History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1825-1914

By Jarlath Killeen

History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1825-1914 is a detailed and accessible study of Gothic literature in the nineteenth century. It examines how the themes and tropes associated with the early Gothic novel were diffused widely in many different genres in the Victorian period, including the ghost story, the regional novel, children's literature and the realist novel. It looks in particular at how the Gothic attempted to resolve the psychological and theological problems thrown up by the modernization and secularization of British society. The book argues that the fetishized figure of the child came to stand for what many believed was being lost by the headlong rush into a technological and industrial future. The relationship between regionalism and horror is examined, the use of the occult in the Gothic is detailed and the book demonstrates that, far from being a simple rejection or acceptance of secularization, the Gothic attempts to articulate an entirely different way of being modern.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Jun 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781783163892

Book preview

GOTHIC LITERATURE 1825–1914

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

1825–1914

Jarlath Killeen

© Jarlath Killeen, 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 or under the terms of a licence issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London, EC1N 8TS. 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.

ISBN978-0-7083-2070-9 (hardback)

978-0-7083-2069-3 (paperback)

e-ISBN978-1-78316-389-2

The right of Jarlath Killeen 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.

‘Oliver’s reception by Fagin’ from The Adventures of Oliver Twist. © Classic Image / Alamy.

CONTENTS

Series Editors’ Foreword

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1The Ghosts of Time

2The Horror of Childhood

3Regional Gothic

4Ghosting the Gothic and the New Occult

Conclusion: Moving to the Gothic Trenches

Survey of Criticism

Gothic Chronology

Endnotes

Bibliography

SERIES EDITORS’ FOREWORD

The Histories 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

This book was written in a period of personal upheaval during which I transferred from Keele University, Staffordshire to Trinity College Dublin, which entailed moving country as well as house. That it was finished at all comes as something of a surprise to me. My thanks go to Ben Fisher and Andrew Smith for their encouragement and supervision as general editors of this series and the team at the University of Wales Press for steering me through the process. Many thanks also to the anonymous reader for the Press, who made some extremely pertinent criticisms of the original manuscript and helpful suggestions for revision.

I am in great dept to the very large number of critics who have written on the Gothic in general, and nineteenth-century Gothic in particular, from whom I have learned much. The Gothic attracts some of the very best critical minds around, and if this volume is useful it is only because it tries to distil the analyses produced by others in the last thirty years. As always, my family was supportive and I dedicate the book to my brothers: Michael, Peter, David and Paul. My colleagues in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin were immensely encouraging. I particularly thank Kate Hebblethwaite (a fellow cloak race enthusiast), Aileen Douglas, Eve Patten, Philip Coleman, and Stephen Matterson. The students in my seminars in Gothic Fiction in Keele University and Trinity College contributed in many ways to this book, and had to endure my endless ramblings on the issues and texts covered here. Particular thanks to my postgraduate students Valeria Cavalli and Paul Morrissey, and an undergrad Paula Keatley who contributed some of the ideas contained and acknowledged here. Darryl Jones as always has been a mine of information; he tolerated numerous conversations about the Gothic, and shared with me his wide reading in and theoretical knowledge of the field. Many thanks also to Martha Fanning and Eoin Smith, Eimear McBride and William Galinski, Margaret Robson, Trish Ferguson, Antoinette Curtin, Marion Durnin, Jenny Brown.

My deepest debt is to Mary Lawlor. For everything.

Publication dates are those of first serial publication when appropriate.

