Gothic villains and criminal detectives in Theodor Fontane, Anna Katharine Green and Arthur Conan Doyle

Martina Ulrike Jauch, Purdue University

Abstract

In the decade of the 1890s, the detective story genre turned to the older form of Gothic fiction as a way to express its own thematic concerns. Detective fiction needed a way to express its key themes, specifically the study of social masquerade and the psychological roots of criminal behavior. By borrowing from the Gothic, late nineteenth-century detective fiction revitalized the Gothic mode and found in the older form, first, a model for geographical movement from the countryside to the urban spaces and, second, an elegant way to express the often repressed fears and anxieties that were the deeper concern of detective fiction at this time. Concerned with the return of the repressed, the Gothic and the detective novel both represent reality in terms of tainted physical bodies and twisted geographical spaces in order to address the issue of the volatile, transgressive nature of the Gothic by exploring Gothic writings as “a para-site” of perverse and criminal impulses. Thus the Gothic detective novel maps out and recreates the urban landscape as it pursues its desire to confront criminality and, subsequently, impose a sense of order, retribution, and hierarchy. The London depicted by Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) in his Sherlock Holmes stories is the culmination of a development that begins with the German author Theodor Fontane (1819-1898) and was developed by the American novelist Anna Katharine Green (1846-1935). The chapters on Fontane's novels discuss how his deceptive protagonists illustrate the illusory sensibility of nature and introduce a new kind of humanity and responsibility into a traumatizing urban Berlin. The chapters on Anna Katharine Green’s character Amelia Butterworth explore how she operates within a liberating spiritual shadow world of “providences” yet incorporates a particularly elitist version of history that denies progress. The next two chapters investigate how Doyle explores the traces that Holmes’s leaves behind in London, redefining detection as a different art form, while remaining caught up in a system of feminine desire and victimization. The last chapter discusses the 2009 cinematic representation’s inclusion of traits of the epic hero in its portrayal of a Gothic villain.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Palmer, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Comparative literature|American literature|British and Irish literature

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