This paper has a number of origins and should, like The Castle of Otranto or the Name of the Rose, pretend to be the work of another, unknown author, found in mysterious circumstances. Instead an honest attempt is made to set out its multiple origins.
The first point of origin is that I used to teach at St Mary’s University which shares premises with Strawberry Hill House the home of Horace Walpole, the author of that first gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto. A related second is that the University is a Roman Catholic one and the gothic has long been associated with Catholicism (O’Malley, 2006). Thirdly in my criminology teaching I often start with, what I found myself eventually calling ‘gothic’ to describe the variously, ‘common-sensical’, ‘medieval’, ‘popular’, ‘religious’ or just nameless criminologies which trade in notions of sin, evil and guilt.[ii] That is a pre-modern (feudal) take on crime. I point out that none of these attitudes have been supplanted but merely supplemented and that with all these additions and accretions criminology itself might be seen as ‘gothic’ rather than ‘classical’ as the next week’s lecture would claim.
It was disconcerting to find Picart and Greek (2007a) already using the term rather differently than I was in my lectures; not pre-modern but postmodern. We shall examine all these but what we seem to share is the contention that the subject matter of criminology can be gothic. Gonzalez (2008) uses the term crypto-criminology to allude to some of the same issues.[iii]
And finally, channelling the more gothic Charlotte Brontë, gentle reader I own to a personal connection. Family myth, giving me my third name, claims distant descent from the family of Jane Austen. Finally published after her death, Northanger Abbey, is Jane’s ‘take down’ of the excesses of gothic romances like Walpole’s Castle of Otranto and more specifically Anne Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho. Some of her spirit but also that of Walpole will guide us.
Picart and Greek assert that Katz (1988) ‘discussed evil in Gothic dimensions (2007,19) in his analysis of ‘righteous slaughters’ and cold-blooded ‘senseless’ murder. The declaration on Katz’s front cover (for which I blame his publisher obviously) plays with the truecrime schlock school of popular criminology and might be reason enough to declare it gothic, ‘A CHILLING EXPLORATION OF THE CRIMINAL MIND - FROM JUVENILE DELINQUENCY TO COLD-BLOODED MURDER’.
Katz does not use the term ‘Gothic’ in his book save once to describe the script used in some graffiti. He does, however, make extensive use of the word evil. One example particularly caught my eye. Discussing some gangs Katz noted that the Conservative Vice Lords (!):
wore black capes with gold lettering and earring; using a top hat, canes, and gloves, they created a logo worthy of a collaboration between Noel Coward and the devil (1988,136)That does not immediately suggest evil nor the gothic but camp! Fincher (2006) suggests that the Gothic is camp because it is queer. Fincher opens his article with a quote from Susan Sontag:
in the eighteenth century; there the origins of Camp taste are to be found (Gothic novels, Chinoiserie, caricature, artificial ruins, and so forth). But the relation to nature was quite different then. In the eighteenth century, people of taste either patronized nature (Strawberry Hill) or attempted to remake it into something artificial (Versailles). (2018,10)It is gratifying to see the queer, the camp and Strawberry Hill all brought together. I have not written about camp before but saw the outside of Strawberry Hill House most days for 20 years and the inside often before its restoration and the inside on several occasions since. In 2010 I also attended the V&;A’s exhibition about Walpole and Strawberry Hill House.[iv] I have written about what has now become ‘queer criminology’ (Groombridge, 1999) and for the Sage Dictionary about ‘queer theory’. Katz’s work is due a thorough reconsideration from a queer perspective which would be as post-modern as Picart and Greek’s (2007b) claims for him as gothic.
One trouble for Picart and Greek (2007a) and, indeed, for some of my own arguments, are the definitional issues. Edmundson (1999:29) asserts that a weakness of Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae, ‘lies in Paglia’s inability to find much that’s not Gothic in art from the late eighteenth century to the present’. Edmundson seems himself to find much gothic in popular culture from soap opera and reality TV to literature and the more obvious horror film genre. Similarly, Picart and Greek (2007b) tend to see everything that criminology looks at to be gothic. Punter goes further claiming gothic, is the paradigm of all fiction, all textuality’ (1998,1).
I shall examine each of the chapters in Picart and Greek’s edited collection (2007a), many by them. I shall then pick up on other’s use of the term gothic in criminology before concluding with my own proposed use of it.
Monsters All
Peter Lorre is pictured on the front cover, his eyes are droopy and ‘dead’, he has a scar on his forehead and a cigarette dangling from his lips. The poster for the film The Man Who Knew Too Much (Alfred Hitchcock, 1934) transforms his physiognomy still further to a caricature of evil. Some that ‘evil’ may have been carried over from playing the child murderer in Fritz Lang’s M (1931). The charity Changing Faces (2017) noted the discrimination and hate crime suffered by people with disfigurements. He’s not Emily Brontë’s (1870) Heathcliff nor Anne Rice’s (1977) Lestat. He is not the brooding hero/villain of early gothic fiction - and we shall return to him when looking specifically at Benson’s chapter (2007). I mention it here because it signals early my unease about too readily reaching for the gothic label.
Picart and Greek’s chapter is extensive and introductory aiming ‘toward a gothic criminology’ with its ‘focus on themes such as blood lust, compulsion, fear, godlike vengeance, and power and domination’ (2007b:11). This may be gothic, but it plays to the true crime and schlocky end of crime talk. Early on they quote Edmundson on the growth of the gothic in, ’American popular culture, academia and even public policy’ (1997:xii). They and their contributors might have done well to make more use of him than that. For instance, when he notes, ‘Jane Austen and her brilliant rebuttal to the Gothic genius of her age’ (1999,138).
Picart and Greek (2007a) point to two sources for gothic criminology; first gothic literature and secondly Stanford Lyman’s ‘gothic sociology’ (Lyman,1990) and his sociology of evil (1989). Picart and Greek (2007a) recognise the polysemy of the term gothic to mean either ‘primitive’ or a returning aspect of European civilisation repressed by Enlightenment thinking; or goth sub-culture but recognising the original architectural usage. I am not a historian but the contention that 18th Century England was marked by reason and order might take have been taken with a pinch of salt or some Foucault.
I have to agree that, ‘the settings and trappings of the Gothic have become such a hallmark of horror that they have become cliché gimmicks’ (2007a,23) and fear that Picart and Greek reproduce too many of them. I would also challenge their association of the gothic with Christianity, I prefer O’Malley’s (2006) association of it with Roman Catholic Christianity specifically. O’Malley illustrates this point by quotes from Austen’s Northanger Abbey in his opening paragraphs where our gothic-loving protagonist Catherine Morland is given no doubt that in Protestant England her fears cannot be justified.
