Saving the Monsters? Images of Redemption in the Gothic Tales of George Macdonald‪.‬

George MacDonald is known to most readers for his children's stories; to a smaller number for his Christian mythopoeia, Phantastes and Lilith; to a smaller number still for his novels, sermons, and poetry. But few are aware of his several contributions to Victorian gothic fiction and, while studies have been undertaken that deal with gothic and chthonic aspects of Phantastes and Lilith, no treatment of MacDonald as a gothic writer in his own right has yet emerged. (1) In part this is probably because critics and scholars have had difficulty defining the boundaries of the genre. (2) While it ultimately derives its name from the fact that many of the earliest and best known examples, beginning with Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), are set among Gothic edifices in remote regions of Europe, by the early-nineteenth century the genre came to be characterized less by geography and architecture and more by its stock figures such as vampires, ghosts, and other revenants who supernaturally and eerily transcend the barrier between the living and the dead. Apart from these rather obvious characteristics, however, the question of the genre's moral economies also looms large. J. Sheridan Le Fanu, "the supreme master of the Victorian tale of terror" (Cavaliero 37), and a contemporary of George MacDonald, perhaps captures its essence most succinctly when he writes in "The Watcher" (1847): pre