Chapter 5
In: Neo-Victorianism and Medievalism
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Abstract
This chapter explores how John Logan’s Gothic television series Penny Dreadful (2014–2016) deploys various medieval motifs to reimagine the nineteenth-century fin-de-siècle on screen. Adapting Andrew B. R. Elliott’s analysis of the repurposing of the Middle Ages in mass media, I trace the ideological implications of the amalgamation of the neo-Victorian and neomedieval in a postmodern product for mass consumption. On the basis of the show’s encoded medievalism, introduced through tropes of witchcraft and spiritualism, monster-avengers, and allusions to female mysticism, I argue that both “the medieval” and “the Victorian” as specific historical referents mutate into amorphous floating signifiers of generalized attitudes toward the past as barbaric and backward. Penny Dreadful draws not only on the Middle Ages but also on nineteenth-century remediations of the earlier period, thus accentuating the show’s Gothic narrative and constructing the Victorian fin-de-siècle as a new “Dark Age”, particularly inimical to women.