History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1764-1824

By Carol Margaret Davison

This title offers a detailed yet accessible introduction to classic British Gothic literature and the popular sub-category of the Female Gothic designed for the student reader.

Works by such classic Gothic authors as Horace Walpole, Matthew Lewis, Ann Radcliffe, William Godwin, and Mary Shelley are examined against the backdrop of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British social and political history and significant intellectual/cultural developments. Identification and interpretation of the Gothic’s variously reconfigured major motifs and conventions is provided alongside suggestions for further critical reading, a timeline of notable Gothic-related publications, and consideration of various theoretical approaches.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Jun 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781783163878

Carol Margaret Davison

Carol Margaret Davison is Full Professor and Department Head at the University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada, and the Director of the sickly taper website, the world's largest and most comprehensive website devoted to Gothic bibliography (www.thesicklytaper.com). A former Canada-U.S. Fulbright scholar and author of Anti-Semitism and British Gothic Literature (Palgrave Macmillan 2004), she has recently completed a co-edited collection, Scottish Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, with Dr. Monica Germanà (forthcoming in 2016) and edited The Gothic

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GOTHIC LITERATURE 1764–1824

SERIES PREFACE

Gothic Literary Studies is dedicated to publishing groundbreaking scholarship on Gothic in literature and film. The Gothic, which has been subjected to a variety of critical and theoretical approaches, is a form which plays an important role in our understanding of literary, intellectual and cultural histories. The series seeks to promote challenging and innovative approaches to Gothic which question any aspect of the Gothic tradition or perceived critical orthodoxy.

Volumes in the series explore how issues such as gender, religion, nation and sexuality have shaped our view of the Gothic tradition. Both academically rigorous and informed by the latest developments in critical theory, the series provides an important focus for scholastic developments in Gothic studies, literary studies, cultural studies and critical theory. The series will be of interest to students of all levels and to scholars and teachers of the Gothic and literary and cultural histories.

SERIES EDITORS

Andrew Smith, University of Glamorgan

Benjamin F. Fisher, University of Mississippi

EDITORIAL BOARD

Kent Ljungquist, Worcester Polytechnic Institute Massachusetts

Richard Fusco, St Joseph’s University, Philadelphia

David Punter, University of Bristol

Chris Baldick, University of London

Angela Wright, University of Sheffield

Jerrold E. Hogle, University of Arizona

HISTORY OF THE GOTHIC

Gothic Literature 1764–1824

Carol Margaret Davison

© Carol Margaret Davison, 2009

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff, CF10 4UP.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN978-0-7083-2009-9 (hardback)

978-0-7083-2045-7 (paperback)

e-ISBN978-1-78316-387-8

The right of Carol Margaret Davison to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Cover image: © The Marsden Archive

CONTENTS

Series Editors’ Foreword

Acknowledgements

Chronology

Introduction and Critical Overview

1Gothic Enlightenment/Enlightenment Gothic

2Anatomizing the Gothic

3The Female Gothic

4Revolutionary Gothic/Gothic Revolutions

5Female Gothic Reconfigurations

6The Gothic Romantics/Romanticizing the Gothic

7Revitalizing the Gothic

8Afterword – Victorian Gothic

Endnotes

Bibliography

Annotated Bibliography

SERIES EDITORS’ FOREWORD

The History of the Gothic series consists of four volumes: Gothic Literature 1764–1824, Gothic Literature 1825–1914, Twentieth Century Gothic and American Gothic. The series provides a comprehensive introduction to the history of Gothic Literature and to a variety of critical and theoretical approaches. Volumes in the series also raise questions about how the Gothic canon has been received and seek to critically challenge, rather than simply reaffirm, commonplace perceptions of the Gothic tradition. Whilst intended as an introduction to the history of the Gothic they thus also provide a rigorous analysis of how that history has been developed and suggest ways in which it can be critically renegotiated.

The series will be of interest to students of all levels who are new to the Gothic and to scholars and teachers of the history of Gothic Literature. The series will also be of interest to students and scholars working more broadly within the areas of literary studies, cultural studies, and critical theory.

