Romantic Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion 9780748696758

Citation preview

Romantic Gothic

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd i

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Edinburgh Companions to the Gothic Series Editors Andrew Smith, University of Sheffield William Hughes, Bath Spa University This series provides a comprehensive overview of the Gothic from the eighteenth century to the present day. Each volume takes either a period, place, or theme and explores their diverse attributes, contexts and texts via completely original essays. The volumes provide an authoritative critical tool for both scholars and students of the Gothic. Volumes in the series are edited by leading scholars in their field and make a cutting-edge contribution to the field of Gothic studies. Each volume: • Presents an innovative and critically challenging exploration of the historical, thematic and theoretical understandings of the Gothic from the eighteenth century to the present day • Provides a critical forum in which ideas about Gothic history and established Gothic themes are challenged • Supports the teaching of the Gothic at an advanced undergraduate level and at masters level • Helps readers to rethink ideas concerning periodisation and to question the critical approaches which have been taken to the Gothic Published Titles The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, Andrew Smith and William Hughes Romantic Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, Angela Wright and Dale Townshend American Gothic Culture: An Edinburgh Companion, Jason Haslam and Joel Faflak Women and the Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik Forthcoming Titles Scottish Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, Carol Margaret Davison and Monica Germanà Visit the Edinburgh Companions to the Gothic website at: www.euppublishing.com/series/edcg

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd ii

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Romantic Gothic An Edinburgh Companion

Edited by Angela Wright and Dale Townshend

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd iii

22/09/15 10:22 AM

© editorial matter and organisation Angela Wright and Dale Townshend, 2016 © the chapters their several authors, 2016 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 9674 1 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9675 8 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 0923 0 (epub) The right of Angela Wright and Dale Townshend to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd iv

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Contents

1. Gothic and Romantic: An Historical Overview Dale Townshend and Angela Wright

1

Part I: Gothic Modes and Forms 2. Graveyard Writing and the Rise of the Gothic Vincent Quinn

37

3. Gothic Romance Deborah Russell

55

4. The Gothic Stage: Visions of Instability, Performances of Anxiety Diego Saglia 5. Gothic Poetry and First-Generation Romanticism Joel Faflak 6. Gothic and Second-Generation Romanticism: Lord Byron, P. B. Shelley, John Polidori and Mary Shelley Jerrold E. Hogle 7. Political Gothic Fiction Robert Miles 8. Shorter Gothic Fictions: Ballads and Chapbooks, Tales and Fragments Douglass H. Thomson and Diane Long Hoeveler 9. Oriental Gothic Peter J. Kitson 10. Gothic Parody Natalie Neill

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd v

73 95

112 129

147 167 185

22/09/15 10:22 AM

vi

Contents

Part II: National and International Borders 11. Gothic Borders: Scotland, Ireland and Wales Meiko O’Halloran

207

12. Gothic Travels Mark Bennett

224

13. The Romantic and the Gothic in Europe: The Elementary Spirits in France and Germany as a Vehicle for the Transmission and Development of the Fantastique, 1772–1835 Victor Sage 14. American Gothic Passages Carol Margaret Davison

247 267

Part III: Reading the Romantic Gothic 15. Gothic and the Language of Terror Jane Hodson

289

16. Gothic Science Andrew Smith

306

17. Gender and Sexuality in Gothic Romanticism Patrick R. O’Malley

322

18. Gothic Forms of Time: Architecture, Romanticism, Medievalism Tom Duggett

339

19. Gothic Theology Alison Milbank

361

Notes on Contributors

377

Index

383

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd vi

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Chapter 1

Gothic and Romantic: An Historical Overview Dale Townshend and Angela Wright

Romantic Gothic: for some, the title of this volume of essays might read as oxymoronic, if not overtly confrontational. That is, despite the critical attention that, since the late 1960s, the relationship between ‘Gothic’ writing of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the ‘Romantic’ aesthetics with which they were contemporary has received, we might still be inclined to think of the ‘Gothic’ and the ‘Romantic’ as two oppositional, even mutually exclusive modes. Indeed, of all the taxonomic distinctions that structure our negotiation of literary history and canonicity, it would seem that those between the ‘Romantic’ and the ‘Gothic’, though by no means uncontested, are some of the most inveterate. For many cultural commentators over the past two centuries, the phrase ‘Romantic Gothic’ might be accused of yoking together, as if by a certain violence, two utterly heterogeneous modes. Despite the fact that ‘Romantic’ and ‘Gothic’ are both literary terms that were retrospectively annexed to the forms that they inhabit, it seems relatively easy, at first glance, to appreciate the differing contours of these two discrete literary strains through a brief consideration of two serendipitously linked texts: William Wordsworth’s ‘Lines Written A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798’, the final poem included in the first edition of Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s collaborative but anonymously published Lyrical Ballads, With A Few Other Poems (1798), and Sophia Ziegenhirt’s The Orphan of Tintern Abbey, a three-volume romance that was published by A. K. Newman at the Minerva Press, London, in 1816. As the ‘Advertisement’ that prefaced Lyrical Ballads in 1798 made clear, Wordsworth and Coleridge’s collection of poetry was

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 1

22/09/15 10:22 AM

2

Dale Townshend and Angela Wright

to be conceived of as wholly ‘experimental’ in nature, as a new and somewhat audacious attempt at adapting the ‘language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society’ to ‘the purposes of poetic pleasure’ (Gamer and Porter 2008: 47). Indeed, it is largely on the basis of this and other ‘democratising’ gestures, both formal and political, to be found across the collection that the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 is still, today, often hailed as the moment of inauguration for the Romantic ‘school’ or ‘movement’ in Britain. In his otherwise hostile review of this curious poetic experiment, Robert Southey singled out ‘Tintern Abbey’ as the one poem in Lyrical Ballads in which ‘the author’ seemed to discover ‘still superior powers’ to those displayed in ‘The Female Vagrant’, boldly claiming that, ‘in the whole range of English poetry, we scarcely recollect any thing superior to a part of the following passage’ and extracting some forty-seven lines of the poem in defence of his claims (Gamer and Porter 2008: 149). With retrospect, it is clear to see that Southey’s praise for ‘Tintern Abbey’ unwittingly celebrated aspects of the poem that, though long before the category was in place, would subsequently be celebrated as some of the defining features of ‘Romanticism’ and ‘Romantic’ aesthetics: the nostalgia of the mature poet as he recalls that boyish time ‘when like a rose / I bounded o’er the mountains, by the sides / Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, / Wherever nature led’ (lines 68–80); the ‘still, sad music of humanity’ (line 92) that the persona descries beneath the picturesque prospect of the ruin; the ‘elevated thoughts’ of ‘a sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused’ engendered by the poet’s sensuous engagement with the natural world, that nurturing and mystical force that is ‘the nurse, / The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul / Of all my moral being’ (lines 110–12). If, by ‘Romanticism’, we mean the lyrical outpourings of a refined poetic consciousness that both ‘perceives’ and ‘creates’ the sometimes picturesque, sometimes sublime world around it, the poetic outpourings of a psyche that, through its visionary powers of recollection, is tenderly expressive of feelings of ‘unremembered pleasure’ (line 32), then Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ seems to epitomise it. In the process of imaginative appropriation, Tintern Abbey itself, the ruin of the ‘Gothic’ or medieval Cistercian abbey situated on the west bank of the river Wye, Monmouthshire, loses its relations to both history and the contemporary present (Levinson 1986), becoming, instead, bound up in the persona’s reflections upon childhood, memory, nature and human relationships.

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 2

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Gothic and Romantic

3

Though adopting the same architectural ruin as its point of departure, Sophia Ziegenhirt’s The Orphan of Tintern Abbey takes off in quite a different direction, one tellingly signified by the marker of the ‘Minerva Press’ of its title page, and implicitly referenced in its titular allusions to such earlier ‘Gothic’ fictions of the same press as Regina Maria Roche’s The Children of the Abbey (1796) and Eleanor Sleath’s The Orphan of the Rhine (1798). What follows in Ziegenhirt’s narrative is a fast-paced tale of mistaken identities and lost parental origins in which the heroine Paulina, originally the abandoned orphan of the novel’s title, is eventually restored to her familial legacy. Though at least some of the action takes place in London, it is set, for the most part, within and around Tintern Abbey itself, when, like Pierre de la Motte in Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791), Mr Belmont, the heroine’s grandfather, takes up residence in the ruin in the narrative’s opening moment: These beautiful remains of Gothic architecture could not fail to attract the particular notice of Mr Belmont. The principal aisle, though unroofed, still retained striking proofs of former grandeur; the noble Gothic window, where the luxuriant ivy proudly usurped the place of many a painted pane, appeared now to have regained some of its former brilliant colouring, by the rays of a glorious setting sun darting its beams betwixt the ivy leaves. (Ziegenhirt 1816: II.2)

Though the text is strikingly lacking in any real sense of the supernatural, it traffics, well beyond its architectural setting, in most if not all of the other conventions that we have subsequently come to identify as ‘Gothic’, not least of all, in its account of the machinations of a ‘wily priest’ and the ‘idle superstitions’ of Catholics in general (Ziegenhirt 1816: II.25, 16), traces of what Diane Long Hoeveler calls the ‘Gothic ideology’ (Hoeveler 2014). It further draws upon the well-recognised Gothic trope that sees the restoration of a heroine’s legitimate identity through the revelatory power of rings, portraits and other sensationalist devices. Throughout the fiction, the pulses of recent political events in Europe are never far away, and the narrative makes continuous reference to the French Revolution, the tide of anti-clerical violence in post-Revolutionary France, the Treaty of Amiens and the downfall of Napoleon as it progresses, interweaving the fate of its heroine with the turmoil and chaos of the recent past. In the denouement of the final volume, the heroine Paulina’s mother, Maria, is revealed to have been brutally murdered by the Revolutionary mob in punishment for her loyalty and attachment to Marie

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 3

22/09/15 10:22 AM

4

Dale Townshend and Angela Wright

Antoinette, a scene of political violence that the narrative simultaneously celebrates and censures. If, as Wordsworth would later phrase it in the Preface to the second, revised edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1800, ‘Tintern Abbey’ is an instance of poetry as ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ that ‘takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity’, Ziegenhirt’s the Orphan of Tintern Abbey is an example of what Wordsworth in the same place would decry as ‘frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse’ (Gamer and Porter 2008: 183). While Wordsworth’s poem appears to be the quiet poetry of memory, lyricism, reflection and restraint, Ziegenhirt’s The Orphan of Tintern Abbey, a fiction of urgency, suspense and fevered political intrigue, seems to enact its opposite. Though both texts find their inspiration in the same scene of architectural ruin, the one epitomises the features of ‘Romanticism’, the other the characteristics of what we have come to describe as ‘Gothic’. If our placement, above, of the terms ‘Gothic’ and ‘Romantic’ in inverted commas suggests a certain caution in their critical application, this is because, as this Introduction demonstrates, neither category is natural nor self-evident. Nor are they the terms according to which writers such as Eleanor Sleath, Regina Maria Roche and Sophia Ziegenhirt, on the one hand, and William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, on the other, might have described themselves and their own work. Rather, both the ‘Gothic’ and the ‘Romantic’ are the critical by-products of a complex historical process of literary canon formation, one begun in the culture of periodical review during the 1790s and early 1800s, extended in numerous literary histories over the course of the nineteenth century, and culminating in the formal institutionalisation of academic literary criticism at the beginning of the twentieth. Consequently, it is our aim in this Introduction to demonstrate not only how the terms ‘Gothic’ and ‘Romantic’ came to be, but also how they came to be regarded as the two major but antithetical literary strains in British, American and European culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, strains perceived, for the most part, to be locked into a relationship of mutual antagonism and suspicion, and coming together only in a few select instances. Following this survey of canon formation, and the installation of the Gothic / Romantic divide within critical discourse, we provide an overview of the ways in which criticism from the Romantic period through to the present has sought to revise and respond to received understandings of the relationship between Romanticism and the Gothic, demonstrating, as we do so,

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 4

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Gothic and Romantic

5

the mutual implication of both literary modes – a concerted overlap between the Romantic and the Gothic that the essays in this volume address under the rubric of ‘Romantic Gothic’.

Romanticism and the Gothic Certainly, if we take the words of many of the poets and essayists whom we have come to think of as distinctly Romantic at face value, it would seem that Romanticism, in intention at least, remains as opposed to, and removed from, the Gothic as conceivably possible. As Michael Gamer has argued, the emergence of canonical Romanticism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries depended considerably upon the rejection of the forms of textuality now known as ‘Gothic’, with several prominent members of the Romantic literati variously denigrating, recuperating and offering an aesthetic alternative to what was often interchangeably referred to as the ‘terrorist school of novel writing’, ‘modern romance’, ‘horrid novels’, the ‘detritus’ of the Minerva Press or the ‘trash of the circulating library’ or, simply, ‘the German school’ in contemporary letters (Gamer 2000: 3). As Gamer, in a reading of the work of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Robert Southey, Joanna Baillie, Lord Byron, Walter Scott and others has shown, critical reactions to the Gothic in the period constituted the grounds upon which Romanticism, in all its perceived difference from the Gothic, first emerged, with these and other Romantic poets, critics and essayists constructing a sense of ‘high’, ‘Romantic’ culture through a complex process in which ‘popular’ Gothic was routinely rejected and disavowed (Gamer 2002). Though the instances of this are well known, it is worth revisiting some of these formative moments in order to gauge the vehemence of their reactions. Wordsworth’s denigration of those ‘frantic novels’, ‘sickly and stupid German Tragedies’ and ‘deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse’ in the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads had in all likelihood been occasioned by the rather hostile reviews that the first edition of the collection had received (Gamer 2000: 118–19), not least of all in Southey’s uncomfortable identification of ‘the popular superstition of witchcraft’ at work in a poem such as ‘The Thorn’, or the ‘Dutch attempt at German sublimity’ that was ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ (Gamer and Porter 2008: 149). In a marked turning away not only from the Gothic aspects of such early works as ‘Fragment of a Gothic Tale’, The Vale of Esthwaite (c. 1787), Salisbury Plain (1793–4) and The Borderers (1795–7), but also

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 5

22/09/15 10:22 AM

6

Dale Townshend and Angela Wright

from the supernaturalism of the first edition of the poems, Wordsworth in the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads sought to retrieve certain ‘salutary’ aspects of the Gothic from the ‘wanton’ reading process with which the mode was associated; as Gamer has noted, this process of ‘purging’ was complemented by several pointed instances of editorial exclusion, renaming, glossing and revision (Gamer 2000: 103–26). For, as Wordsworth and Coleridge seemingly intended them, the poems in Lyrical Ballads were to be conceptualised as an antidote to, or counteraction of, the ‘degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation’ that was the Gothic (Gamer and Porter 2008: 177). Romanticism thus presented itself as the Gothic’s favourable aesthetic alternative. Despite his own Gothic leanings in Osorio: A Tragedy (1797), ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1798), ‘Christabel’ (first part written in 1797) and ‘Kubla Khan’ (completed in 1797), Coleridge had sketched out his general aversion to the Gothic first in a series of reviews of popular Gothic fictions published in The Critical Review during the 1790s, including Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) (August and November 1794); Matthew Lewis’s The Monk: A Romance (1796) (February 1797); Radcliffe’s The Italian; or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797) (June 1798) and Mary Robinson’s Hubert de Sevrac: A Romance of the Eighteenth Century (1796) (August 1798). The most vociferous of these, of course, was his well-known review of Lewis’s The Monk, a response that is as useful for gauging critical reactions to this novel in particular as it is Romantic reactions to the Gothic more generally. ‘The horrible and the preternatural have usually seized on the popular taste, at the rise and decline of literature’ (Clery and Miles 2000: 185), the opening of the review reads, Coleridge thus presenting his readers with two equally unfavourable ways of perceiving that debased literary mode of which The Monk is a particularly extreme example: if not the sign of an immature and even barbaric cultural production of a nation that is yet in its infancy, the Gothic is the symptom of a certain literary exhaustion and cultural decline. Rapidly attempting to relate these two alternatives back to national differences, Coleridge continues by claiming that ‘The same phaenomenon [sic], therefore, which we hail as a favourable omen in the belles-lettres of Germany, impresses a degree of gloom in the compositions of our countrymen’ (Clery and Miles 2000: 185): in Germany, the Gothic marks the first dark flowering of national literary ability; in England, the decline of literary taste itself. The associations between Germany and the Gothic that Coleridge invokes here were commonplace throughout

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 6

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Gothic and Romantic

7

the 1790s (Murnane 2014), and it was only later, in a review of Charles Maturin’s Gothic drama, Bertram; or, The Castle of St Aldobrand, in 1816 that Coleridge was embarrassingly led to concede that the ‘ruined castles, the dungeons, the trap-doors, the skeletons, the flesh-and-blood ghosts, and the perpetual moonshine’ of current literary fashions are, indeed, ‘English’ in origin (Norton 2000: 215). ‘We should submit to carry our own brat on our own shoulders’, Coleridge here continues, for this lapse in aesthetic taste goes at least as far back in English literary history as Edward Young’s The Complaint; or, Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality (1742), James Hervey’s Meditations Among the Tombs (1746), Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady (1748) and Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764); Coleridge would later rework these views into his reflections on the German drama in volume two of Biographia Literaria in 1817 (Coleridge 1817: II.256–60). Indeed, the notions of perverted national appetite and taste that would later resurface in both Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads in 1800 and Coleridge’s review of Bertram in 1816 feature in Coleridge’s review of The Monk too, particularly in his concern with the vitiating effects of addiction and overexposure to the thrills of popular romance: ‘Most powerful stimulants’, these fictions of the ‘horrible and preternatural’ can ‘never be required except by the torpor of an unawakened, or the languor of an exhausted, appetite’ (Clery and Miles 2000: 185); ‘figures that shock the imagination, and narratives that mangle the feelings’, he continues, ‘rarely discover genius, and always betray a low and vulgar taste’ (Clery and Miles 2000: 187). If not satiated by the sheer ‘multitude of the manufacturers’ alone, the debased, low-cultural taste for Gothic, Coleridge hopes, will in all likelihood recede, as its readers, ‘wearied with fiends, incomprehensible characters, with shrieks, murders, and subterraneous dungeons’, will eventually come to realise ‘with how little expense of thought or imagination this species of composition is manufactured’ (Clery and Miles 2000: 185). Implicit in Coleridge’s comments on The Monk are several of the values that earlier, pre-Romantic essayists such as Edward Young and William Duff had enshrined as the cornerstone of ‘original genius’, the celebration of the powers of the original, creative, organic imagination that would become so central to the rise of Romanticism later in the eighteenth century. Composed of endlessly recycled plots, conventions, characters and settings, the Gothic easily lent itself to condemnation in terms that were initially outlined in a treatise such as Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (1759):

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 7

22/09/15 10:22 AM

8

Dale Townshend and Angela Wright Originals are, and ought to be, great Favourites, for they are great Benefactors; they extend the Republic of Letters, and add a new province to its dominion: Imitators only give us a sort of Duplicates [sic] of what we had, possibly much better, before; increasing the mere Drug of books, while all that makes them valuable, Knowledge and Genius, are at a stand. (Young 1759: 10)

If Ann Radcliffe, even in the work of Coleridge, was often exempted from this broadscale Romantic condemnation of a tired and highly conventionalised literary form (Townshend and Wright 2014), this was largely because she was perceived as the writer of original genius par excellence, as Walter Scott’s ‘first poetess of romantic fiction’, the ‘mighty enchantress’ or ‘founder of a class, or school’ (Scott 1824: iv, vii, xvii) whom other, less able writers were only ever capable of copying. Coleridge’s review of Robinson’s Hubert de Sevrac conveyed this view, stating rather unfairly that Robinson’s novel ‘is an imitation of Mrs. Radcliffe’s romances, but without any resemblance that may not be attained by a common pen’ (Coleridge 1798: 472). For Coleridge, Robinson’s deviations into producing Gothic fiction were disappointing in the light of her earlier poetic endeavours, although he would later concede that Mary Robinson ‘is a woman of undoubted genius’ (qtd in Griggs 1930: 91). Coleridge’s reasons for denigrating Hubert de Sevrac may be more complex than they at first appear, but his mode of criticising Robinson’s novel was just as derivative, if not more so, than Mary Robinson’s excursions into the Gothic mode. The terms of Coleridge’s review – that it was the very conventional nature of the Gothic mode that aligned it so closely with the forces of soulless, unimaginative ‘manufacture’ akin to the machine-driven productions of the industrial present – was one of many reiterations of the values that Young had celebrated in his Conjectures: An Original may be said to be of a vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root of Genius; it grows, it is not made: Imitations are often a sort of Manufacture wrought up by those Mechanics, Art, and Labour, out of pre-existent materials not their own. (Young 1759: 12)

It was in his later Biographia Literaria that Coleridge would give full expression to his sense of the natural, organic imagination, but here, too, his earlier sense of the Gothic as a moribund, mechanical iteration resurfaces in that well-known footnote to Chapter 3:

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 8

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Gothic and Romantic

9

For as to the devotees of the circulating libraries, I dare not compliment their pass-time, or rather kill-time, with the name of reading. Call it rather a sort of beggarly day-dreaming, during which the mind of the dreamer furnishes for itself nothing but laziness and a little mawkish sensibility; while the whole materiel and imagery of the doze is supplied ab extra by a sort of mental camera obscura manufactured at the printing office, which pro tempore fixes, reflects and transmits the moving phantasms of one man’s delirium, so as to people the barrenness of an hundred other brains afflicted with the same trance or suspension of all common sense and all definite purpose. (Coleridge 1817: I.49–50)

Figured here as the sub-literary fare of the circulating library, Gothic is dismissed by Coleridge as a tawdry form of mass visual entertainment akin to that of the phantasmagoric show, a modern spectacular technology designed for the projection of ghosts, ghouls and other ghastly images, and engendering in the reading public a risible form of passivity. His review of The Monk had raised similar concerns: the ‘libidinous minuteness’ of Lewis’s fiction, he argues, might conceivably serve as a ‘provocative for the debauchee’ that, once activated, might prove to be ‘the first link in the chain of association’ that leads inexorably to perdition (Clery and Miles 2000: 188, 189). Here, as elsewhere in his responses to the Gothic mode, Coleridge articulates reservations concerning the ill effects of romance reading – its lewdness, its non-productivity and its ability to incite the dangerous passions of young female readers – that were commonplace in the period (Halsey 2014). Indeed, so idle have consumers of Gothic romance for Coleridge become that they may not be described as ‘readers’ in any meaningful sense of that term at all; instead, the footnote in Biographia Literaria continues, their paradoxical ‘indulgence of sloth’ and ‘hatred of vacancy’ is akin to such trifling activities as ‘gaming, swinging, or swaying on a chair or gate; spitting over a bridge; smoking; snuff-taking; tête à tête quarrels after dinner between husband and wife; conning word by word all the advertisements of the daily advertizer in a public house on a rainy day, &c. &c. &c’ (Coleridge 1817: I.50). If Gothic was the highly visual stuff of mass, popular entertainment, a mode that rendered its consumers the passive receptacles of poor aesthetic judgment, bad taste and ungoverned passions, Wordsworth and Coleridge’s versions of Romanticism presented themselves as the visionary, sound-based corrective poetic alternative, as the Aeolian harps to the phantasmagoric show that was Gothic writing (Townshend 2005).

