Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Gothic Fiction

Episode Date: November 1, 2022

From Dracula, to Frankenstein, to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, to Twilight’s Edward Cullen…when did our fascination with gothic fiction begin?In today’s episode Kate is joined by Abby Boucher & Daniel Jenkin-Smith to talk about the origins of gothic fiction, how we define it, and the gender dynamics in the books and films throughout the centuries.You can hear Abby and Daniel’s podcast, Save Me From My Shelf, here. Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Mixed by Thomas Ntinas.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - enter promo code BETWIXTTHESHEETS for a free trial, plus 50% off your first three months' subscription. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. My lovely betwixters, how are you? Thanks for joining me again. I am here with your fair dues warning. This is the warning that I give you to let you know, if you didn't know already, that this podcast is going to cover adult themes in an adult nature.

Today we're talking about the history of Gothic fiction. So we are inevitably talking about sexy things and torturous things and scary things, and you just might not want to listen to that. you might just want to just get on eating your corn flakes and not have to deal with this nonsense, in which case, don't worry about it. I'll catch you next time.

I am Dracula. Dracula. Frankenstein's monster, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. These are only some of the starring characters of the Gothic canon. But where did they come from? Why are they so popular? And do any of them have anything in common with Edward Cullen?

Why do you look for any man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing it. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, for a beautiful time. Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal in Society, with me, Kate Lister. If you have read any Gothic fiction, or indeed watched any Gothic films, you may have noticed certain

traits, commonalities arising. I'll paint you a picture. There's normally a spooky castle, or perhaps a dilapidated manor somewhere, a creepy crypt, always a forest, definitely a forest at night filled with mist, and also filled with virginal women in white, running around and falling over so the monster can get her. Silly bint. Today I am joined by Abby Boucher and Daniel Jenkins Smith to find out why these tropes were so important. When did Gothic become popular? Why has it endured the way it has? How did Gothic literature written by women differ from Gothic literature written by men?

And how, if at all, does romance fit into any of this? Let's do it. To Abby Boucher and Daniel Jenkins Smith for this particularly Gothic edition of Betwixt the Sheets. Hello! Hello, thanks for having us. Kind of, I wish that I had one of those sound effect. I want lightning crackling and kind of like demonic laughs in the background because today we are talking about Gothic and there is no two better people I could be talking to about it. So I suppose we'll start here. What is Gothic? Well, it's a type of literature that's sort of all about vibes, I think it is. It's a-

vibe. Yes, it's got a very long lineage. It's still going strong today. And it's one that we thought you'd be interested in because it's concerned with particularly, intriguing sexual representations, we'll say, some dodgy gender dynamics, lots of fracturing off. So Gothic is one of those things where it's like, everyone thinks they know what it is. And maybe they do. But when it actually comes to trying to define it, that's a bit harder. Like, what does a text have to do, or a film or whatever, to be Gothic? Like, are they kind of like, I don't know, like a tick box, a Gothic? What does it have to have? What does it have to do to fall into that category? Isn't that part of it, the fact that, you know,

You know it and you see it. So to speak that it's not definable in kind of fixed bureaucratic terms is what makes it partly its own things. Yes. Back to vibes. Yeah. You know what you see it. Back to vibes. I can see what you mean by that.

Like gothicy, like medieval gothicy vibes. That's one I would have said. Yeah. So when it, this got going in the late 18th century, they really started to get intrigued by the medieval period because it was sort of a reaction to the Enlightenment, which was very about the ancient world, the ancient Romans, the ancient Greeks. But this is sort of in tandem with the rise of romanticism. So instead of being very, we're rational, we're logical, we're sort of cool-headed, these people were sort of like, hey, maybe let's bring back a little dark energy. Okay.

So like your enlightenment thinkers are all kind of about like the classical big boys, like rational sense, common sense, let's be sensible about this, is there proof? Yes. That kind of thing. That's them. as a reaction against that comes a whole new wave of people going... The passions. Passions.

Yeah. Oh, I like that. Yeah, so you were talking about the tick box. And there are some very common tropes, especially in the high Gothic, that, you know, you can sort of tick box. So it's usually set historically, so even though it's being written in the late 18th century, usually set in the medieval period thereabouts. British Gothic is usually set in Europe.

It usually has a big commentary on Catholic. As being this sort of sinister and superstitious thing. There's a lot of, you know, debauched aristocrats, debauched monks. And that's about Catholicism? I never put those two together. Yeah. In part, it's a sort of way of saying, aren't you glad that we're Protestant now, Britain? We've gotten rid of this whole sort of superstitious thing.

Middle class Protestants being like, oh, I'm glad we're not like that, but I kind of want to watch. That's the point, is it? Oh, I like that. There's a lot of voyeurism. There's a lot of really weird sex. stuff, often connected with death and violence. I mean, men just are like kidnapping women, like their pies cooling on windowsills, basically. It deals a lot with isolated settings. So it's not, the Gothic isn't so much scary as it evokes a sense of dread. Okay. Yeah, castles. That just