Andrew Smith, University of Glamorgan

Benjamin F. Fisher, University of Mississippi

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Andrew Smith and Benjamin Fisher, the series editors, who issued me the challenging invitation to write this book. Their patience and encouragement has meant a great deal to me, as has that of Dafydd Jones and the University of Wales Press, during what has been a rather erratic production process. I am also thankful to the anonymous reader of my outline and the draft manuscript for invaluable commentary and corrections. I am grateful to Palgrave/Macmillan for allowing me to reprint revised sections from my book, Anti-Semitism and British Gothic Literature (2004) and to Sir Simon Marsden for allowing me, for a nominal fee, the use of his atmospheric image of Duntroon Castle in Argyll, Scotland, for this book’s cover. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the Canada-US Fulbright program for supporting my stint as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Virginia from September to December 2005.While that award was for research for my next book on the Scottish Gothic, it did double duty. I am grateful to former President Ross Paul, Provost Neil Gold, Dean Cecil Houston and Karl Jirgens, Head of English, at the University of Windsor, for pulling strings to allow me to accept that award. Special thanks are due to Heather Moore Riser, Head of Public Services, and the gracious staff at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia, which houses the world-renowned Sadleir-Black Gothic collection. That such a collection should be located in the subterranean space of an Enlightenment institution founded by Thomas Jefferson, attended by Edgar Allan Poe and visited by William Faulkner struck me as extremely appropriate given my subject matter. My attendance there would have been impossible without the assistance of my ever-gracious and beloved parents. I dedicate this book, in part, to the memory of Frederick S. Frank, who urged me to work with the Sadleir-Black collection. His lifelong dedication to the field of Gothic scholarship is a shining example to us all and he will be greatly missed. (I am doing everything in my power to ensure thesicklytaper.com lives on.) My old friends, Robert Murphy and Sylvie Roy in Richmond, were tremendously accommodating hosts while I was there, as is their way. Closer to home, I owe so much to the hundreds of students at Concordia University, McGill University, the University of Toronto and the University of Windsor, to whom I have taught a broad spectrum of Gothic courses over the past seventeen years. Without their questions, interest and feedback, this book could never have been written. I also benefited greatly from my course releases as the University of Windsor Humanities Fellow in 2006 granted by the Humanities Research Group, and am grateful for the assistance I continue to receive from the ever-friendly and efficient staff at the Leddy Library, University of Windsor. The wonderful Emily Wunder pulled rabbits out of hats to efficiently alter the notation format at the eleventh hour. During this and the indexing process Betsy Keating was, as ever, a wonderfully precise and astute editorial assistant and, more importantly, a true and dear friend. Darrin Mara McAgy was at the opposite end of that spectrum, reminding me on numerous horrible and traumatic occasions that the Gothic is firmly rooted in real life. Giving birth to a book and a baby, as a single mother with no family nearby, has been an extremely challenging experience that I would not recommend to even the most intrepid of scholars. My hideous progeny is definitely the book and although she can’t yet read it, the book is for the baby.

Chronology of major works and relevant historic events

1700John Pomfret’s A Prospect of Death.

1707Act of Union between England and Scotland.

1715First Jacobite Rebellion (‘The Fifteen’).

1717Birth of Horace Walpole.

1722Thomas Parnell’s ‘A Night Piece on Death’.

1729Birth of Clara Reeve.

1742Edward Young’s The Complaint, or Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality (1742–5).

1743Robert Blair’s The Grave.

1745Second Jacobite Rebellion (‘The Forty-Five’); Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Carceri d’Invenzione (1745–61).

1746James Hervey’s Meditations Among the Tombs (1746–7).

1747Thomas Warton’s On the Pleasures of Melancholy.

1750Birth of Sophia Lee; Horace Walpole commences the redesign of Strawberry Hill as part of a revival in Gothic architecture.

1751Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’.

1753John Bond’s An Essay on the Incubus, or Night-mare.

1756Birth of William Godwin; commencement of the Seven Years War, which involved all of the major European powers. Britain emerged as the world’s dominant colonial power, while France lost its colonial power in the Americas.

1757Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful.

1760Death of George II; birth of William Beckford.

1761Death of Samuel Richardson.

1762Richard Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance; James Macpherson’s Fingal; Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract and Émile, or On Education.

1763Peace of Paris ends the Seven Years War between France and England; James Macpherson’s Temora.

1764Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (reissued in 1765 with the subtitle A Gothic Story); birth of Ann Radcliffe; birth of Regina Maria Roche (?).

1765Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.

1768Horace Walpole writes The Mysterious Mother.

1770Birth of James Hogg.

1771Birth of Sir Walter Scott.

1772Birth of Charlotte Dacre; birth of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

1773John and Anna Laetitia Aikin’s ‘On the Pleasure Derived From Objects of Terror’.

1774Accession of Louis XVI of France.

1775Birth of Matthew Gregory Lewis; birth of Jane Austen.

1776American Declaration of Independence; Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations; Adam Weishaupt founds the Illuminati.

1777Clara Reeve’s The Champion of Virtue (Old English Baron, 1778).

