ALH Online Review, Series XXXVI 935 https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajad028 © The Author 2023. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com Jimmy Packham, Gothic Utterance: Voice, Speech, and Death in the American Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2021), 252 pp. Reviewed by Scott Peeples, College of Charleston The Gothic is always telling people something they don’t want to hear: our consciences can’t be killed; past sins, our own or our ancestors’, will ultimately be revealed; and we’re generally not who we think we are. In Gothic Utterance: Voice, Speech, and Death in the American Gothic, Jimmy Packham demonstrates how frequently, in US fiction of the long nineteenth century, the Gothic literally speaks, through the voices of the dead, the undead, and the dying, as well as the traumatized, the outcast, the nonhuman, and the wilderness. This emphasis on voice and speech offers a useful reorientation. Simply by discussing hauntings and other gothic devices in terms of their auditory power, sifting through the nineteenth-century American Gothic canon (broadly conceived) with an ear for uncanny voices, Packham helps us imagine these texts differently. A few of them, like Wieland (1798) and “The Raven” (1845) could hardly be avoided. But the concept of “Gothic utterance” also proves pivotal, for instance, in the shriek that introduces Isabel in Melville’s Pierre (1852) and Cassy’s haunting of Simon Legree in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Elsewhere, Packham builds on Vanessa Dickerson’s observation that nineteenth-century ghost stories could make women’s selves “legible, visible, readable” by analyzing supernatural tales by Louisa May Alcott, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and Phoebe Yates Pember that make women “audible” (58). Being heard may empower more than being seen, as in Alcott’s “A Whisper in the Dark” (1877) in which the heroine must first hear her victimized mother’s movements in the attic before understanding her own entrapment and freeing herself, delivering her own “declaration of independence” (69). Although Packham repeatedly refers to Gothic utterances as “speech acts,” he is attuned to the very question of how “speech” is defined, especially if the voice is not coming from a living human being, as is often the case here. Behind these fictional speech acts lie questions concerning the “encounter between voice and death, between Gothicised speech and the human, and the presence of death within language” (14). How does one read, for instance, the communications of Poe’s M. Valdemar, who, having been mesmerized at the moment of death, continues to speak after all other signs of life have ceased? Emphasizing Valdemar’s “mechanical” utterances, Packham compares him to Euphonia, a speaking automaton exhibited by P. T. Barnum in 1846, suggesting that with Valdemar “Poe paints the human less as the speaking animal than as a speaking machine” (37). A more blatant subversion of human subjectivity occurs in Poe’s “The Man that Was Used Up” (1839), in which the war hero Brevet Brigadier General John A. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/35/2/935/7159660 by College of Charleston user on 06 December 2023