[Paleopsych] Christine Ruolto: Individual and Social Psychologies of the Gothic
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Christine Ruolto: Individual and Social Psychologies of the Gothic
English 981 at the University of Virginia
[Sarah found this when inspired by the previous TLS review, "Serious
play's feat of clay." The several parts of the course desciption are
concatenated. For more, go to http://www.virginia.edu and do a Google
search on the site for Ruotolo and for "psychologies of the gothic."]
Individual and Social Psychologies: Introduction
http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.intro.html
The Gothic novel springs forth rather suddenly as the increasing
preoccupation with individual consciousness that begins in the early
18th century collides with the unique cultural anxieties of the late
18th century. The effect of the former has already been
well-established in literature, as Richardson and other "novelists of
sensibility" invest their characters with unprecedented psychological
depth. The Gothic novelists are less skillful and subtle in their
depictions, and are often accused of populating their novels with
stock or "flat" characters. Yet the emotions of these characters are
externalized in a radical new way; their deepest passions and fears
are literalized as other characters, supernatural phenomena, and even
inanimate objects. At the same time, the nature of the fear
represented in these novels--fear of imprisonment or entrapment, of
rape and personal violation, of the triumph of evil over good and
chaos over order--seems to reflect a specific historical moment
characterized by increasing disillusionment with Enlightenment
rationality and by bloody revolutions in America and France.
The excerpts arranged below, therefore, are united by a focus on the
psychological aspects of the Gothic in the broadest possible sense.
They address such complex and overlapping themes as the mental and
emotional portrait of the characters within the novels, the deep
cultural anxieties that the novels reflect (and often attempt to work
through), and the intense psychological responses that these works
seek to elicit from their readers. The critical excerpts are therefore
not necessarily psychoanalytic in their approach; they draw from a
wide variety of structuralist, historicist, and reader-response
traditions as well. Further introduction is provided at the beginning
of each of the four sub-sections.
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
[1]
1. Terror and horror
Primary excerpts:
[2]Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho
[3]Matthew Lewis, The Monk
[4]William Beckford, Vathek
[5]Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Secondary excerpts:
[6]Ann Radcliffe, "On the Supernatural in Poetry"
[7]Devendra Varma, The Gothic Flame
[8]Robert Hume, "Gothic versus Romantic"
[9]Robert Platzner, "'Gothic versus Romantic': A Rejoinder"
_________________________________________________________________
[10]
2. Dreams of the Uncanny
Primary excerpts:
[11]Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho
[12]Matthew Lewis, The Monk
[13]Ann Radcliffe, The Italian
[14]Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Secondary excerpts:
[15]Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny"
[16]Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic
[17]Terry Castle, "The Spectralization of the Other in The Mysteries
of Udolpho"
[18]Peter Brooks, "Virtue and Terror: The Monk
[19]Margaret Anne Doody, "Deserts, Ruins, and Troubled Waters: Female
Dreams in Fiction and the Development of the Gothic Novel"
[20]Aija Ozolins, "Dreams and Doctrines: Dual Strands in Frankenstein"
_________________________________________________________________
[21]
3. Architecture of the Mind
Primary excerpts:
[22]Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho
[23]Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer
[24]Matthew Lewis, The Monk
[25]Ann Radcliffe, The Italian
Secondary excerpts:
[26]Norman Holland and Leona Sherman, "Gothic Possibilities"
[27]Philip Hallie, The Paradox of Cruelty
[28]Peter Brooks, "Virtue and Terror: The Monk"
[29]Max Byrd, "The Madhouse, the Whorehouse, and the Convent"
[30]Jacques Blondel, "On Metaphorical Prisons"
_________________________________________________________________
[31]
4. Pscyho-social issues
Primary excerpts:
[32]Matthew Lewis, The Monk
[33]Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
[34]William Godwin, Caleb Williams
[35]Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto
[36]Ann Radcliffe, The Italian
Secondary excerpts:
[37]Marquis de Sade, Idee sur les Romans
[38]Ronald Paulson, "Gothic Fiction and the French Revolution"
[39]Frederick Karl, The Adversary Literature
[40]David Punter, The Literature of Terror
[41]Stephen Bernstein, "Form and Ideology in the Gothic Novel"
References
1. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.terror.html
2. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.terror.html#udolpho
3. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.terror.html#monk
4. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.terror.html#vathek
5. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.terror.html#frank
6. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.terror.html#radcliffe
7. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.terror.html#varma
8. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.terror.html#hume
9. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.terror.html#platzner
10. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.uncanny.html
11. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.uncanny.html#udolpho
12. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.uncanny.html#monk
13. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.uncanny.html#italian
14. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.uncanny.html#frank
15. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.uncanny.html#freud
16. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.uncanny.html#todorov
17. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.uncanny.html#castle
18. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.uncanny.html#brooks
19. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.uncanny.html#doody
20. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.uncanny.html#ozolins
21. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.architecture.html
22. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.architecture.html#udolpho
23. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.architecture.html#melmoth
24. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.architecture.html#monk
25. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.architecture.html#italian
26. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.architecture.html#holland
27. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.architecture.html#hallie
28. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.architecture.html#brooks
29. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.architecture.html#byrd
30. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.architecture.html#blondel
31. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.social.html
32. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.social.html
33. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.social.html#frank
34. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.social.html#caleb
35. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.social.html#otranto
36. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.social.html#italian
37. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.social.html#sade
38. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.social.html#paulson
39. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.social.html#karl
40. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.social.html#punter
41. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.social.html#bernstein
-------------
Terror and Horror
http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.terror.html
Although the novels commonly referred to as "Gothic" are united by
certain thematic and stylistic conventions, they seem to vary a great
deal in the emotional responses they seek to elicit from readers. Ann
Radcliffe herself was among the first to draw an affective dividing
line down the middle of the newly emergent genre. Conservative and
rational in her own approach to the Gothic, Radcliffe clearly objected
to the shocking scenes depicted in The Monk, and it is widely believed
that she wrote The Italian as a protesting response to Lewis' novel.
She elucidated her stance in an 1826 essay entitled "On the
Supernatural in Poetry," in which draws upon Edmund Burke in order to
distinguish between terror and horror in literature. She argues that
terror is characterized by "obscurity" or indeterminacy in its
treatment of potentially horrible events; it is this indeterminacy
that leads the reader toward the sublime. Horror, in contrast, "nearly
annihilates" the reader's responsive capacity with its unambiguous
displays of atrocity.
Although Radcliffe uses examples from Shakespeare, rather than Gothic
novels, to articulate her position, later critics have consistently
adopted the terms "terror" and "horror" to distinguish between the two
major strains of the Gothic represented by Radcliffe and Lewis
respectively. Devendra Varma was one of the first critics to seize
upon this distinction, characterizing the difference between terror
and horror as the difference between "awful apprehension and sickening
realization," with Radcliffe the sole representative of the former and
Beckford, Maturin, Shelley and Godwin allied with Lewis in
representing the latter. Robert Hume has also embraced this
distinction, although in slightly different terms: he argues that the
horror novel replaces the ambiguous physical details of the terror
novel with a more disturbing moral and psychological ambiguity. In a
sharp rebuttal to Hume, Robert Platzner has questioned the rigid
categories of terror and horror, quoting from Udolpho to demonstrate
that Radcliffe herself often crosses the line between the two. He
calls for a more methodical and text- oriented approach to
characterizing the Gothic novel.
For related discussions, see the section on Burke's notion of [1]the
sublime and the section on [2]the Female Gothic.
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>From The Mysteries of Udolpho
A return of the noise again disturbed her; it seemed to come from that
part of the room which communicated with the private staircase, and
she instantly remembered the odd circumstance of the door having been
fastened, during the preceding night, by some unknown hand. Her late
alarming suspicion concerning its communication also occurred to her.
Her heart became faint with terror. Half raising herself from the bed,
and gently drawing aside the curtain, she looked towards the door of
the staircase, but the lamp that burned on the hearth spread so feeble
a light through the apartment, that the remote parts of it were lost
in shadow. The noise, however, shich she was convinced came from the
door, continued. It seemed like that made by the undrawing of rusty
bolts, and often ceased, and was then renewed more gently, as if the
hand that occasioned it was restrained by a fear of discovery. While
Emily kept her eyes fixed on the spot, she saw the door move, and then
slowly open, and perceived something enter the room, but the extreme
duskiness prevented her distinguishing what it was. Almost fainting
with terror, she had yet sufficient command over herself to check the
shriek that was escaping from her lips, and letting the curtain drop
from her hand, continued to observe in silence the motions of the
mysterious form she saw. It seemed to glide along the remote obscurity
of the apartment, then paused, and, as it approached the hearth, she
perceived, in the stronger light, what appeared to be a human figure.
Certain remembrance now struck upon her heart, and almost subdued the
feeble remains of her spirits; she continued, however, to watch the
figure, which remained for some time motionless, but then, advancing
slowly towards the bed, [it] stood silently at the feet where the
curtains, being a little open, allowed her still to see it; terror,
however, had now deprived her of the power of discrimination, as well
as that of utterance.
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>From The Monk
[A light] proceeded from a small Lamp which was placed upon a heap of
stones, and whose faint and melancholy rays served rather to point
out, than dispell the horrors of a narrow gloomy dungeon formed in one
side of the Cavern; It also showed several other recesses of similar
construction, but whose depth was buried in obscurity. Coldly played
the light upon the damp walls, whose dew-stained surface gave back a
feeble reflection. A thick and pestilential fog clouded the height of
the vaulted dungeon. As Lorenzo advanced, He felt a piercing chillness
spread itself through his veins. The frequent groans still engaged him
to move forwards. He turned towards them, and by the Lamp's glimmering
beams beheld in a corner of the loathsome abode, a Creature stretched
upon a bed of straw, so wretched, so emaciated, so pale, that He
doubted to think her Woman. She was half-naked: Her long dishevelled
hair fell in disorder over her face, and almost entirely concealed it.
One wasted Arm hung listlessly upon a tattered rug, which covered her
convulsed and shivering limbs: The Other was wrapped round a small
bundle, and held it closely to her bosom. A large Rosary lay near her:
Opposite to her was a Crucifix, on which She bent her sunk eyes
fixedly, and by her side stood a Basket and a small Earthen Pitcher.
Lorenzo stopped: He was petrified with horror. He gazed upon the
miserable Object with disgust and pity. He trembled at the spectacle;
He grew sick at heart: His strength failed him, and his limbs were
unable to support his weight.
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Ann Radcliffe, "On the Supernatural in Poetry," The New Monthly Magazine
(1826): 145-52.
[Ed. note: Radcliffe's essay is in the form of a dialogue between
Willoughton, "the apostle of Shakespeare," and Mr. Simpson, "the
representative of Philistine common sense."]
[W____:]"Who ever suffered for the ghost of Banquo, the gloomy and
sublime kind of terror, which that of Hamlet calls forth? though the
appearance of Banquo, at the high festival of Macbeth, not only tells
us that he is murdered, but recalls to our minds the fate of the
gracious Duncan, laid in silence and death by those who, in this very
scene, are reveling in his spoils. There, though deep pity mingles
with our surprise and horror, we experience a far less degree of
interest, and that interest too of an inferior kind. The union of
grandeur and obscurity, which Mr. Burke describes as a sort of
tranquillity tinged with terror, and which causes the sublime, is to
be found only in Hamlet; or in scenes where circumstances of the same
kind prevail."
"That may be," said Mr. S____, "and I perceive you are not one of
those who contend that obscurity does not make any part of the
sublime." "They must be men of very cold imaginations," said W____,
"with whom certainty is more terrible than surmise. Terror and Horror
are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul and awakens the
faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes and
nearly annihilates them. I apprehend, that neither Shakespeare nor
Milton by their fictions, nor Mr. Burke by his reasoning, anywhere
looked to positive horror as a source of the sublime, though they all
agree that terror is a very high one; and where lies the great
difference between horror and terror, but in uncertainty and
obscurity, that accompany the first, respecting the dreaded evil?
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Devendra P. Varma, The Gothic Flame (New York: Russell & Russell, 1966).
Mrs. Radcliffe, a mistress of hints, associations, silence, and
emptiness, only half-revealing her picture leaves the rest to the
imagination. She knows, as Burke has asserted, that obscurity is a
strong ingredient in the sublime; but she knew the sharp distinction
between Terror and Horror, which was unknown to Burke. "Terror and
horror...are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and
awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts,
freezes and nearly annihilates them...; and where lies the great
difference between terror and horror, but in the uncertainty and
obscurity, that accompany the first, respecting the dreaded evil?"
Sounds unexplained, sights indistinctly caught, dim shadows endowed
with motion by the flicker of the firelight or the shimmer of the
moonbeam invoke superstitious fear. "To the warm imagination," she
writes in The Mysteries of Udolpho, "the forms which float half-veiled
in darkness afford a higher delight than the most distinct scenery the
Sun can show."
_________________
The chords of terror which had tremulously shuddered beneath Mrs.