1778Franco-American alliance; Britain declares war on France; Thomas Warton’s The History of English Poetry.

1780Birth of Charles Robert Maturin; the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots.

1781Robert Jephson’s The Count of Narbonne – an adaptation of Horace Walpole’s Otranto – produced at London’s Covent Garden; Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare (1781–2) first exhibited at the Royal Academy summer show of 1782.

1783Sophia Lee’s The Recess (volume I) published (completed in 1785); Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres.

1785Birth of Thomas De Quincey; birth of Thomas Love Peacock.

1786William Beckford’s Vathek published in Paris.

1788Birth of George Gordon, Lord Byron.

1789Fall of the Bastille, beginning of the French Revolution; Ann Radcliffe’s The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne; William Blake’s Songs of Innocence.

1790Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France; Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance; Mary Wollstonecraft’s AVindication of the Rights of Men.

1791Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest.

1792Birth of Percy Bysshe Shelley; September Massacres; Mary Wollstonecraft’s AVindication of the Rights of Woman.

1793Trial and beheading of Louis XVI (21 January); France declares war on Britain (1 February); Reign of Terror; murder of Jean-Paul Marat; execution of Marie Antoinette; William Godwin’s Political Justice.

1794Prime Minister William Pitt (the Younger) suspends Habeas Corpus; Treason Trials and acquittals of the radical activists John Horne Tooke, Thomas Hardy and John Thelwall; execution of Robespierre (July); end of the Reign of Terror; Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho;Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason;William Godwin’s Caleb Williams; Naubert’s Herman of Unna (1778) translated and published in Britain.

1795Birth of John William Polidori; birth of John Keats; Seditious Meetings Act and Treasonable Practices Act; Friedrich von Schiller’s The Ghost-Seer translated and published in Britain; Cajetan Tschink’s Victim of Magical Delusions translated and published in Britain.

1796Regina Maria Roche’s The Children of the Abbey; Karl Grosse’s Der Genius translated and published in Britain as Horrid Mysteries; Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk.

1797Death of Horace Walpole; birth of Mary Shelley; death of Mary Wollstonecraft; Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian; Matthew G. Lewis’s The Castle Spectre staged at London’s Drury Lane; Abbé Barruel’s Mémoires; John Robison’s Proofs of a Conspiracy; The Anti-Jacobin founded by Tory politician George Canning.

1798Irish Rebellion; Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland; Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman published posthumously; William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (including Christabel and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner); Nathan Drake’s ‘On Gothic Superstition’; Regina Maria Roche’s Clermont; Etienne-Gaspard Robertson first presents the ‘fantasmagorie’ at the Pavillon de l’Échiquier in Paris

1799Suppression of Corresponding Society and other radical groups; Combination Acts against formation of unions; Bonaparte made First Consul; William Godwin’s St. Leon; Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond, Arthur Mervyn and Edgar Huntly; John Broster’s Edmond, Orphan of the Castle staged – an adaptation of Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron.

1800Act of Union with Ireland; William Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads; Marquis de Sade’s ‘Reflections on the Novel’.

1801Robert Southey’s Thalaba; first Phantasmagoria shows in Britain staged at London’s Lyceum Theatre.

1802Peace of Amiens with France (March).

1803Napoleonic Wars (1803–15).

1805Battle of Trafalgar (October).

1806Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya.

1807Death of Clara Reeve; abolition of slave trade in the British Empire.

1808Sir Walter Scott’s Marmion.

1809Quarterly Review founded; Mary-Anne Radcliffe’s Manfroné; or, The One-Handed Monk (1809).

1810Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne.

1811Beginning of the Regency when George IV was instated as Prince Regent to rule in the place of his unfit father, George III.

1813George Gordon, Lord Byron’s The Giaour.

1814Fall of Paris (March); abdication of Napoleon; Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley; Eaton Stannard Barrett’s The Heroine.

1815Napoleon leaves Elba; The Battle of Waterloo and Napoleon’s surrender (July).

1816Ghost-story contest near Geneva involving Lord Byron, the Shelleys and John Polidori; Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan and Pains of Sleep; Charles Robert Maturin’s Bertram.

1817Death of Jane Austen; suspension of Habeas Corpus (March); Seditious Meetings Bill; Lord Byron’s Manfred; Sir Walter Scott’s The Doom of Devorgoil: A Melodrama.

1818Death of Matthew Gregory Lewis; Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey published posthumously; Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein published anonymously; Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey; Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘General Character of the Gothic Mind in the Middle Ages’.

1819Peterloo Massacre; John William Polidori’s The Vampyre; Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci.

1820Death of George III (end of the Regency), George IV accedes; Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer; John Keats’s Lamia, Isabella, Eve of St. Agnes and other poems.

