Abstract
This chapter finishes out the Victorian Era by scrutinising the intersections of law and medicine in fin-de-siècle Queer Gothic. The author sheds new light on the connections and ways that juridical and medical language and ideas surrounding criminality, disease, and homosexuality play out in three classic end-of-century Gothic tales: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886); Arthur Machen’s best-known piece of ‘weird fiction’ – The Great God Pan (1894); and, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). While many pieces written on these three stories employ sexological discourse as a tool to understand the stories better, this author, instead, turns to Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) as another ‘strange case’ that, through medical jargon, also makes congenital homosexuality and transsexuality monstrous. The overlap between Krafft-Ebing’s patients’ lived experiences, his prurient reporting of them, and the exploration of the queer fictional characters urges the reader to consider the ways that laws and medical practices not only informed the literature, but the ways that literature informed legal and medical ‘truths’ and policies toward queer and trans people at the end of the nineteenth-century.
Published Version
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