For my brothers

Introduction

Declining Definition

This study is an introduction to the varieties of Victorian fiction implicated in the Gothic genre. Before turning to that fiction itself, however, it is important to acknowledge that the very application of the term ‘Gothic’ to Victorian literature is controversial. In a valuable study of ‘Gothic and the critical idiom’ (1994), the influential critic Maurice Levy ‘mourned’ the devaluation of the term ‘Gothic’ in studies of the form. He pointed out that traditionally, in scholarly works of the early and mid twentieth century, the term ‘Gothic’ had been used to designate a body of literature published between 1764, the year Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto first appeared, and 1820, which marked the grand culmination of the form in Charles Robert Maturin’s encyclopaedic Melmoth the Wanderer. Levy complained that since the 1970s, however, ‘Gothic’ had been applied to all kinds of texts written right through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, texts which had formal and narrative features which were not common to the ‘Gothic tradition’.¹ Levy’s point is that imprecision has invaded critical writing about the Gothic, and that in using the term to cover writing so different in nature from the ‘original’ tradition, its ‘fundamental’ meaning is being obscured. His criticism is echoed by Fiona Robertson, who defines Gothic precisely as ‘a type of fiction which invites readers’ fears and anxieties in highly stylised mystery-tales, using a limited set of plots, settings, and character-types, and including an element of history’. She warns that ‘a novel should not be categorised as Gothic if it makes no attempt to situate the events of its plot in a historical setting’.² Her definition means that she excludes as ‘non-Gothic experimentation[s] with Gothic conventions’ novels usually included in studies of the genre, such as William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938).³ Robert Mighall likewise makes an investment in history fundamental to his definition of the Gothic, highlighting a ‘concern with the historical past … [and] rhetorical and textual strategies to locate the past and represent its perceived iniquities, terrors, and survivals’, on which basis he excludes Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818).⁴

Discursive imprecision is a perennial problem in literary critical history,⁵ and it may well be that critics are far too quick to assign the term ‘Gothic’ to any literature which employs conventions or tropes tangentially linked to the original tradition. There is certainly a widely acknowledged difficulty distinguishing between the formal terms ‘Gothic’ and ‘horror’, and, as Clive Bloom has suggested, such terms are often ‘interchangeable’.⁶ Some early reviewers of the original tradition adopted a ‘shopping-list’ approach to defining the genre. The anonymous article ‘Terrorist novel writing’ appeared in 1797 with the ‘following recipe’ for a Gothic novel:

Take – An old castle, half of it ruinous.

A long gallery, with a great many doors, some secret ones.

Three murdered bodies, quite fresh.

As many skeletons, in chests and presses.

An old woman hanging by the neck; with her throat cut.

Assassins and desperados, ‘quant suff’.

Noise, whispers and groans, threescore at least.⁷

Many subsequent critics have tended to read as Gothic literature which reworks some or all of these conventions, so that even a text which is predominately ‘realist’, such as Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1855–7), can, because of its presentation of state institutions as reconstructions of traditional Gothic castles, be seen as an extension of the Gothic tradition. What is certainly true is that while one manifestation of the Gothic came to an end with Maturin’s magnum opus, the form and tradition did not simply die in that moment, but were reborn and revivified in new ways, so that, as Julian Wolfreys has explained, after the 1820s Gothic cannot be ‘figured … as a single, identifiable corpus’.The genre fragmented and took up ghostly habitations elsewhere, indeed everywhere, in nineteenth-century culture:‘Escaping from the tomb and the castle, the monastery and the mansion, the gothic arguably becomes more potentially terrifying because of its ability to manifest itself and variations of itself anywhere’.⁸ From the realist to the historical novel, from the strictest of rationalists to the most credulous of believers, the Gothic became ubiquitous. Wolfreys calls this survival of the Gothic the ‘haunting absence’ of the genre as a body of works in and of itself. This study will adopt a very flexible and inclusive understanding of the Gothic; ‘purifying’ the genre, by ring-fencing it through a very strict definition and then evicting texts which fail to fit this definition, does not take full cognisance of the sheer generic openness of the Gothic and its ability to migrate and adapt to formal circumstances far removed from its ‘original’ manifestations in the late eighteenth century. In looking at nineteenth-century Gothic we must follow the traces of a tradition, delineating the means by which the Gothic travelled into and transformed other genres and narratives while maintaining its own cognitive implications and formal and thematic conventions.

