NEO-GOTHIC DINOSAURS AND THE HAUNTING OF HISTORY

Abstract

Marie-Louise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben have identified the Neo-Victorian Gothic as a mode particularly suited to political and ethical cultural engagement. Indeed, the Gothic more generally has always been a genre which attends to the social and cultural problems faced in the contemporary moment, precisely because of its interest in the strange, the abject, the Other. This essay examines the dinosaur narrative as a particular kind of Neo-Gothic uniquely positioned to address the collapse of moral, spatial and historical boundaries. Addressing the range of films in the Jurassic Park series (1993-2018), as well as Ray Bradbury’s ‘A Sound of Thunder’ (1952) and what was perhaps the first ‘dinosaur novel,’ Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), this essay will explore the dinosaur as a figure of the limit of our Gothic imagination. In particular, however, the essay will focus on the specific engagement with Gothic tropes in the most recent Jurassic Park film, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018): the isolated mansion, the rich benefactor, the orphan child, the presence of family secrets, the haunting or stalking figure. In these ways, and in a contemporary context concerned with environmental collapse, the dinosaur and its impossible presence is reinvigorated in the conservatism of the Neo-Gothic narrative not as a warning, but as a manageable problem.