Radcliffe's gentle fingers were now smitten with a new vehemence. The
intense school of the Schauer- Romantiks improvised furious and
violent themes in the orchestra of horror.... The contrast between the
work and personalities of Mrs. Radcliffe and ' Monk' Lewis serves to
illustrate the two distinct streams of the Gothic novel: the former
representing the Craft of Terror, the latter and his followers
comprising the chambers of Horror....
The difference between Terror and Horror is the difference between
awful apprehension and sickening realization: between the smell of
death and stumbling against a corpse. Professor McKillop, quoting from
Mrs. Radcliffe, said that " obscurity [in Terror] . . . leaves the
imagination to act on a few hints that truth reveals to it, . . .
obscurity leaves something for the imagination to exaggerate". Burke
held that "To make anything very terrible, obscurity seems in general
to be necessary", and added that, ". . . darkness, being originally an
idea of terror, was chosen as a fit scene for such terrible
representations ". Burke did not distinguish between the subtle
gradations of Terror and Horror; he related only Terror to Beauty, and
probably did not conceive of the beauty of the Horrid, the grotesque
power of something ghastly, too vividly imprinted on the mind and
sense.
Terror thus creates an intangible atmosphere of spiritual psychic
dread, a certain superstitious shudder at the other world. Horror
resorts to a cruder presentation of the macabre: by an exact portrayal
of the physically horrible and revolting, against a far more terrible
background of spiritual gloom and despair. Horror appeals to sheer
dread and repulsion, by brooding upon the gloomy and the sinister, and
lacerates the nerves by establishing actual cutaneous contact with the
supernatural...
Each writer of the intense school contributed a grotesque and gruesome
theme of horror to the Schauer-Romantik phase of the Gothic novel.
They wrote stories of black-magic and lust, of persons in pursuit of
the elixir virtue, of insatiable curiosity and unpardonable sins, of
contracts with the Devil, of those who manufacture monsters in their
laboratories, tales of skull-headed ladies, of the dead arising from
their graves to feed upon the blood of the innocent and beautiful, or
who walk about in the Hall of Eblis, carrying their burning hearts in
their hands.... The baleful hall of Eblis, "the abode of ve ngeance
and despair", is pictured in the full effulgence of infernal majesty.
It conveys to us the horror of the most ghastly convulsions and
screams that may not be smothered. Here everyone carries within him a
heart tormented in flames, to wander in an eternity of unabating
anguish...
_________________________________________________________________
>From Vathek
In the midst of this immense [Hall of Eblis], a vast multitude was
incessantly passing, who severally kept their right hands on their
hearts, without once regarding anything around them: they had all the
livid paleness of death. Their eyes, deep sunk in their sockets,
resembled those phosphoric meteors that glimmer by night in places of
interment. Some stalked slowly on, absorbed in profound reverie; some,
shrieking with agony, ran furiously about like tigers wounded with
poisoned arrows; whilst others, grinding their teeth in rage, foamed
along more frantic than the wildest maniac. They all avoided each
other; and, though surrounded by a multitude that no one could number,
each wandered at random unheedful of the rest, as if alone on a desert
where no foot had trodden.
_________________
Almost at the same instant, the same voice announced to the caliph,
Nouronihar, the four princes, and the princess, the awful and
irrevocable decree. Their hearts immediately took fire, and they at
once lost the most precious gift of heaven-- HOPE. These unhappy
beings recoiled, with looks of the most furious distraction. Vathek
beheld in the eyes of Nouronihar nothing but rage and vengeance; nor
could she discern aught in his, but aversion and despair. The two
princes who were friends, and, till that moment, had preserved their
attachment, shrunk back, gnashing their teeth with mutual and
unchangeable hatred. Kalilah and his sister made reciprocal gestures
of imprecation; all testified their horror for each other by the most
ghastly convulsions, and screams that could not be smothered. All
severally plunged themselves into the accursed multitude, there to
wander in an eternity of unabating anguish.
_________________________________________________________________
>From Frankenstein
How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate
the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to
form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as
beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the
work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous
black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these
luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes,
that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in
which they were set, his shriveled complexion and straight black lips.
The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings
of human nature. I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole
purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had
deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour
that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty
of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my
heart.
_________________________________________________________________
Robert Hume, "Gothic Versus Romantic: A Revaluation of the Gothic Novel," PMLA
84 (1969): pp. 282-290.
Terror dependent on suspense or dread is the modus operandi of the
novels of Walpole and Radcliffe. The Castle of Otranto holds the
reader's attention through dread of a series of terrible
possibilities-Theodore's execution, the (essentially) incestuous
marriage of Manfred and Isabella, the casting-off of Hippolita, and so
on. Mrs. Radcliffe's use of dramatic suspension is similar but more
sophisticated. She raises vague but unsettling possibilities and
leaves them dangling for hundreds of pages. Sometimes the effect is
artificial, as in the case of the black-veiled "picture" at Udolpho,
but in raising and sustaining the disquieting possibility of an affair
between St. Aubert and the Marchioness de Villeroi, for in stance, she
succeeds splendidly. Mrs. Radcliffe's easy manipulation of drawn-out
suspense holds the reader's attention through long books with slight
plots.
The method of Lewis, Beckford, Mary Shelley, and Maturin is
considerably different. Instead of holding the reader's attention
through suspense or dread they attack him frontally with events that
shock or disturb him. Rather than elaborating possibilities which
never materialize, they heap a succession of horrors upon the reader.
Lewis set out, quite deliberately, to overgo Mrs. Radcliffe. The Monk
(1796), like Vathek (1786), Frankenstein, and Melmoth the Wanderer,
gains much of its effect from murder, torture, and rape. The
difference from terror-Gothic is considerable; Mrs. Radcliffe merely
threatens these things, and Walpole uses violent death only at the
beginning and end of his book. The reader is prepared for neither of
these deaths, which serve only to catch the attention and to produce a
climax, respectively.
Obviously a considerable shift has occurred. Is its purpose merely
ever greater shock? Or has the Gothic novelists' aesthetic theory
changed? Terror-Gothic works on the supposition that a reader who is
repelled will close his mind (if not the book) to the sublime feelings
which may be realized by the mixture of pleasure and pain induced by
fear. Horror-Gothic assumes that if events have psychological
consistency, even within repulsive situations, the reader will find
himself involved beyond recall.
This change is probably related to a general shift in conceptions of
good and evil.... Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe maintain the proprieties
of a strict distinction between good and evil, though in Manfred and
Montoni they created villain- heroes whose force of character gives
them a certain fearsome attractiveness, even within this moral
context. But with the villain-heroes of horror-Gothic we enter the
realm of the morally ambiguous. Ambrosio, Victor Frankenstein, and
Melmoth are men of extraordinary capacity whom circumstance turns
increasingly to evil purposes. They are not merely monsters, and only
a bigoted reading makes them out as such.
To put the change from terror-Gothic to horror-Gothic in its simplest
terms, the suspense of external circumstance is de- emphasized in
favor of increasing psychological concern with moral ambiguity. The
horror-Gothic writers postulated the relevance of such psychology to
every reader; they wrote for a reader who could say with Goethe that
he had never heard of a crime which he could not imagine himself
committing. The terror novel prepared the way for a fiction which
though more overtly horrible is at the same time more serious and more
profound. It is with Frankenstein and Melmoth the Wanderer that the
Gothic novel comes fully into its own.
_________________________________________________________________
Robert L. Platzner, "'Gothic versus Romantic': A Rejoinder," PMLA 86 (1971):
266-74.
[W]hen Mr. Hume, in search of a theoretical model of the mechanism of
Gothic sensibility, turns to the Burkean concept of the sublime and
its attendant emotions, he finds in the distinction between terror and
horror not only a satisfactory modus operandi for Radcliffean Romance
but an adequate principle of differentiation for all Gothic Romance
after Radcliffe. What I would object to in all this is not the very
existence of an esthetic of terror or even the fact of its importance
to Mrs. Radcliffe and her contemporaries....[n]o, what I propose to
students of the Gothic is that any reinterpretation of this genre must
proceed beyond or outside of the constricting framework of
late-eighteenth-century esthetic theory, for if we are to establish
the groundwork for a new appraisal of the Gothic imagination we will
have to provide for the theoretical differentiation of mythopoetic
tendencies that cannot be accounted for in terms of either "terror" or
"horror".
I would suggest, further, that there are reasons for doubting the
final adequacy of neo-Burkean sensationalism, or any of the
distinctions it makes possible between gradations of terror and their
source, even if we restrict ourselves to the Radcliffe- Lewis-Maturin
era. I, at least, remain unconvinced that Mrs. Radcliffe's rationale
for terror is in fact the governing principle behind all of her work.
It appears, rather, that far from never crossing the boundary between
terror and horror, Mrs. Radcliffe compulsively places her heroine in
situations of overwhelming anxiety in which a gradual shift from
terror to horror is inescapable. Let us agree, for example, to dismiss
the notorious "veil" scene as too crudely melodramatic to be properly
representative, and focus on a more modestly terrifying episode that
occurs sometime later in the same chapter:
"A return of the noise again disturbed her; it seemed to come from
that part of the room which communicated with the private staircase,
and she instantly remembered the odd circumstance of the door having
been fastened, during the preceding night, by some unknown hand. Her
late alarming suspicion concerning its communication also occurred to
her. Her heart became faint with terror....she saw the door move, and
then slowly open, and perceived something enter the room, but the
extreme duskiness prevented her distinguishing what it was. Almost
fainting with terror, she had yet sufficient command over herself to
check the shriek that was escaping from her lips....but then,
advancing slowly towards the bed, [it] stood silently at the feet
where the curtains, being a little open, allowed her still to see it;
terror, however, had now deprived her of the power of discrimination,
as well as that of utterance."
How far is Emily from that annihilation of sensibilities that is
characteristic only of pure "horror"--a hairbreadth? What is the
practical utility of insisting upon a critical distinction that belies
rather than discloses the dramatic character of events or sensations?
No doubt some such dichotomy between titillation and revulsion is
necessary to express the shift in tone and subject one encounters as
one moves from the school of Radcliffe to the Schauerroman of Lewis or
Maturin and its singular preoccupation with the perverse and the
occult. Once again, however, I find (as in the relation between
Gothicism and Romanticism) the continuity between Udolpho and The Monk
at least as instructive as the discontinuity. Regarded in this light,
Lewis' marginally pornographic Romance is but an actualizing of the
incipient or imagined horrors of an Emily or an Adeline. Put another
way, the paranoiac apprehensions of the Radcliffean heroine become the
real crimes of an Ambrosio, no slight distinction to be sure. But
transcending even such a distinction is the undeniable presence of
evil, whether manifest as free-floating dread or demonic temptation.
References
1. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/zach.sublime1.html#burke2
2. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/ami.intro.html
---------------
The Uncanny and the Fantastic
http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.uncanny.html
The German word "unheimlich" is considered untranslatable; our rough
English equivalent, "uncanny", is itself difficult to define. This
indescribable quality is actually an integral part of our
understanding of the uncanny experience, which is terrifying precisely
because it can not be adequately explained. Rather than attempting a
definition, most critics resort to describing the uncanny experience,
usually by way of the dream-like visions of doubling and death that
invariably seem to accompany it. These recurrent themes, which trigger
our most primitive desires and fears, are the very hallmarks of Gothic
fiction.
According to Freud's description, the uncanny "derives its terror not
from something externally alien or unknown but--on the contrary--from
something strangely familiar which defeats our efforts to separate
ourselves from it" (Morris). Freud discusses how an author can evoke
an uncanny response on the part of the reader by straddling the line
between reality and unreality within the fiction itself. In The
Fantastic, Todorov goes to some length to distinguish his
structuralist approach to this genre from a Freudian psychoanalytic
approach; nonetheless, he shares many of Freud's conclusions,
especially in attributing literary terror to the collapsing of the
psychic boundaries of self and other, life and death, reality and
unreality.
Although Freud never mentions Gothic fiction in his essay, and Todorov
partially excludes it from his, critics of the Gothic have drawn
heavily upon both of them, often in conjunction with one another.
Terry Castle's article on the "other" in Radcliffe's novels and Peter
Brook's essay on The Monk are two examples of this combined
theoretical approach. Although Margaret Anne Doody does not mention
Freud or Todorov specifically, her essay--which describes how
Radcliffe blurs the distinction between dreams and reality within her
novels--seems indebted to both of them. This emphasis on dreams is
also essential to any analysis of Frankenstein, a text which is itself
the product of a dream-vision and which seems to capture the very
essence of the uncanny.
See also the excerpt on the Freudian uncanny by [1]David Morris.
_________________________________________________________________
Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny," in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. & trs. James Strachey, vol. XVII
(London: Hogarth, 1953), pp. 219-252.
