Alien Nation: Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fictions and English Nationality 9781512818581

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Alien Nation

NEW CULTURAL STUDIES Series Editors Joan Dejean Carroll Smith-Rosenberg Peter Stallybrass Gary A. Tomlinson

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Alien Nation Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fictions and English Nationality CANNON

SCHMITT

PENN University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia

Copyright © 1997 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10

9 8 7 6 5 4 ) 1 1

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-6097 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schmitt, Cannon. Alien nation : nineteenth-century gothic fictions and English nationality / Cannon Schmitt. p. cm. — (New cultural studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. I S B N 0-8122-3351-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. English fiction — 19th century—History and criticism. 2. Gothic revival (Literature) —Great Britain —History— 19th centurv. 3. De Quincev, Thomas, 1785-1859. Confessions of an English opium eater. 4- National characteristics, English, in literature. 5. Nationalism —Great Britain — History— 19th centurv. 6. Horror tales, English — History and criticism. 7. Nationalism in literature. 8. Autobiography. I. Title. II. Series. PR868.T3S33 1997 823'.087290908—dc2i

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Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction: Gothic Fictions and English Nationality

i

1. Paranoia and the Englishwoman: Ann Radcliffe's The Italian

21

2. De Quincey's Gothic Autobiography and the Opium Wars

46

3. Border Crossings: Nationality, Sexuality, and Colonialism in Charlotte Bronte's Vilktte

76

4. Written on the Body: The Sensational Nation in Matthew Arnold and Wilkie Collins

107

5. Mother Dracula

135

Afterword

156

Notes

169

Bibliography

197

Index

215

Illustrations

Figure i. William Mulready, Train Up a Child in the Way He Should Go; and When He Is Old He Will Not Depart from It. 1841-53. Figure 2. Sir John Tenniel, "The British Lion's Vengeance on the Bengal Tiger." Punch 22 August 1857. Figure 3. "The Irish 'Vampire.'" Punch 24 October 1885.

Acknowledgments

acknowledge here contributed to the making of this book. At Indiana University, a remarkable and remarkably generous group of teachers and scholars presided over the first incarnation of Alien Nation. Pat Brantlinger took an interest in my work early on and has fostered it ever since. Ken Johnston's wit and critical acumen never failed him (or me). Brian Caraher continued to send along comments even after relocating to Northern Ireland. Special thanks go to Mary Favret. Her seminar on Theories of the Gothic provided the initial occasion to formulate the ideas at the center of this project. More importantly, though, she has contributed to my thinking so thoroughly and with such generosity and insight that I don't know what the finished product would have looked like without her. Members of the academic community at Indiana University of importance in more circuitous ways were Kathryn Flannery, Don Gray, Sheila Lindenbaum, Andrew H. Miller, and Don Ulin. A graduate reading group attended to several chapters with care. My appreciation goes to Stephanie Browner, David Cassuto, Bill Little, Steve Pulsford, Liz Rosdeitcher, and Michelle Thomas. At the University of Pennsylvania, Peter Stallybrass's enthusiasm for and faith in the project were invaluable; as long as he remains one of its members, the academy will never itself become an alien nation. At Grinnell College, I have benefited from the expertise of Michael Bell, Morgan Holcomb, Cameron Krieger, and Kelley Wagers as well as from the munificence of the Grinnell College Grant Board chaired by Dean Charles Duke. My colleague Jared Gardner placed me forever in his debt by reading every page with a critical eye. For extra-academic support and companionship I thank my family, especially my parents, Jack Schmitt and Zebe Y. C. Schmitt, and M A N Y M O R E P E O P L E THAN I CAN

xii

Acknowledgments

my brother, T. Beckett Chesnut. Finally, Jacqui Sadashige provided a flesh-and-blood exemplification of the phrase sine qua turn. The book is dedicated to her. Earlier versions of three chapters first appeared as essays. I would like to thank the Johns Hopkins University Press for permission to reprint material from "Techniques of Terror, Technologies o f Nationality: Ann Radcliffe's The Italian," published in ELH\ the University of Oklahoma Press for permission to reprint material from "Alien Nation: Gender, Genre, and English Nationality in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White" published in Genre; and the Bucknell Review for permission to reprint material from "Mother Dracula: Orientalism, Degeneration, and AngloIrish National Subjectivity at the Fin de Siecle." Comments from anonymous readers for ELH and Genre improved the pieces on Radcliffe and Collins; at the Bucknell Review, John Rickard's interest in the essay on Dracula came at an opportune moment. The University of Pennsylvania Press has been a pleasure to work with from first to last: reports from anonymous readers for the Press both challenged and encouraged me; Jerry Singerman, the Acquisitions Editor, managed to be everything an author most needs.

Introduction: Gothic Fictions and English Nationality

All national rootcdncss . . . is rooted first of all in the memory or the anxiety of a displaced—or displaceable—population. — Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx

I N 1924 A R T H U R C O N A N D O Y L E published "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire," a Sherlock Holmes story, in The Strand. As the title suggests, the case is one of suspected vampirism. In a written appeal for help from Holmes, Robert Ferguson, an Englishman, describes the shocking behavior of his Peruvian wife. She has twice attacked her stepson, Jack, Ferguson's child from an earlier marriage. Moreover, she has been seen actually drinking blood from the neck of her own baby. Ferguson's appeal closes with a comment on the incomprehensible alienness of such behavior: "I know little of vampirism beyond the name. We had thought it was some wild tale of foreign parts. And yet here in the very heart of the English Sussex—" (1221). Holmes, of course, proceeds to demystify this macabre tale, rationalizing its supernatural elements by disinterring, in the end, not the doubly foreign body of an Undead Peruvian woman but the quotidian psychopathology of an adolescent boy.1 Holmes disavows irrationality, and Doyle, through Holmes, disavows the Gothic itself as detective fiction's unsavory stepmother. That disavowal, however, begins with the invocation of a constellation of unstable identities that had haunted Britain for well over a century: the nation, gender, and the Gothic. Doyle's story alludes,

2

Introduction

in its opening episode as well as in the curious geographic insistence of its title ("Sussex Vampire"), to the question of nationality—in particular, of Englishness. Implicit in Ferguson's comments on vampirism ("We had thought it was some wild tale of foreign parts") is the opposition of foreignness and the supernatural to England, the legibility of Englishness as the not-foreign, the not-wild. Ferguson's wife at once confirms and refutes such an equation. As a Peruvian, she allows vampirism in England to be read as contamination; her nationality affirms England's difference from other nations. As a vampire "in the very heart of the English Sussex," however, she gives the lie to that difference. In Doyle's narrative, as in so many others, the nation is made and unmade through the figure of a woman. Finally, providing the generic space and narrative patterns in which nationality and gender constitute one another is the Gothic, at once "wild tale of foreign parts" and quintessentially English domestic product. The nation, gender, and the Gothic, in their various and shifting mutual articulations, comprise the chief concerns of Alien Nation. This book has it origins in the realization that the Gothic encapsulates a powerful and enduring cultural narrative for lateeighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. Gothic fictions depend for their effects upon varieties of estrangement, from the breakdown of communication between genders and classes to the baffled efforts of modernity to make sense of its own feudal past. No single thread unites these orders of misunderstanding, but I am increasingly convinced that nationality organizes much of what is characteristically Gothic. "Nation" here carries a double valence. On one hand, Gothics pose as semi-ethnographic texts in their representation of Catholic, Continental Europe or the Far East as fundamentally un-English, the site of depravity. On the other, a notion of Englishness is itself constructed in the novels. This construction initially functions by means of threatened female figures who ostensibly embody a peculiarly English subjectivity. Later, threatened femininity comes to stand in metonymically for the English nation itself, a generalization of Gothic narrative with imperial as well as domestic consequences. Sup-

Gothic Fictions and English Nationality

3

posed threats to the nation provided the perfect casus belli for imperial aggression. But the workings of such a logic could produce unexpected results—as in "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire." Ferguson's wife, a palimpsest of the vulnerable Englishwoman overwritten by a predatory foreign vampire, undermines national purity from within by way of a corrupt maternity, Mother England's nightmarish double. The "anxiety of a displaced—or displaceable—population" that Jacques Derrida, in Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, finds at the base of all "national rootedness" is an anxiety the Gothic insistently puts to work: threat of invasion from without produces Englishness within. But if Continental Europe, the East, or South America provides an antithesis against which Englishness might be elaborated, their menacing and alluring alterity eventually makes good on its threat. The English are displaced, figuratively if not physically: their Englishness admits of Otherness, and England itself becomes an alien nation.

Generic Terror The Gothic still frightens. To be sure, its decaying castles and ubiquitous banditti, which once drove characters and readers alike to distraction, now seem capable of producing only wry amusement. But the genre itself continues to elicit a frisson of dismay by posing to its critics the riddle of its own identity.2 Remarkable for the provocative way in which it deploys apparent fixities (of gender, class, nation) in the service of instability and collapse, the Gothic defines itself as that genre in which definition is in doubt. "What am I?" it asks, echoing the implicit question of its own enigmatic monstrosities, its Montonis, Frankenstein's creatures, Heathcliffs, and Draculas. One response to this question has been the construction of a literary-historical narrative about prose fiction in late-eighteenthand early-nineteenth-century Britain. On this view, the term

4

Introduction

"Gothic" describes a series of novels that possess common thematic concerns and plot devices —in the disparaging language once preferred by many critics, "Gothic trappings." Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, published late in 1764, initiates this series. Its medievalism, fascination with physical and psychological extremity, supernatural elements, and purported status as a found manuscript set the pattern for the texts that followed. Other works in the vein of Otranto were published in the 1770s and 1780s, but the real efflorescence of the genre occurred in the final decade of the eighteenth century and is now associated primarily with a single author, Ann Radcliffe. The popularity of Radcliffe's novels, the most significant of which are The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and The Italian (1797), was part of—and, in turn, helped to fuel—a surge of interest in Gothic fiction. The exchange between Isabella Thorpe and Catherine Morland in Jane Austen's Northartger Abbey (written 1797-1803; published 1818) attests to that interest and, in doing so, indicates another characteristic of the Gothic novel: its supposed appeal to audiences of young, educated, and newly leisured middle-class women. [Catherine:] "Oh! I am delighted with the book [Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho]! I should like to spend my whole life in reading it. I assure you, if it had not been to meet you, I would not have come away from it for all the world." [Isabella:] "Dear creature! how much I am obliged to you; and when you have finished Udolpho, we will read the Italian together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you." "Have you, indeed! How glad I am! — What are they all?" "I will read you their names directly; here they are, in my pocket-book. Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries. Those will last us some time." (60-61)

The titles Isabella Thorpe cites refer to actual novels, many of them issued by the successful publishing venture, the Minerva Press (Sadleir; Blakey). But if Austen's send up provides evidence of the popularity of the genre, it also marks the beginning of the

Gothic Fictions and English Nationality

5

end. Despite Catherine's assertion that she "should like to spend [her] whole life in reading it," demand for the Gothic waned following the turn of the century—in part because of the scandal surrounding the publication of Matthew Gregory Lewis's The Monk (i795), in part because of the reaction against the Gothic's valorization of the individual, a tendency many of the English linked to the horrors of the French Revolution (M. Butler, Romantics 156-57). After a brief resurgence of interest in the second decade of the nineteenth century, the history of the Gothic as traditionally understood comes to a close in 1820 with the publication of Charles Robert Maturing Melnwth the Wanderer. This apparently straightforward account, while in many ways useful and accurate, nonetheless suffers from a host of complications. To begin with, even a cursory glance at novels possessed of Gothic characteristics published in the half-century between 1764 and 1820 reveals multiple subcategories. There are, for instance, both horror-Gothics, marked by an obsession with the macabre, and terror-Gothics, focusing on the mysterious and ineffable (Hume; Summers 28-31). The political Gothics of William Godwin (e.g., Caleb Williams [1794]) and of his American disciple, Charles Brockden Brown (author of Wieland [1798]), necessitate further definitional exceptions —as do oriental Gothics, the most familiar example of which is William Beckford's Vathek (1786); Gothic romans a clef, such as Thomas Love Peacock's Nightmare Abbey (1818); and so forth. Even within the apparently narrow limits that some literary-historical accounts have placed on the term "Gothic"—prose fiction published between the 1760s and the 1820s characterized by a fascination with extremes, the supernatural, and the medieval—sheer diversity threatens categorical coherence. Difficulties of definition become even more serious, though, when challenges from without those limits are considered. Formally, the Gothic impulse did not find vent only in prose fiction. As Robert Miles notes, "we are dealing, not with the 'rise' of a single genre, but with an area of concern, a broad subject-matter, crossing the genres" (4). Coleridge's "Christabel" (1816) displays

6

Introduction

many of the qualities associated with the Gothic—as does, albeit in a very different way and to quite different ends, Canto 16 of Byron's Don Juan (1819-23). Further, in the nineteenth century the term was used, and not coincidentally, to refer to a type of architecture. The Gothic revival promoted by A. W. N. Pugin proffered the Catholic Middle Ages as a cure for Britain's rapidly industrializing cityscapes rather than as a setting for mysterious criminality (Clark; R.Williams, Culture 130-58). Finally, the traditional definition of the Gothic invites challenges to its temporal boundaries as well. On one end of the temporal spectrum, what is called the Gothic novel has much in common with early Renaissance romances. On the other, not only did novels and poems resembling the works of Walpole, Radcliffe, and Maturin continue to be written, published, and read over the course of the nineteenth century, but there are a substantial number of late-twentieth-century avatars, from the "costume Gothics" that line supermarket shelves to Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987).3 Given such a wealth of possible meanings for the term "Gothic," the choice to select from among them a single definition cannot appeal to categorical rigor alone. In this sense the Gothic, because of its particular generic incoherence, lays bare the stakes involved in naming any genre. To claim that a text is Gothic (or realist or modernist, for that matter) risks hypostatizing generic distinctions and thus removing individual texts from history. Particularities may be occluded and contexts overlooked in the service of constructing a categorical coherence that transcends geographic, temporal, and even formal differences. But to abandon genre altogether poses another risk, that of losing sight of important lines of affiliation (intentional or otherwise) that tie groups of texts together. Without something like a notion of genre, each text can only be read as if it were sui generis, its faint echoes or forthright repetitions of other texts incomprehensible except as a function of its unique system of meaning. This double bind requires in turn a double solution: the recognition that a given genre functions differentially both in relation to other genres and in relation to itself over time.

Gothic Fictions and English Nationality

7

Insofar as genre gains identity negatively, by way of difference rather than similarity, it resembles gender (and, as I argue throughout this book, nationality). Laurie Langbauer explicitly addresses this resemblance in Women and Romance: The Consolations of Gender in the English Novel, where she asserts that the two entities announced in her title are constituted, not in themselves, but in contradistinction to what they are not: men and novels. The shifting meanings of "women" and "romance" that result from this dynamic, Langbauer claims, constitute "an ever useful ploy of the dominant system, which maintains its positions of privilege — staked out by those attempting to define themselves as 'men' and 'novels'—by taking its meaning from women and romance" (2). Like romance, of which indeed it has often been seen as a subcategory, the Gothic was for much of the nineteenth century the feminized and derided antithesis of the realist novel (Levine). This opposition structures the discourse of narrative fiction both in novels themselves (such as those of Austen, whose Northanger Abbey at once parodies the Gothic and puts forward a realist manifesto) and in critical discussions of writing practice (such as the attacks on sensation fiction carried out in the periodical press during the 1860s). The Gothic, for its proponents and detractors alike, was nothing so much as the realist novel's historically prior or affectively Hysterical Other. But this wholly negative method of characterizing genre— and this genre in particular—partially misleads, for it is also the case that the Gothic was (and is) recognizable with reference to specific formal characteristics. I follow Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in isolating as "Gothic" a limited and coherent set of narrative conventions: structural devices such as repetition, multiple narrators, and stories within stories as well as thematic obsessions that include the supernatural, confession, oppressive physical surroundings, doubles, the unspeakable, and dreams or dreamlike states (Sedgwick, Coherence).* These conventions, codified at the end of the eighteenth century with the popularity of Radcliffe's novels, outlive their origins. They remain available for use throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth: Byron's Manfred

8

Introduction

(1817), Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (1868), H. Rider Haggard's She (1887), some of the science fiction stories of H. G. Wellsall these diverse texts incorporate Gothic conventions, from the most obvious (Manfred's decaying castle) to the most subtle (the formal device of multiple narrators in The Moonstone, ostensibly in the service of legalistic realism, replicates Gothic doubling and perspectivism). Such claims may appear to succumb to the very risk of hypostatizing genre warned against above. Rather than elevate these characteristics to a fixed inventory of the Gothic as such, however, I look to them as a way to measure change. This strategy constitutes the second part of the double solution to the problem of genre: the recognition of a genre's difference from itself over time. Such a strategy reveals historicism's dependence upon essentialism, for without an initial essentializing gesture to provide the ground against which difference can be measured, part of the historicity of a text remains inaccessible. Fredric Jameson most clearly formulates the logic of this apparent paradox. Commenting on Vladimir Propp's formalist treatment of the morphology of the folktale, Jameson notes that "the value of such narrative models lies in their capacity to measure a given text's specific deviation from them, and thereby to raise the more dialectical and historical issue of this determinate formal difference" (126).5 Similarly, specifying generic conventions provides the means to group texts and to measure their changing relations to one another and to the cultural contexts in which they are produced and consumed.

A Tradition of Subversion For one particularly influential strain of criticism of the Gothic, though, the genre does not in fact change much over time. Critics who subscribe to this view have in various ways sought to show that the Gothic is, like certain manifestations of English Romanticism, subversive or oppositional. The most sweeping claim to this effect is made by Tzvetan Todorov in The Fantastic: A Structural

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9

Approach to a Literary Genre. Placing the Gothic under the rubric of the fantastic, Todorov argues that it anticipates psychoanalysis in its exploration of the taboo: incest, necrophilia, homosexuality. Further, for Todorov the very structure of the Gothic calls into question the reality of reality itself by blurring the boundaries between the real and the unreal (even if in the end those boundaries are either restored, as in the uncanny, or redefined, as in the marvelous). More historicized readings make more modest assertions. David Punter, for instance, sees the Gothic as a product of and reaction to Enlightenment rationalism. The Gothic, for Punter, signals the reemergence of the irrational and serves as the generic space for the return of the (realist novel's and bourgeois subject's) repressed (Literature; "Social Relations"). In a related reading, Mary Poovey argues that Radcliffean Gothic exposes and challenges the ideological underpinnings of late-eighteenth-century capitalism—though it is unable, finally, to maintain this challenge ("Ideology and The Mysteries of Udolpho"). Mar)' Jacobus notes that the Gothic rose to prominence at nearly the same time and is marked by similar thematic concerns and structural displacements as high Romanticism. Jacobus's discussion of Charlotte Bronte's Villette (1853) seeks to demonstrate how the Gothic keeps its Romantic charge into the Victorian era and militates with feminism against the conventions of Victorian realism ("The Buried Letter"). All these readings, different as they are, share what Michel Foucault has called the "repressive hypothesis" (History of Sexuality 1: 17-49). That is, they conceive of power negatively, as that which forbids, controls, represses. Subversion in such a schema is figured as the irruption of repressed forces. Applied to the Gothic, this way of viewing power marks the genre as subversive: the sexuality, chaos, confusion, and terror the novels feature are read as the emergence of what has been forbidden. As the textual practice that registers this emergence, the Gothic disrupts the dominant system—whether that system is identified as rationalism, capitalism, patriarchy, or the realist novel.6 By placing the Gothic in relation to nationality, Alien Nation seeks to revise this understanding

10

Introduction

of the genre. Such an undertaking and the demonstrations that accompany it allow a move beyond the repressive hypothesis to a consideration of how Gothics represent and enact productive (though not necessarily benign) workings of power—specifically, how various works in the genre represent and enact the formation of England conceived as a nation and of English national subjects.7 Moreover, establishing a link between the Gothic and English nationality makes it possible to trace the nature of the continuing importance of the genre in the Victorian period and beyond: the work of national definition continues to make demands upon the Gothic as Englishness becomes a defining characteristic of midand late-nineteenth-century culture.

Gender as Genre: Female Gothic Considering the Gothic in conjunction with the question of the nation also provides the means to interrogate long-standing assumptions about the genre's relation to gender. Ellen Moers was the first to use the term "female Gothic" to refer to the texts of RadclifFe and writers like her, and with this act of nomination she initiated a view of the Gothic novel as uniquely expressive of female subjectivity: for Moers, the Gothic constitutes a literary space "where woman is examined with a woman's eye" (Literary Women 109). There are two sides to this understanding of the genre's relation to women's lives, one that views that relation as compensatory and another that views it as symptomatic. Consider, for instance, the double approach apparent in Moers's reading of The Mysteries of Udolpho. For eighteenth-century women increasingly confined to the domestic sphere under a regime of feminine propriety, Radcliffe's novel was compensatory, "a feminine substitute for the picaresque, where heroines could enjoy all the adventures and alarms that masculine heroes had long experienced, far from home, in fiction" (126). At the same time, the "horrors" of Udolpho may be read as symptomatic of "the grim realities of eighteenth-century girlhood," including "restraints on . . . freedom" and "mysterious, unexplained social rituals" (136).

Gothic Fictions and English Nationality

n

While feminist criticism continues to explore both possibilities, the latter view, which sees in the pages of the Gothic symptomatic textual representations of actual female suffering, has been particularly influential. The essays collected by Juliann Fleenor under the title The Female Gothic, for instance, proceed from the assumption that, as Fleenor puts it, "the Gothic and . . . female experiences have a common schizophrenia" (28). Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, by choosing a quintessentially Gothic figure—the madwoman in the attic—as the central metaphor of their study of nineteenth-century women writers, implicitly install the Gothic as "a paradigm of many distinctively female anxieties and abilities" (xii). More recently, Michelle Masse has argued that Gothics reveal the truth of nineteenth-century women's lives. According to Masse, the repeated encounters with terror in the Gothic are not phantasmatic but real insofar as "the originating trauma that prompts . . . repetition is the prohibition of female autonomy in the Gothic, in the families that people it, and in the society that reads it" (In the Name 12).8 These critics have established a crucial observation about the Gothic: the centrality to the genre of the threat of violence against women.9 They have also convincingly argued for a correspondence between this discursive threat and a range of extra-fictional violence faced by women. In understanding the Gothic heroine as a figure for imperiled womanhood, however, they have sometimes neglected both the figurative nature of the feminine and the presence of feminized and suffering male characters in the texts.10 Threatened femininity is central to the Gothic precisely for its function as a crucial but contested site in discourses of identity, chief among them the discourse of the nation.11 In the context of the Gothic's characteristic oppositions, victimized womanhood embodies a nationalist narrative in miniature—an argument pursued at length in the chapter on Radcliffe. Moreover, attentiveness to the Gothic's participation in the construction of national identity suggests that masculinity is as implicated as femininity. If the figure of woman in early Gothic fictions serves as a privileged reservoir for supposedly English national characteristics, as the nineteenth century unfolds that figure increasingly becomes

12

Introduction

important for the ways in which it can be manipulated in attempts to define and redefine English manhood.

National Gothic and the Alien Nation The title of this study, alluding as it does to a film that displaces the problematic of American race relations onto the familiar sciencefictional terrain of an invasion of Earth by extraterrestrial beings, should serve to suggest a truncated version of my thesis: that, like American science-fiction movies of the mid- to late twentieth century, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English Gothic novels engage, albeit in a displaced manner, fundamental questions of identity—the identity of the nation and of national subjects. What remains unclear in this formulation, however, is the motive behind what may seem a peculiar conjunction: the English nation and the Gothic novel. Benedict Anderson, in his book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, claims that the formation of nationalism depended upon the development of a standardized print language and of an experience of time as an empty continuum in which historical evolution could take place. The rise of the realist novel was clearly of importance to both developments: as commodities, (English-language) novels were sold in and helped to consolidate markets of (English) readers; as generic constructs, novels presumed and promoted "empty time" in which plots dependent on causation and national histories opening out onto an undetermined future could unfold. Gothic novels, however, problematize these two preconditions of the modern nation. These novels feature, as both a theme and a narrative device, indecipherable, illegible, or unspeakable words. (Alonzo di Mon£ada to John Melmoth in Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer: "'Are you the depository of that terrible secret which — ' " [72].) In addition, they return over and over to moments of slowed or stopped time. (Mon^ada again: " 'All colours disappear in the night, and despair has no diarv,—monotony is her essence and her

Gothic Fictions and English Nationality

13

curse"' [173] ) Thus realist novels are more obviously nationalistic on these grounds. And on another: realist novels specifically set out—and here I follow George Levine's argument in The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley—to construct from instability a stable and shared sense of self, society, and (I would add) nation. Anderson stresses the fundamental importance of this work of inclusivity, dismissing the prevalent concept of nations defining themselves against other nations. Mutual love and belonging within nations, not hatred between them, constitute national identity: "The cultural products of nationalism . . . show this love very clearly in thousands of different forms and styles. On the other hand, how truly rare it is to find analogous nationalist products expressing fear and loathing" (129; emphasis in original). Gothic fictions, I suggest, are just such "analogous nationalist products." Often set abroad, they are nevertheless marked by the most virulent sorts of xenophobia. In one sense this is only to be expected. The Gothic is preoccupied with opposing binaries: inside/outside, sadistic male/victimized female, and doubled characters who despise and torment one another. Xenophobia may be read as this preoccupation carried to the level of nation (and, by the middle of the nineteenth century, race). Yet there are specific historical reasons why these novels are so concerned with nationality and foreignness. While dating from the 1760s, Gothic novels rise to prominence and solidity as a genre in the years immediately following the French Revolution. They belong to the tumult of the 1790s and participate in the intense struggle in England to distance all that was "English" from the French and their debacle. The political import of such distancing is clear as early as 1790, the year of Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (at moments a Gothic text in its own right): a revolution in England is to be rejected as un-English.12 Throughout the nineteenth century the ramifications of a work of national definition begun in the aftermath of the Revolution become increasingly evident. Englishness takes its place as an essential nineteenth-century value and a key element in Victo-

14

Introduction

rian self-representations. Comparative and negative definitions of English selfhood are invoked with greater frequency as the empire comes into contact with and subdues more and more foreign peoples. And, somewhat paradoxically, an internalization of the foreign occurs that results in an uneasy awareness of a hybrid, deeply fractured, and contradictory self. As Robert C. Young writes, "Perhaps the fixity of identity for which Englishness developed such a reputation arose because it was in fact continually being contested, and was rather designed to mask its uncertainty, its sense of being estranged from itself, sick with desire for the other" (2). Foreignness, so vociferously defended against, penetrates English domestic space literally and figuratively—a penetration that then serves as the rationale for still more urgent attempts to ensure national purity. Gothic fictions not only registered this work of nation-making but provided a glossary of figures and narrative conventions with which Englishness was defined and redefined. In Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837, her study of the development of British national identity, Linda Colley places particular emphasis on the period during and immediately after the French Revolution. According to Colley, the unification of various provincial and class identities into a single British nationality was effected "above all by war" (5). Britain's tense relations with other European powers throughout the eighteenth century provided important preliminary circumstances, but it was in the face of the deep upheaval across the English Channel after 1789 and, later, the possibility of an invasion by Napoleon's troops, that a British identity came fully into being. This crucial formative period for the nation's sense of itself also witnessed the immense success of the Gothic. Chapter 1 of Alien Nation explores the national resonance of Gothic narrative in a novel published at the end of the final decade of the eighteenth century, Ann Radcliffe's The Italian. That novel carefully articulates the binary opposites available to the late-eighteenth-century understanding of nations and nationality: either afiercelocal attachment to one's native land

Gothic Fictions and English Nationality

15

or a cosmopolitan dismissal of merely local allegiances in favor of a view of people and places as everywhere fundamentally the same. The novel rejects both localism and universalism, however, and so appears entirely to sidestep the issue of the nation. Nevertheless, The Italian's central situation, the quintessentially Gothic tableau of an innocent young woman persecuted by a malevolent male aristocrat, has a recognizably nationalist resonance. Here war is writ small, focused on the body of a woman. The precise nature of the dynamics of national identity in such a plot is illuminated by conduct books of the period, including Hannah More's influential xenophobic diatribe, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799). For More, as for Radcliffe, the construction of national identity requires that a woman be threatened, that she incarnate in herself what Claudia Johnson has termed "the Burkean concept of the nation as a fragile body" (105). In addition, both More and Radcliffe insist on a proper response to this threat: the cultivation of an intense, ceaseless scrutiny of self and others. In national terms, this paranoid subjectivity constructed for (and out of) threatened womanhood is conspicuously English rather than British. Whereas Colley finds conflict resulting in an inclusive British nationality, generously encompassing the genders, classes, and distinct ethnicities that make up the British Isles, attention to the Gothic narrative of victimization in Radcliffe and More reveals a specifically English nationality in the process of being elaborated. Perhaps Colley's emphasis on British rather than English identity results from the boundaries of her study, which ends with Victoria's accession to the throne in 1837. By that time, she asserts, Britain's sense of itself was firmly in place. Despite cultural nationalists' insistence on a fixed identity rooted in an ancestral past, however, national identity must be constandy produced. Further, changed circumstances within or without national boundaries demand accommodation, which itself results in a continuous rewriting of nationality. Two particularly important changes to Great Britain's socio-political landscape after the period Colley studies involve an insistent racialization of identity given credibility by a

16

Introduction

pseudo-scientific discourse of race and, at least partly as a result, an increasing focus on Englishness rather than Britishness. In a complex relation to those changes is a third, perhaps the most dramatic legacy of the nineteenth century: the expansion of European imperial holdings (as the narrator of V. S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men avers, "The empires of our time were short-lived, but they have altered the world for ever; their passing away is their least significant feature" [32]). Once primarily the concern of a few private individuals—such as the owners of the British East India Company, abolished following the Indian Rebellion of 1857-58—empire comes to be a matter of widespread public interest. Edward Said has unearthed the various ways in which imperial possessions and aspirations became "a major topic of unembarrassed cultural attention" for nineteenth-century Europeans (Culture and Imperialism 9). Said finds his most dramatic novelistic instance of that attention in Austen's Mansfield Park, which, he claims, "opens up a broad expanse of domestic imperialist culture" (95).13 A great many novels, from Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford (1853) to E. M. Forster's Howards End (1910), similarly domesticate the imperial, naturalizing territorial aggression within the provincial settings of realist narrative. But there is another and quite different trajectory for the involvement between narrative fiction and imperialism: a movement out whereby the public debate about the role of empire is given shape by plotting first elaborated in the pages of the Gothic. Chapter 2 reads Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822; 1856) and his writings on the Opium Wars as a signal instance of the transformation and generalization of the Gothic trope of the threatened woman found in Radcliffe and More. Whereas in the 1790s such a trope functioned chieflv to define the Englishwoman, De Quincey's work demonstrates that, in the first half of the nineteenth century, threatened femininity could be usefully employed to characterize Englishmen, and, ultimately, England herself (a conventional gendering of the nation that here takes on a more-than-conventional resonance). In the Confessions, the figure of the suffering Gothic heroine is

Gothic Fictions and English Nationality

17

pulled from the pages of fiction and pressed into the service of male autobiography. In the process, she becomes a (feminized) he, an English Opium-Eater compromised by consumption of a foreign drug and persecuted in dreams by a malevolent East that takes a bewildering array of shapes, from leering Malays to Nilotic crocodiles. Such Gothicized and orientalized literary transvestism might seem of purely psychological interest were it not for the fact that, in the years leading up to Britain's two Opium Wars with China (1839-42, 1856-58), De Quincey and others who urged military action did so by characterizing Britain as peculiarly vulnerable in order to parlay that vulnerability into an argument for aggression. Only by striking out, they claimed, could catastrophic victimization be avoided. It is in the context of this appeal to national victimization that, in Chapter 3, I consider Charlotte Bronte's ViUette. Bronte, like De Quincey, constructs an English identity that is somehow both positionally superior to and potentially threatened by other nations. Set in the capital city of a small Francophone nation in northern Europe during the nationalist upheavals of the 1840s, ViUette makes use of the full range of the Gothic's sensationalistic anti-Catholic cliches in order to give shape to an irrational, sexually predatory, un-English Continental manhood against which its English protagonist, Lucy Snowe, stands out in bold relief. Importantly, though, the novel also takes some pains to demonstrate the perils of such an invidious approach to identity formation. In particular, Bronte reveals the danger faced by women entangled in narratives of Englishness that require female martyrdom. As if to ward off that danger, the story of Lucy Snowe's sojourn abroad alternates between the Gothic narrative found in Radcliffe and De Quincey and another narrative of identity, a realist Bildungsroman intent upon detaching an individual woman's fate from the fate of the nation. This strategy of double or alternating narrative patterns allows the construction of a habitable national subjectivity in the interstices between the two, but that subjectivity remains haunted by the binarism it attempts to elude. Historians of the Victorian period point to the 1850s and

i8

Introduction

1860s as decades of calm after the economic, social, and political challenges faced in the first half of the nineteenth century. While it is true that a certain self-satisfied tone characterizes Britain's estimations of its place in the world at this time—witness the Great Exhibition of 1851—there were also dissenting voices. Among the most famous of such voices is that of Matthew Arnold, whose Culture and Anarchy (1869) assails English complacency by anatomizing England's deficiencies. Chapter 4 reads two of Arnold's other works, "England and the Italian Question" (1859) and On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867), together with Wilkie Collins's sensation novel The Woman in White (i860), as interventions in an ongoing debate about national identity. Whereas Radcliffe, De Quincey, and Bronte enlist the resources of the Gothic in an effort to constitute Englishness as distinct from other (i.e., foreign) nationalities, Arnold and Collins harness the destabilizing effects of Gothic narrative to change England's representation of itself in relation to earlier forms of Englishness. For Arnold, this change involves that "Hellenization" of the English familiar from Culture and Anarchy. In The Woman in White, the redefinition of Englishness entails an expansion of middle-class English masculinity: the novel claims for that masculinity the signs and powers of the aristocracy. Chapter 5, which considers Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), stands as a coda to the rest of this book. Dracula's engagement with English nationality is particularly vexed because it is at once an English and an Anglo-Irish novel. The cultural work it performs, carried out during a period of clamorous debate (and, indeed, terrorist as well as state-sponsored violence) directed toward settling the question of Ireland's status as a nation, takes place on the hyphen that separates Anglo from Irish. In Stoker's text, the foreign threat to womanhood common in English Gothics is altered and intensified, so that where once a Schcdoni or Count Fosco menaced the virtue or wealth of female characters, now Dracula, a literal monstrosity, imperils the fate of nations and races by attacking womanhood (and, by implication, nationality) at its "source": maternity. As if in actualization of the shift from vie-

Gothic Fictions and English Nationality

19

tim to aggressor initially evident in De Quincey, Dracula's female victims become vampiric and threatening in turn. Paradoxically, however, in the end this transformation infuses the desiccated English characters —and the Englishness of the Anglo-Irish —with new life. The story that Alien Nation tells about nineteenth-century English nationality and the Gothic could have been told in other ways and with other texts. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818; 1831), for instance, might well have figured prominendy, for the English and Irish sequences in that novel contribute to the domestication of the Gothic that culminates in sensation fiction—and do so, moreover, in a plot expressly concerned with the intersection between proper personal and national sentiment. Similarly, H. Rider Haggard's She and Richard Marsh's The Beetle (1897), which belong to a subgenre Patrick Brantlinger has named "imperial Gothic," might have been considered in place of Dracula: all three texts exploit the fear of an invasion of Britain by a monstrous femininity originating beyond the pale of an occidental Europe understood as normative (Rule of Darkness 227-53). Like Frankenstein, She, and The Beetle, the five Gothics treated at length here feature a rich, suggestive intertextualitv. They owe their privileged position in my argument, however, to their various critical intersections with English national culture in the making. In The Italian, Radcliffe narrativizes the fear of victimization that Hannah More and others writing in the shadow of the French Revolution installed at the heart of what it means to be English. De Quincey, in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and in his writings on China, adopts this threatened English femininity and transforms it into a rationale for imperial aggression. Bronte's ViUette, Collins's The Woman in White, and Stoker's Dracula participate in the discourse of English nationality precisely by placing themselves in (uneasy) relation to the work of Radcliffe and De Quincey more insistently than do texts by other authors (or, for that matter, than do other texts by Bronte, Collins, and Stoker). At the same time, all three represent more hybrid generic forms than do earlier Gothics. This move from "pure" to hybrid texts parallels and so

20

Introduction

points up the historico-cultural shift toward hybrid or incorporative nationality as the century unfolds. Thus, the structure of this book and my selection of texts adumbrates the burden of my argument, which traces the imbricated trajectories of Gothic fiction and the English nationality that that fiction by turns anticipated, reproduced, and reinflected.

I

Paranoia and the Englishwoman Ann Radcliffe's The Italian

"Prying, peeping, and listening are the natural occupations of people situated as we are." — Gabriel Betteredgc in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone

T H E PLACE OF NATIONALITY IN A n n R a d c l i f f e ' s The

Italian

(1797) appears obvious: the text promises to reveal the secrets of an alien national identity to English readers. The novel's very tide makes this promise, as does the much-admired frame tale that introduces the narrative proper. Anna Letitia Barbauld, in her introduction to Radcliffe's novels in The British Novelists (1810), writes of this frame: Nothing can be finer than the opening of this story. A n Englishman on his travels, walking through a church, sees a dark figure stealing along the aisles. H e is informed that he is an assassin. O n expressing his astonishment that he should find shelter there, he is told that such adventures are common in Italy. (Barbauld, Preface v)

The Italian who has explained the strange mores of his native country proceeds to give the English traveler a manuscript—one that, in good Gothic fashion, turns out to be The Italian itself. The assassin in the church does not figure in what follows, but this otherwise puzzling lack of direct connection between prologue and tale at the level of plot confirms rather than negates the promise that the novel will exhibit and explain alien behavior. The un-

22

Chapter i

motivated preamble on the ways of the Italians positions the text in its entirety as an emblem of Italianness, Catholicism, a mysterious and un-English way of life. Many Gothic novels make such promises and deploy such textual conceits, including that work most often cited as the first Gothic, Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764). Walpole, writing under a pseudonym, asserts in the preface to the first edition that the text of Otranto was "found in the library of an ancient catholic family in the north of England" but had originally been "printed at Naples, in the black letter, in the year 1529" (3). He offers his "translation" of this text to the English reader—just as Radcliffe, in her prologue, offers The Italian —as an entertaining artifact of another age and country, an embodiment at once quaint and informative of a displaced world: "I have no doubt but the English reader will be pleased with a sight of this performance" (5). Walpole's faith was well founded: the English reader was indeed pleased, and, in the wake of Otranto's remarkable success, its author drops his pseudonym and admits to having fabricated this "performance" himself. The preface to the second edition (1765), which sets out Walpole's aims in writing the novel, differs markedly from the first preface insofar as it articulates concerns that have to do less with sixteenth-century Italy than eighteenthcentury England. Walpole now claims Otranto, not as the deft translation into English of an authentically alien text, but rather as a generic experiment in which he self-consciously set out to "blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern" (7). The literary implications of this attempt are at once self-promotional and explicitly national: in pioneering this new form of romance, Walpole sought to imitate the "mixed" style of Shakespeare rather than a classical model, and to defend the English Bard—"our immortal countryman"—against the vilifications of his French detractor, Voltaire (9).1 Similar concerns mark The Italian, so that a text that seems to hold out to its late-eighteenth-century English readers the pleasures of a pure exoticism actually involves them in the quotidian and domestic as much as in the rarified and foreign. The insistent

Paranoia and the Englishwoman: Radcliffe's The Italian

23

presence of chapter epigraphs drawn from English literature— from Shakespeare and Horace Walpole himself to Milton, Collins, Gray, and Beattie—indicates that the novel seeks to belong, as did Otranto and Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) before it, to a specifically English literary tradition.2 Other, less obvious borrowings demonstrate the same ambition. That The Italian is offered as a found manuscript, for example, serves at once to confirm as canonical a line of English writers that includes Richardson, Walpole, and Clara Reeve and to announce Radcliffe's intention of belonging to this line. In addition to allying itself with desirable precursors, the novel rejects undesirables—most importantly, Matthew Gregory Lewis. As David Punter has written, Radcliffe's novel must be seen as "at least in part a de-parodization of The Monk [1795]," Lewis's ludicrously sensationalistic version of Radcliffean Gothic ("Social Relations" 109). Thus, The Italian, which appears at the outset to offer a simple object lesson in Otherness, breaks down upon examination into a complex mixture of generic conventions driven by national literary aspirations.3 There remains, however, much that is alien in the novel: villains whose demeanors mark them as foreign to English experience, exotic natural landscapes with no English equivalents, even more exotic social landscapes—monasteries, convents, the prisons of the Inquisition. The simultaneous presence of both intransigent otherness and domestic sameness in The Italian provides but one example of the multifarious and often conflicting commitments in Radcliffe's fiction. Her novels resist being read monologically: they promote aristocratic as well as bourgeois values, demonstrate both progressive and conservative political beliefs, are by turns feminist and anti-feminist, sentimentalist and stoic. So pervasive is this unresolvable conflictedness that several twentieth-century critics have elevated it to a definitive characteristic of RadclifFean Gothic.4 These critics offer a range of factors in explanation of the divided, doubled, or simply incoherent allegiances in the fiction. Radcliffe wrote at a historical juncture between the aristocratic advance of the mid-eighteenth century and the triumph of the middle class in the nineteenth (M. Butler, Romantics 12-14; Cot-

24

Chapter i

torn 35-67); she succeeded as a novelist at a time when authorship posed problems of respectability for women (Poovey, Proper Lady)-, her novels were written and published over the course of an unusually fractious decade in European history, the decade that witnessed the French Revolution and the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars (Paulson 215-47). In sum, Radcliffe's fiction constitutes what Claudia Johnson, writing about Radcliffe and other women writers of the 1790s, calls an "imaginative response to a world riven with crisis" (2). Whether viewed in terms of class (the rise of the bourgeoisie), gender (the redefinition of a proper femininity), or politics (the French Revolution abroad and reaction at home), that crisis was fundamentally national —not merely in the sense that it affected Britain as a whole but because it urgently posed to the English the question of what it means to be a nation. Radcliffe's novels respond to that question by elaborating in their pages a version of English national identity. In The Italian, Englishness manifests itself at the level of character in the shape of a Gothic heroine who stands out in high relief against the sinister backdrop of foreign landscapes and villains. The anti-types or exempla of otherness with which the heroine is contrasted, although derived from eighteenth-century travel writing, achieve their starkest form in the Gothic, a genre enchanted with binaries of all kinds (see Chard). While the opposition between heroine and villain is crucial to The Italian's construction of English national identity, more significant still is the deployment in the novel of narrative techniques of terror. In the same manner as a conduct book, The Italian explicitiy sets out to teach young women how to behave: in it the heroine models proper behavior, the villain improper and unEnglish behavior. But the peculiar contribution the novel makes to Englishness results from its narrativization of the values it promotes. The structure of the heroine's experience—in which she negotiates an alien landscape and encounters a series of betrayals, confused identities, nebulous malevolences, and opaque motivations—demands in response a wide-ranging paranoia. Such all-

Paranoia and the Englishwoman: Radcliffe's The Italian

25

encompassing distrust of others and, especially, of the self leads in turn to an internalization of surveillance—as Foucault has argued, precisely that which distinguishes the modern bourgeois subject, the subject of discipline. In the pages of The Italian and novels like it, bourgeois subjectivity emerges, elicited by narrative techniques of terror, as the need incessandy to monitor the self. In the context of the national crisis that England faced in the 1790s, however, The Italian's deployment of these techniques is at the same time a deployment of a technology of nationality that aims at the formation not simply of a bourgeois subject, but more particularly of that gendered national subject known as the Englishwoman.

I "Ever since I was condemned, my confessor has besieged me; he threatened and menaced, until I almost began to think that I was the monster that he said I was." — Justine Moritz in Marv Shellev's Frankenstein

Few devices are more typical of eighteenth- and earlynineteenth-century English Gothic novels than their tendency to be set in the distant pasts of foreign countries. Many attempts to account for this displacement have been made, none of them entirely convincing or satisfactory.51 argue below that one function of displacement in The Italian is the intensification of a binarism between English and foreign already at work in the domestic settings of sentimental fiction. Before proceeding to a reading of Radcliffe's novel, however, I want to dwell for a moment on displacement in order to sketch out its relation to national identity— a relation mediated by paranoia. Initially, displacement provides the means for developing those techniques of suspense so characteristic of the Gothic and its literary descendants: sensation, horror, and detective fiction.6 By placing their protagonists at a distance from eighteenth-century England—in medieval Italy, early

26

Chapter i

Renaissance France, the Spain of the Inquisition—Gothic novelists enabled the textual proliferation of criminality and confusion. This confusion involves a starkly physical problem of location (one result of the labyrinthine architecture of the Gothic castle is its opacity to heroines and readers alike), but encompasses as well ignorance as to the motivations of others, difficulty in communication, and the unreliability of language itself. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has pointed out, the "ineffable" in many ways defines the genre (Coherence 17). Insight as to how such uncertainties might contribute to the formation of a particular kind of subject is provided by Nancy Armstrong in her Foucauldian reading of the novel, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Armstrong sets out to explain the shift over the course of the eighteenth century from social status to "essential qualities of mind" as the chief locus of individual worth (4). Like Foucault, for whom the modern period witnesses the move from an aristocratic "symbolics of blood" to a middle-class "•analytics of sexuality" (History of Sexuality 1: 148; emphasis in original), Armstrong views this shift as connected to class: the increasingly high value placed on inward, properly psychological traits derived from and contributed to the rise of the bourgeoisie. But to this class analysis Armstrong adds the axis of gender by tying the middle-class "analytics of sexuality" to women: "the modern [middle-class] individual was first and foremost a woman" (8). Whence the attention in Desire and Domestic Fiction to novels and conduct books: the new middle-class subject first emerged in the pages of these two forms of "women's writing," both of which give shape to a "private domain of culture that was independent of the political world and overseen by a woman" (98). And this division of the world into a private sphere, gendered female, and a public sphere, gendered male, contributes rather than detracts from women's power within the middle class because it is at the same time a valorization of domesticity, interiority, and, above all, the (implicitly female) power of surveillance. Armstrong's jusdy celebrated reading of Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) reveals the place of surveillance in this argument.

