ABSTRACT
The gothic’s relation to the class that, for the most part, produced and consumed it has seemed more convoluted, involving a kind of gothic doubling. The gothic is part of the reaction against the political, social, scientific, industrial, and epistemological revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which enabled the rise of the middle class. Like Romanticism, the gothic is especially a revolt against a mechanistic or atomistic view of the world and relations, in favour of recovering an earlier organic model. The gothic is thus a nightmare vision of a modern world made up of detached individuals, which has dissolved into predatory and demonic relations which cannot be reconciled into a healthy social order. In the gothic, ‘normal’ human relationships are defamiliarised and critiqued by being pushed to destructive extremes. The gothic’s appearance at the time suggests the political interest, and the concern with reinforcing a mythology of an unbroken British past and tradition of freedom.