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 9

22/09/15 10:22 AM

10

Dale Townshend and Angela Wright

To this broad cultural devaluation of the Gothic, Coleridge’s friend and one-time collaborator, Robert Southey, lent his firm support. Appointed as Poet Laureate in 1813, Southey published A Vision of Judgment, a paean to the recently deceased King George III, in 1821, prefacing the poem with an anxious diagnosis of the state of contemporary letters that, in its turn of phrase and sentiment, directly recalls the concerns that Coleridge had raised earlier in relation to Gothic romance. Anticipating the negative reception that his use of the English hexameter in the poem is likely to receive, Southey’s Preface strategically redirects the attention of his critics elsewhere, figuring the Gothic, in the process, as little more than a critical scapegoat, an object that is far more deserving of critical censure than his own poem: Would that this literary intolerance were under the influence of a saner judgment, and regarded the morals more than the manner of a composition; the spirit rather than the form! Would that it were directed against those monstrous combinations of horrors and mockery, lewdness and impiety, with which English poetry has, in our days, first been polluted! For more than half a century English literature has been distinguished by its moral purity, the effect, and in its turn, the cause of an improvement in national manners. A father might, without apprehension of evil, have put into the hands of his children any book which issued from the press, if it did not bear, either in its title-page or frontispiece, manifest signs that it was intended as furniture for the brothel. There was no danger in any work which bore the name of a respectable publisher, or was to be procured at any respectable booksellers. This was particularly the case with regards to our poetry. It is now no longer so; and woe to those by whom the offence cometh! (Southey 1821: xvii–xviii)

An excess of horror, impiety, lewdness, and the sure mark of a decline in national taste: like Coleridge, Southey reads in the Gothic all the signs of an impending cultural apocalypse, even directly recalling, in his reference to the well-meaning father who might once have ‘put into the hands of his children any book which issued from the press’, Coleridge’s earlier claim that ‘the Monk is a romance, which if a parent saw in the hands of a son or daughter, he might reasonably turn pale’ (Clery and Miles 2000: 188). These metaphors of children and the supervision of children’s reading in Coleridge and Southey are significant, pointing, as they do, to the abiding link between ghosts, ghouls and various states of developmental and aesthetic immaturity that we see in much

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 10

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Gothic and Romantic

11

Romantic-era writing. Stadial histories of English literature in the period frequently perceived the Gothic as an early stage in cultural development that had to be overcome in the inevitable growth towards maturity, a move that served to relegate the mode to the superstitious imaginings of the nursery or the feminine tales of the servant-girl or old wife. The first book of Mark Akenside’s The Pleasures of Imagination (1744), a text that made an important contribution to the development of the Romantic discourse on the imagination, provides a cogent example of these links between old women, children and tales of the terrific and the supernatural: Hence finally, by night The village matron, round the blazing hearth, Suspends the infant-audience with her tales, Breathing astonishment! of witching rhymes, And evil spirits; of the death-bed call To him who robb’d the widow, and devour’d The orphan’s portion; of unquiet souls Ris’n from the grave to ease the heavy guilt Of deeds in life conceal’d; of shapes that walk At dead of night, and clank their chains, and wave The torch of hell around the murd’rer’s bed. At every solemn pause the croud [sic] recoil, Gazing each other speechless, and congeal’d With shivering sighs: till eager of th’ event, Around the beldame all erect they hang, Each trembling heart with grateful terrors quell’d. (Akenside 1744: 18)

According to a cultural bias that reaches at least as far back in British culture as the early modern period, tales of spectres and sprites were regarded as the provenance of old women, servants and nursery maids, all instances of women in positions of marginality and servility who were said to use these tales of the supernatural to terrify into submission the children placed in their care; as anxieties around the female reader of romance during the Romantic period attest, these correspondences between women, immaturity and the Gothic persisted well into the nineteenth century. What Gamer identifies as this Romantic tendency to dismiss the Gothic as ‘the genre of adolescence and women’ (Gamer 2000: 11) is particularly identifiable in the turns taken by that group of poets that we now identify as second-generation Romantics, among them Walter Scott and Percy Bysshe Shelley. As Gamer has shown, Scott

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 11

22/09/15 10:22 AM

12

Dale Townshend and Angela Wright

effectively ‘grew out’ of his earlier dabblings in the Gothic in the poems that he contributed to Matthew Lewis’s anthology, Tales of Wonder (1801), in order to effect a turn towards more legitimate, masculine antiquarian romance in his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802) and the metrical romance of his longer poems (Gamer 2000: 163–200). Beyond that, of course, Scott would eventually ‘mature’ into the historical novelist of Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since (1814), famously framing his fictional innovation as an alternative to the high-blown fancies of the Radcliffe school. Commenting upon his choice of the novel’s title, Scott’s introductory chapter to Waverley notes how the name of his title character is ‘an uncontaminated name, bearing with its sound little of good or evil, excepting what the reader shall be hereafter pleased to affix to it’ (Scott 1986: 3). If the main title of the novel is thus refreshingly free of the ‘contamination’ of the Gothic, so Scott’s choice of subtitle, ‘’Tis Sixty Years Since’, has been equally designed so as to preclude in the reader intimations of the Gothic mode suggested by other alternatives, such as ‘A Tale of Other Days’ or ‘A Romance from the German’: Had I, for example, announced in my frontispiece, ‘Waverley, a Tale of other Days’, must not every novel-reader have anticipated a castle scarce less than that of Udolpho, of which the eastern wing had been long uninhabited, and the keys either lost or consigned to the care of some aged butler or housekeeper, whose trembling steps, about the middle of the second volume, were doomed to guide the hero, or heroine, to the ruinous precincts? Would not the owl have shrieked and the cricket cried in my very title-page? and could it have been possible for me, with a moderate attention to decorum, to introduce any scene more lively than might be produced by the jocularity of a clownish but faithful valet, or the garrulous narrative of the heroine’s fille-de-chambre, when rehearsing the stories of blood and horror which she had heard in the servants’ hall? Again, had my title borne, ‘Waverley, a Romance from the German’, what head so obtuse as not to image forth a profligate abbot, an oppressive duke, a secret and mysterious association of Rosycrucians [sic] and illuminati, with all their properties of black cowls, caverns, daggers, electrical machines, trap-doors, and dark lanterns? (Scott 1986: 3–4)

Scott’s laboured endeavours to distance himself from the ‘taint’ of the Radcliffean Gothic may have been in response to Byron’s earlier mischievous caricature of him in his English Bards and Scotch

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 12

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Gothic and Romantic

13

Reviewers: A Satire of 1809, where he ranked the author of ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel’ (1805) alongside ‘the scribbling crew’ who pen ‘tales of terror’ in a flurry of literary activity. Eager for recognition and success, Scott, for Byron, is among those writers who spin yarns merely to entertain ‘dames’ and ‘frighten foolish babes’ (McGann 2000: 4–5). Reiterating the links between Gothic, femininity and disease that had, by 1809, become commonplace among members of the Romantic literati, Byron later in the poem satirically apostrophises both Walter Scott and Matthew Lewis in a witty appropriation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth: Oh! wonder-working LEWIS! Monk, or Bard, Who fain would’st make Parnassus a church-yard! Lo! wreaths of yew, not laurel, bind thy brow, Thy Muse a Sprite, Apollo’s sexton thou! Whether on ancient tombs thou tak’st thy stand, By gibb’ring spectres hailed, thy kindred band; Or tracest chaste descriptions on thy page, To please the females of our modest age; All hail, MP! from whose internal brain Thin sheeted phantoms glide, a grisly train; At whose command ‘grim women’ throng in crowds, And kings of fire, of water, and of clouds, With ‘small gray men,’ ‘wild yagers,’ and what not, To crown with honour, thee, and WALTER SCOTT: Again, all hail! If tales like thine may please, St Luke alone can vanquish the disease: Even Satan’s self with thee might dread to dwell, And in thy skull discern a deeper hell. (McGann 2000: 7–8)

Within the context of a discussion of Scott’s poetry, Byron’s reference, here, to ‘small gray men’ and ‘wild yagers’ is particularly telling: returning his readers in these lines to some of the ballads included in Lewis’s Tales of Wonder, Byron refuses to let Scott forget his humble Gothic origins, origins from which Scott himself had also thereafter tried to flee (Thomson 2010: 40). Southey, too, had contributed eight ballads to Lewis’s anthology of supernatural verse, but, as Douglass H. Thomson has shown, this would later turn out to be a source of considerable embarrassment and shame for the national poet (Thomson 2010: 232–7); at the insistence of either his agent or Southey himself, his contributions were removed from the second, one-volume edition of Tales of Wonder that was published

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 13

22/09/15 10:22 AM

14

Dale Townshend and Angela Wright

later in the same year, and Southey remained dismissive of his early ‘balladings’ throughout his late correspondence (Thomson 2010: 21). For all Scott’s subsequent appropriations of Gothic convention in his fiction (Robertson 1994), the Gothic was a shameful adolescent secret, a momentary lapse in aesthetic judgment from which one had to distance oneself in the eventual move towards artistic legitimacy. The career of Percy Bysshe Shelley follows a similar trajectory: though dabbling in the excesses of Gothic romance in his reworking of Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya; or, The Moor (1809) in Zastrozzi; A Romance (1810), and then in the supernaturalism of his William Godwin-inspired St Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian, A Romance (1811), the poet would subsequently appear to abandon the Gothic mode in favour of the high sublimity of a poem such as ‘Mont Blanc. Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni’ (1817). Its companion-piece, ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ (1817), includes a familiar dismissal of the Gothic as either the product of infantile folly or a form of ‘false consciousness’ (Hamilton 2000: 27–34) in the following lines from the fifth stanza: While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing Hopes of high talk with the departed dead. I called on poisonous names with which our youth is fed – I was not heard, I saw them not [. . .] (Wu 2000: 842)

Disenchanted with the revelatory powers of both ghosts and the afterlife, the persona in Shelley’s poem is forced by other means to access, and celebrate, this ‘awful shadow of some unseen Power’ (Wu 2000: 841). Apparently jettisoning and discarding the Gothic as the cheap shudders of servants, nursemaids and old women, Romanticism presents itself as the masculine endeavour of a more penetrating, more sublime spiritual quest. Our qualifiers, however, are important, for though the critical narrative suggests that the masculine endeavour of Romantic poetry jettisons the more feminised Gothic prose aesthetic, it is important to appreciate that P. B. Shelley’s poetic rendition of ‘Mont Blanc’, like his Gothic romance Zastrozzi (1810), bears the discernible traces of Radcliffe’s descriptions of the mountain range that surrounds the castle of Udolpho in her celebrated The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794).

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 14

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Gothic and Romantic

15

Gothic and the Critical Installation of Romanticism That process that witnessed the canonisation and critical installation of the notion of ‘Romanticism’ over the course of the nineteenth century only echoed the arbitrary divisions between Romantic poetry and prose, strengthening the attitudes, reactions and critical denunciations that separated one from the other. In accordance with the workings of Jerome J. McGann’s notion of the ‘Romantic ideology’ (McGann 1983), literary historians and cultural commentators of the Romantic and Victorian periods in Britain took the Romantic poets’, novelists’ and essayists’ documented views on the Gothic at face value, thus not only setting up a seemingly insuperable divide between ‘Romantic’ poetry and ‘Gothic’ works with which they were contemporary, but also being forced to employ complex rhetorical strategies to address and account for moments in which the Gothic / Romantic divide seemed to be most under threat. To a certain extent, this was the consequence of semantic indeterminacy on both sides, since, as numerous scholars have shown, the terms ‘Romantic’ and the ‘Gothic’ had circulated in British culture with a range of diverse meanings and significations for at least a century. E. J. Clery has argued that the association of the term ‘Gothic’ with the literature of terror and the supernatural is largely a twentiethcentury one, and that ‘Gothic’ as it was most frequently used during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries referred to a sense of the medieval, the barbaric, the savage, the unenlightened and the natively English (Clery 2002: 21). And yet, there is evidence to suggest that by 1798, the year in which Lyrical Ballads was first published, the term had already come to assume some of the literary meanings that are close in spirit to our critical understanding of the ‘Gothic’ today. In his Literary Hours; or, Sketches Critical and Narrative (1798), for instance, Nathan Drake delineated a distinct strain of ‘Gothic superstition’ over which Shakespeare was said to preside, a native English literary tradition that, in contrast to the Italianate verse of Ariosto and Tasso, was characterised by a penchant for ghostly imaginings (Drake 1798: 90). In a third volume of Literary Hours published in 1804, Drake paused during an essay on the Renaissance poet Robert Herrick to muse over what he defined as a distinctive ‘Gothic mythology’, a national English preoccupation with spectres, ghouls, elves and other superstitions in which Herrick’s poetry, like the plays of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, was seen to participate (Drake 1804: III.81–2); citing, alongside Robert Burns’s ‘Tam O’Shanter’ and other poems, two ballads that Scott

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 15

22/09/15 10:22 AM

16

Dale Townshend and Angela Wright

had contributed to Lewis’s Tales of Wonder as examples, Drake in this third volume of Literary Hours gives expression to a notion of the ‘gothic imagination’ that is remarkably close to current literarycritical usages of the term (Drake 1804: III.262). Nonetheless, as we show below, ‘Gothic’ did not always lend itself as a descriptor when later nineteenth-century critics sought to address the ‘dark’, ‘gloomy’ and ‘unrealistic’ aspects in the poetry of the period that we now think of as ‘Romantic’. ‘Romanticism’ as both a critical term and a category of literaryhistorical description was beset by similar vagaries. As critics such as René Wellek, George Whalley and Aidan Day have shown, ‘Romanticism’ was the retrospective ‘invention’ of literary historians who variously sought to comment on, respond to, analyse and historicise a rather disparate group of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century poets and writers (Wellek 1949; Whalley 1972; Day 2012). As these and other studies argue, the distinction between the Classical and the Romantic that had been formulated in August Wilhelm Schlegel’s Über dramatische Kunst und Litteratur: Vorlesungen (1809), though appropriated in Coleridge’s lectures between 1808 and 1813, only became established and well known in England after the English translation of Madame de Staël’s De L’Allemagne in 1813, an explication of Schlegel’s German aesthetics that was originally written in French. Though the word ‘Romantic’ does not feature in it, one of the earliest identifications of a new and distinctive ‘spirit’ in contemporary literature occurred in Francis Jeffrey’s review of Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) that was published in the Edinburgh Review in October 1802. Discussing the work of Southey, Wordsworth, Coleridge and other writers of their ‘sect’, Jeffrey, in claiming that such poets are ‘dissenters from the established systems in poetry and criticism’ (Jeffrey 1802: 63), set in place an association between Romanticism and political and aesthetic revolution that would endure throughout the nineteenth century. Seeking to determine ‘the nature and tendency of the tenets’ that Southey and his ilk have sought to promulgate (Jeffrey 1802: 63), Jeffrey references, among other elements, Wordsworth’s commitment to the quotidian language of ordinary men and women in Lyrical Ballads, noting that the most ‘distinguishing symbol’ of Southey and his ‘sect’ is ‘undoubtedly an affectation of great simplicity and familiarity by language’ (Jeffrey 1802: 64). Recalling Wordsworth’s emphasis upon the natural world, Jeffrey notes ‘that great love of nature with which they are all of them inspired’ (Jeffrey 1802: 65), and registers Wordsworth’s prioritising

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 16

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Gothic and Romantic

17

of lyrical expression in the claim that ‘their sentiments, they are determined [,] shall be indebted, for their full effect, to nothing but their intrinsic tenderness or elevation’ (Jeffrey 1802: 66). However, remaining ever doubtful of this ‘Romantic ideology’ – that is, the stylised and cultivated self-presentations of Romantic poets and essayists – the remainder of Jeffrey’s review is given over to the critical interrogation of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey’s poetic practices. Despite their claims to originality, for instance, their verse is replete with borrowed elements, including the ‘antisocial principles, and distempered sensibility of Rousseau’, the ‘simplicity and energy (horresco referens) of Kotzebue and Schiller’ and the ‘homeliness and harshness of some of Cowper’s language and versification’ (Jeffrey 1802: 64). Turning to a reading of Thalaba the Destroyer, Jeffrey stumbles upon an even greater difficulty: in effect, the poem is too ‘Gothic’ in nature, a reservation that he articulates by citing two passages of supernatural import prior to offering the following commentary: Now, this style, we conceive, possesses no one character of excellence; it is feeble, low, and disjointed; without elegance, and without dignity; the offspring, we should imagine, of mere indolence and neglect; or the unhappy fruit of a system that would teach us to undervalue that vigilance and labour which sustained the loftiness of Milton, and gave energy and direction to the pointed and fine propriety of Pope. (Jeffrey 1802: 69)

‘Supernatural beings’, he later continues, ‘though easily enough raised, are known to be very troublesome in the management, and have frequently occasioned much perplexity to poets and other persons, who have been rash enough to call for their assistance’ (Jeffrey 1802: 76). And yet, a sub-Radcliffean technique of the ‘explained supernatural’ does not present a viable alternative for Jeffrey either, for commenting on instances of this strategy in Southey’s poem, he notes that the reader ‘who has been promised an energetic sentiment, or sublime allusion, must often be contented with a very miserable substitute’ (Jeffrey 1802: 70). Composed of outrageous hyperbole and trafficking in the extremes of sentiment, the language of Southey’s verse ‘presents nothing on every side but prodigies and terrors’ (Jeffrey 1802: 70). In technical terms, too, Thalaba is of ‘a species of monsters, or exotics’ (Jeffrey 1802: 72), while its sentiments, like those identifiable within other poems by this sect, are filled with ‘virtuous horror’ at the injustices of society (Jeffrey 1802: 71).