Paranoia and the Englishwoman: Radcliffe's The Italian

27

The eponymous heroine's rise to middle-class power in the novel comes about by way of a double reconfiguration of desire: Pamela herself becomes desirable, not for her body, but for an inner self associated with language; in turn, Mr. B, her erstwhile persecutor, learns to desire that inner self, which cannot be seized physically but is only accessible through words (in the form of a mutual contractual agreement, which is to say: bourgeois marriage). Pamela, in psychologizing its heroine, shifts the operation of power from the male world of physicality and display to the female world of interiority and surveillance. Most important for our purposes is Armstrong's invocation, at precisely the point where she discusses surveillance, of the Gothic. Pamela's forced move from the house where she is first harried by Mr. B to an estate in Lincolnshire signals a shift in the locus of value from aristocracy to middle class, display to surveillance: For the Lincolnshire estate is represented as a grimly gothic version of the first manor house. . . . This nightmarish version of the country house leaves no doubt that the threat of self-annihilation intensifies as the assault on Pamela's body becomes more a matter of ocular rape than of physical penetration. Such a shift in the strategy of sexual violation to the violation of psychological depths provides a strategy for discovering more depths within the female body to write about. . . . Pamela wins the struggle to interpret both herself and all domestic relations from the moment the coach swerves off the road to her father's house and delivers her to Mr. B's Lincolnshire estate. The power dominating at the estate is already female power. It is the power of domestic surveillance. (123)

Armstrong emphasizes the role of women in scrutinizing others —a role constitutive of middle-class subjectivity and, further, of women's power within the middle class. She also locates the emergence of another sort of scrutiny in Pamela: surveillance of the self, which for Foucault is the distinctive feature of the modern subject (Discipline 195-228; History of Sexuality 1: 58-73). Both types of surveillance, outer and inner, come about as a response to the isolation and opacity of a rural estate that Armstrong describes as "grimly gothic." Though an apparent anachronism, this identification of the Lincolnshire episode of Pamela as Gothic avant la lettre

28

Chapter i

in fact points up a signal similarity between the domestic realist novels that feature prominently in Desire and Domestic Fiction and the Gothic novels that are largely omitted: both types of fiction perform a turn from the corporeal to the psychological. But if the former install women and the domestic sphere at the center of a newly important middle class, the latter are peculiarly suited to evoking from women the habits of surveillance that constitute that class's characteristic form of power. Radcliffean Gothic, no less than Richardsonian realism, contributed to the formation of the modern subject by demanding the adoption of habitual internal surveillance in its heroines. In The Italian, however, this contribution was at the same time a strategic development in the history of English nationality, for in England at the end of the eighteenth century the installation of surveillance was intimately tied to Englishness. While Armstrong attends somewhat to the national implications of the middleclass cultural revolution she charts, her focus on class and gender crowds out issues of national identity. In a variety of texts from the 1790s, however, the middle-class woman without nationality whose power, on Armstrong's reading, derives from facility at surveillance appears instead in the form of an Englishwoman who achieves full national identity by means of a narrative of victimization that equates Englishness with paranoia. Hannah More's Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, published two years after The Italian in 1799, makes this claim astonishingly explicit. More, an Evangelical crusader for sincerity and propriety, sets out in Strictures to criticize and reform the way women are educated.7 The importance of this effort lies in the central position More claims for women: "The general state of civilized society depends . . . on the prevailing sentiments and habits of women" (2). By means of the influence they wield, women shape those around them and, by extension, society as a whole. Influence, however, is a two-way street, and women not only wield it to great effect but are especially susceptible to it as well. Only women armed with proper education are capable of defending against this susceptibility, and present educational

Paranoia and the Englishwoman: Radcliffe's The Italian

29

efforts are failing. More attacks the prevailing method of bringing up girls as well as the kind of woman such a method produces; she condemns the reigning triumvirate of "vanity, selfishness, and inconsideration" (66; emphasis in original), the obsession with externals over the cultivation of the spirit (92-107), and the neglect of Christian instruction (222-336). She argues for change in the direction of the Evangelical virtues of piety, seriousness, and restraint. Given Armstrong's and Foucault's claims about the modern subject, it is especially significant that More singles out surveillance—the surveillance of others, but most especially the surveillance of the self—as the essential practice of well-educated women. Women require such surveillance because they are by nature unruly, subject to continuous internal rebellion fomented by "the imagination," which More describes as "a lion, which though worldly prudence indeed may chain so as to prevent outward mischief, yet the malignity remains within" (296; emphasis in original). The idea of childhood innocence, then, is a dangerous myth. Because all girls secrete within themselves this "malignity" that cannot be extirpated, teachers must possess "such a strong impression of the corruption of our nature, as should insure a disposition to counteract it; together with such a deep view and thorough knowledge of the human heart as should be necessary for developing and controlling its most secret and complicated workings'" (67; emphasis in original). But the impossibility of completely or permanently conquering the imagination means that external surveillance is never sufficient. Regardless of the rigor with which parents and teachers scrutinize them, girls will almost certainly be led astray if they are not themselves constantly engaged in struggle with, enabled by surveillance of, the self. In a chapter ominously entitled "The Benefits of Restraint," More explains that the best means of inculcating the habit of self-monitoring takes the form of restrictions imposed on girls' activities. The chapter begins with an alarmed (and, from the perspective of the late twentieth century, well-nigh prophetic) prediction that the present assertion across the Channel and among English radicals of the rights of man will lead in

30

Chapter i

the end to demands for "the rights of youth, the rights of children, the rights of babies'." (170; emphasis in original). Against what she terms this "revolutionary spirit in families" More prescribes early restraint. Although useful in itself, the primary importance of restraint is as a tool for teaching self-doubt: "Girls should be led," More writes, apparently without irony, "to distrust their own judgment" (180). Such self-doubt, in turn, should ensure the installation in girls and women of the need for (and habit of) constant internal surveillance. A passage on confession near the end of her book reveals that the self-scrutiny More advocates requires not only incessant searching for imperfection, but incessant discovery as well. Indulging in a vision of the fantastically rigorous application of her recommendations, More reminds readers that, while girls must be encouraged to confess their failings frequendy, frequency alone provides no guarantee of truthfulness. A proper confession "must be a confession founded on self knowledge which is to itself arise out of the practice of self-examination; for want of this sort of discriminating habit, a well-meaning but ill-instructed girl may be caught confessing the sins of some other person, and omitting those which are more especially her own" (327). But in fact such a result is nothing other than the inevitable and, indeed, salutary outcome of an education in paranoia: for what more complete success could be imagined for the self-as-surveillant than the discovery and confession of "sins" not properly one's own? Strictures on the Modem System of Female Education, then, incarnates the kind of conduct book Armstrong argues set out to produce the middle-class subject of discipline. For More, though, the project undertaken in Strictures goes beyond the production of merely generic modern subjectivity, or even of proper middleclass femininity. Her entire argument, fromfirstto last, is couched in nationalistic terms that demonstrate the real end in view to be the shaping of women into English national subjects. Misguided educational efforts, More asserts early on in Strictures, leave women susceptible to the evils of influence. And influence— bad influence, at least—invariably takes the shape of the foreign: for More, foreign mores threaten to undermine English girls'

Paranoia and the Englishwoman: Radcliffe's The Italian

31

morals, foreign languages distract them from mastery of the English tongue, and foreign religiosity (or fashionable foreign universalism) destroys their English Christianity. More's book is suffused with nationalism to the extent that her very metaphors are national. Criticism of women, she explains in the Preface to Strictures, should not be blamed as treasonous, for "[s]o to expose the weakness of the land as to suggest the necessity for internal improvement... is not treachery, but patriotism" (viii). An avowed enemy of French cosmopolitanism, she condemns Napoleon for attempting to be "an Infidel in Paris, a Papist at Rome, and a Mussulman at Cairo" and recommends that educators "teach the [English] youth to hug his prejudices, to glory in his prepossessions" (269). Modern France poses an immediate military threat, but England has been vitiated for centuries by its citizens1 fondness for residence abroad. Despite the war with France, foreign manners, literature, and citizens continue to penetrate England's porous borders. French governesses—who receive a third of a chapter unto themselves —pose the most dangerous imported threat to young women: it has been an especially deleterious habit of women of rank "to entrust their daughters to foreigners, of whose principles they know nothing" (105). Other harmful influences work their way into England in the form of literature, debased products of the German and French press. More notes that women in particular "have been too eagerly inquisitive after these monstrous compositions," which are "irrevocably tainting them" (46, 47). For More, the thoroughly nationalistic bent of her argument constitutes a logical development of the promotion of conduct in the form of internal surveillance. The ideal subject envisioned in Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, a young girl so beset from within and without that she must engage in ceaseless scrutiny of self and others, closely resembles the Foucauldian middle-class subject of discipline. But this ideal subject is also, and not coincidentally, represented in terms of a specific national identity. More's Strictures is a conduct book, that is, that advocates inculcation of surveillance explicitly as the first and indispensable

32

Chapter i

step in the production of the Englishwoman. Raddiffe's The Italian makes a similar demand for surveillance, and with a similar end in view.

II I must say first of all that description itself is a political act. — Salman Rushdie, "Imaginary Homelands"

At one point in The Italian the book's male protagonist, Vincentio di Vivaldi, gently mocks his servant Paulo for displaying feelings of attachment to Naples. Admiring the mountains surrounding the lake of Celano, Paulo exclaims: "It reminds me of home; it is almost as pleasant as the bay of Naples! I should never love it like that though, if it were an hundred times finer." After Vivaldi and his beloved, Ellena, make obligatory observations on the sublimity and beauty of the lake, the servant continues: "[H]ave the goodness to observe how like are the fishing boats, that sail towards the hamlet below, to those one sees upon the bay of Naples. They are worth all the rest of this prospect, except indeed this fine sheet of water, which is almost as good as the bay, and that mountain, with its sharp head, which is almost as good as Vesuvius—if it would but throw out fire!" "We must despair of finding a mountain in this neighbourhood, so£ood as to do that, Paulo," said Vivaldi, smiling at this stroke of nationality. (159; emphasis in original)

Paulo admires this landscape merely because it resembles that of his birthplace and home. Admiration on such grounds betrays an insensitivity linked to class in that it fails to employ an aesthetic discourse of the sublime and the beautiful and, in doing so, is reduced to dependence on an inappropriate and limited affective terminology —as Vivaldi indicates by his emphatic repetition of Paulo's praise-term, "good." Servants in Raddiffe's novels often display this sort of local attachment, and they often receive mocking treatment at the hands of their social superiors for doing so.

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33

In The Mysteries of Udolpho, Annette's longing for French ballads and French landscapes while imprisoned with her mistress in the Apennines is of a piece with her incessant gossiping, her inability to narrate properly, and her generally frivolous concerns. Peter, a servant in The Romance of the Forest (1791), amuses that novel's heroine with displays of unbounded enthusiasm upon returning home to his native Savoy (240-41 ).8 Peter's inappropriate language use parallels Paulo's derided reliance upon "good" in The Italian — although in Peter's case it is the narrator, not another character, who calls attention to his solecism: "When he came within sight of his native mountains, his extravagant joy burst forth into frequent exclamations, and he would often ask Adeline if she had ever seen such hills in France" (240; emphasis in original). Failure to distinguish mountains from hills or sublimity from goodness at once indicates and enforces inferior class status. Such instances of terminological ineptitude mark an allegiance to nationality or national origins as amusingly misguided. But if local attachment is laughable to the genteel protagonists of Radcliffean Gothic, they tend to view its opposite, sophisticated cosmopolitanism, as despicable and potentially dangerous. Relativistic attitudes as to the value of one country in relation to another are held most often by villainous aristocrats in search of self-serving rationales for their heinous acts.9 The Marquis de Montalt of The Romance of the Forest, unrepentant fratricide and would-be incestuous rapist, incarnates the evil cosmopolite. He attempts to urge Pierre de la Motte to crime with a lecture on the essential equivalence of national codes of behavior: "There are certain prejudices attached to the human mind," said the Marquis in a slow and solemn voice, "which it requires all our wisdom to keep from interfering with our happiness. . . . Nature . . . every where acts alike in the great occurrences of life. The Indian discovers his friend to be perfidious, and he kills him; the wild Asiatic does the same. . . . Even the polished Italian, distracted by jealousy, or tempted by a strong circumstance of advantage, draws his stilletto [sic], and accomplishes his purpose. It is the first proof of a superior mind to liberate itself from prejudices of country, or of education." (222)

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Montalt, with his peculiar combination of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism and debased Rousseauistic primitivism, anticipates later Radcliffean aristocrats who cynically disregard mere "prejudices" against criminal or violent acts in the service of desire: Montoni in Udolpho and the monk Schedoni—otherwise Count di Marinella—in The Italian. Radcliffe's apparent refusal to endorse either localism or cosmopolitanism may seem to signal an abandonment of the issues of nationality and national allegiance altogether. By embodying these opposed positions on the question of the nation in clownish servants and evil, machinating aristocrats, Radcliffe leaves room for her protagonists, most notably her central heroines, to escape the trammels of either viewpoint and thus to behave "naturally." But this very naturalness promotes (English) nationality on a more subtle (and so more effective) level than outright declarations of partisanship. Inhabiting a space well outside recognizable positions in the cosmopolitanism/localism debate, that is, Radcliffe's heroines may incarnate a national archetype rather than espouse nationalist (or anti-nationalist) beliefs. Radcliffe, writing in the tradition of the sentimentalists, like them creates heroines who are recognizably English—and this is the case despite the fact that these heroines are nominally French or Italian. The Englishness of Radcliffe's heroines takes on greater clarity and significance when placed in the context of the development of English nationalism in the eighteenth century. Following Kenneth R. Minogue, Isaiah Berlin, and other theorists and historians of nationalist movements, Gerald Newman asserts in The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740-1830 that "[nationalism is, at the outset, a creation of writers" (87). While misleading as an unqualified generalization, this pronouncement has particular relevance to eighteenth-century England.10 Newman locates the initial impulse to codify and valorize Englishness in the response of various eighteenth-century artists, writers, and intellectuals to a crisis in the system of patronage. This crisis, brought on by the shift from aristocratic support to marketplace value for artistic production, was perceived by some English artists

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as a form of favoritism by which foreign, and particularly French, artists were given support before or instead of their English competitors. This seeming injustice spurred native artists to cling to and elevate Englishness by reformulating localism as nationalism. Nationalism, in turn, was adopted by the middle class—the class to which most of the disgruntled artists belonged or aspired — as a weapon in their struggle with the aristocracy for political power. In this way the aristocratic culture of Francophilia, coupled with a nationalistic revaluation of domestic traditions, enabled the middle class to portray the upper class as aliens in their own nation (Newman 63-67). 11 Newman finds evidence of this nativist movement in cultural manifestos such as John Brown's Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (1757-58), in the paintings of William Hogarth, in the lexicography of Samuel Johnson, and, most importantly, in sentimental novels written by such authors as Samuel Foote, Fanny Burney, Tobias Smollett, and Thomas Day. He looks primarily to the sentimentalists when seeking to document the attempt to give form to an ideal Englishness, and in the protagonists of sentimental fiction he finds a national stereotype created to embody as "English" the psychological and ethical traits of "innocence, honesty, originality, frankness, and moral self-reliance" (133). Day's The History of Sandford and Merton (1783-89) may be taken as representative of these fictions. The novel's construction invites comparison between rustic, simple Harry Sandford and the aristocratic and Frenchified Tommy Merton. At every turn the novel upholds simplicity and forthrightness as admirable and quintessentially English while denigrating fashion, imitativeness, and urbane polish as conspicuously foreign (Newman 100-109). The History of Sandford and Merton in one sense fails to typify nationalist-sentimentalist novels, however, in that it lacks a plot device common to many: a central heroine who either incarnates English virtue or vacillates between that virtue and the specious attractions of foreign polish. The Italian features just such a heroine, which is one of the reasons why, despite the ridicule with which it treats localism, the novel displays an identifiable nation-

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alist impulse. Ostensibly Italian herself, Ellena di Rosalba unmistakably possesses attributes singled out by eighteenth-century cultural nationalists as English: innocence, frankness, and selfreliance.12 More indicative than the mere existence of these qualities, however, is their presence despite the fact that they are responsible for incoherent characterization. Ellena is contradictory in various ways: although of noble parentage, she must work to support herself and her aunt; she defies authority in some instances but remains obedient to the ideology of the proper lady in others; she lives amidst metropolitan temptation but retains an innocence so complete as to be comic. The demands of Englishness explain the need for such apparendy irreconcilable character traits. Ellena's ambiguous class status is exemplary here. In true Radcliffean fashion, her origins are initially presented as humble only finally to be revealed as noble. Certainly the plot of The Italian depends on such dissimulation: earlier knowledge of the true circumstances of Ellena's birth would eliminate the need for most of what occurs in the novel. Aside from its necessity to the plot, though, delay in the revelation of Ellena's nobility functions to nationalist ends. It allows her to demonstrate the middle-class, English virtue of self-reliance and to be loved for this virtue by her suitor, Vivaldi. Thus early in the novel the reader learns that in order to secure an income Ellena "passed whole days embroidering silks," a form of "industry, which did honor to her character" (9). Her financial independence is emphatically approved of, even to the extent that we are told of Vivaldi, heir to one of the most illustrious houses in Naples: "If he had known of these circumstances, they would only have served to encrease the passion, which . . . it would have been prudent to discourage" (9). Ellena displays mental as well as material independence. In contrast to many of Radcliffe's heroines, there are points in the text where she actively, even vigorously resists oppression. When imprisoned in a convent and pressured to take the veil, for instance, Ellena confronts the Abbess and "demandjs] by whose will she had been torn from her home, and by whose authority she was now detained, as it appeared, a prisoner. The Abbess, unac-

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customed to have her power opposed, or her words questioned, was for a moment too indignant to reply" (68). This resistance and its forthright expression should be seen in the context of Ellena's Englishness; so, too, should her absurdly exaggerated innocence. At the outset of The Italian, Ellena lives in seclusion in the midst of Neapolitan grandeur, impervious to the temptations of the cosmopolitan metropolis.13 She is not simply resistant to evil, but in fact unable to recognize it, as is clearest in the episode later in the novel where Schedoni, the Italian of the title, attempts to murder her. Despite ample evidence that Schedoni has come to inflict harm, Ellena persists in putting the best interpretation on the discouraging fact of his presence—dagger in hand—in her bedroom at midnight: "'Did you come to warn me of danger? . . . [H]ad you discovered the cruel designs of Spalatro? Ah! when I supplicated for your compassion on the shore this evening, you little thought what perils surrounded me!'" (238). Ellena parallels sentimental heroines in her possession of model traits; like those heroines, though, Ellena is recognizable as English only because she is defined against the foreign. If sentimental novels gave shape to Englishness by means of opposed characters, presenting in a domestic setting a distinction between English virtue and Francophilic vice, the Gothic at once retains and intensifies this opposition by setting its action in an antination and pitting its protagonists against monstrously "other" anti-types. The specific contribution of the Gothic to the binarism of sentimental novels, that is, is the former's concern with foreign villains and foreign social landscapes. As Anna Letitia Barbauld notes of Radcliffe, her "living characters correspond to the scenery: — their wicked projects are dark, singular, atrocious. They are not of English growth; their guilt is tinged with a darker hue than that of the bad and profligate characters we see in the world about us" (Preface i). Foreignness in The Italian is concentrated in the figure of Schedoni.14 The presentation of the novel conspires to give him the status of exemplary Other. The title itself signals this status by suggesting that although the entire novel is set in Italy—and thus

3»

Chapter i

that readers might expect to be presented with numerous Italians—one of these will be especially representative. The passage where Schedoni makes his first appearance bears out that suggestion: "There lived in the Dominican convent of the Spirito Santo, at Naples, a man called father Schedoni; an Italian, as his name imported, but whose family was unknown" (34). This sentence confirms Schedoni's representative nature by the repeating the title's singular gesture of marking him as "an Italian" in a book populated by none but Italian characters. Further, the sentence returns attention to the opening sequence of the assassin in the church, reinvoking that sequence's equation between Continental Europe, Catholic mystery, and macabre criminality while embodying all these in the person of the monk. Chloe Chard, in her introduction to the Oxford edition of The Romance of the Forest, notes that "[i]n its portrayal of murder, incest, and other manifestations of 'vice and violence,' the Gothic novel, adopting an imaginative geography of a semi-feudal, Roman Catholic Europe, appropriates from contemporary travel writing an equation between the foreign and the forbidden" (xiii). The operation of such an equation in The Italian means that Schedoni need not display specifically un-English traits in order to embody foreignness. It serves just as well merely to assert his Italianness and then couple it with the blackness of his crimes—crimes that include ordering the murder of his brother (361), forcing his brother's widow to marry him and then attempting to murder her (363), plotting the abduction and murder of his niece (23335), forging documents in order to send Vivaldi to the dungeons of the Inquisition (245), and poisoning his erstwhile accomplice, Nicola (402-3). His crimes "speak" his otherness, as does even his physiognomy: despite the difference in social class between the two, we may say of Schedoni, "the Italian," what Radcliffe writes of his servant Spalatro, that he "had 'villain' engraved in every line of his face" (211). In the typological sense I have been developing, then, The Italian figures Ellena as English and Schedoni as Italian—or, more broadly, as simply foreign. That Ellena is actually Italian herself may seem to contradict the argument I have been making about

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her Englishness. On the contrary, the national label she is given serves to suggest the universality of the English ideal: according the logic of the novel, that is, all good women behave as if they were Englishwomen. The novel's foreign setting also allows for the contrasting of this ideal with a fantastically amplified and distorted foreignness in a way impossible to domesticfiction,fiction set in England itself. The Italian holds more implications for nationalism than can be exhausted in character typology, however, insofar as the text does not merely represent what it is to be English but, in its language and structure, enacts Englishness for and communicates Englishness to its readers. If the opposition between heroine and villain provides a model for how and how not to be, an image of English nationality as well as of what is foreign to it, such a model threatens to remain only that—to have no effect. This possibility leaves room for readers to keep a distance, to invest in neither Ellena nor Schedoni. Worse still, readers might —as perhaps is suggested by Barbauld when she refers to foreign villains as Radcliffe's "living characters"—read against the text to reject Ellena's absurd innocence while admiring Schedoni's tortured aspirations. What remains to be accounted for in the novel is a mechanism of Englishness, a technology of national subject formation that works to confirm identification between English reader and "English" characters and characteristics. In The Italian, and in the Gothic generally, this technology is provided by the techniques of terror enabled by, but not reducible to, a foreign setting and a dualistic framework.

Ill "The drama of terror has the irresistible power of converting its audience into its victims." —Alonzo di Mon^ada in Charles Robert Maturin's

Melmoth the Wanderer

The Italian enacts the formation of the proper Englishwoman that More, in Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, takes such pains to recommend. Through a combination of plot

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Chapter i

devices and narrative techniques the novel elicits from its heroine Englishness in the form of self-surveillance. As sketched out above, these techniques comprise methods by which suspense is built and uncertainty maintained: in short, techniques of terror. Terror, enabled by Gothic displacement, lays the groundwork for the heroine's generalized paranoia. Paranoia is also required of the readers of The Italian. As Patricia Meyer Spacks writes of the novel, it "invites identification not with villainous plotters but with their victims; it places its readers in the imaginative dilemma of victimization" (169). Its imprisonment of Ellena in the midst of mysterious environs is at the same time a similar imprisonment of its readers —and one that requires a similar paranoiac and vigilant subjectivity by way of response. Insofar as Ellena can be said to develop at all (like most heroines in early Gothics, her virtue is as static as it is complete), she moves through the novel in the direction of doubt: doubt of others and of self. The narrative of her misfortunes chronicles a series of imprisonments and escapes the overall tenor of which is to bring into question most of what she has held as true. Some of the uncertainty thus raised, though sensationalistic enough, is unsurprising: the narrative undermines authority by revealing that convents may be prisons, monks murderers, and aristocrats petty conspirators. A more disruptive kind of uncertainty, though, assails the foundations of perception and knowledge. Sounds occur that appear to have no source. Vision is partial and frequently mistaken. Self-understanding fails, shaken by circumstances.15 Roughly the first third of the novel relates Ellena's initial abduction from Naples and her life in and escape from San Stefano, one of Radcliffe's luridly imagined convents. Ineffability, inexpressibility, and uninterpretability recur throughout the sequence, casting suspicion on Ellena's capacity to perceive or behave correcdy. Her kidnappers take her in a closed carriage through unknown villages over mountain passes "more terrific than the pencil could describe, or language can express" (63). Her first view of San Stefano, "seen at intervals beneath the gloom of

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cypress and spreading cedars, seemed as if menacing the unhappy Ellena with hints of future suffering" (64). A nun warns her of the punishments to which she may be subjected with the phrase "'Imagination cannot draw the horrors o f — a warning that enacts its own truth, ending in a dash that refuses to mention what cannot be described. This sequence of the novel culminates in Ellena and Vivaldi's thwarted attempt at marriage. We find, however, even before the two are torn from one another at the altar by supposed agents of the Inquisition, the effects on Ellena of pervasive uncertainty. Doubt turns inward. Unable at first to agree to Vivaldi's marriage proposal, Ellena puts him off. He rebukes her for this, and for the first time her own actions and motivations appear as opaque to her as those of others: [S]he appeared to herself an unjust and selfish being, unwilling to make any sacrifice for the tranquility of him, who had given her liberty, even at theriskof his life. Her very virtues, now that they were carried to excess, seemed to her to border upon vices; her sense of dignity, appeared to be narrow pride; her delicacy weakness; her moderated affection cold ingratitude; and her circumspection, little less than prudence degenerated into meanness. (181) Needless to say, Ellena is actually nothing like what she accuses herself of being here. Passages such as this one, in which moral certainties disintegrate before the corrosive power of Gothic circumstance, are significant precisely because of the heroine's immaculate virtue. The workings of the plot create uncertainty where none has been or should be, sparing no one.16 The section of the novel most illustrative of the proliferation of uncertainty is also, perhaps, its most memorable: Ellena's sojourn at an isolated house on the seashore. Having escaped from San Stefano and almost succeeded in marrying Vivaldi, Ellena is spirited away to yet another place of imprisonment, "an ancient and peculiar structure" inhabited by Schedoni's servant Spalatro. Each new object and turn of events in this house instills suspicion: Spalatro's face, in which "villainy and suffering" are equally

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Chapter i

marked; the ever-present threat of a death sentence constantly put off; midnight visions that leave Ellena "congealed with terror"; the possibility of poisoned food; seemingly indulgent offers that "she knew not whether to accept or reject" (210-19). As this list should indicate, the difficulties posed for Ellena in this prison are not those of survival—she can do nothing to escape, and little to affect events—but of interpretation. Spacks writes in explanation of how Ellena resolves these difficulties that "Ellena's ways of 'making sense' create orders of fear" (167). It might be more accurate to say that Ellena's ways of making sense create orders of doubt, levels of paranoia. Paranoia, moreover, is particularly justifiable in The Italian, as the climax of this section of the novel demonstrates. Schedoni arrives at Ellena's seaside prison determined to murder her. Having steeled himself to the task, he enters Ellena's room while she is sleeping, draws aside her clothes in order to stab her, and is stopped by the sight of a "miniature . .. which had lain concealed beneath the lawn [i.e., fabric] that he withdrew" (234-35). When he awakens Ellena and demands to know how she has come to bear the miniature, the exchange that ensues takes nearly all of its power from repeated plays on the word "father" (on this point see Mellor 94; Spacks 168). Ellena, whose faith in the "fathers" of the church has already been undermined, now learns (erroneously, it turns out) that Schedoni is her "father" in another sense: the portrait on the miniature is, of course, of Schedoni himself. Ellena's predicament recalls that of other orphan heroines of the Gothic who must interpret and respond appropriately to destabilizing events without familial guidance. Ellena's miniature in The Italian—like Emily's miniature in Udolpho and the manuscript Adeline finds in The Romance of the Forest—encodes a tale of crime resulting from the ascendancy of selfish passion over selfless reason (in this case, Schedoni's murder of his brother, Ellena's actual father). All these artifacts admonish the young women who possess them, as Signora Laurentini admonishes Emily in Udolpho, "'Sister! beware of the first indulgence of the passions; beware of the first!'" (646). And all, as Laurentini's "Sister!" may be taken

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to indicate, reveal buried family connections. The stories represented in miniatures and manuscripts function as imperatives to scrutinize the depths of the self and restlessly to examine the surfaces of the outer world—to identify and resist the passion found within and to search every stranger's face for lineaments of enmity or kinship. The artifacts in themselves, however, exceed the status of mere warnings precisely because of their function in the novels as clues. Wearing about her neck a portrait that may be of her father or his murderer, reading over a manuscript that may tell of fratricide in the distant past or foreshadow her own fate in the immediate future, the Gothic heroine is conditioned to interrogate each object with which she comes into contact, to look for and yet fear each new revelation. These artifacts and the monitory stories they encode function as clues for readers of the Gothic as well. They take their place along with all the other devices and techniques with which the genre attempts to move readers, to use the stick of terror and the carrot of curiosity as incitements to reading. In The Italian, hints and promised revelations proliferate wildly: family resemblances exist where none should; interrupted narratives suggest vague but terrible crimes; inexplicable sounds may be ghosts, banditti, or the projections of a guilty conscience. The reader's position with regard to these hints replicates, in a mise en abtme, that of the heroine herself: for reader and heroine alike, each new bit of evidence, each new piece of suggestive information demands interpretive attention. In the heroine's case, this demand is often a matter of personal survival, as an episode in The Italian involving an unreadable note demonstrates. Ellena, alone in the darkness of her cell in the convent of San Stefano, cannot make out instructions Vivaldi has sent her regarding an escape: A thousand times she turned about the eventful paper, endeavoured to trace the lines with her fingers, and to guess their import, thus enveloped in mystery; while she experienced all the various torture that the consciousness of having in her very hand the information, on a timely knowledge of which her life, perhaps, depended, without being able to understand it, could inflict. (132)

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With the life-or-death urgency removed, this passage serves as a figure for the predicament, not only of the heroines, but also of the readers of the Gothic. Apparently possessed of all they need to know to interpret events and piece together strands of the narrative, they nevertheless cannot make out the truth and are driven to turning over the "eventful paper"—each succeeding page of the novel, we might say—all the while "enveloped in mystery."17 Of course, the mysteries in Radcliffe's Gothic novels are, famously, "solved" in the end: Ellena's parentage is cleared up; Schedoni's actual history is recounted in full; sounds and sights that at one time appear inexplicable turn out to be so mundane as to have been made by owls, importunate servants, or the wind. An excess, however, remains. Michelle Masse, addressing the disparity between disturbing middle and comforting end in the Gothic, writes that the "ending's reassurances have specious weight when balanced against the body's mass of suffering; there is a surplus of anxiety still unaccounted for by 'reality'" ("Gothic Repetition" 689).18 There can be little doubt that contemporary readers felt this surplus. Coleridge, in a review of The Mysteries of Udolpho, complains that "[c]uriosity is raised oftener than it is gratified; or rather, it is raised so high that no adequate gratification can be given it" (357). Anna Letitia Barbauld, in words nearly identical to those of Coleridge, notes of The Italian : "The scenes of the Inquisition are too much protracted, and awaken more curiosity than they fully gratify; perhaps than any story can gratify" (Preface vii). It is this excess of curiosity, this remainder of anxiety and paranoia, that constitutes The Italian's most important contribution to the formation of the Englishwoman. Certainly it is significant that the novel's heroine is possessed of traits advanced by eighteenth-century English cultural nationalists as English, and that these traits appear in explicit contrast to a monstrous foreignness. Hannah More's Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, though, suggests that even more characteristic of and appropriate to the Englishwoman than a given set of character traits is an attitude of paranoia and a habit of surveillance. On this reading, that Ellena serves as a model of correct Englishness

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for readers of The Italian is less important to the construction of English national subjects than the novel's promotion of a generalized paranoia. If everything is finally explained, if readers leave the novel with all specific mysteries cleared up, in a different sense they leave with mystery itself untouched. Anxiety remains, anxiety to which, in Coleridge's words, "no adequate gratification can be given"—to which the only adequate response is an increasingly penetrating surveillance. Hannah More condemns the kind of reading to which The Italian belongs, novels that "have become one of the most universal, as well as most pernicious, sources of corruption among us" (218). In light of the work of national subject formation performed by Radcliffe's novel, this condemnation is ironically misguided. Yet it is by no means an unusual response to Gothic novels, particularly around the turn of the eighteenth century. Associated with revolutionary France by virtue of their treatment of transgression, explosive passion, and individual consciousness, these novels continued to be viewed with suspicion as long as counter-revolution held sway in England (M. Butler, Romantics 11-38; Mudge). While Walpole's and Radcliffe's nationalist literary aspirations were successful in the longer term—novels by both authors are included by Barbauld in her British Novelists— the Gothic novel nevertheless fails to becomes synonymous with English nationalism in the way that, for instance, the Gothic revival in architecture does. The final irony may be, however, that the suspicion and hostility these novels generated in the critical establishment provide the most concrete evidence we have that the paranoid temperament the novels feature—and that constituted, for women in the 1790s and early 1800s, an important form of Englishness—was communicated to actual readers.

2 De Quincey's Gothic Autobiography and the Opium Wars

The Italian, English nationality takes shape in relation to a woman in danger, a central threatened heroine, nominally Italian, whom the novel positions as the bearer of Englishness. This national identification achieves coherence in contrast to a menacing foreignness. Schedoni, the representative Italian of the novel's title, embodies the double otherness of Continental Europe by the unlikely feat of being at once a Jesuitical monk and an aristocratic sensualist. It is his relendess pursuit of Ellena di Rosalba that calls forth from that heroine the paranoid, vigilant scrutiny of self and others essential to the Englishwoman in the 1790s. In Theltalian, and indeed in Radcliffean Gothic more generally, proper national subjectivity is inseparable from victimization. Far from a pathological condition, the paranoia that constitutes the most appropriate response to threats from without and doubts from within comprises Englishness itself. In the work of Thomas De Quincey, by contrast, a more easily recognizable form of national self-definition is evident: that of triumphant England vociferously announcing its supremacy. Consider, for instance, what is perhaps the most affecting such moment in De Quincey's corpus, a dream-vision related in the final section of "The English Mail-Coach" (1849): IN ANN RADCLIFFE'S

Tidings had arrived . . . of a grandeur that measured itself against centuries; too full of pathos they were, too full of joy, to utter themselves by

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other language than by tears, by restless anthems, and Te Deums reverberating from the choirs and orchestras of the earth. These tidings we that sat upon the laurelled car had it for our privilege to publish amongst all nations. . . . We waited for a secret word, that should bear witness to the hope of nations as now accomplished for ever. At midnight, the secret word arrived; which word was— Waterloo and Recovered Christendom! The dreadful word shone by its own light; before us it went; high above our leaders' heads it rode, and spread a golden light over the paths which we traversed. (322)

This Englishness takes the form of proclamation rather than paranoia, and it does so not simply as one nationality among others but rather as the epitome of nationality, set apart both geographically and temporally: England's victory over Napoleon achieves "the hope of nations . . . for ever." Military triumph, declarations of national superiority, a destiny at once earthly and sanctioned by heaven ("Waterloo and Recovered Christendom!"), displays of patriotic fervor balancing masculine aggressivity with maudlin tears — such is the familiar stuff of the nationalist imaginary. If anything surprises it must be the very completeness of the inventory: with characteristic De Quinceyan excess, the passage gathers together all possible permutations of the rhetoric of the nation-state in one dense outpouring of sentiment. Even here, however, there is a hint of Radcliffe, for De Quincey, in claiming the "privilege to publish" the "secret word" of victory at Waterloo, appropriates the function of the Gothic to disseminate secret knowledge. As the ecstatic vision unfolds, it is unsettled by a Gothic feature seemingly even more at odds with the unalloyed triumphalism of national victory: victimized womanhood. De Quincey discovers that the coach on which he rides, the coach that bears the "secret word," is rolling through an immense cathedral. Suddenly "a female child, that rode in a carriage as frail as flowers," appears in its path. The coach does not slow in its progress, and De Quincey can neither stop it nor warn the child. Immobile, mute, and resigned to the inevitability of a collision, he laments inwardly: "'Oh, baby! . . . Must we, that carry tidings of great joy to every people, be messengers of ruin to thee?'"

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(324). Apparently so: victorious nationhood—and De Quincev's own participation in such victory as its privileged mouthpiece — demands the sacrifice of a young girl. "The English Mail-Coach" is only one of many autobiographical texts in which De Quincey borrows Gothic plotting in order to lend substance and shape to his experiences. The first and most enduringly successful of these attempts at selfrepresentation, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822; 1856), can accurately be described as a Gothic autobiography—a text that organizes its material, the life and times of Thomas De Quincey, on the model of a Gothic novel. And like "The English MailCoach," Confessions suggests that De Quincey found in Gothic narrative a useful way to represent not only the struggles of the self, but the travails and triumphs of the English nation as well. This double function of the Gothic is explained by a fatality at the heart of Confessions that inexorably binds De Quincey to the fate of the nation: his addiction to opium. Opium, the substance to which De Quincey turned for relief from pain and which eventually tormented as much as it soothed him, lay behind two of Britain's most far-flung imperial conflicts, the Opium Wars with China (1839-42, 1856-58). Contemporary accounts of these wars by British opium traders and military officers illustrate the expanding currency of the Gothic narrative of victimization in explaining Britain's imperial and mercantile relations with the rest of the globe. De Quincey's own journalistic writings on the subject, however, most fully demonstrate the uses to which such a Gothicization of history and geopolitics might be put. Moreover, in the context of these writings the national implications of this expansion of Gothic narrative become particularly clear: his essays on the Opium Wars suggest that to be English is of necessity to be frail. National identity is not secured through triumphant proclamation, with its "restless anthems" and "7? Deums reverberating from the choirs and orchestras of the earth." Rather, Englishness is constructed as a state of dependence, and the English as inevitably, eternally subject to victimization.

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I Si bene calculum ponas, ubique naufragium est. [If you think it over properly, there is shipwreck everywhere.] — Petronius, Satyricon

For De Quincey, catastrophe is omnipresent. The past is comprised of misfortune and suffering, "the deep, deep tragedies of infancy," the "infinite iteration" of the "aboriginal fall" ("Suspiria" 349; "The English Mail-Coach" 304). The future holds only despair, for "if from some secret stand we could look by anticipation along [life's] vast corridors . . . [w]hat a recoil we should suffer of horror!" (352; emphasis in original). The present, too, causes dismay, for it "offers less capacity for [humanity's] footing than the slenderest film that ever spider twisted from her womb" (361). De Quincey's writings attempt to find an adequate expression for the catastrophic and an adequate explanation for its ubiquity. As the digressiveness and prolixity of the writings indicate, the demands of such an attempt could only be met by a restless and exhaustive search for appropriate language. The Gothic provides one solution to that search. Though not the only generic mold with which De Quincey shapes his experience, the Gothic is one of particular power and significance.1 De Quincey was steeped in the Gothic: he produced journal entries replete with dark Romantic materials, made cliched references to Radcliffe as "the great enchantress" (see, e.g., Confessions 1856 282), and wrote his own Gothic novel, Klosterheim (1832), a tale of secrecy and vengeance set during the Thirty Years War.2 So far reaching an effect did the genre have on his imagination that his writings constantly borrow from it in order to give form to his life, his ideas, and, in perhaps the strangest case, his understanding of international relations. "As an essayist and autobiographer," Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has written, "Thomas De Quincey was a great Gothic novelist" (Coherence 41).

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Sedgwick substantiates this claim by identifying in De Quincey's writings a full catalogue of Gothic conventions—a constellation of related thematic elements that includes "sleep, dreams, live burial, the unspeakable, [and] the sublime of privation" (44).3 In keeping with her formalist reading of the genre, she surveys these elements only to find in all of them a primary "dynamic structure" dominated by the correspondence between two spaces: "within" and "without" (49). Such a structure is indeed evident in De Quincey's writings. The more interesting and significant kinship to the Gothic found there, however, has to do with an obsessive recourse to the genre not, as Sedgwick would have it, in search of the formal structure of inside and outside, but for the promise of a paranoid narrative involving unjust and inexorable persecution. The centrality of the Gothic as an organizing presence in De Quinceyan autobiography is not evident on the surface of his works. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater presents De Quincey's life up to the time of his opium addiction in order to justify that addiction and to explain the origin and contents of his sleeping and waking visions. As such, its overt structure—clearest in the 1856 revision, but already present in 1822—is at once geographical and medical. Geographically, the text traces a series of spatial relocations: from home and family, to Manchester Grammar School, to Wales, to London, to Oxford, and, ultimately, to the drug that constitutes its own peculiar landscape, opium. The organization of Confessions is medicalized as well, for each geographic locale is important in its connection to the stomach ailment that leads to the initial need for opium and, in turn, to De Quincey's addiction and dreams.4 "Suspiria de Profundis" (1845), one of several pieces written as sequels to Confessions, carefully articulates the rationale for this pattern: "The work itself [ConfessionsJ opened with the narration of my early adventures. These, in the natural order of succession, led to the opium as a resource for healing their consequences; and the opium as naturally led to the dreams" (336). Covertly, however, Confessions organizes itself around recurrent scenes of threat to a helpless victim—often female, always feminized—and the unavailing efforts of a would-be savior to pro-

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vide aid. In most of these scenes De Quincey represents himself as an ineffectual Gothic hero, the character Joanna Russ has called the genre's "Shadow-Male": like Vivaldi in Radcliffe's The Italian or Valancourt in her Mysteries of Udolpho, he repeatedly encounters a woman in danger whom he cannot protect.5 This situation is not unique to Confessions; on the contrary, we can see it played out again and again in De Quincey's writings. In the passage from "The English Mail-Coach" cited at the beginning of this chapter he watches but cannot act as his carriage bears down upon the doomed girl (324); in the Autobiography he recounts standing by helplessly at that "ineffable" affliction, the death of his sister Elizabeth (54); in "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts" he dwells for pages on the vulnerability of a "young girl" stalked by her would-be killer (111). Indeed, this scenario dominates his work—and, if the work is to be believed, his life: the appearance of a "lost Pariah woman," "some shadowy malice which withdrew her . . . from restoration and from hope," and his own incapacity to ward off that malice (Autobiography 346-47). De Quincey encounters the central "Pariah woman" of Confessions in London, a city whose terrors are so forceful that the text adumbrates them well before De Quincey's actual arrival there. The menace of certain architectural arrangements is a familiar feature of the works of Radcliffe, Lewis, and other Gothicists; their novels frequently invoke the aura of malevolent power given off by passages that lead through Inquisitorial dungeons or Apennine castles. De Quincey invests London with the same aura in his vision of that city in the 1856 version of Confessions. He has stopped at Shrewsbury and must await the Holyhead mail coach in a large, unoccupied ballroom. This ballroom, transmogrified by night and imagination, foreshadows the dangers to be found in the English Babylon to which he travels: But now rose London—sole, dark, infinite—brooding over the whole capacities of my heart.... This single feature of the rooms—their unusual altitude, and the echoing hollowness which had become the exponent of the altitude— . . . threw me into the deadliest condition of nervous emo-

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tion under contradictory forces, high over which predominated horror recoiling from that unfathomed abyss in London into which I was now so wilfully precipitating myself. ( 4 6 - 4 7 ) 6

This nebulous but ominous threat is made good on arrival, for in London De Quincey encounters two young girls victimized by circumstance. The first of these girls is the nameless waif with whom he shares poor lodgings and poorer meals. The second, remembered with "far deeper sorrow," is the London prostitute Ann. De Quincey's account of Ann and his inadvertent loss of contact with her, like that of the dark vision of London's streets as imagined from an empty ballroom in Shrewsbury, makes use of the Gothic to body forth an episode from his life and, in doing so, to construct a self out of helplessness and victimization. After spending months in London on the brink of starvation, surviving by means of Ann's companionship and aid, De Quincey learns of a possible reconciliation with his guardians—whom he had alienated earlier by running away from school (1822 40, 51). He leaves to follow up on this possibility, parting from his friend and benefactress but determined to find her on his return and include her in any success he might have. Subsequently, however, this determination proves fruidess: despite days of earnest searching, he is unable to locate her. The loss of Ann leads to a powerful fantasy of radical contingency and anonymity, clearly related to fears of mass society, but, if we recall the pervasive opacity of Radcliffe's and Lewis's convents, casdes, and dungeons, just as clearly derived from the conventions of the Gothic : This, amongst such troubles as most men meet with in this life, has been my heaviest affliction. — If she lived, doubtless we must have been sometimes in search of each other, at the very same moment, through the mighty labyrinths of London; perhaps even within a few feet of cach other—a barrier no wider than a London street, often amounting in the end to a separation for eternity! (1822 6 4 , 1 8 5 6 3 7 5 ) 7

This "separation for eternity" from Ann re-enacts the separation from his sister Elizabeth that De Quincey suffered as a child.