Drawing from an internet Glossary of Literary Gothic Terms[v] they find the following themes appear in both the Gothic and criminology:
body snatching, claustrophobia, the devil, imprisonment, exorcism, the grotesque, the Inquisition, masochism and sadism, necromancy, possession, the pursued protagonist, pursuit of heroines, revenge, reason, somnambulism, superstition, transformation/metamorphosis, and witches and witchcraft. (2007a,29)I would certainly include many of those in my simpler definition of gothic criminology as early or pre-criminology and am glad to hear them declare, ‘the primary effort of criminology has been to demystify concepts such as these’ (2007a,29) but the whole book is haunted by those terms and a celebration of them.
They particularly pick up on issues of imprisonment and punishment. In my lectures on the justifications for punishment I note the usual acceptable ones of deterrence, retribution and rehabilitation generated by Enlightenment and Positivist or neo-classical criminologies but also a strain of revenge that plays out in popular/populist penology. This is the gothic. Yet, when noting the victimisation of virtuous and idealistic heroines they miss the chance to mention Northanger Abbey.
Finally, some sympathy for the Devil is examined. They note criminology ‘long ago sought to eliminate discussions of the devil or persons influenced by the devil to do evil’ (2007a,31/32). Agreed, putting my hands up to that one and feel strongly they should have done more to disentangle demonology and criminology.
Towards the end of their chapter they introduce the rest of the chapters in the anthology and this will be drawn on for discussing those chapters below. True to the book’s title Picart and Greek (2007a) state the chapters will all be about ‘contemporary monsters’ which, derived from Latin, warn (monere) or point to (monstrare) the boundary between the horror and the fascination. The ‘monsters’ represented are:
Ingebretsen (2007) paedophilic homosexual priests;Houck (2007) the hyper-masculinised rogue cop;Benson (2007) the masculinised mother;McKahan (2007) the drug addict;Gill (2007) the white-collar criminal;The Reverend Ingebretsen (2007) drawing on his own book Ingebretsen (2001) seems to be right in identifying a gothic theme to some coverage of priest’s sex with children or young people but he also notes the similarity between Church cover ups and those relating to the Enron corporation. Foucault is cited on the disciplinary power of priests and therefore our fascination with their imperfections. He is right to distinguish paedophilia from ephebophilia and to note that other priests of other denominations were equally suspected but wrong to downgrade those observations to a footnote. Unhelpfully for Picart and Greek’s (2007a) project he notes the emergence of the gothic as ‘the genre of the age’ and ‘a style of memory – late postmodern pastiche’ (2007,60).
Greek (2007) the hyper-masculinised rogue cop and corrupt practices;Surette (2007) Paranoid policy making;Picart and Greek (2007c) the serial killer andPicart and Greek 2007d the terrorist.
For Picart and Greek (2007b) the City itself has become a gothic monster and Houck (2007) examines the hyper-masculinised rogue cop that bestrides it, Dirty Harry. Yet despite the effusive, and repeated, thanks he gives to his editors Houck’s chapter doesn’t really help Picart and Greek’s (2007a) development of a gothic criminology let alone a coherent one.
Early on Houck admits, ‘this is not to say that Dirty Harry is a Gothic film per se’ (2007,68). We are treated to an annotated synopsis of the movie. There are precious few mentions of the gothic beyond some assertions about the city and Harry and his doubled villain. There are, however, many rather straight forward Freudian readings of the phallic nature of Harry’s gun and various buildings. As the chapter title archly suggests, ‘my that’s a big one’.
A queer reading suggests itself too. For instance, in discussing Harry’s relationship to his bosses, ‘such foppery might be appropriate for the “fifth floor” but it might get you killed or rendered queer – perhaps both outside precinct headquarters’ (2007,77). Two pages later Houck, musing on why Harry is called ‘dirty’, says, ‘The whole queer bureaucratic edifice buggers harry; the “fifth floor” continues to sodomize its most virile hard body” (2007,79). Clearly neither a Freudian nor queer reading rules out the gothic but these both run stronger in this chapter.
Analysing the 1934 version of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much Benson (2007) pits the damaged masculinity of the villain, Abbot – played by Peter Lorre, discussed above – against that of the masculinised mother who shoots one of the villain’s accomplices, Ramon. Abbot himself is shot by the police so the doubling that Benson presents as gothic is only partial. Benson does not pretend that the film is gothic though makes much of Hitchcock’s exposure to German expressionist film but he glosses it as gothic.
Like several other contributors he relies on Ingebretsen (2001) on the meaning of the monstrous and monsters; showing us boundaries, allowing ‘a community to reinterpret itself’ (Benson 2007,92). That seems like a Durkheimian functionalist view of the role of deviants and criminals more generally which most criminologists operate with without resort to monsters.
Abbott is marked as monstrous by his physiognomy (no mention of Lombroso or phrenology). MacArthur (2011) notes how in adapting Psycho Hitchcock casts the conventionally good-looking Anthony Perkins not the fat bespectacled protagonist of the novel. Benson recognises he has a bit of a sell in depicting the ‘poised, accomplished, and loving modern mother’ (2007,93) as monstrous. Clearly, she is a modern, possibly feminist woman. It is she who is competing in an international skeet shooting competition and can dance with another man in front of her husband. That man is then shot in her arms! I am sure when the film was released, she might have been seen as progressive, if not ‘fast’, but Benson’s citation of John Knox from 1558 on the monstrousness of a women exercising a weapon doesn’t convince. Whilst the gothic is touched on throughout a much stronger case is made within Benson’s chapter for a nationalist reading of English pluck winning out against ‘Johnny Foreigner’. Moreover, towards the end Benson starts to offer a Bakhtininan, carnivalesque reading of the film. Slightly beside the point but I’m concerned that the skills required to use a shotgun on clay ‘pigeons’ and those to use a rifle to shoot the baddie standing by your daughter are too easily overlooked.
Ingebretsen’s (2001) warning of monsters is mentioned again in McKahan’s (2007) analysis of the drug addict.[vi] He notes the use of gothic tropes in some drugs films and reporting. Thus, despite claiming the horror – particularly of drug-related deaths - was beyond depiction reporters ‘seemed to impose Gothic narrative discourses’ (2007,119). It would have been nice to have had some reports analysed to back this up. Indeed, he briefly referred to ‘execution-style’ killings earlier in the sentence which, however gruesome, suggests rationality more than righteous slaughter.
