Year: 2024
Type: article
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.
Authors: Esmeralda Orndorff, Joanne Myers
Institution: Gettysburg College
Language: English
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4411094516