When we proceed to review the things, persons, impressions, events and
situations which are able to arouse in us a feeling of the uncanny in
a particularly forcible and definite form, the first requirement is
obviously to select a suitable example to start. Jentsch has taken as
a very good instance 'doubts whether an apparently animate being is
really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in
fact animate'; and he refers in this connection to the impression made
by waxwork figures, ingeniously constructed dolls and
automata....Jentsch writes: 'In telling a story, one of the most
successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the
reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a
human being or an automaton, and to do it in such a way that his
attention is not focused directly upon his uncertainty, so that he may
not be led to go into the matter and clear it up immediately." That,
as we have said, would quickly dissipate the peculiar emotional effect
of the thing.
_________________
The theme of the 'double' has been very thoroughly treated by Otto
Rank (1914). He has gone into the connections which the 'double' has
with reflections in mirrors, with shadows, with guardian spirits, with
the belief in the soul and with the fear of death; but he also lets in
a flood of light on the surprising evolution of the idea. For the
'double' was originally an insurance against the destruction of the
ego, an 'energetic denial of the power of death', as Rank says; and
probably the 'immortal' soul was the first 'double' of the body....
Such ideas...have sprung from the soil of unbounded self-love, from
the primary narcissism which dominates the mind of the child and of
primitive man. But when this stage has been surmounted, the 'double'
reverses its aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, it
becomes the uncanny harbinger of death...The 'double' has become a
thing of terror, just as, after the collapse of their religion the
gods turned into demons.
_________________
Many people experience the feeling [of the uncanny] in the highest
degree in relation to death and dead bodies, to the return of the
dead, and to spirits and ghosts....There is scarcely any other matter,
however, upon which our thoughts and feelings have changed so little
since the very earliest times, and in which discarded forms have been
so completely preserved under a thin disguise, as our relation to
death. Two things account for our conservatism: the strength of our
original emotional reaction to death and the insufficiency of our
scientific knowledge about it. Biology has not yet been able to decide
whether death is the inevitable fate of every living being or whether
it is only a regular but yet perhaps avoidable event in life. It is
true that the statement 'All men are mortal' is paraded in text-books
of logic as an example of a general proposition; but no human being
really grasps it, and our unconscious has as little use now as it ever
had for the idea of its own mortality....Since almost all of us still
think as savages do on this topic, it is no matter for surprise that
the primitive fear of the dead is still so strong within us and always
ready to come to the surface on any provocation....
_________________
The uncanny as it is depicted in literature, in stories and
imaginative productions, merits in truth a separate discussion. Above
all, it is a much more fertile province than the uncanny in real life,
for it contains the whole of the latter and something more besides,
something that cannot be found in real life. The contrast between what
has been repressed and what has been surmounted cannot be transposed
on to the uncanny in fiction without profound modification; for the
realm of phantasy depends for its effect on the fact that its content
is not submitted to reality-testing. The somewhat paradoxical result
is that in the first place a great deal that is not uncanny in fiction
would be so if it happened in real life; and in the second place that
there are many more means of creating uncanny effects in fiction than
there are in real life.
The imaginative writer has this license among many others, that he can
select his world of representation so that it either coincides with
the realities we are familiar with or departs from them in what
particulars he pleases. We accept his ruling in every case. In fairy
tales, for instance, the world of reality is left behind from the very
start, and the animistic system of beliefs is frankly adopted.
Wish-fulfillments, secret powers, omnipotence of thoughts, animation
of inanimate objects, all the elements so common in fairy stories, can
exert no uncanny influence here; for, as we have learnt, that feeling
cannot arise unless there is a conflict of judgment as to whether
things which have been 'surmounted' and are regarded as incredible may
not, after all, be possible; and this problem is eliminated from the
outset by the postulates of the world of fairy tales.... The situation
is altered as soon as the writer pretends to move in the world of
common reality. In this case he accepts as well all the conditions
operating to produce uncanny feelings in real life; and everything
that would have an uncanny effect in reality has it in his story. But
in this case he can even increase his effect and multiply it far
beyond what could happen in reality, by bringing about events which
never or very rarely happen in fact. In doing this he is in a sense
betraying us to the superstitiousness which we have ostensibly
surmounted; he deceives us by promising to give us the sober truth,
and then after all overstepping it. We react to his inventions as we
would have reacted to real experiences; by the time we have seen
through his trick it is already too late and the author has achieved
his object. But it must be added that his success is not unalloyed. We
retain a feeling of dissatisfaction, a kind of grudge against the
attempted deceit.
_________________________________________________________________
Tsvetan Todorov, The Fantastic (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975).
The fantastic requires the fulfillment of three conditions. First, the
text must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters as
a world of living persons and to hesitate between a natural and a
supernatural explanation of the events described. Second, this
hesitation may also be experienced by a character; thus the reader's
role is so to speak entrusted to a character, and at the same time the
hesitation is represented, it becomes one of the themes of the
work--in the case of naive reading, the actual reader identifies
himself with the character. Third, the reader must adopt a certain
attitude with regard to the text: he will reject allegorical as well
as "poetic" interpretations....
The fantastic, we have seen, lasts only as long as a certain
hesitation: a hesitation common to reader and character, who must
decide whether or not what they perceive derives from "reality" as it
exists in the common opinion. At the story's end, the reader makes a
decision even if the character does not; he opts for one solution or
the other, and thereby emerges from the fantastic. If he decides that
the laws of reality remain intact and permit an explanation of the
phenomena described, we say that the work belongs to another genre:
the uncanny. If, on the contrary, he decides that new laws of nature
must be entertained to account for the phenomena, we enter the genre
of the marvelous.
The fantastic therefore leads a life full of dangers, and may
evaporate at any moment. It seems to be located on the frontier of two
genres, the marvelous and the uncanny, rather than to be an autonomous
genre. One of the great periods of supernatural literature, that of
the Gothic novel, seems to confirm this observation. Indeed, we
generally distinguish, within the literary Gothic, two tendencies:
that of the supernatural explained (the "uncanny"), as it appears in
the novels of Clara Reeves and Ann Radcliffe; and that of the
supernatural accepted (the "marvelous"), which is characteristic of
the works of Horace Walpole, M. G. Lewis, and Maturin. Here we find
not the fantastic in the strict sense, only genres adjacent to it.
More precisely, the effect of the fantastic is certainly produced, but
during only a portion of our reading: in Ann Radcliffe, up to the
moment when we are sure that the supernatural events will receive no
explanation. Once we have finished reading, we understand--in both
cases--that what we call the fantastic has not existed.
_________________
One might say that the common denominator of the two themes,
metamorphosis and pan-determinism, is the collapse of the limit
between matter and mind Thus we may advance a hypothesis as to a
generating principle of all the themes collected [in this study]: the
transformation from mind to matter has become possible.
...[In fantastic literature] a character will be readily
multiplied....The multiplication of personality, taken literally, is
an immediate consequence of the possible transition between matter and
mind: we are several persons mentally, we become so physically.
Another consequence of the same principle has still greater extension:
this is the effacement of the limits between subject and object. The
rational schema represents the human being as a subject entering into
relations with other persons or with things that remain external to
him, and which have the status of objects. The literature of the
fantastic disturbs this abrupt separation. We hear music, but there is
no longer an instrument external to the hearer and producing sounds...
_________________________________________________________________
>From The Mysteries of Udolpho
Retired to her lonely cabin, her melancholy thoughts still hovered
round the body of her deceased parent; and, when she sunk into a kind
of slumber, the images of her waking mind still haunted her fancy. She
thought she saw her father approaching her with a benign countenance;
then smiling mournfully, and pointing upwards, his lips moved; but,
instead of words, she heard sweet music borne on the distant air, and
presently saw his features glow with the mild rapture of a superior
being. The strain seemed to swell louder, and she awoke. The vision
was gone; but music yet came to her ear in strains such as angels
might breathe. She doubted, listened, raised herself in the bed, and
again listened. It was music, and not an illusion of her imagination.
After a solemn, steady harmony, it paused--then rose again, in
mournful sweetness--and then died, in a cadence that seemed to bear
away the listening soul to heaven. She instantly remembered the music
of the preceding night, with the strange circumstances related by La
Voisin, and the affecting conversation it had led to concerning the
state of departed spirits. All that St. Aubert had said on that
subject now pressed on her heart, and overwhelmed it. What a change in
a few hours! He who then could only conjecture, was now made
acquainted with the truth--was himself become one of the departed! As
she listened, she was chilled with superstitious awe; her tears
stopped; and she arose and went to the window. All without was
obscured in shade; but Emily, turning her eyes from the massy darkness
of the woods, whose waving outline appeared on the horizon, saw, on
the left, that effulgent planet which the old man had pointed out,
setting over the woods. She remembered what he had said concerning it;
and the music now coming at intervals on the air, she unclosed the
casement to listen to the strains, that soon gradually sunk to a
greater distance, and tried to discover whence they came. The
obscurity prevented her from distinguishing any object on the green
platform below; and the sounds became fainter and fainter, till they
softened into silence. She listened, but they returned no more.
_________________________________________________________________
Terry Castle, "The Spectralization of the Other in the Mysteries of Udolpho,"
in The New 18th Century, ed. Nussbaum and Brown (Routledge: New York, 1987).
To be a Radcliffean hero or heroine in one sense means just this: to
be "haunted," to find oneself obsessed by spectral images of those one
loves. One sees in the mind's eye those who are absent; one is
befriended and consoled by phantoms of the beloved. Radcliffe makes it
clear how such phantasmata arise....The "ghost" may be of someone
living or dead. Mourners, not surprisingly, are particularly prone to
such mental visions. Early in the novel, for instance, Emily's father,
St. Aubert, is reluctant to leave his estate, even for his health,
because the continuing "presence" of his dead wife has "sanctified
every surrounding scene" (22)....After St. Aubert dies and Emily has
held a vigil over his corpse, her fancy is "haunted" by his living
image: "She thought she saw her father approaching her with a benign
countenance; then, smiling mournfully and pointing upwards, his lips
moved, but instead of words, she heard sweet music borne on the
distant air, and presently saw his features glow with the mild rapture
of a superior being" (83). Entering his room when she returns to La
Vallee, "the idea of him rose so distinctly to her mind, that she
almost fancied she saw him before her" (95).
But lovers--those who mourn, as it were, for the living--are subject
to similar experiences. The orphaned Emily, about to be carried off by
her aunt to Tholouse, having bid a sad farewell to Valancourt in the
garden at La Vallee, senses a mysterious presence at large in the
shades around her:
"As her eyes wandered over the landscape she thought she perceived a
person emerge from the groves, and pass slowly along a moon-light
alley that led between them; but the distance and the imperfect light
would not suffer her to judge with any degree of certainty whether
this was fancy or reality." (115)
...When Emily's gallant suitor Du Pont, the Valancourt-surrogate who
appears in the midsection of the novel, traverses the battlements at
Udolpho in the hope of seeing her, he is immediately mistaken by the
castle guards (who seem to have read Hamlet) for an authentic
apparition. He obliges by making eerie sounds, and creates enough
apprehension to continue his lovesick "hauntings" indefinitely (459).
Similarly, at the end of the fiction, when Emily is brooding once
again over the absent Valancourt, her servant Annette suddenly bursts
in crying, "I have seen his ghost, madam, I have seen his ghost!"
Hearing her garbled story about the arrival of a stranger, Emily, in
an acute access of yearning, assumes the "ghost" must be Valancourt
(629).
_________________
Characters in Udolpho mirror, or blur into one another. Following the
death of her father, Emily is comforted by a friar "whose mild
benevolence of manners bore some resemblance to those of St. Aubert"
(82). The Count de Villefort's benign presence recalls "most
powerfully to her mind the idea of her late father" (492). Emily and
Annette repeatedly confuse Du Pont with Valancourt (439-40);
Valancourt and Montoni also get mixed up. In Italy Emily gazes at
someone she believes to be Montoni who turns out, on second glance, to
be her lover (145). But even Emily herself looks like Valancourt. His
countenance is the "mirror" in which she sees "her own emotions
reflected" (127)....This persistent deindividuation of other people
produces numerous dreamlike effects throughout the novel. Characters
seem uncannily to resemble or to replace previous characters....Du
Pont, of course, is virtually indistinguishable from Valancourt for
several chapters. Blanche de Villefort is a kind of replacement-Emily,
and her relations with her father replicate those of the heroine and
St. Aubert...and so on. The principle of deja vu dominates both the
structure of human relations in Udolpho and the phenomenology of
reading.
One is always free, of course, to describe such peculiarly
overdetermined effects in purely formal terms. Tzvetan Todorov, for
example, would undoubtedly treat this mass of anecdotal material as a
series of generic cues--evidence of the fantastic nature of
Radcliffe's text. The defining principle of the fantastic work, he
posits in The Fantastic, is that "the transition from mind to matter
has become possible." Ordinary distinctions between fantasy and
reality, mind and matter, subject and object, break down. The boundary
between psychic experience and the physical world collapses, and "the
idea becomes a matter of perception"....
Radcliffe's fictional world might be described as fantastic in this
sense. The mysterious power of loved ones to arrive at the very moment
one thinks of them, or else to "appear" when one contemplates the
objects with which they are associated--such events blur the line
between objective and subjective experience....But the fantastic
nature of Radcliffe's ontology is also manifest, one might argue, in
the peculiar resemblances that obtain between characters in her novel.
