Criminality, Pathology, and the Urban Gothic:
Fin de Siècle London and Gotham City
By Erica McCrystal
The noted relocation of the Gothic from the remote castle to the urban
infrastructure in the latter half of the nineteenth century marked a new place to situate
and reflect extant societal concerns. London became rapidly fictionalized as a Gothic
setting that could raise social awareness of anxieties and monstrosities in the real world.
Criminality in the urban Gothic is often manifested in Gothic monsters who follow
destructive tendencies to exploit an already fragile space. The Gothic city encourages the
villain by providing a space that he can easily navigate, even though it may appear dark,
distorted, and labyrinthine to much of the rest of society. Yet, there is a relationship
between the city and its villains that allows the Gothic to continue to manifest itself in
urban fiction, especially newer media. Comic books, graphic novels, and their film
adaptations have reimagined criminality in the Gothic metropolis in ways that can inform
readings of iconic fin de siècle Gothic novels, including Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of
Dorian Gray, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,
and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Critics have frequently taken a New Historicist approach to late Victorian Gothic
fiction. Linda Dryden, for example, in her reading of fin de siècle narratives, argues that
key players, Stevenson, Wilde, and Wells, “fictionally inscribed on the London landscape
monstrous transformations, mutilations and dualities that spoke of urban concerns” (16).
For Dryden, the Gothic that these authors draw upon entails the alteration of accepted
norms in order to expose existing threats. Likewise, Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik argue,
“the form…threats take is influenced by historical moment; to that extent, abjection is
both temporally and culturally infected” (2). Thus, the anxieties reflected in the urban
Gothic are both historically and culturally informed.
As with the Gothic, popular in studies of comic books and graphic novels is the
argument that superhero narratives are reflective of their contemporary historical,
cultural, and political moments. Douglas Wolk notes, “superhero cartoonists can present
narratives whose images and incidents are unlike our own sensory experience of the
world…but can still be understood as a metaphorical representation of our world” (92).
Comic books, like Victorian Gothic literature, despite being set in another world, reflect
the real world, in particular, relevant social anxieties and tensions. “In general, comic
book stories are often a moral panic about the decline or complete demise of family,
democracy, and freedom” (Philips and Strobl 70). Within the Batman franchise, Gotham
City has evolved into a Gothic space, displaying a visual Gothic aesthetic and using the
hero/villain dichotomy to represent extant threats in the real world. Gotham City has been
depicted in various ways throughout Batman’s existence but typically embodying
present-day cultural anxieties. Critics find Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns
deeply concerned with U.S. politics, particularly Reaganism amid the Cold War.
Christopher Nolan’s reboot in 2005 marked a new era of Batman, concerned with post9/11 fears and set in a Gotham City that has the likeness of several twenty-first century
American cities (DiPaolo 51). Nolan’s use of the Gothic may be found through the power
of terror over the imagination: “The Batman films are spectacles of terror that use media
spectacle to terrorize audiences, and the spectacles of terror and destruction are so
powerful in Nolan’s trilogy that it is possible for audiences to identify with some of the
terrorist characters and their acts of destruction” (Kellner 164). The Gothic supervillain
serves multiple functions: raising social awareness, on one hand, while also evoking
particular fears and maintaining a Gothic condition and aesthetic in the work of fiction.
Considering criminals of fin de siècle literature as Gothic supervillains, then,
allows for a repositioning of Gothic London; the urban Gothic representations of London
are indicative of a particular universe that encompasses supervillains who are
representative of cultural threats while also exposing particular power struggles. To
understand fin de siècle London as a Gothic universe, we can use Gotham City as a
model. The permeation of supervillains in Gotham City demonstrates the ways in which
the criminal can maintain the decrepit state of its Gothic universe. Likewise, fin de siècle
Gothic representations of London contain criminals who exacerbate nineteenth-century
fears of degeneration.