popped into my head when you said that. Like, isolated castles on a hill somewhere, yes, all right, spooky forest or a, you know, yeah, on monastery where everyone's locked away. You get a lot about young girls being locked up in convents where the nuns abuse them and it's all very like gross and titillating. You're trapped by space and time, aren't you? You're stuck in a kind of old castle that you can't get out of, but also, you know, that is a metaphor for the past kind of weighing on the present in a sort of disturbing way. And in part this was because there were scientific disciplines that were just getting started like evolutionary biology, geology, geology, and archaeology, where people started to get really morbidly fascinated with concepts of time and how far back does humanity. go and where do we come from. So it's all feeding into that. Well, that's the irony, isn't it, that it's through Enlightenment thought that you end up with the sense that maybe we're not, you know, perfectable and maybe progress isn't going

to happen. I love, I don't know why I just thought of this, but is it kind of like after the hippie movement of the 1960s, the punks came along? Is it kind of, like, it's that almost like complete 180 of like, right, so we're going to do flower power. And then all of a sudden it's like, no, anarchy. Exactly. It's a bit degenerationist. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Oh, Okay, okay, I think I'm with you. Well, with the logics, if there are a couple of big authors at this point who were talking about the paradoxes of emotion, they were trying to say, okay, we've done the logic thing. What about the emotional register? We still have feelings.

And sometimes they don't make sense. So Edmund Burke was discussing in, I think, 1757, the idea that you can have different sensations produced by one emotion. So sometimes when you're really happy, there's kind of this little kernel of sadness or wistfulness in that. or there's an author named Anna Letitia Aiken Barbald, which is quite the mouthful. That's a good name. She talked about the paradox of the heart about how reading terrible things kind of gives you this perverse pleasure. So she basically described why people go to horror films. It's like a safety valve.

And they were trying to wrap their head around this sort of illogical engagement. Why do we want to read about these horrible things happening to these, you know, innocent people? God, didn't that that's so, and we still. do that, of course. We still, like, were drawn to horror and Gothic, and regularly I sit there watching true crime documentaries, and they finish. And I'm like, why did I watch that? That is just, like, the most awful thing that I've just sat there and, like, what's wrong with me? But yeah, that's interesting that you said that. It's a sort of a space to explore quite extreme emotions. And they were sort of, this was being discussed into the 18th century, did you say? Yeah,

yeah. One was 1757 and the other was, I think, 1775. So right at the sort of the turrets, point of the Enlightenment where they're like, okay, we've done this. Let's be a little irrational. Let's get weird with it. Let's get some vibes going. So, like, there's a lot going on there. What was, like, the first Gothic text and how on earth did that come about? Is there a first Gothic text, or did it all just kind of happen organically? The sort of arose in countries all across Europe, kind of at the same time. Everyone had just been fed up a little bit with the Enlightenment. So it did kind of spring up. In Germany, it was called the, my German, It's terrible. It's got the shower roman or literally the shutter novel. In France, it was called

the Roman noir. Yeah, the black novel. It's just everything's better in French. Okay. I think the most widely considered first Gothic novel was actually British, and that's Horace Walpole's the castle of a Toronto, which is bonkers. Yeah, tell us a bit about that. What happened on that? We actually have a... What doesn't happen? Yeah. Yeah. It opens with a wedding in which the groom is running to his, you know, he's running late to his wedding and gets crushed to death by a helmet the size of a house that just magically falls out of the sky. And this is the start of a whole, it's an accursed family, the curse has come to fruition. And it just goes off the rails from there. That's the most normal thing that happens in the novel. And then his dad tries to marry the bride.

So, yeah, it's sort of a dodgy incest type of setup. There's a castle. Yep. Yeah, pretty much nailed it, yeah. There's tunnels and things. A statue nose, bleeds on somebody at one point. I mean, it's just, it's disgusting, it's bonkers. I love Gothic literature because it's got plot enough for two and vibes enough for 10. Just my appetite for this is boundless. And was this a big hit? Huge. It is a completely bonkers piece of work, and it was an enormous hit. Yeah, I think people were just ready to live in a world of superlatives where every guy is just an absolute sewer of a human being. Well, there's always a giant armoured hand around the next corner. Yeah, exactly. Who was it? Who wrote it? Horace Walpole, he was, or carry on.

No, I was going to say it. And what was he like? Well, he was the son of the first prime minister. Well, that figures. That's an Etonian education. Yeah, he was an Etonian, right? Yeah, he was a very kind of sort of delicate, rarefied antiquarian. Oh, was he? And then just, he let rip with this deranged thing. Well, exactly. It came to him in a dream. Yeah, it was a dream. Yeah, like, you were saying about geology and stuff. He was, like, interested in old architecture. And I think he just kind of read up on one castle too many and started having dreams about it and, you know, the rest of his history. He kind of invented this whole new turn. Oh, wow. So he wasn't like particularly gothic, evil horror of a human being. He was just a guy who had a dream.

One man with a dream, yeah. One man with a demented dream. I think he was slightly, maybe you could call him a little bit decadent or something. He kind of, I think he set a certain precedent at his temperament. But yeah, he was more just a kind of enlightenment intellectual who just, yeah, Had a weird dream that really stuck with him. So how did the public react to this text? It was a huge hit. Like, do you have any kind of like records of, you know, was it like the exorcist where people were fainting after they'd read it?

Or was it like, was it like scandalous? Or was it like, how was it received? The big thing was that with the first edition, he claimed that he just found the manuscript and translated it. He's like, oh, this is not mine. I just was researching it. That's like the Blair Witch. Exactly.

Yes. That's, oh, that's so clever. Based on a true story. Yes. Sound footage, isn't it? Yes. But then he later admitted that it was a kind of experiment. And I think people were a bit like, you know, all the literary critics had been shown up and were a bit embarrassed that they'd fallen for it.

