Anna Sigg, in this chapter, argues that in Embers Beckett represents trauma most of all through bodily internal sea sounds. This radio play effectively ‘blinds’ its listener and places him in a mental cave. Embers focuses on Henry, who is tortured by a roaring ‘tinnitus’, an internal sea-like sound, which reminds him of the death of his father and his own mortality. This chapter illuminates the connection between Henry’s loss and the listener’s perception of the ‘tinnitus’ by drawing on Mladen Dolar’s idea of the acousmatic object voice and Jacques Lacan’s concept of objet petit a. Henry’s ‘tinnitus’, Sigg argues, is a bodily object voice manifesting an uncanny intimation of the unconscious. It expresses Henry’s mourning and his confrontation with mortality, while also generating countermelodies to the traumatic losses inside the listener’s head.

Thomas Percy’s The Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, first published in 1765, was a seminal text in English literature. A comprehensive three-volume set of British ballads, it was one of the most significant collections of the century, and its influence was felt on British editors and writers for generations afterwards. The backdrop for this literary endeavour was a culture war in English and Scottish literature which emanated from the Glorious Revolution period in the late seventeenth century and found expression in a variety of texts. At the core of this battle was a struggle for cultural superiority between Scotland and England. Through The Reliques, Percy posited a conception of British literary history which maintained that the English were cultural inheritors of the Goths, a racial grouping which he believed was superior and different to Scotland’s antecedents, the Celts. By advancing this idea, Percy was aiming to defend and consolidate a cultural position that favoured an interpretation of English predominance over other constituent members of the United Kingdom. He also anticipates Gothic literary approaches in his treatment of Scotland as practically a suicidal nation.

When Highsmith’s friend Arthur Koestler committed suicide with his wife due to his leukaemia and Parkinson’s disease, she was both shocked and furious. Her friend Jonathon Kent recalled, ‘As she talked about it her face blackened, and she was very angry. She said that she would never forgive him’. This chapter explores how Highsmith approaches the question of suicide in her writing, and examines how suicide or self-murder, perhaps the darkest of acts, accesses the Gothic in ways not usually considered within the context of crime writing. Emphasis will be placed on the ways in which the theme of suicide both foregrounds crime fiction’s debt to the Gothic and also provides an interdisciplinary presence that binds both genres together.

Gothic themes, tropes and narrative converge in the 2012 videogame Dear Esther. Set in perpetual twilight, on a deserted Hebridean island, this game is part of a growing sub-genre known as the ‘first-person walker’, which involves the player exploring a typically Gothic space – a setting as evocative as that of Frankenstein or Wuthering Heights. Through a subversion of gaming expectations and tropes, this chapter argues that Dear Esther's control system and lack of interactivity with the game’s landscape allows the player to take the role of a ghost, haunting the island, as she unis a narrative of loss and suicide. The chapter further argues that through the game’s construction, the player forces the narrator – an unnamed male whom the player hears as she walks across and even inside the island, delivering fragments of letters to the titular Esther – to endlessly repeat his suicide and the events that lead to it.

This chapter explores why so many fin-de-siècle Gothic novels conclude on equally complex, if different, forms of suicide, including Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Machen's The Great God Pan (1894) and Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). The chapter argues that, as in Jekyll and Hyde, images of the self-destructive self should be seen within the context of models of social self-destruction found in theories of degeneration. The writings of Edwin Lankester and Max Nordau, in particular, suggest that society is prone to self-destruction when it becomes overly refined and collapses back on to itself. Images of the body thus need to be related to wider issues of the body politic. However, this chapter argues  that the fin-de- siècle Gothic does not simply replicate the terms used in theories of degeneration but rather scrutinises how images of wealth, cultural refinement and class-bound models of ‘civilisation’ lead to Gothic representations of self-destruction that strangely liberate the subject from the demands of the ostensibly degenerate body. The chapter outlines how the death of the body becomes, in suicide, an act of agency in which the self is able to transcend its corporeal limits and gain access to a higher spiritual realm.

Among the more counterintuitive tropes of the vampire genre is the propensity of vampires to attempt suicide (often successfully). This chapter focuses on three motivations for vampire suicide – vampire guilt, vampire martyrdom and vampire ennui. In relation to guilt, this chapter will discuss Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles series, James Malcolm Rymer’s novel Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood  and Park Chan-wook’s 2009 film Thirst. Vampire martyrdom will be discussed in relation to David Slade’s 2007 American horror movie 30 Days of Night, based on Steve Niles’s 2002 graphic novel, and Darla in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer spin-off, Angel . As for vampire ennui, the characters of Godric (Allan Hyde) in HBO's True Blood and Adam (Tom Hiddleston) in Jim Jarmusch's 2013 Only Lovers Left Alive will provide examples. After noting the motivations for vampire suicide in Gothic narrative, the emphasis of the chapter will be on the ways in which vampire suicidal tendencies constitute a half-hearted attempt to recuperate the vampire genre from charges of immorality through a strategy of inversion.

If the Romantic Gothic hero is typically defined by his or her marginalisation from society and its norms and is characterised by excess, individualism and transgression, the ultimate act of defiance is self-annihilation. Given its associations with a long-standing interest in what has been characterised as ‘the Romantic agony’, it is perhaps surprising that suicide is not treated as a topic distinct from death in the critical literature on the Gothic – all the more so with respect to its connections with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and its notoriety as a work causing suicidal contagion, with sufferers donning Werther’s blue coat and yellow waistcoat as if exchanging their bodies for his own. This chapter explores allusions to Werther within British Gothic writing about suicide, which are to be found particularly in writings by women. Their retellings of Werther’s story interrogate the relationship between infection and agency with respect to suicide. Works by Charlotte Dacre, Charlotte Smith, Sarah Farrell, Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley are considered.

The Introduction will open by identifying, for the first time, the importance of suicide as a constant factor in Gothic textuality. Utilising Byron’s commentary on how Castlereagh’s death was understood in Gothic terms, it will demonstrate that the presence of self-destruction haunts the genre from Horace Walpole’s earliest intervention to its contemporary realisations. The Introduction will further argue that the Gothic provided a central corpus of images through which the complicated act of suicide could be understood, rationalised and contained – a tradition, as it were, of dissipating the troubling implications that accompany self-destruction. The emphasis here is less on the presence of the ghost, the vampire or the zombie and more on the singular and violent human action that in many cases prefaces the mobilisation of these occult and supernatural beings. The Introduction will then briefly summarise the chapters which follow, setting the tone for this unique and timely intervention into the medico-legal study of Gothic.