Queer Temporalities, the Gothic, and Representations of Female Queer Subjectivities and Non-Normative Desires in Late Victorian and Neo-Victorian Literature

Abstract

This thesis is interested in the underexplored links between queer temporalities and the Gothic, focusing on the potential of their intersection to facilitate representations of female queer subjectivities and non-normative desires. It aims to explore various forms of queer temporality configured through the strategic use of Gothic elements in the selected Victorian and neo-Victorian literature. Recent theories about queer temporalities developed by critics, especially Lee Edelman, Jack Halberstam, Elizabeth Freeman, Kathryn Bond Stockton, Valerie Rohy, and Annamarie Jagose provide the frameworks for my analysis. The thesis examines the work of five female literary writers from the late nineteenth century to the present. These authors engage with and reach back to the Victorian era to depict female sexualities that are non-normative, unstable, or indeterminate. Each chapter addresses various ways in which the Gothic disrupts conventional models of linear time and creates possible queer moments in which female queer sexualities can emerge. Chapter One explores Vernon Lee’s supernatural tales, focusing on the uncanny transhistorical bonds between women from different periods as a form of queer resistance to reproductive futurity. Chapter Two investigates texts by Charlotte Mew in which queer subjects struggle to accept their non-normative sexualities. Mew’s short story “Passed” is read in light of both Halberstam’s “queer time and space” and the idea of Victorian Urban Gothic. Her poem “The Changeling” suggests an association between queer childhood development, Victorian degeneration discourse, and the figure of the monstrous fairy. Chapter Three considers Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. It demonstrates the role of Gothic motifs involving anachronism, such as haunting and the spectre, in Hall’s negotiation of sexological identity categories of the sexual invert. Chapter Four examines Angela Carter’s reimagining of Victorian sexological discourse, which constructs queer people as temporally backward. Nights at the Circus suggests a utopic championing of the so-called primitive using abject and carnivalesque elements. Drawing on Annamarie Jagose’s theory of the logic of sexual sequence, Chapter Five considers the notion of sequence which has rendered lesbianism as second-order and belated, in Sarah Waters’s Affinity. It demonstrates how the queer temporalities of spiritualism, alongside the use of neo-Victorian historical fiction and the Female Gothic, facilitate Waters’ critical engagement with sexual sequence.