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Where the Evidence Leads: Gothic Narratives and Legal Technologies

This essay examines how and why the gothic novel explored a number of contested legal issues and evolving legal technologies during this period. The gothic novel’s popularity straddles the divide between the earlier, class‐based approach to law and the later utilitarian reforms. As such, we see in gothics (like other romantic‐era texts) an ideological bifurcation between what Jürgen Habermas refers to (somewhat sweepingly) as the “pre‐modern,” paternalistic, providential, divine‐right approach versus “modernity’s” utilitarian, rationalistic replacement of the divine and authoritarian with the human and the secular. We focus in this essay on what we recognize as the legal palimpsest that emerges in contested form in one gothic novel after another: (1) the oral versus written testimony debate that was central to the evolution of a modernized, secularized print‐based culture; (2) the anxiety that emerges in textuality when a providential, divine‐rights legal system symbolized by a judge is replaced by novels that examine more “real‐life” legal issues and criminal cases decided by a jury of one’s peers; and (3) the continued contest between providential and aristocratic/authoritarian appeals to legality and the emerging rationalistic and utilitarian approaches (the way that law replaces religion in society).