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 17

22/09/15 10:22 AM

18

Dale Townshend and Angela Wright

Summing up his damning views, Jeffrey makes predictable recourse to some of the assumptions outlined, among them the overwhelming immaturity of the Gothic mode: From this little sketch of the story, our readers will easily perceive, that it consists altogether of the most wild and extravagant fictions, and openly sets nature and probability at defiance. In its action it is not an imitation of any thing; and excludes all rational criticism, as to the choice and succession of its incidents. Tales of this sort may amuse children, and interest, for a moment, by the prodigies they exhibit, and the multitude of events they bring together: but the interest expires with the novelty; and attention is frequently exhausted, even before curiosity has been gratified. The pleasure afforded by performances of this sort, is very much akin to that which may be derived from the exhibition of a harlequin farce; where, instead of just imitations of nature and human character, we are entertained with the transformation of cauliflowers and beer-barrels, the apparition of ghosts and devils, and all the other magic of the wooden sword. (Jeffrey 1802: 76)

An extravagant fiction, a tale of the supernatural, a trifle merely capable of entertaining the children: Jeffrey condemns Thalaba the Destroyer in the language hitherto reserved for the Gothic. The significance of his review is thus twofold: while it is one of the earliest instances in which the poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey is grouped together – a ‘sect’ that Jeffrey, in a later review of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, would influentially describe as the ‘Lake school’ of poets – it also takes care to police and ward against any fruitful connection between the Gothic and the emergent category of ‘Romanticism’. Though written prior to the point in which either category had become known as such, Jeffrey’s review of Southey sets up an antagonism between the Gothic and the Romantic, between the horrors and terrors of popular romance and the poetic writings of the Lake school. William Hazlitt’s contribution to the formation of a ‘Romantic’ canon in his lecture ‘On the Living Poets’ that he initially delivered at the Surrey Institution in 1818 achieved much the same effect: while constituting a sense of Romanticism as a new and distinctive aesthetic practice, Hazlitt’s views, subsequently published as Lectures on the English Poets (1818), drove a firm conceptual wedge between an emergent Romanticism and the Gothic. Though he would provide an extremely positive assessment of Radcliffe and her work in his Lectures on the English Comic Writers in 1819, Hazlitt’s lecture ‘On the Living Poets’ takes care to exclude Radcliffe and other female

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 18

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Gothic and Romantic

19

novelists from serious aesthetic consideration on the basis of their use of the novelistic form: I am a great admirer of the female writers of the present day; they appear to me like so many modern Muses. I could be in love with Mrs. Inchbald, romantic with Mrs. Radcliffe, and sarcastic with Madame D’Arblay [Frances Burney]: but they are novel-writers, and, like Audrey, may ‘thank the Gods for not having made them poetical’. (Hazlitt 1818: 289)

Turning his attention instead to those contemporary writers who work primarily in the more aesthetically elevated forms of poetry, Hazlitt discusses the work of Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Hannah More, Joanna Baillie, Thomas Moore, Lord Byron, Wordsworth and Scott. This act of Romantic canon-formation, though, is coupled with, and even in a sense dependent on, Hazlitt’s stern censuring of each poet’s dabblings in the Gothic. Byron, he claims, ‘shuts himself up too much in the impenetrable gloom of his own thoughts, and buries the natural light of things in “nook monastic” ’ (Hazlitt 1818: 304); in such poems as The Giaour (1813), The Corsair (1814) and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–19), Hazlitt continues, Byron figures brooding heroes who are ‘all the same person’ and ‘apparently all himself’, thus traversing ‘the same dark ground of fiction, with the darker colours of the poet’s mind spread over it’ and achieving nothing but ‘the unceasing accumulation of horrors on horror’s head’ (Hazlitt 1818: 304–5). As gloomy, dark and repetitive as any contemporary romance, Byron’s poetry, for Hazlitt, suffers from a surfeit of the Gothic, and in a mischievous reworking of Byron’s jibe in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers that ‘wreaths of yew, not laurel’ crown the head of the notorious Gothic romancer Monk Lewis, Hazlitt notes of Byron that ‘the flowers that adorn his poetry bloom over charnel-houses and the grave’ (Hazlitt 1818: 304). Similar attitudes pertain to Hazlitt’s reading of Walter Scott. Though generally appreciative of Scott’s verse, Hazlitt remains dismissive of its Gothic qualities: ‘His imagery is Gothic and grotesque’, he opines, and while this may suit the ancient, barbaric times in which the narrative poems are set, it nonetheless introduces into his writing a ‘spirit’ that is, at once, ‘effeminate and frivolous’ (Hazlitt 1818: 308). While Wordsworth might be said to be ‘at the head of that which has been denominated the Lake school of poetry’ by Francis Jeffrey, not even his verse is ‘sacred from criticism’, and recalling Southey’s critique of the excessive ‘Germanism’ of Lyrical Ballads,

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 19

22/09/15 10:22 AM

20

Dale Townshend and Angela Wright

Hazlitt notes that the sentiments and opinions of Wordsworth’s verse ‘were directly imported into this country in translations from the German about that period’ (Hazlitt 1818: 318). Though the possibility remains that Hazlitt, in invoking notions of the Germanic at this point, might be referring not to the Gothic but to Schlegel’s distinction between the Classical and the Romantic, other instances of the word in this lecture confirm its familiar Gothic associations. Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’, for instance, Hazlitt describes as ‘his most powerful performance, and the only one that I could point out to any one as giving an adequate idea of his great natural power’; ‘It is high German, however’, he quickly concedes, ‘and in it he seems to “conceive of poetry but a drunken dream, reckless, careless, and heedless, of past, present, and to come” ’ (Hazlitt 1818: 327). As of old, the connections between Germany, the Gothic and the aesthetic of immaturity return in Hazlitt’s observation that ‘His [Coleridge’s] Sonnet to Schiller conveys a fine compliment to the author of the Robbers, and an equally fine idea of the state of youthful enthusiasm in which he composed it’ (Hazlitt 1818: 329). Even as it constitutes a sense of ‘Romanticism’ as a distinctive poetic movement that is, firstly, revolutionary in politics and sentiment and, secondly, based upon a rejection of the neoclassicism of Pope and the French school, Hazlitt’s lecture ‘On the Living Poets’ figures the Gothic as a subliterary, counter-Romantic impulse, one in which the living writers of the Lake school indulge at their peril. In several literary histories of the Victorian period, many of these patterns recur: setting out to account for, and define, the category of the ‘Romantic’, the work of scholars such as Thomas B. Shaw, William John Courthope and Edward Dowden either overlooked or censured the Romantic poets’ engagement with the Gothic, or framed the Gothic as a marginal, thoroughly inferior fictional mode with which ‘Romanticism’ in its purest forms had no dealings. In the posthumously published A History of English Literature (1864), for example, Thomas Shaw, a graduate of St John’s College, Cambridge, Professor of English Literature at the University of Saint Petersburg and eventually Professor of English to the Grand Dukes of Russia, undertook to produce a textbook of ‘those writers and those subjects which ought to occupy the main attention of the Student’ (Shaw 1864: iii). Shaw’s assessment of the place of the Gothic in the literary history of the eighteenth century is particularly revealing. Though his study pays considerable attention to the ‘impulse’ in modern novels that ‘was given by HORACE WALPOLE’, the ‘fastidious dilettante and brilliant chronicler of the court scandal of his day’,

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 20

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Gothic and Romantic

21

Walpole remained of a ‘mind devoid of enthusiasm and elevation’ (Shaw 1864: 462). For Shaw, The Castle of Otranto, consequently, is ‘totally absurd and unnatural’, and the heroine ‘one of those inconsistent portraits in which the sentimental languor of the eighteenth century is superadded to the female character of the Middle Ages’ (Shaw 1864: 462). Even Ann Radcliffe, ‘whose numerous romances exhibit a surprising power (perhaps never equalled) over the emotions of fear and undefined mysterious suspense’, is meted out only measured praise in this study: filled with repetitive plots, poorly executed characters and a limited imaginative repertoire, Radcliffe’s romances, even at their finest, are second-rate productions, for, ‘after all, pure fear – sensual, nor moral, fear – is by no means a legitimate object of high art’ (Shaw 1864: 464). Lewis, predictably, is written off in Shaw’s History as ‘a good-natured effeminate man of fashion’ who was ‘the first to introduce into England a taste for the infant German literature of that day, with its spectral ballads and diablerie of all kinds’ (Shaw 1864: 464); the continued popularity of The Monk well into the nineteenth century is due ‘chiefly to the licentious warmth of many of its scenes’ (Shaw 1864: 464). The works of Charles Maturin, too, are ‘full of the most outrageous absurdities’, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) a mere ‘farrago of impossible and inconceivable adventures, without plan or coherence’ (Shaw 1864: 464). While some of the scenes in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), Shaw is forced to concede, ‘are managed with a striking and breathless effect’ that ‘makes us for a moment forget the childish improbability and melodramatic extravagance of the tale’ (Shaw 1864: 465), the Gothic ‘canon’ of Walpole, Reeve, Radcliffe, Lewis, Mary Shelley and Maturin already in place in A History of English Literature is markedly different from, and in all senses inferior to, ‘The Dawn of Romantic Poetry’ that Shaw discusses in another chapter. As in earlier accounts, what Shaw terms ‘the romantic type in literature’ is figured as the literature of aesthetic and political revolution that, though anticipated in the works of James Beattie, Robert Blair, Thomas Percy, James Thomson, William Collins, Mark Akenside, Thomas Gray and others, reaches its zenith in the writing of Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Thomas Moore, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Southey. When Shaw inevitably encounters traces of the Gothic aesthetic at work in the poetry of ‘High Romanticism’, he either condemns them outright, or celebrates and excuses them as examples of the Romantic poet’s commitment to antiquarian authenticity. Thus, while Coleridge’s Christabel is said

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 21

22/09/15 10:22 AM

22

Dale Townshend and Angela Wright

to contain too many dreamlike elements that are ‘fatal to the poem as a work of art’ (Shaw 1864: 454), ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ is described as ‘a wild, mystical, phantasmagoric narrative, most picturesquely related in the old English ballad measure, and in language to which an air of antiquity is skilfully given in admirable harmony with the spectral character of the events’ (Shaw 1864: 453). ‘The whole poem’, he continues, ‘is a splendid dream, filling the ear with the strange floating melodies of sleep, and the eye with a shifting, vaporous succession of fantastic images, gloomy or radiant’ (Shaw 1864: 453). Lacking in a critical vocabulary in which to discuss and describe the Gothic, Shaw resorts to the rhetoric of darkness, gloom and unreality whenever he encounters it in a Romantic text. Thus, he describes Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer and The Curse of Kehama (1810) as ‘wild, extravagant, unearthly, full of supernatural machinery, but of a kind as difficult to manage with effect as at first sight splendid and attractive’ (Shaw 1864: 456), as poems composed of language that ‘abounds in an affected simplicity and perpetual obtrusion of vulgar and puerile phraseology’ (Shaw 1864: 457). Forging a definite sense of canonical Romanticism, A History of English Literature legislates on what, precisely, Romanticism should and should not consist of. Instances of the Gothic in the Romantic canon thus always betray ‘a most painful air of laxity, and a want of intellectual bone and muscle’ (Shaw 1864: 456–7). And so, the institutionalisation of Romanticism in the nineteenth century continued. When William John Courthope published his The Liberal Movement in English Literature in London in 1885, he glossed his title in the book’s Preface by stating that ‘I might, indeed, have called the series “the Romantic Movement in English Literature,” but this would not have expressed all that I had in my mind’ (Courthope 1885: viii). Here, within a study that describes Romanticism as the ‘Liberal’ revival of ‘the genius of Romance’ among a select group of male writers that includes Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge (Courthope 1885: xii), the Gothic features as little more than a trivial, temporary diversion: though ‘the virtuoso pure and simple’, Horace Walpole was ‘Without a spark of genius’, his fanciful ‘experiment in romance in “The Castle of Otranto” ’ merely ‘a toy novel’ (Courthope 1885: 120). The impulses of the Gothic, in fact, are altogether overtaken in the teleological development of English literature that comes to fruition with the publication of Lyrical Ballads; as such, the mode remains a form of immature, permanently ‘unripe’ cultural production:

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 22

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Gothic and Romantic

23

Towards the close of the eighteenth century the taste for the supernatural and the marvellous was quickened by German influences, which inspired the fictions of Monk Lewis and Mrs. Radcliffe; and the stream of romance added to its volume the French Revolutionary ethics advocated in the imaginative and philosophical works of William Godwin. In all these writers two leading characteristics are manifest; a Conservative adherence to classical form, and a Liberal tendency to encourage romantic feeling; a tendency which, it is evident, may be either so chastened by judgment and reflection as simply to intensify the pleasures of the imagination, or, if unchecked by reason, may ripen into revolt against the whole order of existing society. (Courthope 1885: 121–2)

While Walter Scott, in time, is said to have found himself in the midst of a society ‘rejoicing in the supernatural machinery of the Minerva Press’, he effectively retrieved the romance form from the Gothic’s horrid grip while resolutely remaining ‘perfectly alive to the childishness of the prevalent taste’ and invariably acknowledging his obligations to his Gothic predecessors, ‘Horace Walpole and Mrs Radcliffe’ (Courthope 1885: 124). Apart from being the object of occasional and reluctant recognition, the Gothic barely features in The Liberal Movement in English Literature, and when it does, as in Courthope’s discussion of the poetry of Coleridge, it renders a poem such as ‘The Dark Ladie’ ‘on a lower level’ to the poet’s other productions (Courthope 1885: 173). By the time of the publication of Edward Dowden’s The French Revolution and English Literature in 1897, the revised version of the lectures that Dowden had first given at Trinity College, Cambridge, what Dowden calls ‘the Romantic movement’ in English literature has lost all relations to the Gothic (Dowden 1897: 157). Despite a cursory discussion of the ‘political Gothic’ of William Godwin’s Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) and Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria (1798), and although his sense of the Romantic canon extends beyond Southey, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Byron and Shelley to include William Blake and Robert Burns, Dowden’s study remains preoccupied with the effects of Revolutionary events in France ‘upon young men of genius’ in England (Dowden 1897: 153); as such, he gives nothing but the most passing of references to what he clearly regards as the feminised, unoriginal turns of the Gothic romance.

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 23

22/09/15 10:22 AM

24

Dale Townshend and Angela Wright

Romanticism and the Gothic, 1900–Present It fell, then, to the task of twentieth-century critics to devote serious attention to the Gothic as a distinctive literary form, one that, contrary to the views of most nineteenth-century critics, is in several senses inseparable from its domineering Romantic sibling. Early works of criticism upon the Gothic that were produced in the wake of such dismissive criticism from the Victorian period, such as Dorothy Scarborough’s The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (1917) and The Popular Novel in England, 1770–1800 (1932) by J. M. S. Tompkins, were apologetic and hesitant in their discussion of the Gothic genre. The first words of Tompkins’s Preface to The Popular Novel in England articulate this apologetic and hesitant tone perfectly: ‘A book devoted to the display of tenth-rate fiction stands in needs of justification’ (Tompkins 1932: v), Tompkins begins, before going on to declare that the objects of her study are ‘not good books, whose vitality springs from an inner source, but poor books, on which the colour of life was reflected from their readers, and must now be renewed by imaginative sympathy’ (Tompkins 1932: v–vi). Implicit as early as the second page of her study is the argument that for the readership of the 1930s, ‘imaginative sympathy’ must be exercised by the reader in order to enter into the spirit of her study of the Gothic. ‘Imaginative sympathy’, in itself a Romantic impulse, one might argue, lies behind the pleas that The Popular Novel in England makes to justify its publication. The spirit of Jane Austen, so Tompkins argues, would prove to be ‘too strong’ for her study of those Gothic predecessors who were the ‘leaf-mould in which that exquisite and thriving plant was rooted’ (Tompkins 1932: vi). Despite its tone of insistent apology, this ‘leaf-mould’ holds a vital clue to the recalibration of the Gothic / Romantic relationship in the fourth decade of the twentieth century. For here Tompkins recognises and appreciates, albeit in a denigrating fashion, a direct organic relationship between Gothic novelists and their Romantic successors. For Tompkins, the original literary shoot is healthy but disposable; the Gothic is a ‘beanstalk [that] shot up overnight into redundant vegetation, and enterprising novelists thronged its stem’ (Tompkins 1932: 243). Amidst the laboured metaphors of redundant vegetation, nonetheless, The Popular Novel in England did acknowledge the presence of Romanticism within the Gothic. Of the talkative, prattling nature of Radcliffe’s work, for example, Tompkins noted that:

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 24

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Gothic and Romantic

25

Through the mouths of sixteenth-century Frenchmen and seventeenth-century Italians she imparts her opinions on education, medical treatment, religious toleration, gardening and the humane treatment of geology. These things did not make her fame, but they are characteristic both of her conscientious mind and of the catholic appetite and happy digestion of the romantic mood. (Tompkins 1932: 251)

Radcliffe, here, is quite rightly situated in relation to the ‘romantic mood’ in relation to conversation, religious toleration, gardening and geology. The topics highlighted align Radcliffe with her more canonical contemporaries such as Coleridge and Wordsworth. These are Romantic poets who reviewed her, who drew upon her literary inspiration and who, at various moments in their own careers, either revered her or underplayed her influence as it suited their own artistic impulses. The publication of The Popular Novel in England is a pivotal moment in the rapprochement between Romanticism and the Gothic. In its wake followed a series of studies that looked to consolidate the impulses of the Romantic and the Gothic. For Mario Praz, an Italian critic working outside of the confines of the English literary canon, the Gothic and the Romantic are of a piece, and not only in England, but across Europe too. His critical work of 1933, The Romantic Agony, discusses the far-reaching tremors of Romantic and Gothic texts, treading breathlessly between Byron, the figure of the outlaw and ‘characteristics derived from Mrs Radcliffe’ (Praz 1933: 78). The sheer dizzying breadth of Praz’s account renders this a work that seems by contemporary standards to have been composed in shorthand, but The Romantic Agony nonetheless remains an important milestone due to the trans-European and trans-historical impulses of Gothic and Romanticism that it traces; from Richardson to SaintBeuve, Byron to Radcliffe, the impulses of the ‘horrible and terrible’ that constitute Praz’s vision of Romantic agony are wide-ranging and canon-busting, dismantling, with a certain irreverence, the notion of a ‘high Romantic’ canon inherited from Victorian critics. Such irreverence persisted, too, with the enthusiastic defence of the Gothic mounted by the antiquarian and bibliographer Montague Summers in his monumental The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel in 1938. Following hot on the heels of Praz’s The Romantic Agony, The Gothic Quest came close to pleading with its readership for the significance and aesthetic worth of the Gothic:

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 25

22/09/15 10:22 AM

26

Dale Townshend and Angela Wright The Gothic Novel was a power in the land, and its votaries were drawn from all classes, high and low. With Mrs Radcliffe, with Monk Lewis and Maturin, to mention no other names, it touched genius. It was able to sink to bathos and the most formal absurdity, although I am bound to acknowledge that in the whole course of my reading of fiction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which has involved not a little delving in dusty and forgotten corners, I have never come across any novel, however feeble, however immature, which can be deemed such dreary and dead rubbish as are only too many of our modern trite and yawny novels. (Summers 1938: 87)

Despite the Herculean efforts of Summers, traces of the Victorian tendency to elevate the productions of high-cultural Romanticism over the popular-cultural excesses of the Gothic still remained. When Devendra P. Varma published The Gothic Flame in 1957, he not only, like Tompkins before him, felt the need to apologise for his own critical attention – ‘A study devoted to the analysis and investigation of a body of fiction that is usually left to moulder in the libraries of the curious, perhaps stands in need of justification’ (Varma 1957: 1) – but also eventually made disappointing metaphorical recourse to Tompkins’s own sense of the Gothic as the baser material out of which Romanticism would later flourish: ‘The Gothic novel is also well worth studying, if not for its particular literary form, at least as an expression of the general taste of the period and because of its function as ‘the leaf-mould’ in which more exquisite and stronger plants were rooted’ (Varma 1957: 3). Ambivalence, apology and defence all characterise critical evaluations of the Gothic into the 1950s. With such hesitant critical evaluation, it is surprising that Gothic not only survived, but flourished. Its persistence can be attributed to several factors: first, despite the high-cultural condemnations of Gothic during the Romantic period, we now know, thanks to the enormous book-historical work upon reading the English novel undertaken by Peter Garside, James Raven and Rainer Schöwerling, the extent to which popular Gothic fiction from the Romantic period was printed and reprinted throughout the nineteenth century (Garside, Raven and Schöwerling 2000). Roche’s The Children of the Abbey, for example, ran to multiple editions between 1800 and 1880, continuously reprinted and reissued over these eight decades by numerous publishing houses. It is to our detriment to underestimate the role that enjoyment plays in the persistence of any literary genre. Even as its significance is downplayed by the official vanguards of culture and appropriate taste, the Gothic

