Threshold Domesticity in the English Gothic Novel

This dissertation straddles the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with two chapters on the eighteenth-century Gothic novel (focusing on Walpole’s Castle of Otranto and on the Gothic novels of the 1790s) and two on the Victorian Gothic (centered around Charlotte Brontë). I focus on the way Gothic narratives portray domestic spaces and characters’ interactions with them as a means for gaining power and agency, arguing that these key negotiations happen not in the extremes (the towering heights of a gothic castle, or its inner confines), nor in the most “gothic” of moments—but in the repeated, everyday act of crossing the threshold. While home is often cast as a place of coercion and confinement—at the same time as the threat of homelessness hangs over characters’ heads—the canonical Gothic novels examined here each demonstrate that we can find power (and adventure) in the domestic, even if the structures of law, marriage, and inheritance conspire to define home as a place of social control. In this dissertation, rather than focusing on the extremes—architectural or ideological—I attend to the switch-points, the interstices, the boundaries, moments of return or departure, and the spaces that are traversed again and again. It is in these moments that we can see what happens to make the domestic what it is to us—how we create (or reject) the trappings of home at each encounter.

While we tend to think of the threshold as a place to push through, an either/or, a symbol of going forward, or (at times) an interdiction, I claim it as a space that can be inhabited, paced over, returned to as a touchstone, even a space where we can take up residence. Changes in power, points of reversal, opportunities to re-make the domestic, gain agency, or make decisions tend to coalesce at the thresholds of home or a possible home. It is often in leaving—or re-approaching—home that characters are able to re-make it and thus re-structure the power dynamics of their situation.
It is not just in the storyworld, but in their discursive techniques, that Gothic novels practice activeness at the threshold. It this interplay between “threshold domesticity” on the levels of story and discourse that I follow with most interest. I theorize “threshold domesticity” as a spatial practice of characters within the story—moments when they practice recursive activeness in their largescale journeys or their embodied activeness, including acts of pacing, recursive or cyclical journeying, and re-reading. But I also define threshold domesticity as phenomenon on the level of narrative discourse. This dissertation follows places where the narration slows or suspends itself at a return home, structurally recurs in eddies or overt repetitions, indulges in unusual detail or invests tension and suspense in seemingly-mundane moments. These two patterns often converge at the threshold of a home or prospective home, story-time and discourse-time mapping onto each other to invest the threshold space with the possibility for change.

This kind of restless, frustrated journeying—seemingly pointless yet accumulating, outing by outing, into a wayward mode of travel down an altogether new path—is often found in the Gothic, and I will argue that it is not a manifestation of madness, but a method for gaining traction. Intersectional feminist scholars or feminist geographers might see this mode of movement more as the exploratory treading and retreading of ground that takes place when an experienced feminist mapmaker prepares to survey and redefine the territory. The novels I examine negotiate home as both confining and exclusionary, a vexed concept. The imaginative site of the domestic is one of constant questioning and remaking. Whether this means surveying from the threshold, reading and reinterpreting accepted structures, or remapping the world as we walk through it, the deceptively active nature of the pause at the threshold is one of the key components to naming and uncovering the seething power invoked when creating one’s own home.