When everyone looks like everyone else, the limit between mind and
world is again profoundly undermined, for such obsessive replication
can only occur, we assume, in a universe dominated by phantasmatic
imperatives. Mirroring occurs in a world already stylized, so to
speak, by the unconscious. Freud makes this point in his famous essay
"The Uncanny" in which he takes the proliferation of doubles in E. T.
A. Hoffmann's "The Sandman" as proof that the reader is in fact
experiencing events from the perspective of the deranged and
hallucinating hero....
[Later in his study, Todorov] uncovers one of the central themes of
the fantastic: "To think that someone is not dead--to desire it on one
hand, and to perceive this same fact in reality on the other--are two
phases of one and the same movement, and the transition between them
is achieved without difficulty.'' Only the thinnest line separates the
experience of wishing for (or fearing) the return of the dead and
actually seeing them return. Fantastic works, he argues, repeatedly
cross it. Here indeed is the ultimate fantasy of mind over matter.
Just such a fantasy--of a breakdown of the limit between life and
death--lies at the heart of Radcliffe's novel and underwrites her
vision of experience. To put it quite simply, there is an impinging
confusion in Udolpho over who is dead and who is alive. The ambiguity
is conveyed by the very language of the novel: in the moment of
Radcliffean reverie, as we have seen, the dead seem to "live" again,
while conversely, the living "haunt" the mind's eye in the manner of
ghosts. Life and death--at least in the realm of the psyche--have
become peculiarly indistinguishable....
_________________________________________________________________
>From The Monk
...Alarmed at the [sexual fantasies of Matilda] which He was
indulging, He betook himself to prayer; He started from his Couch,
knelt before the beautiful Madona, and entreated her assistance in
stifling such culpable emotions. He then returned to his Bed, and
resigned himself to slumber.
He awoke, heated and unrefreshed. During his sleep his inflamed
imagination had presented him with none but the most voluptuous
objects. Matilda stood before him in his dreams, and his eyes again
dwelt upon her naked breast. She repeated her protestations of eternal
love, threw her arms round his neck, and loaded him with kisses: He
returned them; He clasped her passionately to his bosom, and...the
vision was dissolved. Sometimes his dreams presented the image of his
favourite Madona, and He fancied that He was kneeling before her: As
He offered up his vows to her, the eyes of the Figure seemed to beam
on him with inexpressible sweetness. He pressed his lips to hers, and
found them warm: The animated form started from the Canvas, embraced
him affectionately, and his senses were unable to support delight so
exquisite. Such were the scenes, on which his thoughts were employed
while sleeping: His unsatisfied Desires placed before him the most
lustful and provoking Images, and he rioted in joys till then unknown
to him.
_________________________________________________________________
Peter Brooks, "Virtue and Terror: The Monk," ELH 40 (1973): 249-63.
[In The Monk,] the experience of the eerie and the uncanny coincides
so closely with Freud's description of the Unheimliche (the uncanny)
that we are impelled to consider the Freudian derivation. For Freud,
the Un--this sign of negation which makes the heimlich into something
strange--represents an act of censorship which turns into the weird
and uncanny what is in fact too familiar, too close to home: a
repressed primal experience. So in The Monk: the novel makes it clear
that the world of the supernatural which it has evoked, from the
Bleeding Nun to Matilda's satanic traps, is interpretable as a world
within the characters themselves, and that Ambrosio's drama is in fact
the story of his relationship to the imperatives of desire. His tale
is one of Eros denied, only to reassert itself with the force of
vengeance, to smite him--in the manner of folktale and Greek
tragedy-through and in his very claims to superiority, which are in
fact denials, repressions, psychic disequilibrium. Matilda, disguised
as the innocent and adoring young novice Rosario, makes her first
approach to Ambrosio precisely through his piety and loathing for the
impurity of the secular world, and works his downfall through his
confidence in his own purity, his failure to recognize the repressions
that it represents. The narcissism of his proud chastity will lead
to--lead back to--the erotic narcissism which is incest. Matilda's
masterstroke is to have her own portrait painted in the disguise of
the Madonna: underneath Ambrosio's passionate adoration of the sacred
icon there will be, unbeknownst to him, a latent erotic component,
which Matilda will need only to make explicit. The painting of the
Madonna/Matilda is in fact a kind of witty conceit demonstrating why
God can no longer be for Ambrosio the representative of the Sacred:
spirituality has a latent daemonic content; the daemonic underlies the
seemingly Holy. And the daemons represent, not a wholly other, but a
complex of interdicted erotic desires within us. The tremendum is
generated from within. Lewis's consistent understanding and
demonstration of this generation constitutes his major claim to our
attention.
_________________________________________________________________
Ann Radcliffe, The Italian (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1968).
Satisfied with this conclusion, [Vivaldi] again laid his head on his
pillow of straw, and soon sunk into a slumber. The subject of his
waking thoughts still haunted his imagination, and the stranger, whose
voice he had this night recognized as that of the monk of Paluzzi,
appeared before him. Vivaldi, on perceiving the figure of this
unknown, felt, perhaps, nearly the same degrees of awe, curiosity, and
impatience that he would have suffered, had he beheld the substance of
this shadow. The monk, whose face was still shrowded, he thought
advanced, till, having come within a few paces of Vivaldi, he paused,
and, lifting the awful cowl that had hitherto concealed him,
disclosed--not the countenance of Schedoni, but one which Vivaldi did
not recollect ever having seen before! It was not less interesting to
curiosity, than striking to the feelings. Vivaldi at the first glance
shrunk back; --something of that strange and indescribable air, which
we attach to the idea of a supernatural being, prevailed over the
features; and the intense and fiery eyes resembled those of an evil
spirit, rather than of a human character. He drew a poniard from
beneath a fold of his garment, and, as he displayed it, pointed with a
stern frown to the spots which discoloured the blade; Vivaldi
perceived they were of blood! He turned away his eyes in horror, and,
when he again looked round in his dream, the figure was gone.
A groan awakened him, but what were his feelings, when, on looking up,
he perceived the same figure standing before him! It was not, however,
immediately that he could convince himself the appearance was more
than the phantom of his dream, strongly impressed upon an alarmed
fancy.
_________________________________________________________________
Margaret Anne Doody, "Deserts, Ruins, and Troubled Waters: Female Dreams in
Fiction and the Development of the Gothic Novel," Genre 10 (1977): 529-73.
...In eighteenth-century English fiction, until the appearance of the
Gothic novel, it is women, not men, who have dreams. Masculine
characters rarely dream; those who do are usually simpletons whose
dreams can be jocosely interpreted. Heroes are not dreamers....Women,
weaker than men, not in control of their environment, are permitted to
have dreams...Women are often seen as living an inward life rather
different from that of men, whose consciousness is more definitely
related to the objective world and to action within it. Women, less
able to plan and execute actions, are seen as living a life closer to
the dream-like, and closer to the dream-life....It was left to later
(I certainly do not say superior) novelists to deal extensively with
fear, desire and repression in terms of the nightmare images used by
earlier novelists only occasionally to provide momentary glimpses into
the perturbed depths of the feminine psyche. That is, the
occasionally-glimpsed landscape of feminine dream was to become the
entire setting in another, non- realistic, type of novel.
The writers of the Gothic novel could give their full attention to the
world of dream and nightmare--indeed, the "real world" for characters
in a Gothic novel is one of nightmare. There is no longer a common
sense order against which the dream briefly flickers; rather, the
world of rational order briefly flickers in and out of the dreamlike.
There is no ordinary world to wake up in....All the imagery we have
met in these fictional dreams of women is to be found in the Gothic
novel: mountain, forest, ghost, desert, cavern lake, troubled waters,
ruined building with tottering roof, subterraneous cavern, sea,
"howling and conflicting winds," snowy wastes, the bleeding lover,
orange groves, corpse, iron instruments, invisible voices and dread
tribunals--and, with these, sudden changes of place, preternatural
speed, irresistible forces. In the Gothic novel these things are not
the illusions which result from momentary feminine weakness--they
constitute objects and facts in the "real" outer world. whose nature
it is to create dread....
In what is probably [Radcliffe's] best work, The Italian (1797) the
reader shares the separate experience of both Ellena and Vivaldi, and
the hero's experience is even more frightening than the heroine's.
Everyone remembers Vivaldi's being brought into the fortress of the
Inquisition, and the scenes of his interrogation before mysterious
tribunals, in the depths of the labyrinth behind iron doors. These
scenes touch on our terror of being tried, of facing accusation
without defence, of being tainted with unspecified guilt while
innocent of crime....[They are] capable of shocking the mind with the
dread of what is fearfully unreasonable and painful in consciousness,
from which one cannot be dismissed by awakening, while at the same
time conveying the fact that the public world is inescapably harsh,
crushing the individual in the name of order and reason, attempting to
make both masculine and feminine sexual identity and inner existence
into guilt. The hero is really afraid, and, when he "at length found a
respite from thought and from suffering in sleep," he has a
frightening dream in which the unholy monk appears, holding a
bloodstained poniard. When he awakens he finds "the same figure
standing before him" although in this reality into which the dream has
melted, the monk does not at first seem to be holding a dagger. It is
only after the strange conversation with Vivaldi that the intruder
shows him a poniard and asks him to look at the blood upon it: "Mark
those spots. . . Here is some print of truth! To-morrow night you will
meet me in the chambers of death!" (p. 323). Clementina had looked for
marks of blood that were not there: reality and dreaming melancholy
were separate. Now within the environment of nightmare man as well as
woman is the victim, and dream and reality are indistinguishable.
The Gothic novel as Mrs. Radcliffe developed it takes the images of
nightmare and gives them a strong embodiment; they are the framework
of life, they are reality. The images and their concomitant emotions
are no longer the figments of a particular feminine consciousness
within the novel, nor do they, as in The Recess, provide an
environment for feminine consciousness alone. They cannot be dismissed
as symptoms of a peculiar psychological state....The Gothic novel has
a value in this alone in making accessible what was strange and
elusive, and so paying full attention to what had been underdeveloped
in the work of earlier novelists...Adolescent heroines had previously
been shown as troubled by dubious fears and mysterious dreads upon
their coming to maturity. Mrs. Radcliffe also associates fear with
maturing, and assumes, quite calmly, that men can be afraid.
_________________________________________________________________
>From Frankenstein
[From Mary Shelley's 1931 Introduction]: "We will each write a ghost
story," said Lord Byron; and his proposition was acceded to. There
were four of us....I busied myself to think of a story -- a story to
rival those which had excited us to this task. One which would speak
to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror --
one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and
quicken the beatings of the heart. If I did not accomplish these
things, my ghost story would be unworthy of its name. I thought and
pondered -- vainly. I felt that blank incapability of invention which
is the greatest misery of authorship, when dull Nothing replies to our
anxious invocations. Have you thought of a story? I was asked each
morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying
negative.
...Night waned...and even the witching hour had gone by, before we
retired to rest. When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep,
nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and
guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a
vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw -- with shut
eyes, but acute mental vision -- I saw the pale student of unhallowed
arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous
phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some
powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half
vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be
the effect if any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of
the Creator of the world. His success would terrify the artist; he
would hope that, left to itself, the slight spark of life which he had
communicated would fade; that this thing, which had received such
imperfect animation, would subside into dead matter; and he might
sleep in the belief that the silence of the grave would quench for
ever the transient existence of the hideous corpse which he had looked
upon as the cradle of life. He sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens
his eyes; behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his
curtains, and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative
eyes.
I opened mine in terror. The idea so possessed my mind, that a thrill
of fear ran through me, and I wished to exchange the ghastly image of
my fancy for the realities around....I could not so easily get rid of
my hideous phantom; still it haunted me. I must try to think of
something else. I recurred to my ghost story -- my tiresome unlucky
ghost story! O! if I could only contrive one which would frighten my
reader as I myself had been frightened that night!
Swift as light and as cheering was the idea that broke in upon me. "I
have found it! What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only
describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow." On the
morrow I announced that I had thought of a story. I began that day
with the words, It was on a dreary night of November, making only a
transcript of the grim terrors of my waking thoughts.
____________________________________________________
[From the text]: The different accidents of life are not so changeable
as the feelings of human nature. I had worked hard for nearly two
years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body.
For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it
with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had
finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and
disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I
had created, I rushed out of the room, and continued a long time
traversing my bed-chamber, unable to compose myself to sleep. At
length lassitude succeeded to the tumult I had before endured; and I
threw myself on the bed in my clothes, endeavouring to seek a few
moments of forgetfulness. But it was in vain: I slept indeed, but was
disturbed by the wildest dreams. I though I saw Elizabeth, in the
bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt. Delighted and
surprised, I embraced her; but as I imprinted the first kiss on her
lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared
to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in
my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the graveworms
crawling in the folds of the flannel.
_________________________________________________________________
Aija Ozolins, "Dreams and Doctrines: Dual Strands in Frankenstein,"
Science-Fiction Studies 2 (1975): 103-10.