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 26

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Gothic and Romantic

27

persists through the pleasure-driven practice of rereading and an ever-creative invention of new readerships. Popularity and flexibility also characterise the second cultural factor that ensures the critical survival of Romantic Gothic beyond its heyday. This comes in the form of a renewed and revitalised attention to literary genre that really gathers impetus in 1969 with the publication of Robert D. Hume’s article, ‘Gothic versus Romantic: A Revaluation of the Gothic Novel’ in PMLA, where he set out to define the contours of that literary relation. It was a rejoinder from Robert L. Platzner that rendered this discussion fully of note; there, Platzner argued that the ‘Gothic Romance is a conglomerate of literary “kinds,” grafting character types and melodramatic devices of Jacobean drama and sentimental fiction onto a sensibility derived largely from graveyard poetry and the cult of the sublime’ (Platzner 1971: 266), and maintaining that there exists not separation, but ‘a degree of continuity’ between ‘Gothic quests and Romantic epiphanies’ (Platzner 1971: 268). Hume and Platzner’s debate proved of significance to future criticism, for from its ashes there arose a renewed attention to the Gothic, its foundational generic hybridity and its relationship to mainstream Romanticism. David Punter’s groundbreaking The Literature of Terror (1980) revisited the Gothic’s generic origins in graveyard poetry of the eighteenth century in far greater detail, finding the mode to be influenced by sentimentalism, poetry and eighteenth-century aesthetic theories of terror. In turn, argued Punter, most of the major poets of that period ‘were strongly affected by Gothic in one form or another. . . . Blake, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron and Keats all played a part in shaping the Gothic, in articulating a set of images of terror which were to exercise a potent influence over later literary history’ (Punter 1996: I.87). In the figures of the wanderer, the vampire and the seeker after forbidden knowledge, Punter detected vital affinities between the Gothic and the Romantic, a range of literary resemblances, appropriations and strategic modifications which were subsequently traced with considerable force by critics such as Anne Williams and Jerrold E. Hogle (Hogle 1998; Hogle 2001; Hogle 2005). In her influential monograph Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (1995), Williams immediately dispels any doubt about the connections between Romanticism and the Gothic by arguing on the first page of her study that ‘ “Gothic” and “Romantic” are not two but one’ (Williams 1995: 1). Williams then considers Coleridge and Keats alongside authors such as Radcliffe and Lewis, in order to argue instead for gendered ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ forms of Gothic textuality. In 2000, Michael Gamer’s

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 27

22/09/15 10:22 AM

28

Dale Townshend and Angela Wright

Romanticism and the Gothic, proceeding on the basis of Williams’s claim for the inseparability of these two concepts, scrutinised in close detail the ‘Gothic’ works of the Romantic poets, as well as the cultural institutionalisation of Romanticism that had first led to the division between Romanticism and the Gothic in the first instance. What Hogle’s special issue of Gothic Studies in April 2001 termed the ‘new Gothic’ epitomises some of the ways in which contemporary critics, not least of all Hogle himself, have sought to revisit the Gothic / Romantic relation: bequeathed a system of hollow and counterfeited signs, a writer such as Coleridge seeks in a poem such as ‘Frost at Midnight’ to ground the ghost, that primary signifier of the Gothic mode, in the more ‘authentic’ locus of childhood and nostalgic reflection (Hogle 1998). Recent work on Byron has argued a similar point: while second-generation Romanticism might appropriate certain Gothic figures, it often does so with ‘deeper’, more ‘meaningful’ aesthetic, political and religious intent (Hopps 2013; Botting 2014: 83–103). In Romantic Misfits (2008), Robert Miles interrogates the limits of McGann’s ‘Romantic ideology’ by drawing attention to, among other anomalies in Romantic self-presentation, the strikingly Gothic moments in Wordsworth’s poetry (Miles 2008). With the publication of Tom Duggett’s Gothic Romanticism (2010), the two contested terms were brought together in the title of an academic study, even as Duggett here argued that Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey, in forging for themselves a broader sense of ‘Gothic culture’, eschewed the accoutrements of horror and terror in their construction of a purified national poetic and political ‘Gothic’ tradition (Duggett 2010). More recently, Hogle has shown, through a reading of Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian, how the tensions between the Romantic and the Gothic may in some senses be internal to the Gothic text itself (Hogle 2014). Through these and other critical interventions, the once insuperable divide between Romanticism and the Gothic has been revisited, complicated, interrogated, revised and breached. We are fortunate, then, in entering the twenty-first century with a version of literary history that no longer reads the ‘Gothic’ and the ‘Romantic’ as oxymoronic, but as complementary, symbiotic and, indeed, inseparable forms. The chapters that follow in this Companion all proceed from the assumption that Romanticism and the Gothic, even if they differ at certain moments, form one continuous literary tradition which, like any other one, seeks to scrutinise, criticise and redefine itself continuously. Drawn from a range of new and internationally recognised critics, the perspectives offered in the

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 28

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Gothic and Romantic

29

following chapters offer fresh and insightful readings of a range of works that fall within the broad chronological range of ‘Romantic Gothic’ (roughly, 1740–1830). In Part I, ‘Gothic Modes and Forms’, we seek to provide an account of the Gothic’s major formal manifestations in the period. In ‘Graveyard Writing and the Rise of the Gothic’, Vincent Quinn expertly examines some of the earlier poetic influences from the eighteenth century that helped to shape what we now understand by ‘Gothic’. Quinn argues that ‘eighteenth-century poetry and the Gothic inhabit a shared discursive field where numerous strands intersect and cross over’, thus underlining the reciprocity of any literary influence; as Gothic nourishes the works of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and many others, so it in its turn is inspired by its immediate poetic forbears in the eighteenth century. Deborah Russell’s chapter ‘Gothic Romance’ continues this conversation, illustrating the Gothic’s indebtedness to the form of romance, and highlighting the significance of this relation. Her chapter illustrates that the dating of Gothic romance from Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto alone is debatable, to say the least. In ‘The Gothic Stage: Visions of Instability, Performances of Anxiety’, Diego Saglia revisits the crucial and persistently underestimated significance of the stage to the formation of the Gothic, raising at the same time important questions about genre classification during the Romantic period. Chapters 5 and 6 offer chronological accounts of First- and Second-Generation Romantic writers and their engagement with the Gothic. Although the taxonomic separation of Romanticism into First and Second generations is complex and debatable – at the very least, it is flouted by a figure such as William Godwin, who straddles both generations – neither Faflak nor Hogle takes the generational model for granted. In ‘Gothic Poetry and First-Generation Romanticism’, Joel Faflak examines Gothic impulses both before and in the wake of the Fall of the Bastille in France, offering innovative readings of Gothic poetry from old and new sources; William Blake’s Songs of Innocence, in Faflak’s account, becomes part of a continuum along which one can also read the Gothic poetry of Helen Maria Williams. Jerrold E. Hogle’s chapter, ‘Gothic and Second-Generation Romanticism’, insightfully argues that the endurance of the works of both Shelleys, Lord Byron and John Polidori has less to do with their relationship to ‘first-generation’ Romantic authorship, and everything to do with ‘how they radicalise the features and underpinnings of the Gothic mode itself’. This radicalisation of the Gothic mode’s features is a concept that can equally be applied to Chapter 7, by Robert Miles, where he persuasively

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 29

22/09/15 10:22 AM

30

Dale Townshend and Angela Wright

makes the case for a renewed scrutiny of the political nuances of Gothic fiction, arguing that it is through the trope of ‘mortmain’, the metaphor of the dead hand, that even seemingly ‘apolitical’ Gothic fictions assume political relevance and urgency that is distinct, in some senses, from more recognisably Jacobin novels. In Chapter 8, Douglass H. Thomson and Diane Long Hoeveler look at understudied and under-theorised offshoots of the Gothic in the shorter, often disposable forms of chapbooks, ballads and bluebooks, shedding vital light upon forms of Gothic that, due to their ephemeral nature, remain, to date, relatively unscrutinised. Peter Kitson’s chapter on ‘Oriental Gothic’ focuses on a version of ‘Romantic Gothic’ that is frequently overlooked in scholarly accounts. Here, Kitson revisits the various manifestations of Oriental Gothic in poetry and prose of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, detecting shared impulses in the projects of Orientalism and the Gothic during the Romantic period. Natalie Neill’s chapter on ‘Gothic Parody’, which examines both celebrated and unknown parodies of the Gothic during the Romantic period, makes the important point that Radcliffe and Lewis were practising the art of parody themselves before their own most celebrated creations were, in turn, parodied. Part II, ‘National and International Borders’, looks towards other national spaces where the Gothic first flourished. Chapter 11, by Meiko O’Halloran, examines the contribution of Scotland, Ireland and Wales to the Gothic impulses of the Romantic period; Chapter 12, written by Mark Bennett, looks at the way in which travel-writing situated the Gothic not only geographically, but culturally too, offering a fresh perspective upon the vital intersections between the Gothic and travel-writing in the Romantic period. In Chapter 13, Victor Sage courageously takes on both French and German literary examples which intersected, overlapped and responded to emergent traditions elsewhere, demonstrating how the Gothic flourished across Europe in the early nineteenth century in spite of military hostility between the nations involved. ‘American Gothic Passages’ by Carol Margaret Davison, like the work of Sage on European Gothic, reveals some exciting and important examples of literary Gothic across the Atlantic, conventions manipulated in this New-World context to ‘contest and coalesce’ America’s ‘dreams and nightmares’. Part III, ‘Reading the Romantic Gothic’, offers a suite of essays that sheds new light across the chronological span that this book

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 30

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Gothic and Romantic

31

encompasses. In ‘Gothic and the Language of Terror’, Jane Hodson begins by examining how Ann Radcliffe was ‘an attentive and close reader of the linguistic means by which terror is rendered on the page’, before proceeding to argue that language is the Gothic’s ‘instrument of terror’, instanced in the Gothic’s close attention to silence and disembodied voices. As Hodson’s linguistic study argues, it is language that, more often than not, becomes the primary ‘medium of terror’ in Gothic literature. Andrew Smith’s exploration of ‘Gothic Science’ begins with careful contextualisation of scientific innovation during the Romantic period, before analysing a series of Gothic texts that engage with these developments. Beginning with a refreshing re-examination of Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian, Smith then proceeds to examine a series of texts by William Godwin, Mary Shelley and John Keats. Patrick O’Malley’s account of gender and sexuality argues that it is through the ‘fascination with the eroticised aesthetics of power as they are enacted in the enforcement and the dismemberment of gendered hierarchies and ideologies that the Gothic both produces and problematises its relationship to Romanticism’. Revisiting the problematic relationship between Romanticism and the Gothic in gendered terms, O’Malley argues for viewing both phenomena as ‘stylistic and phenomenological modes that can appear in any number of texts’. This he then ably demonstrates through examining two works, one a celebrated Gothic work, and the other less well known. The penultimate chapter of our collection, Tom Duggett’s ‘Gothic Forms of Time: Architecture, Romanticism, Medievalism’, is crucial, too, to the aims of this volume in its examination of the polysemy of the term ‘Gothic’ in architectural and political discourse, and in its particular reexamination of poetry by Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey in relation to this. In ‘Gothic Theology’, the final chapter of the volume, Alison Milbank begins with the poet Anna Laetitia Aikin’s essay on monasticism before revisiting the poetry of Wordsworth, Keats and Byron alongside the works of Radcliffe, Maturin and Harriet Lee in an exciting exploration of the various ways in which ‘Gothic’ engages with, and advances, the theological debates of the Romantic period. Combined, the chapters in Romantic Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion revisit both familiar and overlooked works of literature from the Romantic period that, whether consciously or unconsciously, variously sought to engage, enlist, parody, critique, appropriate or circumvent the potent, profitable and magnetic lure of the Gothic.

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 31

22/09/15 10:22 AM

32

Dale Townshend and Angela Wright

References Akenside, Mark (1744), The Pleasures of Imagination: A Poem in Three Books, London: n.p. Botting, Fred (2014), Gothic, 2nd edn, Oxford and New York: Routledge. Clery, E. J. (2002), ‘The genesis of ‘Gothic’ fiction’, in Jerrold E. Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 21–39. Clery, E. J. and Robert Miles (eds) (2000), Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook, 1700–1820, Manchester: Manchester University Press. [Coleridge, Samuel Taylor] (1798), Review of Hubert de Sevrac, The Critical Review (August 1798): 472. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1817), Biographia Literaria; or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, 2 vols, London: Rest Fenner. Courthope, William John (1885), The Liberal Movement in English Literature, London: John Murray. Day, Aidan (2012), Romanticism, 2nd edition, Oxford and New York: Routledge. Dowden, Edward (1897), The French Revolution and English Literature, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. Drake, Nathan (1798), Literary Hours; or, Sketches Critical and Narrative, London: Printed by J. Burkitt and sold by T. Cadell, Junior, and W. Davies. Drake, Nathan (1804), Literary Hours; or, Sketches Critical, Narrative, and Poetical, 3 vols, London: Printed for T. Cadell and W. Davies. Duggett, Tom (2010) Gothic Romanticism: Architecture, Politics, and Literary Form, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Gamer, Michael (2000), Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gamer, Michael (2002), ‘Gothic fictions and Romantic writing in Britain’, in Jerrold E. Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 85–104. Gamer, Michael and Dahlia Porter (eds) (2008), ‘Lyrical Ballads’ 1798 and 1800, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview. Garside, Peter, James Raven, James and Rainer Schöwerling (2000), The English Novel 1770–1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction published in the British Isles, Vol. I, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Griggs, Earl Leslie (1930), ‘Coleridge and Mrs Mary Robinson’, Modern Language Notes, 45.2: 90–5. Halsey, Katie (2014), ‘Gothic and the history of reading, 1764–1830’, in Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend (eds), The Gothic World, Oxford and New York: Routledge, pp. 172–84. Hamilton, Paul (2000), Percy Bysshe Shelley, Tavistock: Northcote House.

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 32

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Gothic and Romantic

33

Hazlitt, William (1818), ‘Lecture VIII. On the Living Poets’, in Lectures on the English Poets. Delivered at the Surrey Institution, London: Printed for Taylor and Hessey, pp. 283–331. Hoeveler, Diane Long (2014), The Gothic Ideology: Religious Hysteria and Anti-Catholicism in British Popular Fiction, 1780–1880, Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Hogle, Jerrold E. (1998), ‘The Gothic Ghost as Counterfeit and its Haunting of Romanticism: The Case of “Frost at Midnight” ’, European Romantic Review, 9 (Spring 1998): 283–92. Hogle, Jerrold E. (2001), ‘Romanticism and the “New Gothic”: An Introduction’, Gothic Studies, 3.1 (April 2001): 1–7. Hogle, Jerrold E. (2005), ‘ “Christabel” as Gothic: The Abjection of Instability’, Gothic Studies, 7.1 (May 2005): 18–28. Hogle, Jerrold E. (2014), ‘Recovering the Walpolean Gothic: The Italian; or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents (1796–1797)’, in Dale Townshend and Angela Wright (eds), Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 151–67. Hopps, Gavin (ed.) (2013), Byron’s Ghosts: The Spectral, the Spiritual and the Supernatural, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Hume, Robert D. (1969), ‘Gothic versus Romantic: A Revaluation of the Gothic Novel’, PMLA, 84.2 (March 1969): 282–90. Hume, Robert D. and Robert L. Platzner (1971), ‘ “Gothic Versus Romantic”: A Rejoinder’ PMLA, 86.2 (March, 1971): 266–74. Jeffrey, Francis (1802), Review of Thalaba the Destroyer, Edinburgh Review (October 1802): 63–83. Levinson, Marjorie (1986), Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems: Four Essays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McGann, Jerome J. (1983), The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. McGann, Jerome J. (ed.) (2000), Lord Byron: The Major Works, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miles, Robert (2008), Romantic Misfits, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Murnane, Barry (2014), ‘Gothic translation: Germany, 1760–1830’, in Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend (eds), The Gothic World, Oxford and New York: Routledge, pp. 231–43. Norton, Rictor (ed.) (2000), Gothic Readings: The First Wave, 1760–1840, London: Leicester University Press. Praz, Mario [1933] (1951), The Romantic Agony, 2nd edn, trans. Angus Davidson, London and New York: Oxford University Press. Punter, David [1980] (1996), The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day, 2nd edn, 2 vols, London: Longman. Robertson, Fiona (1994), Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic, and the Authorities of Fiction, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 33

22/09/15 10:22 AM

34

Dale Townshend and Angela Wright

Scott, Walter (1824), ‘Prefatory Memoir to Mrs Ann Radcliffe’, in The Novels of Mrs Ann Radcliffe, Novelist’s Library, Vol. X, Edinburgh: James Ballantyne and Company, pp. i–xxxix. Scott, Walter [1814] (1986), Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since, ed. Claire Lamont, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shaw, Thomas B. (1864), A History of English Literature, ed. and notes by William Smith, London: John Murray. Southey, Robert (1821), A Vision of Judgment, London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown. Summers, Montague (1938), The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel, London: Fortune Press. Thomson, Douglass H. (ed.) (2010), Tales of Wonder, by Matthew Gregory Lewis, Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview. Tompkins, J. M. S. (1932), The Popular Novel in England, 1770–1800, London: Constable & Co. Townshend, Dale (2005), ‘Gothic Visions, Romantic Acoustics’, in Robert Miles (ed.), Gothic Technologies: Visuality in the Romantic Era, Romantic Circles Praxis (last accessed 21 January 2014). Townshend, Dale and Angela Wright (2014), ‘Gothic and Romantic Engagements: The critical reception of Ann Radcliffe, 1789–1850’, in Dale Townshend and Angela Wright (eds), Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 3–32. Varma, Devendra P. (1957), The Gothic Flame, Being a History of the Gothic Novel in England: Its Origins, Efflorescences, Disintegration, and Residuary Influences, London: Arthur Barker Ltd. Whalley, George (1972), ‘England: Romantic-Romanticism’, in Hans Eichner (ed.), ‘Romantic’ and Its Cognates: The European History of a Word, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 157–262. Wellek, René (1949), ‘The Concept of “Romanticism” in Literary History. I. The Term “Romantic” and Its Derivatives’, Comparative Literature, 1.1 (Winter 1949): 1–23. Williams, Anne (1995), Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wu, Duncan (ed.) (2000), Romanticism: An Anthology with CD-Rom, Oxford: Blackwell. Young, Edward (1759), Conjectures on Original Composition. In A Letter to the Author of ‘Sir Charles Grandison’, London, Printed for A. Millar and R. and J. Dodsley. Ziegenhirt, Sophia F. (1816), The Orphan of Tintern Abbey. A Novel. In Three Volumes, London: Minerva Press.

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 34

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Chapter 2

Graveyard Writing and the Rise of the Gothic Vincent Quinn

Shortly before she died in 1800, the poet and novelist Mary Robinson reframed her life with some Gothic mythmaking. Picturing her birth in a ‘Minster-house’ attached to Bristol Cathedral, she describes a ‘tempestuous night’ during which ‘the wind whistled round the dark pinnacles of the minister tower, and the rain beat in torrents against the casements of [my mother’s] chamber’ (Robinson 1994: 18). In the course of her memoir Robinson presents herself as a suffering heroine who deserves our compassion, but her claim on victimhood demonstrates her command of the Gothic: she is the mistress of this form, not its helpless construct. Crucially, she links Gothicism to literary fluency: As soon as I had learned to read, my great delight was that of learning epitaphs and monumental inscriptions. A story of melancholy import never failed to excite my attention; and, before I was seven years old, I could correctly repeat Pope’s Lines to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady; and Mason’s Elegy on the Death of the beautiful Countess of Coventry; and many smaller poems on similar subjects. (Robinson 1994: 21–2; emphasis in original)1

Robinson’s recollections provide a useful guide to the poetic forms that helped shape early Gothic fiction. Although the bulk of this chapter will look at graveyard poetry, I want to start by unpicking some of the overlapping genres in Robinson’s childhood reading. Doing so will establish the basic principle of my argument, which is that eighteenth-century poetry and the Gothic inhabit a shared discursive field where numerous strands intersect and cross over, sometimes running parallel, at other times diverging. Along the way

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 37

22/09/15 10:22 AM

38

Vincent Quinn

I will analyse memorial texts, poems set in graveyards, poems about nightfall and mental disorder, and works that personify extreme emotions; I will also address the relationship between language and visual culture. The chapter will end by asking what the Gothic’s debt to graveyard writing tells us about the social function of the novel.

