The Gothic and Scotland's Identity Crisis in Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting

Abstract

This thesis looks at Irvine Welsh’s 1993 novel Trainspotting through a Gothic lens. It explores the novel’s use of Gothic tropes, particularly skin, blood, and monstrosity, and how these yield a nuanced reading of Trainspotting’s political backdrop. The novel is set at a time of drastic upheaval for Scotland. Deindustrialization spurred by policies from Margaret Thatcher’s England in the 1980s led to the shuttering of key industries, fueling mass unemployment, poverty, and, on a deeper level, a loss of working-class identity. Trainspotting shows the grim reality left for the next generation of this class in stark terms. But it also resurrects the working-class identity that has been excised from the nation, showing that it never really left. Instead, it haunts the characters, who grapple with embracing an ever-changing present and their inextricable ties to the past. While critics have noted this history well, they have adopted either an exclusively negative or positive tone about this change in terms of identity construction. When we see the way this crisis plays out in the body and through these Gothic tropes, however, both present and past are destabilized, resulting in a more complex theorization of Scotland’s history.