Gothic Brexlit: Maggie Gee’s New Monsters in The White Family

Abstract: Recent analyses, such as Kristian Shaw’s (2018), suggest how Brexlit reflects Britain’s shifting sense of community after 2016, revealing changing narratives surrounding British national identity, and the perceived Otherness of European migrants and post-colonial minorities. Scholars like David Foster Russell (2022) and Roger Luckhurst (2023) assert that the ‘anxiety model’ associated with Brexit-related imageries of social collapse and foreign subjugation finds its roots in the fin de siècle Imperial Gothic genre, which echoes Said’s “rhetoric of blame” (1993) of absolving the Self while demonizing an Other. Gothic Brexlit, if such a thing exists, thus emerges not as a reactionary or subversive aesthetics per se, but as the flipping ideological construction of Otherness between pre- and post-referendum fiction: from portraying the EU as a Frankensteinian ‘undesirable Other’ to framing a civil-war-like dimension that involves the UK Leavers as a new form of monstrosity. However, long before the Brexit vote, Maggie Gee’s The White Family (2002) anticipated this reversal of scapegoating dynamics blending Gothic, family saga, and Condition-of-England tropes to expose crises of Englishness, along with the prevailing climate of political disillusionment and social fragmentation in contemporary public discourse.