Memorial Stones and Monuments Although ‘epitaphs and monumental inscriptions’ are no longer popular reading matter, Robinson’s memoir reminds us that the writers who forged Romanticism were raised on such materials. She herself did well from her education among ‘the mouldering arches’ (Robinson 1994: 18) of Bristol’s disbanded abbey: her first novel Vancenza; or, The Dangers of Credulity (1792), an imitation of Ann Radcliffe, sold out inside a day (Byrne 2004: 293). More broadly, graveyard writing has left a trace on Romantic aesthetic theory and on Gothic fiction. One of Wordsworth’s most compelling interventions on poetic diction, the Essays Upon Epitaphs (1810–12), critiques ‘the Epitaphs, in verse, of the last century’ which are ‘thoroughly tainted by the artifices which have overrun our writings in metre since the days of Dryden and Pope’ (Wordsworth 1974: 84). By evaluating grave inscriptions with the same seriousness that he employs in the 1800 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth demonstrates a permeability – now mostly lost – between poetry and material culture. The essay’s logic is that language owes a duty to the dead, and that poetry should aspire to a quasi-religious status. In placing the inscriptions that she finds in Bristol Cathedral alongside poems by Alexander Pope and William Mason, the young Robinson – like Wordsworth – makes no distinction between verses printed in books and words carved on gravestones. Both are forms of publication, and although we now regard print as more prestigious, this would not necessarily have been the case in a religious age. Indeed, to have one’s words inscribed on a memorial tablet would be to share a sacred space with the word of God; it would also make one’s writing visible to a wider public. But Robinson’s formative texts are more permissive than Wordsworth’s, and more susceptible to melodramatic appropriation. Of the pieces that she mentions, Mason’s 1761 poem about the Countess of Coventry is not a monumental inscription: it was written as a tribute to a tragic beauty. The other poem, Pope’s ‘Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady’ (1717), is a fictive exercise in ghoulishness featuring ‘a beck’ning

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 38

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Graveyard Writing and the Rise of the Gothic

39

ghost’ with a ‘bleeding bosom’ (Pope 1963: 262). Although the deeds of the ‘unfortunate lady’ are not spelled out, they evidently involve extramarital sex and premature death. It is ironic that Robinson mentions Pope’s poem in the same breath as the monuments of Bristol Cathedral because the ‘Unfortunate Lady’ doesn’t lie in sanctified ground. Because of her past, she has been denied a church burial: What though no weeping loves thy ashes grace Nor polish’d marble emulate thy face? What though no sacred earth allow thee room, Nor hallow’d dirge be mutter’d o’er thy tomb? (Pope 1963: 263)

With her shady end, Pope’s ‘unfortunate lady’ is a prototype of the fallen woman that appears in so much later Gothic fiction; one successor is the Bleeding Nun in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796). Unlike Pope’s protagonist, Mason’s Countess of Coventry was an identifiable person, but she, too, carried an air of doomed romance about her: poisoned by her overuse of lead-based make-up, the countess died aged twenty-seven. A different effect is created by another poem by Mason, which Robinson does not name in her memoir, but which she would certainly have known given that it is inscribed on a monument that was erected in Bristol Cathedral when she was nine. This is Mason’s tribute to his wife who died after eighteen months of marriage in 1767. Urging her to ‘Speak, dead Maria!’ the poet asks his late wife to ‘Breathe a strain divine’ that will teach viewers of the epitaph to ‘be chaste, be innocent, like thee’ (Mason 1811: 138). Putting these texts together, we see that Robinson’s youthful reading includes poems that make varying claims on truthfulness, which contain more than one perspective on religion and morality, and which construct competing accounts of femininity; writing in poverty and sickness after a career on the stage and a period as a royal mistress, it cannot be accidental that Robinson mentions poems about women undone by gender. The pieces also raise questions about authorship. When Thomas Gray saw a draft of the epitaph for William Mason’s wife, he objected to the weakness of Mason’s conclusion. Although the version in Bristol Cathedral incorporates Gray’s alternative ending, the text remains attributed to Mason. Eleven years later, Mason would write the epitaph for Gray’s memorial in Westminster Abbey, while he himself would be commemorated there by one of his and Gray’s mutual friends, Richard Hurd, the author of that key text in

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 39

22/09/15 10:22 AM

40

Vincent Quinn

the eighteenth-century revival of interest in the art, literature and architecture of the medieval or ‘Gothic’ past, Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762). As well as hinting at a porous relationship between public and private speech, these examples show that memorial poetry often allowed writers to work collaboratively (though not always happily) with sculptors, and with each other.2 The resultant texts are generically complex, and have an important connection to emergent notions of literary history. In turn, literary history underpins the development of Gothic fiction later in the century by providing a periodbased framework through which to imagine or invent medieval and Renaissance settings. It is no accident, for example, that Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey begins to assume its familiar form in the eighteenth century, and that it does so in tandem with the first histories of English poetry; nor is it accidental that two of Britain’s earliest literary historians, Thomas Gray and Thomas Warton, have Gothic affiliations. In all these cases, versions of the past are co-opted in the service of a new national story. This is exemplified in the 1778 memorial to Thomas Gray in Westminster Abbey, which depicts the muse of lyric poetry holding Gray’s portrait and pointing to Milton’s monument, which hung above Gray’s. The sense of poetic succession, and its link to national status, is underlined by Mason’s tribute to his friend, which reads: No more the Graecian Muse unrival’d reigns: To Britain let the nations homage pay; She felt a HOMER’s fire in MILTON’s strains, A PINDAR’s rapture in the lyre of GRAY. (Mason 1811: 142)

In other words, just as Milton’s epic poetry recalls Homer’s achievements, so too do Gray’s odes evoke those of Pindar; consequently, Britain has inherited the mantle of classical Greece. Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) offers a graphic collision between burial motifs, literary history and Gothic representation. The opening sees Manfred’s heir being crushed to death by an outsized helmet. This turns out to be a supernatural replica of the helmet on the tomb of Alfonso the Good, whose descendants Manfred has wrongfully displaced. Throughout the story, key encounters take place around graves; during one of them, Alfonso’s marble effigy has a nosebleed. The plot is finally wound up when Manfred destroys his own line of descent by accidentally stabbing

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 40

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Graveyard Writing and the Rise of the Gothic

41

his daughter while she hides near Alfonso’s tomb. It is hard to imagine a more material instance of the moral weight of tradition, or its mediation through burial tokens, than being pursued by an avenging grave monument until your usurping line is expunged. If we place this plotline beside Walpole’s defence of Shakespeare in the Preface to the novel’s second edition of 1765, and if we bear in mind Walpole’s own antiquarian activities (which included a defence of the ultimate anti-hero, Richard III), Otranto begins to be seen as a book that is as much about cultural succession as it is about familial succession. This is underlined by the novel’s selfconscious evocation of Renaissance drama throughout its storyline, particularly Shakespeare’s tragedies, Hamlet and Macbeth. By making Shakespeare, ‘the brightest genius this country . . . has produced’ (Walpole 1993: 12), central to a story about lines of descent, Walpole contributes to the eighteenth-century consolidation of the Bard’s reputation, a process that was also marked by acts of physical memorialisation such as the establishment of David Garrick’s Shakespeare Temple near Richmond in 1756, as well as the placing of a statue of the dramatist in Poet’s Corner in 1740. Given that a memorial effigy is integral to Otranto’s plot, and given that grave memorials are intrinsically concerned with lineage and origins, the correspondences between Otranto’s plot and Walpole’s broader interest in cultural transmission seems clear. In other words, his novel transfers the logic of family memorials onto literary history and in doing so establishes a preoccupation with rightful inheritance that pulses through countless subsequent Gothic texts.

Night-Thoughts and Night-Pieces Because of its links to Parliament and the monarchy, Westminster Abbey houses an unusually high number of national figures. Most other burial grounds (even abbeys and cathedrals) are heterogeneous spaces in which the bones of the weak and the poor lie alongside those of the rich and the powerful. As a result, the bulk of eighteenthcentury funeral inscriptions are anonymous, unprized products of what Gray called ‘the unlettered muse’ (Gray et al. 1969: 132). This context is vital when considering the body of work I want to examine next, namely the so-called ‘graveyard poetry’ of the mid-eighteenth century. With varying degrees of subtlety, the poems gathered under this label feature a poet-narrator who meanders through a burial ground

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 41

22/09/15 10:22 AM

42

Vincent Quinn

at night voicing reflections on mortality and the transience of fame. Class differences are both noted and disavowed in these soliloquies. The aristocracy are shown to have complicated monuments while the middle classes make do with engraved tablets and the poor have wooden markers that will decay within a generation; the poor, though, may stand a better chance of salvation. Poems that explore this territory include Thomas Parnell’s ‘A Night-Piece on Death’ (1722), Edward Young’s Night-Thoughts (1742–5), Robert Blair’s The Grave (1743) and Thomas Warton’s The Pleasure of Melancholy (1747). Alongside these lie innumerable forgotten imitations plus a single work that transcends its period: Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ (1751) remained popular through the middle of the twentieth century, though nowadays it is more often anthologised than read. As with all literary-historical terms, there are problems in grouping a diverse range of poets under the same designation, and it is especially misleading to talk of a ‘graveyard school’ as if the writers shared a single aesthetic agenda. To be sure, Parnell’s ‘Night-Piece’ influences the poems that follow, but Parnell’s own work is informed by Thomas Browne’s prose meditation, Urne-Buriall (1658), a reflection on funeral customs that includes a transcendental account of time and mortality. A later prose work, James Hervey’s Meditations and Contemplations (1746–7), is composed of brief, first-person effusions on subjects such as the stars, the night and tombstones. William Blake was one of the many figures influenced by Hervey – his ‘Epitome of James Hervey’s Meditation Among the Tombs’ (c. 1820–5) depicts a procession of the dead making their way towards God, who is positioned at the apex of a Gothic arch. Given the mixture of genres on offer here, and given the dialogue between verbal, sculptural and pictorial forms, I would argue that graveyard poetry owes its prominence to the zeitgeist, not to a set of mutually agreed prescriptions. Instead of defending a category called ‘the graveyard school’, I want to think more generally about a range of recurring preoccupations. Features commonly associated with such work might include: an impressive ruin, a wild landscape . . . framing devices . . . the priesthood and monastic institutions; sleeplike and deathlike states; subterranean spaces . . . affinities between narrative and pictorial art . . . unnatural echoes or silences . . . the unspeakable . . . the poisonous effects of guilt and shame; nocturnal landscapes and dreams; apparitions from the past. . .the charnel house and the madhouse. (Sedgwick 1986: 9–10)

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 42

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Graveyard Writing and the Rise of the Gothic

43

If this list seems familiar it is because I have lifted it from the opening pages of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1986). Although Sedgwick is listing tropes associated with Gothic fiction, the ones I have reproduced apply equally to graveyard writing of the earlier eighteenth century; indeed, they appear in eighteenth-century poetry long before they are reproduced in Gothic novels. By their very nature, poems set in graveyards at night are likely to include ‘priesthood and monastic institutions’, ‘sleeplike and deathlike states’, ‘subterranean spaces’, ‘nocturnal landscapes and dreams’ and the ‘charnel house’. Many of these poems further heighten their atmosphere with an ‘impressive ruin’ or a ‘wild landscape’: Parnell’s ‘Night-Piece’ invokes a starlit ‘Place of Graves’ where a yew tree ‘bathes the Charnel House with Dew’. When the moonlight weakens, the ‘Shades’ who lie beneath the ground ‘rise in visionary Crouds [sic]’. These figures are ‘slow, and wan, and wrap’d with Shrouds’. Slow-moving bodies wrapped in shrouds rising from a graveyard at night? It would not be altogether flippant to describe this as an early instance of a zombie resurrection. As the first section of this chapter showed, memorial inscriptions embody many of the ‘affinities between narrative and pictorial art’ that Sedgwick mentions. This tendency is exploited in Gray’s first book, Designs by Mr R. Bentley for Six Poems by Mr T. Gray (1753). As the title indicates, Richard Bentley’s illustrations are as important as Gray’s words. Bentley’s frontispiece for the ‘Elegy’ shows a visitor bending over a grave so that his shadow falls on the headstone. As well as dramatising lines 115–6 of the poem, the image reminds readers of their own deaths; pointedly, the vignette is framed by a Gothic arch. Bentley’s end-piece depicts a cross section of the fan-vaulted crypt over which a funeral procession moves; the implication here is that the ground beneath our feet is full of corpses, and that one day we too will join them. Significantly for students of Gothic aesthetics, Bentley was a member of the ‘Committee of Taste’ that advised Walpole on the remodelling of his ‘little Gothic castle’ Strawberry Hill from 1750 onwards (Walpole 1798: II.398). Equally significantly for students of Romanticism, Gray’s poems were subsequently illustrated by Blake, who also collaborated on editions of Young’s Night-Thoughts and Blair’s The Grave. As an apprentice engraver, Blake had been sent to copy the medieval arches housing effigies of English monarchs in Westminster Abbey, and versions of these niches reappear in his mature work.3

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 43

22/09/15 10:22 AM

44

Vincent Quinn

One of the most important lessons that graveyard poetry holds for historians of the Gothic is that framing is not an extraneous device – on the contrary, it can be a way of acting out the narrative’s moral crux. The narrator of Parnell’s ‘Night-Piece’ is interrupted at line 55 by a new speaker (‘Methinks I hear a voice begin’) whose soliloquy occupies the rest of the poem. This is echoed in Gray’s ‘Elegy’, where the narrator is interrupted more than once and where the poem ends, not with the speaker’s educated diction, but with an awkward grave inscription.4 The Chinese boxes of Gray’s structure anticipate the narrative strategies of texts such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner’ (1798), Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). In all these, multiple narrators produce questions of reliability: how do we know whom to trust? This uncertainty – key to so much Gothic plotting – is present, in miniature, when the figure beneath the graves in Parnell’s ‘Night-Piece’ identifies himself as Death. What could be more final, more absolute, than death? Yet Parnell’s Death turns out to be the man-made product of human projections: When Men my Scythe and Darts supply, How great a King of Fears am I! They view me like the last of Things: They make, and then they dread, my Stings. (Parnell 1989: 170; emphasis in original)

Undermining its own substance, the voice proclaims that Death does not exist, except as a portal to the afterlife: Fools! if you less provok’d your Fears, No more my Spectre-Form appears. Death’s but a Path that must be trod, If Man wou’d ever pass to God. (Parnell 1989: 170)

Despite the ghostly backdrop, Death is revealed as a poetic effect, a ‘Spectre-Form’ (my emphasis), not a solid being. This anticipates the so-called ‘explained supernatural’ of Ann Radcliffe’s fiction, in which ghoulish manifestations are ultimately revealed to have rational explanations: had the heroine paused to reflect, she would not have been caught in a misapprehension. Similarly, if the reader of Parnell’s poem had been more careful, she or he might have realised

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 44

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Graveyard Writing and the Rise of the Gothic

45

that Death, far from being a material presence, is simply a product of the narrator’s imagination (‘Methinks I hear a voice begin’). The novelty of Parnell’s poem is its graveyard setting, but it is also part of a wider tradition of poems about nightfall in the English literary canon. Many of these were written in imitation of John Milton’s ‘Il Penseroso’ (1645), where a speaker addresses Melancholy in a darkening landscape, finally deciding that ‘I with thee will choose to live’ (Milton 2007a: 151). The poem’s celebration of contemplative solitude recurs in the evening-time effusions of many Gothic novels, especially Radcliffe’s. Indeed, one formula for Gothic fiction could be the atmosphere of ‘Il Penseroso’ combined with an anti-hero derived from Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). Anne Finch’s ‘A Nocturnal Reverie’ (1713) gives an insight into the gender politics of these night-time poems; it also illuminates the Gothic’s importance to female readers and writers later in the eighteenth century. Finch’s 50-line poem consists of a single sentence, the main verb of which is held back until line 47; before that, the poem’s opening phrase (‘In such a night’) ushers in a series of subclauses, each of which adds details about the pastoral surroundings. The deferral of the main verb means that anyone attempting to recite the piece aloud needs an operatic level of breath control to get to the end without gasping. After such a build-up the lines that finally resolve the poem seem anticlimactic, but their conventionality is part of the point: In such a night let me abroad remain Till morning breaks, and all’s confus’d again: Our cares, our toils, our clamours are renew’d, Our pleasures, seldom reached, again pursued. (Finch 1713: 294)

Night represents escape whereas daytime brings disappointment, especially for women. The repeated deferrals also mean that for the bulk of the poem the speaker’s presence has to be inferred from her description of the night. It is only in the final lines that she herself appears in the scenery, and she does so via an oddly pleading phrase: ‘In such a night let me abroad remain’. Evidently, the evening world that she describes cannot be taken for granted – like the breaths with which the poem’s single sentence is composed, it must be snatched in gulps. Gifted with greater civic freedom and untroubled by questions of sexual honour, men could occupy space – and language – more

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 45

22/09/15 10:22 AM

46

Vincent Quinn

expansively than women. It is only possible for Finch to celebrate night-time sensations because she does so within an enclosed parkland: as the wife of the Earl of Winchilsea she enjoyed the run of a large gated property. By contrast, an unaccompanied middle-class woman walking through open ground at night would have been seen as insane, or a prostitute, and even within the privileged space of the poem, Finch acknowledges that solitary wandering could endanger the reputation and physical safety of women.5 Churchyards would have been a still more treacherous location given that they were often used for illicit sex. Little wonder, then, that graveyard poetry was the exclusive preserve of eighteenth-century men. The indirection that class and gender enforce on Finch can be read back into the strategies and seductions of Gothic fiction. The trembling excitation of the ‘Nocturnal Reverie’ has an analogue in the mixture of danger, fear and excitement experienced by heroines such as Emily St Aubert in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Also, by showing how fraught it was simply to be alone outdoors, Finch’s lyric hints at the attraction that Radcliffe’s novels would have held for women readers. Labelling a text ‘escapist’ is a way of diminishing it, but escape has its uses and, as I will argue in the final part of this chapter, Radcliffe’s fiction also confronts the reader with several hard and unpalatable truths. In any case, both Radcliffe and Finch allow the imagination to expand into forbidden territory. While the appeal is not limited to female readers, it would, in the period, have been especially acute for them.

‘Screaming Horror’s funeral cry’ It will be clear from the work that I have been quoting that graveyard writing is replete with doleful personification such as Death, Sorrow and Slaughter (these three are from Blair’s The Grave), but personifications also populate works that are not set in churchyards. Gray’s ‘Ode on a Distant prospect of Eton College’, for instance, name-checks ‘Grim-visag’d comfortless Despair’, ‘bitter Scorn’, ‘grinning Infamy’, ‘hard Unkindness’, ‘moody Madness’, ‘disdainful Anger’, ‘pallid Fear’, ‘Envy wan’ and ‘faded Care’. The same poet’s ‘Ode to Adversity’ begs Adversity not to appear ‘in thy Gorgon terrors clad’, a guise in which she is accompanied by ‘screaming Horror’s funeral cry, / Despair, and fell Disease, and ghastly Poverty’ (Gray et al. 1969: 73).