There is ample evidence in the novel that the creature functions as
the scientist's baser self. Frankenstein's epithets for him
consistently connote evil: devil, fiend, demon, horror, wretch,
monster, monstrous image, vile insect, abhorred entity, detested form,
hideous phantasm, odious companion and demoniacal corpse. Neutral
terms like creature and being are comparatively rare. Most important,
there is Frankenstein's thinking of him as "my own vampire, my own
spirit let loose from the grave, and forced to destroy all that was
dear to me". And after each murder Frankenstein acknowledges his
complicity: "I not in deed, but in effect, was the true murderer".
One sure sign of the double is his haunting presence. Maria Mahoney
characterizes the feeling as "someone or something behind you, an
ominous adversary dogging your footsteps...[a1 sinister and truly evil
figure lurking in the dark." Even though Frankenstein initially flees
from his creature and even though their direct confrontations are few,
the monster is nevertheless a ubiquitous presence in his life. When he
agrees to fashion a mate for his creature he is told to expect
constant surveillance: "I shall watch your progress with unutterable
anxiety; and fear not but that when you are ready I shall appear" .
After breaking his promise he is even more oppressed by a sense of the
monster's presence; even his days take on a nightmarish quality:
"although the sun shone," he felt only "a dense and frightful
darkness, penetrated by no light but the glimmer of two eyes that
glared" at him.
The psychological motif of the double is reinforced by several visual
tableaux that hint at a secret sympathy between the monster and his
maker. At the beginning of her dream Mary saw "the pale student of
unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together," but at
its conclusion the positions are reversed, with the "horrid thing"
standing at the student's bedside and "looking on him with yellow,
watery, but speculative eyes". This picture is repeated at the end of
the novel when the monster stands sorrowfully over the corpse of
Frankenstein. Similarly, there are three moonlight encounters between
the two. Although meetings by lightning and moonlight are a
conventional part of the Gothic landscape, Mary's conjunction of man,
moon, and monster is traceable to her dream and serves to emphasize
the close relationship between them. Also, because most of these
moonlight encounters are preceded by a crime, they spotlight the
creature's jeering, malevolent form.
The last and most important point regarding the double is the
necessity to confront and recognize the dark aspect of one's
personality in order to transform it by an act of conscious choice.
Ideally, the Shadow diminishes as one's awareness increases. "Freedom
comes," according to Mahoney, "not in eliminating the Shadow...but in
recognizing him in yourself." Prospero acknowledges Caliban--"This
thing of darkness I acknowledge mine"--but Frankenstein's typical
reactions are first to flee, then to kill. His rejection of his
creature is crucial, both in the present psychological context and in
the sociological context we shall consider later. Frankenstein, as
Philmus says, is always "fleeing from self-knowledge," always seeking
"to lose himself in the external world," and thus denying, in Nelson's
words, the "nether forces for which he should have accepted a fully
aware responsibility."
References
1. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/zach.sublime1.html#morris
----------------
Architecture of the Mind
http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.architecture.html
It is important to remember that "Gothic" connoted architecture long
before it connoted literature. Horace Walpole was the first to
establish a link between the two; his obsession with his beloved
miniature castle at Strawberry Hill was the inspiration for The Castle
of Otranto, and the book's subtitle, "A Gothic Story," marks the first
time that the term was used in a literary context. Ever since,
representation of the labyrinthine and claustrophobic space associated
with Gothic architecture has been the defining convention of Gothic
fiction. This space is usually represented by a castle, but
monasteries, convents, and prisons (often in ruins) also appear
frequently.
This architectural space is integral to the psychological machinations
of Gothic fiction, and is used to invoke feelings of fear, awe,
entrapment and helplessness in characters and readers alike.
Furthermore, the architecture itself can be said to be psychically
alive; it is often depicted as having "a vile intelligence of its own"
and as "hyper-organic in all its aspects" (Frank 436). The following
excerpts all discuss the relationship between physical structure and
emotional affect within Gothic fiction, exploring how the individual
or social psyche is externalized in its various architectural forms.
[See also the closely related section on the [1]"inner space" in the
Female Gothic.]
_________________________________________________________________
>From The Mysteries of Udolpho
The sun had just sunk below the top of the mountains she was
descending, whose long shadow stretched athwart the valley, but his
sloping rays, shooting through an opening of the cliffs, touched with
a yellow gleam the summits of the forest that hung upon the opposite
steeps, and streamed in full splendor upon the towers and battlements
of a castle that spread its extensive ramparts along the brow of a
precipice above. The splendor of these illuminated objects was
heightened by the contrasted shade which involved the valley below.
There, said Montoni, speaking for the first time in several hours, is
Udolpho.
Emily gazed with melancholy awe upon the castle, which she understood
to be Montoni's; for, though it was now lighted up by the setting sun,
the Gothic greatness of its features, and its mouldering walls of
dark-gray stone, rendered it a gloomy and sublime object. As she
gazed, the light died away on its walls, leaving a melancholy purple
tint, which spread deeper and deeper as the thin vapor crept up the
mountain, while the battlements above were still tipt with splendor.
From those, too, the rays soon faded, and the whole edifice was
invested with the solemn duskiness of evening. Silent, lonely, and
sublime, it seemed to stand the sovereign of the scene, and to frown
defiance on all who dared to invade its solitary reign. As the
twilight deepened, its features became more awful in obscurity; and
Emily continued to gaze, till its clustering towers were alone seen
rising over the tops of the woods, beneath whose thick shade the
carriages soon after began to ascend.
_________________________________________________________________
Norman N. Holland and Leona F. Sherman, "Gothic Possibilities," New Literary
History 8 (1977): 278-94.
We can begin with the formula, maiden-plus-habitation, and the
prototypical habitation in it, the castle. An older psychoanalytic
criticism would have assumed a one-to-one equation: the castle
symbolizes the body. Unfortunately, this kind of easy isomorphism does
not stand up under experimental testing or even close introspection.
Rather, each of us resymbolizes reality in our own terms. A gothic
novel combines the heroine's fantasies about the castle with her fears
that her body will be violated. The novel thus makes it possible for
literents to interpret body by means of castle and castle by means of
body, but does not force us to do so nor does it fix the terms in
which the two of us will do it.
Instead, the castle admits a variety of our projections. In
particular, because it presents villains and dangers in an archaic
language and mise-en-scene, it fits all we can imagine into it of the
dark, frightening, and unknown. If, like Udolpho, it also has midnight
revelry, violence, battles, confusing noises and disturbances, it can
express our childhood fears at the strange sounds of "struggle"
between our parents in the night and the sexual violence children
often imagine as a result. At the same time, the gothic novel usually
says that the castle contains some family secret, so that the castle
can also become the core for fantasies based on a childish desire that
adulthood be an exactly defined secret one can discover and
possess....
The castle delineates a physical space which will accept many
different projections of unconscious material. de Sade makes this
receptive function of the castle quite terrifyingly explicit: its
chief attribute is an isolation in which the heroine is completely
controlled by someone else while separated from those she loves. The
castle threatens shame, agony, annihilation--and desire. From the
torture chambers of, say, the monastery in Justine, we can create a
magic realm, beyond all normative associations and experience, where
the best anodyne one can hope for is catatonia. Given such an arena
for sexual and sadistic games, we are free to use de Sade's satanic
imaginings to structure our own wildest wishes and fears about loss
and helplessness.
_________________________________________________________________
>From Melmoth the Wanderer
The magnificent remains of two dynasties that had passed away, the
ruins of Roman palaces, and of Moorish fortresses, were around and
above him;--the dark and heavy thunder-clouds that advanced slowly
seemed like the shrouds of these spectres of departed greatness; they
approached, but did not yet overwhelm or conceal them, as if nature
herself was for once awed by the power of man....Stanton gazed around.
The difference between the architecture of the Roman and Moorish ruins
struck him. Among the former are the remains of a theatre, and
something like a public place; the latter present only the remains of
fortresses, embattled, castellated, and fortified from top to
bottom--not a loop-hole for pleasure to get in by--the loop-holes were
only for arrows; all denoted military power and despotic subjugation a
l'outrance.... So thought Stanton, as he still saw strongly defined,
though darkened by the darkening clouds...the solid and heavy mass of
a Moorish fortress, no light playing between its impermeable
walls--the image of power, dark, isolated, impenetrable.
_________________________________________________________________
Philip P. Hallie, The Paradox of Cruelty (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1969)
...[T]o look into the eyes of the villains is not to see the full
force of the tremendum of the Gothic Tale. That force is embodied in
the ambiente, the time and place in which those villains prey on their
victims. The place is often a castle whose lord is the villain. And
the castle, as Maturin puts it towards the beginning of Melmoth, is
"...fortified from top to bottom--not a loophole for pleasure to get
in by--the loopholes were only for arrows; all denoted military power
and despotic subjugation a l'outrance...." A medieval castle was a
fortress with one purpose: to maintain and intensify the power of its
lord. Medieval castles came into being when nobles were comparatively
independent of their kings, and could with impunity exert absolute
power upon anyone living in or near them. It is just such impregnable
power that the castle expresses in the Gothic tale.
And one reason it expresses this power has to do with the victims or
prisoners of its lord. When they are in the dungeon of a lord's
castle, their weakness is as total as his power. The castle heightens
the power of the villain and the weakness of his victim by making it
impossible for the victim to escape the "danger" or dominion of the
lord, and equally impossible for him to get help from the outside,
since even if his cries could be heard through all that distance and
stone, his allies would have to "storm" an impregnable fortress.
...Cruelty occurs most readily in sequestered areas in which the
dominion of the powerful one is inescapable and impregnable, at least
for the moment. Whether it be a dungeon in a medieval castle or a
group of boys gathered round to see a bird have its eyes burned out in
a London street, sequestration from escape and resistance is important
to cruelty. By heightening the strength of the strong one and by
rendering the victim more passive, the castle helps generate and
maintain the difference of power that helps make cruelty, like a spark
of electricity, possible. The castle is the dynamo of cruelty.
_________________________________________________________________
>From The Monk
The Monks quitted the Abbey at midnight. Matilda was among the
Choristers, and led the chaunt. Ambrosio was left by himself, and at
liberty to pursue his own inclinations. Convinced that no one remained
behind to watch his motions, or disturb his pleasure, He now hastened
to the Western Aisles. His heart beating with hope not unmingled with
anxiety, he crossed the Garden, unlocked the door which admitted him
into the Cemetery, and in a few minutes He stood before the Vaults.
Here He paused. He looked round him with suspicion, conscious that his
business was unfit for any other eye. As He stood in hesitation, He
heard the melancholy shriek of the screech-Owl: The wind rattled
loudly against the windows of the adjacent Convent, and as the current
swept by him, bore with it the faint notes of the chaunt of
Choristers. he opened the door cautiously, as if fearing to be
over-heard: He entered; and closed it again after him. Guided by his
Lamp, He threaded the long passages, in whose windings Matilda had
instructed him, and reached the private Vault which contained his
sleeping Mistress.
Its entrance was by no means easy to discover: But this was no
obstacle to Ambrosio, who at the time of Antonia's Funeral had
observed it too carefully to be deceived. He found the door, which was
unfastened, pushed it open, and descended into the dungeon. he
approached the humble Tomb, in which Antonia reposed. He had provided
himself with an iron crow and a pick- axe; But this precaution was
unnecessary. The Grate was slightly fastened on the outside: He raised
it, and placing the Lamp upon its ridge, bent silently over the Tomb.
By the side of three putrid half-corrupted Bodies lay the sleeping
Beauty.
_________________________________________________________________
Peter Brooks, "Virtue and Terror: The Monk," in ELH 40 (1973): 249-63.
It is notable that toward the end of [The Monk], all the major
characters are compelled to descend into the catacombs of the Convent
of St. Clare, and that it is deep in this multi- layered sepulchre
that the climaxes of all the different plots in the novel will be
played out: here Agnes has been imprisoned by the Domina, here
Ambrosio has sequestered Antonia in order to rape her, and here the
nuns of St. Clare retreat as the incensed mob sacks and fires their
convent. The sepulchre, into which the Domina descends for her
sadistic punishments, and Matilda for her diabolical conjurations, has
come in the course of the novel to represent the interdicted regions
of the soul, the area of the mind where our deepest and least avowable
impulses lie, and at the novel's climax the characters are driven
unconsciously, but all the more powerfully, to go to confront their
destinies in the sepulchre. The force of this drive is imaged in the
description of Lorenzo's decision to descend: this arch-rationalist of
the novel is impelled by a movement "secret and unaccountable "into
the labyrinth" of the sepulchre (p. 347). He then discovers the
trap-door into the lowest depth, a "yawning gulph "which he must go on
to explore "alone . . . and in darkness " (p. 354) . That the young
lovers of the novel will eventually find a measure of peace and
tempered happiness is no doubt a product of this experience in and of
the central darkness of the soul: their exploration of the content of
the unconscious will be curative.
