Gothic Utterance: Voice, Speech and Death in the American Gothic

By Jimmy Packham

The Gothic has always been interested in strange utterances and unsettling voices – from half-heard ghostly murmurings and the admonitions of the dead, to the terrible cries of the monstrous nonhuman. Gothic Utterance is the first book-length study of the role played by such voices in the Gothic tradition, exploring their prominence and importance in the American literature produced between the Revolutionary War and the close of the nineteenth century. The book argues that the American Gothic foregrounds the overpowering affect and distressing significations of the voices of the dead, dying, abjected, marginalised or nonhuman, in order to undertake a sustained interrogation of what it means to be and speak as an American in this period. The American Gothic imagines new forms of relation between speaking subjects, positing more inclusive and expansive kinds of community, while also emphasising the ethical demands attending our encounters with Gothic voices. The Gothic suggests that how we choose to hear and respond to these voices says much about our relationship with the world around us, its inhabitants – dead or otherwise – and the limits of our own subjectivity and empathy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Jun 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781786837561

Book preview

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GOTHIC UTTERANCE

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 scholarly 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 Sheffield

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

For all titles in the Gothic Literary Studies series visit www.uwp.co.uk

Gothic Utterance

Voice, Speech and Death in the American Gothic

Jimmy Packham

illustration

© Jimmy Packham, 2021

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. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3NS.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

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

ISBN 978-1-78683-754-7

e-ISBN 978-1-78683-756-1

The right of Jimmy Packham 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.

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: Gustave Doré, ‘The Raven’ (1882), engraving for an 1884 edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven. Retrieved from the Library of Congress.

For Imogen and my parents

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

A note on referencing

Introduction: American Biloquism

Part I: Gothic Utterance and Selfhood

1Deadly Locution and Delphic Shrieks: Haunted Significance and the Self

2Cries and Whispers: Spectral Voice, Community and Gothic Consciousness

Part II: Voices, Soundscapes, Histories

3Howls and Echoes: Frontier Gothic and the Voice of the Wilderness

4(Dis)embodied Utterance and the Peripatetic Voice: Hearing the Haunted Plantation

5Squawking Soldiers and the Babbling Corpse: War-torn Words and the Civil War Gothic

Conclusion: Quoth the Gothic

Notes

Bibliography

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

There are many voices – some of them Gothic, some less so, all of them kind and generous – that have informed my own in the writing of this book. There is not room enough here to thank them all individually, but there are a few I would like to highlight. Thanks are due first to David Punter, who supervised a very different iteration of this research project during my doctoral studies at the University of Bristol. The entirety of the English Department at Bristol is to be thanked, too, for the generosity and encouragement provided during this period and beyond; I am particularly grateful for the guidance and friendship of Laurence Publicover, Tamsin Badcoe, Ians Burrows and Calvert, Stephen James, Theo Savvas, Lesel Dawson, Pam Lock, Jen Baker and Joan Passey – and all of ‘Pathway 4’. At the University of Birmingham, thanks are due to Andrzej Gasiorek, Tom Lockwood and Deborah Longworth, for their support during the writing of this project, and to Dorothy Butchard, Melissa Dickson, Ellie Dobson, John Fagg, Fariha Shaikh and Matthew Ward for their conversation and comments on early drafts of this work. I am thankful to Sarah Lewis, Dafydd Jones, Andy Smith and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock at UWP for their kindnesses, assistance and helpful feedback. Any errors that remain are, of course, my own. A special mention is due to Richard Vigars (for the music) and Mark Puttick (for the movies). To my parents, Sarah and Kevin, I am indebted in ways that will never be adequately repaid. I am grateful to Alfred, for reminding me that not all animal utterances are Gothic. Finally, with love: Imogen Peck, to whom I owe the greatest part of my happiness.

A note on referencing

Where, across directly successive sentences, quotations are drawn from a single source, I have adopted a single endnote, following the final quotation, in order to indicate the location(s) of the quoted material; this is intended to prevent the text (and reader) from becoming overwhelmed by endnotes in particular passages.