McKahan makes the claim - relying on Ingebretsen (2001) – that there has been ‘an expansion in the Gothic writing style of criminology in the cold war discourses of the 1950s’ (2007,121). A big claim and reference to Ingebretsen’s work doesn’t seem to back it up nor does my own knowledge of criminological literature. I am grateful to have an analysis of some very old movies like Edison’s 1894 Chinese Opium Den and the Lumières Fumiere d’opium (1899/90). These representations are inaccurate and, today, insultingly racist and sexist. I should have known such dens were legal for the Chinese then. Other films are found to use stereotypical and clichéd depictions of drugs, their effects and users but racism and orientalism seem to feature more strongly than the gothic.
In Picart and Greek’s (2007b,35) introduction to Gill’s (2007) chapter on white-collar crime as monstrous they cite Marx on the vampiric nature of capitalism depicted in Das Capital. Gill makes no mention of Marx. Both might have usefully referred to Neocleous (2003) on the wider vampire discourse in Marx (as there are only three specific vampire mentions in the whole of Das Capital). Others argue that Marx himself was a gothic writer (for instance Francis Wheen, 2006)[vii]. Lyman (1989) may have influenced Picart and Greek (2007b) but none of his writings on the sins of white-collar crime are cited by Gill, and Ingebretsen (2001) gets a mention in the references but not in the text.
But to return to the unmentioned Marx. Gill notes the rise of dramatic representations of monsters, the ‘successful corporate bloodsuckers’ who run ‘profitable if malign organizations and companies’ (2007,142). However, after the introduction, half of the chapter looks at the horror genre and specifically teen-friendly TV series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Beyond recognising the titles I don’t know any of the series but a number of takes on the horror genre over time are set out. Do they support or subvert conventional moral codes? The second half mentions the corporate malfeasance and corrupt practices of authorities and their agents. Again, the gothic is touched upon. None of this readily supports Picart and Greek’s (2007a) gothic criminology.
Greek (2007) examines the hyper-masculinised rogue cop and corrupt practices in films about the NYPD and LAPD using the Jewish legend of the Golem. As ever there is a nod to the work of Ingebretsen (2001). Bertman (2015) explores potential links between the Golem and Frankenstein’s monster but it is surprising Greek (2007) does not make the connection, particularly when noting the Golem and the police’s tendency to become uncontrolled. Greek oversimplifies - to help his cause - by claiming that the Golem and the police share a mission ‘to protect and serve’ (2007,164). There is clearly a compensatory strand in Jewish folklore that would welcome a mighty protector, but many Golem’s are simply household slaves or even potential sex-slaves (Morris,2004).
Greek (2007) examines a number of movies from the 80 and 90s and the real police scandals sometimes reflected in those movies like the beating of Rodney King and deaths and beatings in custody. His readings of good cop/bad cop and due process/crime control movies are unexceptional and back up his assertion on the criminological significance of such movies. I am far from convinced the films ‘fall squarely within an American Gothic tradition that first appeared in the gangster films of the 1930s and film noir crime dramas of the 1940s and 1950s.’ (Greek 2007,166).
In other discussion of the Golem he mentions Meyrink’s (2010) version where instead of the Golem aspiring to a human state the humans become robotic. A mention of Robocop might have been made hear as might some attempt to engage with Houck’s earlier work on Dirty Harry rather than just trail of in discussion of the cops in Prince of the City, ‘they model themselves on the rogue cops in a Clint Eastwood film’ (2007,175).
From time to time a cop is seen to be Golem-like but he makes a very interesting point in discussing Dark Blue 'the closing moments feel tacked on …as the bad cop … redeems himself by destroying the entire corrupt bureaucracy’ (2007,186). That sounds like the actions of a golem or even a blinded samson but to analyse the film as depicting a golem-like figure based on the section you don’t think fits seems perverse.
In discussion Greek (2007) sees the distaste amongst police officers for such dramas as congruent with Surette’s analysis in the following chapter to which we now turn. In their introductory chapter Picart and Greek make clear their disagreement with Surette saying his conception of ‘gothic criminology’ is ‘the opposite of what we mean by the term’ (2007b,28). They suggest his concerns about the influence of the gothic on criminal justice policy ‘assumes an uncritical engagement’ and misses that their gothic criminology maintains the ‘humanity of its monsters’ (2007b,28). Perhaps this is why he proposes a critical gothic criminology, but they feel that theirs already is. Surette may have a simpler nastier gothic criminology in mind a bit like my proposed usage. We shall see.
Surette’s chapter is very different in that he has read the introduction and the work of other contributors. This gives us a chance to further analyse some of these issues. Surette sets out his take on gothic criminology. It is not always clear if he means his version, Picart and Greek’s (2007a) or, more often, the media’s popular/populist version but he makes many good points. Surette notes, gothic criminology ‘reexamines the notions of sin, evil and foreignness’ after ‘mainstream criminology migrated to scientific positivism and … “deviance”’ (2007,199) which I’ll take as support for my contention for a pre-modern gothic which now lives on in late and post-modern forms. Combatively he also lumps both serial killers and their profilers together in the gothic universe. He is also very clear on his social constructionist theoretical perspective. In this both factual and fictional media play a strong role and the whole feeds back into criminal justice policy. He runs us through his law of opposites whereby the uncommon crimes of serial killers are given the greatest coverage and common property crimes given the least. Moreover, the front-end of criminal justice – policing – is covered more than the backend though I think he might be downplaying the gothic charms of prisons and the movies that depict them.
He is concerned that in this gothic atmosphere crime is no longer seen as a social problem but down to ‘biology or mythology’ (2007,205). He sets out five broad theoretical perspectives in criminology but first makes a further statement about how he sees gothic criminology, which raises the ‘grim possibility that crime cannot be explained … that it may simply be an unavoidable form of evil or mysterious fact of social life’ (2007,208). This is clearly the pre-criminology that I argue should alone bear the title ‘gothic criminology’. As a ‘pre-criminology’ perhaps it should not be admitted to the canon but I’ve always drawn criminology widely to include any attempt to talk about crime and what to do about it from the Bible to boxoffice, Beccaria to Lombroso and right realist to left idealist etc and back again. Whilst this gothic criminology may not be able to explain crime it still ‘knows’ what to do about it: from praying to brutal and arbitrary purgings whose theological intentions can’t disguise their punitive effect.
Surette (2007) finds something about the gothic to discuss in all the theoretical perspectives. First, he links classicism and rational choice theories with their emphasis on the rational actor rather than the criminal – for which reason some might exclude these from the criminological canon – so rightly associates much business crime with such a calculating attitude. He goes too far, though, by importing gothic imagery in portraying such a person also to be a ‘violent ladies’ man’ (2007,209). He goes even further awry in claiming a connection between classicist demands that ‘punishment must be swift and decisive’ and the gothic. He is plainly wrong here. My gothic criminology and the popular gothic expect arbitrary, protracted, spectacular punishment; so arbitrary that sometimes the wicked are not punished at all.