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In the first volume of the Autobiography he describes his feelings after Elizabeth's death, comparing his situation to that of the Wandering Jew—both fated to live out a "doom of endless sorrow," the Jew expelled from Jerusalem and De Quincey cut off from the presence of Elizabeth (43). In the case of De Quincey, though, separation occurred not once but repeatedly. The loss of Ann, whom De Quincey refers to as his "sister" (just as he describes other London prostitutes as his "sisters in calamity"), pointedly repeats the loss of Elizabeth (1856 359). And, as "Suspiria de Profundis" refers to Ann as the original for the "lost Pariah woman" of his opium visions (222), Elizabeth lies at the base of these as well. But the question is not one of origins; whether Elizabeth's death set the terms for all the other losses in De Quincey's life or whether those losses inspired in him the need for an original that he found, after the fact, in his sister is impossible to determine—and finally, perhaps, unimportant. The certainty is that, in De Quincey's self-representations, loss and the constant threat of loss constitute existence.8 This loss, which might at first glance appear to be a freefalling melancholy, in fact takes the specific form of a structure of persecution consisting of three positions: persecutor, victim, and impotent onlooker. As Michelle Masse argues in In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism, and the Gothic, such a structure is typical of Gothic fictions. Moreover, it corresponds closely to the beater/beaten/spectator (or sadist/masochist/voyeur) triad described by Freud in "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes" (1915) and " 'A Child Is Being Beaten'" (1919). Masse critiques Freud's notion of this triad insofar as, for Freud, the inhabitants of at least two of the three positions are predictable and static: men are sadists, women masochists (40-72). In his meditations on Elizabeth, Ann, and other women in danger, De Quincey reproduces this fixed form of victimization, for frequently he looks on as women suffer at the hands of men. But elsewhere the inhabitants of these positions arc in fact quite volatile. In particular, his sympathy for victimized women often results in an identification with them so complete that he takes their place, suffering for them—or, more

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accurately, as them—the torments of a lost pariah.9 This inhabitation of the position of feminized victim is crucial to De Quincey's portrayal of himself: the English opium-eater is, above all, one who suffers. 10 Moreover, this construction of autobiographical subjectivity lays the groundwork for a similar construction of English national identity. A notable instance of De Quincey's victimization appears in the 1856 Confessions and has to do with his decision to leave Manchester Grammar School. In 1822 he devotes only a few paragraphs to his time there and is vague about his reasons for running away. In 1856, though, the section detailing this episode has been greatly expanded. According to De Quincey, bad food and lack of exercise reduced him to a state of illness so severe that he determined to leave school against the wishes of his mother and guardians. This decision to "elope," as he calls it, although based in his sense of himself as an outcast, is also an assertion of independence, a refusal to suffer. Suffering comes in the attempt to account for this act to his mother. With this aim in mind he travels from Manchester to his mother's house in Chester. When he confronts her, however, he is incapable of explaining himself—and the effort to explain to the reader this inability to explain to his mother requires the invocation of an Ur-victimization, an archetype of self-betrayal: If in this world there is one misery having no relief, it is the pressure on the heart of the Incommunicable. And, if another Sphinx should arise to propose another enigma to man—saying, What burden is that which only is insupportable by human fortitude? I should answer at once— It is the burden of the Incommunicable. . . . Just so helpless did I feel, disarmed into just the same languishing impotence to face (or to make an effort at facing) the difficulty before me, as most of us have felt in the dreams of our childhood when lying down without a struggle before some allconquering lion. (316; emphasis in original) 11 In positing an aboriginal dream of "languishing impotence" common to humanity, De Quincey expresses his sense of human life as fundamentally catastrophic. More than this, though, he constitutes the autobiographical subject as victim, and specifically as

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helpless in the face o f the need t o speak. By elevating "the Incommunicable"

t o the one affliction w i t h o u t succor, the passage

exemplifies D e Quincey's self-representation, not as a "ShadowM a l e " unable to help a swooning, speechless w o m a n , but as that w o m a n herself. Further, in making the curious analogy between prostrating oneself before a lion and facing the inability to explain to one's mother w h y one ran away from school, D e Quincey connects G o t h i c victimization t o the familial in a way that will recur t h r o u g h o u t Confessions and elsewhere. T h e ineffable, which Radcliffe reserves for the most inexpressibly alien elements o f cruel and distant lands, n o w takes up residence at home, at the feet o f an English mother. There are many other moments in Confessions in which the autobiographer dwells o n his o w n status as victim, emplotting his life as if it were a Gothic novel and he the novel's heroine. In the passage o n L o n d o n cited above, for instance, it is the opium-eater himself w h o cowers before an image o f the "unfathomed abyss" o f the metropolis (1856 47). (If, in the event, L o n d o n torments t w o y o u n g w o m e n as well, this fact only confirms D e Quincey's identification with female sufferers.) T h e most remarkable passages o f victimization in Confessions, however, are those often-discussed accounts o f the o p i u m dreams involving the Malay. T h e final section of Confessions, entitled " T h e Pains o f O p i u m , " documents these dreams in great detail. In them the Gothic pattern o f victimization returns, but this time with a significance that, in light o f D e Quincey's subsequent role in Britain's relations with the Far East, can properly be understood as proleptic. For these dreams not only continue the portrayal o f D e Q u i n c e y as victim, but also identify the Orient as the source o f persecution. In this regard, the f o l l o w i n g brief excerpt from the " M a l a y dream" o f M a y 1818 is exemplar)': Under the connecting feeling of tropical heat and vertical sun-lights, I brought together all creatures, birds, beasts, reptiles, all trees and plants, usages and appearances, that are found in all tropical regions I ran into pagodas: and was fixed, for centurics, at the summit, or in secret rooms; I was the idol; I was the priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed. . . .

Chapter 2 I was buried, for a thousand years, in stone coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud. (1822 109)

The strange mélange of Near, Middle, and Far Eastern imagery in this dream illustrates an orientalizing imperative that would turn all concomitants of "tropical heat" into signs of a dismaying and persecutorial East. It also specifies the nature of the danger posed by the Orient: a pollution that amounts to deracination.12 Throughout Confessions De Quincey undertakes a selffashioning wherein he presents himself as helpless in the face of persecution—either powerless witness to a woman menaced by some "shadowy malice" or himself a target of such malice. This dream and others like it at the end of Confessions lend substance to that shadow. What horrifies De Quincey is the swirling multiplicity of selves he experiences: "I was the idol; I was the priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed." Such horror is tied to opium: dependence on the drug promotes a destabilization of identity in the autobiographical subject.13 And the nature of this destabilization is quite specific: De Quincey's dismay derives from being an " I " that is also an "it," an Englishman "confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud." To fear being "confounded" with all that lives and dies at the bottom of the Nile is to fear being mixed with, taken for, indistinguishable from what one cannot—for De Quincey, what one must not—be: an Oriental. The East, in the eyes of nineteenth-century Europe, was the special province of opium use (De Quincey on the Malay: "To him, as an Orientalist, I concluded that opium must be familiar" [1822 91]) 1 4 Despite the widespread availability of opium in England, to be an occidental user of the drug could call the integrity of one's national and racial identity into question. The very tide Confessions of an English Opium-Eater declares as much —though that title may be taken in at least two ways. It may serve to render the threat of orientalization harmless by proclaiming from the

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start the Englishness of this particular consumer of opium. O n the other hand, it may just as well amount to an admission of contamination: the very necessity of including "English" in the title suggests that those who eat opium ordinarily hail from a different part of the globe. This titular rhetoric of simultaneous innocence and guilt serves as a stylistic analogue for the simultaneous refutation and confirmation of contamination by the foreign evident throughout Confessions—of the possibility that, as John Barrell writes of De Quincey, "He was Chinese; he was the Malay that haunted his dreams" (Infection 19; emphasis in original). 1S Put another way, the anxiety surrounding addiction to opium concerns an insuperable bodily dependence on—and hence conflation with—a presence alien to the self but also, more horribly, alien to the nation.16

II Thinking the body is thinking social topography and vice versa. — Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression

Even in the 1822 edition of Confessions, De Quincey was nervously warding off the potentially deracinating implications of his drug habit and his decision to write about it. Structurally, this defensiveness appears in an accumulation of preludes to the actual drug "confessions" themselves. The opium visions treated in Part II of the book are preceded by no less than three introductory sections. Part II itself begins with a few pages of introduction; these, in turn, are preceded by Part I, entitled "Preliminary Confessions." And even before these preliminaries, an address "To the Reader" appears, the burden of which is to sketch De Quincey's "apology for breaking through that delicate and honourable reserve, which, for the most part, restrains us from the public exposure of our own errors and infirmities" (29).

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The pronouns "us" and "our" refer, as the next sentence makes clear, to the English, to whom "[n]othing, indeed, is more revolting . . . than the spectacle of a human being . . . [openly displaying] his moral ulcers or scars" (29). Such display is best left to "French literature, or to that part of the German, which is tainted with the spurious and defective sensibility of the French" (29). The reference here is specific: as Marilyn Butler notes, the Tory De Quincey "is careful to begin by disassociating his Confessions from those of Rousseau, the archetypal apologist for himself, who moreover made self-realization and fulfillment a potentially liberal cause" (Romantics 174-75). The defensiveness evident in the address "To the Reader," though, attempts a distancing from other nationalities more general than the allusion to Rousseau suggests. Certainly De Quincey wishes to avoid being associated with the valorization of the self characteristic of sansculottic Frenchmen and their English Jacobin sympathizers. At the same time, he is concerned to combat the appearance of involvement with the foreign understood more broadly as the source —and perhaps therefore the proper domain—of his addiction. A passage in "Suspiria de Profundis" that directly addresses opium addiction clarifies the relation among autobiography, the Gothic, and the anxiety about association with and dependence on the foreign intimated in the prefatory sections of Confessions. Early on in "Suspiria," De Quincey gives an account of the realization that he no longer has any hope of overcoming his opium habit. No fewer than three descriptions of this realization are required adequately to depict it and to convey the despair to which it gives rise. First, De Quincey recounts a dream in which gates that once provided an exit from "vast avenues of gloom" are now not only closed and barred against him but also, as if to insist that what seems to be merely enclosure is actually live burial, "hung with funeral crape" (337). This dream, in turn, he compares to "the situation of one escaping by some refluent current from the maelstrom roaring for him in the distance, who finds suddenly that this current is but an eddy wheeling round upon the same maelstrom" (337). The dream represents permanent addiction as

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the imprisonment of a solitary wanderer in a barren, crepuscular landscape; the analogy to drowning in a whirlpool retains and intensifies this sense of immurement but adds the anguish attendant upon hopes of salvation suddenly revealed to be unfounded. Finally, both dream and analogy are glossed with reference to "a striking incident in a modern novel": A lady-abbess of a convent, herself suspected of Protestant leanings, and in that way already disarmed of all effectual power, finds one of her own nuns (whom she knows to be innocent) accused of an offence leading to the most terrific of punishments. The nun will be immured alive if she is found guilty; and there is no chance that she will not,—for the evidence against her is strong, unless something were made known that cannot be made known, and the judges are hostile. All follows in the order of the reader's fears . . . the judgment is delivered; nothing remains but to see execution done. At this crisis, the abbess . . . considers with herself that . . . there will be one single night open, during which the prisoner cannot be withdrawn from her own separate jurisdiction. This one night, therefore, she will use, at any hazard to herself, for the salvation of her friend. A t midnight. . . the lady traverses the passages which lead to the cells of prisoners. . . . Suddenly she has reached the door; she descries a dusky object; she raises her lamp; and, ranged within the recess of the entrance, she beholds the funeral banner of the holy office, and the black robes of its inexorable officials. (337-38)

As in the dream of gates shut and hung with "funeral crape," addiction here is likened to a permanent imprisonment that amounts to being "immured alive" (hence the "funeral banner" of the Inquisition). As in the analogy to the swimmer and the maelstrom, hopes of escape are raised only to be undercut at the last instant. This "striking incident," however, not only echoes but also expands upon the representations of addiction that precede it, primarily by dilating a moment of realization to the extent that it becomes a narrative. De Quincey initially presents a tableau: a figure in a landscape. From this tableau he moves to a scene of drowning that constitutes a narrative in miniature (hopes of escape found to be baseless) and that may imply a larger narrative structure (shipwreck, or perhaps—given De Quincey's predilection for classical texts—a revision of Odysseus's encounter with Charybdis). In the

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tale of the abbess and the nun, what began as tableau swells into an entire novelistic episode, complete with characterization, suspense, and a tortuous plot. This narrativization, in addition to reinscribing what was at first an instant of dismay as a temporal and developmental sequence, also shifts the story of addiction from the realm of male heroism (the Homeric shipwreck) to that of female victimization. The opium addict is divided into spectator and victim, both women: the abbess, "suspected of Protestant leanings, and in that way already disarmed of all effectual power," and the blameless nun, unfairly "accused of an offence leading to the most terrific of punishments." Elsewhere De Quincey expresses his loathing of the possibility of "find[ing] housed within himself . . . some horrid alien nature" ("The English Mail-Coach" 292n). Here, however, positing the existence of a dual (and female) nature within provides a strategy of disavowal that allows him the luxury of denying responsibility for his own addiction. 17 According to the logic of this episode, that is, one part of the self watches in horror as a second part, innocent but incapable of proving as much, is tried, found guilty, and punished by "inexorable officials." As mid-nineteenth-century readers of "Suspiria de Profundis" surely recognized, the "modern novel" from which De Quincey claims to have taken this incident, if indeed it existed at all, must have been a Gothic one. Especially remarkable about the appearance of generically Gothic thematic materials in "Suspiria" is that the displacement which is for Gothic novelists themselves a more or less deliberate and cultivated exoticism, here—and also, as we have seen, in Confessions—provides De Quincey with the ability to represent a moment of deeply personal importance. It is not just the familiar frisson of Gothic horror that serves De Quincey's needs. The particularities of the genre's concerns with sexuality, persecution, monastic Catholicism, and Continental depravity provide a narrative within which De Quincey can suitably place the story of his unconquerable addiction: the narrative of an innocent female relentlessly tormented by an unjust— and un-English—authority. In effect, what is at first described as

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an essentially private moment is finally translated into the arena of the nation. At the end of this passage, addiction is no longer simply a failure of will on the part of the addict; on the contrary, it takes place at the intersection of the powerful, and powerfully social, forces of gender, politics, religion, and nationality. Thus, the rather surprising analogy suggested by the details of the episode—its monastic setting, the baleful presence of the Inquisition, live burial as punishment for a crime that could be sexual, heretical, or both—is that being an Englishman subject to an unconquerable opium addiction is like being the innocent, female, and probably Protestant victim of Catholic religious persecution. In this passage, the foreign threat of opium addiction takes a shape familiar from Gothic novels of the 1790s: a lurid, irrational, Continental malevolence. Increasingly for De Quincey, though, addiction will be drained of this resonance; in place of the Continent, the East will appear—a far more likely persecutor, if we recall opium's association with the Orient. As the dreams and visions reported at the end of Confessions indicate, De Quincey conducts an orientalization of the Gothic. The most significant instance of this orientalization occurs in his essays on the Opium Wars with China—essays that constitute, at the same time, a gothicization of the Orient. A similar representation of persecution appears in both Continental and oriental versions of the tale. As in "Suspiria de Profundis," a tableau of victimization is narrativized and, in the process, translated from a "male" to a "female" genre. Despite such similarity, with this orientalization De Quincey enters a larger arena and plays, as it were, for higher stakes. From providing a framework for the expression of personal dependence, the Gothic opens up to convey a sense of national peril. Victimization comes to characterize not simply the autobiographical subject, but the English nation itself. Before turning to the Opium Wars, it will be useful to consider briefly the episode in Confessions that immediately precedes the opium dreams: De Quincey's encounter with the Malay, one of a very few moments in the text in which the autobiographer is victor rather than victim. Just before relating his visions he de-

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scribes being called down from his upstairs study (in Dove Cottage) to meet an unexpected and inexplicable visitor. He descends to find his servant, Barbara Lewthwaite, and a neighborhood child confronting a Malay. Characteristically, the confrontation is first rendered as a tableau, De Quincey himself arranging his subjects and embellishing the details of their appearance: [ A ] more striking picture there could not be imagined, than the beautiful English face of the girl, and its exquisite fairness, together with her erect and independent attitude, contrasted with the sallow and bilious skin of the Malay, enamelled or veneered with mahogany, by marine air, his small, fierce, restless eyes, thin lips, slavish gestures and adorations. Halfhidden by the ferocious-looking Malay, was a little child from a neighboring cottage who had crept in after him, and was now in the act of reverting its head, and gazing upwards at the turban and the fiery eyes beneath it, whilst with one hand he caught at the dress of the young woman for protection. (1822 91)

In this account, De Quincey is neither feminized victim nor helpless onlooker. The potential for the victimization of a woman is present—the contrast between Barbara Lewthwaite's "exquisite fairness" and the Malay's "mahogany" skin and "fierce, resdess eyes" seems deliberately provocative, and the presence of a English child adds still more tension to an already fraught scene—but De Quincey has this potentiality firmly in hand. His meticulous presentation of the encounter arrests its forward motion and so assures his distance from and control over events. The autobiographer's narration veers into a painterly stop-time, lingering with mingled interest and fear over a scene in which the oceanic distances between England and the Orient have suddenly collapsed. Some two decades later, the academician William Mulready rendered a tableau remarkably similar to this one as an actual painting. Train Up a Child in the Way He Should Go; and When He Is Old He Will Not Depart from It (1841; repainted 1851, 1853) depicts three very white figures—presumably an English child and two Englishwomen—encountering three lascars on a rural path framed by dark vegetation and towering cliffs (see Figure i).18 One of the lascars makes a gesture of entreaty, and the two women encourage the child to place money into his outstretched hand. The

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title of the painting demands that we read it as a kind of pictorial conduct book for would-be parents: the child receives a lesson in the virtues of charity, the reluctance he feels in risking contact with the lascar only strengthening the effect of the lesson insofar as it is a reluctance that can be overcome. But Train Up a Child is particularly charged because of the way in which it approaches—but, as it were, holds in suspension —the myth of a dark man raping a white woman, a myth to which the Gothic was instrumental in giving currency (see Paxton, especially 7-8). In accounting for the curious sexualization of this scene, Peter Stallybrass observes that "it is the lascar's hand, in the center of the painting, which breaks the stark division of black from white, male from female, and if it is reaching out to receive the child's gift, it is at the same time turned palm up immediately beneath the breast of the woman on the right" ("Marx and Heterogeneity" 78). The threat encoded in Train Up a Child is a threat constantly looming but permanendy deferred: if the painting implies the before and after of narrative movement, it need not—indeed cannot —depart from the undecidable moment of its present. Like Mulready's painting, De Quincey's account of the appearance of the Malay raises the specter of rape across racial and national boundaries. But autobiography, unlike painting, cannot finally evade the necessity to narrate. The episode proceeds, and De Quincey defuses the horrible possibility of victimization that his tableau suggests by turning to language. With a pretended fluency in eastern tongues, he manages to lord it over both Malay and servant: "I addressed him [the Malay] in some lines from the Iliad. . . . He worshipped me in the most devout manner, and replied in what I suppose was Malay. In this way I saved my reputation with my neighbours: for the Malay had no means of betraying the secret" (1822 91). The Incommunicable, elsewhere the most unbearable of human afflictions, here provides the opportunity to assert dominance over Malay, servant, and neighbors alike. The inability to explain oneself, earlier compared to lying down helpless before a lion, is surmounted by transforming a babel of mutually unintelligible languages—English, Malay, Homeric Greek—into an occasion for triumph.19

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Subsequently, however, the triumphant self is refused and reconstituted as the persecuted self. The Malay returns, not as oriental dupe, but as an endlessly recurring and dizzyingly polymorphous series of orientalist nightmares: "[TJhis Malay . . . fastened afterwards upon my dreams, and brought other Malays with him worse than himself, that 'ran a-muck' at me, and led me into a world of troubles" (1822 92). We may glimpse in this reversal the strategic value of a Gothic narrative of victimization. By inverting his relation with the Malay so that he is victim rather than persecutor, De Quincey effectively disavows his own power—just as, in the dream recounted in "Suspiria de Profundis," he disavows responsibility for addiction. A similar strategy of disavowal characterizes English accounts of the Opium Wars. In those accounts, military action is required, not to impose the will of England on China by opening its markets by force of arms, but to protect a weak nation from the inevitability of Chinese aggression.

Ill I know not whether others share in my feelings on this point; but I have often thought that if I were compelled to forego England, and to live in China, and among Chinese manners and modes of life and scenery, I should go mad. — Dc Quincey, Confessions

It is a peculiarly sharp irony of history that in 1821, the year in which Confessions of an English Opium-Eater appeared in serial form in the London Magazine, the rulers of China made their first significant effort to stop the importation of opium into their country. Chinese who sold the drug were arrested and imprisoned or exiled, the export of tea was shut down for some months, and a few British ships were seized temporarily by the Chinese authorities. That the Chinese should have turned immediately to the tea trade reveals that the Chinese addiction was tied to a British one: for many years, China served as a supplier of tea, a commodity that

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was, by the early nineteenth century, essential to Britain's social well-being. (One participant in the First Opium War refers to tea as "that fragrant herb, become now among us Britons almost a necessary of life" [Bingham xiii].) The large and ever-increasing British demand for tea—which only the Chinese knew how to grow and prepare—occasioned a severe trade imbalance that, because the British produced no goods the Chinese would accept in exchange, Britain was forced to make up in silver.20 To alter the situation and put a stop to the flow of silver out of Britain, an officially illegal but in fact state-sanctioned trade in opium was instituted. According to Maurice Collis (who is perhaps too easily convinced of Chinese complicity): "For a very long time the East India Company had sought to find a staple to send to China. But the Chinese had so little use for any of the commodities offered and made their demand for opium so clear that it became inevitable that it would be satisfied" (80). Grown in the poppy fields of British-held Bengal or bought in Turkey, opium was shipped to the South China coast, where it was sold by the chest to Chinese merchants who, in turn, sold it directly to Chinese consumers. Once rare in China, the recreational use of opium spread rapidly and widely—due largely to aggressive marketing by British and American smugglers, who introduced the drug to more and more remote areas of the country. So successful was this trade that the imbalance between Britain and China was reversed in a relatively brief period. China, once an exporter of tea and an importer of silver, soon found itself exporting silver and importing opium.21 The effects on Chinese society were disastrous: the growing number of opium addicts disrupted both the workings of the national economy and the effective functioning of the state (Beeching 1-12; Chesneaux et al. 53-56; Collis 13-91; Inglis). The 1821 attempt by the Chinese to repair such disruption by putting an end to the importation of opium had little effect. In fact, trade in opium seems only to have become more firmly entrenched. As Jack Beeching notes in The Chinese Opium Wars: "Chinese harassment continued for two years [after 1821]... . The easy-going days were over; but the Chinese addicts were unable to stop their craving for the drug. The trade became more furtive but

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it increased enormously; by 1835 the number of Chinese opium addicts was estimated at two million" (36). By the late 1830s the problem had grown more serious still, and the Chinese again decided to take action. An imperial statute forbidding the trade in and consumption of opium was issued in 1839 (Chesneaux et al. 62). Arrests were made—as in 1821, primarily of Chinese. This time, however, opium was confiscated from British traders. The drug continued to be sold, though, until an order was given by Lin Ze-xu, High Commissioner of Port Affairs, to close Canton entirely to British trade (Beeching 74-81; Chesneaux et al. 63). Lin Ze-xu's action gave the British an excuse to conduct a full-scale war on the Chinese, a war now known as the First Opium War (1839-42). British troops, many of them sepoys, defeated Chinese imperial troops in a series of battles that came to an end in 1842 with the capture of Shanghai and the siege of Nanjing. The treaty of Nanjing was ratified in 1843; it ceded Hong Kong to Britain and named five ports—Canton, Shanghai, Ningbo, Amoy, and Fuzhou—"treaty ports" in which foreigners would be allowed to live and trade (Collis 295). The issue of opium, the ostensible cause of the war, remained unsettled; it continued to touch off disagreements that would result, in 1856, in yet another Opium War (Beeching 152-56; Chesneaux et al. 65; Inglis). De Quincey, describing how his encounter with a destitute Malay lost in England's Lake District gave rise to years of terrifying visions, asserts that this Malay "brought other Malays with him worse than himself, that 'ran a-muck' at me, and led me into a world of troubles" (1822 92). "A-muck," which derives from the Malay adjective "amoq," in English usage frequently appears in the phrase De Quincey employs, "to run a-muck," meaning "to run viciously, mad, frenzied for blood." The OED cites Andrew Marveil's The Rehearsal Transprosd (1672) as the earliest instance of this usage: "Like a raging Indian he runs a mucke (as they cal it there) stabbing every man he meets." Subsequent examples establish that the phrase was standard among British commentators on the East. Indeed, it seems to have been something like an orientalist cliche. Nonetheless, that this phrase should appear frequendy in ac-

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counts of the Opium Wars is suggestive. Arthur Cunynghame, in The Opium War: Being Recollections of Service in China (1845), claims to have witnessed a scene in Singapore in which Malays, "maddened by bad fortune [at gambling], losing all command over themselves and their actions, committed the most extravagant excesses, stabbing and maiming all whom chance threw in their way, during which fits of excitement they were described as having 'run-a-muck'" (37). J. Elliot Bingham, in his Narrative of the Expedition to China (1843), opines: The Malays, like the Chinese, have a remarkable similarity of feature; in one you behold the face of the whole nation. If excited by jealousy, or other causes, they are most cunning and revengeful, and when 'running a muck,' stab all whom they meet with their kreeses [daggers with ridged, serpentine blades], which are said to be poisoned with the juice of the upas tree. (1: 159)22 These comments are made toward the beginning of these two participants' accounts of the First Opium War, separate from their opinions on the war itself. Nevertheless, the comments are striking insofar as they mirror the logic of Britain's excuse for war—that the Chinese empire had itself "run amuck," brutally and rashly destroying British interests, and that it was likely to do so again unless stopped. The fullest development of this logic was undertaken by none other than the English opium-eater, Thomas De Quincey. Peter Ward Fay, in The Opium War 1840-1842, writes of a fever that, in 1842, struck British troops stationed in the south of China: "Among the dead in Hongkong [sic] was young Horatio De Quincey. . . . It was as close as his father, England's most celebrated opium eater, would get to the war that bore in a sense his name" (366). De Quincey's second son Horatio did indeed die of fever while stationed near Canton; yet his death was by no means the closest that his father would get to the Opium Wars. On the contrary, De Quincey was an active propagandist for the British cause from the start. As David Masson, the editor of the Collected Writings, notes: "China, as known to him by his readings, had always been an object of his special abomination" (14: 346). One

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of the ways in which he gave vent to this "special abomination" was by devoting an immense amount of time and effort to writing up and disseminating his ideas on the subject of Britain's proper relation to China during the periods leading up to the First and Second Opium Wars. In these writings, the Gothic tropes that in Confessions were taken inward and used to represent a life are projected outward and made to serve as an excuse for war—and, finally, as a representation of what it means to be English.23 The feminized victim of senseless aggression remains, but she is now not De Quincey's sister Elizabeth, nor his London savior Ann, nor even De Quincey himself, but that "mighty mother in Europe," England ("Opium Question" 180). The first of De Quincey's articles on China, "The Opium Question with China in 1840," appeared in Blackwood's Magazine.24 Its author's sentiments as to Britain's proper policy are clear from the outset: Very fit it is that so arrogant a people [i.e., the Chinese] should be brought to their senses; and notorious it is that in Eastern lands no appeal to the sense of justice will ever be made available which does not speak through their fears. . . . By all means, thump them well: it is your only chance— it is the only logic which penetrates the fog of so conceited a people. ( " O p i u m Q u e s t i o n " 175)

It is war that De Quincey wants, and in the event the British government did not disappoint him. This bellicose position—and the estimate of the Chinese that lies behind it—is close to that of those who had most to gain from a war, the opium traders themselves. Two years earlier, in 1838, James Matheson (a trader with Jardine, Matheson & Co., a prosperous opium smuggling concern founded in 1828) had published an anti-Chinese tract entided The Present Position and Future Prospects of the China Trade. Matheson, too, finds a rationale for British aggression in the Chinese character, which he describes as marked by a "marvellous degree of imbecility and avarice, conceit and blasphemy" (qtd. in Beeching 56). Matheson and other opium traders, for reasons of their own, were determined to play down the dangers of war. Typically, they

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represented the Chinese military as ludicrously inept, as in the following excerpt from an anonymous 1836 essay in The Chinese Repository. "What terms can convey an adequate idea of the monstrous burlesque which the imperial navy presents to our astonished gaze? Powerless beyond the power of description to ridicule or portray, yet set forth with all the braggadocio and pretence for which the Chinese are so famous" (qtd. in Collis 178). De Quincey, however, readily admits to the difficulties posed by a Chinese campaign. In fact, the vulnerability of the English and the inviolability of the Chinese obsess him. The very characteristics of China that might be taken as disadvantageous in war, the supposed torpor and barbarism of the "vast callous hulk of the Chinese Empire," provide proof against invasion: "It is defended by its essential non-irritability" (176). England, by contrast, is "scattered and exposed": "We are to be reached by a thousand wounds, in thousands of oudying extremities; the very outposts of civilization are held by Englishmen, everywhere maintaining a reserve of reliance upon the mighty mother in Europe " (180). This comparison between the two nations, with its suggestion of a hulking evil that endangers the "mother in Europe" by threatening the Englishmen who represent her abroad, maps the Gothic situation of threatened femininity onto the realm of international politics.25 The invocation of that "mighty mother," England, which is at once a refuge and somehow as "scattered and exposed" as its colonists, recalls the nexus of frailty, family, and opaque but urgent danger so prevalent in Confessions.2* Victimization reappears in "The Opium Question with China in 1840"; it does so, however, not as an event that befalls a narrator or his "sisters" so much as the fate of England itself. Two crucial passages in the essay feature weak England threatened by malicious and powerful China. The first involves abasement and victimized women by way of a meditation on the kotou, the ritual act of kneeling and touching the head to the floor in order to show homage. On the first British mission to China, in 1793, Lord Macartney refused to kotou before the Emperor, shocking the Chinese but setting a precedent that would be followed in

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subsequent missions to China from the British Crown (Beeching 16). For De Quincey, this refusal is of the utmost significance: Some of our anti-national scribblers at home . . . insisted upon it, that our English ambassador ought to have performed the kotou. . . . Had Lord Amherst [of the second British mission, 1816] submitted to such a degradation, the next thing would have been a requisition from the English Factory of beautiful English women, according to a fixed description, as annual presents to the Emperor. (184)

The logical leap here is dizzying: an Englishman abasing himself before a foreign ruler leads immediately ("the next thing") to Englishwomen mass-produced and exported to China for the Emperor's delectation. In light of De Quincey's other writings, though, such a leap is also predictable. To show weakness once, to lie down before the lion of the Incommunicable or to allow the Malay to enter into your dreams, is to ensure the playing out of the Gothic plot on the instant. Even without the kotou, atrocities against the defenseless are certain to occur when China is involved. A second passage in the essay in which England stands looking on as China acts the tormentor involves the narration of an incident that took place in 1784. As De Quincey tells it, a British ship at port in China, the Lady Hughes (in this context, a name significant in itself), fired a salute that accidentally struck and killed a Chinese. Chinese authorities demanded that the man who had fired the round, an aged Portuguese gunner, be turned over to them for punishment. The British complied, apparently with the intention of securing his release after a short time, but the gunner was hanged before they could get him back (187-89; see also Beeching 81).27 For De Quincey, this incident emblematizes the situation of England victimized by the foreign. Importantly, it also serves as an indication of the threat of contamination posed by the Chinese, an example of "the atrocities which . . . even firee-born Britons can commit, and which, under their accursed system of law, the Chinese can exact" (189). Just as in Confessions the greatest terror of opium resides in its ability to compromise the identity of its user,

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so in "The Opium Question with China in 1840" the worst aspect of Chinese malevolence is that it will somehow be communicated to Westerners who come into contact with "this wicked nation" (187). What is more, as long as contact with China is maintained there can be no respite from incidents such as that involving the Lady Hughes-. "The same scenes are eternally impending" (189).28 This certainty of the repetition of Chinese outrages is what legitimizes, in advance, the war on China. And, lest the fate of a Portuguese gunner in the eighteenth century seem weak as a demonstration of what might occur should the British fail to "thump" China in 1840, De Quincey quickly transforms this story into one of more awful torment. The recounting of an atrocity committed in the past provides the impetus for prophesying future atrocitics: And, if some colonial ship freighted with immigrants, or some packet with passengers, should be driven out of her course, and touch at a Chinese port, as sure as we live some horrid record will convulse us all with the intelligence that our brave countrymen, our gentle countrywomen and their innocent children, have been subjected to the torture by this accursed state. (193-94) The case of a single man executed for killing a Chinese metamorphoses into a shipload of men, women, and children tormented by China simply for being English and helpless. The verb tense in the passage, which hovers between future perfect and past perfect, is indicative: these Chinese outrages belong to the future; at the same time, they are so certain that the only appropriate way to describe them is as if they have already happened, as if innocent passengers "have been subjected to the torture." De Quincey's involvement with China did not end with the ratification of the Treaty of Nanjing in 1843. It flared out again with the advent of renewed hostilities in 1857. In that year he wrote no fewer than three essays on China for James Hogg's Titan. As Hogg notes, De Quincey even went to the trouble of collecting the first two of these and reissuing them, together with prefatory material and a postscript, as a pamphlet of 152 pages in length (Hogg 7). The third, uncollected essay, "The Chinese Question in

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1857," was reprinted in the Collected Writings. It repeats—compulsively, almost deliriously—the essay of 1840 in both sentiment and content, differing only in that what was anger has now risen to hysteria: "[I]n the case of China this apostrophe — The tuitions hate thee\ — would pass by acclamation, without needing the formality of a vote" (349; emphasis in original). The kotou reappears, and this time the consequences of performing it are even more severe than before: De Quincey goes so far as to assert that the Opium Wars came about because a Russian ambassador to China foolishly agreed to kotou before the Emperor early in the eighteenth century (364). The story of the gunner of the Lady Hughes is repeated in full —again, as an example of what to expect from the Chinese (366-67). 29 Finally, there is, again, an impending Chinese violation, for the Chinese will assuredly "repeat their atrocious insolences as often as opportunities offer" (350). In the dream-fugue at the end of "The English Mail-Coach," the proclamation of English national triumph at Waterloo involves the death of a girl. Earlier sections of the essay provide a local explanation for the necessity of this death, as well as for De Quincey's position as sympathetic but helpless onlooker: the vision combines, in the form of what De Quincey called an "involute," his many coach rides during the Napoleonic Wars with an incident in which a coach on which he was traveling nearly destroyed a carriage carrying a young man and woman. Yet this explanation does little to account for the incessant recurrence of women in danger not only in "The English Mail-Coach," but in De Quincey's writings as a whole. The episode echoes and is echoed by many others: the death of Elizabeth, the loss of Ann, De Quincey's own self-representations as a feminized pariah. In Confessions, the result of this attention to victimization is the construction of a self whose most salient characteristic is its openness to threat. Moreover, that threat takes the shape of the foreign: literally, opium; figuratively, in the dreamscape of the visions to which opium gives rise, the East and its corruptions. If the intent of autobiography is to render visible a dis-

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tinct self, to represent or construct a subjectivity that will appear unique, De Quinceyan autobiography achieves this end by continually confronting the possibility of the complete failure of such a project.30 The "English Opium-Eater" announced in the title of Confessions is a being constantly subject to disintegration into some Other because of his use of opium; yet the possibility of such contamination is what makes him who he is. The fact that opium is actually imbibed renders this threat particularly visceral: addiction to the drug in this sense amounts to a literal, physical dependence on the foreign. Gothic plotting provides a way to portray that dependence as a narrative of victimization, of a helpless woman persecuted by an invincible enemy.31 This narrative functions to represent the autobiographical subject, but is also transposed into the realm of international relations in order to represent the English nation. In De Quincey's writings on the Opium Wars, England takes the place of the feminized victim and China assumes the role of persecutor. But the emphasis De Quincey places, not just on threat, but on contamination, provides a crucial nuance to an otherwise predictable story. In the Malay dreams at the end of Confessions, the consequence of dependence on opium is a polluted, compromised self. In the context of the Opium Wars, an identical pollution threatens the English nation. The agent of this national contamination, though, is not opium but tea—without which, De Quincey writes in "The English in China," "the social life of England would receive a deadly wound." 32 And while drinking tea has been naturalized (or Anglicized) in a way that eating opium has not—witness the absurd redundancy of any Confessions of an English Tea-Drinker —the very strength of the connection between England and tea underscores English dependence on China, which for much of the nineteenth century was the primary source of the nation's national beverage. As Brian Inglis notes of the First Opium War, "[i]n a sense, it was really the Tea War" (198). De Quincey's writings on the Opium Wars embrace rather than deny that dependence, strategically parlaying the contamination and fragility it implies into a definition of English nationality:

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Englishness amounts to frailty, openness to attack. Such frailty is symbolically constitutive: just as it provides De Quincey with an autobiographical subjectivity, it provides England with a national identity. The workings of this logic explain the necessity of a girl's death beneath the wheels of the coach that bears the news of "Waterloo and Recovered Christendom'.": the nation, in making itself, must endanger itself—which it can do most convincingly by endangering what is understood to be at once its weakest and its most representative citizen. One source for this strangely catastrophic construction of self and nation is specific to De Quincey and has to do with his deep conviction of human existence as constituted by pain and suffering. Yet, in the context of imperialist nation-making, such a conviction has strategic value. Nigel Leask has noted that, although apparendy innocent, De Quincey's tendency' to identify with the victim is "very far from being hostile to imperialism" (5). In the case of England's relation to China, the sense of threat that such an identification enabled worked to generate, by way of response, a war of conquest. The construction of a victimized identity at the national level, that is, provided the most powerful nation in the world with a rationale for aggression based, paradoxically, in a sense of itself as the beleaguered heroine of Gothic romance.

3

Border Crossings Nationality, Sexuality, and Colonialism in Charlotte Bronte's Villette

But the female

sacrificc was welcome to all

parties. —Thomas De Quincev, "Suggestions upon the Secret of the Mutiny"

China that the national victimization De Quincev anxiously predicted finally took place. Sepoy troops stationed at Meerut mutinied on 10 May 1857, firing upon their British officers and looting European homes before fleeing toward Delhi. By the evening of the next day, the mutineers had defeated that city's garrison and seized its magazine of weapons and gunpowder. In the month that followed, nearly all the Indian regiments in northwestern India broke into open revolt: the Indian Rebellion (or Sepoy Mutiny, as the British called it at the time) was underway.1 Of the various confused accounts of the Rebellion that reached England in the weeks and months following the initial action, most electrifying were rumors of atrocities committed against Englishwomen and their children.2 On 17 September 1857, for instance, The Times reported: "Children have been compelled to eat the quivering flesh of their murdered parents. . . . Men in many instances have been mutilated and, before being absolutely killed, have had to gaze upon the last dishonour of their wives and daughters previous to being put to I T WAS I N I N D I A R A T H E R T H A N

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death" (qtd. in Dawson 87). Such scenes of carnage quickly assumed the shape of a veritable iconography, a collection of anecdotes and illustrations whose depictions of the Rebellion focused with horrified fascination on the spectacle of white women and children menaced, tortured, or hacked to bits by swarthy sepoys.3 As Graham Dawson notes: "The imaginative impact of the Rebellion . . . took the form of outrage and a sense of insult and degradation at what had apparendv been done to the bodies of British people" (87). The suppression of the Rebellion—which involved no small share of its own atrocities, such as hanging captured sepoys en masse or blowing them to pieces after securing them to the mouths of cannon—was conceived less as a military solution to the politico-military crisis of a colony in revolt than as the only appropriate answer to the savaging of English innocents. "The British Lion's Vengeance on the Bengal Tiger," a drawing by Sir John Tenniel that appeared in Punch on 22 August 1857, captures the workings of such a logic by depicting the infliction of justified reprisal for outrageous injury: an enormous lion is frozen in the act of attacking a tiger crouched over the prone bodies of a woman and her infant (see Figure 2).4 In the aftermath of the Rebellion, the tale of Gothic horror that De Quincey oudined in "The Opium Question with China in 1840," the tale that "will convulse us all with the intelligence that our brave countrymen, our gende countrywomen and their innocent children, have been subjected to the torture," uncannily reaches England in the form of lurid newspaper accounts and drawings of the fate of the English at the hands of the sepoys (193-94).5 The Englishness De Quincey constructed in the pages of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and in his essays on the Opium Wars, aggressive because fragile, now grips the public imagination and shapes official policy toward India. As in the opium-eater's tableaux of victimization, depictions of the Rebellion as Indian violation of English daughters, sisters, and mothers evoke by way of response a jusdy vengeful masculinity. To De Quincey himself such depictions were more than simply the vindication of his predictions, for his daughter Florence, her

Figure 2. Sir John Tenniel, "The British Lion's Vengeance on the Bengal Tiger." Punch 22 August 1857.

