The Melancholy Briton: Enlightenment Sources of the Gothic

Melancholy and foreboding about death is the performance of subjectivity. In eighteenth-century Britain there seems to be much cultural work devoted to death, and if this work is not as spectacular as in the Victorian period, it is interestingly less fully ritualized and containing. In general, Locke seems resistant to anything like Cartesian dualism, with its machine body/immaterial soul dichotomy. Death seems to be, for Locke, of the mind as much as of the body. Elaborating on Locke's melancholy monitions about the limitations of the understanding and on the "unreal" character of most sense impressions, Addison reaches for the imagery of the Gothic. The Gothic novel explores Burke's urgent sense of the fragility of civilization and of the ghastly evidence, across the Channel, of an utter betrayal of the dead. Cannon Schmitt traces the xenophobia of Gothic novels to their rise to prominence and solidity as a genre in the years immediately following the French Revolution.