Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Servants in long-eighteenth-century gothics are peripheral and yet ever-present; they act as appendages to protagonists and villains alike. Kathleen Hudson draws this stock figure out from the shadows, showing how servants perform a protean identity that destabilizes master narratives about Enlightenment selfhood and society. Hudson breaks new ground with her contention that servants—as liminal figures that raise uneasy questions about identity—are metafictional devices and even authorial metonyms. Beginning with Horace Walpole’s debt in The Castle of Otranto (1764) to Shakespearean comic servants, Hudson pairs gothic novels with theatrical adaptations to call attention to the physicality of performance, even in prose. In examining the “convention” of the hidden manuscript, for example, Hudson shows that servants frequently appear as actual artifacts, as living and breathing manuscripts. As they tell their stories to the eager protagonist, they perform relationships between authors and readers. Hudson’s introduction identifies the gothic’s preoccupation with servant storytellers as part and product of generally widespread anxieties among the middle and upper classes [End Page 295] in a rapidly changing commercial economy. Throughout the book, Hudson illustrates that gothic novels reproduce the expected—didactically faithful or villainous servants—and yet simultaneously, whether wittingly or not, also “Gothicize” these stereotypes through servants’ performances of social class and gender. These performances, which often seem emotional and irrational, blur boundaries between self/other and master/servant. Tracing how this unsettling performance plays out across a wide literary field, Hudson contributes to recent work that illuminates commonalities among so-called “masculine” and “feminine” gothics and “market-driven” and “political” ones.

Servants and the Gothic is ambitious in its reach. Hudson looks both before and beyond the eighteenth-century and Romantic-era gothic to suggest that its servant storytellers recall pre-Enlightenment folklore even while exerting a proto-postmodern tug on dominant narratives with continued resonance today (see her reading of Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049). Of particular importance is the assessment in chapter 2 of popular gothics like Ann Radcliffe’s alongside political ones by William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, as this comparison shows that in popular and political texts alike, servants unsettle dominant narratives (both in-text and contextually). Hudson builds on this framework in chapter 3 by reminding us that the imposing and handsome Moor of Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya (1808) is, after all, a servant. As the Devil in disguise, Zofloya intentionally performs servility. This performance is increasingly clear to readers, though not to the imperious anti-heroine Victoria, whose own (unwitting) performance as mistress leads her to lose control of herself and her narrative. As Hudson underscores, Zofloya’s performance of servitude underwrites Victoria’s downfall, making Zofloya an authorial figure. Hudson establishes that Dacre’s variation on the stock-gothic servant as storyteller enables her to recycle stereotypes about blackness as dangerous and Other, in contrast to abolitionist literature, in which Black characters appear as victims and abolitionists as saviours. Hudson infers that Zofloya’s performance of servility and his eventual mastery over Victoria destabilizes this binary, constructed by white British authors, that distinguishes the white British subject from African Other, whether that Other is figured as demon or victim.

Servants are so pervasive by the 1810s, Hudson contends in the final chapter, that whether present or absent, the servant figure sparks in novations. First, Hudson notes the further popularizing of the form via chapbooks (“trade gothics” are much shorter than gothic novels and are often by anonymous and obscure authors). Second, she identifies second-generation Romantics like Walter Scott, James Hogg, and Mary Shelley, who use gothic conventions to forge new ground. Hudson evaluates Scott’s historical romances of the late 1810s and 1820s, Hogg’s metatextual The Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), and Shelley’s Frankenstein (both the 1818 and 1831 versions), along with Richard Brinsley Peake’s 1823 [End Page 296] theatrical adaptation, Presumption; or the Fate of Frankenstein. But Hudson does...