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husband Colonel Richard Bairdsmith, and their young child were living in Delhi when it was captured by rebel troops (Lindop 379, 383; Masson 131). The boundaries between personal and national, textual and historical waver and collapse; the subject position demanded of the public by the iconography of the Indian Rebellion —that they witness outrages upon women as if they were those women's sons, brothers, or fathers—is precisely reproduced in De Quincey's relation toward his own daughter and grandchild.6 Unable to obtain reliable information about the fate of the English in Delhi for several months, he is plagued by nightmares: "Every night, often times all night long . . . I had the same dream—a vision of children, most of them infants, but not all, the first rank being girls of five or six years old, who were standing in the air outside, but so as to touch the window; and I heard or perhaps fancied that I heard, always the same dreadful word, Delhi* (qtd. in Lindop 383; emphasis in original).7 Inevitably, De Quincey draws upon this private torment in order to fashion a public call to action. He writes a series of three essays on the situation in India, all published in James Hogg's Titan: "Hurried Notices of Indian Affairs" (September 1857), "Passing Notices of Indian Affairs" (October 1857), and "Suggestions upon the Secret of the Mutiny" (January 1858). All three essays dwell to some extent upon scenes of female suffering, but the first—"Hurried Notices of Indian Affairs," written in August 1857 under the influence of a barrage of rumors about the fate of the English at Delhi—concerns itself with little else. The essay opens with a gesture that places the Rebellion under the sign of the unspeakable: "things not utterable in human language or to human ears —things ineffable—things to be whispered—things to dream of, not to tell — these things amongst high caste Brahmins . . . have been the product of the passing hour" (345). The remainder of the essay replicates in miniature the form of De Quincey's corpus as a whole by attempting paradoxically to utter the unutterable. As in Confessions, "Suspiria de Profundis," and similar autobiographical texts, giving voice to the Incommunicable demands recourse to what might be called crypto-

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discourses: forms of writing that elliptically or allusively embody that which cannot be represented directly. Whence the extended reference to Agamemnon's sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia for the good of the Greek cause against the Trojans: while no living father, De Quincey assures readers, could repeat such an act, the English should not be averse to profiting from a filial sacrifice they were powerless to forestall. If, as the English believe to have been the case in India, some ineluctable victimization were to befall an innocent daughter "under circumstances which involved an advantage to her country, the most loving father might gradually allow himself to draw consolation from the happy consequences of a crime which he would have died to prevent" (346). The nature of those "happy consequences" emerges in a passage in which De Quincey, not content to speak as a bereaved father, raises the English dead in order to ventriloquize his desire for revenge. The female victims of supposed sepoy atrocities apostrophize "dear distant England!": "We from our bloody graves . . . send up united prayers to thee, that upon the everlasting memory of our hell-born wrongs, thou, beloved mother, wouldst engraft a counter-memory of everlasting retribution, inflicted upon the Moloch idolatries of India" (346). The bayonetting and hanging of captured rebels (351), the further entrenchment of the British government of India (346-48), the elimination of the entire Indian caste system (346) — this is the "everlasting retribution" demanded. Like widespread pictorial representations of the Rebellion as primarily an act of sexualized victimization, "Hurried Notices of Indian Affairs" reinscribes what might be understood as a proto-nationalist uprising in terms of oriental savagery. This reinscription, in turn, prepares the way for the extension and strengthening of Britain's grasp on India—realized with the incorporation of direct rule by the British in 1858 and reaching a symbolic apotheosis in 1877 with the assumption by Queen Victoria of the title Empress of India. Rationalizations for such imperial activity turn on the fulcrum of the figure of the Englishwoman. In "Suggestions upon the Secret of the Mutiny," the last of his essays on the Rebellion, De Quincey includes the sentence that stands

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as the epigraph to this chapter: "But the female sacrifice was welcome to all parties" (93; emphasis in original). In the context of his argument about the origins of the Rebellion, "all parties" refers to sepoys and to the conspiratorial rajahs that he suspects of inciting them to violence. But De Quincey might just as well be referring to himself and the British Raj. The imagined and actual suffering of individual Englishwomen at the hands of rebellious Indians may be redeemed insofar as it constitutes a national martyrdom, a "female sacrifice" welcome because it weds Englishness to an imperial expansionism conceived of, not as self-interested predation, but as a reactionary and retributive duty. Nearly a decade before the Indian Rebellion, in a letter in which she comments on the European nationalist revolutions of 1848, Charlotte Bronte demonstrates her own understanding of the connections among sexuality, empire, and national destiny when she writes: "That England may be spared the spasms, cramps, and frenzy-fits now contorting the Continent, and threatening Ireland, I earnestly pray. With the French and the Irish I have no sympathy. With the Germans and the Italians I think the case is different; as different as the love of freedom from the lust for license" (qtd. in Gaskell 244).® Here the national and the sexual are so thoroughly intertwined that Bronte figures the distinction between good and bad nationalisms as the difference between sacred and sinful desire, between "the love of freedom" apparently displayed by Italians and Germans and "the lust for license" attributed to the French—traditional enemies of the English—and the Irish—the subject race of England's oldest "white" colony. Furthermore, the effect of the sexual metaphor at the end of this pronouncement is such that what seems at first to be a description of national uprisings in terms of disease ("spasms, cramps, and frenzy-fits") appears on a second reading to be a rendering of rebellion as hysterical sexual passion. Thus all attempts at national self-determination are tainted with (but also made desirable by) their proximity, whether distant ("love") or immediate ("lust"), to sex.9

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Villette, the novel Bronte was writing in the late 1840s, displays an equally thorough sexualization of national difference. An account of an Englishwoman's sojourn in a Francophone land, Villette explicidy formulates questions of Englishness and foreignness as questions of love and lust, freedom and license.10 The novel's narrator and protagonist, Lucy Snowe, must piece together a national and sexual identity from disparate sources: the mores of England, from which she has exiled herself, and those of Labassecour (Bronte's fictionalized Belgium), to which she has fled; the austerities of Protestantism, to which she clings, and the voluptuousness of Catholicism, which she finds by turns alluring, threatening, and absurd.11 Yearning for escape from social determination provides Villette with both its impetus and its plot: Lucy Snowe's flight from England to Labassecour—from the prospect of life-long servitude as governess or lady's companion to an uncertain, but at any rate different, future—originates in the desire to make herself over, to reconstitute herself as someone else. Geographical relocation, the initial attempt at escape, gives rise in turn to what might be seen as the real work of reconstructing identity and subjectivity, the autobiographical labors that, in their complex documentation and transfiguration of events mental and actual, comprise the text of Villette itself.12 The novel reveals two faces of this reconstruction. In part, the move to Labassecour provides Lucy the means, not for dissolving, but rather for reinforcing oppositions between self and other. This consolidation of personal and national identity is achieved by adapting the resources of the Gothic: as in Radcliffe's novels, a central heroine establishes her Englishness by confronting the perils of Continental persecution; as in the writings of De Quincey, that heroine metonymically stands in for England itself insofar as she is weak and suffering, subject to persecution. And just as De Quincey revivifies the English dead in India to ventriloquize his horror and desire for revenge, so Bronte in Villette speaks through Lucy Snowe of "hunger, rebellion and rage"—to cite Matthew Arnold's notorious pronouncement on the novel (qtd. in Allott 201). But in Villette this shaping of identity by means of a woman's vie-

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timization is also seen as suspect; indeed, it is part of what Lucy Snowe attempts to escape by leaving England. The text of the novel betrays an awareness of the sinister implications of the necessity for "female sacrifice" in the service of the consolidation of national identity. As a result of such an awareness, the Gothic plot of a woman in danger is accompanied in the novel by another generic pattern: that of a Bildttngsroman in which the Continental (and also the colonial) Other appears as constituent of the self rather than opposed to it.13 Lucy fashions a habitable subject position and an acceptable nationality neither by simplv invoking the Gothic's victimized women and invidious binaries nor by replacing them, but by alternating between them and the less xenophobic conventions of realism.

I One way to think through Villette's vexed relation to the binaries by means of which nationality, colonialism, and sexuality usually make sense is to consider a text that works by putting those binaries into question: Neil Jordan's The Crying Game (1992). The first of many ironies the film presents involves the difficulty, in a not-quite-postcolonial world, of distinguishing colonized from colonizer. The film's opening section dismantles the possibility of a simple opposition between these two terms. An Irish Republican Army faction captures Jody—a black man born in Antigua, raised in England, and serving in the British Army in Northern Ireland—with the idea of exchanging him for imprisoned comrades. While the kidnappers await the fulfillment of their demands, one of them, Fergus, befriends Jody. This friendship, however, only guarantees Fergus the privilege of carrying out Jody's execution when the British refuse to deal. Thus it happens that two men from distant corners of the globe who debate the merits of cricket and curling in what is for both a colonial language are brought together in such a way that one must kill the other. A black man, English because of British colonialism, finds himself condemned

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to death by colonized whites in the name of national liberation and anti-imperialism. At the center of these confused and collapsed binaries is the figure of the transvestite. Because of his dismay at Jody's death, Fergus flees to London in order to escape continued IRA involvement. There he seeks out Jody's girlfriend, Dil, who is, like Jody, both black and English. In a reenactment of heterosexual film noir, amidst an aura of impending violence and betrayal, the two become increasingly involved—until the moment when Dil's "true" sex, and with it his/her transvestism, is revealed. Framed as the secret of the story by the film's distributors as well as by cooperative reviewers and critics, this revelation is accomplished by the sudden, dramatic unveiling of a semi-erect penis. Although Fergus vomits at this sight—ostensibly displaying in heightened form the dismay of straight male viewers at the "truth" of their desire for Dil—the peculiar charm of The Crying Game is its insistence on working through the rest of the plot with the figure of the transvestite intact. Dil remains permanendy transgendered; he/she continues to play the role allotted to the woman in a familiar version of boy-meets-girl. (At film's end Dil him-/herself campily remarks to Fergus, now in prison for a murder Dil committed: "How romantic—my man's doing time for me") Dil's gender travesty, perhaps because it is the film's most fundamental subversion of rigid identity categories, functions as a metonym for the subversions that have gone before. The transvestite, neither man nor woman but also both, stands in for all the film's exploded binaries: colonized/colonizer, nationalist/imperialist, black/white, queer/straight. I begin with The Crying Game because it shows, albeit in a particularly complex way, connections that bind together nationality and sexuality—what the editors of Nationalisms & Sexualities call "two of the most powerful global discourses shaping contemporary notions of identity" (A. Parker et al. 2). The essays in that collection demonstrate nationalism's long and varied involvement in the construction of normative (and also deviant) masculinities, femininities, and sexualities. In addition to representing

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the nation itself as motherland or fatherland, nationalism has demanded of its male and female citizens an appropriately gendered and sexed national subjectivity. Such a demand has been made, moreover, in the context of the undesirable gender identities and sexualities of others: those others within the nation who "betray" or "subvert" national ideals; citizens of other nations and of colonies; and, for postcolonial nations, the colonizers themselves. The Crying Game provides only a recent and particularly self-conscious instance of the function of nation, colony, and sex as multiple constituents of subjectivity. In The Crying Game the rigid binaries of self and other are put into crisis, a crisis signaled most acutely by Dil's undoing of the determinate relation between sex and gender. The resulting collapse enables the film to offer, in place of social determination, an idealistic individualism. A heterosexual Irishman and a black, homosexual, English transvestite are freed from the restrictions of their identity-labels and allowed to live out a Hollywood romance: omnia vincit amor. Bronte's Villette, though much less sanguine about the possibilities for self-determination open to the subject, also explores the imbrications of nationality and sexuality by way of the figure of the transvestite. The most memorable— though not the only—transvestite in the novel is the nun seen by Lucy Snowe at times of heightened emotion. This quasi-spectral figure first appears when Lucy takes a letter of John Graham Bretton's up to the garret of Madame Beck's pensionnat in order to read it in private: "Say what you will, reader—tell me I was nervous or mad; affirm that I was unsettled by the excitement of that letter; declare that I dreamed: this I vow—I saw there—in that room—on that night—an image like—a NUN" (325). The figure makes four more appearances: once again in the attic (337), twice beneath a pear tree in the garden of thc pensionnat (381-82, 458), and, finally, stretched out on Lucy's bed when she returns from an opium reverie in Villette's central park (569-70). Over the course of the narrative the nun signifies variously: it is by turns the ghost of a historical nun, "a girl whom a monkish conclave of the drear middle ages had here buried alive, for some sin against her vow"

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(172); a product of Lucy's own fevered imagination; M. Paul's past in the shape of his deceased fiancee. In the end, though, the nun is revealed to be a transvestite: Colonel Alfred de Hamal adopting drag to facilitate his clandestine visits to Ginevra Fanshawe (57375). And though, due to the requirements of the mid-Victorian novel, no irrefutable anatomical evidence emerges to confirm the maleness of this Catholic sister, Villette does provide a phallic revelation of sorts. After attacking the habit that de Hamal has laid out on her bed, Lucy announces: "The long nun proved a long bolster dressed in a long black stole" (569). At first glance, the function of the transvestite nun in Vilktte appears to be the destabilization of binaries constitutive of identity. Marjorie Garber makes this argument in her study of transvestism, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing & Cultural Anxiety. Most critical attention to the transvestite, Garber notes, has been marked by a "tendency . . . to appropriate the cross-dresser 'as' one of the two sexes,. . . not to see cross-dressing except as male or female manque" (10). Garber resists this temptation to read through sartorial presentation to the "truth" of the body. Rather, she attends to the transvestite as such, and in doing so consistendy reads transvestism as a destabilizing "third term" that undermines categorical certainties: "Three puts in question the idea of one: of identity, self-sufficiency, self-knowledge" (11). For Garber, the nun-as-transvestite serves as a figure for generalized "category crisis" in Vilktte. Her/his undoing of the distinction between man and woman signals the collapse of a series of binaries that begins with gender but extends well beyond it. As Garber writes of the novel, "the category crisis here is as much England/France [sic] and Protestant/Catholic as it is male/female: the phantom appearance of the transvestite . . . marks a category crisis elsewhere" (223; emphasis in original). On this reading, the challenge posed by the nun to the gender binary and the determination of gender by sex signals an accompanying destabilization of the central oppositions around which the novel is built: the opposition between England and Labassecour, which in turn is tied closely to that between Protestantism

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and Catholicism. But whereas Garber views the nun's disruption of gender as necessarily a disruption of national and religious identity, I would argue the reverse—that the nun is a figure which, precisely in her/his confusion of gender, strengthens the distinction between England and the Continent. As Garber herself observes, the trope of the monastic transvestite, whether male nun or female monk, has a long history in English representations and vilifications of Catholicism. The fantasy of sexual excess cynically concealed beneath the veneer of an institutional chastity was regularly deployed to prove the superiority of Protestantism and Englishness by depicting the Continent as a site of Romish depravity (Garber 218-19; Zemka). Gothic novels, in particular, derived much of their potential for sensationalism from the myriad possibilities of monastic transvestism—which received perhaps its most notorious treatment in Matthew Lewis's The Monk. In the context of this tradition, de Hamal's use of a nun's habit to enable his trysts with Ginevra reads as an indictment of the hypocritical sexual relations of Labassecourien (and, more generally, Continental) society. As John Maynard has pointed out, this hypocrisy is for Lucy Snowe that of "a sexual system that works by stimulating desire for the prohibited" (176).14 That a figure so apparently destabilizing as the transvestite functions in Villette to solidify rather than dissolve national distinctions suggests that nationalism's relation to the rest of the novel's oppositions approximates the relation of a Lacanian point de caption to the field of elements that it structures. Slavoj ¿izek explains the effect of the point de caption (or "quilting point") by noting that "[i]deological space" consists of "non-bound, nontied elements, 'floating signifiers,' whose very identity is 'open.'... The 'quilting' performs the totalization by means of which this free floating of ideological elements is halted, fixed—that is to say, by means of which they become parts of the structured network of meaning" (¿izek, Sublime Object 87; see also Laclau and Mouffe 112-13). As the "quilting point" in Villette, nationalism organizes oppositions between chastity and lasciviousness, self and Other,

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Protestant and Catholic by placing them all in a determinate relation to the English nation. When viewed from this perspective, Lucy Snowe's derisive comments on the inhabitants of Labassecour, her anger at the Continental surveillance to which she is subjected, and her virulent anti-Catholicism may be seen to fall into place as the necessary concomitants of English nationalism. On this reading Lucy would be what Leslie Stephen called Bronte herself: "a typical example of the 'patriotism of the steeple'" (26). The novel deploys what we might call, in light of the work of Radcliffe and De Quincey, a Gothic logic whereby a domestic, English self is constituted by contrast to a depraved, Continental Other. Such a logic does operate in ViUette. However, in the same way that the gender binary of man and woman is complicated by the transvestite, the simple opposition between England and Labassecour is disturbed by a "third term," a term that falls outside of a geographical, not a sexual, binary: colony. Colony appears in all of Bronte's novels. While frequendy serving as a source of metaphors, it also has a tangible, geographical presence in the texts. William Crimsworth's description of Mile. Reuter in The Professor (1857) exemplifies Bronte's metaphorical use of colony: "When she stole about me with the soft step of a slave—I felt at once barbarous and sensual as a pasha" (184). Here the relation between desired man and openly desiring woman finds expression in an orientalized version of the relation between master and slave. Similar passages abound in Jam Eyre (1847), but equally important in that novel is the presence of colony as locale, as literal place. The workings of the plot depend upon actual colonial holdings and their effects: the West Indies, site of Rochester's marriage to the Creole Bertha Mason and source of Jane's inheritance; the East Indies, location both of St. John Rivers's missionary activity and of his grave. Even in Shirley (1849), so unlike the rest of Bronte's novels in other ways, colony is present in the form of a newly independent America to which Robert Moore contemplates immigrating should his speculations fail. ViUette makes use of both the metaphorical and the tangible colony: India and the

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Middle East provide Lucy with characterizations, metaphors, and turns of phrase, while Guadeloupe materially intervenes between her and her Continental husband-to-be, M. Paul. Several readings of ViUette have been attentive to the presence of colony in the novel. Such readings, however, invariably resolve an unstable system comprised of three terms (England, Continent, and colony) into a stable binary (either England and colony or England and Continent)—a resolution achieved at the expense of the distinction between colonial and Continental. Rosemary Clark-Beattie's reading of ViUette, for instance, assimilates colony to Continent. Clark-Beattie convincingly places Bronte's novel in the context of the anti-Catholic conversion narratives of the 1840s, the Ur-plot of which chronicles the self-serving efforts of a Jesuit priest to convert a young Englishwoman to the Church of Rome.15 ViUette, while modifying this plot considerably, shares with it the basic scenario of female, English Protestantism threatened by male, Continental Catholicism. Clark-Beattie argues that this threat makes possible for Lucy Snowe a sanctioned rebellion. While in England, Lucy feels inward dissatisfaction but must outwardly display acceptance of her role. The move to Labassecour provides "a backdrop against which the ordinary habits of the Englishwoman appear in sudden relief"—a context in which, paradoxically, Lucy's individuality, expressed by means of her rebellion against Continental society, amounts to English propriety (828). The conflation of colonials with Continentals enables ClarkBeattie's argument that the validation of Lucy Snowe's individuality in ViUette depends upon the opposition of Protestant England to Catholic Continent. Early in her essay she likens Lucy to those Englishmen and women who relocated to the colonies in order to live out a dream of aristocratic superiority unavailable in England itself. This is what Clark-Beattie means when she writes that "ViUette is structured by what might be called a colonialist impulse" (825). While it is certainly the case that Lucy's narrative is predicated on her feelings of superiority to the Labassecouriens, there is a fundamental confusion involved in labeling those feel-

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ings "colonialist." Labassecour is not England, but neither is it a British colony; it possesses, in fact, its own colonial holdings. To read Lucy's chauvinism as the result of a relation between England and Labassecour tantamount to that between colonizing and colonized nation is to misrepresent it. The colonial metaphor serves here, as elsewhere in Bronte, to characterize the Continent, but colony in ViUette exceeds such a purely metaphoric role. By denying this, Clark-Beattie reads colony as Continent in much the same way that, as Garber points out, many critics have read the transvestite as a failed man or woman —by looking through surface complications in order to reach a truth that the surface ostensibly obscures. In an opposite but similar interpretive move, other critics read Continental as colonial. This is the case in Suvendrini Perera's Reaches of Empire: The English Novel from Edgeworth to Dickens. Perera performs a skillful reading of Jane Eyre and ViUette as texts in which Western feminism begins by expressing the oppression of all women with tropes of the colonial woman but ends by sacrificing that woman. In Jane Eyre, for instance, Bertha Mason initially provides a literalization of the imprisonment Jane fears from Rochester; Bertha must be sacrificed in a conflagration pointedly reminiscent of sati, however, before Jane can assume her place by Rochester's side.16 Ironically, though, Perera's reading duplicates Bronte's move in reverse: her argument depends upon representations of both colonial and Continental women but finally collapses these two terms into one by subsuming the latter into the former. She writes of ViUette, for instance, that just as St. John Rivers becomes a missionary in India near the end of Jane Eyre, "Lucy establishes herself at the end as the agent of enlightenment and English rectitude among the superstitious corruptions of the 'aboriginal'. . . Labassecouriennes" (86).17 Whether colonial is seen as Continental, as in Clark-Beattie's reading, or vice versa, as in Perera's reading, a complex and mutually constitutive set of three terms is resolved into a simple oppositional binary. The third term is crucial to ViUette. England is not simply opposed to Continent or colony in the novel. All three

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function to articulate one another, and Lucy Snowe weaves all three into her narrative in order to construct a space for identity. Thus, the scheme the novel bodies forth has less to do with a binary self/Other distinction than it does with what John Barrell calls a logic of "this/that/the other." Barrell, writing about Thomas De Quincey, argues that in such a logic the terms self and other can be thought of as superseded by "this" and "that," in a narrative which now says, there is this here, and it is different from that there, but the difference between them, though in its way important, is as nothing compared with the difference between the two of them considered together, and that third thing, way over there, which is truly other to them both. (Infection 10; emphasis in original) For De Quincey, as we have seen, this "third thing" is the Orient as manifest in China and India. In ViUette the role of third is played by colony, which provides the means to articulate a distinction between what is English and what is Continental. And, as the figure of the transvestite nun attests, this colonial construction and destabilization of European nationality in the text is articulated particularly in relation to sexuality and its representations.

II Where is sexuality in ViUette* As in many Victorian novels, sex— acts as opposed to, but constructed as sex by, the discourse of sexuality—is conspicuously absent. And so, for the twentiethcentury reader, sexuality is conspicuously, continuously present as the compensatory discourse produced around a sex that cannot be written. Foucault notes of "the secondary schools of the eighteenth century," for example, that sex, though never spoken of directly in these schools, "was a constant preoccupation" that shaped everything from the structure of buildings to the division of the day (History of Sexuality 1: 27). So, too, Villette: the absence of sex shapes, negatively as it were, the structure of the novel.

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Lucy Snowe, narrator and protagonist, writes about everything but sex—which is at the same time everywhere implied. This is to assume, however, that we understand what sex is, that we would know it if we saw it. It would be more accurate to say that sexuality in Villette is constructed, not as a compensation or substitute for that which is absent, but as absence itself. Thus, for instance, the consummation to which the novel looks forward, the marriage with M. Paul Emanuel that is to be the end of and reward for Lucy Snowe's suffering, turns out to be a blank space, a moment indefinitely deferred by the indeterminacy of the novel's conclusion. M. Paul, away for three years in Guadeloupe amassing a colonial fortune, sets out on his return voyage to Labassecour only to be met by a storm that "did not cease until the Atlantic was strewn with wrecks" (596); whether or not one of these wrecks contains the body of her husband-to-be, Lucy Snowe refuses to say. Paradoxically, though, the blank space where sexuality resides in Villette is not actually empty, or at least it serves as the location for more than one kind of absence. If M. Paul stands in metonymically for what is referred to in the novel as Lucy's "Passion," the space that passion occupies is at the same time identical to the space of colony. As Lucy writes of the three years of M. Paul's residence in Guadeloupe: "The spring which moved my energies lay far away beyond seas, in an Indian isle" (594). Colonial holdings sustain a European nation to which those holdings are effectively invisible, just as a sexuality never named sustains Lucy Snowe. There are, however, moments in the novel when what we would recognize as sexuality comes to the surface. (If my metaphors seem to reproduce the "repressive hypothesis" that Foucault names and censures, this is partly due to the fact that repression is the most insistent trope in Villette itself.) One particularly emblematic moment raises the question of the representation of sexuality and, in doing so, exemplifies the nature of Villette''s articulation of the subject by way of sexuality, nationality, and colonialism. Lucy Snowe is offered two models of womanhood in the

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form of paintings in a gallery in Villette. The first painting she encounters lends its name to the title of the chapter in which it appears: "The Cleopatra." Lucy Snowe describes the painting thus: It represented a woman, considerably larger, I thought, than the life. I calculated that this lady, put into a scale of magnitude suitable for the reception of a commodity of bulk, would infallibly turn from fourteen to sixteen stone. She was, indeed, extremely well fed: very much butcher's meat—to say nothing of bread, vegetables, and liquids—must she have consumed to attain that breadth and height, that wealth of muscle, that affluence of flesh. She lay half-reclined on a couch: why, it would be difficult to say. . . . She had no business to lounge away the noon on a sofa. She ought likewise to have worn decent garments; a gown covering her properly, which was not the case: out of abundance of material — seven-and-twenty yards, I should say, of drapery—she managed to make inefficient raiment. Then, for the wretched untidiness surrounding her, there could be no excuse. Pots and pans—perhaps I ought to say vases and goblets—were rolled here and there on the foreground. . . . On referring to the catalogue, I found that this notable production bore name "Cleopatra." (275-76) A s her description indicates, Lucy sees in "Cleopatra" only excess—of flesh, food, garments, and indolence. Male observers, on the contrary, think they recognize in the woman depicted in the painting "le type de voluptueux" (282), as evidenced by M . Paul himself. Shocked to find Lucy viewing this exhibition of sensuality (" 'Astounding singular audacity! . . . Singulières femmes que ces Anglaises!' " [277]), he forcibly removes her to a corner where four small paintings offer another, contrary model of womanhood. These paintings taken together represent " L a vie d'une femme," and Lucy Snowe describes them in turn: They were painted in a rather remarkable style—flat, dead, pale and formal. The first represented a "Jeune Fille," coming out of a church-door, a missal in her hand, her dress very prim, her eyes cast down, her mouth pursed up—the image of a most villainous little precocious she-hypocrite. The second, a "Mariée" with a long white veil, kneeling at a prie-dieu in her chamber, holding her hands plastered together, finger to finger, and showing the whites of her eyes in a most exasperating manner. The third, a "Jeune Mère," hanging disconsolate over a clayey and puffy baby with a

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face like an unwholesome full moon. The fourth, a "Veuve," being a black woman ["black" because in mourning], holding by the hand a black little girl, and the twain studiously surveying an elegant French monument, set up in a corner of some Père la Chaise. All these four "Anges" were grim and gray as burglars, and cold and vapid as ghosts. ( 2 7 7 - 7 8 ) 1 8

M. Paul, by steering Lucy away from "Cleopatra" to "La vie d'une femme," appears from his position as despotic patriarch to designate the proper choice between two mutually exclusive types of womanhood, two types of female sexuality. In this sense he parallels the implied male presence in each of the four panels of "La vie d'une femme." Such a presence "saves" women from a sexuality that otherwise might be that of "Cleopatra" by anchoring that sexuality at all points to men and reproduction. Three of the terms for stages in a woman's life signify only by virtue of their connection to men: "Mariée" (wife), "Jeune Mère" (young mother), "Veuve" (widow). A fourth places the "Jeune Fille" (young girl) in relation, not to a husband, but to a religious "father" in the person of priest or God, thus implicidy defining the onset of the sexual as that moment when a woman passes from the watchful eyes of the Church fathers into the hands of a husband. It is important, however, to question such an account of who delineates which sexuality for what purpose. The reading above proposes a male/female binary in which men attempt to shape women's sexuality; such a binary operates here, though, only by virtue of a further set of distinctions between English, Continental, and colonial sexualities—Barrell's "this/that/the other." Note, to begin with, that M. Paul juxtaposes an English and Protestant womanhood to a Continental and Catholic one. Acknowledging Lucy Snowe's apparent ability to resist the corrupting influence of "Cleopatra," he exclaims: "'You nurslings of Protestantism amaze me. You unguarded Englishwomen walk calmly amidst redhot ploughshares and escape burning' " (280). Surely this view of Englishwomen as peculiarly chaste and of Continental women as eminendy corruptible would be more appropriately made by Lucy Snowe (or Bronte herself), since it is a familiar nineteenth-century English stereotype of the difference between English and Conti-

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nental female sexuality. Similarly, when taken in the context of the vaunted liberty of the Englishwoman, "La vie d'une femme" constitutes an equally English view of Continental female bondage. Lucy Snowe rejects a sexuality that M. Paul insists upon, that is, not only because it appears repressive, but also because it is constructed in the novel as literally "foreign" to her. These distinctions are even more complex on returning to "Cleopatra," which may at first appear to be nothing but the other half of a dualistic representation of the "foreign" woman still recognizable today: drudge ("La vie") or cxotic do-nothing ("Cleopatra"). The painting exceeds such a reductive description, however, insofar as it functions to structure the distinction between English and Continental sexualities. That the title of this painting is given in English —it is not, that is, "Cleopatre"—signals its difference from "La vie d'une femme." (Villette is marked by the awkward device of presenting conversation sometimes in English, sometimes in French; what gets placed in which language is not accidental.) At the same time, the proper noun "Cleopatra" signals an equal or greater difference from the (denial of the) sexuality of the Englishwoman. If we understand her to represent the colonial subject (by way of Egypt's submission to Rome, to France, and, eventually, to Britain), then "Cleopatra" in Villette functions in much the same way that Bertha Mason does in Jam Eyre, both provide a site, as Cora Kaplan writes in Sea Changes: Essays on Culture and Feminism, for "displacing on to women in subordinate groups the 'bad' elements of female subjectivity" (3). Just as Guadeloupe provides a locale for Lucy Snowe's Passion, so a representation of the colonial subject in the form of "Cleopatra" serves as the reservoir for a sexuality of which both English and Continental womanhood must be emptied before they can be constituted as opposites.

Ill But Cleopatra makes for a problematic colonial subject, for she was herself the ruler of an empire—just as her representation rules

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over the paintings with which it is displayed: "this picture . . . seemed to consider itself the queen of the collection" (275). And to understand Lucy's rejection of Cleopatra, not as colonial subject, but as oriental empress, we should turn to that other queen offered up in the pages of the novel as a potential model of womanhood: the actress referred to as Vashti. John Graham Bretton takes Lucy to see her perform, though he considers her acting as an index to her immorality: "he judged her as a woman, not an artist: it was a branding judgment" (342). Lucy, in part, agrees; but she is also deeply moved by and attracted to Vashti, comparing her favorably to "Cleopatra": "Where was the artist of the Cleopatra? Let him come and sit down and study this different vision" (339). There are many reasons for Lucy's preference. While both queens embody passion for her, the indolence of "Cleopatra" suggests a voluptuous sensuality, whereas the rage of Vashti embodies passionate self-expression. These queens also differ markedly in their relations with men: the historical Cleopatra submitted to a series of them—Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, Octavian; Vashti's Biblical notoriety resides in her defiance of her husband.19 Lucy's attraction to the latter rather than the former is of a piece with her refusal to comply with the many men in the novel who attempt to bend her to their will. Her final assessment of the two women, though, suggests that the key difference between them is one of representation: Place now the Cleopatra, or any other slug, before her [Vashti] as an obstacle, and see her cut through the pulpy mass as the scimitar of Saladin clove the down cushion. Let Paul Peter Rubens wake from the dead, let him rise out of his cerements, and bring into this presence all the army of his fat women; the magian power or prophet-virtue gifting that slight rod of Moses, could, at one waft, release and re-mingle a sea spellparted, whelming the heavy host with the down-rush of overthrown searamparts. (340)

The "fat women" of Rubens, like the "slug" represented in "Cleopatra," embody for Lucy an enslavement to materiality. They result from a confusion between crude substance ("pulpy mass," "heavy host") and art. Art, in this passage, has to do with escape

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(hence the extended metaphor of Moses leading the Israelites out of bondage) — and also with a particular style of representation. If we return to the paintings in the gallery in Villette, it is evident that style is at issue there as well. The paintings offer opposing representations of women's sexuality, representations keyed to national and colonial differences that appear in the paintings' content: the fleshy indolence of "Cleopatra" stands opposed to the oppressive devotion of "La vie," and both are rejected by Lucy Snowe as unacceptable because un-English. But content is not all, for this rejection is also based on the formal qualities of the paintings. The excess of "Cleopatra" is not simply that of the woman depicted, but also that of the depiction itself. The size of the canvas, the amount of paint, the haphazard surroundings — Lucy finds all overdone, "coarse and preposterous" (276). "La vie," on the other hand, is "painted in a rather remarkable style— flat, dead, pale and formal"; the depiction renders the women in the four panels "grim and gray as burglars, and cold and vapid as ghosts" (277-78). If the representation of "Cleopatra" is excessive, too material, that of "La vie" is singularly immaterial, lacking in reality.20 Thus what are meant to be "Anges" appear as "burglars" and "ghosts": guilty, creeping, insubstantial things. In place of both the coarse and the pallid—the over- and the under-represented, we might say—Lucy prefers the meticulous detail she observes in "some exquisite little pictures of still life: wildflowers, wild-fruit, mossy wood-nests, casketing eggs that looked like pearls seen through clear green sea-water; all hung modestly beneath that . . . preposterous canvas [i.e., 'Cleopatra']" (276). Two representations of womanhood are compared and found lacking. What appears in their place is not the representation of yet another type of woman but inanimate objects—"exquisite little pictures of still life" that constitute an alternative to both the carceral domesticity of "La vie" and the flamboyance of "Cleopatra." Modest and small, suitable for display in the nineteenth-century home, these paintings evoke the domestic even as they distance themselves from its representation as female enslavement. At the same time, they make possible the imagination of a wildness that is

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not that of "Cleopatra." With their "wild-flowers, wild-fruit" and their "mossy wood-nests, casketing eggs that looked like pearls seen through clear green sea-water," the paintings encode the familial and the reproductive as at once natural and preternatural. If such a reconciliation of the various demands Villette places on womanhood is enabled in part by a shift in content—from women to objects, from history to nature—it is also made possible by a shift in representation itself, in style. Style may seem to take us far from questions of nation, sex, and colony—to solve such questions with, or abandon them for, the apparently more tame and tractable question of aesthetics. In fact, as Mary Jacobus has argued, representational style in Villette is intimately connected to the novel's construction of identity. Jacobus finds two competing generic styles in Villette: Gothic and realist. The narrative alternates between the two in much the same way that Lucy Snowe herself lives alternately under the sway of "Imagination" and "Reason." 21 Further, these styles carry ideological import: Jacobus associates realism with the denial of women's experience and sees the Gothic's occasional irruption into the text as a return of the repressed, a momentary victory against the silencing of women's voices. For Jacobus, then, the Gothic—which she characterizes as a mode that is "shifting, unstable, arbitrary and dominated by desire"—constitutes "the system of signification which can more properly [than Victorian realism] articulate the self" (51).22 Lucy's encounter with modes of visual representation reveals a parallel between the styles of painting in the gallery in Villette and the narrative styles Jacobus treats. The flat formality of "La vie," like the conventions of nineteenth-century realism and the iron hand of Lucy's Reason, constrains desire, directing it into the socially sanctioned channels of domesticity and religiosity. The flamboyance of "Cleopatra," like the Gothic viewed from midcentury and like Lucy's Imagination, is contaminated by desire, expressing too much of it in too outward a manner. If these parallels partially confirm the validity of Jacobus's reading of Villette, they also modify that reading in that they put into question both

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the repressiveness of realism and the desirability of the Gothic as an answer to repression. The restraint of "La vie" and of Reason can be likened to that of an intolerable realism, but, despite Lucy's condemnation of the painting, Reason nearly always dictates her actions. In doing so, Lucy writes at one point, "She [Reason] did right" (335). The excess of "Cleopatra" and of Lucy's Imagination can be likened to that of a liberating Gothic, but "Cleopatra" is disdained and Imagination constantly kept in check. The scene in the gallery in Villette indicates that Lucy finds neither restraint nor excess, neither realist nor Gothic modes, adequate to the task of representing her subjectivity. Something in between, or something else altogether, is required for such a task, the nature of which is indicated by the still life and its hybrid aesthetic—"mossy wood-nests, casketing eggs that looked like pearls seen through clear green sea-water"—combining meticulous detail, fantastic effect, and macabre undertones (that the nests are "casketing eggs" evokes, in addition to wild domesticity, a kind of death-in-life reminiscent of Lucy's own state of suspended animation). In order to return to the questions of nation, colony, and sexuality with which we began, and to see what this hybrid aesthetic—which, in an autobiographical novel, amounts to a hybrid subjectivity—looks like, we may turn to the scene that exemplifies for many critics Bronte's most spectacular achievement in the ViUette: Lucy's nocturnal wanderings in Villette's central park.

IV Near the end of Villette there is a remarkable and justly famous passage in which Lucy Snowe relates an opium reverie. Exhausted from two days of waiting for M. Paul to visit her before he leaves on his voyage to Guadeloupe, Lucy accepts a drink prepared to help her sleep, an opiate. Rather than stupefy' her, however, the drug achieves what no amount of hardship or abuse has been able to: Lucy's Passion, the ruthless suppression of which has been the burden of the novel, suddenly assumes ascendancy. Imagination

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sends a vision of the central park of Villette "with its long alleys all silent, lone and safe; among these lay a huge stone-basin— that basin I knew, beside which I had often stood—deep-set in the tree-shadows, brimming with cool water, clear, with a green, leafy, rushy bed" (547). The image of this basin, which holds out the prospect of both respite and joy to a narrator lacking in both, impels Lucy to escape from the pensionnat for the night, an act of flight parallel to the act that first brings her to Villette. Escape leads to the park, but not to "the moonlight, midnight park" of Lucy's imagination, empty and dark and cool (547). Instead, Lucy finds streets full of light and people, a landscape inhabited by what at first seem the hallucinations of a drugged mind: "Villette is one blaze, one broad illumination; the whole world seems abroad; moonlight and heaven are banished: the town, by her own flambeaux, beholds her own splendour—gay dresses, grand equipages, fine horses and gallant riders throng the bright streets. I see even scores of masks" (549). This gathering amounts to a recapitulation of the events and personages of Lucy's life to date, for virtually all her acquaintances are there: the Brettons and the Bassompieres as well as the "whole junta" arrayed against her marriage to M. Paul: Mme. Beck, Pere Silas, Mme. Walravens. Also present is M. Paul himself, with his ward, the namesake of his lost love, Justine Marie. In place of silence and moonlight Lucy happens upon a scene that uncannily resembles a spectacle enacted in the theater of her own mind. Memory provides the actors and opium throws an intensity and unreality over all. This passage has often been pointed to as representative of Charlotte Bronte's novelistic achievement, her contribution to fiction of "a vast new idiom and territory" (Heilman, "Bronte's 'New Gothic'" 129; see also Martineau; Ward xxvii-xxx). Robert Heilman calls this idiom "new Gothic," by which he means a stylistic device that makes possible "new ways to achieve the ends served by old Gothic—the discovery and release of new patterns of feeling, the intensification of feeling" (121). Heilman is close to Jacobus here, though the "patterns of feeling" for which Bronte is able to find expression are not for him exclusively women's ex-

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periences. His analysis differs further in that what enables such expression is not the resurfacing of Gothic itself, but a deft combination of Gothic and realist elements. The scene in the park in Villette exemplifies this generic combination; it is also, therefore, the moment in the text in which the hybrid subjectivity that is constructed in Villette is most clearly in evidence. Lucy is drawn to the park by a vision of moonlight on a central pool. This pool has been read as an archetypal image of femininity, Lucy's repressed womanhood beckoning to be reclaimed (Maynard 205; Heilman, "Charlotte Bronte, Reason, and the Moon" 41). While I would argue that it represents the alwayscapitalized Imagination rather than any specifically "feminine" essence, the crucial point to note is that this pure, unitary symbol of the self is sought for but never reached. In its place Lucy encounters a carnivalesque mixture of elements—jostling crowds, illuminations, masks, and revelry—to which she stands in a double relation. On one hand, the dreamlike quality that opium lends to the scene suggests that she yearns for and delights in the festivities. On the other, she declares herself to be resolutely removed, an onlooker who witnesses but refuses to participate: "Amidst such life and joy, it suited me to be alone—quite alone" (552). Peter Stallybrass and Allon White find similar patterns of longing and interdiction in relation to the carnivalesque in the female patients Freud treats for hysteria: Placed on the outside of a grotesque carnival body which is articulated as social pleasure and celebration, the female bourgeois subject introjects the spectacle as both the pathos of exclusion ("why can't that be me?") and as a negative representation which becomes phobic precisely through the law of her exclusion, the interdiction which defines her difference ("You must not be that"). (182-83; emphasis in original) Insofar as Lucy's escape to the park is framed as a search for self, what she discovers is that the heterogeneous throng is her—despite the fact that that is precisely what she must not be. Moreover, in light of the distinctions made earlier in the novel between Continental, colonial, and English, the particular

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nature of this heterogeneity is significant. The celebration Lucy does and does not participate in, the festival she recognizes as representative of her self but also profoundly alien, is a national fête day in honor of martyrs killed in Labassecour's battle for independence. Lucy's description of the battle betrays her characteristic contempt for all things Labassecourien: "In past days there had been, said history, an awful crisis in the fate of Labassecour, involving I know not what peril to the rights and liberties of her gallant citizens. Rumors of wars, there had been, if not wars themselves; a kind of struggling in the streets —a bustle—a running to and fro" (550).23 The tone is sarcastic and dismissive, but the structure of the scene ensures an association between this Continental national independence, however ridiculed, and the personal independence Lucy seeks. "[H]ere I stand—free!" Lucy declares during the celebrations, adopting the language of the fête to give voice to her own momentarily liberated condition. The Continent, which in the gallery scene, and indeed for most of the novel, is rejected as other, is here forced into service as a metaphor for the self. The search for a basin "brimming with cool water, clear, with a green, leafy, rushy bed" ends with the discovery of European nationality. But there is more to be said. On first entering the park, Lucy encounters a vision of a land of enchantment, a garden most gorgeous, a plain sprinkled with coloured meteors, a forest with sparks of purple and ruby and golden fire gemming the foliage; a region, not of trees and shadow, but of strangest architectural wealth—of altar and of temple, of pyramid, obelisk, and sphynx; incredible to say, the wonders and symbols of Egypt teemed throughout the park of Villette. (550) 2 4

As this description makes evident, the fête itself makes use of symbols of the Orient to celebrate Labassecourien independence. Colony, literally and historically a European possession "conceived of as desirable but subordinate" (Said, Culture 52), symbolically and metaphorically provides the means by which Labassecour expresses its freedom and its national identity—and the means by

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which Lucy Snowe here imaginatively envisions the components of her own identity.25 The effects associated with opium use in this scene recall the oriental destabilization of the self to which the drug gives rise in Confessions; Lucy Snowe's response to those effects, however, differs significantly from De Quincey's. What De Quincey presents as a hideous confusion demanding aggressive response is for Lucy Snowe freedom from relentless singularity. We encounter again a logic of "this/that/the other," only now in reverse. That is, Continent and colony, rather than providing negatives against which English nationality and identity are to be defined, constitute that identity. By this logic, the colonies are revealed to be the truth of Labassecourien national character, and that national character in turn provides a representation of Lucy Snowe's self. Earlier, the imperative of the text was to transform its autobiographical subject into an empty space, a space characterized by neither/nor: neither the excess and languor of "Cleopatra" nor the flat religiosity of "La vie d'une femme." Here this neither/nor becomes a both/and: both the signs and symbols of the Orient and the Continental nationality that they represent define the (English) narrating subject of Villette. The two chapters that chronicle the fête in the park end with Lucy's destruction of the nun, her triumph over the specter that has haunted her throughout the novel (as the ghost of Justine Marie, M. Paul's deceased fiancee, but also as England's demonic, Continental Other). Lucy discovers this specter to have been nothing but clothing, a "long black stole" with which de Hamal concealed his pursuit of Ginevra Fanshawe. To borrow Tzvetan Todorov's terms, in the moment of this discovery what has been fantastic becomes uncanny: the inexplicable and therefore potentially marvelous apparition of the nun resolves itself into the plausibility of mere disguise (Todorov 41-51; see also Monleón 10). This démystification may be seen as Lucy's defeat of the Other, her assertion of a self free from haunting and a knowledge of the world around her free from epistemological uncertainty. It might also— in light of its proximity to the scene in the park, might better— be read as the defeat of the habit of demonizing others and a rec-

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ognition of the inextricability of Other and self. The bed where the nun lies is, after all, Lucy's own: "My head reeled, for by the faint night-lamp, I saw stretched on my bed the old phantom — the Nun" (569). As the nun has been one of the central figures setting England and Continent against one another, its destruction destroys the invidious binary that it has helped to construct and fortify. It is in this sense that Garber is correct to assert that the collapse of rigid identities in the novel is brought about through the figure of the transvestite. Other moments of cross-dressing in the text signal a similar breakdown of boundaries: John Graham Bretton, most British and masculine of men, wins a sky-blue turban in a lottery and is forced to keep it (300); Lucy acts in a play dressed in a kind of half-drag, wearing a man's vest, collar, and tie on top of—rather than instead of—her "woman's garb" (209).26 These moments seem to indicate recognition throughout of a gender hybridity parallel to the national hybridity that comes to the fore in Lucy's opium-induced wandering through the fête. As is particularly evident in the scene of the paintings in the gallery in Villette, however, the blurring of lines between self and Other, whether sexual or national, is also systematically denied. Lucy Snowe's construction of an identity for herself in the novel works neither through absolute collapse nor absolute rigidity, but by way of alternation—a crossing back and forth between representational styles, sexual mores, and national and colonial subjectivities. The Crying Game owes its ability to both charm and disturb to a special relation to representational convention, a relation involving difference within repetition. As a transvestite, Dil violates expected norms of self-representation; yet, transvestism apart, Dil and Fergus live out the most hackneyed of celluloid romances. The film's effectiveness lies in this careful deployment of the subversive within the clichéd. As Judith Butler notes in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, in the face of the impossibility of simply absenting oneself from socially prescribed roles, subversive deconstruction and reconstruction of identity is an option

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only as performative variation or parodic repetition—telling, for instance, a heterosexual love story in which one of the players is a transvestite.27 Something of the same strategy is visible in Villette. The story the novel tells is a familiar Gothic tale: that of the constitution of English selfhood by setting England against the foreign. The valorized aspects of Lucy's identity—her Englishness, her Protestantism, her detailed and complex interiority, her powerful and powerfully suppressed sexuality—come into focus insofar as they are opposed to Continental and colonial Others. In Villette, however, the process by which the validation of individual identity occurs involves the recognition that such distinctions are also illusory. In narrative terms this recognition appears in the varied generic resources Lucy's autobiographical efforts draw upon: the specters, foreign institutions, and claustrophobia of the Gothic but also the rational, measured character development of domestic realism. The "impurity" indicated by that combination is insisted on even more pointedly in scenes such as the one documenting the celebration of Labassecourien independence, where Continental and colonial images express the identity of the Englishwoman. These moments of collapse and conflation do not negate or overwrite the distinctions that have gone before; rather, in a curious way, they depend upon them. Villette fashions a subjectivity for the Englishwoman that is its narrator by both borrowing from and rejecting conventions of Gothic narrative—conventions that would invoke invidious comparisons and place female characters in danger in the service of defining the English nation.

