The Climacteric Gothic: Impotence and Menopause in the Eighteenth Century

By charting climacteric bodies – aged, gendered, and (de)sexualised ones – in the Gothic fictions of the Romantic period, this article explores socio-political concerns prompted by impotence and menopause. Enlightenment-era biomedical treatises fixated on the ageing body as a problem for gender and the state. This article weaves these medical and often pseudo-medical archives with Gothic fictions to argue that ageing distinctly interrogates growing anxieties concerning the health of the state and its investment in reproductive futurity. By reading canonical Romantic Gothic narratives, such as Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796), as well as less studied ones, such as Charlotte Smith's Emmeline (1788), we uncover emergent understandings of eighteenth-century health, gender, and sexuality. Ultimately, the article exposes how menopause and impotence are configured by this medico-literary archive in hopes of advancing Gothic studies’ attention to ageing, not as spectacle, but as fundamental to the genre's evolution and socio-cultural significance.