The Ghost in the Machine: Victorian Gothic as a Response to Industrial and Scientific Advancement

Abstract

This paper delves into the Victorian Gothic genre not merely as a blend of speculative constructions or ethereal imaginings or Gothic Romances. Instead, it looks at it as a cosmopolitan and cultured acknowledgement of the angst of the Second Industrial Revolution. Departing from the conventional frameworks of "castles and ruins" toward the high-tech laboratory environment and the dense megalopas, Nineteenth-century novelists cast shadows of the "monstrous" to expose the reckless vanity behind the age's thirst for progress.

Through a cross-examination of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the present inquiry examines how the rise of galvanic science, chemical discourse, and the burgeoning metropolis synthesized into a cautionary literary framework. Rooted in the Freudian “Uncanny” and abreast with contemporary scholarship on atavism, the investigation shows how the emergence of the phonograph and the camera served to wear away the traditional demarcation between the living subject and the mechanical object. The paper concludes that these literary endeavors are emblematic of a built-in paradox that defined the era. It investigates the antithetical relation between scientific mastery and security, contending that as humanity intensified its hold on nature, it concurrently conjured new, uncontainable angst. By drawing a line from nineteenth-century anxiety to the current ethical intersection of AI and biotechnology, this academic work deems that our trepidation of the "technological uncanny" is an invariable unconscious subjective fixture.