1821Death of John William Polidori; death of Napoleon; death of John Keats; Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (London Magazine).

1822Death of Percy Bysshe Shelley.

1823Death of Ann Radcliffe.

1824Death of Charles Robert Maturin; death of Sophia Lee; death of George Gordon, Lord Byron; James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

1825Death of Charlotte Dacre.

1826Ann Radcliffe’s ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’ and Gaston de Blondeville published posthumously

For Kestrel Zandra Davison, born 28 September 2007

my daughter,

my darling,

my teacher,

my muse

And in memory of Frederick Stilson Frank (1935–2008)

a true gentleman,

a passionate scholar,

and a great Gothicist

Introduction and critical overview: vindicating the Gothic

God Almighty! It was the Bleeding Nun! It was my lost Companion! Her face was still veiled, but She no longer held her Lamp and dagger. She lifted up her veil slowly. What a sight presented itself to my startled eyes! I beheld before me an animated Corse. Her countenance was long and haggard; Her cheeks and lips were bloodless; The paleness of death was spread over her features, and her eyeballs fixed stedfastly upon me were lustreless and hollow.

I gazed upon the Spectre with horror too great to be described. My blood was frozen in my veins. I would have called for aid, but the sound expired ere it could pass my lips. My nerves were bound up in impotence, and I remained in the same attitude inanimate as a Statue.

Matthew G. Lewis (1796)¹

The wonderful and miraculous is the forte of our modern novelwriters, and a most singular revolution has taken place in this department of literature. Instead of pictures sketched from Nature … we have narrations of haunted towers, old Blue Beards and Red Beards, spectres, sprites, apparitions, black banners waving on the battlements of castles, strange voices, tapers burning one moment and extinguished by some unknown hand the next, clandestine noises, flashing of lightning, and howling of winds.

Gentleman’s Magazine (1798)²

After the Gothic novel’s inception at the clever hands of Horace Walpole in The Castle of Otranto (1764), the Gothic was celebrated and denigrated, plagiarized, satirized, and bowdlerized, and often written off as cheap and spurious sensationalism, only much later to be eulogized by reformed critics as one of the most accurate literary expressions of the modern moods of metaphysical anguish and existential dread.

Frederick Frank (1984)³

If we conceive of Gothic literature as a type of castle – its most pre-eminent symbol – it is fair and apt to say that it has long been besieged. Since its inception in the mid eighteenth century, Gothic fiction has been critically contested, misunderstood and maligned. Although they were originally consumed by the same, largely middle-class, audience that read novels,⁴ Gothic novels were especially vilified as vulgar, due to their frequently macabre subject-matter, reputed immorality and exceptional popularity, particularly among women readers. And popular they most certainly were, sparking a ‘most singular [cultural] revolution’, as this introduction’s epigraph from the Gentleman’s Magazine suggests, during an era that also witnessed a reading revolution.⁵ What Frederick Frank nicely describes as ‘Gothomania’, an ‘enthusiasm for decay and frenzied appreciation for the supernatural, the pseudo-medieval, and the morbid’,⁶ was blatantly in evidence between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. According to Robert D. Mayo, ‘[d]uring the years from 1796 to 1806[,] at least one-third of all novels published in Great Britain were Gothic in character while on the London stage one Gothic melodrama succeeded another’.⁷ The Gothic novel was, veritably, ‘the major fictional form in English’ in the 1790s.⁸ An explosion of Gothic abridgements, plagiarisms and imitations, in the form of tales, fragments and novellas published in magazines and ‘bluebooks’ or ‘shilling shockers’, followed in the wake of Ann Radcliffe’s tremendous success.⁹ In an era when over seventy per cent of the books borrowed from circulating libraries were novels and less than one per cent were religious in nature,¹⁰ and women were producing and reading more novels than men,¹¹ ‘Gothomania’ was a guilty pleasure for many and a social concern for some.

The case may be made that the popular market success of this hugely adaptable, feminized form¹² served to undermine any serious critical attention it might have otherwise received. According to Ian Watt in his seminal 1957 work The Rise of the Novel, the process of ‘literary degradation’ witnessed in the second half of the eighteenth century, which involved the production of works of ‘little intrinsic merit’, was the result of entrepreneurial booksellers and circulating-library operators being intent on meeting ‘the public’s uncritical demand for easy vicarious indulgence in sentiment and romance’.¹³ Certainly, discussion of ‘the Gothic’ in any coherent, even-handed, or rigorous manner has proven difficult, both then and now, in the face of its widespread and varied diffusion. The unfortunate tendency of many literary critical canonizers, who generally promote and uphold practices of discrimination, to not discriminate between different forms and calibres of Gothic works – for example ‘serious’/‘intellectual’ and ‘market’/‘populist’ Gothics – and to treat the Gothic as a monolith, has resulted in long-standing anti-Gothic biases.¹⁴ These absurd assessments, which fail to employ any parameters of exclusion, have been responsible, in part, for that genre’s ridicule and disparagement. Perhaps the most lamentable outcome has been skewed literary histories.

