Miss Ives and ISIS:

The Cult(ure) of Collaboration in Neo-Victorian Adaptations

Abstract

This article discusses the films The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003) and Van Helsing (2004), as well as the television series Penny Dreadful (2014-2016), as neoVictorian adaptations, particularly in terms of how these works adapt characters from Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). The ways in which those texts and characters are reworked reveal Victorian – as well as more recent – ideas of isolation and collaboration, Gothicism, visuality, science and technology, and morality. Such revelations appear to argue that the darker, more isolated ‘evil’ apparent in these Victorian Gothic source texts is quite capable of openly building its own collaborative network, consistent with Nazism, Fascism, and even ISIS. Similar to ISIS, these contemporary Gothic and neo-Victorian adaptations use science, technology, and hypervisuality in significant ways, often complicating the perception of ‘good’ and ‘evil’. This form of complication has consistently been fundamental to the Gothic, particularly in relation to recent neo-Victorian Gothic adaptations.