Sofia Murray

Gothic Bodies, Eugenic Fears: New Woman Fiction and the Biopolitics of the Fin de Siècle

This paper examines the New Woman Gothic as a marginalised literary mode that both responds to and registers the growing influence of eugenic and degenerationist thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While eugenics circulated primarily within elite scientific, political, and intellectual circles, its assumptions about heredity, disease, and reproductive value were disseminated to a mass readership through popular and non-canonical literary forms. This paper argues that New Woman Gothic functions as a key site through which these ideas were translated and/or contested.

Focusing first on Marie Corelli’s Wormwood (1890), the paper reads the novel as a Gothic response to continental decadence, exposing anxieties around degeneration, addiction, and moral contagion while negotiating their accessibility to a popular readership. Corelli’s position outside of elite literary circles – as well as her complex position on the Woman Question – complicates assumptions about how eugenic and degenerationist ideas reached ‘the masses’, revealing Gothic sensationalism as a crucial vehicle for biopolitical discourse. This framework is extended through readings of New Woman writer Sarah Grand’s novel The Heavenly Twins (1893), which engages with eugenics to reveal tensions over whether biological discourse could be mobilised as a tool of feminist empowerment or constituted a new form of patriarchal regulation, and how the Gothic, in particular, can act as a vehicle for these responses.Collectively, these texts articulate a distinctly Gothic terror – one grounded not entirely in the supernatural of the traditional sense, but in degeneration, disease, and biopolitical control. By foregrounding popular and marginalised literary forms, this paper contributes to fin de siècle and modernist studies by demonstrating how the New Woman Gothic exposes the cultural mechanisms through which eugenic thought was both endorsed and resisted.

Sofia Murray is an AHRC-funded doctoral researcher in English at the University of Kent, specialising in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature. Her research examines representations and aesthetics of eugenics within late Victorian Gothic fiction with particular attention to gender, sexuality, and empire. More broadly, her PhD thesis foregrounds non-canonical and female-authored writing, including the New Woman Gothic. She received an MPhil in English from the University of Cambridge in 2024, and also is the lead coordinator of the CHASE Victorian Network, which holds Victorian research events, writing retreats, and reading groups throughout the year.

Aivaras Ivanauskas

Sleepless Dreams: Decadence, Modernism and Insomnia

Sleeplessness, sleepwalking, and nocturnal “consciousness” are common occurrences in Decadent and Modernist literature: Des Esseintes’ recurrent insomnia in Huysmans’s À rebours (1884); the narrator of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913–1927); Beckett’s Molloy (1951); Schnitzler’s Dream Story (1926), etc.

Insomnia receives an ambiguous appreciation from decadentists and modernists. It is both a certain form of suffering tied to anxiety, aesthetic excess, bodily degeneration, madness, obsession, or moral decay; and a hope for a better future—fantasy replacing memory, a play of the senses, and empowerment. Though predating Decadence and Modernism, Francisco Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters best describes the (per)version of decadent and modernist slumber. It is through relaxing the domination of Enlightened instrumental reason that we catch a glimpse of an emancipated world.

In my talk, I will try to ground the sleep habits of various decadent and modernist literary figures, contrary to bio-psychological explanations that reduce the sharp metaphorical nature of sleeplessness, in socio-cultural terms. It is, in fact, that the insomniacs of Decadence and Modernism react to a social world that has become otherworldly, foregrounding their pathological escape from it. Yet this pathological process of insomnia is also meant to be an emancipation from the rigid socio-temporal structures and habits of highly industrialized capitalist societies.

Unlike the Romantics, whose escape from the unsatisfactory reality they faced meant its denial, Decadentists and Modernists confronted it with apathy and in its full alienating power, without escaping it, thus enabling a more lucid ideological critique of their cultures. Sleepless dreams are the consequences of these processes, offering a fictional and fantastical way out of socially and culturally produced dissatisfaction, alienation, and their reimagining.

I am a second-year PhD student in Philosophy at Vilnius University, in the Department of Continental Philosophy and Religious Studies, currently working on my thesis titled Freud and Nietzsche: Pathology and Critique. My most recent conference papers address such topics as Deleuze and Freud on the Problem of Sadomasochism; Silent Hill 2 and Psychosexual Horror; Enlightenment as Health: A Socio-Historical Reading of Kant’s Account of Illness. My current research focuses on surrealist and decadent thought and modernism in relation to psychoanalysis, while my broader interests include Critical Theory, German Idealism, Aesthetics, Marxist Philosophy, Cultural Criticism, and the Philosophy of Medicine.

Clea Butcher

The Tubercular Body and Australian Modernity: Dymphna Cusack’s Say No to Death (1951)

Set in post-war Sydney, Dymphna Cusack’s novel Say No to Death (1951) has an explicit political agenda, decrying the nation’s inadequate response to the tuberculosis crisis. While Cusack remains a marginalised figure within Australian modernism, tensions emerge in her writing of illness, which complicate any clear-cut categorisation of her as a middlebrow romantic novelist. Given the recent trend in the medical humanities towards expansionism, Cusack’s novel allows us to understand the pressures on the tubercular body in settler-colonial Australia, where discussions over public hygiene and body culture played a formative role in the nation-building project.

On receiving her tuberculosis diagnosis, the central character, Jan, wistfully contemplates her once healthy body, ‘she who had been so vital’ (Cusack 112). By defamiliarising the sick body, Cusack exhibits a modernist interest in subjectivity, embodiment and empathetic engagement. The tragic effect of the narrative depends on establishing illness as difference, and the framing of the sick body as lacking betrays the influence of contemporary debates in Australia over body perfectibility, eugenics and exercise. The experiential aspects of illness intersect with social critique.  By positioning the disruptive aspects of illness, the loss of selfhood and autonomy, as exacerbated by the modern medical institutions and technologies, the novel raises anxieties over bodily disjuncture and surveillance. The novel’s insistence on collective responsibility and compassion for tuberculosis patients challenges the public stigmatisation and systematic othering of the sick body, while also posing fundamental questions about the state of biopolitical governance and public healthcare. Nonetheless, there is an uneasy relationship in the novel between calls for progress in tuberculosis treatment and a persistent scepticism towards medical developments. Given the centrality of the healthy body in discussions of Australian national identity, Cusack’s focus on the tubercular patient offers a re-evaluation of the place of the sick body in Australian modernity. 

Clea Butcher is a second-year PhD student at the University of Edinburgh. Her research explores the relationship between the tragic mode and modernist narrative techniques in the twentieth-century Australian novel. The authors she examines (namely, Henry Handel Richardson, Dymphna Cusack, Eleanor Dark and Christina Stead) critically engage with contemporary debates over settler-colonial history and capitalist modernity, challenging values and institutions associated with the nation-state. In her work on Cusack, who is the focus of this paper, she investigates the place of the tubercular body within Australian Modernity and how such forms the basis of Cusack’s modernist social critique.