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FRED BOTTING (ESSAY DATE 1996)

SOURCE: Botting, Fred. “Homely Gothic.” In Gothic, pp. 113-34. London and New York: Routledge, 1996.

In the following excerpt, Botting discusses the Gothic conventions in The Woman in White.

In The Woman in White the transgressions of individual desire threaten family and society from within. Wilkie Collins was preeminent among the sensation novelists of the 1860s. Sensational effects, however, owe much to Gothic, particularly Radcliffean, styles of evoking terror, mystery and superstitious expectation. The plot, figures and narrative form of The Woman in White also structurally resemble Radcliffe’s Gothic, though transposed into shapes more appropriate to the nineteenth century. Henry James, in the Nation (1865), credits Collins with ‘having introduced into fiction those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Primary Sources
   1. Wilkie Collins (Story Date August-September 1875)
4. General Commentary
   1. Tamar Heller (Essay Date 1992)
5. Title Commentary
   1. The Woman in White
   2. Fred Botting (Essay Date 1996)
6. Further Reading