Victorian gothic soundscapes

Abstract

Resounding with wails, groans, creaks, thunders, bells, and a score of other unsettling and often unidentifiable sounds, the Victorian gothic emerges against the backdrop of what John M. Picker has called "a period of unprecedented amplification" that necessitated new modes of listening. While critics have increasingly acknowledged the significance of the audible world to Victorian literature, and sound studies has exposed new approaches to addressing the acoustic dimensions of texts, the gothic soundscape remains largely unexamined. This article identifies the shared qualities of the sonic world and Victorian gothic fiction, building on two key definitions of sound to expose how the genre absorbed, manipulated, and leveraged the soundscape to spark terror among characters and readers alike. It then offers an overview of scholarship on the gothic and sound, focusing primarily on the past twenty years. Although a number of critics investigate the role of music in gothic fiction by Ann Radcliffe, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Wilkie Collins, among others, few move beyond it to consider the soundscape in its entirety. The final section calls attention to some of the shared keynotes among Victorian gothic texts and suggests possible approaches to more sustained scholarly work on their dynamic soundscapes.