Monopolistic Guilt and Identity in the Romantic Gothic

Abstract

This thesis considers irreparable guilt as a pattern amongst subjects in the Romantic-era Gothic through an analysis of Thomas De Quincey in both Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Suspiria De Profundis and Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Partly an examination of religious shadows after the Enlightenment and partly an analysis of the changes Enlightenment culture wrought on experiences of guilt, its methodology acknowledges both the secularization thesis and recent postsecular scholarship that emphasizes the way religious habits and thought patterns endure into modernity. Drawing on the scholarship of Thomas Roche, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions are used as a model of secular conscience emerging out of the Enlightenment, with recovery from guilt being accessed through the reconstitution of his identity. On the other hand, Adam and Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost are referenced as models of Christian guilt, either adopting the hope for redemption Christ offers (Adam) or thought patterns mimicking the hopelessness of the Calvinist reprobate (Satan). The chapters on De Quincey and Frankenstein combine comparisons to these models with Silvan Tomkins’ work on affect theory, using his monopolistic, snowball model of negative affect to articulate how guilt expands in their affective lives, becomes self-perpetuating, and informs identity—an archetype that reverberates throughout the Gothic. The lens of affect theory illuminates how contradictory strategies for avoiding and defending against negative affect—some rooted in the ideals of the Enlightenment, and others in religious habit—jeopardize identity in a way that makes the extension of guilt paradoxically attractive. Ultimately, this thesis argues that the cultural conditions of the Romantic period enable a monopolistic trajectory of guilt for characters in the Gothic.