Colonial Gothic: Morbid Anatomy, Commodification and Critique in Marcus Clarke’s The Mystery of Major Molineux

Abstract

The dynamics of what might be called colonial Gothic, by which I mean the Gothicizing of the settler-colony as a site of repression, also anticipate the dynamics of an analytical process in which the critic unearths the 'repressed' of colonization: collective guilt, the memory of violence and dispossession, and the struggle for mastery in which the insecurity of the settler-colony is revealed. The Gothic text, and this is its whole point, alludes to and reveals the object of repression, which becomes a locus of horror in it. At least superficially, the text shares with psychoanalytically informed cultural criticism a certain critical impulse, such that colonial Gothic can often tum out to approximate, in the form of an allegory, the process of its own interpretation: it mirrors the alienation of colonialism in exactly that way that renders it amenable to the categories of psychoanalysis (themselves deeply rooted in the tropes of Gothicism). To a degree this is true of Marcus Clarke's novella, The Mystery of Major Molineux, posthumously published in 1881.