And I think the kind of slight trashiness of the Gothic was born with that admission. So it was a bit of a hoax. Yeah, exactly. There were loads of literary hoaxes back then, weren't there? Everyone was doing them. The scallywag. I did know that. All right, so that must have pissed a few people off. How did people read this text?

Did people read it and go, well, that was lovely? Or was there like a big, were people angry about it? Were they upset about it? Was it a mixture? I got to be honest, I'm not really sure. From everything I know, it seemed almost to be a relief to the people who liked it. I'm not sure in terms of... It becomes a bit like an addiction, though, doesn't it?

Because you get like Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, where the, you know, the protagonist reads too many Gothic novels and starts to get in life as a Gothic novel. So I suppose it became a sort of trope that young women in particular would just be reading Gothic novel after a gothic novel, and it would become this kind of thinking you were living. in this kind of world of horror. So I suppose that's the point, isn't it?

That it became a craze. And it's kind of weird, because it's so part of our culture now, Gothic, Gothic novels, gothic films, gothic fashion shows, you can see it everywhere. But to think that, like, there was a time when that didn't exist. Yeah. Like, this was a world that hadn't seen that before when it was kind of launched on it. I mean, presumably there had been scary stories and ghost stories and things. Yeah, and we see hints of this coming, I mean, well back into the past.

So, I mean, Shakespeare's Macbeth, it uses a lot of, you can almost retroactively classify that as kind of a Gothic text. But that's an outlier. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Samuel Richardson's Pamela, but that you can. They're all kind of converging to that point, aren't they? You can see it coming. So there's a scene, it's, you know, a young servant girl who's being sexually harassed by her master. And there's lots of terrifying chase sequences down the hall and, you know, as he's grabbing at her and things. And that's going to become really prevalent in about 70 years.

Yeah, that motif of. a young woman normally in white running through a forest falling over, running away from a monster. That's Gothic vibes, isn't it, very much. Yeah, it's the girl going into the basement going, hello? You know, we still see that today in every slatter flick. I mean, that was, yeah, straight out of the 18th century. I mean, I think the point is that there was loads of kind of violent and disturbing literature before the Gothic. But when it becomes an explicit reaction to enlightenment of rationalism, that it comes into its own.

It becomes fashionable, I suppose. Yeah. Yeah. Or it becomes a kind of historical agenda type thing. Like a movement all of its own. So we've got this, the castle of Atranto, and then that's a hoax. It's not a hoax. But then that's kind of set in motion, not quite a template, but this is what people want,

that kind of juddery, spooky feeling. And they want to be scared because that's tying into your emotions. How can we for passions, as you said. Tell me about the sexy bit. Where did that come from? And like, because it's, you can't read Gothic and not have it there. somewhere. It's bubbling away beneath the surface. And it's usually, as you said, some poor virginal girl's been trapped somewhere. That seems to be a really big theme. Content warning out that if

you decide to read these. We absolutely will. They will be warned. If you decide to read these books, be well warned that as entertaining as they are, they're also very sexually disturbing, especially these high Gothic. They get a lot more complicated as we sort of move through the centuries. The monkey is the big one, isn't it? Well, yeah, the next big one. So the kind of Castle of Atronto percolated for a little while, and I'm sure there were plenty of knockoffs and things, but the next big one was in, let me think, it's 1796, I think, so we're 40 years later. And that's with Matthew Lewis is the monk. And Matthew Lewis is just one of the most committed perverts I think I've ever read.

And he was an MP, right? And he became an MP. He got so famous from this that it helped him land a seat in Parliament. He wrote it really quickly. I think it was in 10 weeks or something. He was only 19. It kind of shows. So this is like the fevered imagination of a 19-year-old Etonian MP in training.

Yes. He's in the Young Tories. He doesn't know what to do. He writes this. This is why we shouldn't let politicians write books. It just doesn't end well. But tell me about this book. So what is he written about?

God, can you imagine like something that you wrote at 19 actually ending up on the classic shelves and people still reading it? Oh, my God. Right. So what happens in the imaginings of this 19-year-old? Well, it's about a monk who just cannot be corrupted. He's so virtuous. And then he immediately gets tempted by Satan who comes to him in the form of this sexy witch named Matilda, who seduces him.

The dream. And he spends the book with Matilda, his lover's help, trying to seduce this other young girl, Antonia, who I believe is only about 15. And turns out to be his sister, spoilers. But it's very voyeuristic. So we get this absolutely absurd scene. where Matilda gives him basically the beauty and the beast magic mirror, where he can spy on Antonia, and he watches her getting ready to take a bath.

And of course, she doesn't know she's being watched. And as she gets undressed, a bird flies through the window and starts nozzling at her boobs. And she's like, oh, no, you know, it's just truly astonishing. This is like the original men-writing women trope, isn't it? Because that's what we do. We get into the bath with the blue tips flying around us. Who has not, right?

Absolutely. Okay. All right. So we've got a slightly incestuous, weird, definitely, she's far too young. This is horrible. Annie's a monk. So there's a lot going on here already. Yeah. And so he sort of helped redefine the playbook in terms of gender. And one of the things that he introduced was the idea of voyeurism. And especially issues of consent in that it's really gross because a lot of his issues of titillation, a lot of the things that he posits are sexy are sort of reliant on the fact that a woman does not. want to consent to this. So there's a whole thing where Antonio goes to church and does not want to take her veil off and men sort of bully her into it because they suspect she's hot and it's kind of like, ooh, yeah. You know, and I'm sitting here as a woman going, leave her alone. Please don't make her disrobe in church. This is odd. It's on page one practically. But then we sort of get to women writing back. So in the high Gothic, there was a quite a big divide critically where women authors started taking this up. And this is where I think things get a lot. lot more interesting because...

