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Dissertation
God’s folly: Gothic justice in the British literary imagination from Walpole to Chesterton
University of Iowa
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of Iowa
Summer 2025
DOI: 10.25820/etd.008155
Abstract
The Gothic begins on Christmas Eve, 1764, with the publication of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. Beginning with Walpole’s novel and winding throughout the long nineteenth century, this dissertation argues that one of the Gothic’s defining features is a thematic concern with justice, in particular a justice that critiques calculative models and offers an alternative rooted in a religio-spiritual longing and haunting. The dissertation opens with an analysis of Christmas ghost stories, offering a reading that places Walpole’s novel in that tradition and looking forward to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843) and Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Old Nurse’s Story” (1852), drawing out the focus these texts have on a vision of justice that is intergenerational and predicated on the (im)possibility of human transformation. The second chapter analyzes The Monk (Matthew Lewis, 1796) and The Devil’s Elixirs (E. T. A. Hoffmann, 1815) to explore the ways that Gothic justice is concerned with eternal punishment and unimaginable forgiveness, as an expression of salvific foolishness. The third chapter takes up the double, a core feature of the Gothic, to explore the challenge of the protean self to calculative justice. This chapter grounds that analysis in two Scottish Gothic novels, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (James Hogg, 1824) and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), that span the nineteenth century. The fourth and final chapter traces the Gothic’s relationship to detective fiction and specifically G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), arguing that Chesterton’s masterpiece is a pure expression of the Gothic threads explored throughout the dissertation, which reveals the nonsense logic at the core of the Gothic and the ways that such logic is a nightmare for calculative justice.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- God’s folly: Gothic justice in the British literary imagination from Walpole to Chesterton
- Creators
- Conor B. Hilton
- Contributors
- Lori Branch (Advisor)Eric Gidal (Committee Member)Kristy Nabhan-Warren (Committee Member)Blaine Greteman (Committee Member)
- Resource Type
- Dissertation
- Degree Awarded
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of Iowa
- Degree in
- English
- Date degree season
- Summer 2025
- DOI
- 10.25820/etd.008155
- Publisher
- University of Iowa
- Number of pages
- x, 203 pages
- Copyright
- Copyright 2025 Conor B. Hilton
- Language
- English
- Date submitted
- 07/21/2025
- Description bibliographic
- Includes bibliographical references (page 200-203).
- Public Abstract (ETD)
In the 2019 whodunit film Knives Out, Benoit Blanc, the detective played by Daniel Craig, muses on possible theories of the case and says, It makes no damn sense. It compels me though. This state of bafflement coupled with a feeling of being compelled that drives Blanc is the same mixture that I find in Gothic novels take on justice. Gothic novels from the origin of the genre in Horace Walpole s The Castle of Otranto (1764) to G.K. Chesterton s further Gothic-detective fiction hybrid The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) present a vision of justice that is at once inscrutable and deeply satisfying. Gothic justice provokes us to imagine alternatives to the common calculative visions of justice that surround us. The chapters explore Christmas ghost stories and human transformation, eternal punishment and unimaginable forgiveness, doubles and the nature of the self, and even the ways that the peace of God could be a nightmare. These threads weave together a tapestry of justice that is wild, baffling, foolish, and somehow, deeply satisfying a Gothic justice.
- Academic Unit
- English
- Record Identifier
- 9984948539702771
Metrics
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