The Horror of Clothing and the Clothing of Horror: Material and Meaning in Gothic and Sensation Fiction

Abstract

The gothic and sensation novel has frequently been considered with reference to psychological dimensions or the semiotics of the body. On the contrary, criticism has generally neglected the function of clothing as the visible and material contact zone between the body and its environment. The gothic and sensation novel in fact devotes remarkable attention to clothing, and clothing in turn is presented as having a considerable impact on both body and psyche. This article argues that the gothic and sensation novel represents a narrative exploration of an increasingly complex relation between subject and object, between the spiritual and the material, in a rapidly expanding consumer culture. As signifier of a (largely urban) modern commodity culture, clothing serves to explore not only the potentials but also the potential horror of the powers of the material over the subject, in particular in situations when the subject loses control over material gone rogue. Moving from the material designs of late eighteenth-century book productions to serialisation in nineteenth-century periodicals and back to late nineteenth-century books in lurid cover designs, the novels as objects also respond to the potential and challenges of material form. As popular reading material the sensation novel thus participates (internally and externally) in a negotiation of cultural preoccupations with the individual’s relation to a modern material world.