His second group are biological theories of crime. Clearly the disfigured monster is popularly and prejudicially associated with crime and sin long before Lombroso tried to catalogue it. Moving from the biological to the psychological for his third group he notes the tendency for media depictions of vampires to have a strong psychological content.
He is correct in claiming that the fourth group of the sociological don’t sit well with the gothic other than providing a mise en scène such as a rural or foreign setting, but he does miss a trick here too. MacArthur (2011) makes a strong claim that some early gothic novels reflect concerns about the French Revolution. Moreover, she notes, arch-conservative Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France wrote his warnings in gothic terms, fearing that the highwayman or murderer, in pursuit of his natural rights, had ‘escaped from the protecting restraint and wholesome darkness of his cell (2011,11).
In his fifth group what might be called critical criminologies are seen to demand societal action and criminal justice reform so have less media interest and potential for gothic reportage. Valier (2002) is scandalously ignored by all contributors to Picart and Greek but she examines the power of horror and specifically notes the, ‘gothic seductions of contemporary punitive populism’ (2007,319). Surette too notes the social conservatism of the gothic and fears for the populist criminal justice policies and practices that in entrains. He even sees the ‘Three strikes and you’re out’ policies for locking up third time serious offenders for long periods a gothic policy. I’m less sure and might want to play up the political dimension, including the role of the National Rifle Association (a gothic monster?).
Surette’s real concern is with the media. He wants context and, intriguingly suggests sports news as a potential model. With statistics, forecasts and commentary etc. I’m less sure as much of that is vacuous filler and pointless speculation. But televised or internet audio streamed trials with expert commentary may be a first start in shining some light into the gothic of our courts.
Surette (2007) includes some consideration of serial killers and their hunters but Picart and Greek (2007c) give a whole chapter to the topic and the compulsions they share with vampires. They follow Simpson (2000) in linking these factual and fictional monsters. Much of the chapter is given to lengthy descriptions of a number of ‘80s serial killer movies with analysis linking to the real cases that inspired the stories. They note that such movies mirror the demographic of white male protagonists. I don’t know the movies or cases well enough to comment on the adequacies of description and analysis. I agree that it ‘may now be impossible to separate real serial killers from their reel life counterparts’ (2007c,249). We are taken through some of the definitional issues of what constitutes a serial, spree and mass killer. They note too that such killers would not be recognisable by external physical features that Lombroso would expect. Frustratingly, they set out the cycle of build-up to killing and argue that it might fit the heterosexual male but not, ‘if the serial killer turns out female and lesbian (and from the lower classes)’ (2007c,253) then close the chapter there!
Jarvis (2007) writing at the same time examines some of the same issues but includes more recent films and the wider culture of murderabilia and serial killer fandom. It is understandable his work is not covered by Picart and Greek (2007c) but very poor that Greek (2017) does not remedy that deficiency. Jarvis connects the serial killer’s consumption of body parts with our consumption including of serial killer movies and memorabilia. Marx’s deployment of gothic metaphor features strongly.
Also woefully ignored is Halttunen’s (1998) Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination which covers some of the same ground. She notes it is possible to contest the gothic even when faced with murder; she speaks of Sister Prejean and Detective Somerset who ‘will not label murderers as moral aberrations, subhuman monsters. The murdered is not, they agree, the devil; he’s just a man’. Though, perhaps a trace remains as the quote immediately continues, ‘subject to sin as they are subject to sin’ (1998,250).
Picart and Greek (2007d) examine the terrorist as Mass Murderer in their final concluding chapter. They conclude that chapter rather hopefully suggesting they have offered a ‘rich panoply of tools for getting at complex stories of how “evil monsters” -within and without, individual or communal – are generated’ (2007d,283). I agree they have attempted to read a number of complex stories sometimes through a gothic lens but more frequently other analytical frameworks offer themselves. Thus, the focus on islamist terrorism in this chapter raises the issue of race and orientalism. They rightly address this; often more so than mentions of gothic. Of at least two films they discuss they say of one that, ‘the film has few gothic elements’ (2007d,274) and of the other, ‘there is no stereotypic low-key lighting’ (2007d,279). Whilst the white supremacist bombing in Oklahoma City is mentioned in passing no high school massacres or workplace examples of people ‘going postal’ are mentioned. Did they not fit even the loose definition of the gothic they employ?
The gothic in criminology and law
We have already noted Valier’s (2002) discussion of the gothic but there have been many other contributions in both law and criminology. Some engagements go deeper than others with mentions of the gothic or deployment of the term to illustrate a point. None present as a specifically gothic criminology. Literary and cultural studies contributions cannot but help notice the extent of crime in gothic literature and practices. Punter claims many early gothic novels are ‘obsessed with the law, with its operations, justifications, limits’ (1998:19) and so should crime be though criminology rates only one glancing mention. Bridging the gap from literature and towards the law and criminology Moran finds the gothic in Bentham’s work posing his rationalism against the ‘ghostly presence, a set of fictions, that haunts law’s reason’ (2005,89). Moran also notes:
Criminal law, criminal justice and criminology are locations par excellence of production of ideas of evil, particularly in the context of violence and sexual acts. There is a long juridical tradition of associations between criminality, particular bodies, the monstrous and the grotesque. (2001,79)More specifically from criminology we find Young (1996) noting the influence of the gothic on romantic views of some criminals. Not content with hybridising cultural and green criminology Nigel South (2017) adds gothic to the mix – a golem, monster or welcome addition to the criminology family? Several other contributors to Brown and Carrabine (2017) also mention the gothic in passing. South relies (2017) on Rafter and Ystehede (2010) for his discussion of gothic criminology and only mentions Picart and Greek (2007a) glancingly.
In his ‘update’ on gothic criminology Greek (2017) fails to mention Rafter and Ystehede (2010). One suggestion might be the merely glancing reference to Picart and Greek (2007a) by Rafter and Ystehede (2010). Of the four mentions of Lombroso in Picart and Greek (2007a) none firmly picture him or his concerns as gothic. A couple associate his biologism with the gothic. On the other hand Rafter and Ystehede are clear from the start, ‘we locate Lombroso’s science of criminal anthropology in the context of late nineteenth-century Gothicism’ (2010,263). Which reminds that there are different gothics from pre-modern to Picart and Greek’s (2007a) postmodern one via my architecturally inspired one and Walpolian (Strawberry Hill House) and Victorian ones (Pugin’s Houses of Parliament).
Such was Lombroso’s gift for publicity criminology his work is cited directly by Stoker in Dracula, ‘The Count is a criminal and of criminal type. Nordau and Lombroso would so classify him, and quâ criminal he is of imperfectly formed mind’. We find too that Lombroso believed in life after death and spirits.