Introduction: American Biloquism

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At the heart of America’s Gothic tradition is the horror of the voice. Charles Brockden Brown’s foundational American Gothic novel, Wieland; or, The Transformation: An American Tale (1798), concerns a family haunted by an array of strange, disembodied utterances. Theodore Wieland interprets these utterances as coming from God and is impelled by them to murder his wife and children and finally, following an admonition from another disembodied voice explaining that he has been misled by his senses, to kill himself. These events play out alongside the arrival of a stranger, Carwin, who finally admits to Clara Wieland, the narrator, that he is a biloquist – somebody who can ‘mimic exactly the voice of another’ and ‘modify the sound so that it shall appear to come from what quarter, and be uttered at what distance [they] please’.1 Carwin confesses to deliberately terrorising the Wielands by ventriloquising their voices and by speaking to them in other voices, which are by turns threatening and seemingly benevolent. Yet he denies using his powers to urge Theodore to commit murder; this voice remains strangely unaccounted for.

The Gothic voices of Wieland invite a rich array of interpretations. They might, for instance, signify the voices of any of the following: God, the demonic, the fanatic, the subconscious, the abjected, the dead, authority (or its absence), the emergent republic (as this ‘American tale’ unfolds between the French and Indian War and the Revolution), the old world (as Carwin is initially presented as an Englishman by birth), the ‘native’ American (a term Carwin applies to himself), the mesmerist or the automaton (for more than once Carwin generates in his auditors, and admits that he responds to, ‘mechanical’ impulses) and so on. As this ambiguity suggests, Carwin’s voice is unruly; its horrors proceed not just from what this voice says, but from its tenuous relationship to the speaking subject. At its wildest, this voice is ‘louder than human organs could produce, shriller than language can depict’.2 But, for all its extremity and excess, this Gothic voice sits uncomfortably close to the more conventional voices of the novel; and it exists within a narrative that continually meditates on the quality of all voices. Prior to Carwin’s arrival, Theodore, a good young American citizen, spends his time practicing his elocution, reciting Cicero’s writings, ‘anxious to discover the gestures and cadences with which they ought to be delivered’ and ‘very scrupulous in selecting a true scheme of pronunciation for the Latin tongue’. With his friend, Henry Pleyel, Theodore spends time ‘bandying quotations and syllogisms’ and arguing over appropriate word choices during dramatic recitations.3 In short, what one says and how one says it matters in Brown’s America.

Moreover, Carwin’s own conventional speaking voice is disarmingly beautiful. ‘It was wholly new’, remarks Clara: ‘The voice was not only mellifluent and clear, but the emphasis was so just, and the modulation so impassioned, that it seemed as if an heart of stone could not fail of being moved by it’.4 Carwin’s voice is a site of both Gothic terror and sublime beauty; it is the ideal voice and this ideal’s own dark doppelgänger. In this respect, Carwin’s is not merely the aberrant voice intruding into the ordinary and wellmannered world. Rather, as a vehicle for hypnotic beauty and disruptive terror, it embodies the fullest possible potential of the voice; in turn, this voice is that which all other voices strive to emulate and, at the same time, it dramatises the notion that any voice might become disorderly and dangerous: biloquism ‘is an art which may be taught to all’, Carwin speculates ominously.5 And beyond all this remains that one voice Carwin will not acknowledge as his own, the voice Theodore ascribes to God – that voice which cannot be located or contained and which gestures irrevocably towards death.

It is the wealth of haunted and haunting voices emanating from the pages of American Gothic writing with which this book is concerned. My focus in particular is on the writing of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, from the emergence of the Gothic tradition following the Revolutionary War to the meditations offered in Gothic fiction on the Civil War and the postbellum United States. I hope through this approach to foreground the absolute centrality of the voice and its utterances to the American Gothic tradition. If, as many have argued, the Gothic is the genre through which the United States finds its own literary voice,6 I want to insist on the preeminent role of voice itself within this lineage. In turn, this suggests the extent to which the literary project of America during its first century or so is one defined and shaped by a careful attention to what I am terming ‘Gothic utterance’ – implying, but not limited to, the voices of the dead, the dying, the revenant and the abjected.