Gothic Victorian / Victorian as Gothic

That the Gothic lost generic focus and shifted from being a tradition in the modernist sense to being a collection of Victorian gestures, a sensibility, to inflections, traces indicative of a nineteenth-century mentality, is hardly surprising to a twenty-first-century reader. After all, while the eighteenth century is still considered to be the age of reason, dominated by neoclassical architecture and rational conversation, in which the Gothic could exist only as a dark counterpart to mainstream culture (a reductive view of the eighteenth century), the Victorian Age itself is, to the general public, a Gothic one. Robert Mighall points out that notions of a barbaric past are crucial to cultural understandings of Gothic;⁹ for this reason it is not surprising that the Victorians and the Gothic have become so closely intertwined to twentieth- and twenty-first-century audiences. To us, the Victorian age is the Gothic age. Wolfreys claims that for the Victorians, the Gothic was literally everywhere: ‘all that black, all that crepe, all that jet and swirling fog … These and other phenomena, such as the statuary found in Victorian cemeteries like Highgate, are discernible as being fragments and manifestations of a haunting, and, equally, haunted, Gothicized sensibility.’ ¹⁰ However, the evidence suggests that Victorian men and women were more likely to think of themselves as living in an age of civilised progress rather than Gothic barbarism. It was in the twentieth century that the Victorian ‘era’ was retrospectively homogenised and transformed into an age of sexual repression shadowed by perverse transgression, an age of hypocrisy and duality, where propriety and pornography existed side by side, an age to which a Gothic vocabulary could be aptly applied. To the popular mind, Victorian England is suffused in fog and threatened by Jack the Ripper, populated by Gothic churches and pervaded by sexual perversity, draped in Dickensian darkness and tracked by Sherlock Holmes. Indeed, the term ‘Victorian’ has become a shorthand way to describe anything negative about contemporary society, and this view of the Victorians is perpetuated by a hundred period costume dramas, particularly the stylish adaptations of the great nineteenth-century canonical novels, often by Andrew Davies, presented on the BBC. Whereas Davies’s adaptations of Jane Austen are invariably suffused with light and laughter, revisions of the works of Charles Dickens and George Eliot often look as if they were shot in the dark (thus giving the impression of an England in perpetual moral night), or through a dirty lens.

These adaptations are themselves heirs to the films of David Lean, especially his renderings of Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948), which utilised the techniques of German expressionist film-makers to create a type of Victorian London straight out of a horror film, a suggestion picked up by the hugely successful versions of Victorian England found in the Hammer horror films of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. As Matthew Sweet has written, ‘Hammer used the historical setting to tell parables about the pleasures of the Permissive Society, which it dramatized as a battle between the promiscuous Undead and the conservative Victorians’.¹¹ Victorian England became the horrific alter ego of the sexually liberated contemporary world. The use of Gothic tropes attempts to tell a comforting story about how far we have travelled from those times. If writers like Walpole tried to use the Gothic to emphasise the historical distance between the ‘medieval’ Catholic Continent and eighteenth-century Protestant England, then Lean and the Hammer horror directors looked to the Gothic mode to indicate how far the Victorian past was from the twentieth century. In the same way, stories are told of the repressed Victorians covering the legs of piano tables as fables of how sensible is our contemporary sexual maturity – despite the fact that this was a joke invented by the Victorians about puritanical Americans.¹² Michel Foucault tried to banish the ‘repression hypothesis’ from the annals of critical literature by demonstrating that, far from stifling sexual discussion, the Victorians made it mandatory¹³; his labours were in vain, however, so that now,

When we see, for instance, David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (1979) or one of David Lean’s Dickens’ adaptations, we congratulate ourselves for having escaped the feculent horror-show of the Victorian city – a black-and-white world of bad drains and brick alleys, which modern plumbing and sodium lights have successfully banished.¹⁴

Indeed, it might be true to say that we need the version of the Victorians we have invented in order to maintain a view of ourselves as liberated in comparison.

