The Material Icon in Eleanor Sleath's "The Orphan of the Rhine"
Roles
Alumni co-author:
Esmeralda Orndorff '22, Gettysburg College
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Summer 2025
Department 1
English
Abstract
In recent years, Eleanor Sleath’s long-neglected The Orphan of the Rhine has received attention as a valuable addition to the Gothic canon. In particular, critics have hailed the unconventionality of her worldly heroine Julie de Rubine. In this article, we resituate Julie’s exceptionalism in a specifically post-Reformation context, arguing that, in Julie, Sleath has created a powerful maternal icon whose mediating authority contests iconoclastic attacks on Marian devotion in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. Julie is, as critics have observed, the moral center of the text, and we show how that role is warranted specifically by her religiosity. Although partway through Orphan Julie suffers to some extent the common Gothic mother’s fate, being abducted and held captive in a convent for a portion of the novel, she remains the focus of the other characters’ attention and ultimately is restored to preside over the deathbed confession of her errant husband. By showing how Julie’s immaculate motherhood reforms the patriarchal family, we suggest that Catholicism, however counter-intuitively, can be understood as a potentially “queer” element in modern British consciousness. By inspiring an alternative domesticity, Sleath’s maternal icon shows one way that the Gothic can provide a constructive alternative to modernity’s strictures.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
DOI
10.5038/2157-7129.15.1.1356
Version
Version of Record
ISBN/ISSN
2157-7129
Recommended Citation
Orndorff, Esmeralda and Myers, Joanne E. (2025). "The Maternal Icon in Eleanor Sleath's The Orphan of the Rhine," ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830: Vol.15: Iss.1, Article 2. http://doi.org/10.5038/2157-7129.15.1.1356.