The threat of degeneration in nineteenth-century London aroused anxiety, but
such a threat cannot be actualized because a disarrayed Gothic city cannot completely
deteriorate away. The apocalyptic condition is actually emblematic of a Gothic norm;
therefore, the actual cause for anxiety is that this state has been normalized. Julia Round
argues, “cultural anxiety…is reflected throughout in Gothic’s focus on marginalized
social elements and its inversion of social and cultural norms” (14). I argue that rather
than inverting norms, the urban Gothic actually establishes a Gothic norm, which is in the
form of an apocalyptic state. This state may visibly reflect the novel’s contemporary
society, as would appear to be the case with Gothic representations of London, or the city
can be illustrated as a volatile state, perpetually on the verge of self-destruction, but
recovering from disaster just enough for another to strike, as with Gotham City. Gotham
will never be completely destroyed; nor will it ever completely recover. Thus, the city
maintains itself by the constant, cyclical recurrence of threat and temporary relief. The
city is not actually degenerating due to these fluctuations. Instead, it continues to exist,
maintaining a state that is just bad enough to necessitate a superhero, but not good
enough to eradicate all supervillains. Using Gotham City as a model of a Gothic state
maintained by its supervillains, I consider Gothic Victorian London as similarly
achieving an apocalyptic norm. The terror evoked by the urban Gothic, then, is not just
that Gothic villains threaten society but that the Gothic state has been normalized.
One way in which the fear of degeneration is exacerbated is through the spread of
disease. Nineteenth-century British physician John Milner Fothergill observes, “town life
is seen to have a malignant and sinister effect on the physique” (4). The popular claim
during this time was that the city debilitates the body and corrupts the mind. In Gothic
fiction, this is represented as an organic force exercised to maintain the city’s agency and
dilapidated condition. Further, “urban living, its diseases and pathologies, were leaving
metropolitan men and women vulnerable to fatigue and debility from prolonged exposure
to the pressures of the very environment which had formed them” (Greenslade 17).
Greenslade makes the argument that the diseased individuals have been created by their
environment. Following such a line of thinking, we can see that the abject, degenerating
city breeds different types of dehumanized offspring. It creates criminals and destitute
and diseased individuals. This is observable in London itself and reflected in the urban
Gothic fiction published during this time, as in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle, where, “like
a rhizomic body, the city is open to attack, infection, penetration, and infiltration from
any direction at any time” (Wolfreys 18). In the novel, London is infected by a foreigner,
the Beetle, who can taint the city’s inhabitants and threaten human lives. Likewise, in
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), humans can be contaminated by vampires, as Van
Helsing tells Mina Harker: “he have infect you” (Stoker 360), and risk becoming
vampires themselves. Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1894) also evokes the fear
of contamination within Gothic London. Villiers describes his feeling upon entering the
Herberts’s former lodgings: “It was as if I were inhaling at every breath some deadly
fume, which seemed to penetrate to every nerve and bone and sinew of my body. I felt
racked from head to foot, my eyes began to grow dim; it was like the entrance of death”
(n.p.). The air in the physical space has been tainted by the Gothic villain and may be
consumed by an individual who enters the space. Regarding the novel, Hurley also notes,
“the contagion of disgust spreads through and overwhelms the text” (49), as those who
interact with Helen have horrible, indescribable experiences that drive them to suicide.
There is some sort of supernatural effect on Helen’s victims, but the frequency and
similarity of circumstances illustrates a spread of a disease of psychological terror.
The fear of contamination adds to Gothic terror in fiction and is noted by
contemporary critics. Ridenhour claims, “disease, like crime, was particularly prone to
Gothicization because of its invisibility and killing force, and because of the difficulty in
preventing or controlling it” (32). Using such a powerful, uncontrollable contaminate,
then, Gothic authors can maintain their Gothic environment through widespread
infection. Considering Batman through such a lens allows us to see the ways in which
disease stimulates visible degeneration that becomes expected of Gotham City because
Gotham requires a threat to humanity. The actual spread of disease, its movement
through the city, and its effect on individuals is explored at length in the “Contagion” and
“Legacy” story arcs. In “Contagion,” the Order of St. Dumas infects Gotham with a
rapidly mutating, deadly strain of the Ebola virus. No one is allowed to leave Gotham,
which results in the inhabitants panicking and rioting. In its sequel series, “Legacy,”
Gotham is threatened by the plague returning. In both cases, the virus is brought into the
city by a villain trying to commit widespread destruction of human life. The two story
arcs demonstrate the instability of the city but not its complete destruction. Police
Commissioner Gordon says, “the mood of the city is ugly. It’s ready to plunge back into
panic and anarchy at any excuse” (Batman: Shadow of the Bat Vol 1, 53). Fear of the
plague causes a reversion in behavior, which allows the Gothic city to be in an anarchic
state. Pathology, then, may be viewed as a threat, but the larger threat is that an urban
condition where disease runs rampant is normal. This contrasts with Foucauldian theory
that “the plague-stricken town…is the utopia of the perfectly governed city” (Foucault
198). Rather, the spread of the disease is a figurative spread of the Gothic. There is no
strong discipline or control over the abject population of a Gothicized environment.
