English Research Seminar -- Professor Catherine Spooner Gothic White: A Counter-History of the White Dress in Modern Literature and Culture

Women in white are ubiquitous in Gothic fiction and film, from the eighteenth-century illustrations to Ann Radcliffe's novels, to the folk costumes of Midsommar and the plantation chic of Beyonce's Lemonade. The popular perception of the white dress is that it represents purity and virginity — absence of sexuality, absence of colour. This paper challenges and complicates this stereotype by examining the various ways in which the white dress is imbued with presence in Gothic texts. Beginning from a historical coincidence — the invention of the mechanised loom and the Gothic novel in the same year, 1764 — it establishes that the emergence of a global textile industry in the later eighteenth century led to a revaluation of the cultural properties of whiteness through material encounters with dress and their representation in the cultural imaginary. Extending and enriching Richard Dyer's arguments in White (1997) that whiteness is inevitably yet invisibly freighted with associations of gender and race, it contends that images of women in white are routinely Gothicised, from Dickens's decaying bride Miss Havisham to the spectral drapery found in Victorian spiritualist photography, the unravelling bandages of the Egyptian mummy to the exotic white furs of the female werewolf. In this close connection between the white dress and the Gothic it discovers a counternarrative of material damage — marking, staining, tearing, decay — that disputes and undermines dominant ideologies of idealised femininity and racialised whiteness. The paper thus restores the significance of dress to our understanding of the cultural construction of whiteness, exploring the social and historical importance of style, cut, shade and texture. Simultaneously, it restores whiteness to the cultural operation of the Gothic, showing how white rather than black may be the genre's most quintessential colour.