“Whichever Way You Move . . . It is Ready to Swallow You”: The Gothic Atlantic and the Mobile Oubliette

Abstract: This article delineates the Romantic tropology of the oubliette, a vertically enclosed dungeon whose etymology derives from the French oublier [to forget] and thus denotes the annihilation of the imprisoned subject. In readings of Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative (1789), Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance (1790), and William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), it argues that two prominent genres of the Romantic Age—the Gothic novel and the slave narrative—transformed this terrifying dungeon from a symbol of the ancien régime into a portable trope responsive to the atrocities of a Gothicized Atlantic World.