As a gothic criminologist ‘Lombroso conjured up mentally warped and physically hideous figures; to tame these monsters, he called for new, more drastic forms of social control (2010,270). Suitably vampiric, a famous quote from Lombroso-Ferrero eventually speaks of ‘the irresponsible craving for evil for its own sake, the desire not only to extinguish life in the victim, but to mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh and to drink its blood’ (1911,24/25). All of this Gothicism at the same time as the attempt to do science. Rafter and Ystehede (2010) see this as a form of gothic doubling whereby the gothic is not the antithesis of the Enlightenment but its flipside.
Rafter and Ystehede suggest ‘Lombroso’s influence persisted, especially on analyses of female criminality (Rafter and Gibson, 2004), but by the end of the century, scientific Gothicism had migrated into psychoanalysis and popular culture’ (2010,279). These would seem to suggest fertile ground for further enquiry.
Whilst Lombroso was often progressive in his policy proposals for much crime he was ‘draconian’ (Rafter and Ystehede 2010,279) on born criminals. I noted earlier the failure of Picart and Greek’s (2007a) contributors it is especially egregious when Rafter and Ystehede (2010) pick out this from Halttunen:
The Gothic narrative of the crime of murder played a primary role in shaping the modern response to criminal transgression, both mandating the social quarantining of criminals in penitentiaries and mental hospitals, and reinforcing the radical otherness of the criminal deviant on which that quarantining rested’’ (1998, p. 248).Relegated to a footnote they find a gothic content in Stan Cohen’s (1979) The Last Seminar. Rafter and Ystehede (2010,282) state, ‘In Cohen’s story, it is not the criminals who are to be feared but academia and the discipline of criminology itself, which he pictures as a cross between a hydra and a haunted tower of Babel’. For me this is not gothic criminology but a recognition that criminology itself tout court may be marked by the gothic.
Arntfield (2016) also mention Picart and Greek (2007a) en passant as coining the term ‘gothic criminology’ but had derived a connection between contemporaries, Bram Stoker and Lombroso in their study of the influence of the gothic on criminal investigation and forensics. He concludes by calling for a literary criminology; perhaps the books and articles I’ve been discussing; and this too, is just that.
Sothcott (2016) barely mentions Picart and Greek (2007a) but riffs extensively on Valier (2008). Valier (2008) finds the moral panic framework inadequate given the permanency of gothic events. Given his examination of the use of representations of the gothic to support a punitive populism his failure to cite Surette (2007) is strange. Sothcott (2016) finds however that the gothic can also be an identity that stands with not just against ‘the other’. His preferred framework is a cultural criminological reading of the TV series Gotham. Instead of a good/bad Manicheanism he finds nuance.
He is wrong to claim, ‘As its name implies, Gotham City is also imagined as a place of Gothic ambiguity’ (2106, 439). He is right that in Batman comics and movies it has acquired that but its application to New York City comes from a Washington Irving article and many point to the ‘Wise Men of Gotham’ a tale about a town in Nottingham, UK that wanted to avoid the cost of a visit from King John. They acted foolishly to persuade him elsewhere (Nigro 2011).[viii]
This is my first proper extensive engagement with the gothic in writing but in my sports criminology book (Groombridge, 2016) I review a host of criminologies and smuggle my definition of gothic in whilst mentioning Picart and Greek (2007a) too. Moreover, my Perverse Criminologies (Groombridge, 1999) is seen by some as ‘queer’ and I’ve already connected that to camp and the gothic above but clearly with my subtitle, ‘the closet of Doctor Lombroso’ I reference German Expressionist cinema, a further iteration of the gothic. Therefore, in one sense I was already doing what Picart and Greek (2007a) now call gothic criminology. In the next section I actually try consciously to apply the gothic.
Doing gothic criminology
Whether we accept Picart and Greek’s (2007) or my more limited definition of gothic criminology it has been clear I feel even they stretch the meaning of gothic and some of their contributors barely try to fully address it. Here I’ll attempt some of my own.
My PhD (1997) was on Car Crime, specifically: the taking and driving away of; or taking without consent of the owner (TWOC); or even simple theft of a motor vehicle not for profit or as part of an insurance fraud by the owner but for fun, commonly known as joyriding (or sometimes twoccing by the young men responsible). Clearly as young men often below the legal age for driving (in the UK) their driving was not always good and ‘displaying’ the stolen car on your estate become a fashion, so deaths occurred; sometimes in the course of a police chase. How can we drag the gothic into such a modernist consumerist crime? Many were serial offenders, but it was the, sometimes, horrific injuries that grabbed the media and political headlines.
Kenneth Baker, the home secretary, told the 1991 Tory party conference ‘As we all know, some joyriders are deathriders who wreck property and other people's lives’ (Furbisher and Hughes, 1991). His usage did not take off but in 2002 ‘Kieran Conlon snr struggled with his emotions as he demanded tougher laws for offenders and appealed for the community to turn its back on the death drivers’ (Murray, 2002). In the next year a couple of local newspapers used the term. A search on Lexis Nexis finds no use of the term in the last year. What might be seen as an attempt to deploy a gothic linguistic censure (Sumner, 2005) of joyriding fails.
Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Phantom of the Opera contains many crimes and a gothic story line derived from a novel stereotypically involving a disfigured protagonist. As a musical (with strong operatic elements) audiences apear to overlook his crimes as incidents that punctuate and drive the plot – attempted murder, two murders, kidnapping, coercive control, blackmail etc. Hogle (2016) mentions crime rarely in his book and referencing Lambroso (!) a couple of times does not inspire confidence. Just as Psycho and Nightmare on Elm Street etc are endlessly called in aid of the gothic the same might be done for Phantom.[ix] More people have seen it than many horror and crime movies. Here the intention in part is to side with Sothcott (2016) and Valier (2008) to show that the gothic does not always support a gothic penal response. The police fail to catch the Phantom and he disappears leaving only his mask.
Sometimes Gothicism is attached to the victim and not the offender. Sophie Lancaster was murdered for being a goth.[x] The Columbine school shooting is only mentioned by Picart and Greek (2007a) as a mass shooting incident. Most will know that the supposed goth leanings of the perpetrators were amongst a number of other ‘explanations’ (videogames, pop music). Griffiths (2010) examines some of the same themes as Valier (2008) and Sothcott (2016) examining the self-identifying goths pictures as folk devils after Columbine. Griffiths (2010) notes physical and online attacks on goths, rules against black gear by schools and panicked media moralising. But interviewing goths (in New Zealand) he found a robust fight back by the ‘folk devils’ online and in mainstream media rejecting the label.