This interpretation of nineteenth-century England was partly created by the literary ‘modernists’, the very designation adopted by these self-conscious innovators suggesting that the Victorians they were reacting against were somehow as ‘medieval’ and anachronistic as the Catholic clergy who dominate Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). Virginia Woolf bizarrely believed that the modern age began the day Lytton Strachey said the word ‘semen’ aloud in her London flat, linking together modernist literature and sexual liberation.¹⁵ It is odd that we have accepted Woolf ’s view that a reluctance to discuss sex in public is an indictment of any civilisation – an opinion which would suggest that the relish with which we lapped up the Starr Report detailing President Bill Clinton’s sexual peccadilloes is an indication of our advancement. Sexual freedom has become the means by which we rate the sophistication of a particular society. Michael Mason begins his valuable study of Victorian sexuality with the warning that ‘in our culture the Victorian age has a special place: more than any other era it awakens in us our capacities to feel hostile towards a past way of life, to perceive the past as alien, unenlightened, and silly’;¹⁶ this appears to be a view we are loath to give up.

To the general public, then, the Victorian era is a Gothic one of public respectability disguising private perversity. The academic view has (with notable exceptions) not been much more sophisticated until recently. For many influenced by post-structuralist and postmodernist views of representation, the nineteenth century was dominated by the realist novel and a realist aesthetic which pushed more ‘radical’ kinds of literature, such as the Gothic, to the margins (this, we should recognise, is merely another version of public light matched by private darkness). The interpretative pervasiveness of this view meant that many academics perpetuated a version of Victorian literature as dominated by a ‘conservative’ realism immune to and repressive towards outbreaks of the Gothic, which was banished to the peripheries. There was a tendency in the 1970s and 1980s to view realism as profoundly ideologically regressive and Gothic as a mode of subversion; since the realist text was central to Victorian writing, Victorian society in general could be stereotyped as reactionary and dedicated to a conservative aesthetic. The dominant interpretation of realism was cogently calibrated by Catherine Belsey as the view that

the strategies of the classic realist text divert the reader from what is contradictory within it to the renewed recognition (misrecognition) of what he or she already ‘knows’, because the myths and signifying systems of the classic realist text re-present experience in the ways in which it is conventionally articulated in our society.¹⁷

Belsey at times seems to suggest that realism is a kind of ideological trick played by ultra-conformist forces to quell social revolution. Colin McCabe’s argument that George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–2) epitomised aesthetic and social conservatism, while James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) was a literary version of social revolution, did not help matters.¹⁸ Likewise, Roland Barthes launched a celebrated attack on the master realist Honoré de Balzac, revealing just how politically constructed such putative narrative realists could be.¹⁹ In an era defined by broadly left-leaning academics, and when versions of Marxism and poststructuralism became default critical positions, many writing on Gothic took the broad view that it operated as an alternative and a response to the dictates of realism (although, as I will outline in the final chapter, when it came to actual analysis of Gothic texts, these same critics were much more nuanced). Gothic was transgressive, and since the Victorians were ‘against’ it, academia was against them.

To their conservative aesthetic realism, the Victorians had the misfortune to add conservative social and political values also. The constant linking of Victorianism to a certain set of ‘family values’ by sections of the political world anathema to many within the intellectual establishment caused considerable difficulties for a more rounded view of Victorian society. The former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously claimed to sympathise with ‘Victorian values’, thereby guaranteeing a whole generation of academics would be almost automatically hostile to these values and the era they supposedly stemmed from. Thatcher opined:

I was brought up by a Victorian Grandmother. We were taught to work jolly hard. We were taught to prove yourself; we were taught self reliance; we were taught to live within our income. You were taught that cleanliness is next to Godliness. You were taught self respect. You were taught always to give a hand to your neighbour. You were taught tremendous pride in your country. All of these things are Victorian values. They are also perennial values. You don’t hear so much about these things these days, but they were good values and they led to tremendous improvements in the standard of living.²⁰