What is high Gothic, just for anyone who's unsure? What's the difference between high Gothic and kind of, like, low Gothic? So high Gothic is what we call this early period where it's starting to be defined, where it sort of bursts onto the scene. And it goes up to probably Frankenstein. That's probably the last high Gothic text before it just fractures off into a million subgenres. So like 1760s to 1820s, I suppose? Yeah.

Okay. Okay, okay, nice, nice. Tell me about women writing Gothic. How long was it before a woman said, you want Gothic? I'll show you goth. Well, I'm sure there were probably women writing in response to Walpole back in the day, but it's in this 1790s period that women were like, okay, let's get in on the action, especially after Matthew Lewis. So you had Anne Radcliffe and people like that. Mary Shelley eventually, you know, writing these things. And what's really fascinating there is that they write about the same stuff. So they're taking this playbook. but they're much more sensitive to it. So these books are a lot more readable today because it's less about, oh, it's sexy because she's not consenting. And it's more, how does it feel as a woman to have this system of oppression and to have these things happen to you?

And there was a critic I read once. I wish I could remember who wrote this, who even talked about how it was a chance for women to sort of explore their own sexuality without being lambasted for it. So it's almost, they pause it like, oh, no, it happened to her. you can't blame her. So it's very complex, weird emotions. That kind of complexity is all part of the Gothic, isn't it?

That it feels prurient but also liberatory at the same time. It's always going for that sort of duality, isn't it? And there was like a whole big sort of thing in the culture at the time. And I guess we still have echoes of it today about how when women say no, they really mean yes. And so they're kind of like, and rape was very fetishized at the time, wasn't it? So it's not really surprising to see it creeping into the literature. And I think that these are actually sort of tropes and narratives.

We're still trying to unpick now, really, aren't they? Oh, this had a very long shelf life. We're still undoing this today. That's the problem with the Gothic, isn't it? That you can explore sexuality, but also it has all these like hangovers, so to speak, from kind of less enlightened days. It's interesting that it goes from sort of the monk, which is just sort of like incest, underaged, voyeuristic, quite deranged,

sexual assault. That's not the tagline that they used on it. It should be. And there's an bird, and a bird, obviously. That's kind of, then that's used for some women writers to explore their own sexuality. That's a really interesting shift, I think. There's a critical divide nowadays between the male High Gothic, which is basically just generically packaged abuse,

and then the female High Gothic, which is a lot more sensitive or at least more thoughtful, it seems, at least in my opinion. Okay. And who do we recognise as being? in one of the first female Gothic authors, and what were they writing? Probably Anne Radcliffe, who did she do? The Mysteries of Udolfo. The mysteries of Adolfo.

And then, of course, you've got, I suppose, Mary Shelley. Yes. With Frankenstein. And who else was there? Who else was women? Jane Austen, I suppose, we could throw in there? Absolutely, yeah. So then it starts getting, maybe not parodied, but bits of it are being used.

The Brontes. The Brontes, of course. Absolutely. You can't have a mad woman locked in an attic and not have that be begun. And then when we get into sensation fiction in the 1860s, they're using little snippets of that all the time. There's often a scene of, you know, some violent storm and the lightning strikes and, you know, somebody's creeping around a house where they shouldn't be or something like that. I love that. What is sensation fiction just for anyone listening? What is that? Well, that's actually, it's made a huge resurgence nowadays. So it's basically the 1860s version of things like Gone Girl or Girl on the train or Big Little Lies.

It's the domestic thriller. And that it got started in the Victorian era. almost perfectly reformed today. It hasn't really changed at all. It hasn't changed. I'll be back with Abby and Daniel after this short break. Hi there. I'm Don Wildman, the host of the brand new podcast, American History Hit. Join me twice a week as I explore the past to help us understand the United States today. You'll hear how codebreakers uncovered secret Japanese plans for the Battle of Midway. Visit Chief Poetan as he prepares for war with the British. See Walt Disney accuse his former colleagues of being communists and uncover the hidden history that lies beneath Central Park.

From pre-colonial America to independence, slavery to civil rights, the gold rush to the space race. I'll be speaking to leading experts to delve into America's past. New episodes dropping every Monday and Thursday. So join me on American History Hit, a podcast by History Hit. It's not concerned, wasn't that? And it started with the Gothic, and maybe it's still with us in some form, that these texts, that this, it would corrupt people's minds, especially women's minds. You see that cropping up again and again, don't you?

Yeah, I know there were a lot of really, not just women's minds, but their bodies as well. There was a lot of now seemingly ridiculous medical texts going, do not let your wives and children read this. They will turn into criminals. They will turn into lunatics. It will send them, you know, to an early grave, their nerves. And yeah, the medical discourse around this is pretty hilarious. Have we got any numbers on this?