Conclusion
I find many of Picart and Greek’s (2007a) readings and those of their contributors illuminating but not always that gothic. It seems that they are engaged in cultural criminology - of which I approve and practice - sometimes in a post-modern style. They find much which is criminal or deviant and might be called gothic. I’m not convinced that this amounts to a gothic criminology. Many of the contributors specifically cite Ingebretsen (2001) or channel him in their use of monster and monstrous throughout. This is not gothic criminology but monstrous criminology. In the thirteen years since the publication of Monsters In and Among Us cultural, visual, queer and narrative criminologies have all grown but the specifically gothic has not made the same progress. Greek (2017) is still hopeful and as we have seen the term gothic is widely used in a variety of criminological texts.
I wish Picart and Greek (2007a) well but here I want to make explicit that which has been implicit throughout that I want to reclaim the gothic from postmodern takes; to recognise that gothic literature was part of a Romantic backlash against Industrialisation but that it did so through a folk memory of a gothic reality not just a fictive one. That is then victims did not tremble whilst reading Lewis’s The Monk by candlelight but lived in mortal terror of their own feudal lords and religious leaders. To return to Jane Austen, MacArthur notes that Catherine, the naïve heroine of Northanger Abbey, credits ‘even the most ordinary object with Gothic significance’ (2011,9). Picart and Greek (2007) seem to do so and try to drag their contributors along with them.
It should be clear that I don’t believe in evil. I don’t think Picart and Greek (2007a) necessarily do; Katz (1988) may well do. Equally I don’t believe in good nor in the supernatural personifications of the Devil and God. To that extent I am a rationalist but beneath the shine of Apollo I still feel the tug of the dark wine of Dionysus. I have no religion or faith yet taught for 20 years at a Roman Catholic University. It seemed right to start my first year criminology lectures with ‘sin’, to help describe a time when there was no criminology to describe crime just theology. Indeed, using Jerome Cohen (1996) Picart and Greek note how, ‘the languages of theology and the Gothic imagination lurk’ (2007b,13) in factual and fictional secular realms.
Impara (2016) mentions Picart and Greek (2007a) but it is her discussion of medieval crimes, and particularly medieval punishments, that is my concern here. As Valier notes ‘gothic writes the present through the evocation of dark medievalism, with the terrifying return of the violence concealed within, yet at the same time enacted by, modern law’ (2002,332). It is this gothic penology that classicism sought to overturn. It is pre-modern not post-modern yet haunts us still (a gothic image) it is this older urGothic - if you like -that I feel should be called gothic criminology and criminology more generally should recognise its gothic elements. These are with us today as Valier notes, ‘gothic tropes are embedded in the practices of the institutions of crime control and punishment themselves’ (2002,321). Or, as Surette has it, ‘Gothic criminology does quite well both historically and contemporarily …the most primitive, long-discredited Gothic theories of crime, such as demonic possession, continually are presented as credible explanations in popular cultural renditions’ (207,212).
The straight lines and clear purposes of classicism set out in penal codes and the American Constitution etc are derived from a reading of ancient architecture. Gothic architecture turns much of that on its head and precedes gothic literature by some several hundred years and informs the settings of early gothic novels and romances. The labyrinthine cellars of the Walpole’s (1998) Castle of Otranto and the elaboration of the architecture of Prague’s Cathedral in Kafka’s The Trial (Kafka,1983) can be connected. Jirsa (2015) connects Kafka’s writing to the cathedral specifically but following Bridgwater (2003) I’d argue Kafka’s work, particularly The Trial and The Castle are modernist workings of themes in gothic literature present then and today. Picart and Greek’s (2007) criminology would be illuminated by more than ascribing ‘gothic’ to a few monstrous aspects of American popular culture and also take into account more European literature, architecture and academics. More too should be made of the Venn diagram where both Marx and Lombroso are clearly gothic thinkers. More generally there should be an expectation that one might also be pastiched and parodied. Remember too that the figure of the detective starts to emerge in some gothic writing. The detective offers a way out of the gothic via the rational.
But, to return to Walpole and his gothic villa, Strawberry Hill House[xi], I know from personal experience that it is no Castle of Otranto. Its exterior is bright white and its interior glows with gilt. Walpole was aiming for a feeling of ‘gloomth’ (his neologism). I’m sure Jane Austen would have loved it. She’d see more camp style than evil.
References
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Austen, J., 2002. Northanger Abbey. Broadview Press.
Benson, T., 2007. Mother and Monster: The Rhetorical Structure of Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much. Monsters in and Among Us: Toward a Gothic Criminology, p.91.
Bertman, S., 2015. The Role of the Golem in the Making of Frankenstein. The Keats-Shelley Review, 29(1), pp.42-50.
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Brontë, E., 1870. Wuthering heights. Smith, Elder.
Brown, M. and Carrabine, E. eds., 2017. Routledge international handbook of visual criminology. London: Routledge.
Changing Faces, 2017. Disfigurement in the UK. London: Changing Faces. Available at https://www.changingfaces.org.uk/campaign/dituk accessed 20 April 2020.
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Cohen, S., 1979. The last seminar. The Sociological Review, 27(1), pp.5-20.
Edmundson, M., 1999. Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, sadomasochism, and the culture of gothic. Harvard University Press.
Fiddler, M., 2011. A ‘system of light before being a figure of stone’: The phantasmagoric prison. Crime, Media, Culture, 7(1), pp.83-97.
Fincher, M., 2006. The Gothic as Camp: Queer Aesthetics in The Monk. Romanticism on the Net, (44).
Flanagan, K., 2016. Sociological Noir: Irruptions and the Darkness of Modernity. Taylor and Francis.
Furbisher, J. and Hughes D., 3 November 1991 ‘Death-Riders’ The Sunday Times (London)
Gill, P., 2007. Making a Killing in the Marketplace: Incorporation as a Monstrous Process. Monsters In and Among Us: Toward A Gothic Criminology, pp.142-163.
Greek, C., 2007. The big city rogue cop as monster: Images of NYPD and LAPD. Monsters in and among us: Toward a gothic criminology, pp.164-198.
Greek, C., 2017. Gothic Criminology. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice. Available at https://oxfordre.com/criminology/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264079.001.0001/acrefore-9780190264079-e-150?rskey=XjW01l&result=1 acceded 15 April 2020.
Griffiths, R., 2010. The gothic folk devils strike back! Theorizing folk devil reaction in the post-Columbine era. Journal of youth studies, 13(3), pp.403-422.
Groombridge, N., 1997. The car and crime: critical perspectives (Doctoral dissertation, Middlesex University).
Groombridge, N., 1999. Perverse criminologies: the closet of Doctor Lombroso. Social and Legal Studies, 8(4), pp.531-548.