While the Gothic’s gender associations have long functioned as a key but veiled issue in its denunciation,¹⁵ the ostensible basis for anti-Gothic standpoints has shifted over the centuries from moral to aesthetic and technical reasons. Anti-Gothic commentary during the Gothic’s heyday was centred on its moral nature and served to normalize ‘an emerging middle-class literature at the expense of a feminized popular culture’.¹⁶ In a typical article in the Scots Magazine in 1802 relating to the Gothic fiction phenomenon, the anonymous author highlights the ‘dangerous effects which arise from novels’ in general, and deems Gothic works ‘literary abortions’ that appeal to ‘the corrupt taste of readers’. These ‘crude conceptions’, s/he notes, are largely produced and consumed by women,¹⁷ the former enterprise being equated with ‘literary prostitution’ by at least one commentator.¹⁸ The involvement of women in the literary marketplace was increasingly associated both ‘with illicit pleasure and … economic gain’.¹⁹ Similar complaints about its moral nature followed in the wake of the launch of the Lady’s Monthly Museum in July 1798, when the Gothic ‘craze’ was at its height. A letter of complaint from ‘one of the first boarding-schools in the Kingdom’ highlighted a perceived disjunction between that magazine’s purported aim ‘to give ardour to virtue, to warn from the approach of vice, to paint the social, moral and religious duties in colours calculated to allure’ and its publication of romances that surrendered to what were described as ‘the sordid taste and depraved morals of the times’.²⁰ Grave concern was expressed, regarding the danger of ‘impressing young imaginations with gross improbabilities, unnatural horrors, and mysterious nonsense’.²¹ Despite various positive notices in the periodical press in response to other, more canonical Gothic works, similar concerns about their immoral tendencies were also expressed by contemporary reviewers. There is tremendous irony to this because, as Elizabeth Napier has noted, ‘many of the first Gothic romances are simply moral tales in supernatural dress’.²² This phenomenon is especially prevalent in the case of most Minerva Press publications that took Radcliffe as their model.

Anti-Gothic biases, based on more aesthetic and technical grounds, persisted throughout the twentieth century. These became more pronounced, however, subsequent to the concerted move in the 1930s and 1940s and beyond to establish a ‘Great Tradition’ in the field of English literature. That development especially served to consolidate problematically narrow and constraining evaluative principles, literary critical and historical categories, and notions of periodization. Notably, those few critics who produced serious examinations of the Gothic in the first quarter of the century neither made apologies for nor justified their Gothic engagements. In such works as Edith Birkhead’s The Tale of Terror (1921) and Eino Railo’s The Haunted Castle (1927), the Gothic – or ‘terror-romanticism’²³ – is regarded as a valid, rich and varied literary form. While each of these critical works possesses its own agenda, strengths and weaknesses, the principal aim of subjecting the Gothic to rigorous scholarly examination marked a novel approach.²⁴ Despite the tendency of these liberal humanist critics to issue universalizing claims about ‘human nature’ and ‘the human condition’, the illumination of some of the Gothic’s foremost ingredients and aesthetic contexts was the result. Summers’s The Gothic Quest is especially noteworthy in its recognition of the diversity of cultural influences at work in the Gothic’s development, ranging from Ossian and Bishop Hurd to various Continental publications. While his claims about the philosophical framework of Romanticism are sometimes contentious, Gothic criticism owes a huge debt to his landmark study of cultural history. Despite his recognition that Gothic bibliographic work was an extraordinarily difficult undertaking, Summers was also, nonetheless, a tireless Gothic bibliographer. His knowledge of the genre, both in its ‘high’ and ‘low’ manifestations, shines through on every page in The Gothic Quest, a self-described labour of love.²⁵ Devendra P.Varma’s The Gothic Flame (1957) is likewise bold and unapologetic in its claims regarding the Gothic mode. Although critical of Summers’s study, with its ‘turgid’ style and tendency to express praise and blame,²⁶ Varma carries Summers’s Gothic torch forward. Disputing Summers’s claim that Continental writers directly influenced the Gothic novel’s development in England, Varma contentiously positions the British (read English) Gothic – in both its novelistic and theatrical forms – as the progenitor of both the Schauerroman and the roman noir. Like Summers, Varma defies critical attempts to sever the Gothic from the Romantic impulse and, as J. M. S. Tompkins describes it in her five-page Introduction to Varma’s book, insists that Gothic writers were engaged in ‘restoring the sense of the numinous to a literature cramped by rationalism and bleached by exposure to unvarying daylight’.²⁷