Gothic Utterance urges readers to pay close attention not just to what is being spoken and by whom, but how it is uttered and how that voice is captured and operates on the pages of the Gothic text. Many of the voices discussed across the following chapters are very real: they emanate from actual, tangible, living (or dying) bodies – from Carwin to M. Valdemar, to Civil War soldiers and the voice of the nonhuman animal. Other voices, however, are less readily locatable in space or time: the voices of ghosts and the dead, the voice of the wilderness, for instance. These may be figurative or imagined voices, but it is their reception as voices that matters here. It is, after all, the prerogative of the Gothic to collapse the real with the supernatural, the actual with the imagined, to destabilise the parameters by which the former might be distinguished from the latter. The voices of the dead may only be voices figuratively speaking; then again, they may well be real. Indeed, as we will see, whether one chooses to apprehend such apparent utterances as one encounters as real or as figurative or imaginary has a profound impact on how one might interpret this encounter and the Gothic text itself. As chapter 4 argues, for example, acknowledging or denying that the Gothic voices heard on the plantations of the US South might be both real and ghostly, historical and imagined, has significant implications for how we understand a subject’s sense of duty towards others and the world they inhabit.

By attending to American literature’s Gothic utterances – the literal, the figurative and those hovering indeterminately somewhere between these two poles – we hear a sustained interrogation of what it means to have a voice and what it means to speak as an American subject. The Gothic articulates many of its most challenging and radical critiques of America’s social fabric and cultural life through its figuration of uncanny or disorderly voices, voices that will not be silenced, voices that come back to us even from beyond the grave. And so, in emphasising the Gothic qualities of speech acts, and by scrutinising speech acts that emerge from or gesture towards death and nonbeing in particular, this American literature, Gothic Utterance argues, presents the troubling foundations on which notions of national identity, American subjectivity and the nation itself are predicated. As literary texts of this period repeatedly draw attention to moments of utterance and self-consciously interrogate what constitutes an American voice, they also repeatedly figure this voice, its speech acts and the American experience(s) it expresses as coextensive with or in large part beholden to death – death in its many varied guises, including bodily death, living death, the death of subjectivity and social death.

There are, consequently, three main aims framing this book. First, it seeks to establish the role played by Gothic utterance in comprehending the limits of American national identity and the way in which the Gothic voices of this literature signify as a critique of certain hegemonic and exclusionary forms of selfhood and subjectivity. By focusing on voices that speak out from various marginalised positions, I demonstrate how Gothic literature posits more expansive, more inclusive, forms of community, remapping the contours of the nation and its society to (re)incorporate or (re)integrate these voices and the subjects they represent. Second, Gothic Utterance contributes the first book-length study of the important role of voice and utterance in the Gothic tradition more broadly. The Gothic is a noisy genre, suffused with wailing winds, creaking floorboards and, again and again, the cries, groans, shrieks, howls and pleas of a panoply of ghosts, monsters and victimised humans. As Isabella van Elferen indicates, sound is absolutely intrinsic to the Gothic across its history, as authors repeatedly ‘describe similar un/heard and dis/embodied sounds disturbing the silence of haunted houses’.7 The rich soundscapes of the Gothic are a vital part of both its aesthetics – generative of Radcliffean terror – and its social purpose, as Gothic figures return from beyond the grave or marginalised spaces in order to give voice to, to speak out against, their unjust treatment in life. Voice and its utterances are key components of the poetics and politics of terror.

A handful of Gothic authors have generated a good deal of critical interest in their presentation of disconcerting voices – most notably Charles Brockden Brown and Edgar Allan Poe.8 But, to date, there exists only a small body of scholarship that addresses what critics have termed the ‘sonic Gothic’ on its own terms. Isabella van Elferen’s Gothic Music provides an engaging study of its subject matter through the complementary lenses of the uncanny and hauntology, to demonstrate how Gothic music capitalises on the spectrality of sound and affective power of music to unsettle its auditors’ relationships with Being and time. Matt Foley has done the most to turn attention to voice in Gothic writing, observing that a clear gap exists in the literature on this topic. Focusing particularly on Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), Foley explores the ‘acousmatic voice’ – the voice without any apparent originating subject – to argue that Gothic literature demonstrates how the clarity and signifying capacity of words are always potentially troubled by the ‘a-symbolic timbre of the voice’, for voice is that which conveys the excessive (and obfuscating) material surrounding spoken language.9 In the context of American literature, Brian Norman’s Dead Women Talking offers a transhistorical account of America’s preoccupation with the voices of dead women who seek social justice and recognition in the (living) world of culture, from Madeline Usher to Desperate Housewives.10 Gothic Utterance expands this small body of scholarship by providing the first book-length analysis of Gothic voices in general, and of utterance in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American Gothic in particular.11