Batman’s surveillance and vigilantism try to control the criminal population, but the
constant resurgence of criminals thwart achieving a utopian vision of a “perfectly
governed” state.
Pathology has also been used as a Gothic trope comparing the spread of disease to
the spread of criminality. This rhetoric may be observed in the writings of early urban
social theorist, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In The Social Contract (1762), Rousseau calls a
crime-ridden state “terminally ill” and feels that an ill-governed state is at risk for dying
(17). This perception changes in Victorian writings, as the city is blamed for creating
criminals and then spreading the disease of criminality. In A Treatise on Man and the
Development of his Faculties (1842), Adolphe Quetelet argues, “society includes within
itself the germs of all the crimes committed, and at the same time the necessary facilities
for their development. It is the social state, in some measure, which prepares these
crimes, and the criminal is merely the instrument to execute them” (6). Crimes
themselves have “germs” that can infect others, perpetuating criminality in the city’s
inhabitants. Quetelet gives agency to the extant state of the city as providing the means
for crime and claims that such criminality is an inevitable result of the city’s condition.
George Sims, in How the Poor Live and Horrible London (1889) notes the degenerative
effect of proximity and its influence on crime (128). Criminality is repeatedly represented
as a pathological result of a contaminated environment.
In a similar vein, recent urban theorists and critics consider the acceptance and
exacerbation of criminal behavior in such an environment, where “unlawful behavior is
not only likely to become socially common but also socially approved. This, in turn,
creates a risk that the disregard of one rule may spread like a contagion infecting other
rules, with the result that doing what is practical in lieu of what is legal may become the
new normal in such an environment” (White, Sepe, and Masconale 20). The escalation of
crime occurs through contamination, which ultimately leads to the normalization of
criminality. Turning to Gothic fiction through this lens, the Gothic city has been seen to
maintain its state through the spread of disease. Considering the common rhetoric of
pathology the sociologists use regarding criminality, we can regard the Gothic metropolis
as an organism that can spread disease and spawn Gothicized criminal offspring to
further maintain its Gothic condition.
Despite the endemic nature of Gothic threats, in the Gothic metropolis extinction
will not be reached, but threats will recycle. Gothic villains prosper, threaten, and
destroy, but are thwarted by the “good” of the story. Batman and Gordon are able to
disrupt the criminals enough to hold off complete destruction of mankind but not enough
to eradicate the Gothicism of the city. Though fin de siècle literature does not contain a
mythic superhero like Batman, it does have foils to the Gothic villains in order to
suppress extreme criminal pursuits. The oppositions to the Gothic criminal restrain the
villain from gaining too much control or causing too much destruction. London will not
allow for all its inhabitants to become vampires, so it provides individuals who can track
Dracula’s movements in order to overcome the villain. Van Helsing and company team
up to chase and kill Count Dracula, while Sydney Atherton and associates pursue the
Beetle. Dorian Gray and Mr. Hyde are pursued by psychologically repressive forces. Dr.
Jekyll, as Mr. Hyde’s counterpart, is successful at destroying the Gothic villain within
himself. Dorian Gray fluctuates from feeling guilty to enjoying the pleasures of vice: “He
knew that he had tarnished himself, filled his mind with corruption and given horror to
his fancy; that he had been an evil influence to others, and had experienced a terrible joy
in being so…But was it all irretrievable? Was there no hope for him?” (Wilde 184).
Dorian acknowledges his pursuit for pleasures resulted in corruptive and destructive
behavior. By the end of the novel, he wants to return to a time of innocence and thinks
that destroying the painting will eliminate his past of sinful extravagance. Dorian,
therefore, is simultaneously superhero and supervillain, both succumbing to and fighting
against the destructive Hedonistic forces within him.
Yet, the defeat of a Gothic villain does not suggest progress for society. Gotham’s
fecundity produces new criminals, and defeated supervillains frequently reemerge. Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Dorian Gray end with their villains’ deaths but without any
suggestion that the city will lose its Gothicism as a result. In fact, because their London is
part of a Gothic universe, the eradication of one villain makes room for the arrival of the
next within a new Gothic text or an adapted version of an original. Therefore, there is no
evidence that society progresses following a villain’s destruction; rather there is a cycling
that constantly reverts back to a Gothicized status quo. As the Gothic evolves of time,
context may change to reflect external social and political concerns; yet, these pale in
comparison to the larger threat that the apocalyptic condition of the urban Gothic
universe has been normalized.