In opposition to Varma’s extremely positive interpretation and claims about the Gothic phenomenon, the institutional embarrassment, aggression and silence that Robert Miles identifies in critical assessments of the romance mode²⁸ is especially in evidence in the latter half of the twentieth century. In such classic novel histories as Dorothy Van Ghent’s The English Novel: Form and Function (1953), for example, silently passing over the Gothic is the order of the day. Van Ghent moves from an examination of Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67) to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) without providing any rationale for glossing over a half-century of literary history. When the Gothic is discussed, as in J. M. S. Tompkins’s The Popular Novel in England 1770–1800 (1932; reprinted 1961), justifications and aesthetic evaluations top the agenda. Tompkins commences her study with the statement, ‘[a] book devoted to the display of tenth-rate fiction stands in need of justification’.²⁹ Such ‘inferior fiction’ has been approached, she explains further, ‘rather as a popular amusement than a literary form, though … [she] notes … formal developments and literary relationships, when these presented themselves’.³⁰ In his very brief introduction to a new edition of Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey and Crotchet Castle published in 1964, J. B. Priestley bluntly remarks upon the ‘vast load of nonsense, of the Teutonic-Gothick-Rosicrucian cloak-and-skeleton kind this [Romantic] movement carried with it, including whole circulating libraries of long-ignored bad fiction’.³¹ Robert Kiely’s The Romantic Novel in England (1972), which examines works from Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), is also rife with belittling commentary. It opens with the explicit declaration that this parasitic³² and ‘calamitous’ genre, is an ‘embarrassing subject’.³³ To some extent, literary critics often take their cue from Gothic writers themselves, who felt the need, from the outset, to justify, explain and/or legitimate their enterprise in one way or another. To this end, Horace Walpole penned his two Prefaces to Otranto (1764, 1765) and Clara Reeve wrote her Preface to the second edition of The Old English Baron (1778).

Ironically, discussion of the Gothic, whether playful or serious, is often marked by Gothic rhetoric. Motifs such as parasitism, monstrosity, deformity and the doppelgänger are frequently employed to characterize the Gothic’s heterogeneous formal nature and putatively oppositional drives. Brendan Hennessy’s graphic description of the Gothic as a generic ‘freak which disappeared into a cul-de-sac’ provides a typical case in point.³⁴ Hennessy conveys the standard critical view in his 1978 essay, his assessment looking back to both the early characterization of the Gothic as a ‘literary abortion’ and Peter Quennell’s memorable description of this ‘bizarre by-product of the Romantic movement’.³⁵ Robert Kiely’s claim that ‘Romantic novels thrive like parasites, on structures whose ruin is the source of their life’³⁶ is echoed in Maggie Kilgour’s description of the Gothic as a genre that ‘feeds upon and mixes the whole range of literary sources out of which it emerges and from which it never fully disentangles itself ’.³⁷ Such readings are grounded in the view of Gothic literature as a sign of deformity and discontinuity in the ‘tradition’ of the novel – an unnatural development³⁸ and ‘sharp historical break’.³⁹ Such classifications privilege realism, disregard the Gothic’s noteworthy and numerous aesthetic innovations, and absurdly suggest that it was an unaccountable and aberrant cultural product of the eighteenth century. As its contemporary critics intimated and its more recent critics have rendered more explicit, this dark spectre hijacked the novel on Realism Road. Indeed, the motif of darkness is particularly prevalent in the critical literature. Andrea K. Henderson, for example, deems the Gothic the ‘eerie doppelgänger of the world described by Romanticism’,⁴⁰ while G. R. Thompson distinguishes between light and dark Romanticism, whereby the qualifier ‘dark’ evokes ‘an image of the lonely, isolated self, pressing onward despite all obstacles while either indulging or struggling with an internal evil, the very conflict a source of energy’.⁴¹ Such views have continued to rear their problematic heads in the twenty-first century and are effectively epitomized in Wolfram Schmidgen’s 2002 description of the Gothic as one of several ‘generic atavisms’ popular in the eighteenth century that undermined ‘the cultural and literary gains made by Defoe, Fielding, and Richardson’.⁴² In this capacity as atavistic, generic monster, the Gothic serves, as Fred Botting and Dale Townshend perceptively note, ‘as grist to the mill of modern literary and literary-critical endeavours, grinding out, through a process of negative definition, not only more respectable types of literature such as the novel, but the very discourse of literary criticism itself ’.⁴³ The Gothic has functioned and continues to function, in short, as a necessary monster.

