The Gothic as Mass Hysteria: the Threat of the Foreign Other in Gaskell's Lois the Witch.

The paper focuses on Elizabeth Gaskell's revision of the female Gothic, where Evil does no longer belong to the supernatural realm but comes into being from erroneous and unbalanced behaviour. Our intention is to reveal Gaskell's accuracy and acumen in achieving the picture of the destructive power of mass hysteria as rejection of Otherness, of its implications and consequences in a way that was several decades later theorized by the social psychologist Gustave Le Bon in The Crowd: A study of the Popular Mind (1896). Gaskell's own analysis of mass hysterical behaviour points at the three categories subsequently detailed by Le Bon: suggestibility, contagion, and anonymity. Making use of a highly symbolical composition and of various forms of excess (visual, lexical, or formal), Gaskell's Gothic shorter fiction proved to be the perfect means for her to express repressed concerns an obsessions that she could not fully develop in her social novels. The novella Lois the Witch (1859) works therefore as a metaphorical but powerful intervention into the social, political and religious discourse of the 19th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]