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 46

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Graveyard Writing and the Rise of the Gothic

47

Further instances occur in William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1746). In ‘Ode to Fear’ the speaker’s initial attitude is reversed by the time we reach the conclusion so that although ‘Fear’ is accompanied by Danger’s ‘hideous Form’ and by the ‘red Arm’ of ‘Vengeance’, the narrator decides, in an allusion to Milton’s ‘Il Penseroso’, that ‘I, O Fear, will dwell with thee’. Fear’s appeal is that it brings an intensity that the speaker associates with ‘the sacred seat of Shakespeare’s breast’ (Gray et al. 1969: 423). Compare this with the Preface to the second edition of The Castle of Otranto, where Walpole describes putting his characters under intense pressure so as to investigate how people react to the farthest limits of danger – an experiment that he also connects to Shakespeare (Walpole 1993: 7–12). Here we find a hint that Gothic fiction and the poems of Gray and Collins share more than a vocabulary of shocks. The ‘Vengeance’ and Danger’ who attend on Collins’s ‘Fear’ are staples of Gothic plotting; if you put the three together, you get a sure-fire formula for psychological thrills. This inter-penetration is shown when Radcliffe uses an epigraph from Collins’s ‘Ode to Fear’ at the start of Chapter 5, volume 2, of The Mysteries of Udolpho.6 In the episode that follows the quotation, Emily is brought to Montoni’s castle against her wishes and discovers the veiled picture that later traumatises her. The interplay between Collins’s epigraph and this crucial plot development suggests an investment, on Radcliffe’s part, in the mechanics of personification. Where Gray and Collins transform abstract emotions into beings that resemble classical gods, early Gothic fiction turns these beings into emblematic characters who are embedded within plot structures that dramatise struggles between Fancy, Pity, Fear, and so on. In this context, it is no coincidence that one of the earliest tussles over Gothic aesthetics involved terms that could have come from Gray’s or Collins’s odes – namely, Radcliffe’s distinction between the educative effects of ‘terror’ and the freezing effects of ‘horror’ as put forward in her posthumously published essay, ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’ (1826). Significantly, this analysis occurs within the context of a discussion of the genius of Shakespeare (Radcliffe 1826: 149). Personified emotions are a way of externalising the inner self – they give solidity to things that are otherwise elusive. By using personification to dramatise shifts of emotional perspective, Gray’s and Collins’s poems provide a pre-Freudian age with a vocabulary for articulating what we would now call ambivalence. The Gothic novel

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 47

22/09/15 10:22 AM

48

Vincent Quinn

explores the same territory in a more dramatic fashion, which is one reason why the mode has garnered so much psychoanalytic critical attention. When we think about the Gothic’s place in the history of affect, though, we should remember that eighteenth-century poetry also feeds into the experiments of the age. To illustrate this relationship between personification, Gothicism and theories of the self, I want to discuss another Finch poem, ‘The Spleen’ (1709). In early medicine the spleen was thought to produce the black bile that caused melancholy; however, Finch’s poem addresses the spleen not as a physical organ, but as a mysterious entity that switches between violent storms and a becalming sense of ennui. Linking ‘the Spleen’ to insomnia, marital bullying, the lack of fulfilling work for women and the mind/body relationship, Finch anticipates many frameworks through which we now approach depression. Her dominant idea is that the Spleen resists treatment because it is too protean even to be grasped. The personification of Spleen allows Finch to get an imaginative handle on something that would otherwise elude control, but she also has to be true to the complexity of the condition that she is describing. One of the ways that she manages this is by addressing Spleen as ‘thou’. By doing so she transforms an abstraction into an interlocutor: the poem interacts with Spleen as if it were a living being. In her analysis of sexual politics, Finch notes that the Spleen is impervious to physicians. The latter are enriched by genteel women and their susceptibility to illness (‘his growing wealth he sees / Daily increas’d by ladies’ fees’). Naming one of the leading surgeons of the preceding half-century, Richard Lower, Finch finishes the poem with the following lines: Not skilful Lower thy source could find, Or thro’ the well-dissected body trace The secret, the mysterious ways By which thou dost surprise, and prey upon the mind. Tho’ in the search, too deep for human thought, With unsuccessful toil he wrought. Till thinking thee t’have catch’d, himself by thee was caught, Retained thy prisoner, thy acknowledg’d slave, And sank beneath thy chain to a lamented grave. (Finch 1713: 97)

Since gender is still an issue within medical practice, it is striking that Finch closes the poem with a parable about a male doctor whose

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 48

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Graveyard Writing and the Rise of the Gothic

49

physically-based medicine is undone by wily Spleen. As a theorist of blood circulation, Lower was indeed associated with ‘the welldissected body’, but his expertise is not much use against melancholia. Although Spleen itself is not gendered, the poem’s conclusion certainly questions the authority of male science. Thinking about this in the context of the Gothic, it is significant that Lower’s masculine hubris is undone by the Spleen’s uncanny ability to shift its shape. Here, in capsule form, are two scenarios that recur in numerous subsequent fictions in the Gothic mode, the over-reaching scientist and the chase narrative in which hunter and hunted interminably swap places. Over the course of 150 lines, Finch leads the reader to the poem’s final word – ‘grave’ – and in doing so articulates a set of interrelated themes (gender, madness, medicine) that are later taken up by Mary Shelley in Frankenstein, among others.

‘Interspersed with some pieces of Poetry’ In this final section I want to think about the role of poetry inside Gothic fiction. These days it might seem affected to pepper a novel with poems, but if we take the device seriously we gain entry into a more fluid literary culture than our own, one in which poetry and fiction are in constant dialogue with one another, and where both interact with material culture. To begin with an easily overlooked point, the full title of Radcliffe’s most famous fiction is The Mysteries of Udolpho, a Romance; interspersed with some pieces of Poetry. This echoes the full title of her earlier novel, The Romance of the Forest; interspersed with some pieces of Poetry (1791). Both novels preface their chapters with poetic quotations and the selections say much about Radcliffe’s taste. Shakespeare and Milton figure predominantly, but she also cites the eighteenth-century poets Mason, Collins and Gray. Critics, in her own day as now, have frequently linked her visual style to paintings by Salvator Rosa and Claude Lorrain, but Radcliffe owes just as much to eighteenth-century landscape poets such as James Thomson, whose long poem, The Seasons (1726–30), she frequently quotes. Such epigraphs occupy an ambiguous space that is, at once, inside the text but outside the plot, recalling the notion of the paratext as theorised by Gérard Genette (Genette 1997: 1–15). Bearing in mind Radcliffe’s pictorial ambitions, one could think of them as a kind of colouring or crosshatching, a way of shading in mood. Then there are the verses that are read or penned by characters within the plot. Examples include

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 49

22/09/15 10:22 AM

50

Vincent Quinn

the mysterious sonnet that Emily finds in Chapter 1 of The Mysteries of Udolpho, the celebration of the Alps that she writes at the start of volume 2, and the prophetic verses that appear in the first chapter of Lewis’s The Monk. These pieces often resemble musical arias: when the context requires intensity, the language shifts into verse. They can also be a way for characters to order their chaotic thoughts by controlling them within metre. At other times, they are riddles demanding a solution. Modern readers who have difficulty with such poems can miss their variety, and the way that they serve to challenge the viewer. In this they resemble grave inscriptions, if not in any direct causal fashion, then at least in terms of a shared rhetoric. Just as Gothic fiction is self-conscious about the process of authenticating manuscripts, a framing narrative device that reaches as far back as The Castle of Otranto itself, so too do many funeral monuments draw attention to their materiality. Take the 1631 Westminster Abbey memorial for Michael Drayton, for instance: Doe pious Marble Let thy Readers Know What they and what their children owe To DRAITON’S name; whose sacred dust Wee recommend unto thy TRUST: Protect his Memry, and Preserve his Storye: Remaine a lasting Monument of his Glorye; And when thy Ruines shall disclame To be the Treas’rer of his NAME; His Name, that cannot fade, shall be An everlasting MONUMENT to thee. (Westminster Abbey 1631)

Here, the uncredited author addresses the ‘pious marble’ memorial, telling it to educate its readers about Drayton’s importance (‘Let thy Readers Know / What they and what their children owe / To DRAITON’S name’). As well as holding Drayton’s ‘sacred dust’, the monument is charged with preserving his fame. This gesture – the raison d’être of memorials – is overturned by the idea that although the sculpture may crumble, Drayton’s glory cannot fade; so in the end, the monument may be glorified by its association with Drayton, and not the other way round. The further complication is that the words are part of what they describe, embossed, as they are, in gilt on the memorial tablet. The result is a complex arrangement in which the monument addresses itself, first telling itself how it should appeal to the reader, then announcing its own obsolescence.

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 50

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Graveyard Writing and the Rise of the Gothic

51

The sophistication of this inscription anticipates the games that Gray’s ‘Elegy’ plays with point of view. The memorial also demonstrates the importance of voice in graveyard inscriptions. Monuments frequently address the viewer, usually with a didactic purpose in mind. We have already seen that Mason’s epitaph for his wife uses her virtues to enforce a conventional version of femininity. The final lines – written by Gray – widen the focus considerably: Tell them, though ’tis an awful thing to die, (’Twas e’en to thee) yet the dread path once trod, Heaven lifts its everlasting portals high, And bids the pure in heart behold their God. (Gray et al. 1969: 256)

In these lines, the inscription addresses the dead woman, asking her to tell the viewer that death opens the way to heaven. Thus, there are two voices at play here, the woman’s and the monument’s, and the viewer is encouraged to ‘hear’ both of them. This anticipates that most fundamental of Gothic devices, the voice that speaks from beyond the grave. Directly or otherwise, all grave inscriptions make this call, so that the uncanniness of the Gothic is often simply a literal version of what is already implied in memorial verse. Gray’s words on Mary Mason recall his observation at line 84 of the ‘Elegy’ that memorial inscriptions exist to ‘teach the rustic moralist to die’ (Gray et al. 1969: 132). But they also teach the viewer how to mourn, and it is here that we see the closest interplay between graveyard discourse and the Gothic. As is so often the case, Udolpho is a pivotal text in this regard. Where Otranto is primarily concerned with the mechanics of succession, Udolpho adds the psychology of loss. Radcliffe positions her heroine as a bereaved subject who loses her mother in the opening pages of the book, and whose father, after a period of decline, dies shortly thereafter. Although the novel eventually restores Emily and Valancourt to La Vallée, the Edenic landscape with which the book began, its last paragraph reflects on the relationship between the author and her readers: And, if the weak hand, that has recorded this tale, has, by its scenes, beguiled the mourner of one hour of sorrow, or, by its moral, taught him to sustain it – the effort, however humble, has not been vain, nor is the writer unrewarded. (Radcliffe 1980: 672)

By turning from the happiness of her hero and heroine to envisage a reader who is in mourning, Radcliffe retrospectively frames the

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 51

22/09/15 10:22 AM

52

Vincent Quinn

entire work as an act of psychic reparation. As a way of consolidating the novel form’s social function, this is a canny move, but it also has the un-canny effect of turning the book into a mourning object – and of positioning the reader as a bereaved subject. Here the connection between graveyard writing and Gothicism moves beyond iconographic similarities and becomes structural, even foundational. What does it mean to constitute a ‘romance interspersed with . . . poetry’ as a mourning object? Does it make the novel into a commemorative token akin to the specially designed items of jewellery that became so common in the eighteenth century?7 A memorial locket, for instance, features prominently in Radcliffe’s plot. What is Radcliffe inviting us to see when we hold a volume in our hands? Is the book, in some complex sense, a grave inscription teaching the reader how to live and die? These questions lie beyond the scope of this chapter, but I want to finish with the thought that Radcliffe, and, in a different way, Walpole, creates a fictional register that foregrounds death and its mediation. In doing so, both writers allow us to see something that is otherwise hidden, namely that English literature is founded on the grave. Beowulf, the most famous poem of the Anglo-Saxon period, culminates in its hero’s burial; Chaucer’s pilgrims tell their tales when travelling to Thomas Becket’s tomb in Canterbury; Hamlet addresses Yorick’s skull while gravediggers excavate the plot in which Ophelia will be laid. More generally, the journey from birth to grave is the story from which all other narratives are derived. We know these things, though we do not always allow ourselves to see them. Like graveyard poetry, Gothic fiction brings them to the surface in ways that help them to be metabolised. By requiring its reader to stay close over the course of four volumes in which the word ‘melancholy’ appears over 170 times, Udolpho acknowledges the inevitability of human loss. Taking its cue from the memorial cultures of the eighteenth century, the novel excavates the space between marriage and death, bereavement and love. In doing so it hints that living and mourning may sometimes be the same.

Notes 1. 2. 3.

Robinson misremembers: the titles are ‘Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady’ and ‘Elegy on the Death of a Lady’. For Pope’s exasperation during one collaboration see Physick 1969: 69. Blake’s first biographer noted in 1863 that Gothic monuments were ‘for years’ the poet’s ‘daily companions’ (Gilchrist 1998: 18).

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 52

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Graveyard Writing and the Rise of the Gothic 4. 5.

6. 7.

53

For a reading of the ‘Elegy’ see Quinn 2012: 89–103. The speaker shares the night with Philomel, the nightingale. This pastoral detail is charged for female poets because the original Philomel was turned into a nightingale after being raped by her brother-in-law. Also, Finch’s repetitions of ‘On such a night’ echo The Merchant of Venice V, i, 1–28 where Jessica and Lorenzo repeat the phrase eight times while eloping. See also the start of volume three of The Romance of the Forest (1791). See Llewellyn 1991: 94–9 for more on mourning jewellery.

References Bentley, Richard and Gray, Thomas (1753), Designs by Mr R. Bentley for Six poems by Mr T. Gray, London: Dodsley. Blair, Robert (1743), The Grave: A Poem, London: M. Cooper. Blake, William (2000), The Complete Illuminated Books, ed. N. John McArthur, London: Thames & Hudson. Browne, Sir Thomas [1642 and 1658] (2012), ‘Religio Medici’ and ‘Urne-Buriall’, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Ramie Targoff, New York: New York Review of Books Classics. Byrne, Paula (2004), Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson, London: Harper Perennial. Coleridge, S. T. and Wordsworth, William [1798–1802] (2005) Lyrical Ballads, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones, London: Routledge Classics. Collins, William (1746), Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects, London: A. Millar. Finch, Anne, Countess of Winchilsea (1713), Miscellany Poems, on Several Occasions, London: Printed for John Barber and sold by Benjamin Tooke, William Taylor and James Round. Genette, Gérard (1997), Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gilchrist, Alexander [1863] (1998), The Life of William Blake, ed. W. Graham Robertson, Mineola, New York: Dover Publications. Gray, Thomas, Collins, William and Goldsmith, Oliver (1969), Gray, Collins and Goldsmith: The Complete Poems, ed. Roger Lonsdale, London and New York: Longman. Hervey, James (1748), Meditations and Contemplations, 2 vols, London: J. and J. Rivington. Lewis, Matthew [1796] (1980), The Monk: A Romance, ed. Howard Anderson, Oxford: World’s Classics. Llewellyn, Nigel (1991), The Art of Death, London: Reaktion Books. Mason, William (1764), Poems, London: Robert Horsfield. Mason, William (1811), The Works of William Mason, Vol. I, London: T. Cadell and W. Davies.

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 53

22/09/15 10:22 AM

54

Vincent Quinn

Maturin, Charles Robert [1820] (2000), Melmoth the Wanderer, ed. Victor Sage, London: Penguin. Milton, John (2007a), Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, revised 2nd edn, Harlow: Pearson Education. Milton, John [1667] (2007b), Paradise Lost, ed. Alistair Fowler, revised 2nd edn, Harlow: Pearson Education. Parnell, Thomas (1989), Collected Poems of Thomas Parnell, ed. Claude Rawson and F. P. Lock, Newark: University of Delaware Press. Physick, John (1969), Designs for English Sculpture, 1680–1860, London: HMSO. Pope, Alexander (1963), The Poems of Alexander Pope: A One-Volume Edition of the Twickenham Pope, ed. John Butt, London: Methuen. Quinn, Vincent (2012), Pre-Romantic Poetry, Tavistock: Northcote House. Radcliffe, Ann (1826), ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’, in The New Monthly Magazine: 145–52. Radcliffe, Ann [1794] (1980), The Mysteries of Udolpho, ed. Bonamy Dobrée, Oxford: World’s Classics. Radcliffe, Ann [1791] (1986), The Romance of the Forest, ed. Chloe Chard, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Robinson, Mary [1801] (1994), Perdita: The Memoirs of Mary Robinson, ed. M. J. Levy, London: Peter Owen. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1986), The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, London: Methuen. Shakespeare, William [c. 1596] (2010), The Merchant of Venice, ed. John Drakakis, London: Arden/Bloomsbury. Shelley, Mary [1818] (1992), Frankenstein, ed. Maurice Hindle, London: Penguin. Thomson, James [1726–30 and 1748] (1972), ‘The Seasons’ and ‘The Castle of Indolence’, ed. James Sambrook, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Walpole, Horace (1798), The Works of Horatio Walpole, Earl of Orford, 5 vols, London: Printed for G. G. and J. Robinson, and J. Edwards. Walpole, Horace [1764 and 1785] (1993), ‘The Castle of Otranto’ and ‘Hieroglyphic Tales’, ed. Robert Mack, London: Dent. Warton, Thomas (1747), The Pleasures of Melancholy, London: Dodsley. Westminster Abbey, Drayton memorial, 1631 (last accessed 9 July 2014). Wordsworth, William (1974), The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, Vol II, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Young, Edward (1742), The Complaint; or, Night-Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality, London: Dodsley.

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 54

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Chapter 3

Gothic Romance Deborah Russell

Otranto’s Spawn Most accounts of the Gothic novel take Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) as the genre’s point of origin. As with most generic boundaries – and stories of origin – there is an arbitrary element in the imposition of such a dividing line. Thomas Leland’s Longsword, Earl of Salisbury (1762), for example, defined by its subtitle as a ‘Historical Romance’, has as good a claim to be situated within the genre as many later texts. Nevertheless, Walpole’s contemporaries did understand his work as a starting point; satirising the boom in Gothic fiction-writing in the 1790s, T. J. Mathias lamented that ‘nought but ghosts and trinkets be display’d, / Since Walpole ply’d the virtuoso’s trade’. Mathias later added a note that underlines Walpole’s responsibility for the later texts: his ‘Otranto Ghosts have propagated their species with unequalled fecundity. The spawn is in every novel shop’ (Mathias 1798: 402). And what makes Otranto stand out as a progenitor, then and now, is that Walpole deliberately positioned his fiction as a new kind of writing. Otranto may not actually be the first Gothic novel – certainly it was not the first work of fiction to contain what we might call Gothic elements – but it retains its significance because of its explicit, self-conscious revival of the ‘romance’ form, and its manipulation of that form into something conceived of as original. In the Preface to the novel’s second edition, Walpole famously described Otranto as ‘an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern’ (Walpole 2008: 9). His text thus presents itself as a new genre, one that merges the improbable tales of heroes and monsters found in chivalric romance with the stories of everyday life found in the modern novel:

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 55

22/09/15 10:22 AM

56

Deborah Russell In the former all was imagination and improbability; in the latter, nature is always intended to be, and sometimes has been, copied with success. Invention has not been wanting, but the great resources of fancy have been damned up . . . The author of the following pages thought it possible to reconcile the two kinds. (Walpole 2008: 9)

Walpole’s understanding of the typology of his work in this formulation was in some ways as influential as the narrative itself. It opened the way for later writers to find their own balance in this mixture of ‘the two kinds of romance’. Thus poised, the Gothic novel was able to negotiate between fantasy and realism. The exploration of that relationship would have far-reaching aesthetic and political implications.

