“Mental Telegraphy,” Distorted Affections, and “Oriental” Villainy in Late Victorian Gothic Fiction

Focusing on late Victorian Gothic fiction, this paper explores depictions of malevolent and occult “Oriental” communications, ones operating on British heroines.  In particular, I am interested in how these communications compete with Western technological networks in the contest over British national identity, as defined through affective alliances.  During the Victorian period, instruments like the telegraph were used to maintain colonial presence; yet rumors arose around events like the Indian Mutiny that Orientals were able to exchange information and fight back through “mental telegraphy,” or telepathy.  This conflict between technological and occult communications—a conflict, fundamentally, over the outlines of the British nation—gives rise to a certain type of Gothic narrative, in which the British heroine becomes a vulnerable communicative node. Here, in keeping with the Gothic genre’s exaggerated attention to affect, nationhood comes down to emotional (rather than simply informational) dispatches: the Oriental villain’s mind control perverts the will and sentiments of the heroine, as well as the marital and maternal roles these define.  By this emotional/domestic apostasy, the entranced heroine symbolizes a nightmare of threatened British national identity, inasmuch as she is a synecdoche for the home ties of the nation itself.  Against this threat, telegraphic, telephonic, and other technological instruments reassert control over the heroine’s domestic affections, and in turn the integrity of the nation.