Frances Burney's Queer Gothic: The Wanderer as Critique of Reproductive Futurity

Nowell Marshall, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Author Biography

Nowell Marshall is the author of Romanticism, Gender, and Violence (Bucknell University Press, 2013) and essays on queer literature, transgothic, and speculative fiction and film. For nine years, he taught eighteenth-century, gothic, and Romantic literature; critical theory; and queer and transgender studies at Rider University in New Jersey. He currently teaches at the University of Wisconsin—Madison.

Abstract

Drawing on George Haggerty’s Queer Gothic, Lee Edelman’s No Future, and Jose Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia, this paper positions The Wanderer as both a female gothic and a queer gothic text through its representations of sapphism and its critique of the marriage narrative and reproductive futurity. In The Wanderer, Burney locates Juliet’s (who also goes by the Incognita, L.S. and Ellis) source of gothic horror in the marriage plot and the obligation of women to embrace reproductive futurity. However, Juliet’s escape from her coerced marriage represents only a part of the novel’s larger refusal of linear life paths and sexual developmental narratives. For both Mr. Ireton and Sir Jaspar Harrington, reproductive futurity unravels itself. It generates the gothic specter of male disempowerment—figured equally through marriage and its avoidance—that prevents both men from achieving it, and this resistance to reproductive futurity compounds the novel’s queer gothic narrative bent. The article ends by tracing Elinor’s trajectory from Wollstonecraftian radical to someone obsessed with gender normativity and marriage. When marriage becomes foreclosed, Elinor becomes a wanderer who enacts her own unique, queer path.

Keywords

Burney, Frances, 1752-1840; The Wanderer; queer futurity; reproductive futurity; queer gothic; female gothic; male disempowerment; nonwhite sexualities; melancholia

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