A Gothic Dystopia at the Antipodes

Abstract

This article offers an analysis of texts which were written in 1802-3 and published in 1812 under the title Panopticon versus New South Wales, namely Jeremy Bentham’s first two letters to Lord Pelham and A Plea for the Constitution, arguing that, in his attempt to show the superiority of his Panopticon plan over the transportation scheme, the reformer depicted New South Wales as a Gothic dystopia. ‘Gothic’ is here understood as a literary genre (with its motifs and scenarios), an ideological term and a critical tool. Bentham upset the conventional cartography of his time by showing that the ‘archaic’ or ‘barbarian’ practices that Gothic novels located in Catholic Europe were actually present in British penal policies. In addition to drawing on the rhetoric and the dichotomies which underlay the Gothic novels published during his lifetime, Bentham anticipated scenarios – such as reverse colonization and contamination – which would be explored in Victorian fiction. By extrapolating in dystopian fashion from trends which were present in the British body politic, Bentham’s Australian writings show how a historical period may be haunted by its future potentialities.