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In 1871 the New York Times ran an exposé on illicit abortion under the headline "The Evil of the Age." An undercover investigation by the newspaper revealed that abortionists continued to sell their services in New York City with little interference from authorities despite an 1869 state law prohibiting abortion at any point in pregnancy.1 Euphemistically referring to abortion as a "forbidden subject" that "cannot with propriety be here described," the article denounces what it characterizes as a "systematic business in wholesale murder":
Thousands of human beings are thus murdered before they have seen the light of this world, and thousands upon thousands more of adults are irremediably ruined in constitution, health and happiness. So secretly are these crimes committed, and so craftily do the perpetrators inveigle their victims, that it is next to impossible to obtain evidence and witnesses. Facts are so artfully concealed from the public mind, and appearances so carefully guarded, that very meager outlines of the horrible truth have thus been disclosed. But could even a portion of the facts that have been detected in frightful profusion, by the agents of the TIMES, be revealed in print, in their hideous truth, the reader would shrink from the appalling picture.2
As investigative journalism "The Evil of the Age" is nonfiction, but it resembles gothic fiction in both form and content: it promises to frighten and appall readers; it uncovers the "hideous truth" about secret crimes; it uses lurid description to simultaneously express moral outrage and excite fascination with the illicit activity it depicts; and it refuses to name the unmentionable topic it nonetheless discusses in colorful detail for more than two full columns.
Defined concisely, gothic is the literary genre that entertains readers by scaring them. The formal features of the genre include sensational rhetoric; suspense-driven narrative; plots involving persecuted heroines and sinister villains; ominous settings such as medieval castles or haunted houses; characteristic tropes such as the unspeakable; manifestations of the fantastic (supernatural encounters) and of the grotesque (monsters); and typical preoccupations such as purity and contamination, violence, death, confinement, blood and gore, sex, and conspiracy, to name a few.3 Although generally identified with fiction, gothic conventions also operate in the service of frightening nonfiction narratives.4 Gothic nonfiction invests actual people,...