Introduction: Framed, Imprisoned, Overhear

Summary

A lonely damsel imprisoned within a castle or convent cell. The eavesdropping of a prisoner next door. The framed image of a woman with a sinister past. These are all familiar scenes from the 1790s Gothic novel, which exploded onto the English literary scene with wildly popular works like Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk. They are also, however, key features of famous high Victorian poems, including Tennyson’s “Mariana” and Browning’s “My Last Duchess.” The Gothic Forms of Victorian Poetry explores the ways in which themes and structures of the eighteenth-century Gothic novel became conventionalized in nineteenth-century poetry, reappearing as quintessential Victorian verse forms: dramatic monologues, women’s sonnet sequences and metasonnets, and Pre-Raphaelite picture poems. Reading earlier fiction alongside later verse, I argue that Victorian poets adopted and transformed tropes central to the Gothic novel, leading to innovations in verse that naturalized and elevated content from a scandalous novel genre. These signature tropes—inquisitional confession and accusation, female confinement and the damsel in distress, supernatural switches between living and dead bodies—are transfigured into poetic forms that we recognize and teach today as canonically Victorian.

Characteristically, Gothic romances are populated by three stock figures: the egomaniacal, murderous husband; the sanctimonious monk figure whose lust outweighs his love for God; and the damsel in distress, imprisoned, framed, or already dead. Such counts, monks, and damsels are sprinkled throughout canonical Victorian poetry. Subsumed within a shared literary consciousness, and already familiar to a nineteenth-century reading audience, these figures found new afterlives in a succeeding generation of Victorian characters. We might consider, for instance, Robert Browning’s Duke of Ferrara as a literary descendant of Radcliffe’s tyrannical Italian Count Montoni. Tennyson’s St. Simeon Stylites mirrors the blasphemous egotism of Matthew Lewis’s villainous monk Ambrosio. And the women pictured in D. G. Rossetti’s “double sonnets” are objectified and mystified like the infamous waxen image in Mysteries of Udolpho. The recurring figure of trapped women especially—from Mariana in the moated grange to the Lady of Shalott—represent Victorian reincarnations of Romantic Gothic’s female victims. These women, frozen in art or banished to dungeons and convents, are certainly drawn from Shakespearean and Arthurian tales; but they are also variations of Radcliffe’s dark, frustrated heroines.