Whiteness and the ‘Western’ Gothic Tradition

The chapter argues that the British gothic is not, as has been assumed, the beginning of the gothic as such, but a response to the local effects of transregional capitalist modernisation. The chapter observes that this history was not only financed by enslavement in the Atlantic world, it was accompanied by a pervasive and fundamentally destructive understanding of racial categories that British gothic writing negotiated. Exploring this entangled material and ideological history, the chapter first analyses late eighteen-century British gothic written at a time when the nation was flush with the spoils of enslavement in the Atlantic world. The chapter then discusses how Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), conceived in the wake of slave-led revolution and uprisings in the Caribbean, abolition concerns, increased industrialisation and escalating industrial action, forges a racialised body around which notions of whiteness can take shape. In the final section, the chapter explores fin de siècle imperial gothic texts that testify to a New Imperialism by registering the increasingly anxious construction of racial identity that attended transregional capitalism at the time.