Gothic Truths in the Asylum

Abstract

This article suggests that Victorian Gothic prose fictions privilege the voices of madness, where, operating in the historical lunatic asylum, truth is encrypted. It begins by expanding upon the relevant background contexts of the nineteenth century, with focus upon the medicalisation of madness, and goes on to offer fresh critical interpretations of false confinement in two pinnacles of nineteenth-century Gothic fiction: the penny dreadful, The String of Pearls (1846–7), and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). The article argues that Gothic writing simultaneously registers and articulates the silence of a madness that has been perceived to threaten rational speech; Gothic subverts the view of the mental asylum as guarantor of truth by demonstrating that this functional site is, by contrast, the generator of falsehoods.