya, the chapter argues that the deployment of sexuality produces a continual extension of areas for the maximisation of power and control.