ABSTRACT
In The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault proposes “four great strategic unities, which, beginning in the eighteenth century, formed specific mechanisms of knowledge and power centering on sex.” These are: (1) a hysterization of women's bodies, (2) a pedagagization of children's sex, (3) a socialization of procreative behavior, and (4) a psychiatrization of perverse pleasure. 1 These processes and the cultural discomfort that they engender are vividly dramatized in the works I am considering. This is not, I would argue, an accident of theater history. I would claim instead that the history of sexuality and the history of Gothic drama are causally related. For the kinds of issues explored in these plays suggest that the processes Foucault describes were codified first in the popular imagination before they ever were articulated by sexologists and psychologists. The sexological history of the nineteenth century, that is, gets its start on the Gothic stage. That is the process I would like to describe.