In his study of Jane Austen, Darryl Jones writes of the 1980s as extraordinarily problematic for many academics who were institutionally and personally outraged by the political values of the Conservative Party under Thatcher, and her government’s assault on the universities: ‘Most academics within the humanities … being of broadly liberal political sympathies … found themselves positioned somewhere between unsympathetic and implacably opposed to Margaret Thatcher’.²¹ Some of these academics went on to write about Gothic almost as if it were a response to this feeling of disenfranchisement, thus promoting the values of the mode of writing they believed had been marginalised by Thatcher’s ideological progenitors, the Victorians. Hence, some of the most influential critical work on Gothic was produced in the 1980s and early 1990s, meaning that it was written either just prior to or during the Thatcher era, including David Punter’s Marxist-inflected The Literature of Terror (1980) and Rosemary Jackson’s politically radical Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (1981). Raphael Samuel explains this confluence very well, pointing out that at the same time as Thatcher was promoting her version of Victorian values as a bulwark against the trade unions and socialism, a revival of interest in the unsolved Jack-the-Ripper crimes of 1888 occurred, so that Victorian England became simultaneously identified with both public moralism and hidden perversion; the same figures that would preach about self-control and sexual restraint in the daytime were likely to be found wandering around Whitechapel procuring prostitutes and possibly ripping them to pieces in a display of the repressed coming back to life at night. Perhaps the horrifically capitalist Thatcherites were merely another incarnation of these murderous prudes.²²

The public tend to think of the Gothic as a mode of representation indicating backwardness, atavism, perversity, sexual repression, murder and abuse, and reject it for that reason as belonging to the past. The Victorians represent that past, as monsters of perversity who lived public lives of staid conformity but who came out of the closet nightly to perpetuate the most horrific versions of abuse. This is a Victorian Britain populated by grotesques and caricatures, psychotics and schizophrenics. We might call it the ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde view’ of the Victorians. Indeed, if one of the most popular complaints about the Victorians is their attendance at freak shows, then they have become a collection of freaks for us. Academics, on the other hand, see the Gothic as liberating and transgressive, and the Victorians as the arch-conservatives who repressed the Gothic because of its threat to the ‘family values’ they held so dear. Mrs Beeton becomes the average Victorian in this scenario. These potent interpretations have caused great difficulty in trying to come to grips with the Victorians in all their historical complexity.

As Alice Jenkins and Juliet John argue,

if realism as an aesthetic mode looms large in twentieth-century discussions of the Victorians – and there is no doubt that it does – this perhaps says as much about our need to create ‘straw men’ against which to measure ourselves as it says about the Victorians themselves.²³

The same is true of the view of the Victorians as sexually repressed, which really needs to be put to rest. Moreover, the division between conservative realism and subversive Gothic is much too simplistic. Far from being merely social and aesthetic conservatives, the realists were engaged in literary experimentation, attempting to diffuse a mode of representation which sees the world as it truly is, however uncomfortable that picture. Although the realist novel does tend to promote middle-class power, this was often a middle class intent on undermining the status quo rather than endorsing it, a middle class trying to understand change, not prevent change from taking place.²⁴

Even more importantly for us, the Gothic can now no longer be seen as aesthetically subversive and transgressive, as if that designated political and social radicalism as well. As Robert Mighall and Chris Baldick note, the description of the Gothic as subversive tells us more about the critical consensus reached in the 1980s than the Gothic itself, since ‘the cultural politics of modern critical debate grant to vindicators of the marginalized or repressed a special licence to evade questions of artistic merit’.²⁵ While an earlier generation of Gothic critics established the transgressive tendencies of much of this literature, a host of new studies have demonstrated that there are also profoundly conservative aspects to the Gothic, including its tendency towards hyperbolic and chauvinistic types of nationalism, extraordinarily reactionary views of sexual deviance, and rigid paranoid policing of the domestic space. Gothic is a mode of writing riven with ambivalence, articulating both disgust and desire. It is too common in criticism to find one aspect or another being emphasised at the expense of an understanding of Gothic in the round – although a close reading of these critics demonstrate that the general views they express are always made more problematic by their textual analyses. Baldick and Mighall, two of the tradition’s best critics, have, for example, consistently drawn attention to the tendency within Gothic fiction to express disgust for Catholicism, the medieval, the past, and believe that the Gothic is essentially an Enlightenment genre since it rejects and denigrates the values of the past in favour of more liberal values. Critics such as David Punter, Fred Botting and Rosemary Jackson, on the other hand, have emphasised the ‘transgressive’ nature of much Gothic fiction, its attraction to the non-conformist, the Catholic, the past (or at least the version of these things believed by a Puritan Protestant society).²⁶ However, rather than conforming