Are they right? where there were a lot more criminals after these books came out. I think I have seen, I don't know if it was like one of those internet jokes that you seemed doing the time, but I'm sure that I saw one of those, this is an admission list for some 18th century asylum, a novel reading was on there. I mean, it was a real concern, wasn't it,

that it would make you go deranged? Yes, the idea that evokes a certain amount of sensation in you and we don't understand what that means physiologically. And you're thinking, well, you've had plays, you've had poetry that evokes this, But apparently this new form is just the giddy limit. I suppose like Don Quixote and the female Cahote, people have always worried about the effects that art have on, you know.

And they still do. I mean, occasionally something crops up like a film that is going to influence people or computer games. Yeah. That's going to turn people really violent. Or heavy metal is the big. Heavy metal music. Yeah, of course.

So we still have this kind of leftover legacy of people are going to be exposed to something and then it's going to warp them completely. I feel like the thing about the. gothic, though, is it's like, if it didn't have that edge, if it didn't have that mystique, it wouldn't be as appealing that you kind of think, oh, am I being changed by reading this? I think, you know what I mean? There's a kind of a self-prurient type thing, if you know what I mean. I want to be changed. Yeah, yeah, or that, you know, ooh, it's being exposed to this somehow

kind of warping me. I mean, it's sexy in that it's forbidden and it's depicting a lot of things that are forbidden, so I can understand why it became such a cultural phenomenon, and it's never gone away. No, and I suppose it as well, it's kind of like, I remember I was speaking to a Jane Austen scholar once. And we were talking about the accusation that her books are really boring. And there were loads of people to start going, going, how dare you?

But if you speak to any undergraduate students, they might disagree without one. The moment, yeah, it's quite boring. And she actually made the point of, like, it's not that it's boring. It's that what she is depicting is the world of most women at the time, which was actually quite small.

Their world was quite small. Because, like, you know, you can't go out and party it up, or you can, but then you'd be a fallen woman. Like, their entire kind of, of existence was set up to get a husband and these really quite tedious social interactions of like, yes, Mrs. Bennett, we'll take a turn around the room and that kind of stuff. So you can sort of see, and then you put a Gothic novel into the hands of people whose lives are quite,

I don't want to say small, but you know what I mean? It's like this kind of like, my God, there are castles and monks and it's sexy and naughty, and I can definitely see that appeal. Yeah, I mean, the kettle has come to a boil really with all of this, especially in the Enlightenment period where, you know, you're just, you're fed up, I want to feel something, I want to go a bit mad with it. I mean, maybe they're right. Maybe people did want to, not that they went mad,

but people did want to feel scared and, you know, aroused and maybe there was something in that. So how do you think Gothic has changed in? So we've got the kind of like the early high Gothic, as you said, in the 18th century, with the rapy monks and weird bird baths and that kind of stuff.

And then women start getting in on the act. By the time you've got to the 19th century, How's like the idea of sort of Gothic and horror? How has it evolved? How has it changed? What does Gothic, Victorian Gothic look like? Well, we get a really huge change in that we developed the urban Gothic, which is something that Dickens was pretty big in helping to codify. And that takes it away from the European continent.

It takes it away from the Catholics and the historical period. And it puts it in the modern city where, okay, all of this stuff, but it's in your backyard. So... This is a bit of a Gothic image but they kind of, Victorian authors kind of dismembered the Gothic, didn't they? And kind of took different elements of it

and compiled it with, you know, yeah, like you were saying, about sensation fiction, different social kind of phenomena or incorporating it in new context. So it's not the pure genre it once was, but it has these kind of same forms and same effects.

So what do you think the Victorians fans are fascinating about it? So it arose in the 18th century in part as a reaction against enlightenment philosophy, which was about rationale, sensible, let's not get carried away now, lads, that. What was the Victorians in like the age of the industrial revolution?

Because arguably they had more technological progress than, well, maybe not our own time, but like the advances that they were making. And they're still returning to this kind of old-worldy, superstitious gothic genre. I suppose that's the paradox, though, isn't it? In the same way that the Enlightenment bred the French Revolution and terror, so too did it create this kind of incredible industrial change and pollution and emissoration and, you know, all of that kind of stuff. And, you know, the bounds of science are ever expanding and you don't know what they're going

to come up with yet, those, you know, the long-haired scientist guys. And so the point is, it's kind of speaking to that sense of ambivalence you might feel about technological progress or, you know, historical change. Yeah, it's that one thread that always goes through the Gothic, which is the sense of dread. And so for every step forward, you sort of wonder, but what are we going to uncover with this? This is why in the, what is it, in the 1880s, when they were laying the transatlantic, when they were laying the transatlantic cable, they were really worried that they were going to discover mermaids.

And there was so much anxiety that that led to, I'm not even kidding, a huge spate of mermaid erotica and straight up porn because people were like, I got to take these bad feelings and do something with them. Wow. Did they find any? Not to my knowledge, but it didn't stop them from looking. You won't find a mermaid that doesn't want to be found, quite frankly.

So it's perhaps like sort of the continuation is, again, it's a reaction against, And maybe we still do that a bit, you know, like there's that line in Jurassic Park, isn't there? Which I'm going to misquote, but it's like just because science can doesn't mean it should, that kind of things. That still underpinned a lot of our Gothic horror today, fear of what science and technology can do. Yeah. And in terms of the empire stuff, we also get imperial Gothic, where, you know, as Britain expands further outward, then all of a sudden it takes, you know, yeah, but how is your white British masculinity going to fare when you're alone in a phone? and land with these strange gods.