For all that my focus and conceptualisation of a death-haunted utterance suggests a rather gloomy approach to voice, I hope, finally, in Gothic Utterance to also offer something rather more affirming: across the textual analysis in the following chapters I want to emphasise the ethical demands that attend our encounters with Gothic voices and speech acts. In this regard, this is a book as much about listening as it is about speaking. Even as a great many of the voices under discussion in this book are unwelcome, intrusive or disruptive, many of them are also voices seeking connections, seeking an interlocutor and seeking thereby to be heard and understood. Certainly, what makes these voices ‘Gothic’ is their strangeness in being unsettlingly disconnected from the world of culture, their uncanniness in resonating at once in familiar and unfamiliar ways, and their bringing back into discourse things that had been repressed. But what an encounter with such voices does is task the characters of Gothic fiction and the readers of that fiction with the work of registering, recognising and responding to these voices. Because of the horror of the Gothic voice, we might be tempted to clamp our hands over our ears and shut out its sound. But what happens, this body of fiction asks, if you do not do that, if, in fact, you cannot do that? What happens if we let the Gothic speak and if we listen? By offering answers to these questions, I want to suggest some of the ways in which the Gothic voice takes its place among the wider chorus of voices in literature and how an understanding of Gothic utterances helps us further theorise the affective power of voice itself. As I explore further in the book’s conclusion, Gothic utterances urge us to hear the limits of our own subjectivity, to listen to voices we would rather not hear and to respond with care or empathy to such voices.

Gothic utterance

To adopt ‘Gothic utterance’ as a critical perspective, we might reasonably be put in mind of the Gothic’s many uncanny or supernatural voices. Beyond Wieland, we might point, for instance, to Edgar Allan Poe’s raven, possibly sentient, possibly not, continually croaking out ‘Nevermore’ in response to the increasingly desperate questions of a grieving and anguished lover. We might hear the satanic utterances assaulting Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown during his dark night of the soul, or the demonic laughter that assails Ambrose Bierce’s Halpin Frayser or the many speech acts performed by Death and ghosts in writing by Emily Dickinson and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. Such voices may signify as Gothic utterances in both content and timbre – a source of terror to their interlocutors because they seem to speak of a world of monstrous forces, or because of their apparent calculated cruelty or simply because it would be frightening to hear that which should be dead speak to us and because death has dramatically altered the quality of the voice. But this is not the only way I wish Gothic utterance to be understood. I want also to draw attention to the Gothic qualities of voice itself, voice more broadly, and the manner in which Gothic fiction exploits this. From this perspective, we can begin to hear how a Gothic voice resides in work which is not, in other respects, traditionally considered Gothic, but which has recourse to Gothic utterance at key moments in the narrative – for example, in nonfiction frontier narratives or accounts of slavery and the plantation.

For all that the speaking voice is traditionally a sign of the human – Aristotle’s ‘speaking animal’12 – there are several main approaches that help to unsettle this connection and which serve as a starting point in consideration of the Gothic modalities of the voice and utterance: the voice’s immateriality or its spectrality; its disjointed connection to the speaking body; the otherness and abject qualities of the voice, and its proximity to nonbeing; and voice and speech as mechanical phenomena. There is an abiding understanding that voice and (self-)consciousness are deeply intertwined: ‘The voice is consciousness’, writes Derrida emphatically; and in ‘the hearing-oneself-speak’, in hearing what Derrida suggestively calls ‘the living voice’, the subject hears their own self and self-presence in the world.13 Mladen Dolar’s recent theories of the voice offer a productive place to begin thinking about the Gothic qualities of such utterance in more detail.