The erotic implications of the sepulchre and its labyrinth are patent,
for it is here, down below the daylight world, that Lewis can indulge
the richest, and most sadistic, urgings of his decidedly perverse
imagination. The descriptions of Agnes's attachment to the putrefied
corpse of her baby become almost unbearable. But Lewis's exploitation
of sepulchre and labyrinth also confirm our sense of his intuitive
understanding of his psycho-historical moment. It is easy to document
that there was a veritable explosion of "claustral" literature at this
period, especially in France from the onset of the Revolution. We know
in fact that shortly before starting to write The Monk, Lewis had seen
one of the most celebrated and melodramatic plays on the theme, Boutet
de Monvel's Les Victimes Cloitrees-- which he later translated--and he
probably also knew Olympe de Gouges' Le Couvent, ou les Voeux forces.
Part of the epistemological moment to which The Monk belongs, and
which it best represents, is this opening up of sepulchral depths, the
fascination with what may lie hidden in the lower dungeons of
institutions and mental constraints ostensibly devoted to discipline
and chastity. What does lie hidden there is always the product of
erotic drives gone beserk, perverted and deviated through denial, a
figuration of the price of repression.
Lewis's psychic architecture, then, offers what we have suggested
about the nature of the supernatural in the novel, and the
transformation of the Sacred into taboo. Ambrosio's story is most
centrally a drama of conquest by a desire made terrific by its freight
of repression. Its liberation will be led to commit both matricide and
incest. That is, through the play of repression, erotic pleasure has
been necessarily tied to the idea of transgression, violation of
taboo; and Ambrosio, once he has given himself over wholly to his
erotic drive, will manage to transgress the most basic of them.
Particularly, Ambrosio with growing urgency discovers the need to
violate, defile, to soil and profane the being who has come to
represent for him the sum of erotic pleasure precisely because she is
most clothed in the aura of the Sacred, and most protected by taboo.
_________________________________________________________________
Max Byrd, "The Madhouse, the Whorehouse, and the Convent," Partisan Review
In the first half of the eighteenth century the primary meaning of the
incarceration that occurs over and over in fiction is restraint.
Unbalancing, socially destructive passions like greed or lust are
simply pressed into submission by moral and social institutions, by
the madhouse and the prison. In the later eighteenth century the
primary meaning of incarceration becomes, not restraint, but burial, a
meaning already implied in the Persephone myth. The dungeons in these
houses are Tartarus, the deepest recesses of the human mind in which
unreason still clings to life. Toward the conclusion of M.G. Lewis's
The Monk the hero Lorenzo, searching through subterranean passages,
stumbles upon the following:
"in a corner of this loathsome abode, a creature stretched upon a bed
of straw, so wretched, so emaciated, so pale, that he doubted to think
her woman. She was half naked: her long disheveled hair fell in
disorder over her face, and almost entirely concealed it. One wasted
arm hung listless upon a tattered rug, which covered her convulsed and
shivering limbs: the other was wrapped round a small bundle, and held
it closely to her bosom."
Thus far we might feel we were reading another description of justly
punished whores in Mrs. Sinclair's brothel; but the next sentence
places us elsewhere: "A large rosary lay near her: opposite to her was
a crucifix , on which she bent her sunken eyes fixedly, and by her
side stood a basket and a small earthen pitcher." The convent in
Gothic novels, outwardly a symbol of self-control and reason, in
reality exists as a den of incarceration, just as the madhouse and the
whorehouse do in earlier literature; inwardly it harbors row after row
of dungeons like this one in The Monk where unreason is shut away.
Within the farthest reaches of this building, learns the heroine of
The Italian,
"is a stone chamber, secured by doors of iron, to which such of the
sisterhood as have been guilty of any heinous offence have, from time
to time, been consigned. This condemnation admits of no reprieve: the
unfortunate captive is left to languish in chains and darkness,
receiving only an allowance of bread and water just sufficient to
prolong her sufferings, till nature, at length, sinking under their
intolerable pressure, obtains refuge in death."
The scene Lorenzo discovers in The Monk reminds us of numerous other
eighteenth-century descriptions of Bedlam cells as well as of
brothels....The bundle an inmate clutches is the corpse of her baby,
an emblem of her original female sin....like mid-century European
fiction, The Monk extends the meaning of its symbols of incarceration,
adding isolation, fantasy, and incest to the themes of restraint,
passion, and death that mark the Augustan madhouses and whorehouses.
In its convents and dungeons, for example, The Monk shows us what the
Age of Reason seems never to have doubted, the disastrous consequences
of incarceration when it is understood as isolation from society. The
wretched mother whom Lorenzo discovers in The Monk has been "plunged
into a private dungeon, expressly constituted to hide from the world
for ever the victim of cruelty and tyrannic superstition. In this
dreadful abode she was to lead a perpetual solitude, deprived of all
society, and believed to be dead, by those, whom affection might have
prompted to attempt her rescue."
...But two further points should be noticed here. The first is how
often the incarcerating house is destroyed by these incestuous
children...Ambrosio is responsible for a mob's destruction of a
convent and the slaughter of its nuns; and Moncada, in the most
terrifying episode of all, brings down the palace of the Inquisition
in fire....All the shattered and smoking convents of the Gothic novel
prove to us the power of unreason to destroy its prisons, if it can
break free or if the keeper lingers in their dark passages. The
recurring theme of incest in these novels also conveys to us the
destructive power of unreason, its ability to tear apart the central
institution of order and stability in a public society, the family.
_________________________________________________________________
>From The Italian
The carriage having reached the walls, followed their bendings to a
considerable extent. These walls, of immense height, and strengthened
by innumerable massy bulwarks, exhibited neither window or grate, but
a vast and dreary blank; a small round tower only, perched here and
there upon the summit, breaking their monotony.
The prisoners passed what seemed to be the principal entrance, from
the grandeur of its portal, and the gigantic loftiness of the towers
that rose over it; and soon after the carriage stopped at an arch-way
in the walls, strongly barricadoed. one of the escort alighted, and,
having struck upon the bars, a folding door within was immediately
opened, and a man bearing a torch appeared behind the barricado, whose
countenance, as he looked through it, might have been copied for the
'Grim-visaged comfortless Despair of the poet.
No words were exchanged between him and the guard; but on perceiving
who were without, he opened the iron gate, and the prisoners, having
alighted, passed with the two officials beneath the arch, the guard
following with a torch. They descended a flight of broad steps, at the
foot of which another iron gate admitted them to a kind of hall; such,
however, it at first appeared to Vivaldi, as his eyes glanced through
its gloomy extent, imperfectly ascertaining it by the lamp, which hung
from the centre of the roof. No person appeared, and a death-like
silence prevailed; for neither the officials nor the guard yet spoke;
nor did any distant sound contradict the notion, that they were
traversing the chambers of the dead. To Vivaldi it occurred, that this
was one of the burial vaults of the victims, who suffered in the
Inquisition, and his whole frame thrilled with horror. Several
avenues, opening from the apartment, seemed to lead to distant
quarters of this immense fabric, but still no footstep whispering
along the pavement, or voice murmuring through the arched roofs,
indicated it to be the residence of the living.
_________________________________________________________________
Jacques Blondel, "On 'Metaphysical Prisons,'" Durham University Journal 32
(1971): 133-38.
The theme of metaphysical prisons in art and literature...expands on
three levels....The first is that of reasonable sublimity implying
some ambiguity in the nature of the supernatural; the next is
deliberately that of moral ambiguity and negation of traditional
norms; while the third is that of 'paradis artificiels' and
self-created prisons. The absence of escape in a fictitious universe
devoid of the redemptive scheme and the absence of forgiveness command
this diversified approach to fantastic worlds of their own. On every
level the implications of 'generic guilt' are there to account for the
density, so to say, of walls and the depth of romantic chasms, to
create or challenge the metaphysics of heated brains and to preside
over the fate of both victims and executioners.
A diachronic study of our theme would less forcibly throw into relief
the relationship, between the ethical implications of 'metaphysical
prisons' and their artistic or literary representation....Granted that
Mrs. Radcliffe follows in the wake of Walpole's canons in the genre--
namely romance--and that romance breaking with 'strict adherence to
common life' should include the marvelous, both writers claim to be
enfranchised from superstition, though allowing room for 'stupendous
phenomena' (The Castle of Otranto, 2nd Preface) confronting the 'moral
agents of the drama'. The description of the well-known castle, an
adumbration of Strawberry Hill, anticipates the architectural designs
of Mrs. Radcliffe's structures, that of Montoni and the prisons of the
Inquisition:
"The lower part of the castle was hollowed out into several intricate
cloisters; and it was not easy for one under so much anxiety to find
the door that opened into the cavern"
...However, the structure of the plot in all cases implies a return to
the world of light, a liberation from the devilish machinery which, as
in the case of The Italian, eventually recoils on its devisor (p.
243); the innocent pair, as in the sentimental novel, are duly
permitted to marry, after the trials undergone in the labyrinthine
vaults of Rome. The caves here, more emphatically than in The
Mysteries of Udolpho, have been the proper setting where Vivaldi
realized the danger of inclining too much to the marvelous (p. 347):
" . . . he dismissed, as absurd, a supposition, which had begun to
thrill his every nerve with horror."
Stress is thus laid on his weakness from the point of view of the
rational-minded novelist who remains content with offering the
'delightful horror' (John Dennis) of plunging one's eyes into depths,
mountain gloom, and mountain glory in turn. Prisons here are
contrasted by visions of the sublime; thus Ellena loses the
consciousness of her prison (San Stefano), "while her eyes ranged over
the wide and freely-sublime scene without . . . She perceived that
this chamber was within a small turret . . . and suspended, as in air,
above the vast precipices of granite, that formed part of the
mountain" (p. 90).
Such contrasts evince Mrs. Radcliffe's avoidance of any whole-hearted
commitment to the powers of darkness; Vivaldi is made to descend
further and further, but the final vision is daylight and open air,
even as in Girtin's sublime landscape. The captivity motif remains
external to the mind, except for the guilty villain, when we are
invited to approve of the judgment of the awful tribunal sentencing
him to suffer. Illusions of any kind have had to be dispelled and
prisons have never been properly metaphysical.
The Gothic nocturnal world of The Monk (1796), though influencing The
Italian, develops the prison theme on medieval metaphysical lines....
In The Monk, the conditions of both physical and moral claustrophobia
are fully achieved. Lewis's story, originating from German 'horror'
tales, concentrates on the powerlessness of the victims (Agnes,
Elvira, Raymond) in the face of adverse forces hailing from the
darksome world. Thus Raymond, once captured by the 'Bleeding Nun' whom
he negates as a phantom, has to be released from his trance by a
magician.
Matilda, another Fuseli-like figure, traps lustful Ambrosio, whose
perverse and morbid passion leads him willingly to persevere in sin
and face damnation. The ambiguity here lies not with the fiction
itself, as in the case of Mrs. Radcliffe's visions of imprisonment,
but consists in the divided commitment of Lewis, strumming on the
strings of sensuality in order seemingly to rouse indignation while
pandering to the desires of the flesh. Thus it is a willing prison the
setting of which tallies with the requirements of the
fantastic....Ambrosio's is the "metaphysical" prison of a belated
medieval age, the creation of an unmetaphysical imagination. Thus all
possibility of redemption is and has to be made absurd (hence the
blasphemous pronouncements here and there in the book) in a world
where the constants of reality are nullified, an illusionary yet
strikingly real one.
References
1. http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/ami.inner.html
-------------------
Psycho-Social Concerns
http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.social.html
A generation of Freudians have busied themselves reading the Gothic
novel as an externalization of the author's psyche, or as a device to
elicit a proscribed pyschological response from the reader. However,
because the true Gothic novels comprise a well-defined canon, produced
within a narrow space of time, it is possible to read them as
reflections a distinct social psyche--that is, as illustrating
deep-seated concerns and anxieties associated with a specific
political and historical moment. The sudden flourishing of the Gothic
novel at the end of the eighteenth century has been linked by critics
to such cultural preoccupations as the French Revolution (and
persistent Jacobin uprisings in England) and concerns about the place
of the individual--in relation to both the family and society at
large--in a rapidly changing social order.
Sade, characteristically ahead of his time, was perhaps the first
critic to identify the fictitious horrors of the Gothic novel with the
all-too-real horrors of the 1790s. He wrote that the revolutionary age
had numbed the senses of the general populace to such an extent that
authors were obliged to "call upon the aid of hell itself" in order to
strike a chord of recognition with readers. (Sade later went on to try
his own hand at Gothic short stories.) In a fascinating article,
Ronald Paulson builds upon Sade's association of the Gothic and the
French Revolution. Paulson reads The Monk and Caleb Williams as
bearing witness to the inevitably bloody excesses of the revolutionary
mob, which in throwing off tyranny becomes itself tyrannical. He sees
Frankenstein as mapping this theme of rebellion onto the family, with
the oppressive "father" locked in struggle with the wronged "son".
