Matthias Eitelmann

The Organic Uncanny: Taboo, Sexuality, and Death in British Gothic Novels

Gothic thrives on transgression: incest, rape, perversion, crime, insanity, and death are prominent themes within the Gothic tradition, which embodies an obsession with the darker side of human life. The recurrent violation of taboos represented in Gothic fiction is closely tied to its primary strategy of evoking terror and fear in the recipient. While one of the fundamental functions of taboos is to create a sense of security and social stability by means of excluding phenomena felt to be threatening along the axes of the sacred and profane and the pure and impure, the dialectical moment of transgression is at the same time constitutive for taboos (cf. Bataille). This paradoxical structure inherent to taboos helps to explain why we have the tendency to react with emotional ambivalence where taboos have been violated: we oscillate between fear and fascination, between “attraction and repulsion, worship and condemnation” (Punter 1996b, 190 with reference to Sigmund Freud), or, expressed in Gothic terms, we experience ‘dreadful pleasure’. It is due to its pronounced focus on taboo areas of socio-psychological life that the Gothic imagination tends to realize “(our ‘psychological’ fears... in very physical terms” (Morgan 6).