As the aforementioned statements by Henderson and Thompson illustrate, when the Gothic is not denounced as a regressive aberration and is approached, instead, as a legitimate domain of scholarship, it tends to be labelled an early or radical left-wing branch of Romanticism.⁴⁴ This ‘interesting link between rationalism and Romanticism’⁴⁵ is often described as anticipating the more accomplished, aesthetically superior form of Romantic poetry, a somewhat ironic situation given that Romanticism was initially a disparaged term.⁴⁶ Among others, Judith Wilt and Elizabeth MacAndrew have emphasized the incipient Romanticism of the Gothic. Such is also the view of Arthur L. Cooke, who argues that the lofty ideals and possibilities inherent in the works of early Gothic experimenters are ultimately realized only in the works of the Romantic poets.⁴⁷ This historico-aesthetic placement is best described by Maggie Kilgour in The Rise of the Gothic Novel (1995). In her words, the Gothic has been regarded by literary critics and historians

as a kind of generic missing link between the romance and the novel, a very low road to Scott, whose rise is a deviation in the evolutionary chain that leads from Enlightenment to Romanticism. Manifesting prematurely, and therefore understandably somewhat crudely, the emerging values of romanticism – an interest in the bizarre, eccentric, wild, savage, lawless, and transgressive, in originality and the imagination – the gothic itself is a transitional and rather puerile form which is superseded by the more mature ‘high’ art of the superior Romantics, such as Coleridge, Keats, and especially, Byron who both realizes and renders redundant the gothic hero-villain.⁴⁸

Even in Robert D. Hume’s controversial 1969 article, ‘Gothic versus Romantic: a re-evaluation of the Gothic novel’, a generally laudatory piece that openly acknowledges long-standing biases against the genre⁴⁹ and urges its reassessment on the basis of its powerful and innovative psychological experimentation,⁵⁰ the Gothic is conclusively deemed to be inferior and unsuccessful in relation to Romantic literature. According to Hume, it is less coherent in comparison with other Romantic writing because of its failure to resolve what he describes as ‘moral and emotional ambiguity’.⁵¹ In the light of this popular theory, Michael Gamer’s insightful yet Gothic-inflected claim that ‘the gothic perpetually haunts, as an aesthetic to be rejected, romanticism’s construction of high literary culture’⁵² also possesses validity when turned on its head – high Romanticism has haunted the Gothic. The Gothic has been fairly consistently portrayed as an inferior, subsidiary form in relation to the putatively ‘dominant’ mode of Romantic poetry. The popularity of this view of the Gothic as a marginal, ‘poor and probably illegitimate relation of romanticism’,⁵³ is ironic, in the light of the fact that the Romantic era ‘was especially eager to credit itself with generic breakthroughs – rebellion from established classifications’.⁵⁴ Such biases continue to be reflected in studies of Romanticism, where, as Annette Wheeler Cafarelli has illustrated, ‘the twentieth-century construct of the Romantic canon has remained exceptionally hidebound.’⁵⁵ Clearly, some critics still need ‘to be reminded that the gothic novel is connected with the mainstream of Romantic literature’⁵⁶ and that ‘the Romantic movement, though it effected a literary revolution at its decisive break-through, was in itself in fact the product of a protracted process of evolution’.⁵⁷ Indeed, as chapters 6 and 7 in the present study argue in some detail, the intense interfacing between the Gothic novel and Romantic writing resulted in a powerful and hugely productive synergy that fuelled both literary developments.

The institutional embarrassment around the subject of Gothic literature has been challenged, at least since the 1960s, in such articles as Hume’s and such studies as Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel (1960). After openly acknowledging that the American novelistic tradition is ‘bewilderingly and embarrassingly, a gothic fiction’,⁵⁸ an unembarrassed Fiedler proceeds with its serious assessment. He yokes together Freudian and Marxist approaches to consider how the Gothic, on both sides of the Atlantic, played out larger social issues like class conflict and more personal traumas born of familial transgressions and repressions. David Punter’s classic 1980 study, The Literature of Terror, likewise stands out, both in its resistance to an institutional embarrassment and in more broadly mapping the field of Gothic Studies in terms of history, cultures and nations. The explosion of Gothic Studies in the last quarter of a century owes much to Punter’s audacious monograph, which dared to think outside the box of established literary history. Revolutionary poststructural developments in literary theory, including new feminist, Cultural Studies, New Historicist and Queer Studies approaches, have resulted in a fundamental and exciting reassessment of the Gothic. By way of these various critical strategies, terror has been culturally contextualized. The nature of the terror and the make-up of the monster that emblematizes it have been shown to depend on their very specific historic and geographic moments, which are, in turn, understood to be the site of a multiplicity of discourses whose authors do not share a single coherent world-view. Attention to such specificities undermines the universalizing, essentialist claims and theories popular in early twentieth-century criticism. This ‘turn to history’, as Fred Botting and Dale Townshend have referred to it, has fostered ‘a contextualizing critical interrogation of the significance of Gothic forms of writing’.⁵⁹