4

Written on the Body The Sensational Nation in Matthew Arnold and Wilkie Collins

The English are a dumb people. They can do great acts, but not describe them. Like the old Romans, and some few others, their Epic Poem is written on the Earth's surface: England her Mark! —Thomas Carl vie, Past and Present

IN THE INTRODUCTION I CONSIDERED an especially provocative implication of Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson's seminal attempt to rethink the nation and reformulate the grounds of its analysis: the association of the advent of the modern nation with a specific literary genre, the novel in general and the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century realist novel in particular.1 In claiming that nations depend upon a standardized print language and "empty time," Anderson implicates realist novels in the birth of nationalism, for as generic constructs and as commodities in largely monoglot markets such novels contributed to the development of both. Moreover, they represented within their pages a contained diversity analogous to the sameness-in-difference that serves as one of the criteria for imagining the nation (appropriately expressed in relief on U.S. coins: E Pluribus Unum).2 The centrality of such inclusivity functions as a crucial component in Anderson's thesis that nations define themselves, not primarily

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as antagonistic to other nations, but as collocations of citizens who—though of diverse classes, genders, and races—possess certain fundamental common attributes recognizable as nationality. Earlier chapters of Alien Nation have sought, in part, to contest such a view of the formation of national identity by demonstrating the usefulness of exclusivity and antagonism to defining Englishness, from the conflicted period of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, when Britain was engaged in a struggle with a Continental rival, through to the various imperial engagements of the mid-nineteenth century. But the link that Anderson suggests between inclusivity, novelistic realism, and the nation seems borne out by the fact that when, in the 1860s, a new "school" of narrative fiction appeared that reviewers received as a unique threat, this fiction took the form of a departure from high realism: the sensation novel. Similar to but more programmatic than Bronte's Villette, sensation novels combined realism with the Gothic, incorporating in particular the latter's tendency toward paranoia, xenophobia, and stereotype—the very characteristics of the genre that I have been arguing provided the means to tell one influential version of the story of what it meant to be English. Although sensation fiction was extremely popular with the reading public, reviewers judged its assault upon the generic conventions of Victorian realist narrative to be a threat to stable gender roles and, by extension, to English nationality itself. Indeed, the very popularity of reading material identified as somehow unEnglish prompted many critics to infer that England might no longer be what it had been or ought to be.3 Surprisingly, perhaps, many twentieth-century considerations of sensation fiction have largely agreed with contemporary critics in understanding the sensation novel as subversive—that is, as actively contributing to national crisis. An attentive reading of the text widely regarded as the first sensation novel, Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (i860), reveals the partial validity of this view but also its shortcomings. Somewhat paradoxically, such a view seems at once too sanguine and not sanguine enough about the potential effectivity of narra-

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tive fiction. It fails to acknowledge sufficiendy, on one hand, forms of containment that limit or mediate the impact of subversion and, on the other, the productive force of the fiction in its modification of and assimilation by various mid-Victorian discourses— in particular, the interlocking discourses of gender, genre, and the nation. By attending to the ways in which versions of English nationality are represented, undermined, and reconstructed in The Woman in White, I will show that its apparent subversiveness functions, not just to explode English nationality, but to explode it in the service of reproducing it with a difference. Further, by recognizing that the contemporary debate surrounding the national import of The Woman in White and other sensation novels took place specifically in the context of their departure from established novel istic convention, it will be possible not only to make precise the peculiarly textual mediation of their reconstruction of Englishness, but also to specify the relation at mid-century among nationality, gender, and genre—a relation adumbrated in sensation fiction as well as in the quite different texts of Matthew Arnold. Like ViUette, Collins's and Arnold's texts move between two generic poles, realist and Gothic. But whereas Bronte's novel articulates the Gothic as the alluring but suspect outer limit of an interstitial national subjectivity, for Collins and Arnold it functions rather as a tool with which to inscribe indelible Otherness, a narrative that announces—to borrow the marvelous hyperbole of Carlylean phraseology—"England her Mark!"

I To Mr. Collins belongs the credit of having introduced into fiction those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors. This innovation gave a new impetus to the literature of horrors. It was fatal to the authority of Mrs. Radcliffe and her everlasting casde in the Apennines. What are the Apennines to us, or we to the Apennines? Instead of

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Chapter 4 the terrors of "Udolpho," we were treated to the terrors of the cheerful country-house and the busy London lodgings. And there is no doubt that these were infinitely the more terrible. — Henry James, "Miss Braddon"

For reviewers such as James, as well as for more recent critics, the sensation novel of the 1860s marked that moment in English literary history when the Gothic turned inward, leaving its traditional locale in the more or less distant past of foreign countries to trouble the "cheerful country-house and the busy London lodgings" of nineteenth-century England.4 There are, of course, earlier instances of novels that feature elements of Gothic narrative in domestic settings. Frankenstein's monster covertly follows his creator on a journey through the British Isles. De Quincey's London, in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, emanates an omnipresent threat as surreal as that of any Radcliffean Italian mountain fastness. Bertha Mason, a foreign madwoman in an English attic, haunts Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (and Jane Eyre). And, as we saw in the previous chapter, Lucy Snowe, in Bronte's Villette, constructs an autobiography and an autobiographical subjectivity by means of a narrative that shuttles back and forth between the Continental and the insular, the alien and the domestic. None of these texts, however, belongs to a distinct subgenre in the way that Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, Mrs. Henry Wood's East Lynne (1861), Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862), and dozens of other works published in the 1860s and early 1870s belong to what was called the "sensation school"; and none was received with the extraordinary degree of fear and hostility that sensation novels inspired in the mid-Victorian literary establishment. H. F. Chorley, reviewing Collins's Armadale (1866) for the Athenaeum, found in the popularity of sensation novels evidence that he lived "in a period of diseased invention" of which "the coming phase . . . may be palsy" (732). A "virus," another reviewer called sensationalism, "spreading in all directions" ("Belles Let-

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très" 27o). The disease metaphor is apposite, succinctly expressing the common accusation that these novels threatened the social order by spreading moral contagion. Sensation novel plots teem with crime, as had those of the Newgate novels of the 1830s, but crime with a difference: in this new type of novel thefts and murders are accomplished, not by Newgate Calendar oudaws, but by middle-class men and, especially, women who sometimes make it to the end of three volumes with impunity (Boyle 127; Reierstad 91-96). Bigamy is commonplace, as is falsified identity, insanity, kidnapping, and false imprisonment. Asylums, graveyards, isolated manor houses—sensational sites—abound, and their mere presence in reading material destined for the hands of young women (the potential audience about whom reviewers were most concerned) was taken to be dangerous. The ubiquity of such scenes and characters doubtless marked sensation fiction as objectionable, but the particular focus of critical animosity lay elsewhere—not in content itself, but in the way this content was treated. The novels were not seen as diseased merely because they depicted crime; Newgate fiction had done that. Nor was the deleterious influence attributed to them due to the fictional representation of lower-class life, which by the 1860s could boast a tradition developed, in part, by well-respected authors such as Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell. Nor, finally, did' the presence of victimizing rather than victimized women alone identify sensation novels as a threat. Objections to and fears about sensation fiction arose in response to its discursive hybridity: its tendency, not simply to encompass, but actively to mix a plethora of contrasting ideological and literary elements within the bounds of a single work. As indicated above, this hvbridity is most easily recognized in setting and character. Sensation novels stage the interpénétration of underworld and domestic world, the confusion between drawing room and asylum, the overlap of middle-or upper-class woman and lower-class criminal. Their effects depend upon figurative miscegenation at all levels. Signalled by and parallel to this mixed content, however, is a more properly formal hybridity, one best understood in terms of the

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simultaneous presence in sensation fiction of two conflicting generic patterns: domestic realism and the Gothic. The marriage of realist and Gothic narrative was, for 1860s critics, the most scandalous formal characteristic of sensation fiction. "Sensation" itself—in this context a term that names a physical response on the part of both characters and readers—was thought to result from the yoking together of these two generic opposites. Margaret Oliphant, for instance, attributes production of the characteristic sensation effect to a disturbingly realistic Gothicism. Writing in Blackwood's Magazine of what she terms the two most startling "sensation scenes" in The Woman in White— Hartright's late-night meeting with Anne Catherick on the road to London and his subsequent recognition that Anne exactly resembles one of his drawing pupils at Limmeridge House, Laura Fairlie—Oliphant notes: The more we perceive the perfectly legitimate nature of the means used to produce the sensation, the more striking does that sensation become. . . . We cannot object to the means by which [Collins] startles and thrills his readers; everything is legitimate, natural, and possible; all the exaggerations of excitement are carefully eschewed, and there is almost as little that is objectionable in this highly-wrought sensation-novel, as if it had been a domestic history of the most gende and unexciting kind. ("Sensation Novels" s66)

While Oliphant here praises the generic hybridity of sensationalism, the more general reaction—one that Oliphant herself would come to share as the proliferation of sensation novels continued unabated throughout the 1860s—was that of scandalized outrage. Reviewer after reviewer echoed the sentiment that these novels were symptomatic of and continued to contribute to a decline in English civilization.5 Taking their cue from Victorian critical response, twentiethcentury literary critics have often read sensation novels as subversive.6 In what is by now a familiar assessment, sensation fiction has been seen as fomenting the breakdown of social class hierarchies, challenging the assumption of a moral universe, and undermining

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distinctions essential to the functioning of middle-class Victorian ideology—distinctions between popular and serious fiction, criminality and innocence, barbarism and civilization, masculinity and femininity. Much of this subversion derives, for these critics, from the novels' content, as if disconcerting fictional events and characters assailed readers direcdy. Such a conclusion may be due to the Victorians' own understanding of the immediacy of sensation. As Oliphant writes in the review of The Woman in White cited above, in sensation fiction "[t]he reader's nerves are affected like the hero's. . . . He, too, is chilled by a confused and unexplainable alarm" (572). But to take such pronouncements at face value is to neglect the significance, even to arguments of direct physical response, of the specifically textual origin of sensational effects. As Oliphant is careful to explain, and as James suggests in his claim that sensation gave "a new impetus to literature of horrors," what shocks is not simply fictional murderers, bigamists, and lunatics, but the deliberate violation of generic convention indicated by, but not reducible to, content in itself. Winifred Hughes argues forcefully for the centrality of this formal, generic dissonance to the subversiveness of sensation. If Victorian social dogma seems threatened by sensation, that threat is mediated by—indeed, in part takes the form of—a threat to the institution of the novel. As Hughes points out, narrative fiction in the form of the novel succeeded in taking over cultural authority from poetry around the time that sensation fiction came along (39).7 The kind of novel possessed of this authority, however, was the domestic or social realist novel, exemplified by works such as Dickens's David Copperfield (1850) and George Eliot's Middlemarch (1872). Patrick Brantlinger best expresses the relation of the sensation subgenre to these novels when he writes that the "development of the sensation novel marks a crisis in the history of literary realism" ("What" 27). With its apparent nonseriousness and its celebration of the scandalous and improbable, the sensation novel directly affronted the conventions of realism. At the same time, sensation made use of realist conventions in order to achieve its peculiar effects. Unlike genres that clearly departed from real-

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ism—melodrama and an older and "purer" sort of Gothic, for instance—sensation was a threat not because it was wholly other but because it was a mixture, a calculated and partial violation. To make matters worse, Collins and other sensationalists undertook this violation in the name of a higher realism. As Hughes notes, "[t]he juxtaposition of fantasy and realism . . . results from a sometimes frenzied attempt to penetrate the dense surface of the realist world, to release its hidden energies and exorcise its fears, to confront realities beyond the everyday" (67).® If sensation affronted mid-century society at large, it did so through realism and precisely because it appeared to be usurping the cultural authority invested in realism to represent the Victorians to themselves.9 The question of sensation's subversiveness, then, cannot be viewed apart from its literary context. This subversiveness is inextricably a generic issue, an issue of hybridity at the level of formal conventions—which is simply to say that any threat posed by novels of the sensation school was an assault in and on a certain discourse as much as on the physical bodies of its readers. Recognizing sensation's place in discourse allows, in turn, modification of the consensus as to its subversiveness. Critics are correct to note the well-nigh hysterical reaction among reviewers to the supposed threat posed by sensation. As that threat was in discourse, however, it should also have been subject to the containment that Foucault argues is one of the salient features of the discursive. The entire polemical thrust of the first volume of The History of Sexuality lies in demonstrating how proclamations of sexual liberation, subversions of the supposed repression of sex, are contained within the larger discourse of sexuality. Foucault argues that liberatory pronouncements function with, not against, repression and prudishness to contribute to the proliferation of sexualities. These apparent opposites, he writes, "are doubdess only component parts that have a local and tactical role to play in a transformation into discourse, a technology of power, and a will to knowledge that are far from being reducible to the former" (12). The peculiar effectivity of the discourse of sexuality is enabled by its ability to utilize both repression and subversion.

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This understanding of subversion suggests that sensation novels' challenge to the status quo may have been recontained within it. Just such an argument is made by the trenchant Foucauldian critic of the nineteenth-century novel, D. A. Miller. In The Novel and the Police, Miller argues that texts such as Collins's The Moonstone (1868) and The Woman in White function, as indeed the novel as an institution does, "to confirm the novel-reader in his identity as 'liberal subject,' a term with which I allude not just to the subject whose private life . . . is felt to provide constant inarguable evidence of his constitutive 'freedom,' but also to . . . the political regime that sets store by this subject" (x). Novels use subversion the better to accomplish this interpellating task. With regard to The Moonstone, for instance, Miller maintains that the novel's rejection of the figure of Sergeant Cuff—and, by implication, the national apparatus of governmental policing he represents—offers the spectacle of subversion at one level to cover for a reinstallation of Cuff at another: "the move to discard the role of the detective is at the same time a move to disperse the function of detection''' (42; emphasis in original). Subversion here functions, as Foucault argues it does in the discourse of sexuality, as a cover for and disavowal of the continual expansion of discipline (16). 10 Miller's insights are thus of help in revising the critical consensus surrounding the subversiveness of sensation. If we consider the novels' participation in a discourse of nationality, it becomes apparent that by representing in their pages an assault upon cherished national icons, in particular the Englishwoman and the home, they worked to undermine a stable sense of English national identity. In addition to suffering spectacularly in the way of Radcliffean victims or De Quinceyan martyrs, Englishwomen in sensation fiction prey upon others in attempts to satiate sexual or monetary appetites. Moreover, the sensational home, rather than constituting an inviolable refuge from foreign persecution, is a space always subject to corruption from within. 11 Miller enables an analysis of such apparent subversion as a destruction of English national identity that ultimately functions in the service of its subsequent reconstruction and reinstallation. I would add, however,

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that for Foucault discourse works not merely to ensure the continuous reproduction of the same—as, for instance, Althusserian Ideological State Apparatuses do—but to harness subversion in order to produce difference. The first volume of The History of Sexuality articulates a discourse of sexuality that neither negates sexuality nor merely reaffirms it as eternally the same; rather, in both its repressive and liberatory guises this discourse has effected "a dispersion of sexualities, a strengthening of their disparate forms, a multiple implantation of 'perversions'" (37). For Miller, however, the novel confirms one type of subject and one type of politics endlessly. The lack of historical grounding with which he is often and accurately charged, then, appears not only understandable but symptomatic. He fails to provide any cxtranovelistic history not as an oversight but because it is in a sense irrelevant, in that each novel he treats interpellates one and only one subject, enforcing a regime of the same. Any differences introduced by the vicissitudes of history take their place, precisely, as that which must be denied if the liberal subject is to be constituted successfully. Closer than The Novel and the Police to my argument about sensation fiction is Nancy Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction. As I noted in the chapter on Radcliffe, Armstrong—like Miller—performs a reading of the English novel that sees it as actively functioning to confirm liberal, bourgeois subjectivity in its readers. She maintains that the rise of the novel "created a private domain of culture that was independent of the political world and overseen by a woman," giving textual embodiment to "a cultural fantasy [that] held forth the promise that individuals could realize a new and more fundamental identity" (98). Unlike Miller, however, Armstrong attends closely to the novel's ability to produce difference as well as to reproduce sameness. Thus, for instance, whereas the novel in the eighteenth century represented forms of consciousness and rankings of social value antithetical to the aristocracy, from whom it was then important for the middle class to distinguish itself, after the 1830s the novel took as an object of critique the emergent working class, at that time more of a threat.

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In both instances woman is the model for bourgeois subjectivity, and this subjectivity is defined in broadly the same terms; nevertheless, with change in historical conditions comes a concomitant change in discursive strategy and in the subject produced. Like Armstrong, I view the figure of woman as central to the identity-formation of the middle class. In the narrative and visual representations with which Alien Nation has been concerned, the spectacle of victimized Englishwomen abroad foments the elaboration of Englishness as distinct from the foreign. Despite their obsessive recourse to women in danger, implicit in such representations is an inviolable, feminized domestic space at home that retains its status as sanctuary for the middle-class Englishman. 12 Consider, in this regard, the passage in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater that De Quincey places immediately before the section of the text entitled "The Pains of Opium": Let there be a cottage, standing in a valley, 18 miles from any town. . . . Paint me, then, a room seventeen feet by twelve, and not more than seven and a half feet high. . . . Make it populous with books: and, furthermore, paint me a good fire; and furniture, plain and modest, befitting the unpretending cottage of a scholar. And, near the fire, paint me a tea-table; and (as it is clear that no creature can come to see one such a stormy night,) place only two cups and saucers on the tca-trav: and, if you know how to paint such a thing symbolically, or otherwise, paint me an eternal teapot—eternal a parte ante, and a parte post -, for I usually drink tea from eight o'clock at night to four o'clock in the morning. And, as it is very unpleasant to make tea, or to pour it out for oneself, paint me a lovely young woman, sitting at the table. Paint her arms like Aurora's, and her smiles like Hebe's:— but no, dear M., not even in jest let me insinuate that thy power to illuminate my cottage rests upon a tenure so perishable as mere personal beautv; or that the witchcraft of angelic smiles lies within the empire of anv earthly pencil. (1822 9 3 - 9 5 ) 1 3

This passage and the cottage it evokes serve as the textual frontier between opium's pleasures and its pains. The books, furniture, and "eternal teapot" comprise an interior that protects against both the "stormy night" without and the anguish that awaits De Quincey (and his readers) on the very next page. Above all, the magic of domesticity is secured by the "lovely young woman" who

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first appears as a mythological being (Aurora, Hebe) and then as ineffable, beyond "the empire of any earthly pencil." Sensation novels depict the violation of sanctuaries such as this one, implicidy a violation of the English ideal of domesticity itself.14 But sensation—and The Woman in White in particular— undermines the dominant version of middle-class English nationality only in order to reconstitute it with a difference. The effect is a symbolic expansion of middle-class hegemony: in Collins's and other sensation novels, middle-class English masculinity incorporates within itself the signs and powers of the aristocracy. This accession amounts to an incorporation of an earlier form of Englishness, properly residual but still evident in various manifestations of Victorian medievalism (Tennyson's Idylls of the King, for instance, which began appearing in 1859), which locates national identity in a rural, aristocratic realm evocative of an idealized chivalric manliness.15 The sensationalism of The Woman in White, which places uncertainty at the center of the home by its inversion of class and gender roles as well as its representation of body, home, and nation as permeable, open spaces, subverts the domestic, middle-class version of Englishness. Imagined victimizations of women, in Radcliffe and De Quincey confined to the Continent (Italy, France) or the Orient (India, China), in Collins plague England itself. Such subversion, though, was actively productive of an expanded Englishness—one that recuperated for professional, middle-class manhood the signs of a chivalric, rural, and aristocratic national identity.

II Englishness has had to be constantly reproduced, and the phases of its most intense reproduction—borne as its finest moments—have simultaneously been phases of threat to its existence from within and without. — Robert Colls, "Englishness and the Political Culture"

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The historical moment that gave rise to sensation novels was, as the stridency of critical reviews indicates, perceived to be one of crisis. War in the Crimea and the Indian Rebellion contributed to such a perception by putting into question Britain's imperial role abroad, while divisive debate over the passage of the Second Reform Bill raised tensions at home. This ideologically fraught period gave rise to less apparently peripheral and ephemeral responses than those produced by sensationalists and their detractors. Far more central and lasting were the writings of Matthew Arnold, especially his full-scale critique of England in the 1860s, Culture and Anarchy (1869). While Arnold may at first seem to have little to do with sensation's subversion and reconstruction of Englishness, the strategy he employs to argue for an alteration in the national character closely resembles the strategy found in sensation. Arnold simultaneously deploys two views of nationality—views that, in generic terms, correspond to realism and the Gothic. This deployment is most evident, not in Culture and Anarchy itself, but in two other works from the 1850s and 1860s: On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867) and "England and the Italian Question" (1859). Before considering The Woman in White in detail, I will turn briefly to these texts to make precise the way in which conceptions of nationality in the 1860s can be seen as generic, as well as the use to which such conceptions could be put in effecting a controlled reconstitution of Englishness. On the Study of Celtic Literature—first delivered as a series of lectures at Oxford, then run in the Cornhill Magazine in 1865 before being collected and issued as a book—makes a recognizably humanist effort to constitute Celtic literature as an object worthy of study. There Arnold insists that the English have something to learn from the peoples of Wales and Ireland living and dead, a position that may imply a triumph of that disinterested love of truth recommended in Culture and Anarchy. In fact, the Celts possess the very Hellenic sweetness and light that will be prescribed in the later and more influential text as "the one thing needful" for the English: there is "something Greek in them, something humane, something (I am afraid one must add) which in the

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English common people is not to be found" (9). This view of Arnold's work on the Celts as disinterested and generous must be modified, however, when his project is revealed as an intellectual extension of the already accomplished English political hegemony. Arnold reassures English nationalists that they need not be threatened by mere intellectual curiosity about their politically marginalized fellow Britons, for "[t]he fusion of all the inhabitants of these islands into one homogeneous, English speaking whole,. . . the swallowing up of separate provincial nationalities, is a consummation to which the natural course of things inevitably tends" (io). 16 Arnold's text demonstrates the ubiquity, peculiar power, and stark contradictions of national categories of thought in the 1860s. Most remarkable about these lectures is the way in which what begins as a narrow, almost antiquarian effort to reevaluate the merits of a particular set of manuscripts quickly becomes a full-blown exercise in national self-fashioning. Arnold initially presents his task as two-fold: first, he must demonstrate the authenticity of Celtic literature by careful analysis of what he calls "internal evidence"—that is, of the texts themselves; second, he must trace the influence of these texts on English literature. Such an undertaking appears straightforward enough, and appropriate for Arnold as Professor of Poetry at Oxford. Almost immediately, however, Arnold turns his attention away from textual analysis to the isolation of essential national qualities of the Celts and, in order to make clear distinctions between the two, the English. What makes this possible is Arnold's sense of the centrality of literature in expressing national characteristics: "By the forms of its language a nation expresses its very self. . . . But the forms of its language are not our only key to a people; what it says in its language, its literature, is the great key" (70). Thus, Celtic texts, when pressed, reveal "the truth" about the Celts—a truth that, conveniently enough, confirms what is already "known" about them simply by virtue of their position of subordination to the English. 17 They have a vigorous love of beauty for its own sake; they are light-hearted and bright; they lack, how-

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ever, the patience and perseverance either to achieve sustained literary productions or to create a lasting political civilization. As contrasted with them, the Germans or Teutons are dull but persevering. The English occupy the enviable position of combining the best traits of both: the "English genius," writes Arnold, "is characterised, I have repeatedly said, by energy with honesty" (80; emphasis in original). Arnold is aware that this portrayal of Englishness may seem chauvinistic, and he thus deliberately denies that English culture is the best culture. In fact, On the Study of Celtic Literature functions as a trial run for the critique of England that will be Culture and Anarchy}* Despite such even-handedness, however, the very national characteristics expressed by the Celts' rich cultural achievement—even as that achievement promises a needed supplement to English culture—ensure their continued existence on the political fringe. There is in Arnold's conception of national "genius" a deep contradiction wielded to advantage but never resolved. At one moment national characteristics are properly racial, inherent in the Celts, Germans, and English because of their blood, their very being. Only such a concept could underwrite Arnold's confidence in the "swallowing up of separate provincial nationalities . . . to which the natural course of things inevitably tends" (10). The Celts are by nature incapable of ruling themselves; the English are by nature fit rulers. Further, indications of such immutable, natural qualities of being are graphically present, inscribed on the surface of peoples and their literary productions: "As there are for physiology physical marks . . . which determine the type of a people, so for criticism there are spiritual marks which determine the type, and make us speak of the Greek genius, the Teutonic genius, the Celtic genius, and so on" (79). At another moment, however, national characteristics are due to a process of historical development and are, hence, mutable. Great outpourings of national genius are possible only "when the embryo has grown and solidified into a distinct nation, into the Gaul or German of history" (72). Fully developed national characteristics are the result, that is, of a people's implication in a cer-

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tain narrative of past deeds and events, an open-ended narrative capable of accommodating development and change. This possibility for change underwrites the entire Arnoldian project of pushing Culture on the English, for only such a possibility allows the English to alter themselves, to become more Celtic or, as Arnold prescribes in Culture and Anarchy, more Hellenic. An earlier Arnoldian text, "England and the Italian Question," more sharply exposes the paradoxical logic behind these two sorts of nationality. There Arnold makes a case for the validity of Italy's nationalist aspirations, which in 1859 culminated in a war against Austria in the interests of Italian unification. He is particularly concerned to defend the status of Italy as a great nation deserving of national unity, and he makes his argument on the basis of Italy's great past. In having a great past Italy is like England, and unlike Poland and Ireland: "A Pole does not descend by becoming [politically] a Russian, or an Irishman by becoming an Englishman. But an Englishman, with his country's history behind him, descends and deteriorates by becoming anything but an Englishman;... an Italian, by becoming anything but an Italian" (17).19 Here again we see both a historical, mutable nationality and a racial, immutable one. The Italians are, at the time of the writing, a colonized people—as are the Poles and Irish. Yet, because of their history, the Italians rightfully aspire to national unity and self-rule. Arnold constructs a narrative of the Italian past fit for only one conclusion: full nationhood. By contrast, Ireland and Poland cannot hope for national self-determination because they have no narrative that would lead to it. They have not done, they have merely been; and, having done nothing, they are condemned to remain subject races, to live out their present indefinitely. There are significant similarities between these two kinds of nationality—one mutable and implicated in open-ended narrative, the other immutable, racial, and graphic—and the two generic components of sensation novels: realism and the Gothic. One of Arnold's conceptions of nationality imagines nations as if they were realist novels: on this view, nations, like novels, function temporally in terms of development, geographically in terms

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of contained diversities. The English and Italians possess this kind of nationality: the product of history, subject to further change, bounded by their past and by the outer limits of comprehensibility for shared regional and class languages. Arnold's other conception of nationality, however, does not fit the realist mold. He writes of the Welsh, the Irish, and the Poles in terms of a more nearly racial conception of national character: atemporal, without apparent origin or end; graphic and indelible, leaving its marks even after its bearers have been politically incorporated into a "greater" nation. If Arnold's model of English and Italian nationality has a literary analogue in the realist novel, this other, racial model would in literary terms correspond to the Gothic, which characteristically substitutes static stereotypes for characters capable of development, metaphysical absolutes for social contingencies, and providential destiny for open-ended plotting. In On the Study of Celtic Literature the interplay of these two types of nationality — narrative (realist) and graphic (Gothic)—works to legitimate Arnold's project of redefining the English. He depends upon a narratable and mutable nationality to argue, here and in Culture and Anarchy, for change in the English. At the same time, he uses a graphic and immutable nationality to naturalize the continued marginalization of the Celts and to ward off the possibility that, if the English change, the difference between Celt and Englishman may dissolve. Arnold plays one type of nationality off the other to allow for a safe change. Such tactical use of contradictory ways of imagining nationality is suggestive with regard both to Anderson's retheorization of nationalism and to sensation fiction's combination of realism and the Gothic. Anderson and those most influenced by him clearly wish to deny the importance of racial—what I have been calling Gothic—modes of thought to defining nationality. "The fact of the matter is," he writes, "that nationalism thinks in terms of historical destinies, while racism dreams of eternal contaminations, transmitted from the origins of time through an endless sequence of loathsome copulations: outside history" (136).20 Arnold, however, reveals that these two conceptions of the nation

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are not mutually exclusive, for even as he invokes the historical destiny of some nations he does so against the background of the "eternal contaminations" of others. In the generic hybridity of The Woman in White we see a similar phenomenon. Initially, the Gothic aspects of the text disrupt English national identity. This disruption, however, functions in the service of reconstitution — a rewriting of Englishness accomplished by realist narrative but dependent upon the Gothic destruction that precedes it. As in Arnold, that is, the Gothic provides not subversion, but opportunity and safety: at first disruptive, it finally enables change and delineates the boundaries of that change's effect.

Ill If I seem a little bizarre, remember the wild profusion o f my inheritance . . . perhaps, if one wishes to be an individual in the midst o f the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque. — Salcem Sinai in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children

The Woman in White opens with the spectacle of Professor Pesca. Walter Hartright, principal narrator and sympathetic protagonist, leaves his L o n d o n chambers to visit his mother and sister in their Hampstead cottage. "I had hardly rung the bell," writes Hartright, "before the house door was opened violently; my worthy Italian friend, Professor Pesca, appeared in the servant's place; and darted out joyously to receive me, with a shrill foreign parody on an English cheer" (35). Dwarfish, excitable, exaggerated in gestures and sentiment—in short, transparendy and thoroughly un-English—Pesca is nonetheless bent on "doing his utmost to turn himself into an Englishman" (35). A n homage to the nation that has received him in his exile from Italy, Pesca's attempts to adopt national characteristics alien to what Hartright

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calls his "warm Southern nature" result in only absurdity (36). The Italian's speech, with which he takes special pains, is a jumble of solecisms and stock phrases; his dress pitifully inappropriate to his figure; and his emulation of manly English athleticism nearly fatal. Failure in this last effort accounts for his place in Hartright's mother's house, as well as for his place in The Woman in White in its entirety. Unable to swim (despite his promising name), yet convinced that swimming is as necessary to being an Englishman as foxhunting or cricket, Pesca sinks to the bottom of the sea off Brighton beach, is fished out by Walter Hartright, and devotes his life to repaying the debt thus incurred (36-37). 21 As it turns out, this debt is twice repaid: once to begin the novel, and once again to end it. Finding his friend a position as drawing master at Limmeridge House, where Hartright becomes entangled in complicated circumstances that will require several hundred pages to unravel, is Pesca's first repayment. The occasion for a second one is brought about by means of Pesca's countryman, the immensely fat, immensely charismatic Count Fosco. If Pesca is laughable in his attempts at being English, Fosco is dangerously successful. Fosco "passes" despite his refusal to ape English habits or to forego certain characteristically foreign and, significantly, effeminate behaviors: love of pets, a preference for sugar water over brandy, and the wearing of flamboyant, dandified clothing. 22 Fluent in his speech and master of the elaborate social mores of his host nation, his talent at being English far exceeds that of his bungling English coconspirator, Sir Percival Glyde—so much so that, after a series of crimes against the woman with whom Hartright is in love, he escapes England and English law entirely. He would also escape Hartright's vengeance if not for the fact that, like Pesca, Fosco too is indelibly marked by his foreignness. Both bear the literal mark, inscribed on their arms, of a secret society of Italian nationalists referred to as "The Brotherhood"—the revelation of which fact constitutes the second repayment of Pesca's debt to Hartright. This outward mark represents an inward difference, an essential

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Otherness that Pesca, late in the novel, describes to Hartright as " 'the iron that has entered into our souls and has gone too deep for you to find it'" (595; emphasis in original). But this "iron" is, in fact, all too easily found, for it is precisely the persistent visibility of Pesca's inability to be anything other than Other that renders his emulation of Englishness so ludicrous. This same visibility provides both the means and the logic by which Fosco is put to death. His assassination at the hands of The Brotherhood he has tried to leave, made possible by the mark on his arm attesting his membership, is punishment for attempting to deny that mark's presence and thus to betray the loyalties of which it serves as a sign. Fosco is last seen on display in the Paris morgue. Naked and wounded in the chest, the Count bears a new mark, one that at once cancels and confirms the first: the letter " T " has been cut into his flesh on top of the earlier mark, a letter that Hartright later learns stands for "the Italian word, 'Traditore' [Traitor]" (644). Pesca and Fosco: two versions of a national stereotype that might be called, after Ann Radcliffe's novel, "The Italian," whose grotesque bodies open and close The Woman in White; two incarnations of a fantasy of Otherness, one parodically tiny and ineffective, the other enormous and masterful. 23 1 have begun my discussion of the novel with these two figures because they indicate the degree to which its concerns revolve around the nation. The penetration and inscription of bodies, the relation of gender to identity, the effect of a Gothic villain in a domestic setting—in Pesca and Fosco these diverse thematics repeatedly find their horizon of meaning in nationality. Foreignness thus accounts for the Italians' grotesque penetrability: they are inscribed by The Brotherhood, run through with the "iron" of Italianness. Foreignness both explains and finds confirmation in their effeminacy: Pesca's failure in English manliness, Fosco "like a fat St Cecilia masquerading in male attire" (250). And foreignness enables their disruption of English life: in the case of Pesca, an elaborate effort to make himself English ends in rescue from drowning and Hartright's

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changed circumstances; Fosco perpetrates crimes that Collins is supposed to have thought " t o o ingenious for an English villain" (Robinson 139). The degree of their disruptiveness is indicated by Walter Hartright himself, who says of Pesca: "he was . . . to alter me to myself almost past recognition" (37). Themselves invaded bodily, the Italians in turn infiltrate the English domestic world. Set against this Gothic narrative of foreign invasion is Hartright's story, which takes the form of a realist Bildungsrotnan in which he learns how to be an Englishman. In the first third of the novel he is characterized, like the Italians, by un-English effeminacy. D. A . Miller locates the source of this effeminacy in "female contagion—stricdy, in the woman's touch" (152). Miller here refers to the famous scene of Hartright's meeting with Anne Catherick, the woman in white of the title, on the road to London, "when," relates Hartright, "in one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop by the touch of a hand laid lighdy and suddenly on my shoulder from behind m e " (47). Yet Hartright's passivity—the sign of his faulty gender identity—exists earlier, in the "inexplicable unwillingness" he feels to apply for the position Pesca has found for him (43). It reaches its apogee when he is, more than touched, penetrated by love for Anne Catherick's half-sister and look-alike, Laura Fairlie. Marian Halcombe, the second of Laura's two half-sisters, expresses the invasive, feminizing danger of this love when she commands Hartright: " 'Crush i t ! . . . Here, where you first saw her, crush it. Don't shrink under it like a woman. Tear it out, trample it underfoot like a m a n ! ' " (96). He cannot tear it out, however; instead, it expels him. A s if in testimony to the degree to which Hartright's failed masculinity amounts to failed nationality, the inability to master his feeling results in headlong flight—first from Limmeridge House, then from England altogether. He finds a place as a draughtsman on an expedition to Central America that takes him away from the country and from the middle third of the novel. The details of this voyage remain obscure; all Hartright reveals is that he survives dangers fatal to others: "Death by disease, death by the Indians, death by

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drowning—all three had approached me; all three had passed me by" (426). O n his return to England this survival explicitiy signals his accession to (English) manhood: These pages are not the record of my wanderings and my dangers away from home. T h e motives which led me from my country and my friends to a new world of adventure and peril are known. From that self-imposed exile I came back, as I had hoped, prayed, believed I should come back—a changed man. In the waters o f a new life I had tempered my nature afresh. In the stern school o f extremity and danger my will had learnt to be strong, my heart t o be resolute, my mind to rely on itself. I had gone out to fly from my o w n future. I came back to face it, as a man should. (427)

The remainder of the novel follows Hartright on a search for the means to restore Laura Fairlie's identity—stolen from her in his absence by Glyde and Fosco—and to punish those responsible. This search involves Hartright in travels throughout England that replicate the traverse of the social landscape characteristic of realist narrative. In an effort to escape the notice of Fosco and Glyde after his return from Central America, he sets up meager house with Laura Fairlie and Marian Halcombe in a working-class area of London's East End, "a poor and a populous neighbourhood" (452). After being discovered by Fosco, the three move into a middle-class London suburb, "quieter" and with "purer air" (569). Finally, upon the defeat of Fosco and the restoration of Laura's identity, they relocate to the rural estate of Limmeridge House itself. Far-flung excursions undertaken to find evidence against Fosco and Glyde punctuate each of these moves up the social scale, and these excursions, too, provide picaresque breadth to the natural and human geography represented in the novel. The Woman in White contains two narratives, then, corresponding to Arnold's two conceptions of nationality and, like them, imbricated but distinct: a Gothic tale of intrigue masterminded by an Italian villain; an English chronicle of, to use Arnold's phrase, "energy with honesty," involving detection but culminating in a domestic tableau. The hinge on which both narratives turn, the figure that makes possible Fosco's crimes and Hart-

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right's socio-economic ascent, is the figure of woman—women, in fact: the eerily similar half-sisters, Anne Catherick and Laura Fairlie. I have been arguing that the strategies of Collins and Arnold are analogous, but the importance of women in Collins's text indicates its difference from "England and the Italian Question" and On the Study of Celtic Literature. The issue of gender does arise for Arnold. He himself cites an attack in The Times that castigates him as "a sentimentalist who talks nonsense about the children of Taliesin and Ossian, and whose dainty taste requires something more flimsv than the strong and sturdy morality of his fellow Englishmen" (On the Study xv). This charge harnesses what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has called "homophobic blackmail" to nationalist ends, threatening both to feminize and forcibly to deracinate (de-Anglicize) Arnold for siding with the Celts (Sedgwick, Between Men 89). In Collins's novel, though, the definition of the nation is made, not primarily in relation to effeminate or feminized men, but on the body of woman. Tamar Heller suggests that the centrality of and ambivalence toward women in The Woman in White and Collins's other novels derive from his conflicted position as a man in female territory, an aspiring author struggling to make a place for himself in a field dominated by women. Because he worked in the novel form, that is, and particularly in subgenres traditionally associated with women writers and a female readership (the Gothic and, to a lesser extent, sensation itself), Collins found himself caught between his identification with women and women's marginality and the necessity to distance himself from them in the name of masculine professionalism (2-n). 2 4 According to Heller, this bind plays itself out in the novels by means of the repeated representation of "acts of reading and writing by women" (1). Such acts figure prominently in The Woman in White. Marian Halcombe, for instance, meticulously records the plot against her half-sister, Laura, until Fosco discovers and takes possession of her journal. Just as significant as scenes of women writing, however, are moments in the novel in which women are written upon. Laura and Anne Catherick, though they look alike facially, most

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resemble one another in their blankness, their function in the text as that which is to be inscribed.25 Anne emblematically wears her whiteness; Laura's is indicated early on by Hartright's description of her, a refusal to describe that takes the form of instructions to the (implicidy male) reader: "Think of her as you thought of the first woman who quickened the pulses within you that the rest of her sex had no art to stir. . . . Take her as the visionary nursling of your own fancy; and she will grow upon you, all the more clearly, as the living woman who dwells in mine" (76). The reader Hartright here addresses is only one of many men the novel invites to make their marks on the blank surface of woman, and Laura only one of many women—although the most important—thus marked. Laura and her doppelgiinger Anne Catherick, as surfaces to be inscribed, are essential to the destruction and reconstruction of national identity in The Woman in White. What I have been calling the novel's Gothic narrative depends upon Sir Percival Glyde's and Count Fosco's ability to write "mad" on Anne and then "dead" on Laura. Glyde's attempt to protect his secret—he was born out of wedlock and hence is neither a baronet nor entitled to the estate he occupies, Blackwater Park—requires placing Anne Catherick in a private asylum. After Anne dies, Fosco exploits her resemblance to Laura, now Glyde's wife, to have Laura declared dead in Anne's place. In this way Fosco and Glyde secure Laura's inheritance, and her place among the English gentry, for themselves. Smuggled as Anne into the asylum where Anne had been kept, Laura Fairlie is effectively blotted out: "socially, morally, legally—dead" (434). Erased as an individual, the proof of her nonexistence appears written on her person: she now wears Anne Catherick's clothes, with Anne's name on them. " 'Look at your own name on your own clothes, and don't worry us all any more about being Lady Glyde,'" an asylum nurse tells her. " 'There it is, in good marking ink . . . —Anne Catherick, as plain as print!'" (448). Similar graphic indicators keep Laura foreign to her previous identity even after she escapes from the asylum (and Anne Catherick's wardrobe). Her face bears the "profaning marks" of suffer-

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ing from incarceration (433); her name now appears on a marble stone in the Limmeridge churchyard that reads "Sacred to the Memory of Laura, Lady Glyde" (426). The testimony offered by this inscription—which the novel titles, in dramatic capitals, "THE NARRATIVE OF THE T O M B S T O N E " — r e m a i n s m o r e p o w e r f u l than

anv evidence Hartright can assemble that Laura is alive. Rest and prolonged freedom from care restore her original appearance; she is taken to Limmeridge and the story of the conspiracy against her is told. But the specter of her nonexistence, the specter of her as a specter, as the ghoulish "dead-alive" (441), lingers until Hartright has caused the inscription on the tombstone to be chiseled off. He leads a procession out to the graveyard where the tombstone stands and all look on as her name is removed: "In a breathless silence, the first sharp stroke of the steel sounded on the marble. Not a voice was heard—not a soul moved, till those three words, 'Laura, Lady Glyde,' had vanished from sight. Then there was a great sigh of relief" (639). The tombstone episode displays with particular clarity mechanisms at work more generally in the novel: how, as in Arnold, graphic markers are allied with the Gothic plot through the power of inscription—here wielded by Glyde and Fosco; how Hartright erases their marks but then proceeds to write Laura into his own story, replacing graphic/Gothic inscription with domestic narration. Themselves marked men (the sign of The Brotherhood on Fosco's arm; the forged entry in the church register recording the marriage of Glyde's parents, a marriage that never took place), villainous count and baronet conspire to inscribe Laura with the sign of Otherness. Just as he has the name on the tombstone removed, Hartright undoes all the marks made by Glyde and Fosco. He then writes in turn—but not on Laura (at least not until their marriage replaces the name "Glyde" with the name "Hartright"); instead, under the guise of restoring her to her real self, he writes her into his tale of success.26 Hartright's narration not only proves more successful than the inscription it replaces, it actively makes use of the deleterious effects of that inscription. In the case of Laura, Walter literally de-

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pends upon the destruction of the ¡dentin' he must restore: his marriage to Laura and possession of Limmeridge would have been impossible without the previous "death" of "Laura, Lady Glyde." The same pattern converts Marian from quintessential feminist into eager domestic helpmate. Fosco's seizure of her journal, to which he appends a "Postscript by a Sincere Friend," signals the end of Marian's independence and the beginning of her docility. "What a woman's hands are fit for," she later tells Hartright, "early and late, these hands of mine shall do" (453; emphasis in original). (Marian's fate, it should be noted, parallels that of Mrs. Fosco. The Count bends this "once wayward English woman" so thoroughly to his will that, even after his death, she continues her uxorial devotion with an appropriate narrative activity: writing a worshipful biography of him [239, 644].) Just as the rewriting of female autonomy as dependence functions by means of the graphic Othering of women, so the entire reconstructive task of the second half of the novel, simultaneously taking the form of detective story and chronicle of upward mobility, depends, albeit in a more figurative way, on the destructive estrangement of English domestic space. "The year in which I am now writing was the year of the famous Crystal Palace Exhibition in Hyde Park. Foreigners in unusually large numbers had arrived already, and were still arriving in England" (584). Thus Hartright accounts for the presence of Fosco and the battery of spies he employs. Fosco's infiltration of Limmeridge and London; Pesca's presence at Hartright's mother's house; Madame Rubelle, Marian Halcombe's nurse; her husband Monsieur Rubelle ("a foreign spv, in every line of his face, if ever there was one yet" [616]) — these figures attest to a very literal otherness within the English nation.27 This defamiliarization extends to the revelation that the English themselves are other than who or what they seem. The cast of English characters reads like a list of counterfeit, tenuous, or failed identities: Sir Percival Glyde, sham gentry; Laura Fairlie, a frail personality easily destroyed; Anne Catherick, wrongly incarcerated as mad; Walter Hartright, driven to the new world to find his old-world manhood.

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It is easy to see in these examples evidence of the subversion of Englishness of which sensation novels were accused. From this subversion, however, comes the possibility of change. In the wake of Gothic plotting, under cover of the sensational destruction of identity, The Woman in White accomplishes a putting into narrative that reconstructs English nationality. The home, middle-class haven and national shibboleth, is shown to contain within it an alien presence; in addition, a rural aristocratic ideal is stripped to reveal at its center either an absence (Sir Percival Glyde, Laura Fairlie) or a malevolent foreignness (Fosco). This destructive demystification, though, enables the repossession of elements of that ideal by the middle class. The tale of detection that comprises Hartright's efforts to restore Laura's subverted identity is, after all, also a middle-class success story—one reminiscent of those told by Samuel Smiles in his 1859 bestseller, Self-Help, but with a wildly ambitious end.28 Few of Smiles's self-made men could boast, as Walter Hartright can at the end of The Woman in White, of having risen from the station of a poor drawing master to being the possessor of Limmeridge House. The novel's final scene—which features Hartright ensconced in his new estate and presented with his son by Laura and Marian —provides an emblematic representation of the new Englishness made possible in its pages: middleclass manliness possessed of the signs of the rural gentry.29 The vogue for sensation novels, initiated by the publication of The Woman in White, was short-lived. By the 1870s readers were apparendy surfeited. Yet in the decade or so that these novels dominated the fiction market their impact was enormous. Readers devoured them voraciously; reviewers deplored them, and deplored their popularity even more. The content of the novels as well as their immense and diverse readership marked them as subversive for contemporary reviewers and continue to mark them as such for many critics. In reconsidering the question of their subversiveness, I have wanted to insist on their position as and in discourse and to document the ways in which this discursivity put subversion to work. I have especially wanted to detail the use to

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which, in the first of these novels, a generically Gothic disruption of English national icons was put in enabling the construction of a representation of Englishness that expanded upon the dominant version, extending the symbolic reach of the middle-class Englishman. Matthew Arnold's strategical deployment, in On the Study of Celtic Literature, of alternate and opposing ways of imagining nationality—nationality as open-ended narrative, rooted in history but capable of change versus nationality as racial and hence permanent, inscribed on the surface of national subjects—provides an analogue for the mechanism by which The Woman in White, with its combination of realism and the Gothic, undermines the English nation only to reconstitute it differently. The presence of such a mechanism in the texts of both authors should also serve to suggest the limitations of understanding the formation of nationality as primarily a process of inclusivity. Recent scholarly work on nationalism claims that one's ability to call oneself English, Italian, Chinese, or Indian depends more upon recognition of sameness within national boundaries than projection of difference without them. As Arnold shows, however—and as The Woman in White itself shows—negative stereotypes of and invidious comparisons with other nations play an indispensable part, even if only a tactical one, in defining one's own. This is the case even when, as with Arnold, as with Collins, the point of defining one's own national identity is in fact to alter it, to alienate it from its earlier self.