Romance and the Novel Working through the opportunities and constraints that the romance form brought to the Gothic necessitates an understanding of the literary and historiographical discourse that informs and surrounds Walpole’s Preface. His opposition between the ‘improbability’ of the older romance and the naturalism of modern fiction was a familiar one. From the late seventeenth century, authors and commentators had used very similar terms to distinguish the embryonic genre of the novel from earlier forms of prose fiction. In 1691, for example, William Congreve’s Preface to Incognita argued that: Romances are generally composed of the Constant Loves and invincible Courages of Hero’s [sic], Heroins [sic], Kings and Queens . . . where lofty Language, miraculous Contingencies, and impossible Performances, elevate and surprise the Reader into a giddy Delight which leaves him flat upon the Ground whenever he gives of[f] . . . Novels are of a more familiar nature; Come near us, and represent to us Intrigues in practice, delight us with Accidents and odd Events, but not such as are wholly unusual or unpresidented [sic], such which not being so distant from our Belief bring also the pleasure nearer us. (Congreve 1970: 27)

The definition of this contrast remained fairly constant throughout the following century. Even when defending romance in 1785, for example, Clara Reeve summarises the matter in very similar terms: ‘The Romance is an heroic fable, which treats of fabulous persons

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 56

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Gothic Romance

57

and things. – The Novel is a picture of real life and manners, and of the times in which it is written’ (Reeve 1785: I.111). It was in comparison with romance, then, that the eighteenth-century novel repeatedly emphasised its relevance to the modern world. As E. J. Clery puts it, ‘the novel needed romance as the measure of its own achievements’ (Clery 2002: 23). The supposed plausibility of the novel, the fact that it offered a recognisable world, was a matter of staying within the bounds of the ‘natural’, the ordered and the rational. These characteristics were accentuated by contrast with the imaginative credulity demanded by romance; its use of the improbable and even the supernatural made the form easy to depict as inherently disordered and resistant to regulation. The early novel’s repeated attempts to define itself against romance were thus a way of asserting the genre’s conformity with the modern public values of Enlightenment rationalism. Thus, for example, principles of propriety and polite sociability infuse James Beattie’s 1783 description of how Don Quixote effected the transition between the chivalric world of romance and modern tastes: Mankind awoke as from a dream. . . . It astonished them to find, that nature and good sense could yield a more exquisite entertainment, than they had ever derived from the most sublime phrenzies [sic] of chivalry . . . Fiction henceforth divested herself of her gigantick [sic] size, tremendous aspect, and frantick [sic] demeanour; and, descending to the level of common life, conversed with man as his equal, and as a polite and cheerful companion. (Beattie 1783: 563–4)

However, as Fred Botting has pointed out, there is a direct correlation between the repetition of efforts to assert such boundaries and the difficulty of policing them (Botting 1996: 28). Another constant element in discussions of the novel and romance is that the two terms blur into each other; the distinction between them is collapsed as often as it is asserted. Throughout the eighteenth century, in the absence of a direct comparison between old and new forms, the two words came almost interchangeably to refer to ‘fiction’, as in William Godwin’s discussion at the end of the century of ‘that species of literature, which bears the express stamp of invention, and calls itself romance or novel’ (Godwin 2000: 262). Part of the issue here is that ‘romance’ is a dangerously imprecise term, applicable equally to medieval verse narratives as to the sentimental prose fiction imported from France in the seventeenth century. Clara Reeve’s The Progress of Romance (1785), quoted above, laments this lack of

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 57

22/09/15 10:22 AM

58

Deborah Russell

clarity, criticising the tendency of commentators to be ‘biassed [sic] by names to which they have not affixed an absolute and determinate meaning’ (Reeve 1785: I.5–6): ‘I have consulted all the Dictionary writers upon the subject, and I do not find that any of them are clear and certain in their definition of it’ (Reeve 1785: I.12). Reeve’s work offers a literary history structured as a series of conversations, in which all three characters offer competing definitions of romance: it is, variously, ‘a wild, extravagant, fabulous story’, ‘stories that are built upon fiction’, and ‘an Heroic fable . . . an Epic in prose’ (Reeve 1785: I.6, 13). For Reeve’s purposes, the latter is the authoritative definition, but even here, in a text that deals with the subject with remarkable clarity and assurance, generic boundaries are not always clear: works that are explicitly referred to as the eighteenth-century version of romances (such as Longsword) are also included in the list of ‘Novels uncommon and Original’ (Reeve 1785: II.33). Even teleological, stadial narratives that celebrate the novel’s present-day suitability by relegating romance to a superstitious past also connect the two genres by making it clear that romance is the novel’s forebear. Sue Chaplin has pointed out that the project of classifying the novel involved giving it a history and, thus, a pedigree: ‘Romance was thus rationalised as the historical predecessor of the novel at the same time as it was denigrated as a dangerously unstable, feminine literary form’ (Chaplin 2007: 5). The distinction between the genres also faced an inherent problem: any attempt to define a type of fiction in terms of its relationship to ‘nature’ and actuality will be unsuccessful, or at best incomplete. Fiction is a priori artificial; it has to move beyond the real. Making romance the province of the imagination meant that the novel could never properly leave it behind. As Ian Duncan puts it, ‘Romance is the essential principal of fiction: its difference from a record of reality, of everyday life’ (Duncan 1992: 2). The novel’s inability to disentangle itself from romance has wider implications for the project of Enlightenment. It is representative of the way in which theories of eighteenth-century rationalism, modernity and politeness cannot fully account for the practice of the century’s culture. Furthermore, it draws attention to the fact that such values always exist in dialectical relationships with their opposites, invoking the things that they define themselves against. This has long been recognised by critics as part of the impetus behind the rise of the Gothic; David Punter, for instance, writes that ‘Reliance on reason may appear to remove mystery, but only at the expense of outlawing large expanses of actual experience, the experience of the emotions,

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 58

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Gothic Romance

59

the passions.’ Rationalism, he argues, is ‘a self-defeating system’ that will always ‘create its own enemies’ (Punter 1996: I.24). By dealing in terror and the taboo, Gothic very explicitly positions itself as the inverted mirror image of Enlightenment systems of thought, but it was its persistent entanglement with romance that made the novel the ideal vehicle for such a development.

Revaluing Romance Despite such ambiguities, the idea that romance had been excluded from the dominant culture remained prominent. This narrative was, however, assessed in different ways as the century progressed. In the early decades, the neoclassical generic hierarchy of the Augustan era emphasised the importance of classical texts over more recent, native literary traditions, ensuring the decline of romance. Commentators’ emphases on the novel’s supposed regularity and probability were in part an attempt to carve out a theoretical space for the new genre within this aesthetic realm. However, by mid-century the cultural context had moved on somewhat, and there was a resurgence of interest in the aesthetic modes that Augustan modernity had left behind. In architecture, Gothic follies and improvements started to appear in estates previously dominated by the clean lines of classical buildings. Antiquarians searched for ancient British artefacts, while historians, literary critics and writers showed a new desire to discover, understand and recreate the literature and culture of the nation’s distant medieval or ‘Gothic’ past. As part of this movement, several writers attempted to reassess the history and the value of romance. One of the most important texts in this vein was Richard Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762), which sets out a well-developed and fairly nuanced narrative about the connection between romance and the political system of feudalism. Here, familiar terms are used to describe literature’s recent transition to probability and rationality, but the evaluation of that development has changed. Hurd acknowledges the process of ‘civilization’, but does so without offering a wholehearted celebration of modernity: reason, in the end . . . drove [the tales of faery] off the scene, and would [not] endure these lying wonders . . . Henceforth, the taste of wit and poetry took a new turn: And fancy, that had wantoned it so long in the world of fiction, was now constrained, against her will, to ally herself with strict truth, if she would gain admittance into reasonable company.

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 59

22/09/15 10:22 AM

60

Deborah Russell What we have gotten by this revolution, you will say, is a great deal of good sense. What we have lost, is a world of fine fabling. (Hurd 1762: 119–20)

Hurd’s central point is a nationalist one, and a direct response to Augustan classicism: he aims to establish ‘The preeminence of the Gothic manners and fictions, as adapted to the ends of poetry, above the classic’ (Hurd 1762: 76). Even while remaining dismissive of a large amount of romance writing, he valorises the imaginative power of a tradition that inspired national literary heroes such as Spenser and Shakespeare. Despite this nationalist pride, though, a sense of loss permeates the end of Hurd’s Letters. Spenser’s Faerie Queene, for example, is ‘one of the noblest productions of modern poetry’ but nothing will ever ‘restore it to those honours which it has, once for all, irrecoverably lost’ (Hurd 1762: 111). Hurd views the change in literary tastes as the result of a serious break with the national past; ‘the Gothic manners of Chivalry . . . springing out of the feudal system . . . were no longer seen or understood’, resulting in ‘a total contempt and rejection of them’ (Hurd 1762: 109–10). This viewpoint sheds light on a different aspect of the novel’s emphasis on its modernity: its contribution to a broader cultural sense of historical rupture. There were, of course, major political and economic reasons behind eighteenthcentury Britain’s sense of itself as a new society, not least, the need to move on from the revolutions of the seventeenth century, the 1707 Act of Union and the rise of commercial capitalism. In such contexts, the idea of progress (political, cultural and economic) necessitated an awareness of historical shift. But as a result, the nation’s past became less accessible, and even, in some senses, foreign. For Hurd, this shift meant a cultural loss, but for Walpole, writing just two years later, it provided an opportunity. His use of romance resonated in this context: the imprecision that surrounded definitions of the form reflected the contemporary uncertainty about the relationship between past and present. An appeal to the authority of romance invoked a generalised set of ideas about old traditions, imagination and superstition, but did not impose the restriction of distinct generic rules or demand that the narrative be shaped around the details of a specific time period. Romance is the symbol of a halfunderstood past, and its reinvention thus offers the excuse for imagining history anew. It is no surprise, then, that the other defining term Walpole chose for Otranto shares romance’s ambiguity of reference.

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 60

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Gothic Romance

61

In subtitling the second edition ‘A Gothic Story’, Walpole evoked images of an unruly, anti-classical past – but such a description could refer equally to a tale set among the Germanic ‘Gothic’ tribes, a story of medieval feudalism, or a narrative taking place during the age of Elizabeth I. Both ‘Gothic’ and ‘romance’ unequivocally gesture to the past, but the history that they refer to is ill-defined, existing primarily in the literary imagination. This, of course, gives literature the power to act as a type of historical record. Throughout the century, debates about fiction writing and reading constantly compare it to the study of history. Just as the novel defined itself against romance, so fiction writing as a whole was defined in relation to history. Romances and novels could be seen as pale ‘Imitations of History’, as Samuel Croxall put it in 1720 (Croxall 1970: 71). Certainly the prefaces to early novels tend to reiterate claims to historical truth: Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), for example, assures the reader that ‘The Editor believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it’ (Defoe 2007: 3). From early in the century, however, discussions of this relationship also recognise the power of fiction to alter perceptions of the past and to compete with straightforward historical accounts. In 1712, for example, John Dennis acknowledges that ‘the just fiction of a Fable moves us more than an Historical Relation can do’ (Dennis 1970: 40). The affective impact of fiction troubles the myriad commentators who agonise over the reading habits of young people and women; they argue that novels and romances will ruin their minds for more serious study or improving occupations. James Beattie, for example, ends his discussion of romance with the warning that a ‘habit of reading them breeds a dislike to history, and all the substantial parts of knowledge’ (Beattie 1783: 574). Other observers, though, acknowledge the connections between history and fiction in a more positive light, seeing fiction as a way of exploring human motives and so truly understanding history. Walpole himself said that ‘the most useful part of all history’ was ‘a picture of human minds’ (Walpole 1845: I.250). And, as Robert Mayer has pointed out, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century historical discourse already ‘allowed for the use, or at the very least the tolerance, of admittedly fabulous material’ to achieve emotional effects, especially when it came to explaining motive and cause, or when ‘rhetorical or practical considerations argued powerfully for its inclusion’ (Mayer 1997: 35). Yet again, generic boundaries prove

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 61

22/09/15 10:22 AM

62

Deborah Russell

somewhat porous. Walpole could even claim that the only difference between history and romance was that ‘History is a romance that is believed: romance, a history that is not believed’ (Walpole 1798: IV.368). Broad cultural support for the idea that imaginative approaches could elucidate history added a potential level of political significance to romance’s vision of the past.

Walpole’s Vision By positioning itself as a new synthesis of fictional genres, then, Walpole’s intervention in these debates claimed to revive the excitement and imagination of romance, bringing it into line with modern sensibilities. It also exploited the areas in which the novel could compete with history: the elucidation of human character and motive. Walpole ‘wished to conduct the mortal agents in his drama according to the rules of probability; in short, to make them think, speak and act, as it might be supposed mere men and women would do in extraordinary positions’ (Walpole 2008: 8–9). Even in the Preface to the first edition, in which Walpole disguised his authorship and innovation by presenting the novel as a translation of an old Italian work, this impression of the text’s characterisation is encouraged: speaking in the guise of a fictional translator named William Marshal, Walpole praises the fact that ‘all the characters comport themselves as persons would do in their situation . . . The characters are well drawn, and still better maintained’ (Walpole 2008: 6). Manipulating his readers’ responses in this way had some effect: despite the echoes of romance’s stock characters (the villainous tyrant; the noble peasant; the victimised but virtuous heroine), the Monthly Review’s initial response to the novel judged that ‘the characters are highly finished; and the disquisitions into human manners, passions, and pursuits, indicate the keenest penetration, and the most perfect knowledge of mankind’ (Anon. 1765b: 97). Even the use of the supernatural could be presented as part of this ‘disquisition’ into human nature; it was a way of accessing the belief systems of the past. Thus ‘William Marshal’ argues in the first Preface that while ‘miracles, visions, necromancy, dreams, and other preternatural events, are exploded now even from romances’, That was not the case when our author wrote; much less when the story itself is supposed to have happened. Belief in every kind of prodigy was so established in those dark ages, that an author would

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 62

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Gothic Romance

63

not be faithful to the manners of the times who should omit all mention of them. He is not bound to believe them himself, but he must represent his actors as believing in them. (Walpole 2008: 6)

That last sentence pre-emptively defends Walpole, anticipating his later admission of authorship. ‘Preternatural events’ might have been expected of a translation of an ancient romance, but were much more challenging in a text of modern provenance. The danger is amply illustrated by the fact that, on discovering the novel’s modern origins with the publication of the second edition, the Monthly Review promptly retracted the praise quoted above and lambasted Otranto as containing ‘absurd and monstrous fictions’, demonstrating ‘false taste’ and advocating for ‘re-establishing the barbarous superstitions of Gothic devilism!’ (Anon. 1765c: 384). Nevertheless, Walpole could argue that it was necessary to activate outmoded superstitions in order to achieve the affective understanding of past peoples that fiction made possible. Reviving romance, especially in collaboration with the novel’s psychological insights, offered access to historical truths. In this light, the depiction of the supernatural could also resonate politically. In Letters on Chivalry and Romance, Hurd had talked about how the characters and events of romance ‘shadowed out’ the political reality of feudalism: the Giants were oppressive feudal Lords; and every Lord was to be met with, like the Giant, in his strong hold, or castle. Their dependents of a lower form, who imitated the violence of their superiors, and had not their castles, but their lurking-places, were the Savages of Romance. The greater Lord was called a Giant, for his power; the less a Savage, for his brutality. (Hurd 1762: 28)

Clery has noted that Hurd’s approach ‘informs Walpole’s treatment of the relation between the medieval setting and manifestations of the supernatural’, arguing that ‘In Otranto, too, exaggerated fantasy is the natural outgrowth of the violent appropriation of power’ (Clery 2002: 26). Walpole’s story certainly reflects on the nature of power: the nostalgia of reviving romance is balanced by a concentration on themes of inheritance, usurpation and oppression. However, Otranto is not an overtly political work. After all, the fantasy element of the ‘blend’ of genres predominates; on a superficial reading of the text it can seem as if Otranto’s revival of romance has simply legitimated a flight of escapist fancy. Walpole’s most famous

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 63

22/09/15 10:22 AM

64

Deborah Russell

statement about the novel, in a letter to his cousin William Cole on 28 February 1765, is that he ‘sat down and began to write, without knowing in the least what [he] intended to say’ – he describes becoming ‘engrossed in [his] tale’ because he ‘was very glad to think about anything rather than politics’ (Lewis 1937–83: I.88). Despite the political potential, much of what Walpole has taken from Hurd is an idea of the pleasure offered by romance – which, as Harriet Guest puts it, ‘is bound up with its furtive and feminine opposition to the social and fraternal values of public life’ (Guest 1992: 119). The Italian setting ensures some distance from commentaries on national history, while the stagey excesses of Walpole’s supernatural – the giant and deadly suit of armour; the walking portrait; the monstrous hand – contain an element of self-parody that complicates the text’s more ‘serious’ meanings. Even the Prefaces, with their layers of authorial personae and their ‘translational masquerade’, to use Angela Wright’s phrase, are tonally ambivalent (Wright 2013: 8). Contemporary reviewers noted this from the start: the Critical Review’s response to the first edition dubbed it a ‘very curious performance’, saying of the ‘translator’ that ‘whether he speaks seriously or ironically, we neither know nor care’ (Anon. 1765a: 50, 51). That said, the ambiguity of tone does not in itself mean that the work is apolitical. The Critical Review’s comment referred directly to the point in the first Preface at which the ‘translator’ accuses the ‘original author’, a priest, of writing a supernatural story ‘to confirm the populace in their ancient errors and superstitions’ (Walpole 2008: 5). This plays with the sense that the modern world should have moved beyond such tastes, anticipates concerns about the negative effects of reviving them – and also, as Ellen Malenas Ledoux has claimed, makes the point that the narrative ‘is poised to be politically persuasive’ (Ledoux 2013: 25). The second Preface then deliberately places the text in the kind of nationalist tradition that Hurd had traced: ‘That great master of nature, Shakespeare, was the model I copied’; ‘The result of all I have said is to shelter my own daring under the cannon of the brightest genius this country, at least, has produced’ (Walpole 2008: 10–11, 14). In the wake of the Seven Years War, the fact that a great deal of the Preface is devoted to defending Shakespeare against Voltaire should simply reinforce the patriotism here, but Wright has recently tracked the ways in which Walpole’s characteristic equivocality evokes ‘an Anglo-French dialectic that [is] by turns hostile, admiring, critical and immeasurably reciprocal’ (Wright 2013: 18). Romance is, after all, a European as well as a national form. The Prefaces thus set up a text that blends fantasy and reality, tradition

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 64

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Gothic Romance

65

and novelty, native and foreign; this extreme heteroglossia allows Otranto to intervene in political and historical narratives in sophisticated ways.

Reeve’s Response There was, however, one element to commentary on romance and the novel that Walpole did not have much interest in: concern about the morality of fiction writing. In the first Preface to Otranto ‘William Marshal’ even regrets this as one of the text’s ‘defects’: ‘I could wish he had grounded his plan on a more useful moral’ (Walpole 2008: 7). The idea that literature should be instructive as well as entertaining was, however, widely accepted in the eighteenth century. It was of particular concern in the debate around the novel and romance because of the popularity of fiction, and especially because of its association with female readers. In a wellknown Rambler essay in 1750, Samuel Johnson had argued that it was the novel, properly handled, that was best suited to inculcate the right moral responses in its readers: In the romances formerly written, every transaction and sentiment was so remote from all that passes among men, that the reader was in very little danger of making any applications to himself; the virtues and crimes were equally beyond his sphere of activity . . . But when an adventurer is levelled with the rest of the world, and acts in such scenes of universal drama, as may be the lot of any other man; young spectators fix their eyes upon him with closer attention, and hope, by observing his behaviour and success, to regulate their own practices. (Johnson 1970: 144)

Other commentators go further in their condemnation of romance; Botting has discussed the ways in which the form’s association with license, irregularity and blurred boundaries led to an assumed ‘inability on the part of romances and their growing readership to discriminate between virtue and vice’ (Botting 1996: 28). However, commentary on the issue was not wholly one-sided: Hugh Blair, for example, wrote in 1762 of medieval romances that though they were ‘suited to the gross ignorance of [past] ages, and to . . . superstitious notions’, they had the merit ‘of being writings of the highly moral and heroic kind’, with characters who acted as ‘patterns’ of good behaviour (Blair 1970: 249). Arguments in this

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 65

22/09/15 10:22 AM

66

Deborah Russell

vein tended to take a nostalgic view, contrasting the lost simplicity of the past with the fashionable consumerism of modern life, and implicating novels in the latter. Blair, for example, admires Defoe, Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson, but also worries about ‘the trivial performances which daily appear in public’ and which ‘tend to dissipation and idleness’ (Blair 1970: 251). This was the side of the argument that Clara Reeve would adopt in her literary history The Progress of Romance: she says of both medieval and seventeenth-century romances that ‘the enthusiasm they inspired was that of virtue and honour’ (Reeve 1785: I.67). In fact, Reeve’s Progress goes beyond her predecessors in its valorisation of romance’s moral and aesthetic potential, constantly levelling romance and epic and refusing to apologise for the former; in comparison, even Hurd makes self-deprecating gestures about the ‘ungrateful task’ of perusing ‘these barbarous volumes’ (Hurd 1762: 24). Her work also takes an explicitly gendered approach: the differing responses of the characters Euphrasia and Hortensius, for example, expose gendered inequalities in the critical reception of individual texts and entire genres. Such moments clearly link romance to ‘the female cause’, in turn identified as ‘the cause of virtue’ (Reeve 1785: I.136). In Gary Kelly’s summary, Reeve’s argument is that ‘ “romance”, or particularly feminised forms of it, can contribute importantly to the “progress” of modernised and civil society’ (Kelly 1999: VI.lx). Reeve thus reframes romance’s associations with femininity to assert a level of authority in dealing with the genre. She could claim such authority as both a practitioner and a theorist; in 1777 she had published a novel entitled The Champion of Virtue, renamed in the second edition as The Old English Baron (1778). The Preface to the latter refers to the work as ‘the literary offspring of The Castle of Otranto, written upon the same plan, with a design to unite the most attractive and interesting circumstances of the ancient Romance and modern Novel’ (Reeve 2003: 2). This was no mere imitation, however: Reeve also confidently asserts that she will correct the ‘defects’ of Otranto (Reeve 2003: 4). Here too she is claiming an implicitly gendered moral authority, based on the assumption that ‘The business of Romance is, first, to excite the attention; and secondly, to direct it to some useful, or at least innocent, end’ (Reeve 2003: 2). Walpole’s approach failed in this regard, she argues, by overusing the supernatural. For Reeve, overly fantastic scenes ‘destroy the work of imagination, and, instead of attention, excite laughter’ (Reeve 2003: 3). Her answer is to rebalance the mixture of fantasy and

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 66

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Gothic Romance

67

realism offered by the blend of romance and novel, keeping the tale ‘within the utmost verge of probability’ (Reeve 2003: 3). In practice, this means that her narrative emphasises the domestic and the familiar. As a result, Reeve’s vision of the past – ghosts included – is markedly unthreatening. By asserting a gendered authority over the realm of romance, then, Reeve constructs a reassuring fiction that emphasises the ‘feminine’ ideals of virtue and benevolent heroism. The obvious propriety of her fiction, though, masks the sheer ambition on display here. After all, the relationship between romance and history retained its political potential, and Reeve’s vision of the past is overtly exemplary: ‘Sweet is the remembrance of the virtuous, and happy are the descendants of such a father! they will think on him and emulate his virtues; they will remember him, and be ashamed to degenerate from their ancestor’ (Reeve 2003: 134–5). The nostalgic patriotism of such passages is a clear indication that Reeve’s Gothic romance offers a vision of history that is designed as both a moral and a political intervention. As she said of a later work, Memoirs of Sir Roger de Clarendon (1793), ‘In my Gothic story my principles will appear, it will speak to men, to citizens, to Princes, & to the People’ (qtd in Kelly 2010: n.p.).

