The dread that dangerous secrets lie beneath once-safe sectors of life resonates strongly across the nineteenth century, echoing particularly in Gothic fiction. That dread and the patterns listed above come from anxiety about the modern age and its implications — especially with regard to the limits of science; the simultaneous reliance on and unknowability of the individual, particularly concerning the distribution of land and wealth into private property to individuals; the overwhelming importance of family lineage to wealth and property; and the limits of the law. The psychological thriller comes then from peculiarly modern dynamics: it confronts modern anxiety about the nature of the mind and the Self through the Enlightenment struggle to subjugate myth and superstition to the forms of science and rationality. But it simultaneously 4 seeks to reveal the limits of knowledge of the individual self: humanity might be ultimately unknowable and uncontrollable. The mind may even be unknown to itself. The growing nineteenth-century understanding of the world primarily through empiricism and objectivity ultimately compelled a radical equivalence of objects and people in reasoning.
“T
he real telos of reason,” Carl Freedman writes in
The Incomplete Projects
, “is not just philosophical but social: modernity’s goal is to allow us to live …show more content…
Indeed, rationality and objective equivalence was borne out in capitalism, industrialization, and scientific progress, even as contemporary thinkers like Marx challenged its cultural implications. Such critics were an effect of the Enlightenment worldview. While rationality, reason, and mastery over nature were lauded in their replacement of the mystery of superstition, unquestioning trust in authority, and fate, the limits and extremes such a worldview presented were immediately feared. This dialectic found cultural expression in Gothic art. Jerrold E. Hogle remarks in his introduction