And, you know, so it's obviously that's a, usually a fairly racist subgenre of this. Kipling got in on that real hard. But you can see where that came from. It's, again, that sort of, but we have all the power. But do we? But do we? We can't not talk about Dracula. And this seems like the perfect chance to bring him in because he ticks a lot of these boxes, doesn't he?

So he is a foreigner from Transylvania. And again, it's urban because he turns up in Whitley. for reasons. And then in London, he is a sexual predator. He, and he's mysterious. So he ticks all of these boxes, doesn't it? Yeah, a reverse invasion narrative. We have that height of empire, oh, no, but what if they come here and they're mystical and stronger? And can we use, you know, all of our modern skills? You know, we know how to type and use, you know, a dictaphone and things like that. And that, our modern bureaucracy will beat Dracula. That is the big thing, isn't it? That technology is also a big aspect of Dracula and it kind of has a sort of, you know, because he's like hiring lawyers

to buy houses and stuff. I know lawyers aren't really a technology, but the kind of modern infrastructure, so there's a kind of like, it can go both ways. At the time, like, that's something that I'm, whenever my students study Dracula, I'm forever saying to them as like, I know this stuff sounds really old now, but you have to like imagine it at the time, the stuff he's talking about is absolutely cutting edge. Like there's a blood transfusion at one point. Yeah. They use what they called stenographers or like a recording device and I think Mina's training to be a teacher and it's like this is absolute cutting edge and there's a psychiatrist. So like in modern parlance I can't even think what that would be the equivalent to but there'd definitely be iPads in it. If you're set in Silicon

Valley or something wouldn't it? Yes, yes. Well, we have a sort of modern version of that which I think aligns maybe not perfectly but it deals with I think the best gothic text I've seen in recent years is ex machina, which deals with all of these technology and sexual dynamics, masculinity, that rural versus technological urban landscape. The voyeurism is there. Everyone's being watched all the time. So you can see, again, like this is, a lot of these tropes are straight out of the 18th century. Yep. Still with us. Still exerting an influence. So why are we so fascinated with vampires? Because we still are, aren't we? We still, and Dracula wasn't the first one, actually. We should say that. I mean, it was a huge blockbuster, but it wasn't the first vampire text, was it?

Yeah, vampire texts weren't even that big in Britain until Dracula. You lot are more about ghosts, really. Vampires were much more a continental myth. And they had had a few other stories. There's Polydorys, the vampire. There was Sheridan LaFenouz, Carmela and things, a handful more. But they did not have the same resonance. And I think it's because Dracula as a figure, the way this text is written, he's such a mutable figure. So we reinvent Dracula. There's so much going on there. We reinvent him every generation for what we need. So in the 1930s with Bella Lagosie, he presents as very dignified European menace, right in the middle of two world wars. In the 50s, with the hammer horror Christopher Lee ones, he presents as sort of masculinity and sexual anxiety, where he's, the women in that

are really into being bitten by Dracula. In a way, I'm not sure. we saw before or since. In the 70s, you got a whole spate of black exploitation. You have Blackula. In the 90s, we had Dracula 2000. We had interview with the vampire and Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula. And all of those deal with issues of time. We're right near the millennium. So we're constantly reinventing Dracula just because he's sort of almost a vague enough a character where we can put whatever we need on him. And vampires are sexy, aren't they? I mean, I'm going to ask you why the hell they're sexy. But it's just, that's always been

a part of it. But when you actually break that down, like, why are they sexy? Because they're effectively just giant parasites. And when you say that, that's not sexy. Like, when Lucy Westimer in Dracula gets basically seduced and then chagged to death by Dracula,

it's all just kind of like, oh, but it's so sexy. And she becomes really eroticized, doesn't she? And she becomes quite horny. It wouldn't be so horny if they said, you have a parasite. that that's not sexy. Depends what you're into, Kay. That's true. I don't want to yuck anyone's yum.

There'll be people out there just going, actually, I quite like my parasite. But what is it about the vampire, the vampire, the vampire, that surrounds with this eroticism, do you think? I think... Being bitten isn't sexy. If someone was to bite you, that's not hot, actually. I think it's the combination of these intense animalistic appetites with extreme restraint. So vampires have rules and a sort of mystique.

They have a code, you know, they can't come into your house unless you invite them. They have, you know, things that ward them off. But it's that tension between there. I mean, essentially they do the same things as werewolves, don't they? But very few people find the werewolf erotic, you know, sorry to all the Jacob fans out there. Yeah, sorry. But it's the vampires are just sexier. Sorry.

But it's that tension of the animal but incredibly cultured, sophisticated, advanced. I like that. Okay. There's a class thing, I think. And there's a class element. Let's not forget that. Yeah. So, like, it's power. It's animalistic. That I think that we are attracted to power as well, aren't we? And it's the idea that the vampire could hypnotize you and make you do things.

That's got quite, maybe that I'm just giving away too much about myself. There's part of it, though, it's a kind of repressed thing, isn't it? It's like, that's what Gothic literature is always about in general. But it's like, oh, I would never do this, but, you know, I'm kind of slightly curious. And I think, yeah, the vampire is carte blanche to do that, right? Because, oh, the vampire just kind of hypnotised me. Hypnotized me. It made me do all these terrible things, Your Honor.

