Social Reform in Gothic Writing: Fantastic Forms of Change, 1764-1834 by Ellen Malenas Ledoux (review)

Abstract

LEDOUX, ELLEN MALENAS. Social Reform in Writing: Fantastic Forms of Change, 1764-1834. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 238 pp. $90.00. The has long taken a backseat to realism in studies of genre. Ellen Malenas Ledoux's Social Reform in Writing: Fantastic Forms of Change, 1764-1834 challenges entrenched generic hierarchies, arguing that writing has a particular power, greater than that of verisimilar writing, to raise audience consciousness about political issues (1). By remapping the generic and national boundaries that have limited studies of the Gothic, Ledoux frames writing as an activist mode and surveys novels, plays, and poems from Britain, Colonial America, and the Caribbean. She invites readers to look beyond the discussions of domesticity and nationalism that have dominated studies of the early and instead establishes how a range of texts--from Horace Walpole's The Mysterious Mother and Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho to Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn and Matthew Lewis's Journal of a West Indian Proprietor--served as transnational tools for reform. By beginning her study with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto and Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, she inevitably retraces familiar ground; however, the literary texts and historical situations she reads alongside these oft-studied novels create fresh vantage points for her readers. By pairing Walpole's novel with his play The Mysterious Mother, she emphasizes the way in which Walpole combined narrative and tragedy to dramatize how political events originate (27). The tragic formula Walpole exploits conditioned readers' responses to political events, such as the Gordon Riots and the discussions of class and race that the riots triggered. In her second chapter, she usefully complicates standard feminist readings of the female Gothic that rely almost exclusively on Radcliffe's fiction. She finds in other Romantic-era novelists alternatives to Radcliffe's treatment of space and domestic politics. For instance, the castles in Radcliffe's novel have been read as symbols of patriarchal repression; however, the castle in Charlotte Smith's Emmeline serves as a symbol of matriarchal power and reconfigures the gender politics of the Gothic. Most interestingly, she reads the working-class author Sarah Wilkinson's bluebook The Castle of Montabino as challenging the bourgeois biases built into The Mysteries of Udolpho and generating a working-class critique of Radcliffean politics. In Wilkinson's novel, readers are left with an unnerving feeling that 'virtue' is over-rewarded in some classes and that suffering goes unacknowledged in others (91). From domestic politics, Ledoux moves to William Godwin's treatment of political economy in St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century. St. Leon relates the adventures of a sixteenth-century alchemist who uses magic to engage in an economic thought experiment (95), which advocates a radical form of equality and critiques class hierarchies. …