The Gothic and the Law: Limits of the Permissible

Abstract

Eighteenth-century fiction, the ‘site’ of the Gothic, is obsessed with the law, with its operations, justifications, limits. Where the universe of the seventeenth-century romance was bounded and controlled by cosmic justice, reflected in already-given quasi-mythic structure, the universes of Defoe, Fielding, Radcliffe, Godwin are limited by various manifestations of human law. Legal characters and legal processes are key ‘figures’ in the fiction, and we can use an exploration of these figures as a beginning for the search for the elusive ‘beginning-in-continuity’ of Gothic.

The law is cryptic. There is no pure space of the family, or of textual genealogy, or of presenting and passing judgment on ‘textual evidence’.¹