Dolar seeks to illuminate the ‘object voice’, the voice-as-voice, but this, it seems, remains elusive. ‘The voice’, he argues, ‘stems from the body, but is not its part, and it upholds language without belonging to it, yet, in this paradoxical topology, this is the only point they share’.14 The voice depends upon the body, originating in it, but cannot be reduced to it, nor can it be definitively located within the body. Yet if the voice is, as Dolar also argues, ‘the very texture of the social, as well as the intimate kernel of subjectivity’, it is one founded on precarious, even illusory, ground: it is caught somewhere between self and Other, body and language, the internal and the external.15 For Slavoj Žižek, the voice is an index of our place within the symbolic order of culture, but it remains dislocated from the physical body by ‘an unbridgeable gap’: it ‘acquires a spectral autonomy . . . so that even when we see a living person talking, there is always some degree of ventriloquism at work’.16

This ‘unbridgeable gap’ must, in some way, be bridged if we are to reliably connect a voice to the speaking subject and, in turn, the specific subjectivity of which it is a marker. Little wonder, then, that Carwin’s biloquism should have such an alarming effect on those whom he ventriloquises. Theodore’s assertion that he has heard the voice of Catharine Pleyel somewhere Catharine cannot have been is a cause for confusion, not least for Catharine herself: ‘That her voice should be thus inexplicably and unwarrantably assumed’, Clara records, ‘was a source of no small disquietude’.17 What is fundamentally unsettling in being told one’s voice has been heard somewhere it should not (and supposedly could not) have been is the separation it affirms between body and voice, and this in turn suggests a rift at the heart of one’s subjectivity. If Brown’s American family prize and strive to demonstrate the unity of the human, and American, subject, the realisation that one cannot ever be truly unified with one’s voice – and that someone else might assume this index of personal selfhood – is disquieting indeed. The voice and the words one utters, in the end, are no reliable index of one’s presence; they are always – quite literally in the case of Wieland – getting away from us.

Such conceptions of the voice, and its relationship to utterance, gesture repeatedly to its uncanny and unsettling qualities. The voice is intrinsic to signification and yet distinct from it, an excess; as noise that finds shape only through the language and speech acts that are moulded into it, the voice presents ‘a certain inchoate, amorphous character’.18 We are put in mind here of America’s most grotesque voice: the voice of the living dead that Poe sketches in ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ (1845). Descriptions of Valdemar’s not-quite-posthumous speech suggest Poe is seeking to impress his readers with a sense of the object voice, the voice without or prior to speech, and can only do so with recourse to tactile, material images, with language that does not seem to quite make sense in relation to utterance’s fundamental immateriality. Valdemar’s voice seems to come ‘from a vast distance, or from some deep cavern within the earth’; it sounds like ‘gelatinous or glutinous matters’ might feel.19

Insofar as the voice is the vessel through which language is transmitted and given shape, the human subject retains the potential to utter the voice without language, the pure voice or indeed the voice stripped of language. For Elaine Scarry, this is what we encounter when we encounter a body in a pain that cannot be observed or felt by any but the subject experiencing it. ‘Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned’.20 The voice of pain is the voice without language. Emily Dickinson offers perhaps the most potent poetic rendition of this idea when she writes that

Pain – has an element of Blank –

It cannot recollect

When it begun – or if there were

A time when it was not –

It has no Future – but itself –21

Pain carries with it an inexpressible blankness, an index of the limits of our language; moreover, it severs the subject’s continuity in time, dislocating them from a linear or progressive historical temporality. As we shall see, the Gothic’s predilection for wounded bodies or bodies-in-pain returns to these ideas, while also dramatising the effect of this inexpressibility and temporal dislocation on an interlocutor; the Gothic insists on the horror of a subject’s encounter with another subjectivity that seems, through its pain-infused utterances, to be teetering on the very brink of that subjectivity, slipping from subject into (dead) object.

The Gothic contours of voice that we are seeing here, as voice sits in uneasy conjunction with the speaking subject, indicates a further strangeness: speech as an index not of self, but of Otherness and abjection. As something we all inhabit (or which inhabits us), the voice is perhaps the supreme point of contact between self and Other; it is, argues Dolar, the shared quality ‘which ties the subject and the Other together, without belonging to either’.22 In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva defines the abject as the product of a ‘primal repression’ peculiarly dependent on the possibility of coherent utterance. The abject, Kristeva argues, is ‘the object of primal repression. But what is primal repression? Let us call it the ability of the speaking being, always already haunted by the Other, to divide, reject, repeat’.23 In this sense, the abjected – that which constitutes the ‘not-me’ in order for the ‘me’ to function as a stable and cohesive entity – depends for its existence on work that originates in the powers of speech. Here, speech is that which is used to express (both in the sense of giving utterance to