Not everyone agrees, however, with this characterization of recent Gothic criticism evidencing a ‘turn to history’. Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall argue vehemently to the contrary that ‘Gothic Criticism’ (by which label they imply it to be monolithic and homogeneous) has ‘abandoned any credible historical grasp upon its subject’.⁶⁰ History has been collapsed in Gothic Criticism, they maintain, ‘into universal psychology’,⁶¹ a critique strikingly reminiscent of early attacks on the Gothic as a genre disconnected from socio-historic reality. Baldick and Mighall’s scathing and patronizing review of Gothic Criticism in the last seventy years maintains that the overwhelming tendency has been away from assessing artistic merit and towards defiance, misconception, ‘universalizing psychological speculation’⁶² and insupportable ideologically based claims. They argue that Gothic Criticism misguidedly positions the Gothic, as a rule, ‘as a kind of revolt against bourgeois rationality, modernity or Enlightenment’⁶³ that subverts the status quo and champions the marginalized and repressed. Baldick and Mighall name names (Stephen Arata, Christopher Craft and David Pirie, for example), and point to the various interpretations of Count Dracula as evidence of Gothic Criticism run amok and creating a hermeneutic crisis. Their implied ‘sometimes a vampire is just a vampire’ theory remains unconvincing, in the final analysis, because they fail to undermine the ample evidence supporting the detailed semiotic readings they critique. Further to this, none of the critics they mention actually engages in a dehistoricized psychoanalytic interpretation.

Baldick and Mighall rightly observe, however, that some contemporary interpretations of the Gothic are anachronistic. The act of dehistoricizing the Gothic by foisting contemporary ideologies on to these eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts has been a serious problem, one, however, that currently plagues all domains of literary critical scholarship.⁶⁴ One such speculative theoretical essay, entitled ‘Postmodernism/Gothicism’, provides a quintessential example of this propensity. Its author’s erroneous claim that ‘indeterminism is a narrative necessity’ of the Gothic⁶⁵ is compounded by his unsupported argument that the reader confronts in the Gothic ‘the embattled, deconstructed self, without sureties of religion and social place, or any coherent psychology of the kind observable in both the Enlightenment or modernist traditions’.⁶⁶ Many works from the classic Gothic era, as the current study shows in detail, fail to support these generalizations.⁶⁷ Even Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), which is heralded as a proto-Modernist text in terms of its portrayal of human psychology, is solidly grounded in its religious standpoint. Some contemporary feminist readings of classic Gothic-era texts also fall into the trap of anachronism by attributing fairly radical agendas to their writers. My discussion of problematic critical claims about Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya; or The Moor (1806) in chapter 5, offers a case in point. While, according to some critics, its status as a work of Female Gothic remains disputable, Zofloya has been alternately deemed feminist and misogynist. In privileging contemporary theory and losing sight of Dacre’s text, some critics have failed to recognize her self-conscious and strategic engagement with both male and female traditions of Gothic writing and, as a result, Zofloya’s unique and pivotal role within those traditions. It can be difficult sometimes for critics to divest themselves of their contemporary lenses and recognize that feminism, like Rome, was not built in a day, and that what appear to be small baby steps from a retrospective distance were, in fact, major milestones at the time.

As a site where diverse poststructuralist approaches have been variously brought to bear, the ‘Female Gothic’, a label originally coined by Ellen Moers,⁶⁸ has become an especially vexed category in the field of Gothic Studies. At issue is the qualifier ‘Female’, whose essentialist implications have generated a whirlwind of critical articles denouncing the universalizing of women’s experience. The debate shows no signs of abating, especially in the face of the ongoing problematizing of gender. The controversy seems to be compounded when the intersection of gender and genre are considered, particularly in relation to such a controversial genre as the Gothic. In fact, it is notable and curious that the same type of debate has not arisen around the term ‘Female Bildungsroman’. This is perhaps because the Bildungsroman – the quintessential