Patrick R. O’Malley. Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Price: US$95.00.

The Gothic—primarily associated with the explosion of Gothic fiction in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with novels such as Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)—remained one of the most intriguing and enduring literary forms of the nineteenth century, and was reanimated by such fin-de-siècle texts as Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), and Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Patrick O’Malley’s approach to the Gothic, focusing on its close association with Catholic discourse and anxious representations of sexual deviance, is at once historically informed and theoretically sophisticated. Beginning with a reading of key Gothic novels, O’Malley devotes the majority of his attention to mid- and late-Victorian works in which Gothic imagery, rhetoric, and narrative tropes make frequent and at times surprising appearances. Yet the originality and impact of O’Malley’s book lie in his thesis that the Gothic itself is deeply intertwined both with the (often phobic) representation of Catholicism, and the representations of sexual deviance as a disruptive presence in narrative literature. In his admirably lucid introduction, O’Malley explains the persistent connection in the nineteenth-century between tropes of Catholicism and those of “non-normative sexual expression or identity” (3) which he subsequently calls “sexual deviance,” a condensed phrase that includes homosexuality, as well as “adultery, celibacy, mannishness, cross-dressing, coarse frankness of gaze, and the sexless marriage” (2). In arguing that the Gothic is a privileged site for this coupling of Catholicism and sexual deviance, O’Malley’s broadest claim is that “the cultural history of religion and sexuality in nineteenth-century England is a cultural history of the Gothic” (3). O’Malley’s first chapter establishes that Catholicism was closely associated with the Gothic novel from its origins in Castle of Otranto (1764)--whose author, Horace Walpole, was fascinated with both Catholicism and Gothic architecture--and Udolpho, in which Radcliffe combined an anti-Catholic rhetoric with portrayals of sexual deviance. It is striking that the Catholicism of Gothic novels so often turns out to be Protestant anti-Catholicism, and at times O’Malley uses the terms interchangeably writing, for example, that in Melmoth the Wanderer, “it is telling how the ultra-Protestant threat to mainstream Anglicanism is troped as itself a kind of Catholicism” (25). The persistent, even obsessive, encryption of Catholicism within Protestant Gothic writing comes to seem like a campaign of anti-Catholic propaganda, in which a domestic, Protestant and pure version of Britishness is contrasted with a corrupt, deviant, and perverse “foreign” Catholicism. Yet the most intriguing dynamic traced by O’Malley is, perhaps, that by which the threat of Catholic perversion, located partly in colonized Ireland, comes home to roost, as it were, in the very heart of English culture and society. At first contained by its setting in a distant medieval past and/or in continental Europe--as in The Monk, where the Catholic monk Ambrosio is shown to commit “fornication…murder, incest, and rape”(42)--what O’Malley terms the “Irish Gothic” of Charles Maturin brings the danger within the ambit of the British Isles, as “the Catholic Church in Ireland is itself a Gothic monster, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein [sic] constructed out of the dead and mouldering material of the past” (48). Shelley’s novel receives scant treatment in the book, which is surprising given that O’Malley refers to Frankenstein as “the early nineteenth-century Gothic tale that most dramatically explodes the distinction between the alien and the domestic” (69). The work of John Ruskin establishes the Gothic as a central component of Victorian culture, one of O’Malley’s most successful moves being to insert Ruskin’s writings about Gothic architecture as a link in the chain connecting the early nineteenth-century and the Gothic revival in the 1890s. Ruskin’s …