Modern Prometheus: Nineteenth-Century Design through the Gothic Novel

The nineteenth century was a modernist century. Born out of late eighteenth-century revolutions in philosophy, science, and industry, the nineteenth century was primed to embrace all that was rational, practical, and new. In fact, it bequeathed us countless things we now take for granted in our own modern lives: mass transportation, department stores, magenta, the stock market, photography, feminism, germ theory, the bicycle, evolution, typing, recorded sound, psychiatry, steel, long-distance communication, the electric vibrator. But despite its commitment to positivism and progressivism, the nineteenth century never entirely rejected, nor altogether suppressed, its anti-modern others. The irrational, the irregular, the mysterious, the monstrous, the ancient, and the occult bubbled beneath the century’s scientific surface, erupting all too often in what Sigmund Freud would later characterize as “uncanny returns.” When nineteenth-century science flies too close to the sun in Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus, the impact of its inevitable fall opens a rift through which these banished forces resurface—all as the result of a cutting-edge design project gone wrong. This course will examine nineteenth-century design—from fashions in le goût gothique to vampire killing kits—through the lens of the gothic novel. Readings will include European and North American period fiction, such as Washington Irving’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820), Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), as well as historical fiction including Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). Film adaptations of the novels will also provide interpretations of period interiors and dress for discussion. In excavating the gothic’s anti-modernisms, we will explore how these undercurrents could overflow into contemporaneous anxieties around class, gender, and race. As gothic fiction suggests, the nineteenth century may have been just as threatened by the contingencies of its own modernity as it was by the rude intrusions of its pasts. 3 credits.