Gothic landscapes and seascapes: dark regions in Wilkie Collins's The Dead Secret

Passey, Joan 2017. Gothic landscapes and seascapes: dark regions in Wilkie Collins's The Dead Secret. Studies in Gothic Fiction 5 (2) , pp. 21-30. 10.18573/j.2016.10106

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Abstract

Wilkie Collins's The Dead Secret, arguably one of his most critically neglected novels, exercises the same concerns with ancestry, inheritance, and history as developed in Collins's later works, projected upon a Cornish landscape. In exploring the way Collins uses Cornwall (a location he had already toyed with in Basil and Rambles Beyond Railways), representations of the Cornish, and specifically Cornish seascapes, I propose that Collins is employing Cornwall as an ideal playground in which to experiment with his reworkings of Gothic tropes and motifs. Indeed, Collins's Cornwall provides a means of understanding debates surrounding regional identities and a lens through which to comprehend the Cornish quest to reclaim a notion of Celtic identity in the late nineteenth century. Collins’s use of seascapes, ruins, transgression, and deadly secrets not only reimagines Gothic tropes in a Victorian context, but also uses them to express anxieties regarding disintegration of self, society, and borders in the period.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PR English literature
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Cornwall, Gothic, Victorian, seascapes, landscapes, ancestry, regionality, spectres
Publisher:	Cardiff University Press
ISSN:	2156-2407
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	10 February 2017
Date of Acceptance:	1 January 2017
Last Modified:	05 May 2023 16:46
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/98244

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