Conclusion: Afterlives and Revenants of Gothic Modernity

Summary

The time may be coming when, their ritual origins traced, their risings and settings chased through our subconscious, we shall know what powers we have evoked.

—Mary Butts, ‘“Ghosties and Ghoulies”’

This study has argued that the period from the late nineteenth century to the outbreak of the Second World War can be seen as one in which Gothicized depictions of place evolve in concert with the socio-historical developments of the era. From this perspective, the fin de siècle marks not an end, but a beginning: it witnesses an explosion of urban Gothic narratives that emphasize the uncanny, weird, and eerie aspects of late Victorian London; and in the ghost stories of Edwardian Britain, the haunted modernism of the postwar metropolis, and the sense of animistic revitalization found in rural-set texts of the 1920s and 1930s we see the traces of that moment echo, fragment, and evolve in myriad forms. This is a period, as noted in my Introduction, that can be defined as ‘modernity’ in a narrow sense, marking the acceleration of British industrialization, consumer capitalism, and urbanization, and the dramatic innovations in cultural production that accompany these developments. It should not surprise us, then, to see a contemporaneous evolution of the Gothic mode, since, as I have argued, those elements of modernity that ostensibly challenge ideas of obscurity, superstition, and enchantment often in fact emphasize or support them in unexpected ways. Modernity, as we have seen, tends to carry the Gothic with it, or to throw it into new relief: its attempts to control, rationalize, map, and reveal the world serve to demarcate the limits of modern power and thought, and to bring to light that which we might have preferred to keep concealed. As Jerrold E. Hogle puts it, ‘the ever-extending tentacles of modern enterprise are always haunted by the doubts, conflicts, and blurring of normative boundaries that the Gothic articulates in every form because, at its best, it is really about the profoundly conflicted core of modernity itself ‘. This entanglement also underpins Maria Beville's claim that the Gothic is ultimately manifested in modernist literature, which she sees as the dominant mode of the interwar era.