The emotional history of the gothic novel, 1790–1810

Jones, Tracey Davina

Abstract

This thesis examines the role of emotions in a selection of Romantic-period gothic novels: Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian, Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House, Regina Maria Roche’s Children of the Abbey, and Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya. I use seventeenth- and eighteenth-century debates around passions, appetites and affections to explain how emotional responses were understood by philosophers including Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith, and in turn were depicted by authors. Novelists' representations of individual states of feeling interact with social and institutional vocabulary and feed into debates around value, response and regulation of emotions within a changing society. The thesis employs Barbara Rosenwein’s Emotional Communities (2006), which emphasises how social groups share, promote and value specific emotions, and how within society there are divergent, overlapping or competing emotional communities, creating personal tension when the values of one community appear to conflict with another. The thesis works with William Reddy’s The Navigation of Feeling (2001), which demonstrates that emotions are not innate but learned, exploring how “emotional regimes” work to shape individual emotions to create a sense of emotional coercion and suffering where their goal differences prevail. By relating novels to their sociocultural as well as intellectual contexts, this thesis contends that the gothic novel from 1790-1810 depicts characters in ways that highlight conflicts between the values and emotional priorities of the middle classes, with their emphasis on virtue and individual merit, and a backwards-looking aristocracy with hereditary conservative values. It explores sites of emotional oppression as well as ones of emotional refuge, showing that institutions associated with religious and political repression such as the abbey and convent, serve both functions and that the domestic family, due to prevailing inheritance laws and customs, can form an equally repressive regime, stifling independence and individualism.

Citation

Jones, T. D. The emotional history of the gothic novel, 1790–1810. (Thesis). Keele University. https://keele-repository.worktribe.com/output/1109368

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: Mar 20, 2025
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 20, 2025
• Public URL: https://keele-repository.worktribe.com/output/1109368
• Award Date: 2025-03