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Man could never d o without blood, torture, and sacrifices when he felt the need to create a memory for himself; the most dreadful sacrifices (sacrifices of the first-born among them), the most repulsive mutilations (castration, for example), the cruelest rites of all the religious cults (and all religions are at the deepest level systems of cruelties) —all this has its origin in the instinct that realized that pain is the most powerful aid to mnemonics. — Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals

homeland, Andrei Codrescu, the Romanian exile, poet, and editor of the journal Exquisite Corpse, delivered a lecture about the Romanian revolution of 1989. Codrescu bitterly recounted what he saw as the betrayal of that revolution by neo-Communists, the sinister manipulation of television and radio, and the fact that the execution of Nicolae Ceau§escu left Romania no less in the hands of an oligarchy than it had been under Ceau§escu's rule. The role played by Romanian nationalism especially disturbed him, in particular the circulation of lurid stories of atrocities supposedly committed against Romanians by other ethnic and national groups. He mentioned in an aside that he had considered putting together a book of such stories, but abandoned the project for lack of material. "For there is really only one nationalist story," he said, "and it is a short one: They caught one of Us, put him in a pot, boiled him, and ate him; and now We have to pay Them back." O N R E T U R N I N G F R O M A V I S I T TO H I S

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Two remarks ought to be made about this brief parable. First, it relies on an equation between nationalism and xenophobia that, although apparently borne out by the history of the middle and, now, late twentieth century, is at present—at least in the academy — in dispute. Second, this story that for Codrescu encapsulates the workings of nationalism, with its Manichean Us-Them oppositions and its depiction of the barbaric rites of an alien tribe, is a manifesdy sensational —perhaps even Gothic—story. It is certainly not Gothic in the narrow sense of the term that applies to the novels of Ann Radcliffe and her imitators: there arc no labyrinthine castles here, no fainting heroines, no ultimately explicable ghosts. And yet, with a few alterations, Codrescu's "one nationalist story" does constitute a serviceable summary of one of the most enduring Gothics ever written: They caught one of Us, put her in a bed, and drank her blood; and now We have to pay Them back. What does this describe, if not the plot of Bram Stoker's 1897 horror-gothic, Dracula? The parallels between this parabolic nationalist story and Stoker's novel merit attention not because they lay bare any sublimely paranoid lines of connection between the Transvlvanianborn poet, Andrei Codrescu, and his mythological Undead compatriot, Count Dracula. Rather, they are important in that they point up, fairly dramatically, what may seem an equally unlikely connection between the resurgent nationalisms of Central and Eastern Europe in the last decade of the twentieth century and a nationalism ascendant nearly a century earlier: the nationalism of Ireland. If the context has altered significantly over the course of a hundred years, many similarities nevertheless remain: in particular, those having to do with imperialism, racialism, and literary production. The flowering of Irish nationalism in the 1890s, like that of the nationalisms of, for instance, Romania, Serbia, and Ukraine during our own fin de siècle, depends upon the collapse, whether impending or already accomplished, of an imperial power. In 1890s Ireland, as in 1990s Europe, the ideology of racialism exerts an influence as marked as it is peculiar. Finally, the combination of racialism and nationalism promoted then, as it pro-

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motes now, grisly actions to be sure, but also the proliferation of grisly stories: tales of murder, rape, torture, cannibalism, bloodsucking.1 The effort to assimilate the case of Ireland to that of other post-colonial nations informs a collection of essays titled Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature. The eminent contributors to that collection—Edward Said, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Seamus Deane—all seek to understand Ireland, not as exactly analogous to other nations struggling for independence or newly independent, but at least as a variation on a theme. Edward Said's essay in particular constitutes an attempt to map Ireland and early Irish nationalist literature onto other colonial and post-colonial situations. In "Yeats and Decolonization," Said sets out to recover William Butler Yeats from internationalist modernism and to place him as a great nationalist poet, specifically as a poet of the transition from colony to nation. He argues that Yeats belongs to a moment of national revival in which a colonized people seeks to create a distinct national identity through the assertion of its difference from the colonizers. For Said Yeats belongs, that is, to what Frantz Fanon has called the "second phase" of the native intellectual. "In the first phase," writes Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, "the native intellectual gives proof that he has assimilated the culture of the occupying power. . . . In the second phase [the phase of early nationalism], we find the native is disturbed; he decides to remember what he is. . . . Past happenings of the byegone days of his childhood will be brought up out of the depths of his memory; old legends will be reinterpreted" (222). From attempting to emulate the colonizer, to be more French than the French, more English than the English, the native intellectual moves to reject this mimicry and to inhabit a space of invented, but nonetheless powerful and apparently necessary, Otherness: the space of the nation.2 In the case of Yeats, however, a complication exists that Said mentions but never seriously considers: the fact that Yeats was at once more and less than a "native intellectual." He was what I shall call a creole; not simply Irish but Anglo-Irish; Irish by birth,

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but English by "blood.'13 We may surmise that this dual heritage compromised any attempts to commit unambiguously to Irish nationalism, and indeed in Yeats we witness a split and anxious national subjectivity played out over the course of his career— from the early Celtic twilight poems, through the establishment of the Abbey Theatre and the protests to which the productions of that theater gave rise, and finally to a late embrace of the AngloIrish Ascendancy tradition. Yeats wavers, belongs neither to colonizers nor colonized, as if some properly racial allegiances of an ancestral past permanently conflict with those of landscape, childhood, and conscious commitment.4 Bram Stoker, a generation older than Yeats, also bears the marks of this ambivalence. But if Stoker's most famous novel tells a tale of atrocity similar to that of Codrescu's "one nationalist story," the relation of this tale to nationalism nevertheless remains unclear. Indeed, on the surface Dracula abandons nationalism altogether for the larger, explicitly supra-national distinctions between East and West. Only in and through this supra-nationalism do the text's implications for Ireland, and for Irish nationalism, become legible. In a move characteristic of the Gothic, social and political content finds its way into the text in a displaced form. This displacement, however, does not function merely as disguise. It enables as surely as it occludes; it does cultural work—work bound up in Stoker's compromised national subjectivity, but also, importantly, in the larger ideological constructs of orientalism and degeneration.

I Orientalism, the West's construction of a reified and stereotyped East, is arguably the dominant discourse in Dracula,s Jonathan Harker, representative middle-class Englishman and narrator of the first section of the novel, orientalizes Eastern Europe and Count Dracula from the outset. He does so initially and most conventionally by reference to time. Time obsesses Harker. As he

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travels from London to the Castle Dracula he keeps painstakingly detailed records of changing—in his view, disintegrating—temporal habits. Witness the first sentence of his travel journal, which is also the first sentence of the novel: "3 May. Bistritz.— Left Munich at 8.35 P.M. on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6.46, but train was an hour late" (1). The lateness of the train is, for Harker, symptomatic of the "oriental" ways of Europe on the wrong (that is, eastern) side of the Danube. Lest we fail to understand the implications of his observations, Harker spells them out, first with a general statement—"The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East" (1) —but later, and more forcefully, with an orientalist reductto ad absurdum oddly reminiscent of De Quincey: "It seems to me that the further East you go the more unpunctual are the trains. What ought they to be in China?" (2). Lack of punctuality is not the only characteristic peculiar to the East. Added to Harker's insistent documentation of an underdeveloped temporal awareness is another familiar orientalizing trope: the touristic appreciation for and appropriation of local color—here, in the form of food. The same journal entry that complains of late trains praises eastern cuisine: "I had for dinner, or rather supper, a chicken done up some way with red pepper, which was very good but thirsty. (Mem., get recipe for Mina.) I asked the waiter, and he said it was called 'paprika hendl,' and that, as it was a national dish, I should be able to get it anywhere along the Carpathians" (1). As this passage indicates, Dracula does not construct the East as a uniformly retrograde anti-West. Rather, the East is denigrated but at the same time cathected, invested with desire. The eastern inability to be punctual irritates Harker, but eastern food—and in particular this Carpathian "national dish"— is suitable for export to England and for reproduction by English fiancees. These two indexes to oriental behavior, time and food, are explicidy linked in Dracula, for what we might call Count Dracula's own "national dish"—blood—both signifies and enables his peculiarly inhuman mode of temporality. In one of his midnight con-

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versations with Harker, Dracula relates the history of what he calls his "race" through millenia. Blood, time, and nationality converge here in a remarkable way. In a lament for the passing of more martial epochs that is equally a scornful judgment on the vitiation of modern existence, the Count admonishes Harker: " 'Ah, young sir, the Szekelys—and the Dracula as their heart's blood, their brains, and their swords—can boast a record that mushroom growths like the Hapsburgs and the Romanoffs can never reach. The warlike days are over. Blood is too precious a thing in these days of dishonourable peace; and the glories of the great races are as a tale that is told'" (29). As he himself seems so concerned to insist, Dracula incarnates a social form that Foucault in the History of Sexuality calls "blood relations," a feudal/aristocratic organization of society in which blood "owed its high value at the same time to its instrumental role (the ability to shed blood), to the way it functioned in the order of signs (to have a certain blood, to be of the same blood, to be prepared to risk one's blood), and also to its precariousness (easily spilled, subject to drying up, too readily mixed, capable of being quickly corrupted)" (1: 147).6 The vampire's diet extends and concretizes this thematics of blood: Dracula, noble because of the blood, convinced of the Tightness and efficacy of shedding blood, must live by blood as well. His blood diet, in addition, makes possible the deep, continuous, "vertical" experience of time to which Dracula as Undead can lay claim. The history of his "race" is autobiography as well, for by virtue of the blood of the living the Count has undone the distinction between these ordinarily mutually exclusive genres. The past survives by leaching the life out of the present; or, in the insistent literalizing of the novel, an antique aristocrat feeds upon the technologically proficient and mosdy middle-class friends of the rising solicitor Jonathan Harker and his fiancee (and later wife) Mina. In this sense Dracula, and the novel that bears his name, bodies forth bourgeois modernity's fear of the undead nature of its own feudal past. This temporal contest, however, this haunting of the "emergent" (or perhaps, by 1897, "dominant") social form by the ghost of a "residual" past,

Mother Dracula is rewritten as geographical opposition.7 Orientalism assimilates the feudal so that Dracula's allegiance to the pre-modern confirms rather than complicates the novel's presentation of fin-de-siecle Europe's confrontation with a supernatural invader from east of its borders as an epic struggle between East and West. In Orientalism (1979), the foundational account of the occidental construction of the Orient, Edward Said examines in particular those actions against Near Eastern, Middle Eastern, and North African cultures licensed by orientalist discourse. He does not thoroughly explore the question of the use to which this discourse has been put in the West itself. The Foucauldian inspiration for Said's study suggests that the development of orientalist fields of knowledge, categories of classification, professional and avocational societies and publications—in short, orientalist institutions —comprises part of that modern operation of power Foucault has termed discipline. Something we might not infer from Foucault, in part because of his turn away from European political history as traditionally understood, is the function of orientalism in mediating or diffusing national rivalries—its ability to counterbalance the centrifugal force of the assertion of distinctly national identities and destinies within the West by providing a common ground for all western nations, a supra-national, monolithic "Occident" defined against an equally supra-national "Orient."8 Just such a function of orientalism is evident in Dracula. When the East in the person of the Count invades the West in an act of what Stephen Arata terms "reverse colonization," various Westerners are drawn together to foil the attack. National differences among these Westerners (an American, three Englishmen, and a Dutchman) are elided in their common defense of a threatened England, svnecdochically the West itself. That is to say, if, as I have been arguing, Transylvania and the Count are orientalized by association with feudalism, an imperfect temporal sense, and an exotic—to say the least—cuisine, then the characters arrayed against the Count are "occidentalized," grouped into a geopolitical entity that transcends national differences and boundaries. And here the sign of the Occident is an explicitly western moder-

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nity that takes the form of various technologies conspicuously present throughout the novel: the Kodak camera, the telegraph, the phonograph, the typewriter, the reliable train.9 DracuJa's invasion is finally reversed when representatives of the West, armed with this superior technology, penetrate to the figurative heart of the East in order literally to penetrate the heart of the Count. Written at the zenith of European imperial expansion, between the Berlin Conference of 1884 and the outbreak of the Boer War in 1899, Dracula takes shape at that moment when widespread armed conflict among European nations over territorial possessions, although temporarily suspended, must have appeared inevitable. The novel's substitution of a binary East/West opposition for varieties of national difference may thus be taken as an imaginary solution to competition among western powers, a solution that would enable them to engage in late-nineteenth-century imperial conquest as a common endeavor. The plurality of nations, the individual trajectories of national histories, the varied qualities of national characters—these late-nineteenth-century concomitants of "nationness" are specifically rejected in favor of a binary organization which, precisely insofar as it suppresses national diversity, secures imperialist unity. Yet the novel, even in its supra-nationalism, employs nationalist tactics, for in Dracula the West is defined—as so many nations have been and are being defined—on and through the body of woman (see A. Parker et al., Introduction). The corruption by the foreign of western femininity—and in particular that aspect of femininity known as maternity—galvanizes western resistance. Structurally, the text consists of three sections, each organized in relation to lost or threatened womanhood. The first section, Harker's journal, is mainly devoted to ushering in Dracula and shadowing forth his plans. The moment of greatest affect in that journal, however, occurs when three female vampires prey upon Harker in an attack that is indistinguishable from a seduction. Frustrated in their menage a quatre by the timely arrival of the Count (apparently a rare instance of "oriental" punctuality), these vampire-women accept in exchange for Harker a small child (36-

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39). This episode introduces the novel's concern with the effects of vampirism upon women. Certainly, as many critics have pointed out, vampirism instills or reveals an aggressive female sexuality.10 But more disturbing, at least in terms of the text's own anxieties, is vampirism's erasure of the maternal: what brings forth "horror" in Harker is not so much his near seduction, but rather the sight of his seducers pouncing upon their infant meal: "One of the women jumped forward and opened [a small bag]. If my ears did not deceive me there was a gasp and a low wail, as of a halfsmothered child. The women closed round, whilst I was aghast with horror; but as I looked they disappeared, and with them the dreadful bag. . . . Then the horror overcame me, and I sank down unconscious" (39). The second section of the text recounts, in careful detail, the vamping of Lucy Westenra—whose very name signals her place as bearer of occidental identity—and the macabre actions taken to repossess her for the West. Here again, vampirism amounts to unbridled female sexuality. Lucy's disregard for sexual mores proleptically indicates her susceptibility to vampire attack early on. Proposed to three times in one day and despondent at the cruel necessity of having to reject two of her three suitors, she writes, humorously but also scandalously: "Why can't they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?" (59). Her initial meetings with Dracula, at night above the cliffs of Whitby, vivify the never completely dormant connections between the figure of the vampire and that of the prostitute—both, in nineteenth-century terminology, creatures of the night. Thus, after finding Lucy alone in a churchyard after dark, clothed only in a nightdress, Mina worries as much about the potential damage to what she calls Lucy's "reputation" as she does about the damage to her health (91-92). When Lucy, after a futile series of transfusions from various suitors, finally becomes a vampire, she appears to the other characters transformed. As Jack Seward, rejected suitor turned vampire-hunter, writes of the Undead Lucy: "[Her] sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and [her] purity to voluptuous wantonness" (211). Insofar as she has

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already shown herself less than sweet and pure, however, Lucy's vampirism functions more as a confirmation than a transformation of her sexuality. Again, though, the most repugnant effect of vampirism is its attendant destruction, indeed inversion, of the maternal. This destruction is signalled initially by the fact that, as the "bloofer [beautiful] lady," the vampire Lucy feeds upon small children in Hampstead Heath. The moment of complete alienation from her, however—captured particularly well in Francis Ford Coppola's film version of the novel—occurs after an act apparently more horrifying than bloodsucking: her unfeeling abandonment of a child. Van Helsing and the other vampire hunters confront Lucy as she returns from a night of feeding. She still carries in her arms one of her child victims, her face and robe stained with its blood. But her interest in the child evaporates the moment she sees her pursuers: "With a careless motion, she flung to the ground, callous as a devil, the child that up to now she had clutched strenuously to her breast, growling over it as a dog growls over a bone" (211). Such episodes indicate that the eastern vampire's destruction of the maternal and the reclamation of women by way of its restoration is central to Dracula's attempt at replacing multiple national identities with a single western one: the primary motivation of the vampire-hunters is the protection of "their" (read: western) women. The Count himself displays an acute awareness of this; in the only moment in the text in which he directly addresses his pursuers, he taunts them with the claim: '"Your girls that you all love are mine already; and through them you and others shall yet be mine—my creatures to do my bidding and to be my jackals when I want to feed'" (306). If this claim specifies western manhood as the ultimate target of Dracula's predation, it reveals at the same time that that target must be reached indirectly, through the medium of women. Thus, the actual position of Lucy and Mina parallels the symbolic position of women in the consolidation of western identity. It is ironic, then, that western success itself ends in the failure of the text's orientalizing (but also occidentalizing) project. The novel's concluding section chronicles Dracula's at-

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tack on Mina Harker and the chase mounted to destroy the Count and so preserve Mina from an Undead fate. I will return below to the originary episode of this section, Mina's "baptism of blood." For now it is enough to note that the event which confirms the final triumph of West over East—quite simply, the birth of Mina Harker's child —is also the event that signals the unravelling of this triumph and the return of the nation. For the binarizing efforts of the novel finally do fail, and Mina and Jonathan's son Quincey indicates how such a failure comes about. In him the male characters of various national origins in the novel are Anglicized, incarnatcd as an Englishman: "His bundle of names links all our little band of men together" (378). This incorporation, which is at the same time a disarticulation of the figure of a monolithic West, is replicated on a much wider scale at the level of narrative structure. Just as the characters are subsumed in Quincey (Jonathan Arthur Abraham) Harker, so various documents—journals, newspaper reports, letters, ships' logs —are subsumed in the English-language novel that is Dracula. It is not, or not just, that an unavoidable kind of linguistic imperialism brings all the languages encountered in the text into English. Dracula enacts a specific narrative imperative: the replacement of materials connected through parataxis (as nations should be in the concept of a unified West) with a narrative structured according to a syntax of hierarchy. By virtue of this hierarchy, at the end of the novel England's relation to the other western nations has moved from one of synecdochy to one of metaphor—a metaphor whose vehicle usurps the place of its tenor: that is to say, at the end of the novel England is the West.

II My reading so far has taken the text at its word; it has read East where East is written. Such a reading, as if drawn into the orbit of Dracula's own obsession with the literal, risks missing the essentially figurative nature of Dracula in particular and of the litera-

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ture of terror in general. Franco Moretti writes that "Marxism and psychoanalysis . . . converge in defining the function of this literature: to take up within itself determinate fears in order to present them in a form different from their real one: to transform them into other fears, so that readers do not have to face up to what might really frighten them" (105; emphasis in original). Moretti makes this formulation specifically in reference to vampirism, but I would suggest that it applies equally to orientalism: the latter ought no more to be taken at face value than the former. The challenge to making sense of the novel amounts not so much to establishing the mere presence of orientalism—which at any rate the text insists upon—but in identifying that which the East/West binary itself figures forth. Rethinking the site from which the text is considered raises compelling possibilities. The preceding discussion, turning as it does upon the East's invasion of a western imperial metropolis, assumes as a textual locus that metropolis itself: London, where Stoker worked for twenty-seven years as acting manager at Henry Irving's Lyceum Theatre. But Dracula, if it is an imperial text, an English text, is also in important ways a colonial, even an Irish one —for the novel was written by an Anglo-Irishman, a human legacy of England's seven hundred years of colonial involvement in the life of its neighbor to the west. Relocating the site of investigation from metropolis to colony, from the domain of imperial citizens to that of colonial subjects, authorizes a certain reinfkcted reading. We might begin by observing that the appearance of supranationalist orientalizing in his novel is underwritten by Stoker's compromised national subjectivity. As an Anglo-Irishman with ambivalence about claiming either half of that strange formulation as his own, he would have had great investment in a project that obviated the necessity of choosing. 11 The novel's construction of monolithic East and West, then, promises to reconcile the split subjectivity of the creole; the inclusive West envelops and thus cancels national adjectives on both sides of the hyphen in AngloIrish. But if we see this we cannot fail to see another possibility: that

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the East/West divide so insistendy present in Dracula does not, as it were, erase the hyphen in Anglo-Irish, but rather reproduces that hyphen (which we might liken to the hyphen in Stoker's original tide, The Un-Dead). We cannot fail to see the possibility, that is, that orientalism highlights rather than occludes the problematic of Anglo-Irish national subjectivity. Within the East/West binary in Dracula resides, on this reading, another set of opposed terms: Irish and English —or, more accurately, Irish and Anglo-Irish. Consider, to begin with, Dracula's own resemblance, not so much to "orientals," as to a nightmare vision of the native, unhyphenated Irish. The savagery of his vampiric attacks combined with the aristocratic hauteur of his manner suggests the peculiarly Irish double threat of Fenianism—regularly depicted in the English press as the hallmark of bestial violence—and Catholic feudalism. From this perspective Stoker's novel takes its place in a tradition of Anglo-Irish Gothics, the most significant of which would include Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla (1872). Melmoth, an explicidy and relendessly anti-Catholic work, marshalls the Gothic's extensive machinery of paranoia for the purpose of demonizing the Irish followers of the Church of Rome as well as their Spanish allies (M. Buder, Romantics 160-61; McCormack). Carmilla, narrated by a young woman of mixed parentage living with her English father in the wilds of Styria (a direct geographical precursor to Stoker's Transylvania), figures native attack as the nighdy predations of a female vampire: Carmilla, decoded anagrammatically, is revealed to be the Countess Mircalla, a long-dead but revenant member of the Styrian aristocracy. Both Melmoth and Carmilla powerfully evoke the extreme isolation of the AngloIrish as representatives of a conquering race surrounded by dispossessed natives—the fear and hostility of those within the pale toward those without. These texts conjure up as well the fear that those natives will repossess, by outright violence or some more subde form of bloodletting, what was once theirs (see Moynahan; Deane, Short History 205). The anxiety in Dracula, however, despite the proximity of the

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abortive Fenian rebellion of 1867 and the Phoenix Park murders of 1882, does not center on a native Irish uprising. What frightens the Anglo-Irish in the 1890s is the specter of absorption. The dominance enjoyed by the Protestant Ascendancy was based in control of Irish land, which they had been given in the Williamite and Cromwellian settlements of the seventeenth century, and in the position held by the Anglican Church as the established Church of Ireland. Both sites of privilege, land and church, came under assault in the last thirty years of the nineteenth century. The passing in Westminster of the Irish Church Act of 1869 disestablished the Church of Ireland, while the Irish Land Act of the next year began the process of protecting native Irish tenants from eviction and enabling them to buy the land they worked. Of these two acts, F. S. L. Lyons notes: "Above all, [they] gave notice that the Protestant Ascendancy was no longer immutable and invulnerable" (Ireland 137). There followed a long series of Land Acts—in 1881, 1887, 1891, 1896—all aimed at dealing with problem of tenant/landlord relations, and all tending to reduce the power of the predominantly Protestant, Anglo-Irish landlords. This legislation formed part of a larger English attempt to conciliate Ireland that continued even after the fall in 1891 of the leader of the Irish Parliamentarians, Charles Stuart Parnell. Although—or rather precisely because—this event effectively destroyed, for a time, the likelihood of Home Rule for Ireland, Westminster was more anxious than ever to make Unionism palatable (Lyons, Ireland 131-218). The legislative dismantling of their system of privilege threatened the Anglo-Irish with absorption in the form of the levelling of economic and political distinctions. But in Dracula the mixed metaphor of vampirism and racialism suggests something more visceral: the Creole's fear of racial absorption.12 This English nightmare has an extensive history in relation to Ireland. In the midto late nineteenth century the English colonialist effort to make of the Irish a distinct people gained credibility from the quasiscientific discourse of race. In terms of this discourse, L. P. Curtis notes, "the Celtic blood of the Irish and Saxon blood of the English determined their contrasting patterns of behavior, and any

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mixture of the two peoples invariably resulted in the corruption or adulteration of the better (Anglo-Saxon) blood by the baser (Celtic) blood" (.Anglo-Saxons 36). By the 1890s, the "baser" Irish had been so long represented by the English as simple, vigorous, and savage that this stereotype could be wielded by the Irish as a weapon in their own defense. The Gaelic cultural revival itself in many ways took this stereotype as its starting point—confirming English suspicions, to be sure, but also fueling English fear (Deane, Celtic 17-37, Introduction; Curtis, Anglo-Saxons especially 108-16). In an ideological climate rife with paranoia about English racial degeneration, Irish assertiveness as to the enduring vitality of the Gaelic "race" took on the appearance of a threat. Indeed, it was as a threat that the Anglo-Irish, and many English, received the infamous formulation of D. P. Moran, founder of the nationalist organ The Leader, author of The Philosophy of Irish Ireland (1905), and implacable enemy of English influence on Irish life: "The foundation of Ireland is the Gael, and the Gael must be the element which absorbs" (qtd. in Lyons, Culture 60). One image ready to hand for embodying the fear of such absorption was that of the vampire: on 24 October 1885, for instance, Punch ran a caricature bearing the caption "The Irish 'Vampire.'" Conflating questions of race and politics, blood and land, the caricature portrays the Irish National Land League as a stereotypical Irishman—albeit one with enormous ears and outstretched bat wings—preying upon the recumbent Hibernia (see Figure 3). We may now turn to the most spectacular dramatization of absorption in Stoker's novel: the scene in which Mina Harker receives her "baptism of blood" from Dracula. A sort of textual repetition compulsion confirms the traumatic centrality of this event, for the scene is narrated twice. In one version, Dr. Seward records in his phonograph diary Mina's firsthand account of Dracula's attack.13 Dracula speaks first: •t[']And you, their best beloved one, are now to me flesh of my flesh; blood of my blood; kin of my kin; my bountiful wine-press for a while; and shall be later on my companion and my helper. .. . But as yet you are

THE IRISH "VAMPIRE." Figure 3. "The Irish 'Vampire.'" Punch 24 October 1885.

Mother Dracula to be punished for what you have done. You have aided in thwarting me; now you shall come to my call. . . . [A]nd to that end, this!['j With that he pulled open his shirt, and with his long sharp nails opened a vein in his breast. When the blood began to spurt out, he took my hands in one of his, holding them tight, and with the other seized my neck and pressed my mouth to the wound, so that I must either suffocate or swallow some of t h e - " (288)

The possibilities for what is being swallowed here are various, as indicated by the dash that, in good Gothic fashion, completes the passage by failing to complete it (recall Mo^ada's question in Melnwth the Wanderer: " 'Are you the depository of that terrible secret which — ' " [72]). Obviously enough, Mina drinks blood: a barbaric rite that confirms the corruptions of racial mixing even as it accomplishes that mixing. The scene's aura of specifically sexual violence, however, suggests that this blood is also semen, thus extending the emphasis on the mingling of races into a displaced (because oral) miscegenation. The deliberate invocation of liturgical language at the beginning of the passage—"flesh of my flesh; blood of my blood; kin of my kin"—reinforces this extension, as does the fact that this nightmare consummation takes place in Jonathan and Mina's marriage bed. Blood and semen, then. But still another liquid is suggested in Seward's own eyewitness account, which precedes Mina's in the text. As Seward tells it: "With his left hand he [Dracula] held both Mrs Harker's hands, keeping them away with her arms at full tension; his right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. . . . The attitude of the two had a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten's nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink" (282). Milk, of course, is the third possibility, and in many ways the most disturbing—not least for the gender reversals upon which it depends (Craft 125). Dracula is feeding Mina, feeding her from his breast. He nurses her, we might say, and this nursing returns us, with a difference, to the thematics of the maternal discussed earlier. What is at issue in Dracula is not simply the destruction of the mother, but the

Chapter 5 displacement of one kind of mother by another: the displacement of the English mother by Mother Dracula.14 The fear of being fed by an "other" mother plays on the connection between national cultural identity and the maternal evident in such expressions as "mother country" and "mother tongue." There is, though, a very literal sense in which foster mothering was felt to threaten English cultural identity in Ireland, and it came in the form of Irish nursemaids. As early as 1596 Edmund Spenser writes in his View of the Present State of Ireland: "the [English] child that sucketh the milke of the nurse, must of necessity learne his first speache of her . . . [and] the speche being Irish, the harte must needs be Irish" (qtd. in Jones and Stallybrass 163). Instead of and before an English mother comes a foreign nursemaid, and while imbibing her milk—in this particular colonialist fantasy—the child imbibes as well a heathen speech, an alien culture, an antagonistic allegiance. Rudyard Kipling, like Stoker a hyphenated Anglo, makes such connections explicit in an 1894 poem titled "The Native-Born." There he offers a toast "To our dear dark foster-mothers, / To the heathen songs they sung— / To the heathen speech we babbled / Ere we came to the white man's tongue" (193). Kipling's lines capture the erotically charged and (for the colonizers) culturally dangerous relationship between the colonial child and the colonized foster mother, representing both the alluring and threatening aspects of this relationship in terms of language.15 Dracula's nursing of Mina works in just this way. It is after this feeding that the vampire-hunter Dr. Van Helsing declares, in a rare moment of grammatical correctness: "'Madam Mina, our poor, dear Madam Mina, is changing'" (323). Mina's baptism of blood, understood as a moment of racial and cultural transfusion, carries a double resonance. That Mina's son Quincey traces his lineage back, not only to all the Westerners in the novel, but to a vampire as well, confirms the Other's pollution of the source of the same.16 Yet the text works in places to obscure this fact. The odd collocation of given and family names belonging to Quincey (Jonathan Arthur Abraham) Harker, for instance, exhaustively testifies to the number of fathers required to

Mother Dracula produce this English child; it fails to indicate —in fact it deliberately leaves uncounted—the number, and type, of mothers. This tactic of selective naming appears elsewhere in Dracula, and it aims at the same end. The orientalism of the text may itself be seen as the most thorough instance of such a naming insofar as it constitutes a desperate attempt to distinguish what is actually indistinguishable. Orientalism in Dracula thus functions as a denial at the level of discursive assertion of what the plot itself confirms: that between West and East, human and vampire, Anglo and Irish, there is no difference. From a colonialist point of view, the novel reads as a literary experiment in the Creole's ability to survive miscegenation. Despite an exchange of bodily fluids, despite the penetration of barriers and the breakdown of distinctions, fundamental racial identities remain intact: East is East and West is West and ever more shall be so. Quincey Harker's multiple parentage also testifies, however, to a certain problem in the West: the inability to reproduce, the loss of potency. English decline is in fact the situation upon which Dracula's invasion of England is predicated.17 As Stephen Arata has pointed out, in the logic of this text "Vampires are generated by racial enervation and the decline of empire, and not vice versa" (629). They prey upon the fallen, springing up in response to destruction. Imperial collapse constitutes the most important factor in the etiology of vampirism, as Van Helsing's version of vampire lore confirms: "he [the vampire] is known everywhere that men have been. In old Greece, in old Rome; he flourish in Germany all over, in France, in India. . . . He have follow in the wake of the berserker Icelander, the devil-begotten Hun, the Slav, the Saxon, the Magyar" (239). Strangely enough, then, what attracts Dracula to England is not, as we might suspect, its rich supply of healthy blood. When the Count gives Harker his reasons for wanting to relocate, "to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death" (20), the emphasis falls on change and death—not because the vampire brings devastation, but because, as Van Helsing might say, he "follow" in its wake.

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The reasons for this are curious, for the British Empire was far from eclipse in 1897. There was nonetheless a widespread fear of imperial collapse and racial dessication.18 In the 1890s this fear took the form of the discourse of degeneration: the obverse of racial triumphalism, the presentiment of decline, of racial obsolescence. Degeneration, which meant both "to lose the generative force" and "to lose the properties of the genus, to decline to a lower type," was for much of the nineteenth century the word for what happened when races moved to areas unsuited to them (Chamberlin and Gilman ix; Stepan). Toward the end of the century, though, the emphasis shifted: western civilization was itself seen to be falling victim to degeneration from within ( Stepan 112). In this regard, the English relation to the Irish was particularly implicated. As Seamus Deane notes, the fin de siècle was a time when "[a] 11 the theorists of racial degeneration—Galton, Nordau, Lombroso, Spengler—shared with literary critics and poets and novelists the conviction that the decline of the West must be halted by some infusion or transfusion of energy from an 'unspoiled' source. The Irish seemed to qualify for English purposes" (Introduction 12). Racial pollution, so long feared, becomes finally a terrible but essential intervention, a last-ditch effort to save an anemic civilization. I have argued above that Dracula's nursing of Mina signals a pollution that the text must work to deny, and that this denial is accomplished by way of orientalism. When viewed in the light of the discourse of degeneration, however, quite a different resonance obtains both for Mina's "baptism of blood" and for the East/West binarism of the text. In this context it is possible to suggest that Dracula's binarism establishes a radical distinction between the human and vampire "races" precisely in order to mix them. And so it is altogether fitting that Dracula feeds Mina in addition to feeding upon her. The novel's orientalism fails, East and West spill into one another, but this failure is a productive one—at least for the English and the Anglo-Irish.19 The resulting hybrid, as the hybrid Anglo-Irish itself, is not contaminated

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so much as strengthened and revivified. This also perhaps explains why Dracula arrives in England aboard a ship named the Demeter: like that other mythological mother, he returns from the underworld bringing new growth to a dead land, fresh blood to an enervated race.

Afterword

G O T H I C F I C T I O N S O F T E N E N D W I T H A r e t u r n t o the b e g i n n i n g ;

their narratives conclude by revisiting the sites that gave rise to them, sites from which at one time they seemed forever estranged. In this return form replicates content: like the specters they sometimes seriously and sometimes coyly deploy, Gothics fail to escape their origins even in death; like the vampires that walk their pages, they take their rest in coffins that are also cradles. Moments of textual closure can so closely echo moments of textual opening that every end signals only another beginning. Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho returns, after an absence of some six hundred pages, to the setting announced in its first paragraph: La Vallee, an estate in Gascony that promises "scenes of simple nature, . . . the pure delights of literature, and . . . the exercise of domestic virtues" (i). In Stoker's Dracula, Jonathan Harker's account of his initial voyage to Transylvania opens the text; a note by Harker relating another such voyage closes it: "In the summer of this year we made a journey to Transylvania, and went over the old ground which was, and is, to us so full of vivid and terrible memories" (378). The presence of "old ground" and "memories" indicates an attempt at rewriting Dracula's homeland, earlier the staging ground for foreign invasion, as quaint tourist attraction. But that, of course, is precisely its position in the novel's first few pages: Harker first sets eyes on a Transylvania already ancient, burdened with the sedimented racial and historical movements of centuries. If this second glance appears to promise quiescence, an end to strife, in so doing it cannot help but also suggest the future emergence of yet another vampire. Because Alien Nation is itself a kind of Gothic fiction, I will

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borrow from Gothic conventions by closing with a return to the text with which I began: Arthur Conan Doyle's 1924 Sherlock Holmes story, "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire." More than a quarter century after the publication of Dracula, and more than a century and a half after the appearance of Gothic novels in England, all the Gothic elements of Stoker's text are present, elements that bring to the fore the danger to England and the English posed by the foreign.1 Robert Ferguson's wife, whom he meets while traveling in South America on business, brings with her both the allure and the menace of what Ferguson refers to as her "foreign birth" and "alien religion" (1220).2 Her disruption of English domesticity is figured, just as it is in Dracula, as a polluted maternity. The story Ferguson relates to Holmes is one of an alien mother perversely attacking her own children, beating her stepson and drawing blood from the neck of her own baby. Holmes characteristically denounces as superstition the idea of vampiric invasion that Ferguson proposes in his appeal for help: for Holmes the suggestion is merely "Rubbish . . . ! What have we to do with walking corpses who can only be held in their grave by stakes driven through their hearts?" (1219). Nevertheless, we might expect even Doyle's pillar of rationality to falter in his conviction, for Ferguson's testimony provides apparently incontrovertible evidence of a monstrous mother at the heart (and the hearth) of an English family. In the event, Holmesian deduction triumphs yet again over the specter of the supernatural. Holmes eliminates vampirism as a possibility and, in its place, installs another sort of irrationality: that of the psychology of family relations. This move to the psychological begins early in the story: during his initial interview with Ferguson, Holmes casually asks about the relationship between Mrs. Ferguson and her stepson, Jack (1223). The solution to the mystery is itself to be found in this relationship, for as one clue is added to another it becomes clear that a "distorted love" for his father and a jealous hatred of his stepmother and her child have made Jack himself attack the baby (1229). The foreign now figures as a weapon rather than as the bearer of weapons: Jack punctures

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the baby's neck with a poison-tipped arrow brought back from Peru. Ferguson's wife's vampirism is revealed to be an attempt to save her child by drawing the poison from its wound, an act of succor similar—as the text rather pointedly insists—to that once undertaken by "a queen in English history" (1229).3 Husband and wife are reconciled, and Jack, the errant son, is to be subjected to the curative powers of the British navy: " 'I think a year at sea would be my prescription for Master Jacky,' said Holmes, rising from his chair" (1230).4 With this elimination of the supernatural, the xenophobic national implications of the story are evacuated: a disturbed English son replaces the disturbing foreign mother; the clinical predictability of family relations replaces the monstrous illogic of national difference. By means of his detective work, Holmes folds the political, social, and national implications of Gothic narrative back into the confines of the self, the psyche. In a procedure reminiscent of Freudian dream analysis, that is, Holmes resolves the story's manifest content of vampirism, foreignness, and corrupted and corrupting maternity into a latent message of the arrested development of an individual child. Holmes's reading of the genre was to become an extremely persuasive one: beginning with Freud's own treatment of the tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann in his essay on "The 'Uncanny,'" psychoanalysis has provided a powerful analytic for interpreting Gothic fictions.5 Part of the work of Alien Nation has been to look behind the notion of the Gothic as a discourse on and of the familial subject of psychoanalysis and to see it as descriptive—in places, constitutive—of the subject as articulated by the sociopolitical discourse of the nation. What makes "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire" so interesting in this regard, however, is that the quasi-psychoanalytic solution to vampirism with which the story closes derives much of the power of its effect from its status as a displacement and replacement of the explicitly xenophobic account suggested initially. The story quite carefully assembles a recognizably Gothic collection of characters and scenes that point in one direction (a foreign and somehow preternatural woman, victimized children, an outraged

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Englishman) only at the last moment to reject that direction as absurd. This rejection, though, by its vehemence and by the ease with which it deploys the very conventions it rejects, attests to the familiarity and strength of those conventions. I have chosen to close my study with this story because in that which it rejects may be discerned the main strands of my argument: Doyle's invocation of the Gothic precisely in the context of anxiety about national identity confirms much of what I have shown regarding the relation of Gothic fictions to English nationality from the end of the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth. At the same time, "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire" redirects our attention to the kinds of questions about the Gothic and the nation addressed in the Introduction. By way of conclusion, I will return briefly to the three most significant of these questions, which involve the role of gender and sexuality (and most especially the status of the figure of woman), the deliberate pairing of Gothic fiction with English nationality, and the dynamics of national definition. A great deal o f criticism on the Gothic has focused on its implications for women. In some of this criticism, one strand of Gothic fiction has even been construed as a kind of women's writing, a notion succinctly expressed by Ellen Moers's term "female Gothic." There can be little argument that the Gothic features a marked thematic and narrative investment in the figure of woman; as several of my chapters demonstrate, Gothic novels return to this figure repeatedly, even compulsively. But it should also be clear that, when considered in relation to national identity, the figure of woman functions in these texts more as a token or cipher in the struggle to construct and reconstruct Englishness than as a representative of what might be thought of as some genuinely female epistemology or ontology. Questions of gender in the Gothic inevitably involve questions of nationality. In Ann Radcliffe's novels, the central heroine is both peculiarly vulnerable to an attack from without understood as foreign and also, perhaps as a result, peculiarly appropriate as a bearer of Englishness. Thomas De Quincey's autobiographical writings and occasional essays reconfigure the Radcliffean heroine by invoking her as a metonym

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for the English nation itself: for De Quincey, to be English is to be feminine insofar as femininity involves potential or actual victimization.6 Charlotte Bronte, Wilkie Collins, and Bram Stoker inherit ready-made the economy of "female sacrifice" in the service of English national identity that De Quincey so chillingly articulates. But each of these authors, while putting that economy to work, nonetheless display ambivalence toward it. If the position of the figure of woman as bearer of Englishness suggests a certain status or power for women, that power comes fraught with danger. Indeed, Bronte's Vilktte takes as one of its central concerns the intolerable burden of a woman's life when it carries the weight of the nation with it. Moreover, from vulnerability it is a short step to corruption and, in turn, predation. Collins's The Woman in White and other sensation novels connect female characters' ability to suffer in the name of the nation to their ability to cause suffering. Paradoxically, then, the construction of the Englishwoman as the nation's most fragile element means that she is also potentially its most dangerous enemy. Dracula none too tacitly admits of such potential by making all the Undead minions of its eponymous Transylvanian Count female. In "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire," the dismay Ferguson evinces in his letter to Holmes results not so much from vampirism itself as from the spectacle of a vampiric woman in the domestic and symbolic space that should be occupied by the angel in the house. By the end of the nineteenth century, woman in the Gothic figures, not primarily as sacrificial victim, but rather as foreign predator feeding upon English domesticity from within. The movement from woman as victim to woman as predator casts a strange but penetrating light on the relation of gender and sexuality to national definition. The editors of a collection of essays titled Nationalisms & Sexualities—Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger—address that relation by observing that gender, like nationality, is "a relational term whose identity derives from its inherence in a system of differences": "In the same way that 'man' and 'woman' define them-

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selves reciprocally (though never symmetrically), national identity is determined not on the basis of its own intrinsic properties but as a function of what it (presumably) is not" (Introduction 5). Gender and nationality not only function similarly but are in fact interdependent; each may work either to reinforce or to undermine the another. Thus, for instance, Parker and his coeditors note that the place of sexuality in the context of national definition is such that "certain sexual identities and practices are less represented and representable in nationalism" (6-7). But the reverse is also the case: certain genders and sexualities are obsessively represented in nationalism. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic fictions, both vulnerable and predatory womanhood play a signal role in the construction of an idea of the English nation. This binary crowds out other possibilities for women characters, certainly, but it also poses difficulties for the status of masculinities—for if male characters take a central part in the action they are nevertheless often symbolically eccentric to the work of defining Englishness. Throughout this study I have had several occasions to refer to Nancy Armstrong's brilliant demonstration of the eighteenthand nineteenth-century British novel's role in the achievement of middle-class hegemony, Desire and Domestic Fiction. Armstrong's argument about the relation between realist narrative and a deeply interior subjectivity, which articulates the former's production and valorization of the latter in the service of an emerging class formation, enables a new and fuller understanding of the cultural politics of fictional forms. The case I make about Gothic fictions and English nationality owes much to Armstrong's work. At the same time, Alien Nation disagrees with Desire and Domestic Fiction over the place of (the figure o f ) woman. For Armstrong, women are representative middle-class subjects: "the modern [middle-class] individual was first and foremost a woman" (8). Insofar as that individual was also an English national subject, however, women are not so much properly representative in themselves as place-holders for men. Even in Gothic novels and conduct books from the 1790s, in which they appear as bearers of

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Englishness, women are always also figures whose victimization calls forth Englishness from (implicitly male) spectators.7 This configuration, whereby women must suffer to produce or confirm Englishness, is intensified and generalized as the century progresses, reaching something of an apogee during the Indian Rebellion. At nearly the same time as the Rebellion, predatory women begin to circulate in the pages of sensation novels and, via reviews of those novels, in the culture at large. If the Radcliffean heroine resembles Armstrong's representative middle-class subject, by the latter half of the nineteenth century that resemblance has largely been lost. Martyrs to the nation and later, as vamps and vampires, apparent threats to it, women in the Gothic enable Englishness rather than exemplify it. If recognition of the pivotal but ambiguous position of the figure of woman constitutes one provisional answer to the question of gender and the nation, it does so only by begging another important question, that of the status of England and Englishness. There are two sides to such a question. To begin with, it may appear perverse to be concerned with English and not British nationality. As the work of many historians has shown, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were marked by a strong and generally successful attempt to forge Britain into a nation by finding in Welsh, Scottish, Irish, and English particularities something commonly British. In Britons, Linda Colley adduces as evidence for this attempt a wide range of cultural products—fictional and nonfictional literary works, paintings, and nationalist manifestos. Colley finds Sir David Wilkie's painting Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Gazette of the Battle of Waterloo (1822), which depicts a large and varied group of people joyously receiving the news of victory over Napoleon, typical of such products. She notes of the painting: "Explicit in this strictly imaginary scene is the existence of a mass British patriotism transcending the boundaries of class, ethnicity, occupation, sex and age" (365). But if Wilkie's painting and other evidence Colley presents appears to offer even-handed inclusivity as the model for British nationality, there is also a body of evidence suggesting that the

