“All Those Sacred Midnight Things”: Queer Authorship, Veiled Desire, and Divine Transgression in Penny Dreadful

Abstract

This chapter considers the ways that John Logan, as a queer author, reappropriates the abject and the liminal in Penny Dreadful (2014–2016) as signifiers of what I call the queer sublime—an almost hallowed state of difference—something Logan conceives of as desirable but inherently misunderstood, often by the very characters who embody it most. Through a “veiling” that conceals the monstrousness/queerness of his characters, either from themselves or from heteronormative Victorian society at large, Logan explores the taboo and fluid sexualities often unloosed in Gothic narratives. The figurative image of the veil (in its Sedgwickian sense, “suffused with sexuality”) functions in Penny Dreadful as both a repressive and emancipatory device, frequently evoked via literal transformations into “other(ed) selves” (demon-possessed Vanessa; lycanthropic Ethan). In Logan’s queer cosmology, these figures of abjection who occupy its dark terrain are therefore impossibly aware of the flesh and its intrinsic mutability—the body as simultaneously both inviolate object and corrupted vessel. To this end, Penny Dreadful finds itself in productive intertextual dialogue with James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) and its sequel Bride of Frankenstein (1935). Just as Whale imbues Frankenstein’s monster and his bride with a corporeal strangeness, Logan foregrounds the body as a site of queer potentiality, collapsing distinctions between the sacred and the profane through destabilizing acts of self-creation. Yet this does not amount to a reductive analogy of simply reading the monstrous as queer. Traditional avatars of monstrosity, such as Lucifer and Dracula, emerge as forces of compulsory heteronormativity in Penny Dreadful. In opposition to these, Logan, like fellow queer author Whale, seeks to define a liminal space (the queer sublime) where his “beautiful monsters” may reside in all their tragic glory.