Introduction

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The intersections of queer, postcolonial and Gothic theories

A missing Indian diamond. A scaffold in New England. A map of the African interior written on a potsherd. A Jamaican vampire bat. A portrait of an Italian castrato. These are some of the props I have chosen to analyse in Queer Others in Victorian Gothic: Transgressing Monstrosity. The props themselves are only pieces of a larger tropology where queer sexuality, transgender bodies, racial otherness and Gothic horror intersect. Each item signifies a site of crisis as well as a site of transgression in Victorian culture. The Western authorities who search for the unusual Indian diamond cannot find it; rather, it is the biracial, genderqueer 'anti-authority' figure who solves the mystery of the stolen yellow jewel. The New England scaffold becomes a murder site where an American Indian woman and an English woman, clinging to one another as they are conducted out of their dank prison cell, are hung as witches by the power hungry Puritan authorities. The map on the potsherd sends three Britons to the heart of Africa where they discover a 'savage' monarch who appears hauntingly similar to Queen Victoria. The vampire bat represents a conflation of racist and imperialist stereotypes about the Jamaican spiritual practice of obeah, fin-de-siècle worries about hereditary taint and the possibility of queer contagion. And the portrait of the genderqueer, beautiful and 'wicked' Italian castrato seduces and then haunts men and women until they wither and die for want of hearing his decadent voice sing yet another song. In some cases, these props signal the author's use of Gothic to interrogate and subvert Victorian hegemonic ideals regarding sexuality, gender identity, race, empire and nation. In some other instances, the props signify the author's deep ambivalence about how to read the multiple and changing faces of the monstrous 'Other' in the nineteenth century.

This project aims to explore the intersections of Gothic, cultural, gender, queer, socio-economic and postcolonial theories in nineteenth-century British representations of sexuality, gender, class and race. Broadly, Michel Foucault's writings about the violence of the 'Victorian regime' – one that forced anyone who was not bourgeois, white and heterosexual into closeted silence – help set up the framework for understanding the ways that the 'other Victorians' were portrayed. These 'other Victorians' included working-class people, imperial subjects, prostitutes, homosexuals and anyone else who did not fall into the prudish and rigidly structured identity deemed appropriate in the Vic