Groombridge, N., ‘queer theory’ McLaughlin, E. and Muncie, J. eds., 2012. The Sage dictionary of criminology. Sage.
Groombridge, N., 2016. Sports criminology: a critical criminology of sport and games. Policy Press.
Halttunen, K., 1998. Murder most foul: The killer and the American gothic imagination. Harvard University Press.
Hogle, J., 2016. The Undergrounds of the Phantom of the Opera: Sublimation and the Gothic in Leroux's Novel and its Progeny. Springer.
Houck, D.W., 2007. ‘My, That’s a Big One’: Masculinity and Monstrosity in Dirty Harry. Monsters In and Among Us: Toward a Gothic Criminology, pp.65-90.
Impara, E., 2016. Medieval violence and Criminology: using the Middle Ages to understand contemporary'motiveless' crime. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology, 8(1), p.26.
Ingebretsen, E., 2001. At stake: Monsters and the rhetoric of fear in public culture. University of Chicago Press.
Ingebretsen, E.J., 2007. Bodies under scandal: Civic gothic as genre. Monsters in and Among Us: Toward a Gothic Criminology, p.44.
Jarvis, B., 2007. Monsters Inc.: Serial killers and consumer culture. Crime, media, culture, 3(3), pp.326-344.
Jirsa, T., 2015. Reading Kafka Visually: Gothic Ornament and the Motion of Writing in Kafka’s Der Process. Central Europe, 13(1-2), pp.36-50.
Kafka, F. (1983). The Penguin complete novels of Franz Kafka: the trial, the castle, America. Harmondsworth, Penguin.
Katz, J., 1988. Seductions of crime: Moral and sensual attractions in doing evil. Basic Books.
Lewis, M.G., 1907. The monk: a romance. Broadview Press.
Lombroso-Ferrero, G. 1911. Criminal man according to the classification of Cesare Lombroso. New York: G. P. Putnam & Sons.
Lyman, S.M., 1989. The seven deadly sins: Society and evil. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Lyman, S.M., 1990. Rereading Robert E. Park: Toward a Gothic perspective on capitalism and imperialism. Explorations: The age of enlightenment, pp.29-108.
MacArthur, S., 2011. Crime and the Gothic: Identifying the Gothic Footprint in Modern Crime Fiction. Libri Publishing.
McKahan, J.G., 2007. The Substance Abuse Film and the Gothic: Typology, Narrative, and Hallucination. Picart and Greek (2007), pp.117-141.
Meyrink, G., 2010. The Golem, trans. M. Pemberton (Sawtry and New York, 1991).
Moran, L.J., 2001. Law and the Gothic imagination. Botting, F., 2005. Gothic. Routledge. pp.87-110.
Moran, L.J., 2001. Gothic law. Griffith L. Rev., 10, p.75.
Morris, N., 2004. The golem as metaphor in Jewish American literature (Doctoral dissertation, State University of New York at Binghamton).
Murray, G., 17 June 2002 ‘Dad's Plea To End Scourge Of Deathriders’ Belfast News Letter (Northern Ireland)
Neocleous, M., 2003. The political economy of the dead Marx’s vampires. History of Political Thought, 24(4), pp.668-684.
O'Malley, P.R., 2006. Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture (Vol. 51). Cambridge University Press.
Paglia, C., 1990. Sexual personae: Art and decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (Vol. 1). Yale University Press.
Picart, C.J., and Greek, C.E. eds., 2007a. Monsters in and among us: Toward a Gothic criminology. Associated University Presse.
Picart, C.J. and Greek, C., 2007b. ‘Introduction: Toward a Gothic Criminology’ in Picart, C.J., and Greek, C. eds Monsters in and among us: Toward a Gothic criminology. Associated University Presse.
Picart, C. and Greek, C.E., 2007c. The compulsions of real/reel serial killers and vampires: Toward a gothic criminology. Monsters in and among us: Toward a gothic criminology, pp.227-255.
Picart, C.J. and Greek, C., 2007d. Profiling the Terrorist as Mass Murderer. Monsters in and Among Us: Toward a Gothic Criminology, pp.256-82.
Punter, D., 1998. Gothic pathologies: the text, the body and the law. Springer.Radcliffe, A.W., 2016. The mysteries of Udolpho. Lulu. com.
Rafter, N. and Ystehede, P., 2010. Here be dragons: Lombroso, the gothic, and social control. Popular Culture, Crime and Social Control, 14, pp.263-284.
Rice, A., 1977. Interview with the vampire: A novel (Vol. 1). Random House Digital, Inc.
Simpson, P.L., 2000. Psycho paths: Tracking the serial killer through contemporary American film and fiction. SIU Press.
Sontag, S., 2018. Notes on camp. Penguin UK.
Sothcott, K., 2016. Late modern ambiguity and gothic narratives of justice. Critical Criminology, 24(3), pp.431-444.
South, N., 2017. Monstrous nature: A meeting of gothic, green and cultural criminologies. In Routledge International Handbook of Visual Criminology (pp. 553-566). Routledge.
Sumner, Colin (2005) Violence, Culture And Censure, Abingdon: Taylor and Francis.
Surette, R., 2007. Gothic criminology and criminal justice policy. Monsters in and among Us: Toward a Gothic Criminology, pp.199-226.
Valier, C., 2002. Punishment, border crossings and the powers of horror. Theoretical Criminology, 6(3), pp.319-337.
Walpole, H., 1998. The castle of Otranto: a gothic story. Oxford Paperbacks.
Wilkes, C., 2013. Social Jane: The Small, Secret Sociology of Jane Austen. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Young, A., 1996. Imagining crime. London: Sage Publications.
notes
[i] Fiddler (2011) makes much of the gothic architecture of prisons.
[ii] I admit to using the terms ‘hippy’ or ‘west coast’ criminology in describing the labelling perspective.
[iii] Crypto-criminology refers to the dark, devious and dangerous side of human nature accessed 19 April 2020
[iv] Victoria and Albert Museum Horace Walpole Strawberry Hill
http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/h/horace_walpole_exhibition/ Accessed 29 April 2020.
[v] Douglass H. Thomson ‘Glossary of literary gothic terms’ https://sites.google.com/a/georgiasouthern.edu/gothic-lit/glossary-of-literary-gothic-terms Accessed 22 April 2020.
[vi] Misspelt as Ingbretsen.
[vii] Francis Wheen 8 July 2006 ‘The poet of dialectics’ The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/jul/08/politics Accessed 23 April 2020. But Wheen adds ‘also a Victorian melodrama, a Greek tragedy or a Swiftian satire’.
