Scottish Gothic

Arguably the Gothic aesthetic developed in Scotland in the 18th century as a result of two historical events: the Union between the parliaments of England and Scotland and the Jacobite Rebellions which followed. The Union resulted in a split in Scottish society as some people supported the Jacobites; the others felt members of the Union and the British Empire. Gothic writers chose to address the nation’s identity crisis through the exploration of the theme of the double. One can name here such works as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner as examples.

The paper argues that at the end of the 20th century the Gothic mode is still very much alive in Scottish literature with writers turning again to Gothic aesthetics in order to explore the lost part of their nation’s identity. The paper examines the theme of the double in contemporary Scottish Gothic based on an analysis of Brian McCabe’s “The Host,” Ali Smith’s “The Hanging Woman” and Jackie Kay’s “The Woman with Fork and Knife Disorder.”

This paper represented the first stage of a new phase in my research: getting back to Radcliffe, but remaining informed by my work on Smith and the developing relationship between the Gothic and the Picturesque. To that effect, I’d put off returning to the “European Novels” and spent some time reading Radcliffe’s oft-overlooked debut against a selection of eighteenth-century Scottish travelogues. In this paper I was primarily interested in demonstrating that Radcliffe consciously chose Scotland as apposite location in which to re-locate the Gothic and develop its emergence within a contemporary and proximate “Imaginative Geography.” I talked a little about the ways in which the novel revises the Picturesque (though without the time to properly contrast this with Smith) and focussed upon Johnson’s seminal Journey to the Western Isles as a key intertext in which a version of the Gothic emerges – largely unintentionally – at moments when the traveller recognises the limited, provisional, quality of his control and comprehension of the landscape.