•  
  •  
 

Author Biography

An alum of Gettysburg College, Esmeralda Orndorff graduated in 2022 with a B.A. in English. During her senior year, she completed an honors thesis that provides a gendered analysis of eighteenth-century British Gothic literature. This article, revised in conjunction with her advisor, Professor Joanne Myers, is an extension of that thesis. Joanne Myers teaches eighteenth-century British literature at Gettysburg College. Her current research concerns the devotional culture of English Catholics, with a special focus on the exiled Poor Clare communities on the continent.

Abstract

In recent years, Eleanor Sleath’s long-neglected The Orphan of the Rhine has received attention as a valuable addition to the Gothic canon. In particular, critics have hailed the unconventionality of her worldly heroine Julie de Rubine. In this article, we resituate Julie’s exceptionalism in a specifically post-Reformation context, arguing that, in Julie, Sleath has created a powerful maternal icon whose mediating authority contests iconoclastic attacks on Marian devotion in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. Julie is, as critics have observed, the moral center of the text, and we show how that role is warranted specifically by her religiosity. Although partway through Orphan Julie suffers to some extent the common Gothic mother’s fate, being abducted and held captive in a convent for a portion of the novel, she remains the focus of the other characters’ attention and ultimately is restored to preside over the deathbed confession of her errant husband. By showing how Julie’s immaculate motherhood reforms the patriarchal family, we suggest that Catholicism, however counter-intuitively, can be understood as a potentially “queer” element in modern British consciousness. By inspiring an alternative domesticity, Sleath’s maternal icon shows one way that the Gothic can provide a constructive alternative to modernity’s strictures.

Keywords

Gothic, Gothic literature, female Gothic, Catholicism, religion, motherhood, maternity

Download

Share

COinS