Frederick Karl also cites Caleb Williams, along with Frankenstein, in
discussing the recurrent theme of the "outsider". David Punter uses
both Freud and Marx to read the original Gothic novels as literary
manifestations of the deep social anxieties of the late eighteenth
century; he sees Otranto reflecting the ambivalence of the English
toward their feudal past in light of the dawning of liberal humanism,
and the later Gothics revealing deep concerns about the fate of the
individual in industrial, post- Enlightenment society. Finally,
Stephen Bernstein takes a very different approach, arguing that the
Gothic novels reproduce a "psychological" ideology in which the will
of the individual is always eventually subordinated to the family and
to society. He cites examples, not just from the "conservative"
Radcliffe novels, but from The Monk, Otranto, and Melmoth as well.
_________________________________________________________________
>From The Monk
Here St. Ursula ended her narrative. It created horror and surprise
throughout: But when She related the inhuman murder of Agnes, the
indignation of the Mob was so audibly testified, that it was scarcely
possible to hear the conclusion. This confusion increased with every
moment: at length a multitude of voices exclaimed, that the Prioress
should be given up to their fury....They forced a passage through the
Guards who protected their destined Victim, dragged her from her
shelter, and proceeded to take upon her a most summary and cruel
vengeance. Wild with terror, and scarcely knowing what she said, the
wretched Woman shrieked for a moment's mercy: She protested that She
was innocent of the death of Agnes, and could clear herself from the
suspicion beyond the power of doubt. The Rioters heeded nothing but
the gratification of their barbarous vengeance. They refused to listen
to her: They showed her every sort of insult, loaded her with mud and
filth and called her by the most opprobrious appellations. They tore
her one from another, and each new Tormentor was more savage than the
former. They stifled with howls and execrations her shrill cries for
mercy; and dragged her through the Streets, spurning her, trampling
her, and treating her with every species of cruelty which hate or
vindictive fury could invent. At length a Flint, aimed by some
well-directing hand, struck her full upon the temple. She sank upon
the ground bathed in blood, and in a few minutes terminated her
miserable existence,. yet though She no longer felt their insults, the
Rioters till exercised their impotent rage upon her lifeless body.
They beat it, trod upon it, and ill-used it, till it became no more
than a mass of flesh, unsightly, shapeless, and disgusting.
_________________________________________________________________
Marquis de Sade, Idee sur les Romans (Geneva: Slatkine, 1967).
Perhaps at this point we ought to analyze these new novels in which
sorcery and phantasmagoria constitute practically the entire merit:
foremost among them I would place The Monk, which is superior in all
respects to the strange flights of Mrs. Radcliffe's brilliant
imagination....Let us concur that this kind of fiction, whatever one
may think of it, is assuredly not without merit: twas the inevitable
result of the revolutionary shocks which all of Europe has suffered.
For anyone familiar with the full range of misfortunes wherewith
evildoers can beset mankind, the novel became as difficult to write as
monotonous to read. There was not a man alive who had not experienced
in the short span of four or five years more misfortunes than the most
celebrated novelist could portray in a century. Thus, to compose works
of interest, one had to call upon the aid of hell itself, and to find
in the world of make- believe things wherewith one was fully familiar
merely by delving into man's daily life in this age of iron.
_________________________________________________________________
Ronald Paulson, "Gothic Fiction and the French Revolution," ELH 48 (1981):
532-53.
The Gothic did in fact serve as a metaphor with which some
contemporaries in England tried to come to terms with what was
happening across the Channel in the 1790s. The first Revolutionary
emblem was the castle-prison, the Bastille and its destruction by an
angry mob, which was fitted by Englishmen into the model of the Gordon
Riots of nine years before. But if one way of dealing with the
Revolution (in its earliest stages) was to see the castle-prison
through the eyes of a sensitive young girl who responds to terror in
the form of forced marriage and stolen property, another was to see it
through the case history of her threatening oppressor, Horace
Walpole's Manfred or M.G. Lewis' Ambrosio--the less comforting reality
Austen was heralding in the historical phenomena of London riots. In
Lewis' The Monk (1795) the two striking phenomena dramatized are first
the explosion--the bursting out of the bonds--of a repressed monk
imprisoned from earliest childhood in a monastery, with the havoc
wreaked by his self- liberation (assisted by demonic forces) on his
own family who were responsible his being immured; and second, the
blood-thirsty mob that lynches-- literally grinds into a bloody
pulp--the wicked prioress who has murdered those of her nuns who
succumbed to sexual temptation. Both are cases of justification
followed by horrible excess: Ambrosio deserves to break out and the
mob is justified in punishing the evil prioress, but Ambrosio's
liberty leads him to the shattering of his vow of celibacy, to
repression, murder, and rape not unlike the compulsion against which
he was reacting; and the mob not only destroys the prioress but
(recalling the massacres of September 1792) the whole community and
the convent itself:
"The incensed Populace, confounding the innocent with the guilty, had
resolved to sacrifice all the Nuns of that order to their rage, and
not to leave one stone of the building upon another. They battered the
walls, threw lighted torches in at the windows and swore that by break
of day not a Nun of St. Clare's order should be left alive.... The
Rioters poured into the interior part of the Building, where they
exercised their vengeance upon every thing which found itself in their
passage. They broke the furniture into pieces, tore down the pictures,
destroyed the reliques, and in their hatred of her Servant forgot all
respect to the Saint. Some employed themselves in searching out the
Nuns, Others in pulling down parts of the Convent, and Others again in
setting fire to the pictures and furniture, which it contained. These
Latter produced the most decisive desolation: In-deed the consequences
of their action were more sudden, than themselves had expected or
wished. The Flames rising from the burning piles caught part of the
Building, which being old and dry, the conflagration spread with
rapidity from room to room. The Walls were soon shaken by the
devouring element. The Columns gave way; The Roofs came tumbling down
upon the Rioters, and crushed many of them beneath their weight.
Nothing was to be heard but shrieks and groans, the Convent was
wrapped in flames, and the whole presented a scene of devastation and
horror."
The end, of course, as it appeared to Englishmen in 1794-- remembering
Thomas Paine's words ("From a small spark, kindled in America, a flame
has arisen, not to be extinguished) and the imagery of light and fire
associated with the Revolution--was the destruction of the
revolutionaries themselves in the general collapse.
_________________
The relationship between Falkland and Caleb is the same explored by
Inchbald and Holcroft between society the cruel hunter and the
suffering individual, its victim. But by the time Godwin was writing,
the French Terror had cast its shadow on libertarian dreams, and his
work reflects that constant potential for simple inversion of the
persecutor-persecuted relationship which events in Paris had so
terribly exemplified....For Caleb Williams, in his way, becomes as
much a persecutor (and ultimately a murderer) as his master--and is
eventually brought to commit similar crimes through an obsessive
concern to protect the "honour" he no longer possesses.
_________________
The construction of the monster, as of the makeshift, non- organic
family, is the final aspect of the Frankenstein plot. Burke's
conception of the state as organic and of the Revolution as a family
convulsed was joined by Mary Shelley with the fact of her own
"family," the haphazard one in which she grew up with other children
of different mothers and with a stepmother. This creation of a family
of children by some method other than natural, organic procreation
within a single love relationship is projected onto the Frankenstein
family, a family assembled by the additive process of adoptions and
the like, and so to Victor's own creation of a child without parents
or sexual love.....Frankenstein predictably sees himself as the father
who ''deserves the gratitude of his children more "completely" than
any other, and in saying so becomes the tyrant himself. As an allegory
of the French Revolution, his experiment corresponds to the
possibility of ignoring the paternal (and maternal) power by
constructing one's own offspring out of sheer reason, but it shows
that the creator is still only a "father" and his creation another
"son" locked into the same love-tyranny relationship Mary's own father
had described so strikingly in Caleb Williams (another book Mary had
reread as she undertook her novel).
_________________________________________________________________
>From Frankenstein
The monster saw my determination in my face and gnashed his teeth in
the impotence of anger. "Shall each man," cried he, "find a wife for
his bosom, and each beast have his mate, and I be alone? I had
feelings of affection, and they were requited by detestation and
scorn. Man! You may hate, but beware! Your hours will pass in dread
and misery, and soon the bolt will fall which must ravish from you
your happiness forever. Are you to be happy while I grovel in the
intensity of my wretchedness? You can blast my other passions, but
revenge remains--revenge, hence forth dearer than light or food! I may
die, but first you, my tyrant and tormentor, shall curse the sun that
gazes on your misery. Beware, for I am fearless and therefore
powerful. I will watch with the wiliness of a snake, that I may sting
with its venom. Man, you shall repent of the injuries you inflict.
_________________________________________________________________
>From Caleb Williams
What--dark, mysterious, unfeeling, unrelenting tyrant!--is it come to
this? When Nero and Caligula swayed the Roman sceptre, it was a
fearful thing to offend these bloody rulers. The empire had already
spread itself from climate to climate, and from sea to sea. If their
unhappy victim fled to the rising of the sun, where the luminary of
day seems to us first to ascend from the waves of the ocean, the power
of the tyrant was still behind him. If he withdrew to the west, to
Hesperian darkness, and the shores of barbarian Thule, still he was
not safe from his gore-drenched foe.--Falkland! art thou the offspring
in whom the lineaments of these tyrants are faithfully preserved? Was
the world, with all its climates, made in vain for thy helpless
unoffending victim?
Tremble!
Tyrants have trembled, surrounded with whole armies of their
Janissaries! What should make thee inaccessible to my fury? No, I will
use no daggers! I will unfold a tale!--I will show thee to the world
for what thou art; and all the men that live, shall confess my
truth!--Didst thou imagine that I was altogether passive, a mere worm,
organised to feel sensations of pain, but no emotion of resentment?
Didst thou imagine that there was no danger in inflicting on me pains
however great, miseries however dreadful? Didst thou believe me
impotent, imbecile, and idiot-like, with no understanding to contrive
thy ruin, and no energy to perpetrate it?
I will tell a tale--! The justice of the country shall hear me! The
elements of nature in universal uproar shall not interrupt me! I will
speak with a voice more fearful than thunder!--Why should I be
supposed to speak from any dishonourable motive? I am under no
prosecution now! I shall not now appear to be endeavouring to remove a
criminal indictment from myself by throwing it back on its author!
--Shall I regret the ruin that will overwhelm thee? Too long have I
been tender-hearted and forbearing! What benefit has ever resulted
from my mistaken clemency? There is no evil thou hast scrupled to
accumulate upon me! Neither will I be more scrupulous! Thou hast shown
no mercy; and thou shalt receive none!--I must be calm! bold as a
lion, yet collected!
_________________________________________________________________
Frederick R. Karl, "Gothic, Gothicism, Gothicists" in The Adversary Literature:
The English Novel in the Eighteenth Century -- A Study in Genre (New York:
Farrar, 1974), pp. 235-274.
The one theme that cuts through virtually all Gothic is that of the
"outsider," embodied in wanderers like Frankenstein's monster and
Maturin's Melmoth, monks such as Lewis's Ambrosio and Mrs. Radcliffe's
Schedoni, and so on. The outsider, like Cain, moves along the edges of
society, in caves, on lonely seacoasts, or in monasteries and
convents. While the society at large always appears bourgeois in its
culture and morality, the Gothic outsider-like the earlier picaro is a
counterforce driven by strange longings and destructive needs. While
everyone else appears sane, he is insane; while everyone else appears
bound by legalities, he is, like Laocoon, trying to snap the pitiless
constrictions of the law; while everyone else seems to lack any
peculiarities of taste or behavior, he feels only estrangement, sick
longings, terrible surges of power and devastation. He is truly
countercultural, an alternate force, almost mythical in his embodiment
of the burdens and sins of society.
_________________
Caleb Williams is a catchall of eighteenth-century themes and
techniques.... Caleb Williams, ultimately, is concerned with the
nature of tyranny and with a definition of individual human rights.
Written shortly after the French Revolution, the novel is, in a sense,
an extension of the ideas of the rights of man. Godwin argues that man
has the right to fulfill himself without interference from tyranny;
that the individual must always seek the maximum amount of choice in
an oppressive society; that a person must never let himself be
governed by circumstance (the latter an eighteenth-century
assumption); that human dignity demands each responsible individual
break the master-slave relationship wherever he finds it; that
responsible people can together create an enlightened world conducive
to freedom; that man is, indeed, Faustian in his positive ability to
throw off the old and assume the mantle of the new.
...Falkland is himself a false representative of the world of art. He
is duplicitous, manipulative, and ruthless in pursuit of his own
values....Falkland, then, is a false prophet. His cultivated mind is
only one part of him; the other part is the tyrannical aspect of
England and Europe, which, before the French Revolution, terrorized
all those who failed to accept traditional hierarchies and customary
chains of being. The truly new man is Caleb Williams--his name alone
would appear to indicate his newness as a post-revolutionary hero.
Although gifted with a bookish mind, a good memory, and an easy
manner, he is ordinary. The hunting down of Caleb, both mythical and
symbolic, is indicative of the play of forces: the new man chased by
the old, hounded by the footsteps of authoritarianism, dogged by
traditional values.
