"History Digs a Shallow Grave": Queer Temporality in Emily M. Danforth's Lesbian Gothic

Danforth’s Plain Bad Heroines (2020) revels in the disruption of time through erotic physicality. Because the Gothic and the queer break the bounds of normative constructions of time, the horror of Plain Bad Heroines arrives in the effect that queer Gothic time has on queer bodies by allowing them to delight in rejecting linearity while they run the risk of destabilizing their identities as they encounter the past. This article demonstrates that such disruption is particularly prevalent in neo-Victorian lesbian Gothic fiction by reading the novel through Freeman’s (2010) concept of erotohistoriography in two ways: first, by focusing on the way queer time effects and facilitates queer embodiment through the setting(s). Second, Gothic doubling is both an erotic and disorderly element of queer time’s effect on the lesbian body in Plain Bad Heroines. Temporal collapse allows the characters to encounter each other and the past, but with dire consequences.