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way for the Welsh, Irish, and Scots to become British was, in effect, to become more English. Beside the unifying project to which Colley quite rightly points, there is always also a sense of England "licensing" what are sometimes referred to as Britain's "provincial" nationalities.8 Such licensing, surely, is the force behind Matthew Arnold's statement, in "England and the Italian Question," that a "Pole does not descend by becoming a Russian, or an Irishman by becoming an Englishman. But an Englishman . . . descends and deteriorates by becoming anything but an Englishman" (17). Implicit in this formulation is the understanding that an Irishman gains an identity as a Briton by foregoing his Irishness and "becoming an Englishman"; an Englishman, by contrast, may be English and British simultaneously and without difficulty. On this view, Englishness functions as something like the core or essence of Britishness. The concern I have shown to delineate the contours of Englishness, then, recognizes the centrality of the idea of "England" both in itself and for the construction and maintenance of an idea of "Britain." There is an additional and somewhat different way in which Englishness is an appropriate concern for a study centered on Gothic narrative: the resources of the Gothic are better fitted to the discriminating project of establishing Englishness than to the unifying project of consolidating Britishness. As I have remarked in several chapters, the Gothic is fundamentally binary in its organization, given to stark oppositions and exclusivity. As such it is remarkably suited to the work of defining what it means to be English but much less suited to clarifying what it means to be British. If Sir David Wilkie could fashion out of the news of victory at Waterloo a scene of regional (and gender and class and occupational) boundaries overcome, a Gothic writer such as De Quincey could put the same national historical event to use for more narrow national ends: it is specifically the English mail-coach that delivers "the secret word . . . ; which word was — Waterloo and Recovered Christendom!" (322). The other side of the question of the Gothic's connection to Englishness has to do with the particularity of such an attribu-

Afterword tion. That is, why not pair the Gothic with American nationality, or German nationality? Of course, there is a curious way in which Englishness and the Gothic—or more precisely those descendants of the Gothic known as the ghost story and the detective story— have come to imply one another.9 This is not at all to suggest, however, that any organic connection between the two may actually be said to exist; nor is it to suggest that the Gothic is not suited to the work of defining other nations. Consider, for instance, the case of the American author Charles Brockden Brown, who published his own Gothic novel, Wieland; or, The Transformation: An American Tale, in 1798. There can be little doubt that Brown understood this work to speak to and about the nature of the new republic: if the novel's own frequent allusions to the challenges of forming the identity of a new nation in a new land are not evidence enough, we need only note in addition that upon its publication Brown sent a copy to President Thomas Jefferson (Warfel 112). Moreover, as Jay Fliegelman writes, Wieland "inaugurated the Gothic preoccupation with the psychological and historical meaning of America, which half a century later would become so central to the works of Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville" (vii).10 Alien Nation delineates the ways in which English Gothics defined, promoted, and complicated a sense of Englishness. It nowhere seeks to assert any essential, necessary connection between England and the Gothic. Indeed, as the effort has been to show again and again the constructedness of national identity, any effort to capture for the Gothic a given national valence would be contradictory. Finally, there is the difficult issue of the dynamics of the construction of national identity. This study has suggested that in the Gothic the English nation is defined primarily against that which it is not—against an anti- or alien nation. Such an assertion leaves unclear, however, whether the nation is defined first and foremost against the identity of other nations or, rather, against earlier definitions of itself, earlier versions of Englishness. Slavoj Zizek provides one answer to this difficulty in a passage on "internal limits" in For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor :

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National identification is an exemplary case of h o w an external border is reflected into an internal limit. O f course, the first step towards the identity of the nation is defined through differences from other nations, via an external border: if I identify myself as an Englishman, I distinguish myself from the French, German, Scots, Irish, and so on. However, in the next stage the question is raised of w h o among the English are "the real English," the paradigm of Englishness.. . . However, the final answer is of course that nobody is fully English, that every empirical Englishman contains something "non-English"—Englishness thus becomes an "internal limit," an unattainable point which prevents Englishmen from achieving full identity-with-themselves. ( n o )

Zizek constructs a sequential movement. First, national identity takes shape as an external boundary, as defined against other nations. Second, this binary of national definition is turned inward, giving rise to a distinction best expressed with an adaptation of a well-known Orwellian line: all Englishmen are English, but some are more English than others. Third, the mechanics of this process result in an internal limit that renders the national subject split and hence incapable of achieving self-identity. It seems mistaken to me to assign temporal or logical primacy either to national definition against other nations or to national definition against others, past or present, within the nation. If we consider England in the 1 7 9 0 s , forceful evidence does indeed establish that the English strengthened their sense of themselves as English against revolutionary France. Looked at another way, however, it is equally apparent that one function of the opposition England/France was to provide a solution to an internal dispute over Englishness, a dispute that can be understood either as one between the aristocracy and the middle classes (see Newman) or as one between Burkean and Paineite conceptions of national identity (see M. Butler, Burke). At mid-century, a similarly doubled and Janus-like situation obtains. Attempts at national redefinition were directed at various internal elements (e.g., Celts, immigrants, the aristocracy); nevertheless, as we have seen, these attempts often manifested themselves as representations of England Strug-

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gling against threats from without. In the work of Bronte, Collins, and Arnold, for instance, undesirable foreignness and equally undesirable versions of Englishness function as metonyms for one another. We should speak, then, not of the ultimate primacy of external or internal limits to national identity, but rather of a shifting disposition, a flexible set of strategies pressed into service as the situation demands. Zizek places final emphasis on the assertion of split subjectivity, of a self incommensurate with any national definition and therefore always partial. Most important here is the effect of this incommensurability, which provides leverage for the operation of power in a way strictly analogous to the leverage Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues is provided by the "homosocial spectrum." That is, just as the existence of ambiguity surrounding the precise conceptual and behavioral border between "heterosexuality" and "homosexuality" demands incessant policing of the self and allows for homophobic blackmail, so the equal ambiguity surrounding what it means to "be" a given nationality provides purchase for the operation of power. Thus Podsnap's absurd "Not English!" in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (1865) has consequences in the regulation of behavior and in the struggle for social and political dominance—consequences played out, among other places, in the pages of the English Gothic, a genre in which the repeated deployment of the accusation "Not English!" is something of a sine qua non. Inevitably, this accusation returns to haunt the Gothic itself, as "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire" demonstrates: the story endorses Ferguson's assertion that vampirism—and, implicitly, Gothic narrative as a whole—is properly "some wild tale of foreign parts." Similar accusations were made about the genre from the first years of its appearance: late in the eighteenth century both Hannah More and Jane Austen took Gothicists to task for producing un-English tales. In these earlier attacks, however, there is an emphasis on temporality that Doyle's story lacks, for in them the Gothic, despite its infatuation with the Middle Ages and its resemblance to the romances of the late Renaissance, is

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taken as a hallmark of modernity. This identification is not limited to detractors: both D e Quincey and the Marquis de Sade praise Gothics as distinctively "modern" novels. 11 Moreover, the same connection between the Gothic and modernity appears in the middle of the nineteenth century in relation to sensation fiction: Margaret Oliphant, in her review essay "Sensation Novels," understands sensation as a symptom of the modern need for "shock of incident" (565). The curious status of the Gothic as both modern and deeply invested in the past provides a compelling explanation for much of the controversy surrounding the genre. At first glance, this dual temporal status—yet another of the Gothic's ubiquitous binaries —seems to contribute to its suitability for giving shape to nationality: the formation of national subjectivity is, above all, a modern project attempting to establish the truth of an ancient nationality, to discern, in the multiple contingencies of the past, the history of a nation. But this fact is precisely what nationalism must deny. As Eric Hobsbawm notes, "modern nations and all their impedimenta generally claim to be the opposite of novel, namely rooted in the remotest antiquity, and the opposite of constructed, namely human communities so 'natural' as to require no definition other than self-assertion" (14). For this reason, the Gothic is a dangerous tool for nation-making insofar as it lays bare modernity's selective use of the past and, in doing so, highlights what nationalists would obscure: the novelty and constructedness of the nation. In the case of nineteenth-century England, the Gothic, with a foot in both past and present, remained both central and controversial as long as Englishness was associated primarily with antiquity. As the sense of Englishness extending into the immemorial past became solidified, however, the English began to find national identity precisely in their modernity, and at that moment the relation between the Gothic and Englishness changed. This, in part, is the force of Doyle's story. "Science" now replaces Gothic narrative as the rubric most suited to making sense of English mysteries. The victory of the modern, scientific Englishmen over the ancient, monstrous vampire in Dracuia may be taken as

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symptomatic of this replacement of the Gothic. In Stoker's novel, though, the monstrous/Gothic still retains enough force to participate in the formation of national identity. In "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire," Gothic narrative is entirely drained of its importance, replaced by the ultra-rationality of Holmes, whose expert use of information retrieval and deductive reasoning prevails over superstition, and the apparent order of the British navy, into whose hands the errant Master Jack is placed for reeducation. The Gothic, for over a century a "modern" genre that spoke to and about what it meant to be English, had become outdated. Or so, at any rate, it seems. For like Stoker's Undead, the Gothic denies the possibility of any truly final end by laying itself to rest in a state of permanent prolepsis —both vampires and the genre that produced them finding their ultimate narrative equivalent in the logic o f the sequel.

Notes

Introduction 1. For more on "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire," see my Afterword. 2. The dearest of many examples of this dismay is to be found in Anne Williams's Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic, one section of which bears the title "On the Dangers of Defining Gothic" (12). 3. Tania Modleski, for instance, discusses modern Gothics in Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women 59-84. 4. While I am indebted to Sedgwick's characterization of the Gothic in The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, I find untenable her reduction of these conventions to a single "dynamic structure" dominated by the correspondence between "within" and "without" (49). 5. Patricia Parker writes of her definition of romance: "These concepts are not conceived as structuring the recurrence of a fixed form, but their reappearance—and cumulative associations—do provide a way of identifying both continuities and differences" (8). 6. Langbauer, while insisting on romance as the novel's scapegoat, maintains that such a position does not necessarily entail subversion (Women and Romance). On this point see also Jacqueline Howard, who takes to task readings of the Gothic that "err in assuming that the everyday forms utilized bv women automatically made their novels subversive or 'counterhegemonic'" (100). 7. A number of studies question or complicate the use of the repressive hypothesis in understanding the Gothic. Michelle Masse dismisses a reading of the Gothic that finds, in the young heroine's repeated encounters with terror, evidence of her masochistic pleasure in confronting the phantoms of her own repression (In the Name). Kate Ferguson Ellis, in The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology, argues that the Gothic novel served as "an increasingly insistent critique of the ideology of separate spheres" (xv). While the Gothic remains "subversive" for Ellis, this subversion is less the spontaneous reappearance of repressed drives than a fairly purposeful attempt on the part of novelists to resist a rapidly solidifying gender binary. Robert Miles

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goes further, asserting that "Gothic writing constitutes a contemporaneously understood debate on the discontents of the 'subject'" (7). 8. On women's suffering and the Gothic, see also DeLamotte, Ellis (ix, xvi-xvii), Heller (especially 13-37), and Miles (7-8), among others. Jacqueline Howard exhaustively surveys feminist criticism of the Gothic in the second chapter of Reading Gothic Fiction (53-99). 9. For the identification of the victimized or threatened woman as central to the Gothic, see also M. Buder, Jane Austen 50,104; Cottom 5167; Punter, Literature of Terror 10, "Social Relations" 109. 10. This distinction is made particularly well in Claudia Johnson's Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s— Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen. Of Fanny Burney, Ann Radcliffe, and Mary Wollstonecraft she notes: "It is clear to each . .. that the spectacle of immanent and outrageous female suffering may not be the unthinkable crime which chivalric sentimentality forestalls, but rather the one-thingneedful to solicit male tears and the virtues that supposedly flow with them, and the preposterousness of their work merges from and engages this horrifying realization'' (15). 11. In this regard the figure of woman in the Gothic may be compared to the figure of the Oriental in orientalist discourse. In Orientalism, Edward Said notes that he is concerned "not with a correspondence between Orientalism and the Orient, but with the internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient . . . despite or beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a 'real' Orient" (5). Whatever its resemblance to "real" inhabitants of the Middle East or Asia, the "Oriental" created and deployed by orientalism functions in the service of a coherent discourse on the Orient. The figure of woman in the Gothic functions similarly: the significance of this figure resides less in its correspondence to "real" women than in its place as a site of cultural work. (For a critique of Said's understanding of the role of the stereotype in colonial discourse, see Bhabha, "The Other Question.") 12. According to Stella Cottrell, "the bulk of the propaganda" issued following the outbreak of war between England and France in 1803 "encouraged a patriotic identification through its particular construction of the external enemy (the French) which, in every aspect of character and social and political life, was the polar opposite of the British" (265). 13. Susan Fraiman takes Said to task for his insufficient attention to the implications gender holds for this argument; see her essay, "Jane Austen and Edward Said: Gender, Culture, and Imperialism."

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Chapter 1 1. In this Walpole anticipates the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, who in a late unfinished essay defends as "English" the Shakespearean mixture of tragic and comic against (presumably French) notions of art that demand purity of form on theoretical grounds (Barrell, "Sir Joshua Reynolds" 173). See also Seymour Howard's essay on Blake's late incorporation of a self-consciously nationalistic "Gothicism" into the cosmopolitan, neo-classical style of his youth. 2. Chloe Chard convincingly demonstrates Radcliffe's ambition to belong to an English literary tradition; see her introduction to The Romance of the Forest, especially page xxii. 3. Claudia Johnson makes a similar point about another of RadclifTe's novels: "Although set in 1584, The Mysteries of Udolpho is pervasively absorbed in the crisis of its present" (98). 4. Mary Poovey and Marilyn Butler have noted, for instance, that Radcliffe's novels are both progressive and conservative, indicting the oppression of the individual but finally preferring oppressive tradition over liberating instability (Poovey, "Ideology"; M. Butler, Jane Austen 30-32, Romantics 22-23). Norman Holland and Leona Sherman find that the Gothic "permits [the reader] to hover between radical exploration and a familiar, conservative ending" (225). Daniel Cottom attributes the peculiar behavior of Radcliffe's heroines, their fainting spells and moments of mute powerlessness, to the "unsettled disposition in these novels of the conflict between traditional aristocratic and sentimental middle-class orders of value" (56). In related readings, Ellen Moers writes of die unusual freedom to travel given by Radcliffe to heroines who nevertheless remain concerned "to preserve their identity as proper Englishwomen" (Literary Women 139; this seeming misattribution of nationality to characters who are in fact French and Italian is one to which I will return), while Terry Lovell maintains that Gothic novels by Radcliffe and others addressed a readership that "desired the rewards of feminine conformity yet simultaneously feared the dangers of submission to male domination" (71). 5. The question of displacement is raised but not answered by David Punter, who writes that in the Gothic "we find an intense if displaced engagement with political and social problems, the difficulty of negotiating these problems being precisely reflected in Gothic's stylistic conventions" ("Social Relations" 107). Mary Poovey, writing about The Mysteries of Udolpho, argues that displacement allows social critique without outright threat ("Ideology" 317). Marilyn Buder suggests that dis-

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placement assures that, despite their subversive valorization of the individual, Radcliffe's novels finally side with orthodox)' (i.e., a critique of tyranny in the past of a foreign country poses no threat to late-eighteenthcentury English hierarchy [ Jane Austen 30-31]). Robert Kiely puts forward a similar claim, arguing that "by setting their stories in other countries and periods" Radcliffe and Walpole, if not other Gothicists, hoped to avoid the appearance of urging social disorder (22). Ronald Paulson, in an interpretive move bearing affinities with those of Poovey, Buder, and Kiely, claims that the Gothic a serve[d] as a metaphor with which some contemporaries in England tried to understand what was happening across the channel in the 1790s" (217). 6. It later becomes possible, by transference to contemporary England of plots first set abroad, to write (oxymoronical) "modern" and "domestic" Gothics such as the novels of the Brontes, sensation fiction of the 1860s, and, most spectacularly, Stoker's Dracula (1897) and Richard Marsh's The Beetle (1897). (Clara Reeve's Old English Baron [1778] is only a partial exception; although set in England, the action takes place at approximately the same time period as that of The Castle of Otranto—i.e., during the Crusades.) Some indication of why it was necessary initially to develop terror in a foreign setting is given by a passage from Austen's Northanger Abbey (1818), in which Henry Tilney chastises Catherine Morland for believing Gothic events could take place in contemporary England: " 'If I understand you rightly, you had formed a surmise of such horror as I have hardly words to—Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians'" (199). 7. For a discussion of More in relation to conduct books, see Armstrong 65, 90. For a discussion that places More among Evangelical promoters of the ideology of the proper lady, see Poovey, Proper Lady 3-47, "Ideology" 310-11. 8. Both instances of nonstandard language use occur at moments when servants voice feelings of local attachment, and this perhaps indicates that Radcliffe is concerned to avoid the appearance, when rejecting aristocratic cosmopolitanism, of embracing a bumpkinish localism. While I have not pursued such an analysis here, a valuable reading of Radcliffe's novels—and one that might begin to address the problem of servants in the Gothic—would attend to the complexities of gender, class, and nationality as reflected in these novels' language use. Chapter 2 of John Barrell's English Literature in History 1730-S0: An Equal, Wide Survey, "The Language Properly So-Called," provides a useful introduction to the issues involved.

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9. But compare The Monk, which features a poem entitled "The Exile" wherein a disowned and exiled Spanish aristocrat pines for his homeland (2isff.). 10. Benedict Anderson, in Imagined Communities, stresses both in the title of his study and in the attention he gives to newspapers and novels the importance of writers to the work of nation formation. Nevertheless, Anderson's discussion of the role of bureaucratic pilgrimages— as well as his brief but suggestive allusions to the function of radio in twentieth-centurv nationalisms—indicates that writers are by no means indispensable to the work of imagining the nation (on bureaucratic pilgrimage, see 50-65; on radio, 48, 56, 123). 11. Kenneth R. Minogue demonstrates that class warfare under the guise of national purification was not limited to the English nationalist movement, but characterized the early stages of French and German nationalism as well (38, 52, 53-80). For a consideration of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century nationalism in Britain that emphasizes the formation of British rather than specifically English national identity, see Colley. 12. In her "Englishness" Ellena resembles the heroines of other Radcliffe novels. As Ellen Moers notes, "[tjhere is something very English about Mrs. Radcliffe's doll heroines" (Literary Women 139). Ronald Paulson makes the same point in his discussion of The Mysteries of Udolpho, and in doing so suggests the nature and context of this Englishness: "The deeply intuitive feelings of Emily [the heroine of Udolpho] are the quiet English virtues of the spectator of sublime overthrow across the channel" (225). 13. The Radcliffean/sentimental opposition of rural virtue to metropolitan corruption is clearest in The Mysteries of Udolpho, the second paragraph of which contrasts the joys of "pastoral simplicity" to the vitiating influence of "the busy scenes of the world" (1). The point is driven home with the case of the heroine's suitor, Valancourt, whose sojourn in Paris leaves him dissipated (see vol. 2, ch. 8). 14. As is appropriate to such powerfully resonant figures, the "meaning" of the Gothic's villainous, aristocratic foreigners is overdetermined: they concentrate in a single character anxieties about class, nationality, feudalistic sexual rapaciousness, and capitalistic avarice. 15. On uncertainty in RadclifFe, see Cottom 57-63; Spacks 168. 16. As Pierre Macherey writes of Radcliffean Gothic: "Every incident and every scene becomes a trial: every manifest presence brings with it an equivocal double: the most exposed shapes are ideally veiled" (32). 17. Chloe Chard makes a similar point about a passage from The Romance of the Forest in which Adeline finds a decaying manuscript and is drawn to read it: "In describing the process by which Adeline reads the

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manuscript, The Romance of the Forest underlines the promise of horror and terror on which its own narrative structure is based. Like all works of Gothic fiction, the novel constandy raises the expectation of future horrors, suggesting that dreadful secrets are soon to be revealed, and threatening the eruption of extreme—though often unspecified—forms of violence" (vii). 18. Compare Macherey: "The mystery novel, as it is practised bv Mrs Radcliffe, seems, then, to be the product of two different movements: the one establishes the mystery while the other dispels it. The ambiguity of the narrative derives from the fact that these two movements are not, properly speaking, successive . . . but are inextricably simultaneous" (34). Chapter 2 1. For other literary models from which De Quincey borrowed, see especially the remarkable passage in "Suspiria de Profundis" in which De Quincey makes an extended analogy between a palimpsest and the human mind. The palimpsest features a "Grecian tragedy" overwritten by a "monkish legend," which is in turn overwritten by a "knighdy romance." These three genres—tragedy, legend, and romance—also characterize the development of the individual mind, for when death, sickness, or opium bring to light the "mysterious handwritings of grief or joy" that have been inscribed there, these genres appear in succession: "The romance has perished that the young man adored; the legend has gone that deluded the boy; but the deep, deep tragedies of infancy, as when the child's hands were unlinked forever from his mother's neck, or his lips for ever from his sister's kisses, these remain lurking below all" (13: 348, 349). 2. For a representative journal entry, consider this excerpt from 1803: "Last night I imagined to myself the heroine of the novel dying on an island of a lake.. . . Last night too I image myself looking through a glass. 'What do you see?' I see a man in the dim shadowy perspective and (as it were) in a dream.... There is something gloomily great in him; he wraps himself up in the dark recesses of his own soul. . . . I image too a banquet or carousel of feodal magnificence—such as in Schiller's GhostSeer, in y e. middle of which a mysterious stranger should enter, on whose approach hangs fate and the dark roll of many woes, etc." (qtd. in De Luca 4). For an extensive list of De Quincey's early reading in the Gothic, see his Diary (215-52). 3. As in Radciffe and Lewis, for instance, De Quincey had an obsession with secret murders and societies for accomplishing them (see

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Hayter, Opium 245-46). As in Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, De Quincey frequently expresses a terror of crowds ("the human face tyrannized over my dreams" [Confessions 1822 81]). The full catalogue of "Gothic conventions" listed by Sedgwick may be found throughout De Quincey's writings. 4. Leask discusses the medicalizing and pathologizing of biographical subjects in De Quincey (178-79). 5. On Russ's use of the term "Shadow-Male," see Modleski 79. 6. As F. S. Schwarzbach has argued, such a vision reveals a sense of London as quite literally foreign, an unknown and threatening terra incognita (65-67). Later, sccnes of architectural terror would come to dominate De Quincey's opium dreams. As he writes: "With the same power of endless growth and self-reproduction did my architecture proceed in dreams" (Confessions 1822 106). J. Hillis Miller calls the sensation evoked by scenes such as this one the "Piranesi effect" after Piranesi's Carceri sketches, which were apparendy known to De Quincey through Coleridge's description of them (J. H. Miller 67; see also Hayter, Opium 248). 7. On mass society, see Barrell, Infection 4-5. 8. This is, in essence, J. Hillis Miller's understanding of De Quincey. Miller, however, attributes a source for this sense of catastrophe: the deith of De Quincey's sister Elizabeth, which, writes Miller, "colors all his existence thereafter" (19). My focus is not on the supposed origin of Dc Quincey's inevitable narrative of catastrophe (which is also a narrative of inevitable catastrophe), but on the uses to which such a narrative was pu: in providing a plot both for De Quincey himself and for the English nanon. 9. Perhaps the most resonant use of "pariah" occurs in a footnote that De Quincey appended to the second part of "Suspiria," entitled "L:vana and Our Ladies of Sorrow," when it appeared in Blackwood's Migazine in June 1845: "The reader who wishes at all to understand the coirse of these Confessions ought not to pass over this dream-legend.. .. [Its importance to the present Confessions is this,—that it rehearses or prefigures their course. This FIRST Part belongs to Madonna. The THIRD belongs to the 'Mater Suspiriorum,' and will be entitled The Pcriab Worlds" (13: 369n). 10. As De Quincey writes of himself in the 1856 version of Confesions, it is as if he were possessed by "some overmastering fiend, . . . soiie oestrus of hidden persecution that bade [him] fly when no man pirsued" (338). 11. That the Sphinx should pose the question of the Incommunicable, and that a lion should conquer him without a struggle, is perhaps ofa piece with De Quincey's intense phobia of large cats. For an extended

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treatment of this phobia, see the chapter in Barrell entitled "Tigridiasis: Tipu's Revenge" (Infection 48-66). Barrell fails to mention a remarkable coincidence involving tigers in the First Opium War. After hostilities had begun, the first large Chinese counterattack was carried out by troops wearing "tiger-skin caps": "The timing of the Chinese attack—a night assault on 10 March 1842—was decided in the event... by War Magic: the twenty-eighth day of the first Chinese month (a Tiger month) and at the hour of the tiger (between 3 and 5 A.M.)" (Beeching 144). 12. John Barrell's The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: A Psychopatholqgy of Imperialism treats De Quincey's fear of this pollution or "infection" compellingly and at great length. 13. As Joshua Wilner observes, "the drug's effect is to cut across or suspend the historical or organic continuity of the subject and institute in its place a depersonalized and detemporalized machinery of imaginative production" (493). But, like the pharmakon that it is, opium also promises to avert such destabilization. Alina Clej notes: "His [De Quincey's] emphasis on 'the most exquisite order, legislation, and harmony' brought by the opium rapture is an attempt to preempt any danger of dissemination and dissipation of the self through the contagious influence of the (feminine, proletarian, or oriental) Other" (xi). (On the pharmakon, see Derrida, "Plato's Pharmacy") 14. Virginia Berridge and Griffith Edwards, in Opium and the People: Opiate Use in Nineteenth-Century England, establish that "the majority of descriptions at this time [the late eighteenth century] still saw opium eating or smoking as a peculiarly Eastern custom" (xxv). 15. Such a logic of the simultaneous plausibility of opposed possibilities is typical of De Quincey. Note the rhetorical gymnastics of the following sentence, in which guilt is at once denied and admitted: "But, on the one hand, as my self-accusation does not amount to a confession of guilt, so, on the other, it is possible that, if it did, the benefit resulting to others, from the record of an experience purchased at so heavy a price, might compensate, by a vast overbalance, for any violence done to the feelings I have noticed, and justify a breach of the general rule" (Confessions 1822 30; emphasis in original). 16. Barry Milligan observes in Pleasures and Pains: Opium and the Orient in Nineteenth-Century British Culture, his fascinating study of opium and empire in nineteenth-century Britain: "Coleridge laid the foundation for a conception of opium as the medium of a retributive Oriental infection-invasion that not only threatens to dissolve the national identity of its user but also clouds some basic reference points for individual identity" (12). The peculiarly powerful anxieties and desires surrounding opium he attributes to the fact that "not only was it literally ingested by British bodies . . . but it also had a reputation for altering the

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consciousness of its user, and it is this dual force that prepares the ground for a cultural context in which to interpret opium and its attendant transformations as various forms of foreign invasion, invasions that are imagined in nineteenth-century British culture as simultaneously pleasurable and painful" (30). Berridge and Edwards locate the association of opium use in England with "moral as well as physical descent" in the anti-opium movement of the last quarter of the nineteenth century (193); both Coleridge and De Quincey, however, betray a similar anxiety more than half a century earlier. 17. As Michael Cochise Young points out, such a displacement of blame is characteristic of De Quincey (55, 57); see also Maniquis, who argues that for De Quincey "[t]he 'real' self floats within a stream of discontinuous selves, and it is always this real self that is innocent. Discontinuous selves mark the presence of guilt, which is always alien, never his" (58; emphasis in original). 18. I am grateful to Peter Stallybrass for calling my attention to Mulready's Train Up a Child; for a deft reading of the painting as well as an account of various contemporary reactions to it, see his essay, "Marx and Heterogeneity: Thinking the Lumpenproletariat." 19. On the linguistic implications of this scene, see also Lcask 209-13. 20. By 1821 there had been two official missions to China from the British Crown. Both missions had been sent by George III. The first, in 1793, was led by Lord Macartney; the second, in 1816, was led by Lord Amherst. Neither was particularly successful at convincing the Chinese to deal directly with the British Crown—though, as we shall see, De Quincey believed that both managed at least to convey British refusal to submit to the Chinese view of them as "barbarians" bearing tribute. Despite these political contacts, relations between the two countries were, from the start, almost entirely mercantile. 21. Some indication of the volume of opium imported into China is provided by Collis, who writes that at the end of the eighteenth century two thousand chests of opium (each chest weighing one hundred and fifty pounds) were sold to the Chinese annually; by 1825, the number had risen to nearly ten thousand chests; in 1836, to more than twenty-six thousand chests (64). 22. These comments, as well as De Quincey's, perhaps owe much to Reverend Sydney Smith's 1803 account. According to Smith, Malays are "the most vindictive and ferocious of living beings.... [W]e cannot help thinking, that, one day or another, when they are more full of opium than usual, they will run amock from Cape Cormorin to the Caspian" (qtd. in Leask 209-10). 23. Nigel Leask, John Barrell, and, to a lesser extent, Robert Mani-

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quis all discuss De Quincey's writings on the Opium Wars; see Leask, 208-28; Barrell, Infection 147-56; Maniquis, 96-106. 24. The essay was published in June 1840 under the title "The Opium and the China Question." It was reprinted in the Collected Writings as "The Opium Question with China in 1840." 25. As Leask writes: "The most disturbing element of De Quincey's dream life . . . is the way that it is quite literally materialized in his later writings about China, Ceylon and the Indian Mutiny" (216). 26. This nexus appears in various guises throughout the essay. In arguing that the Chinese are not to be believed when they claim that they seek to stop the opium trade for the benefit of their citizens, for instance, De Quincey proclaims: "This sudden leap into the anxieties of parental care is a suspicious fact against the Chinese government" (14: 167-68). The suggestion that the Chinese, as a nation, are not good parents is echoed in a later essay on China in which Chinese mothers are attacked: the one duty of such a mother, writes De Quincey, is to "teach to her children, as her earliest lesson in morality, some catechism of vengeance" (qtd. in Barrell, Infection 154). 27. The incident involving the Lady Hughes also figures in an 1833 article in the Chinese Repository. The article's anonymous author, whom Collis suggests was probably Jardine of Matheson, Jardine, and Co., concludes his discussion of the incident thus: "Has not the Chinese commerce of Great Britain been purchased with the blood of the gunner of the Lady Hughes? Has not his immolation up to this day remained unavenged? There is the smell of blood still" (qtd. in Collis 97). 28. On De Quincey's sense of the inevitable, eternal iteration of atrocities, see De Quincey, "The English Mail-Coach" 304; J. H. Miller 193; Snyder xix. 29. Interestingly, as John Barrell has noted, some of De Quincey's predictions did, in fact, come true (Barrell, Infection 152). There was the case of Captain Stead, who landed on the island of Chou-san, which had been seized by the British early in the First Opium War. Stead did not know when he landed, however, that the island had since been returned; he was killed by angry Chinese (Beeching 128). There were also two ships captured on Formosa (present-day Taiwan): one, a troop transport full of Indians named the Nerbudda, is referred to by De Quincey in "The Chinese Question in 1857" (14: 365; see also Barrell, Infection 152); a second, which goes unmentioned, was named—eerily enough in light of Confessions—the Ann (Beeching 137-38). 30. In the words of Alina Clej, "To posit and assert itself the subject has to exceed or lose itself." This consolidation of subjectivity by way of excess and transgression constitutes for Clej the principal instance of

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De Quincey's anticipation of modernity: "This prodigality, the extended play of defiance and impossible redemption, informs De Quincey's confessions and the texts of many of his modernist successors" (11). 31. The constellated concerns of opium, subjectivity, empire, and the Gothic recur frequently in texts throughout the nineteenth century, from Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (1868) and Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) to Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Man with the Twisted Lip" (1901). 32. Note the privileged position occupied by tea in the domestic idyll that De Quincey, immediately before embarking on the section of Confessions titled "The Pains of Opium," invokes as an emblem of all that his addiction to opium rendered irretrievable: "From the latter weeks of October to Christmas-eve, therefore, is the period during which happiness is in season, which, in my judgment, enters the room with the teatray: for tea, though ridiculed by those who are naturally of coarse nerves, or are become so from wine-drinking, and are not susceptible of influence from so refined a stimulant, will always be the favourite beverage of the intellectual" (Confessions 1822 94). Chapter 3 1. On the Indian Rebellion of 1857-58, see Broehl; Hibbert; Hutchins; Moon 676-781; Paxton; Sharpe 57-82; Stokes. 2. Chapters 4 and 5 of Graham Dawson's Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities read the hagiographic writings that followed in the wake of the death Major-General Sir Henry Havelock, a leader in the effort to rescue the English besieged at Lucknow, as an instance of the emergence of the soldier as a national hero simultaneous with the "first 'national-popular' colonial war fought by Britain in its Empire"—the suppression of the Rebellion (81). I would want to draw out and make explicit what is implicit in Dawson's argument: that both Havelock's military apotheosis and the solidification of British rule in India following the Rebellion were enabled by the English view of their activities as an appropriate response to atrocities committed against English women and children. 3. See in particular a depiction of the burning of an English bungalow and the massacre of women and children as illustrative of the capture of Delhi; a parlor scene in which a young white woman with two children, one in the act of nursing, looks up aghast at two barefoot, grizzled, and wild-eyed Indians who have burst in upon her bearing swords and torches; and a crude drawing of a nearly nude white woman hung from

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a tree by her wrists being bavonetted by sepoys, her beheaded infant on the ground below (the first two in Campbell, the third in Frost; these and similar illustrations reproduced in Broehl 84-85). It should be noted that, while massacres certainly occurred, few of the atrocities attributed to the sepoys were subsequently substantiated. 4. According to Arthur Prager, "The British Lion's Vengeance on the Bengal Tiger" was "[t]he most famous of Tenniel's 'Cawnpore Cartoons' It celebrates the capture of Bethan by General Havelock and the burning of the Mahratta Palace in retaliation for the massacre at Cawnpore. Its appearance in Punch aroused strong feelings in the British public and helped to thwart Lord Canning's appeals for humane treatment for the Sepoy rebels. It also doubled Punch's circulation" (18). 5. Paxton argues that "[b]v the 1830s . . . Gothic conventions had restructured English romances about India in such a way that Indian men were usually assigned the role of the villain-rapist while Indian women remained in the victim's position that [Edmund] Burke so graphically described. . . . After the Indian Uprising of 1857, there is a second, more abrupt transformation in the trope of rape in British novels about India as English women replace Indian women as the victims of threatened or actual sexual violence" (7). Essays about and visual representations of the Rebellion establish that this trope was not confined to the pages of fiction. 6. De Quincey places the blame for any incoherence in his second essay on the Rebellion on his intense anxiety—"The same deadly anxiety on behalf of female relatives, separated from their male protectors in the centre of a howling wilderness, now dedicated as an altar to the dark Hindoo goddess of murder" ("Passing Notices" 505). 7. According to Lindop: "There were erroneous reports that all the British at Delhi had been massacred" (383). Masson notes in De Quincey : "Nothing . . . seems to have interested De Quincey so much, or roused him so nearly to a paroxysm of personal excitement, as the Indian Mutiny of 1857-58" (131). 8. In this judgment Bronte only expresses a widely accepted premise; compare J. S. Mill: "The sacred duties which civilized nations owe to the independence and nationality of each other, are not binding towards those to whom nationality and independence are certain evil, or at best a questionable good" (qtd. in Said, Culture 80). 9. For a different and fuller appraisal of Bronte's relation to the revolutions of 1848, see Stoneman. 10. VilUtte's obsession with passion was censured by Harriet Martineau in an 1853 review of the novel that ended her friendship with Bronte. "All the female characters," complains Martineau, "in all their thoughts and lives, are full of one thing, or are regarded by the reader in

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the light of that one thought—love. It begins with the child of six years old, at the opening—a charming picture—and it closes with it at the last page" (254). 11. In her ambivalent attitude to Catholicism, Lucy Snowe resembles Charlotte Bronte herself. Elizabeth Gaskell writes of Charlotte and Emily's encounter with Catholicism in Belgium: "The great solemn cathedral of St. Gudule, the religious paintings, the striking forms and ceremonies of the Romish Church—all made a deep impression on the girls, fresh from the bare walls and simple worship of the Haworth Church. And then they were indignant with themselves for having been susceptible of this impression, and their stout Protestant hearts arrayed themselves against the false Duessa that had thus imposed upon them" (147).

12. See Tanner, who in his introduction to the Penguin edition of ViLette writes: "Just as Charlotte Bronte hands over to Lucy Snowe the right to rename her actual environment... so her whole book is an act of renomination. As she composes her book she is composing herself, and what that book shows us is not just Charlotte Bronte in a refracted light bu: the imagined figure of Lucy Snowe refusing to have her experience named for her" (50). Sec also Carlisle, who places Villette in the context of such mid-century fictional and actual autobiographies as David Copperfield, In Memoriam, and The Prelude. 13. In this regard, see Terry Eagleton's claim that "[a]s both enterprising individualist and helpless victim, Lucy is caught in an interior conflict" {Myths 64). 14. Despite beginning with an apparendy approving reference to Fcucault, Maynard's book on Bronte and sexuality is decidedly antiFojcauldian in that it remains wedded to the "repressive hypothesis" and an essentialist view of human sexuality throughout. Thus, in his final chipter, which considers Villette, he argues that Bronte "attempts to uncover an essential human sexual nature"—and that she is successful in this effort (215). 15. For a reading similar to Clark-Beattic's, see Lawson, who argues, however, that "the distinction between Protestantism and Catholicism [ir Villette] is . . . of a secondary order; it arises from the fundamental dhision within Lucy Snowe herself" (J3). See also Zemka, who develops Clirk-Beattie's emphasis on Villette as conversion narrative, pointing out thit Catholic surveillance in the novel actively produces Lucy Snowe's valorized "Protestant" inferiority. 16. Perera's reading of Jane Eyre resembles that of Gayatri Spivak, wk> sees in Bertha Mason's death by fire "the construction of a selfimnolating colonial subject for the glorification of the social mission of

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the colonizer" (251). Jenny Sharpe, in a reading of Jane Eyre in some ways close to my own understanding of ViUette, observes that the former novel constitutes its eponymous protagonist's subjectivity by way of "a complex system of tropes" that "cannot be reduced to the simple binarism of colonizer and colonized [but] is composed of a two-part constellation in which (1) the 'rebel slave' and 'harem woman' are used to articulate the forms of appropriate and inappropriate rebellion, and (2) the Creole woman and sati rework the doctrine of woman's mission" (30). 17. See also Meyer, who argues that in ViUette and Jane Eyre "Bronte uses references to colonized races to represent various social situations in British society: female subordination in sexual relationships, female insurrection and rage against male domination, and the oppressive class position of the female without family ties and a middle class income" (249). While attentive to the several ways in which colony signifies, Meyer, like Clark-Beattie and Perera, ultimately flattens the distinct resonances of colony and Continent. 18. "Cleopatra" and "La vie d'une femme" are evidently based upon paintings Bronte saw at the Brussels Salon of 1842. According to Gustave Charlier, Bronte's "Cleopatra" resembles a canvas by De Biefve entitled Une Almee and accompanied by two lines of poetry: "Egyptian almees, light-footed dancing girls, / With filmy draperies and long floating curls." Also exhibited at the 1842 Salon was La. vie d'une femme by Mme. Fanny Geefs, a triptych representing Pity, Love, and Sorrow (Charlier 387, 389; Gerin 209). 19. Vashti's defiance is specifically a refusal to display herself: "On the seventh day, when the heart of the king [Ahasuerus] was merry with wine, he commanded Mehuman, Biztha, Harbona, Bigtha, and Abagtha, Zethar, and Carcas, the seven chamberlains that served in the presence of Ahasuerus the king, to bring Vashti the queen before the king with the crown royal, to shew the people and the princes her beauty: for she was fair to look on. But the queen Vashti refused to come at the king's commandment by his chamberlains: therefore was the king very wroth, and his anger burned within him" (Esther 1.10-12). 20. Tanner writes of these paintings, "Lucy is striving to find the right kind of mediation between the wrong kind of substance and the wrong kind of shadow" (23). 21. See, for instance, chapter 23 of Villette, in which Lucy writes two sets of letters to John Graham Bretton: "Feeling and I turned Reason out of doors, drew against her bar and bolt, then we sat down, spread our paper, dipped in the ink an eager pen, and, with deep enjoyment, poured out our sincere heart. When we had done . . . then, just at that moment,

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the doors of my heart would shake, bolt and bar would yield, Reason would leap in, vigorous and revengeful, snatch the full sheets, read, sneer, erase, tear up, re-write, fold, seal, direct, and send a terse, curt missive of a page" (335). 22. Jacobus's argument depends upon her assimilation of the Gothic to Romanticism. She writes, for instance, of "Gothic and Romantic modes" that "challenge the monopolistic claims of realism on 'reality'" (48). While it is possible—even important—to question such an assimilation, I would like instead to attend to the resulting valorization of the Gothic in the text. (See also the Marxist Feminist Literature Collective; Jacobus was a member of this group, and her views on Villette color the Collective's essay "Women's Writing") 23. The battle for Labassecourien independence closely resembles that for Belgian independence, which took place in 1830 and was won after four days of fighting (September 23-27). M. Constantin Heger, the Belgian schoolmaster with whom Charlotte Bronte apparently fell in love in 1842 and who was the model for M. Paul, fought for the Nationalists; his brother-in-law was among four hundred and forty-five men on the Belgian side killed in the fighting (Gerin 194). 24. As in De Quincey's dreams, in Lucy Snowe's waking visions opium summons into existence an orientalist landscape in the midst of European space. 25. Remarkably, Bronte here describes Belgian Independence, September 23-27, in terms of the Feast of the Assumption, August 15. Bronte witnessed the latter festival while in Brussels. See Gerin, who notes: "In chapter 38 of Villette, where Lucy Snowe under the strong opiate administered by Madame Beck, wanders out into the streets of the city at night, and finds herself in the midst of a great throng of holiday-makers, Charlotte recorded very exactly the scene that took place in the royal park of Brussels on 15 August 1843" (238). 26. To this list of cross-dressing in the novel we might add M. Paul's afterlife in the criticism as a transvestite. Leslie Stephen, for instance, writes: "At bottom he [M. Paul] is always (like all ladies' heroes) a true woman, simple, pure, heroic, and loving—a real Joan of Arc, as Mr. Thackeray said of his creator, in the beard and blouse of a French professor" (28). 27. Butler writes: "The subject is not determined by the rules through which it is generated because signification is not a founding act, but rather a regulated process of repetition that both conceals itself and enforces its rules precisely through the production of substantializing effects. . . . If the rules governing signification not only restrict, but en-

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able the assertion of alternative domains of cultural intelligibility . . . then it is only within the practices of repetitive signifying that a subversion of identity becomes possible" (145; emphasis in original). Chapter 4 1. This is a specific instance of Anderson's more general, and more important, claim: that nations, because they are neither natural nor eternal, require cultural work for their production and reproduction. Thus, the editors of Nationalisms & Sexualities draw attention in their introduction to "the nation's insatiable need for representational labor to supplement its founding ambivalence, the lack of self-presence at its origin or in its essence" (A. Parker et al. 5). 2. As Timothy Brennan notes, the realist novel "historically accompanied the rise of nations by objectifying the 'one, yet many' of national life, and by mimicking the structure of the nation, a clearly bordered jumble of languages and styles" (49). 3. Reviews of sensation fiction repeatedly invoke the criterion of a "national literature" as a means of critiquing that fiction. The upshot of much of this criticism was that sensation fiction was simply not English. A review of Collins's No Name (1862) in the Reader (3 January 1863) states this quite directly: "It [sensation] is a plant of foreign growth. It comes to us from France, and it can only be imported in a mutilated condition" (qtd. in Page 134-35). Other reviewers, while less literal minded, also expressed the sentiment that sensation fiction failed insofar as it purported to be English literature. J. Herbert Stack, considering "novels of adultery" in the Fortnightly Review (1871), devotes the entirety of his review—fifteen pages—to distinguishing between what is proper to English literature as distinct from the literatures of Greece, France, and Italv. For Stack, a literary work that deviates from the characteristics proper to its nation of origin is inevitably flawed because "the conventional types in each country are strong enough to form a kind of atmosphere for the national literature—an atmosphere necessarv to its life" (736). Any author who sets her or his story in England but fails to ensure its conformity with the English "atmosphere" must be unsuccessful, for such an author "has drawn a novel of English life, and simply on account of national and local tone, the whole story seems absurd, unnatural, and untrue" (733; emphasis in original). 4. James, as my epigraph from his review of Braddon's Aurora Floyd (1863) suggests, finds the mixture of Gothic and domestic to be the distinguishing feature of sensation fiction. For a contemporary assess-

Notes to Chapter 4 ment similar to James's, see "Sensational School." More recently, Thomas Boyle, Patrick Brantlinger, Winifred Hughes, and Jenny Bourne Taylor all consider the interplay of Gothic and domestic realist elements to be central to sensation novels (see Boyle 126-27; Brantlinger, "What" 2, 4; Hughes 7-8, 63-67; Taylor 1, 5-6). See also Keith Reierstad and Tamar Heller, both of whom detail Collins's revision of the novelistic practice of Ann Radcliffe and other Gothicists. 5. For representative reviews, see "Belles Lettres"; Chorley; James; Rae; Sala; "Sensational School"; Stack. Oliphant furnishes one of the most interesting cases among contemporary reviewers. She published a series of three essays on sensation fiction in Blackwood's Magazine, dated 1862, 1863, and 1867. Taken together, the essays reveal an increasing nervousness with the novels, a nervousness that begins with hedged acceptance but culminates in an impassioned appeal to national purity. The generic hybridity that I argue constitutes an important formal feature of sensation has been transmogrified, by the time of Oliphant's final essay, into the specter of racial pollution through literal miscegenation: "[A] woman has one duty of invaluable importance to her country and her race which cannot be over-estimated—and that is the duty of being pure. There is perhaps nothing of such vital consequence to a nation. . . . [T]here can be no doubt that the wickedness of man is less ruinous, less disastrous to the world in general, than the wickedness of woman. That is the climax of all misfortunes to the race" ("Novels" [1867] 275). See Oliphant, "Sensation Novels" "Novels" (1863), and "Novels" (1867). Also see Helsinger, Sheets, and Veeder, who discuss Oliphant's views on sensation novels as they relate to the "Woman Question." 6. The vast majority of recent considerations of sensation novels read them as subverting, as Ranee puts it, "a diversity of early and midVictorian ideologies" (Wilkie 1). Knoepflmacher places The Woman in White in a tradition of novels that privilege a counterworld of nihilistic passion deeply antithetical to the presumed social consensus of the nineteenth century. In a related essay, Thro, who assimilates sensation fiction to melodrama, describes works by Dickens, Collins, and Charles Reade as marked by struggle between moralistic good and amoral energy. Reierstad considers the sensation novel to be as subversive as the Gothic novel that preceded it: "if the latter rebelled against the stultification of rationalism, the former rebelled against the stultification of respectability" (117). Hughes, whose Maniac in the Celiar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s is a still-authoritative treatment of the sensation school as a whole, suggests the disruptive power of sensationalism by allying it with modernism. For Hughes this means that these novels anticipate, perhaps even initiate, the attack on "Victorian social dogma" that the modernists complete (144).