[viii] Nigro, C., 25 January 2011 ‘So, Why Do We Call It Gotham, Anyway? New York Public Library available at https://www.nypl.org/blog/2011/01/25/so-why-do-we-call-it-gotham-anyway accessed 29 April 2020.
[ix] Perhaps with the even more popular Les Miserables.
[x] Sophie Lancaster Foundation website http://www.sophielancasterfoundation.com Accessed 29 April 2020.
[xi] Strawberry Hill House website https://www.strawberryhillhouse.org.uk/ Accessed 28 April 2020.
Ingebretsen, E.J., 2007. Bodies under scandal: Civic gothic as genre. Monsters in and Among Us: Toward a Gothic Criminology, p.44.
Jarvis, B., 2007. Monsters Inc.: Serial killers and consumer culture. Crime, media, culture, 3(3), pp.326-344.
Jirsa, T., 2015. Reading Kafka Visually: Gothic Ornament and the Motion of Writing in Kafka’s Der Process. Central Europe, 13(1-2), pp.36-50.
Kafka, F. (1983). The Penguin complete novels of Franz Kafka: the trial, the castle, America. Harmondsworth, Penguin.
Katz, J., 1988. Seductions of crime: Moral and sensual attractions in doing evil. Basic Books.
Lewis, M.G., 1907. The monk: a romance. Broadview Press.
Lombroso-Ferrero, G. 1911. Criminal man according to the classification of Cesare Lombroso. New York: G. P. Putnam & Sons.
Lyman, S.M., 1989. The seven deadly sins: Society and evil. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Lyman, S.M., 1990. Rereading Robert E. Park: Toward a Gothic perspective on capitalism and imperialism. Explorations: The age of enlightenment, pp.29-108.
MacArthur, S., 2011. Crime and the Gothic: Identifying the Gothic Footprint in Modern Crime Fiction. Libri Publishing.
McKahan, J.G., 2007. The Substance Abuse Film and the Gothic: Typology, Narrative, and Hallucination. Picart and Greek (2007), pp.117-141.
Meyrink, G., 2010. The Golem, trans. M. Pemberton (Sawtry and New York, 1991).
Moran, L.J., 2001. Law and the Gothic imagination. Botting, F., 2005. Gothic. Routledge. pp.87-110.
Moran, L.J., 2001. Gothic law. Griffith L. Rev., 10, p.75.
Morris, N., 2004. The golem as metaphor in Jewish American literature (Doctoral dissertation, State University of New York at Binghamton).
Murray, G., 17 June 2002 ‘Dad's Plea To End Scourge Of Deathriders’ Belfast News Letter (Northern Ireland)
Neocleous, M., 2003. The political economy of the dead Marx’s vampires. History of Political Thought, 24(4), pp.668-684.
O'Malley, P.R., 2006. Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture (Vol. 51). Cambridge University Press.
Paglia, C., 1990. Sexual personae: Art and decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (Vol. 1). Yale University Press.
Picart, C.J., and Greek, C.E. eds., 2007a. Monsters in and among us: Toward a Gothic criminology. Associated University Presse.
Picart, C.J. and Greek, C., 2007b. ‘Introduction: Toward a Gothic Criminology’ in Picart, C.J., and Greek, C. eds Monsters in and among us: Toward a Gothic criminology. Associated University Presse.
Picart, C. and Greek, C.E., 2007c. The compulsions of real/reel serial killers and vampires: Toward a gothic criminology. Monsters in and among us: Toward a gothic criminology, pp.227-255.
Picart, C.J. and Greek, C., 2007d. Profiling the Terrorist as Mass Murderer. Monsters in and Among Us: Toward a Gothic Criminology, pp.256-82.
Punter, D., 1998. Gothic pathologies: the text, the body and the law. Springer.Radcliffe, A.W., 2016. The mysteries of Udolpho. Lulu. com.
Rafter, N. and Ystehede, P., 2010. Here be dragons: Lombroso, the gothic, and social control. Popular Culture, Crime and Social Control, 14, pp.263-284.
Rice, A., 1977. Interview with the vampire: A novel (Vol. 1). Random House Digital, Inc.
Simpson, P.L., 2000. Psycho paths: Tracking the serial killer through contemporary American film and fiction. SIU Press.
Sontag, S., 2018. Notes on camp. Penguin UK.
Sothcott, K., 2016. Late modern ambiguity and gothic narratives of justice. Critical Criminology, 24(3), pp.431-444.
South, N., 2017. Monstrous nature: A meeting of gothic, green and cultural criminologies. In Routledge International Handbook of Visual Criminology (pp. 553-566). Routledge.
Sumner, Colin (2005) Violence, Culture And Censure, Abingdon: Taylor and Francis.
Surette, R., 2007. Gothic criminology and criminal justice policy. Monsters in and among Us: Toward a Gothic Criminology, pp.199-226.
Valier, C., 2002. Punishment, border crossings and the powers of horror. Theoretical Criminology, 6(3), pp.319-337.
Walpole, H., 1998. The castle of Otranto: a gothic story. Oxford Paperbacks.
Wilkes, C., 2013. Social Jane: The Small, Secret Sociology of Jane Austen. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Young, A., 1996. Imagining crime. London: Sage Publications.
notes
[i] Fiddler (2011) makes much of the gothic architecture of prisons.
[ii] I admit to using the terms ‘hippy’ or ‘west coast’ criminology in describing the labelling perspective.
[iii] Crypto-criminology refers to the dark, devious and dangerous side of human nature accessed 19 April 2020
[iv] Victoria and Albert Museum Horace Walpole Strawberry Hill
http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/h/horace_walpole_exhibition/ Accessed 29 April 2020.
[v] Douglass H. Thomson ‘Glossary of literary gothic terms’ https://sites.google.com/a/georgiasouthern.edu/gothic-lit/glossary-of-literary-gothic-terms Accessed 22 April 2020.
[vi] Misspelt as Ingbretsen.
[vii] Francis Wheen 8 July 2006 ‘The poet of dialectics’ The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/jul/08/politics Accessed 23 April 2020. But Wheen adds ‘also a Victorian melodrama, a Greek tragedy or a Swiftian satire’.
[viii] Nigro, C., 25 January 2011 ‘So, Why Do We Call It Gotham, Anyway? New York Public Library available at https://www.nypl.org/blog/2011/01/25/so-why-do-we-call-it-gotham-anyway accessed 29 April 2020.
[ix] Perhaps with the even more popular Les Miserables.
[x] Sophie Lancaster Foundation website http://www.sophielancasterfoundation.com Accessed 29 April 2020.
[xi] Strawberry Hill House website https://www.strawberryhillhouse.org.uk/ Accessed 28 April 2020.
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