GOTHIC ECONOMIES: 

GLOBAL CAPITALISM AND THE BOUNDARIES OF IDENTITY

by Robert Herschbach

University of New Hampshire, December, 2002

B.A., University of Virginia 1987

M.F.A., University of Iowa 1992

 INTRODUCTION....................................................................................................................1 

I. FAMOUS IMPOSTERS: THE VICTORIAN METROPOLIS.......................................40 

II. DRACULA AND THE CRISIS OF SUBJECTIVITY................................................... 67

 III. ELIOT AND THE GOTHIC..........................................................................................93

 IV. VAMPIRE CULTURE: GIBSON AND THE GLOBAL AESTHETIC.................. 118 

V. BABES IN THE GARDEN: THE SUBURBAN IDYLL........................................... 143

 BIBLIOGRAPHY.................................................................................................................160

ABSTRACT

Since Dickens and Mary Shelley, the Gothic has provided a rubric for literary

conceptualizations of modernity. Dickens' depictions of industrial London characterize it

as a labyrinth of temptations and horrors, haunted by monstrosity and by personal and

social demons: the monster in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is the disfigured byproduct of

science and technology. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, perhaps the most effective "global"

narrative to come out o f the British fin de siecle, grafted elements of a pre-Enlightenment

atavism onto the tum-of-the-century liberal metropolis. In our own era, the literature of

the postmodern technopolis - the fiction of William Gibson, for example - has continued

to borrow Gothic motifs and devices.

This dissertation is a study of literary representations of technology, capitalism

and the modem metropolis - representations based in the anxieties and desires that

accompany middle-class self-fashioning. The Gothic, in its original guise, depicts the

corruption and ruination of the estate, often by economic and cultural forces emanating

from the city and associated with capitalism and modernity; thus, to invoke the Gothic is

also to reference middle class guilt and doubts about legitimacy. At the same time. Gothic

allusions allow the middle class to retell its foundational myth of a struggle for liberation

from feudal constraints

Much 19,h and 20th literature, both popular and highbrow, entertains an

ambiguous and complicated relationship to the city - the site of economic, political and

cultural forces which are both liberating and traumatizing. Though capitalism and

technology drove its ascendancy, the middle class has traditionally seen the city as a

place both of opportunity and danger, of allure and revulsion or horror - a set of mixed

emotions which tends to suggest an insecure, unstable or divided subjectivity. This

complicated relationship to the city provided much of the impetus for the quest to build a

"bourgeois utopia" - a refuge located at the fringe of the city in which the equilibrium of

a romanticized pre-urban order is recovered. But because the contradictions within

middle class identity can never be fully resolved, the "utopia" always harbors the

potential to become a haunted grove, visited by that which has been repressed or abjected

in the process of creating modernity.