15 - The Gothic Novel and the Negotiation of Homophobia

Summary

The Gothic novel, at least prior to the Stonewall Resistance Riot of 1969, is profoundly reticent about the spectacle of direct homophobia, as reticent as it is about the spectacle of homosexuality. To approach the dialogue between the structuring principle of homophobia in the early Gothic novel and the novel's remarkable silence on the topic of male-male sexual relations, one must return to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's formative work in Between Men. This chapter describes two Gothic narratives from the long nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish tradition: Lewis's 1796 novel The Monk, and Sheridan Le Fanu's 1872 novella "Carmilla". If The Monk offers its readers a series of anachronistically understood metonyms that can be pressed to cohere in the legible figure of "the homosexual" Le Fanu's "Carmilla" offers a narrative of a young woman named Laura, who lives with her father in a remote castle in the Austrian province of Styria.