It goes back to that female high gothic of, well, it's not my fault because I was hypnotised. Oh, I like that. And I suppose it's well, of course, the fact that there's the vampire bite, which you get, a bite isn't sexy. But the way it's done in these films and texts, it is quite sexy. Like, they have to get very close. There's a reason why they bite on the neck, isn't there? And that in itself is quite an erotic. act, I suppose. And it's

the most thinly veiled metaphor for fluid exchange and you know, the melding of bodies and things like that. Of course. There is that scene, isn't there, in Dracula and I show this to my students all the time, of when Dracula is turning this character of Mina into a vampire

and he opens a vein in his chest and he like, he pushes her head to it. And I'd always say it, I probably shouldn't, but I say it the students, think blowjob. And then when you read that passage again, like it's absolutely, He's talking about he's holding her head down and she's sucking and he's moaning in ecstasy. And it's just like, steady on Bram.

I don't know. And there's a sort of perverted parent kink there and that it's sort of a breastfeeding metaphor as well and that he creates these children who are also his brides. And it's just, oh, it's so messed up. Are we saying Dracula's a daddy? He's gone full daddy. He's gone full daddy. We'll get Stanley Tucci on the phone. This is the Dracula for this generation.

We should say as well, because there are more women vampires in Dracula than there are men vampires, and they are all horny minksers. So it's not just that you become damned, you become really hot as well, right? Yeah, they even sort of spoof that a little bit in Twilight. Where are we now with vampire and gothic fiction, do you think? Because it's still with us. We can't seem to let it go. It turns up all the time.

We're still fascinated by it. And I think that like the kind of the obsession with a mythosal, medieval past is still, I think it's enjoying, it's been enjoying a new resurgence ever since Game of Thrones started, which kind of does the same thing, which is like, yeah, it's very violent, it's very rapy, but it's medieval, so that's just what they did. And it's not. But where are we today with the Gothic, do you think? I think the Gothic lately has been incredibly thoughtful and it always deals with issues of structural power. And so it's being deployed in quite intriguing ways nowadays. So another great Gothic film is Get Out.

where it's sort of the suburban Gothic. So we've had urban Gothic, we've had, you know, Imperial Gothic, we've had Southern Gothic, you know, where, you know, I declare we never recovered from the war and we have all of our secrets in the attic sort of thing. But now we're getting into suburban life. So that deals very much with issues of race and vision. Again, it's very sort of voyeuristic in that sort of way. Conformity.

It's about conformity a lot in modern society. So the Stepford Wives is another good example, invasion of the body snatchers. Do you think that's Gothic, Stepford Wives? I've never thought of it like that. The book certainly is in that it's this isolated community and women are getting picked off one by one. But again, a bit like with those Victorian novels that sort of borrow. It's the kind of gothic is sort of disseminated throughout the culture even if we don't have like kind of pure exemplars of the year. Yeah, the pure Gothic I think has probably faded.

but it's just completely being recycled by... It keeps returning anyway, doesn't it? That's the point of the Gothic. It's a revenant. How about something like 50 Shades of Grey? Would you say that that has had Gothic influences? Just because that is a very rich, wealthy man who has a lot of power who seduces a virgin, a young virgin, Anastasia,

and then keeps her in his red room. I've heard, I've never read it, obviously. I mean, that's... And it's a Twilight fanfic. I think that's certainly shuffled into the deck of the god. Gothic, even if only as a Joker. It's certainly playing with tropes of the Gothic. Again, it all depends on the vibes. Does it vibe as Gothic? And that's a hard thing. You know it when you see it. I've never thought of it like that before, but now I just said it. I think it's got that kind of

appeal. Because I'm forever interested in why that text became the absolute cultural juggernaut that it did. And I don't really buy into people that kind of want to tear it down, say it was badly written and blah, blah, blah. We can do that all day long. But it's more like what button did that push? Yes. In the same way that the castle of Otranto pushed something, Dracula pushed something that made people just go, I don't know what that is, but I want it. And like, what was it? I think there's a social element, right, that you kind of, it's the fantasy of being chosen

by this kind of elite. Because a vampire is like, ultimately an aristocrat, right? And it's like, he's a dumb. Yeah, exactly. You're the one they want. You know, you've got the unpaid internship. Look at you. You know, that's, I think that's the kind of, we're living in another cultural moment,

or maybe not a cultural moment, a social moment of inequality. and people kind of slightly fetishize that maybe. Well, and I think also, Twilight, I don't actually think that is a Gothic text. It's a text about vampires, but it just doesn't hit the same notes. Oh, so you're going to start a fight now with people this. But make your case, Abby,

why isn't Twilight a Gothic text? I think, again, it just doesn't quite hit some of the same notes. It's one of those things, and I'm happy to be disagreed with here, but it's kind of just about how you feel with it. It doesn't evoke that sense of dread. I think it focuses too much on the. romance and the introspection and the anxiety and things like that, but it doesn't fill you with dread in the same way. And you can't have sparkly vampires. You can't have literally vampires and

call it Gothic. I know that there aren't hard and fast rules with this, but I'm going to make that one of them. And I'm sure there are scenes in there that would probably qualify, but as a whole. And I think that's why 50 Shades might have also taken it in a new direction, because that injects a little bit more of the Gothic, as you're saying. So it just, it takes Twilight and just goes slightly on a fork in the road. It's not so much about entrapment, is it? I think there's not enough entrapment. It's more that their relationship could collapse outward

rather than them being trapped in this kind of awful situation. Whereas 50 shades of grey is obviously very much about certain kinds of constraint. So I think that's the Gothic element. I like it. And what do you make of the Twilight vampires and monsters? Because I loved what you said there about like the figure of Dracula can be retold for any time. What do you think that Twilight tells us about our own time?