_________________
Gothic fiction, as we have observed, is concerned with the outsider,
whether the stationary figure who represses his difference, or the
wandering figure who seeks for some kind of salvation, or else the
individual who for whatever reason- moves entirely outside the norm.
In any event, he is beyond the moderating impulses in society, and he
must be punished for his transgression. Frankenstein's monster
obviously straddles these categories. He wanders through mountain
areas of the far North, lurks in caves and caverns, in places no one
else dare go. He seeks a mate, a complement to his own loneliness. He
is gloomy and melancholy, full of self-pity and self-hatred. Like
Cain, he is the perpetual outsider, marked by his appearance, doomed
to wander the four corners of the earth, alone and reviled.
As an outsider, he argues with Frankenstein that he needs a female
monster with the same defects, so that he will not have to go through
life alone. He desires completion in monstrosity--still well within
the Gothic orbit. This argument, however, becomes intermixed with
several eighteenth-century strains existing outside of Gothic. In a
curious turn, the monster sees himself as capable of all kinds of
beautiful behavior, but because of his ghastly appearance, no one will
allow him to develop his propensities for good. A product of ill
treatment and society's horror, he can only indulge in revenge and
cruel acts against the innocent. The monster's plaint comes directly
from the eighteenth-century belief in the tabula rasa and Godwin's
sense of the individual's innate right to develop at his own rate. At
the same time, this point is well within the idealism and political
beliefs of Shelley's circle.
_________________________________________________________________
>From The Castle of Otranto
The prisoner soon drew her attention: the steady and composed manner
in which he answered, and the gallantry of his last reply, which were
the first words she heard distinctly, interested her in his favour.
His person was noble, handsome and commanding, even in that situation:
but his countenance soon engrossed her whole care. Heavens! Bianca,
said the princess softly, do I dream? or is not that youth the exact
resemblance of Alfonso's picture in the gallery? She could say no
more, for her father's voice grew louder at every word. This bravado,
said he, surpasses all thy former insolence. Thou shalt experience the
wrath with which thou darest to trifle. Seize him, continued Manfred,
and bind him--the first news the princess hears of her champion shall
be, that he has lost his head for her sake. The injustice of which
thou art guilty towards me, said Theodore, convinces me that I have
done a good deed in delivering the princess from thy tyranny. May she
be happy, whatever becomes of me!--This is a lover! cried Manfred in a
rage: a peasant within sight of death is not animated by such
sentiments. Tell me, tell me, rash boy, who thou art, or the rack
shall force thy secret from thee. Thou hast threatened me with death
already, said the youth, for the truth I have told thee: if that is
all the encouragement I am to expect for sincerity, I am not tempted
to indulge thy vain curiosity farther. Then thou wilt not speak? said
Manfred. I will not, replied he. Bear him away into the court-yard,
said Manfred; I will see his head this instant severed from his body.
_________________________________________________________________
David Punter, The Literature of Terror (London: Longman, 1980).
...Otranto is serious about history. For whatever its shortcomings and
infelicities, it does give evidence of an eighteenth century view of
feudalism and the aristocracy, and in doing so originates what was to
become perhaps the most prevalent theme in Gothic fiction: the
revisiting of the sins of the fathers upon their children. When this
is placed in a contemporaneous setting, it is a simple theme; but it
becomes altogether more complex when the very location of crime and
disorder is thrust back into the past. The figure of Manfred, laden
with primal crime, is considerably larger than Otranto itself: his
violence, his bullying, his impatience with convention and sensibility
mark him out not only as the caricature of a feudal baron, but also as
the irrepressible villain who merely mocks at society, who remains
unassimilable.
What is interesting is the conjunction in Manfred, and after him in so
many other Gothic villains, of the feudal baron and the figure of
antisocial power. If, as seems likely, the widespread appearance of
these figures signifies a social anxiety, then that anxiety clearly
had a historical dimension: threat to convention was seen as coming
partly from the past, out of the memory of previous social and
psychological orders. In other words, it came from the atrophying
aristocracy; and if one thing can be said of all the different kinds
of fiction which were popular in the later eighteenth century, it is
that they consistently played upon the remarkably clear urge of the
middle classes to read about aristocrats. Otranto's strength and
resonance derive largely from the fact that in it Walpole evolved a
primitive symbolic structure in which to represent uncertainties about
the past: its attitude to feudalism is a remarkable blend of
admiration, fear and curiosity.
_________________
A great deal of Gothic is about injustice, whether it be divinely
inspired, or meted out by man to his fellow men and women. The
Wanderer and Frankenstein's monster are powerful symbols of that
injustice....The question of why these symbols of injustice and
malevolent fate should be conjured up at a particular historical
period is a delicate one....It is conventional, and reasonable, to say
that the society which generated and read Gothic fiction was one which
was becoming aware of injustice in a variety of different areas, and
which doubted--principally in the persons of the great romantics--the
ability of eighteenth-century social explanations to cope with the
facts of experience. We can see it in the dawning consciousness of
inequality in the relations between the sexes; in the romantic
emphasis on the partiality and non-neutrality of reason as a guiding
light for social behaviour; in the increasing awareness that there are
parts of the psyche which do not appear to act according to rational
criteria; in the constantly reiterated thought that, after all and
despite so-called natural law, it is still often the sins of the
fathers which are visited on their descendants. This last may well be
the strongest argument in connexion with Frankenstein....
...Gothic writing emerges at a particular and definable stage in the
development of class relations: we may define this as the stage when
the bourgeoisie, having to all intents and purposes gained social
power, began to try to understand the conditions and history of their
own ascent. This, surely, is the reason for the emphasis in the
literature on recapturing history, on forming history into patterns
which are capable of explaining present situations....The coming of
industry, the move towards the city, the regularisation of patterns of
labour in the late eighteenth century, set up a world in which older,
'natural' ways of governing the individual life--the seasons, the
weather, simple laws of exchange--become increasingly irrelevant.
Instead, individuals are propelled along paths of activity which make
sense only as parts of a greater, less easily comprehended whole. The
individual comes to see himself at the mercy of forces which in
fundamental ways elude his understanding. Under such circumstances, it
is hardly surprising to find the emergence of a literature whose key
motifs are paranoia, manipulation and injustice, and whose central
project is understanding the inexplicable, the taboo, the irrational.
_________________________________________________________________
>From The Italian
[Marchese:] "[W]hat reparation can you make [Ellena] for the
infatuated folly, which has thus stained her character? What"--
"By proclaiming to the world, my Lord, that she is worthy of becoming
my wife," replied Vivaldi, with a glow of countenance which announced
the courage and the exultation of a virtuous mind.
"Your wife!" said the Marchese, with a look of ineffable disdain,
which was instantly succeeded by one of angry alarm.--"If I believed
you could so far forget what is due to the honour of your house, I
would for ever disclaim you as my son."
"O! why," exclaimed Vivaldi, in an agony of conflicting passions, "why
should I be in danger of forgetting what is due to a father, when I am
only asserting what is due to innocence; when I am only defending her,
who has no other to defend her! Why may not I be permitted to
reconcile duties so congenial! But, be the event what it may, I will
defend the oppressed, and glory in the virtue, which teaches me, that
it is the first duty of humanity to do so. Yes, my Lord, if it must be
so, I am ready to sacrifice inferior duties to the grandeur of a
principle, which ought to expand all hearts and impel all actions. I
shall best support the honour of my house by adhering to its
dictates."
"Where is the principle," said the Marchese, impatiently, "which shall
teach you to disobey a father; where is the virtue which shall
instruct you to degrade your family?"
"There can be no degradation, my Lord, where there is no vice,"
replied Vivaldi; "and there are instances, pardon me, my Lord, there
are some few instances in which it is virtuous to disobey."
"This paradoxical morality," said the Marchese, with passionate
displeasure, "and this romantic language, sufficiently explain to me
the character of your associates, and the innocence of her, whom you
defend with so chivalric an air. Are you to learn, Signor, that you
belong to your family, not your family to you; that you are only a
guardian of its honour, and not at liberty to dispose of yourself? My
patience will endure no more!"
_________________________________________________________________
Stephen Bernstein, "Form and Ideology in the Gothic Novel," Essays in
Literature 18 (1991): 151-65.
[The] overriding concern of the gothic with the solution in the
present of past family crimes, with the assertion expressed in
Walpole's "Translator's Preface" to the first edition of Otranto (and
borrowed from Exodus), that "the sins of the fathers are visited on
their children to the third and forth [sic] generation," is obviously
a variation on the plot of Oedipus Rex, and for this reason may seem
worthy of little discussion. The explosion of so many such plots in
the English novel during the period of the gothic novel, however,
suggests that the novels performed an historically specific
ideological task, one which it is important (if only to better
position the gothic novel historically) to understand. What this form
of resolution implies, guaranteeing as it does that justice will be
done despite the degree to which the original crime has been obscured
and forgotten, is that the power of social stability is stronger than
any individual's attempt to transgress it. This in itself was no new
topic for fictional works, even in the mid- eighteenth century, but in
the gothic it is expressed in such an obsessive manner that the
representation signifies a depth of concern with the issue not always
apparent in other works where it is treated....
When the gothic narrative structure is seen in conjunction with the
Freudian model of neurosis, the leap is not too great to see the genre
taking part in the transmission, through popular narrative, of a
socially acceptable constitution of the properly integrated subject.
This subject formation demands a rectified personal history,
guaranteeing social integration only at the point when the skeletons
are, indeed, out of the closet. The further assurance is made, of
course, that whether the subject exhibits such candor or not, the
offensive stain on the past will be made public. Better, it seems, to
live in such a way as to give one less to fear from the scrutiny of
the anonymous gaze. In this way the gothic promotes what Antonio
Gramsci terms an "historically organic" ideology, that is, an ideology
such as those which "have a validity which is 'psychological'; they
'organize' human masses, and create the terrain on which men move,
acquire consciousness of their position, struggle, etc....
The importance of marriage in this schema cannot be overstated. Not
only does movement toward matrimony in the gothic's present trigger
the appearance of the buried past, but that buried past itself always
contains information tied to the institutions of matrimony or family
interest, as noted above. It is in this emphasis that the gothic also
articulates concerns regarding class and property, creating a nexus
important for further ideological interpretation. ...the operation of
the gothic text is to secure in the subject a certain raining in, and
acceptance of, the approved path toward ideological interpellation via
matrimony. Since marriage was inexorably tied to the movement of
property in society, the gothic strives to make palatable the economic
truth of the match through its melodramatic emphases on the fitness
and rightness of the spouse, the difficulty of courtship, and the
purification of the family name....Thus the conjunction of love,
sexuality, property, and economic power in the eighteenth-century
marriage creates a program ruling out all types of perversion, the
offensive behavior constituted equally damningly by either lower class
lack of property or the perceived forms of sexual debauchery.
_________________
In Otranto Ricardo's false claim on Alfonso's castle is the cause of
the later action; it is echoed in Manfred's consuming desire for an
heir so that the property can continue in its wrongful transmission, a
desire that leads him to seek an all-but-incestuous union with
Isabella and to murder his own daughter....[In The Italian,] [a]ll of
the plotting against--and imprisonment of--Ellena is founded on the
desire of Vivaldi's mother (suggested and inflamed by Schedoni) to
keep her son from marrying in a way unbefitting of his class. Property
is at the heart of the conflict and motivates Schedoni's turnaround
and attempt to renegotiate the marriage when he mistakenly believes
that Ellena is his daughter.
_________________
The seeming contradiction between the gothic's prohibition of
class-violating marriages and the rise in them between middle and
upper classes at this time is not as troubling as it first appears.
The marriages problematized in the gothic are most often those
involving a lower-class participant, someone who can bring no property
to the match. The frequent gothic peripeteia of showing that someone
with no ostensible status actually possessed it all along (as with the
marriages in Radcliffe's works} is actually well suited to
middle-class aspirations toward greater status and stability.
In this way the field of power deployed through gothic narrative
expands. Where earlier we saw that these novels provided a way of
shaping in the subject an acceptance of the futility of criminality
due to the precariousness of privacy and the certainty of detection
and furthermore posited this realization as "health," we can now
observe the way in which the novels extend this surveillance into the
micro-social sphere of the family.... The subjectification of the
family works in a more publicly oriented way in that it creates two
levels of responsibility, the micro-social level of governance within
the family, and the macro-social level of the family's relations with
the broader society of other families. Through constant reminders of
the imbricated status of family, marriage, property, and surveillance,
the gothic projects a subject role for the family which then continues
to define itself through constant vigilance and an importation into
the domestic sphere of the hegemonic tactics of external class
reality.
_________________
All these aspects of narrative structure have been demonstrated above
as interpellating aspects of a dominant ideology of social formation.
The ideology of the gothic novel is the legitimation of burgeoning
capitalist power, a dark fairy-tale assurance that the propertied,
after surviving their troubles, could maintain their ascendancy in
terms of political and economic power should correct subject
positions, both for individual and family, be assumed. The period
experienced, as is well known, the increasing ascendancy of the middle
class, so it is here that the utility of a dominant ideology should be
sought.
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