Thomas Carlyle's difficult and obscure prose - the bane of every reader who has attempted to come to terms with his works - has often been interpreted as a reflection of the author's temperament or idiosyncrasies. Mary Desaulniers, however, argues that Carlyle's language is a deliberate strategy for revisioning language and places it within an "economics" of representation. By situating his prose within the Gothic tradition, with its history of resistance to linguistic transparency, Desaulniers makes the provocative claim that in The French Revolution Carlyle uses revisionary Gothicism as a linguistic vehicle for economic and political issues.

Using Aristotle's oikonomia to establish a paradigm of wholeness and authentic engagement, Desaulniers argues that Carlyle returns language to material wholeness by insisting on situating sign within representation so that the materiality of the sign is not surrendered to the idea imposed on it. By focusing on reading as an act of Constitution within The French Revolution, she places the political crisis within a linguistic one: the Constitution becomes both a thematic and self-reflexive constituent of the linguistic process.

Desaulniers concentrates on Carlyle's use of Gothic conventions, drawing upon Goethe's Faust and the Gothic romances of Maturin and Lewis. Establishing The French Revolution as a precursor to Browning's Sordello, she illustrates that the "economics" of representation remains a pivotal nineteenth-century linguistic strategy.