If like you were to fast forward 200 years in the future and people, scholars are looking at Twilight to try and work out what the hell we were thinking about. Like, what is it about those vampires? Because they glitter, they can go out in the sun. Why is he going to high school? I never quite understood that. He's hundreds of years old. Like, why?

Shit it, Matt. He never passed his GCSE. Yeah, he just needs to keep retaking him. That's all it is. He's just been held back endlessly for hundreds of years. I think the reason why this resonated is, if we're talking about why vampires are sexy and it's those animal appetites with restraint. Edward Cullen has the most restraint of any vampire because he's written from a very,

I believe, Mormon bent. I didn't know that. Okay. I think the author is Mormon. So there's a very heavy Christian tone. And I think that accentuates, especially when you add in the werewolf element, which are much more like greased up shirtless jailbait sort of situation mixed. And then you have Edward on the other side who's sort of hilariously neurotic and pasty.

I think just we're accentuating that tension there of, but look how restrained. He loves her so much. Yeah, there's a real emphasis on the romance in it, isn't there? But that culture of abstinence and sort of sexual anxiety is obviously still very much present in America now. So I suppose maybe you can say that Twilight's sort of a harbinger of, you know, kind of contemporary issues.

A sexually restrained vampire. I just like, how did that become a massive cultural spot? Well, yeah, who knows? But, you know, we're paying the dividends now, aren't we? We are. So what do you think that the future is for Gothic then? Because I'm going to have to draw this to a close, although I could keep talking to you for forever. Where do you think we're going to go with this now? Did you read that interview with the recently, you remember that guy that recently got sacked from Google who said a computer had come alive and they had this kind of very disturbing conversation about sort of what it meant to be turned off and things. I've missed all of that. Wow. I'm thinking AI. That read like a sort of had a sort of slightly unnerving, maybe not full on gothic, but it had a kind of creepiness, the transcript of their conversation. So I'm wondering if

AI might be a potential. Oh, for sure. For sure. I think it's... We're already on it, really, aren't we? And we've been doing this sort of technological Gothic already. We've been doing that since the, you know, 19th century. But I think, again, to bring up things like ex machina, what does that mean in terms of gender as well? Because we have the whole tension of the sex bot thing, again, to bring up the Stepford wives. You know, these ideas are percolating. And I think we're in for another cycle of that. I think, I mean, that's endlessly exploible, isn't it? How technology can fuck us up

and vice versa. I think, do you think you could ever get like, obviously, you know, in the wake of Me Too and various ways of feminism and what we're calling out this stuff. And we can now look at most of the Gothic, not even the stuff from the 18th century, but like right the way up and kind of go, that is a bit actually, I'm not quite so sure about that. But could you ever have like a sexually liberated equal feminist Gothic or does it always need to have that power dynamic in it somewhere for it to be Gothic?

Because Dracula wouldn't have worked at all, would it? If he'd found Lucy and then Lucy gone, actually, I don't consent to this and he'd gone well on Irish and racial wishes. And if he'd gone, and like, because that's sort of central to it, isn't it? Is that it's not sexually egalitarian? It is quite predatory. Do you think we could take that out and still have Gothic or would it be crap gothic? I don't know.

I feel like it's by definition a reactionary outform, right? Because it is about looking back and it's about the idea of the past coming to take over your present and indeed like about sort of sexual predation and like any other kind of predation. I suppose the point is more that it's a space in which that can be explored without necessarily encouraging it. The problem is when it seems to be encouraging it, right? But I think, yeah, it is reactionary for better and worse. It has so much to do with time and they're always talking about the sins of the father being revisited. So I think especially as we go forward and understand a lot more about systematic. inequalities, that's just going to come to the four all the more.

So it might give it more to explore and play with. Yes. Yeah, it could be a good thing. It could be a space to explore these kind of inequalities, or it could be a bad thing in a place to fetishize them. And final question. Favorite Gothic film for both of you? Or text?

Oh, God, you put it in the spot. Yeah. Quick, you have a crib sheet there. I've got a crib sheet right here. I'm going to pick Marx's Capital, which Francis Ween says is a kind of, you know, a tale of humankind being enslaved by its own creations, the value form. So there's my slightly perverse response to a question given in good faith. Nice. I'm going to go with Hitchcock's Rebecca. Oh, okay. Okay. Why that choice? The way the camera works to sort of magnify the absent

space, it follows the invisible, you know, long dead Rebecca, where she would have been. And it's just such a great way of manifesting a ghost right in front of us without showing anything. I think it's tremendous. Thank you so much for joining me today, Abby and Daniel. And if people want to learn more about the Gothic or if they want to find out more about you, where can they do that? We actually have a podcast that recaps classic literature in an irreverent fashion. It's called Save Me From My Shelf. And we're right around this time releasing two episodes on Gothic text. So if you have any interest, please check us out. We are on Twitter at SMFMS underscore podcast. And we're on Instagram and TikTok at Save Me From My Shelf. And please do, because you're

is absolutely fabulous for all Gothic and non-Gothic lovers alike. Thank you so much for talking to me today. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you for listening and thank you so much, Abby and Daniel, for joining me. And if you like what you've heard, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe, wherever it is that you get your podcasts. Join me again, The Twix the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit.