Haunting Corporeality: A Gothic History of the Animate Skeleton 1700–1850

McCrea, James Terrance (2025) Haunting Corporeality: A Gothic History of the Animate Skeleton 1700–1850. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

This thesis explores how the animate skeleton experiences a new and complex un-life through its integration into the Gothic, offering a sustained study of the skeleton as a symbolic negotiator between the living and the dead, the present and past, as well as the mundane and the mythical. Using Alfred Gell’s methodology of object agency and Robert Hertz’s dichotomous assessment of reactions to wet and dry cadavers offers an effective means to determine the skeleton’s capacity to evoke reactions in the reader vicariously through those of the characters within the narratives in question. Despite the predominantly anthropological nature of this methodology and approach, it enables a suitably interdisciplinary assessment of the ways in which skeletal remains infiltrate the imagination, beginning with direct encounters via funerary traditions and anatomical studies, and subsequently accruing new layers of meaning alongside increasingly complex historical contexts ranging from the Medieval to the Victorian. Specifically, the dry skeleton — static and easy to handle — readily evokes contemplation through association with past lives, becoming a staple image in ecclesiastical settings and poetry of the Graveyard School. Conversely, the wet skeleton — undergoing dramatic physical change through decomposition — evokes the fear of death and the moral doubts that accompany morbid anxieties, affording the rotting, spectral skeletal figures of Gothic literature a terrifying agency. As the nature of the Gothic becomes complicated by socio-political dialogues concerning the body and soul in the nineteenth century, the skeleton at once assumes a satirical stance in re-imaginings of the dance of death, commenting upon policies like The Murder Act and The Anatomy Act, while being tacitly mocked as a superstitious emblem of The Dark Ages. Here, the wet and dry deaths simultaneously converge and deconstruct each polarity while the medical profession assumes dominion over the fate of the dead.