Notes to Chapter 4 Boyle, in an account nearly as sensationalized as the novels he treats, makes the same point. Ranee argues that sensation fiction targets specifically the middle-class ideology given a name by Samuel Smiles: selfhelp (see both "Wilkie" and Wilkie). Showalter, in her reconstruction of a female literary tradition, claims that sensation fiction by women parodically inverts both the generic conventions of earlier domestic fiction and the role of Victorian women in the family; she specifically excludes Collins, however, writing that his novels are "relatively conventional in terms of their social and sexual attitudes" (A Literature of Their Own 159-60,162). Taylor modifies this judgment somewhat. More attentive to narrative technique than Showalter, she takes the struggle to narrate in Collins's novels as an indication that he was most adept among the sensationalists at manipulating nineteenth-century psychology in order both radically to undermine and finally to reestablish middle-class complacency about social and gender identity (an argument remarkably similar to many that have been made about Radcliffean Gothic; see Chapter 1, note 4). David supports such a view. She asserts that the fiction of Collins in particular "conflates resistance to dominant aesthetic and sexual ideologies" but is reappropriated by those ideologies (186). 7. As D. A. Miller notes, "perhaps no openly fictional form has ever sought to 'make a difference' in the world more than the Victorian novel, whose cultural hegemony and diffusion well qualified it to become the primary spiritual exercise of an entire age" (x). John Lucas concludes his study of ways of imagining England in English poetry with Tennyson and the Brownings because, he argues, with these figures poets cease to think of themselves as speaking to and for a national audience, ceding this role to novelists. 8. For discussion of sensation fiction as a "new realism," see Kendrick 35; Ranee, "Wilkie" 52-53; Hughes ch. 2, especially 69-72; and Taylor, 5-8,15-18. 9. George Levine's The Realistic Imagination constitutes one of the most closely reasoned and sympathetic articulations of the cultural authority wielded by the realist novel in nineteenth-century England. "Realists," writes Levine, "take upon themselves a special role as mediator, and assume self-consciously a moral burden that takes a special form: their responsibility is to a reality that increasingly seems 'unnameable,' as Carlyle implies mockingly in the pseudo-science that opens Sartor Resartus-, but it is also to an audience that needs to be weaned or freed from the misnaming literatures past and current" (12). (The quintessential "misnaming literature" for nineteenth-century realists was of course the Gothic itself; see, for instance, Jane Austen's early realist manifesto, Northanger Abbey [1818].)

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10. In a wide-ranging and persuasive essay, Laurie Langbauer argues that Miller's reading of sensation fiction replicates that fiction's strategy of "collapse." Just as sensation novels' collapse of the figures of mother (all-powerful woman) and hysteric (servile woman) establishes "for the male subject a comfortable relation to what controls him," so the collapse of genders in Miller's reading involves consolation "for the critic as well" ("Women in White" 230, 231). 11. Even in her praise of sensation fiction, Oliphant alludes to its disruption of domesticity: "[I]t is a fact that the well-known old stories of readers sitting up all night over a novel had begun to grow faint in public recollection. Domestic histories, however virtuous and charming, do not often attain that result —nor, indeed, would an occurrcncc so irregular and destructive of all domestic proprieties be at all a fitting homage to the virtuous chronicles which have lately furnished the larger part of our literature" ("Sensation Novels" 565). Julian Wolfreys, in Being English: Narratives, Idioms, and Performances of National Identity from Coleridge to Trollope, focuses specifically on Collins's exposure of the domestic ideal: "Through attention to the details of domestic life, Collins unfolds the troubles, contradictions, hypocrisy and corruptions that comprise the architecture of the heart of English middle-class culture" (12; see also his chapter on Collins, 103-28). 12. On Englishncss and domesticity, see Dodd 4-7; Ranee, Wilkie, chapter 1. Elizabeth Langland demonstrates the intersection of class and gender in the mid-Victorian domestic ideal in her fine essay, "Nobody's Angels: Domestic Ideology and Middle-Class Women in the Victorian Novel." She finds in middle-class women's deployment of a wide range of domestic discursive practices (managing visits, enforcing sartorial etiquette, organizing household prayer) evidence that these women "controlled the dissemination of certain kinds of knowledge and thus helped to ensure a middle-class hegemony in mid-Victorian England" (291). She is, however, somewhat inattentive to the powerfully nationalistic cast of the ideal she describes. In discussing Sarah Ellis's influential Women of England (1839), for instance, Langland cites Ellis's account of a botched domestic visit. Ellis explains—in terms that anticipate 1860s reviewers' explanations of what they see as the failure of sensation fiction—that the woman unable to accommodate visitors properly "fails to exhibit the character of the true English woman, whose peculiar charm is that of diffusing happiness" (qtd. in Langland 297; emphasis in original). Langland glosses the passage as follows: "at the summarizing moment, it shifts its focus to woman's essential nature.... By attributing the problems to the failure of English feminine nature, this passage obscures the material and political realities of domestic life" (297). But the passage, if it retreats to

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essential femininity, just as clearly seeks to inculcate domestic norms as natural to Englishwomen—or, better, attempts the latter in the guise of the former. 13. The cottage is Dove Cottage, Grasmere; "M." refers to De Quincey's wife, Margaret Simpson. 14. An article in the Christian Remembrancer titled "Our Female Sensation Novelists" (1863) defines that ideal in the process of objecting to its treatment at the hands of sensationalists: "It is easier . . . to take up and carry through the professed vocation of a saint, than to work out the English ideal of wife, mother, and presiding spirit of the house, after any wide departure from custom and decorum; and it is one of the most mischievous points of a bad moral that leads the young and inexperienced reader to suppose otherwise" (qtd. in Helsingeret al. 3: 128-29). 15. On chivalry and Englishness, see Lucas, chapter 8. 16. On Arnold's project as the "licensing" of marginalized cultures, see Dodd 11—15. 17. Arnold's "discovery" of a national genius in Celtic poetry that fits neatly with what is already known about the Celts is reminiscent—as are perhaps most European discourses on the Other—of the workings of orientalism as described by Edward Said: "For what the Orientalist does is to confirm the Orient in his readers' eyes; he neither tries nor wants to unsettle already firm convictions" (Orientalism 65; emphasis in original). 18. Brantlinger explains Arnold's conflicted position between English nationalism and some more properly international set of allegiances: "Arnold condemned much that was occurring around him in Britain, and as both a literary critic and an educationalist he might be described as an internationalist rather than a nationalist (though always working for the betterment of his nation): the Prussian and French schools had the advantage over their British rivals, and English writers had much to learn from those of other countries and ages. Yet the most familiar formulation of the relation between state authority and culture is also Arnold's. . . . It was through allegiance to the state rather than to squabbling classes and sects that Arnold thought it possible to develop a nation of 'best selves'" ("Nations" 258). 19. Arnold's distinction between proper and spurious national aspirations recalls the pronouncement of Bronte's that I cite near the beginning of the previous chapter: "With the French and the Irish I have no sympathy. With the Germans and the Italians I think the case is different; as different as the love of freedom from the lust for license" (qtd. in Gaskcll 244). 20. During is explicit about his view of the need to rescue nationalism from its own (bad) reputation as essentially a disguised form of

Notes to Chapter 4 racism: UI refuse the position, shared by most humanists, modernists, and Marxists, that nationalism is an essentially nasty ideological formation. It is important immediately to remember that nationalism has different effects and meanings in a peripheral nation than in a world power. . . . And let us also remember that the nation-state is, for better or worse, the political institution which has most efficacy and legitimacy in the world as it is. Modernity reproduces itself in nation-states, and there are few signs of it happening otherwise" (139). 21. Pesca's association of Englishness with swimming is not a mere caprice. As Charles Sprawson notes in Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero, a fascinating cultural history of swimming: "In the nineteenth century the English were acknowledged as the best swimmers in the world, at a time when a passion for athleticism and for games became their distinguishing feature, and made them an object of fascination to the rest of Europe" (19). 22. On the socio-cultural implications of—to use Carlyle's word— "dandiacal" dress and behavior in England at mid-century, see Moers, The Dandy: Brummell to Beerbohm, especially chapters 8, 9, and 10. 23. In referring to the two Italians in The Woman in White as grotesque, I use the term in the sense elucidated by Stallybrass and White (who, in turn, borrow it from Bakhtin). Pesca and Fosco embody the "discursive norms" of the grotesque: they are marked by "impurity (both in the sense of dirt and mixed categories), heterogeneity, masking, protuberant distension, disproportion, exorbitancy, clamour, decentered or eccentric arrangements, a focus upon gaps, orifices" (23). In this regard, see also Susan Stewart's chapter on "The Imaginary Body" in On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (104-17). 24. Arnold seems to have been in a similar bind: torn between genuine respect for the Celts and the apparent dangers of being "feminized" by association with them. 25. As D. A. Miller playfully observes: "An English translation of the French translation of the novel might be entitled, precisely, The Woman as Blank7' (175). 26. Here my argument approaches closely to that of Ann Cvetkovich, who notes that the "sensational moments" in The Woman in White "enable the more materially determined narrative of Walter's accession to power to be represented as though it were the product of chance occurrences, uncanny repetitions, and fated events" (25). The relation posited by Cvetkovich between what I call the Gothic ("sensational") and realist ("materially determined") elements of the text—a relation of spectacular and subversive "cover" to a talc of class mobility—is precisely analogous to the relation that obtains between a specious foreign threat that en-

Notes to Chapter 5 ables and covers for an expansion of Englishness. See also Perkins and Donaghv, whose argument proceeds along similar lines. 27. Of analogous figures in Collins's The Moonstone, Ashish Roy writes: "Not that the problem-solving dynamics are entrusted entirely to the inside job. The latter coincides with the unmasking of the agents of the Indian plot, the disguised Hindu priests, who are incorporated in what may be called an 'imperial bestiary,' a symbolic body, which joins the alreadv outre stimuli of detection to the excitement of the hunt" (663). 28. But see Ranee, who avers on the contrary that Collins's novels undertake "the fictional project of undermining the traditional bourgeois ethic of self-help" ("Wilkie" 47). With regard to The Woman in White, Ranee views Hartright's importation of survival strategies learned in Central America, for instance, as a tacit admission of the corruptness of a social order in which Smilesian self-help is possible. 29. Compare Eagleton on the Brontes: "It seems to me possible to decipher in the struggle between Heathcliff and the Grange [in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights] an imaginatively transposed version of that contemporary conflict between bourgeoisie and landed gentry which I have argued is so central to Charlotte's work. . . . I take it that Wuthering Heights, like Charlotte's fiction, needs mythically to resolve this historical contradiction" (Myths 115).

Chapter s 1. For English representations of Irish nationalism as monstrous and destructive, see Curtis, Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature. 2. There is a third phase. Fanon refers to it as "the fighting phase, [in which] the native, after having tried to lose himself in the people and with the people, will on the contrary shake the people" (222). 3. The OED defines "creole" as "a person born and naturalized in the [colonized] country, but of European . . . race." Usage originates in the Americas under Spanish rule as an explicitly racial distinction between people born in the Americas but of "pure" Spanish descent (crioilos, the Spanish word from which "creole" is derived) and people of mixed Spanish and indigenous blood (mestizos). For the relation between Creoles and nationality, see Anderson (50-65), GoGwilt (190-219), and Jones and Stallybrass. 4. Hazard Adams reads Yeats's movement back and forth as a purposive "antitheticality" designed to avoid binaries present in Ireland. 5. On orientalism in the novel, see Arata; Wasson. Wasson's oddly

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literal reading turns Stoker's novel into a piece of anti-Soviet Cold War rhetoric by taking its condemnation of Easterners at face value. Arata, in an essay titled "The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization," concentrates specifically on the invasion theme in the novel, arguing that the plot of "reverse colonization" reflects British fear that a vigorous Other might replace them, as well as British guilt about their own devastating invasions. While Arata's argument informs my own at several points, I would want to question in particular his failure to address the overwhelming presence in the text, not simply of fear and guilt, but of desire. Further, although he devotes three paragraphs to Stoker's Irishness, Arata appears to be unaware that Stoker's Anglo-Irish heritage complicates anv presumed loyalty to his "Irish brethren" (633). 6. Geoffrey Wall, who has also noted Dracula's status as a figure for Foucault's "blood relations," believes the novel to be principally concerned with "the crisis of the bourgeois family" (15). Wall's essay serves as a remedy to Arata's in that for him desire figures prominently; however, he flattens the resonance of the text by reading all of its concerns— sexuality, racialism, imperialism, and so on—as familial, and, ultimately, psychological: "Transylvania is Europe's unconscious" (20). 7. The terms are, of course, those of Raymond Williams (Marxism 121-27). 8. Compare Brantlinger, who writes of George Eliot's Daniel Deronéa (1876) and Disraeli's Coningsby (1844) and Tancred (1847): "In all three novels, romantic versions of 'orientalism' oppose rather than suppor the stereotyping that would identify one's nation and race as superior to ethers" ("Nations" 256). 9. See Regenia Gagnier's brief but suggestive essay, "Evolution and Information, or Eroticism and Everyday Life, in Dracula and Late Vicorian Aesthcticism," in which she considers the novel's reinscription of grnder roles in the context of late-ninetcenth-centurv aestheticism and technological modernity, and Jennifer Wicke's "Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media." 10. Several critics have focussed on the implications of gender and sexuality in Stoker's novel, and on the place of women's sexuality in particuar. Judith Weissman claims that what is really at issue in Dracula is "control over women" (405). Elaine Showalter notes that Dracula is disruptive in his activation of women's sexuality, and asserts that the burden of tie text is to redomesticate the New Woman the vampire has unleashed (Saaal Anarchy 180-81). Carol Senf argues that, rather than condemning the New Woman, Stoker "tries to show that modern women can combine the best of the traditional [passive sexuality, maternity] and the new [intellect, professional independence]" (49). Robert Tracy, in an essay thai considers the place of vampires and Undead in literature over the

IÇ2

Notes to Chapter 5

course of the nineteenth century as a whole, observes that "thev threaten the writer's—and perhaps the reader's—own sexuality, by suggesting that women can be like men" (5s). Nina Auerbach reads in this threat evidence for her claim, in The Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth, that the myth of the powerful woman was central to Victorian culture; she argues with regard to Dracula in particular that "women secretively take the novel from [the Count]" (22). Christopher Craft, in one of the most compelling essays yet written on Stoker's novel, reads vampirism together with the late-ninteenth-century discourse of "sexual inversion," noting that in both cases potentially disruptive samc-sex desire is contained within an essentially heterosexual matrix. 11. Due to the general paucity of biographical information on Stoker, evidence of his conscious attitude to Ireland and the Irish Question is scarce. With regard to Home Rule, in Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving Stoker refers to himself as a "philosophical Home-Ruler" (1: 343-44; 2: 30-31). 12. In the late nineteenth century Dracula's Romanian countrymen were thought to possess the power to absorb other races and ethnicities. Emily Gerard, for instance, writes in her Land Beyond the Forest: Facts, Figures and Fancies from Transylvania (1888) that a Hungarian man who marries a Romanian woman "will not only fail to convert her to his ideas, but himself, subdued by her influence, will gradually begin to lose his nationality" (qtd. in Arata 630). 13. On the complicated narrative method of Dracula, which the Count's triply embedded speech to Mina exemplifies, see Seed. 14. On the place of the nursemaid in the nineteenth-century family, see Davidoff; Stallybrass and White 149-70; Swan. On the place of the maternal in Dracula, see Roth, who argues that "the primary source of the ambivalences and fantasies in Dracula is pre-Oedipal, alternately focusing on 'morbid dread' and lustful anticipation of an oral fusion with the mother" (in). is. In this regard see also Kipling's Kim, a celebration of Britishheld India in which the insistent thematics of wet nursing by "dear dark foster-mothers," always tied to Indian-born Englishmen's superior ability to rule, cathect linguistic and cultural knowledge of the Other. To take only one passage: near the end of chapter 4 of the novel the woman from Kulu, one of Kim's many Indian foster parents, comments approvingly on an (apparently native-born) English District Superintendent of Police: " 'These be the sort to oversee justice. They know the land and the customs of the land. The others, all new from Europe, suckled by white women and learning our tongues from books, are worse than the pestilence'" (124). For a consideration of Kipling's popularity in relation to gender and the Orient, see Kaarsholm.

Notes to Chapter 5

193

16. Thus Judith Halbcrstam: "Monster, in fact, merges with man by the novel's end, and the boy reincarnates the dead American, Quincey Morris, and the dead vampire, Dracula, as if to ensure that, from now on, Englishness, rather than a purity of heritage and lineage, or a symbol for national power, will become nothing more than a lost moment in Gothic history" (350). As to the question of why Quincey Morris alone of the vampire-hunters must die, this textual sacrifice parallels and completes the turn from England as synecdoche for the West to England as the West itself. Indeed, the death of an American is especially appropriate in a text concerned, as is Dracula, with national identity, maternity, and degeneration. Anna Davin, in "Imperialism and Motherhood," notes of English fears at the fin de siècle: "If the British population did not increase fast enough to fill the empty spaces of empire, others would. The threat was not from indigenous populations . . . but from rival master-races" (204). 17. Even Lucy's and Mina's resemblance to "New Women" may be tak;n as a symptom of English degeneracy. Characterizing the representations of decadence at the end of the century, Sandra Siegel notes: "The Ne*' Woman, like her mirror image, the new decadent, who was always mic, confused what was essential to her nature. She not only moved in die public sphere, but behaved like a man even as the new decadents, in ther self-absorption and inaction, behaved like women, lost their masculin« vigor" (209). 18. Max Nordau characterizes the 1880s and '90s in his 1892 study Defeneration as follows: "One epoch of history is unmistakably in its declir.e, and another is announcing its approach. There is a sound of rending in every tradition, and it is as though the morrow would not link itself with to-day. Things as they are totter and plunge, and they are suffered to ree and fall, because man is weary, and there is no faith that it is worth an effort to uphold them" (Nordau 5-6; the first English translation of De£ereration appeared in 1895; the book went through seven printings befor: the end of that year [Siegel 206]). On the relation between this sense of décliné and literature, sec Brantlinger, who, in Rule of Darkness: British Litrrature and Imperialism, 1830-1914, uses the term "imperial Gothic" to refer to Dracula and a collection of other adventure novels that appeared at the turn of the century. He argues that the three themes prominently fearured in such works—"regression, invasion, and the waning of adventure—indicate proleDtically "the larger, gradual disintegration of British hegemony" (253). 19. For an interesting consideration of the place of deliberate failure in iynge's Playboy of the Western World and in the Easter Rising of 1916, seeTifft.

194

Notes to Afterword

Afterword 1. For a consideration of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories in conjunction with empire, see Thompson, chapter 3: "The Adventurous Detective: Conan Doyle and Imperialism" (60-79). 2. Appropriately (given the resonance tea holds for De Quincev), Ferguson is a tea-broker (1219). 3. William S. Baring-Gould, in The Annotated Sherlock Holmes; The Four Novels and the Fifty-Six Short Stories Complete, identifies this queen as Eleanor of Castile, the consort of Edward I (reigned 1272-1307); she was supposed to have sucked poison from a wound Edward received while crusading in Palestine (473). 4. It should be noted that the refusal of the Gothic and the concomitant turn away from jingoistic nationalism in "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire" fly in the face of its author's conscious commitment to spiritualism and British patriotism. See chapter 5 of Patrick Brantlinger's Rule of Darkness. 5. For psychoanalytic readings of the Gothic that range from Freudian to Lacanian to Kristevan, see Belsey; Day; Garner; Holland and Sherman; MacAndrew; Sadoff; Thomas; A. Williams. 6. Depictions of victimized women in the service of patriotism of course predate the Gothic. Herbert Atherton notes of the figure of Britannia in eighteenth-century satirical prints: "Again and again the prints show her as an innoccnt, abused, insulted, cozened" (95). On representations of Britannia, see also Dresser. 7. See the Introduction and Chapter 1. Claudia Johnson, in Equivocal Beings, explores the necessity for spectacular female suffering to the sentimental male subject in the 1790s. 8. For extended discussions of this point, see Dodd; Hechter. 9. Terry Casde writes: "Given the indigenous mania for things Gothic, England indeed seemed the natural home for phantasmagoria" (37). Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert, in their introduction to Victorian Ghost Stories, An Oxford Anthology, cite five criteria for good ghost stories, one of which, strangely, is that "there must be a definable Englishness about the story" (x). 10. Fred Lewis Pattee notes that Brown, whom he calls "the Father of American literature," "was possessed from the first with the conviction that the American romancer should work only in American materials. Romance, even of the Gothic type, he found even in the environs of Philadelphia" (ix, xxviii). On Brown, national identity, and the Gothic, see also Gardner.

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ii. See De Quincev, "Suspiria de Profundis" (337). Sade, in "Idées sur les romans," refers to Gothics as "ces romans nouveaux . . . le fruit indispensable des secousses révolutionnaires, dont l'Europe entière se ressentait" (these new novels . . . the inevitable offspring of the revolutionary shocks that all Europe has felt) (30).

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Index

Anderson, Benedice, 12-13, 107-8, 123, 173 n.io, 184 n.i Anglo-Irish, 18, 137-38, 146-49, 154-55, 191 n.5 Arata, Stephen D., 141, 153, 190-91 n.5 aristocracy, 18, 27, 35, 116, 118, 133, 147, 165 Armstrong, Nancy, 26-28, 29, 30, 116-17, 161-62, 172 n.7 Arnold, Matthew, 83, 109, 119-24, 128-29, 131, 134, 163, 166, 188 n.17, 189 n.24; "England and the Italian Question," 18, 119, 129, 163; Culture and Anarchy, 18, 119, 121-23; On the Study of Celtic Literature, 18, 119-23, 129,134 Auerbach, Nina, 192 n.io Austen, Jane, 4 - 5 , 7, 16, 166, 172 n.6, 186 n.9 autobiography, 17, 48, 50, 58, 64, 73-74, no, 140 Barbauld, Anna Letitia, 21, 37, 39, 44, 45 Barrell, John, 57, 92, 95, 172 n.8, 175-76 n.7,177-78 n.23 Beckford, William, 5 Bhabha, Homi K., 170 n.n Bildunflsroman, 17, 84, 127 blood, 121, 135, 136-41, 144, 148-49, 152, 155,190 n.3,191 n.6 bourgeois subject, 24-28,115-18,190 n.29, 191 n.6. See also Middle class Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, n o Brantlinger, Patrick, 19,113,185 n.4, 188 n.18,191 n.8,193 n.18,194 n.4 Bronte, Charlotte, 18,108-10, 160, 166,

172 n.6; Jane Eyre, 89, 91, 96, no, 180 n.8, 181-82 n.16,183 n.25; Shirley, 89; The Professor, 89, Villette, 9, 17, 19, 76-106, 108-10, 160,180-81 n.io, 181 nn. 12, 14, 182 n.17, 183 n.22 Brown, Charles Brockdcn, 5, 164, 194 n.io Burke, Edmund, 13,165, 180 n.5 Butler, Judith, 105-6,183-84 n.27 Butler, Marilyn, 23, 45, 58, 171 n.4, 171-72 n.5 Bvron, Lord, 6, 7 - 8 Carlyle, Thomas, 107, 109 Catholicism, 2, 6, 17, 22, 38, 60-61, 83, 87-90, 95, 147, 181 nn. 11, 15 Chard, Chloe, 38,171 n.2,173-74 n.17 China, 65-75, 76, 92,118,177 nn. 20, 21, 178 nn. 25, 26. See also Opium Wars Codrescu, Andrei, 135-36,138 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 5-6, 44-45, 175 n.6, 176-77 n.16 Colley, Linda, 14-16, 162-63, '73 n.n Collins, Wilkie, 114,118,127,129,134, 160, 166,187 n . n ; The Moonstone, 8, 21, 115, 179 n.31,190 nn. 27, 28; The Woman in White, 18, 19,108-9, no, 112, 115, 118, 119,124-35, 160,185 n.6,189 nn. 23, 26,190 n.28 Colls, Robert, 118 colonialism, 82, 84-86, 89-92, 9 3 , 9 6 99,103-5,137,146,182 n.17. See also Empire; Imperialism Continental Europe, 2-3, 38, 46, 58, 60-61, 83-84, 88-92, 9 5 - 9 6 , 1 0 2 - 6 , 108, n o , 182 n.17

Index

216 c o s m o p o l i t a n i s m , 31, 3 3 - 3 4 , 1 7 2 n . 8

48, 5 6 - 5 7 , 69, -74-75, 7 - , 82, 83-84,

Crying Game, The, 8 4 - 8 6 , 1 0 5 - 6

89, 9 1 - 9 2 , IOJ-6, 1 0 8 - 9 , 1 1 7 - 1 8 , 121, 1 2 4 - 2 7 , 133-34, 1 5 9 - 6 7 , 187 n.12, 188

C u r t i s , L . P., 1 4 8 - 4 9 , 1 9 0 n . i

n . i j , 189 n.21, 190 n . 2 6 , 193 n.16, 194 n.9

D a y , T h o m a s , 35 D e Q u i n c e y , T h o m a s , 18, 4 6 - 4 8 , 4 9 51, 5 2 - 5 4 , 5 7 - 5 8 , 6 3 - 6 5 , 6 8 - 7 0 , 7 3 - 7 5 , 7 7 - 8 2 , 83, 89, 9 2 , 1 1 5 , 1 1 7 18,139, 1 6 9 - 7 0 , 1 6 3 , 1 6 7 ; of an English Opium-Eater,

Confessions 16-17,

19, 48, 5 0 - 5 8 , 6 0 - 6 4 , 65, 67, 6 9 - 7 1 , 7 3 - 7 4 , 77, 8 0 , 1 0 4 , n o , 1 1 7 - 1 8 ; " T h e C h i n e s e Q u e s t i o n in 1857," 7 2 - 7 3 ; " T h e E n g l i s h in C h i n a , " 74; " T h e E n g l i s h M a i l - C o a c h , " 4 6 - 4 8 , 49, J I , 73; " T h e O p i u m Q u e s t i o n w i t h C h i n a in 1840," 6 9 - 7 2 , 77; " S u s p i r i a d e P r o f u n d i s , " 49, 50, 5 8 - 6 1 , 65, 80 Deane, S e a m us, 137,154 d e g e n e r a t i o n , 138, 1 4 9 , 1 5 4 , 1 9 3 n.16 deracination, 56,129 D e r r i d a , J a c q u e s , 1, 3, 176 n.13 D i c k e n s , C h a r l e s , 1 1 , 1 1 3 , 1 6 6 , 1 7 9 n.31, 185 n . 6 d i s c i p l i n e , 25, 3 0 - 3 1 , 1 1 5 , 1 4 1

F a n o n , F r a n t z , 137,190 n . 2 f e m a l e G o t h i c , 10, i j 9 f e m i n i n i t y , 2, 1 0 - 1 2 , 16, 19, 24, 30, 70, 102, 113, 142, 160, 187-88 n . 1 2 f e u d a l i s m , 140, 141 f o r e i g n n e s s , 1 - 3 , 1 3 - 1 4 , 1 - , 18, 2 1 - 2 4 , 30-31, 3 5 - 3 9 , 46, 5 7 - 5 8 , 71, 7 3 - 7 4 , 83, 96, 106, n o , i i 7 , 1 2 4 - 2 7 , 132, 142, 152, 156-60, 166, 172 n n . 5, 6, 175 n . 6 , 1 8 4 n . 3 , 1 8 9 - 9 0 n.26. Seeaiso Xenophobia F o u c a u l t , M i c h e l , 25, 9 2 - 9 3 , 1 1 4 - 1 6 , 1 4 0 - 4 1 , 181 n.14, 191 n . 6 ; Discipline and Punish, Sexuality,

27; The History of

9 - 1 0 , 26, 27, 92, 1 1 4 - 1 6 ,

140 F r e n c h R e v o l u t i o n , 5 , 1 3 - 1 4 , 19, 24 F r e u d , S i g m u n d , 53, 102, 158, 194

d i s p l a c e m e n t , 9, 2 5 - 2 6 , 40, 6 0 , 1 3 8 , 152,158,177 n.17

G a r b e r , M a r j o r i e , 8 7 - 8 8 , 91, 105

D i s r a e l i , B e n j a m i n , 191 n.8

G a s k e l l , E l i z a b e t h , 16, 111, 181 n . n

D o d d , P h i l i p , 187 n . 1 2 , 1 8 8 n.16

g e n d e r , 1-3, 7 , 1 0 - 1 2 , 13-16, 24-25,

D o v l c , A r t h u r C o n a n , Sir, 1-3, IJ7-J9, 1 6 6 - 6 8 , 179 n . 3 1 , 1 9 4 n . i

26-28, 60-61, 85-89,105,108-9, ix8, 1 2 6 - 2 7 , 132, 151, 1 5 9 - 6 2 , 163, 169 n . 7 , 172 n . 8 , 1 8 6 n . 6 , 1 8 7 n n . 10,

E a g l e t o n , T e r r y , 137,181 n . 1 3 , 1 9 0 n . 2 9 E l i o t , G e o r g e , 1 1 3 , 1 9 1 n.8 e m p i r e , 1 4 , 1 6 , 82, 96, I J 3 - J 4 , 176 n . 1 6 , 179 n . 2 , 193 n.16, 194 n . i . See also Colonialism; Imperialism E n g l a n d , 1 - 3 , 10, 13, 16, 22, 2 J - 2 6 , 31, 34-35, 46-47, 6J-67, 70-73, 7 4 - 7 J , 8 2 - 8 3 , 8 7 - 8 9 , 1 0 4 , 1 0 8 - 9 , " 0 , 119, 1 2 2 , 1 2 j , 1 2 7 - 2 8 , 1 3 2 , 1 3 9 , 1 4 1 , 14J, 1 4 6 , 1 5 3 , 155, 157, J62, 1 6 3 , 1 6 4 , 165, 167, 170 n . 1 2 , 186 n . 7 , 1 8 9 n . 2 2 , 1 9 3 n . 1 6 , 1 9 4 n.9 Englishness, 2-3, j o - 1 2 , 1 3 - 2 0 , 24-25, 28, 3 0 - 3 2 , 3 4 - 3 7 , 3 9 - 4 0 , 4 4 - 4 5 , 4 6 -

12,191-92 n.io g e n r e , 3 - 5 , 6 - 8 , 9 - 1 2 , 24, 26, 43, 4 9 - 5 0 , 6 1 , 1 0 7 - 9 , " 3 - 1 4 , 158-59, 1 6 6 - 6 8 , 174 n . i G o t h i c fiction, 1 - 2 0 , 2 2 - 2 4 , 2 5 - 2 8 , 3 8 - 3 9 , 4 3 - 4 J , 48, 4 9 - 5 0 , 55, 61, 88, 106,108-9, 110-14, ' 2 2 - 2 4 , 128-29, 131-34, 136, 138, 147, 151, 1 5 6 - 6 8 , 1 5 6 , 1 5 8 - 5 9 , 1 6 1 - 6 2 , 1 6 9 nn. 4, 6, 1 6 9 - 7 0 n . 7 , 1 7 1 - 7 2 n . j , 172 n n . 6, 8, 173 n n . 14, 16, 174 n . 2 , 175 n.3, 180 n . 5 , 1 8 4 - 8 5 n . 4 , 1 9 3 n.18, 194 n n . 5, 9-10 G r e a t E x h i b i t i o n , 18

Index

217

Haggard, H . Rider, 8, 19

Martineau, Harriet, 180-81 n.10

Heiiman, R o b e r t B., 101-2

masculinity, n - 1 2 , 1 8 , 77, 105, 113, 118,

H o b s b a w m , Eric, I6 -7

1 2 7 - 2 8 , 132

H o g g , James, 72, 80

masochism, 5 3 - 5 4

Hughes, Winifred, 113-14

Masse, Michelle A . , 11, 4 4 , 5 3 - 5 4

hvbriditv, 14, 1 9 - 2 0 , 1 0 0 - 1 0 6 , 111-12,

M a s s o n , David, 68, 180 n.7 maternity, 1 - 3 , 1 8 - 1 9 , 1 4 2 - 4 5 , 1 5 1 - 5 5 ,

114, 124, 154-55, 185 n.5

1 5 7 - 5 8 , 1 9 1 n . 1 0 , 1 9 2 n.14, 193 n.16 imperialism, 16-17, 75, 85, 136-37, 142, 145, 191 n.6. See also Colonialism;

M a t u r i n , Charles R o b e r t , 5, 6, 12-13, 3 9 , 1 4 7 , 175 n.3 middle class, 2 3 - 2 5 , 2 6 - 2 8 , 35, 116-

Empire incommunicability, 5 4 - 5 5 , 6 4 - 6 5 . See

1 8 , 1 3 3 , 1 4 0 - 4 1 , 1 6 5 , 1 8 2 n.17. See also Bourgeois subject

also Incffabilitv

Miller, D. A., 115-16, 127, 186 n.7, 187

India, 83, 9 0 , 91, 9 2 , 118, 179 n.2,

n.10, 189 n.25

1 7 9 - 8 0 n.3, 192 n.15 Indian Rebellion, 16, 7 6 - 8 2 , 119, 162,

Miller, J. Hillis, 175 nn. 6, 8, 178 n.28 Milligan, Barry, 1 7 6 - 7 7 n.16

1 7 9 - 8 0 n.3 ineffability, 7, 12-13, 2 6 , 4 0 - 4 2 . See also

modernity, 2, 1 4 0 - 4 2 , 1 6 6 - 6 8 , 1 7 9 n.30,189 n.20,191 n.9

Incommunicabilitv inscription, 109, 121, 1 2 5 - 3 2 , 134, 174 n.i Ireland, 18-19, 82, 8 4 - 87, 119, 122,

M o e r s , Ellen, 159,171 n . 4 , 1 7 4 n.12, 189 n.22 M o r e , Hannah, 16, 19, 28, 45, 166, 172

1 3 6 - 3 8 , 1 4 6 - 4 9 , 154-55, 190 n.4, 192

n.7; Strictures on the Modern Sys-

n.n

tem of Female Education,

15, 2 8 - 3 2 ,

44-45 Jacobus, Marv, 9, 9 9 - 1 0 0 , 101, 183 n.22 James, Henry, 1 0 9 - 1 0 , 113, 1 8 4 - 8 5 n.4 Jameson, Fredric, 8, 137 J o h n s o n , Claudia I.., 15, 24, 170 n . i o , 171 n . 3 , 1 9 4 n.7 Kipling, Rudvard, 152, 192 n.15;

M o r e t t i , Franco, 146 M o v n a h a n , Julian, 147 Mulreadv, William, 6 2 - 6 4 narrative, 2, 11, 1 4 , 1 7 - 1 8 , 2 4 - 2 5 , 28, 4 3 - 4 4 , 48, 50, 5 9 - 6 0 , 63, 6 4 - 6 5 , 74,

Kitn,

192 n.15 Langbauer, Laurie, 7, 169 n.6, 187 n.10 L e Fanu, Joseph Sheridan, 147 Leask, N'igei, 7 j , 175 n.4, 1 7 7 - 7 8 n.23, 178 n.25 Levine, G e o r g e , 13, r86 n.9 Lewis, M a t t h e w Gregory, 5, 23, 51, 52, 88, 174 n.3 Lvons, F. S. L . , 148

90, 9 9 , 106, 1 0 8 - 9 , 1 2 2 - 2 4 , 1 2 7 - 3 3 , 134, 145, 161-62, 131-32, 173 n.17, 174 n.18, 175 n.8, 186 n.6, 189 n . 2 6 , 192 n.13 nationalism, 1 2 - 1 4 , 1 7 , 3 1 , 3 4 - 3 6 , 39, 47, 81, 82, 8 5 - 8 6 , 8 8 - 8 9 , 1 0 3 , 1 0 7 , 123,125, 1 3 4 , 1 3 5 - 3 8 , 1 4 2 , 1 4 7 - 4 9 , 1 6 0 - 6 1 , 173 nn. 10, 11, 184 n . i , 188 n . 1 8 , 1 8 8 - 8 9 n . 2 0 , 190 n . i , 194 n . 4 nationality, 2 - 3 , 9 - 1 0 , 1 1 - 1 6 , 1 7 - 2 0 , 21-23, 2 4 - 2 5 , 30-31, 32-34, 4 4 45, 4 6 - 4 8 , 57, S8, 61, 7 4 - 7 5 , 8 2 - 8 4 , 92, 9 5 - 9 6 , 103-5, 107-9, " 5 ,

"7-

Macherev, Pierre, 173 n.16, 174 n.18

18, 1 2 0 - 2 4 , 1 2 6 - 2 7 , 1 2 8 - 2 9 , 133-34,

Marsh, Richard, 1 9 , 1 7 2 n.6

1 4 1 - 4 2 , 145, 1 4 6 - 4 7 , 154-55, 1 5 8 - 5 9 ,

2I8

Index

nationality (continued) 160-68,172 n.8,173 n.14, 180 n.8, 184 n.2, 185 n.j, 190 n.3 Newman, Gerald, 34-35,165 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 135 Oliphant, Margaret, 112-13,167,185 n.s, 187 n . n opium, 16-17, 48, so, 55, 57, 58, 6167, 73-74, 86, 100-102, 104, " 7 , 176 nn. 13,14, 176-77 n.16,177 n.21,179 nn. 31,32,183 n.24 Opium Wars, 16-17, 48, 61, 65-73, 7475, 77,176 n . n , 178 nn. 23, 29. See also China Orient, 61,92,103-4,118,141,170 n . n , 188 n.17, 192 n.15. See also China; India Oriental, 81, 97,104,139,142,147,170 n . n , 176 n.16 orientalism, 56, 61, 65, 89, 138-45, 146-47, 153-54, 170 n . n , 188 n.17, 190-91 n.5,191 n.8 otherness, 3, 7, 23-24, 38, 46, 74, 84, 89,92,104-6,109,124-28,131,137, 152,176 n.13,188 n.17,191 n.8,192 n.15 painting, 63-64, 93-96, 97-100,162, 177 n.18, j8j n . n , 182 nn. 18, 20. See also Tableau; Visual representation paranoia, 46, 47,108,147,149 Paulson, Ronald, 172 n.5,173 n.12 Paxton, Nancy L., 180 n.5 Peacock, Thomas Love, 5 Perera, Suvendrini, 91-92,181-82 n.16 Petronius, Gaius, 49 Poovey, Mary, 9 , 1 7 1 - 7 2 n.5,172 n.7 Protestantism, 59-61, 83, 87-90, 95, 106,148,181 n.15 psychoanalysis, 9,146,158 Punter, David, 9,171 n.5 race, 12-14, 16,18-19,108,122, 140, 147,148-49,151,154-55,182 n.17,

185 n.s, 190 n.3,191 n.6, 192 n.12,193 n.16 Radcliffe, Ann, 6, 7, n , 16, 17, 18, 47, 49, 51, 52, 55, 83, 89, 109-10, 115, 116, 118, 136, 156, 159, 162, 170 n.io, 171 nn. 2, 4, 171-72 n.5, 173 nn. 12, is, 16, 185 n.4; The Italian, 4-5, 14-15, 19, 21-25, 28, 32-34, 36-45, 46-47, 51, 126; The Mysteries of Udolpho, 4 5, 9, 10, 23, 33, 34, 42, 44, Si, 109-10, 156, 171 nn. 3, 5, 173 nn. 12-13; The Romance of the Forest, 4, 33-34, 42, 38, 173-74 n.17 realism, 8, 9, 28, 84, 99-100, 106, 122-23,183 n.22 realist novel, 7, 9, 12-13, 28, 107, 113-14, 122-23, 186 n.8 Reeve, Clara, 23, 172 n.6 Romanticism, 8-9,49,183 n.22 Rushdie, Salman, 32,124

Sade, D. A. F. de, 167,19s n . n Said, Edward W., 16,137-38,141,170 n.13; Culture and Imperialism, 16, 103; Orientalism, 141,170 n . n , 188 n.17 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 7, 26, 49-50, 129,166,169 n.4,175 n.3 sensation fiction, 7,18,19, 25,108-18, 119,122-23,133-34,160,162, 167, 172 n.6,184 n.3,184-85 n.4,185 n.5, i8s-86 n.6,187 nn. 1 0 - n sentimcntalism, 25, 35-37, 171 n.4,173 n.13,194 n.7 Sepov Mutinv. See Indian Rebellion sexuality, 9,17, 26, 60, 82, 84-92, 9296, 98, 100, 106,114-15, 143-44, 159-61, 181 n.14, 191 n.6, 191-92 n.io Shelley, Mary, 19, 25 Showalter, Elaine, 186 n.6, 191 n.io Smiles, Samuel, 133,186 n.6,190 n.28 Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 40, 42 Spivak, Gavatri Chakravortv, 181-82 n.16

219

Index Sprawson, Charles, 189 n.21 Stallybrass, Peter, 57, 64, 102, 177 n.18, 189 n . 2 3 , 1 9 2 n . 1 4

Stephen, Leslie, 89, 183 n.26 Stoker, Bram, 138, 146-47,152,160, 168, 192 n.11; Dracula, 18-19, 136, 138-45, 1 4 6 - 4 8 , 149-55, 156-57, 1 6 0 , J 6 7 - 6 8 , 1 7 2 n . 6 , 1 9 0 - 9 1 n . 5 , 191 n . 9, 1 9 1 - 9 2 n . i o , 1 9 2 n n . 13, 14, 193

nn. 1 6 , 1 8 ; Persomi Reminiscences of Henry Irving, 192 n . n subjectivity, 46, 54, 56, 61, 74, 75, 8384, 86, 9 3 , 9 6 - 9 7 , 100, 102, 1 0 6 , 109, 1 1 5 - 1 8 , 1 3 4 , 138, 1 4 6 - 4 7 , 1 5 8 , 1 6 1 - 6 2 , 1 6 6 - 6 7 , 1 7 0 n . 7 , 1 7 6 n . 1 3 , 178 n . 3 0 , 1 7 9 n . 3 1 , 1 8 1 n . 1 6 , 1 9 4 n.7

tableau, 5 8 - 6 1 , 6 3 - 6 4 , 128. See also Painting; Visual representation tea, 6 5 - 6 7 , 7 4 , 1 7 9 n . 3 2 , 1 9 4 n . 2

Tenniel, Sir John, 77-79,180 n.4 Tennyson, Alfred, 118, 186 n.7 Todorov, Tzvetan, 8-9,104

vampirism, 1-3, 18-19, 139-41, 1424 4 , 1 4 6 , 148, 153, 1 5 7 - 5 8 , 160, 166, 1 9 1 - 9 2 n . i o , 193 n . 1 6 victimization, 15-17, 18-19, 27-28, 40, 4 6 , 48, 5 2 , 5 3 - 5 5 , 59, 6 1 - 6 5 , 70, 7 3 - 7 5 , 7 6 - 8 2 , 8 3 - 8 4 , 118, 1 6 0 - 6 2

Victoria, Queen, 81 visual representation, 77-80, 14950, 1 7 9 - 8 0 n . 3 . See also Painting; Tableau Walpole, Horace, 4, 6, 22-23, 45, 171 n.i, 1 7 2 n . 5 White, Allon, 57, 102, 189 n.23, >9* n.14

Wilde, Oscar, 179 n.31 Williams, Raymond, 191 n.7 Wood, Henry, Mrs., n o xenophobia, 13, 108, 136. See also Foreignness Young, Robert C., 14

t r a n s v e s t i s m , 17, 8 5 - 8 9 , 91, 92, 1 0 5 - 6 , 183 n . 2 6

2izek, Slavoj, 88,164-66