Romance Fantasies and Political Realities Other women writers followed Reeve in asserting gendered authority in relation to romance, but as the Gothic novel developed into a recognisable genre Reeve’s overt didacticism was displaced by a new concentration on a feminised version of the sublime. In The Old English Baron, romance offered access to an improving national history, but for Sophia Lee and perhaps also for Ann Radcliffe, romance appropriated history for its own aims. Fiction no longer simply elucidates character and motive; rather, romance’s valorisation of imaginative, affective approaches allows the power and belief structures that produce history to be questioned. This is particularly true of Lee’s novel The Recess (1783–5), which centres on the insertion of forgotten female narratives into national history. It imagines the stories of the fictional twin daughters of Mary Queen of Scots, recounting the damage done to the women by patriarchal political structures, their inability to claim any public political birthright and the eventual removal of any trace of their existence from the historical record. The Recess of the title, the

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 67

22/09/15 10:22 AM

68

Deborah Russell

sisters’ childhood home, is an old monastic structure, and its eventual destruction links their story to Britain’s unwanted Catholic heritage. As Richard Maxwell argues, the women’s experiences are thus representative of ‘repressed collective memories, facts willed or decreed to be fictions . . . [and] rejected tradition’ (Maxwell 2002: 169). As the sisters tell their stories, then – the emotional truth reinforced by gaps and contradictions – The Recess imaginatively reclaims and valorises the experiential histories of women. Radcliffe’s approach is strongly indebted to Lee, but rather than concentrating on the narratives written out of history, her novels project a modern, middle-class, British, feminine viewpoint back into the past. As her rational, sociable heroines encounter her villains (representatives of oppressive, foreign and outdated feudal and religious power) in variations of old romance plots, they thus enact cultural and historical clashes. This is a new version of Walpole’s original formulation: the values of novel and romance intertwine as Radcliffe stages conflicts between old and new systems. Jerrold E. Hogle has recently explored such use of the Walpolean Gothic, with its ‘ungrounded mixture of openly incompatible beliefs and styles’, in The Italian (1797) (Hogle 2014: 167). Hogle points to a persistent tug of war between past and present, ‘the unresolved tension between regressive and progressive ideologies . . . the pulling between different attitudes and longings’ (Hogle 2014: 155). Radcliffe, in other words, uses the potential of Gothic romance to explore the idea of historical transition. In doing so, she, like Reeve, emphasises the importance of feminine influence to concepts of historical progress. Other Radcliffean territory is also familiar from earlier debates. Walpole’s innovative reintroduction of the supernatural did not bring it within accepted bounds of probability, despite the historicising justification for its use. The critics’ responses and Reeve’s reformulation of the ‘blend [of] the two kinds of romance’ demonstrate that Walpole’s work was judged by contemporaries to have retained much of romance’s impropriety. Reeve’s rather underwhelming, prosaic ghost, however, sacrificed much of the excitement of the genre. Radcliffe’s response to this dilemma – which was especially problematic for a woman writer – was to pioneer the phenomenon of the ‘explained supernatural’. This became characteristic of her version of Gothic and the source of some of her fiction’s iconic moments. It offered the tempting pleasures of imagination and terror, but then tempered them with rationalisation and moralising. At its best, the explained supernatural could offer a commentary on each approach. The success of Radcliffe’s vision is, of course, evident from the enormous impact that her writing had during the 1790s, but it can

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 68

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Gothic Romance

69

also be seen in her realisation of a familiar goal. Radcliffe’s volume and chapter epigraphs are the most obvious examples of her novels’ constant appeals to Shakespeare. They are evidence of her staking her place in the same national tradition that Hurd had traced in 1762 and Walpole had appealed to in Otranto. With Radcliffe, however, her contemporaries took the bait, describing the novelist not just as a modern ‘enchantress’, harking back to the ‘faery realms’ of romance, but as the real originator of the new genre, the one who imbued it with ‘the spirit of fiction or the air of tradition’ – and finally, crowning her the ‘Shakspeare [sic] of Romance writers’ (De Quincey 1897: 3.282; Hazlitt 1907: 165; Drake 1798: 249). The most famous commentary on Radcliffe’s Gothic, however, was less flattering, if not entirely unaffectionate: Jane Austen’s satirical portrait of the ‘horrid novel’ craze in Northanger Abbey (1818). Here, Radcliffean Gothic is implicated in fostering a dangerous lack of historical awareness. The avid reader Catherine Morland starts to see contemporary England through a Radcliffean lens – and on the surface this is a misreading that leaves her open to Henry Tilney’s rebuke: ‘Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians . . . Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them?’ (Austen 1995: 186). This is the rational novel’s challenge to romance, but in fact the maligned form already had a response. For writers of ‘Jacobin Gothic’ – William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, for example – romance nightmares were rooted in ‘remembering the country and the age’. Both Godwin’s Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) and Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria (1798) use a new formulation of the mixture of fantasy and realism. These radical novels were written in direct response to the political tumult of the decade following the French Revolution. For them, an accurate portrayal of the nation’s injustices far surpasses the worst imaginings of villainy and horror in romance: Abodes of horror have frequently been described, and castles, filled with spectres and chimeras, conjured up by the magic spell of genius to harrow the soul . . . But, formed of such stuff as dreams are made of, what were they to the mansion of despair, in which Maria sat . . .? (Wollstonecraft 2007: 69)

While the tyranny of class and gender is real, however, romance’s heroes are not. The very idea of heroism is shown as a comforting fiction; relying on patriarchal ideas of chivalry, it ultimately serves to shore up the lingering oppression of feudal systems. Thus, figures

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 69

22/09/15 10:22 AM

70

Deborah Russell

who initially seem like saviours inevitably disappoint. After spending the first volume of the novel in the position of the romance hero, for example, Godwin’s Falkland becomes an obsessive, vengeful persecutor – and is clearly influenced by having ‘imbibed the love of chivalry and romance’ in his youth (Godwin 1998: 10). Despite their profound reworking of the conventions of romance, however, these radical novelists continue to make use of earlier debates about the form. Walpole’s innovation – the opening up of the relationship between the plausible and the fantastic – makes their vision possible. Hurd’s understanding of the connections between romance and feudalism is in play, as is Reeve’s sense of the social agency of fiction and Lee’s understanding of how dominant narratives marginalise the powerless. The enormously popular images of Radcliffean Gothic were at once something to draw on and to define themselves against. Most of all, though, Wollstonecraft and Godwin retain an idea common to all these writers: that such fiction matters because romance allows history to be seen anew. As Godwin put it, ‘The writer of romance is to be considered as the writer of real history’ (Godwin 2000: 264).

References Anonymous (1765a), Rev. of The Castle of Otranto, The Critical Review; or, Annals of Literature, 19 (January 1765): 50–1. Anonymous (1765b), Rev. of The Castle of Otranto, The Monthly Review; or, Literary Journal: By Several Hands, 32 (February 1765): 97–9. Anonymous (1765c), ‘Article 17’, Rev. of 2nd edn of The Castle of Otranto, The Monthly Review; or, Literary Journal: By Several Hands, 32 (May 1765): 394. Austen, Jane [1817/18] (1995), Northanger Abbey, ed. Marilyn Butler, London: Penguin. Beattie, James (1783), ‘On Fable and Romance’, in Dissertations Moral and Critical, London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, pp. 505–74. Blair, Hugh [1762] (1970), ‘On Fictitious History, from Lectures on Rhetoric and Poetry’, in Ioan Williams (ed.), Novel and Romance 1700–1800: A Documentary Record, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 247–51. Botting, Fred (1996), Gothic, London: Routledge. Chaplin, Sue (2007), The Gothic and the Rule of Law, 1764–1820, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Clery, E. J. (2002), ‘The Genesis of Gothic Fiction’, in Jerrold E. Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 21–40.

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 70

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Gothic Romance

71

Congreve, William [1691] (1970), ‘Preface to Incognita’, in Ioan Williams (ed.), Novel and Romance 1700–1800: A Documentary Record, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 27–8. Croxall, Samuel [1720] (1970), ‘Preface to A Select Collection of Novels’, in Ioan Williams (ed.), Novel and Romance 1700–1800: A Documentary Record, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 71–2. Defoe, Daniel [1719] (2007), Robinson Crusoe, ed. and intro. Thomas Keymer, notes by Thomas Keymer and James Kelly, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dennis, John [1712] (1970), ‘From the Essay on the Genius and Writings of Shakespeare’, in Ioan Williams (ed.), Novel and Romance 1700–1800: A Documentary Record, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 40–1. De Quincey, Thomas (1897), The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, Volume III, ed. David Masson, London: A & C Black. Drake, Nathan (1798), Literary Hours; or, Sketches Critical and Narrative, London: T. Cadell and W. Davies. Duncan, Ian (1992), Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Godwin, William [1794] (1998), Caleb Williams, ed. David McCracken, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Godwin, William [1797] (2000), ‘On History and Romance’, in E. J. Clery and Robert Miles (eds), Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook 1700–1820, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 260–4. Guest, Harriet (1992), ‘The Wanton Muse: Politics and Gender in Gothic Theory After 1760’, in Stephen Copley and John C. Whale (eds), Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts 1780–1832, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 118–39. Hazlitt, William [1818] (1907), Lectures on the English Comic Writers, London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press. Hogle, Jerrold E. (2014), ‘Recovering the Walpolean Gothic: The Italian, or the Confession of the Black Penitents (1796–1797)’, in Dale Townshend and Angela Wright (eds), Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 151–67. Hurd, Richard (1762), Letters on Chivalry and Romance, London: A. Millar. Johnson, Samuel [1750] (1970), ‘Rambler, 4, Saturday, March 31, 1750’, in Ioan Williams (ed.), Novel and Romance 1700–1800: A Documentary Record, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 142–6. Kelly, Gary (ed.) (1999), Bluestocking Feminism: Writings of the Bluestocking Circle, 1738–1785, 6 vols, London: Pickering & Chatto. Kelly, Gary (2010), ‘Reeve, Clara (1729–1807)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (last accessed 18 August 2014). Ledoux, Ellen Malenas (2013), Social Reform in Gothic Writing: Fantastic Forms of Change, 1764–1834, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 71

22/09/15 10:22 AM

72

Deborah Russell

Lewis, W. S. (ed.) (1937–83), The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 48 vols, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Mathias, Thomas James [1794–7] (1798), The Pursuits of Literature: A Satirical Poem in Four Dialogues, 7th edn, London: T. Becket. Mayer, Robert (1997), History and the Early English Novel: Matters of Fact from Bacon to Defoe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maxwell, Richard (2002), ‘Phantom States: Cleveland, The Recess, and the Origins of Historical Fiction’, in Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever (eds), The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel, Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 151–82. Punter, David (1996), The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day, 2 vols, London: Longman. Reeve, Clara (1785), The Progress of Romance, through Times, Countries, and Manners, 2 vols, Colchester: W. Keymer and London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson. Reeve, Clara [1777/8] (2003), The Old English Baron, ed. James Trainer, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Walpole, Horace (1798), The Works of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford, 5 vols, London: G. G. and J. Robinson. Walpole, Horace (1845), Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Third, ed. Denis le Marchant, 2 vols, Philadelphia, PA: Lea and Blanchard. Walpole, Horace [1764/5] (2008), The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story, ed. W. S. Lewis, intro. and notes by E. J. Clery, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wright, Angela (2013), Britain, France and the Gothic, 1764–1820: The Import of Terror, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wollstonecraft, Mary [1798] (2007), ‘Mary’ and ‘The Wrongs of Woman’, ed. Gary Kelly, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 72

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Chapter 4

The Gothic Stage: Visions of Instability, Performances of Anxiety Diego Saglia

A relatively uncomplicated definition of ‘Gothic drama’ would describe it as the counterpart of Gothic romance, one in which the plots, themes and other appurtenances of the latter are transferred to the stage or, at least, into a dramatic text. Romantic-period commentators themselves recognised that drama appropriated the features made popular by contemporary Gothic fiction, translating them into a visual, multimedia and three-dimensional artefact. In his scathing attack on Charles Robert Maturin’s Bertram (1816), Samuel Taylor Coleridge associated stage Gothic with hackneyed elements, including ‘ruined castles’, ‘dungeons’, ‘trap-doors’, ‘skeletons’, and ‘flesh-andblood ghosts’ (Coleridge 1983: II:211). As the last item in this list suggests, stage versions of Gothic gave visual and material immediacy to the imaginings of fictional texts. Accordingly, in his foundational study of 1947, Bertrand Evans defined Gothic drama as being distinguished by ‘specialized settings, machinery, character types, themes, plots, and techniques selected and combined to serve a primary purpose of exploiting mystery, gloom, and terror’ (Evans 1947: 5). Several plays performed and/or published between the 1760s and the 1820s conform to these features, and serve to delineate a potential canon of Gothic drama. The conventional starting point is Horace Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother (1768, 1781, 1791), though with John Home’s Douglas (1756) and Hall Hartson’s The Countess of Salisbury (1765) as forerunners. In the 1770s and 1780s Gothic features evidently emerged in Robert Jephson’s adaptation of Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) as The Count of Narbonne (Covent Garden, 17 November 1781), but also in historical plays such as Hannah More’s Percy (Covent Garden, 10 December 1777); Hannah Cowley’s Albina (Haymarket, 31 July 1779); and Andrew

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 73

22/09/15 10:22 AM

74

Diego Saglia

Macdonald’s Vimonda (Haymarket, 5 September 1787); plays inspired by classical antiquity such as Arthur Murphy’s The Grecian Daughter (Drury Lane, 26 February 1772); operatic comedies like John O’Keeffe’s The Castle of Andalusia (Covent Garden, 2 November 1782) and James Cobb’s The Haunted Tower (Drury Lane, 24 November 1789); or pantomimes such as Miles Peter Andrews’s The Enchanted Castle (Covent Garden, 26 December 1786). The 1790s saw a burgeoning of frisson-inducing drama thanks to popular adaptations of the fiction of Ann Radcliffe, William Godwin and Matthew Gregory Lewis (such as James Boaden’s Fontainville Forest, Covent Garden, 25 March 1794; George Colman’s The Iron Chest, Drury Lane, 12 March 1796; and Boaden’s Aurelio and Miranda, Drury Lane, 29 December 1798); and the astounding success of Lewis’s The Castle Spectre (Drury Lane, 14 December 1797), which remained in the repertoire well into the nineteenth century. Joanna Baillie’s Gothic-inflected tragedy on hate, De Monfort, appeared in her 1798 volume of Plays on the Passions and was staged at Drury Lane on 29 April 1800, with John Philip Kemble and Sarah Siddons in the lead roles. In the early 1800s Lewis continued indefatigably to produce Gothic entertainments that proved much more popular than gothicised tragedies such as William Godwin’s Antonio (Drury Lane, 13 December 1800) or William Sotheby’s Julian and Agnes (Drury Lane, 25 April 1801). By contrast, in the mid 1810s, legitimate serious theatre scored some notable successes with Coleridge’s Remorse (Drury Lane, 23 January 1813), Maturin’s Bertram (Drury Lane, 9 May 1816), and Richard Lalor Sheil’s The Apostate (Covent Garden, 3 May 1817) and Evadne (Covent Garden, 10 February 1819), all of which import and rework Gothic conventions. By the 1820s, then, it was second-generation Romantic poets who produced Gothic-inflected tragedies that, however, mostly remained unperformed, as with Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819, 1821) and Lord Byron’s The Two Foscari (1821). Structured through a recognisable rise-and-fall curve, this and other similar accounts of the Gothic on stage take us more or less neatly up to the conventional cut-off date for Romantic-era Gothic fiction. This fundamentally reassuring narrative features a roster of familiar names and a few of those turning points that are typical of literary and cultural histories. In addition, it can be read historically both in terms of precedents (Gothic dramas drew upon Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, Restoration and eighteenth-century ‘she-tragedies’ and bourgeois drama) and events ranging from the American War of Independence and Reformist clamouring in 1780s Britain, to the

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 74

22/09/15 10:22 AM

The Gothic Stage

75

French Revolution, Napoleon’s triumph and downfall, and revolutionary reverberations in the Napoleonic aftermath. This narrative pattern underlies not only Evans’s pioneering account, but also Paul Ranger’s more recent study of the staging practices and acting style of Gothic drama, which starts by echoing Evans’s definition (Ranger 1991: 17). Yet, if the findings of Evans and Ranger are still useful, their interpretative approaches are somewhat fraught with complications. Most visibly, Evans seeks to identify the ‘true origins’ of Gothic drama while constantly sifting mere ‘subliterary concoctions’ from valuable ‘literary compositions’ (Evans 1947: 162, 228). In this light, the customary invocation of Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother as the fountainhead of Gothic drama with high literary aspirations is in itself problematic, since the play was initially printed only for private circulation in 1768, then again in 1781 to forestall a possible pirated edition, and did not actually exist in the public imagination until Walpole’s posthumous Collected Works of 1798. Moreover, as their final lists of titles point out, both studies aim at tracing a teleological narrative that seems to reach its point of conclusion around the 1820s, thus sidelining, among other things, the increasing relevance of melodrama as a vehicle for Gothic in the theatre from the 1820s to the 1830s and beyond. It follows that, even though studies such as those by Evans and Ranger successfully traced the contours of Gothic drama and constituted it as an object of academic study, they also, by the same token, unintentionally contributed to the restriction of its scope, circumscribing its relevance, and relegating it to a marginal position within Romantic-period culture. Another way of approaching Gothic drama – and one that counteracts received notions of it as an anaemic version of Gothic fiction or a sub-literary version of ‘popular’ Romanticism – is to see it as part of a broader Gothic aesthetic, as well as in light of recent work on Romantic-period theatre as a cultural practice grounded in conflicts between theatrical legitimacy and illegitimacy, popular and elite entertainment, ‘closet’ and staged texts, and metropolitan and provincial cultural spheres. Jeffrey Cox, Paula Backscheider and Michael Gamer, among others, have provided groundbreaking contributions in this direction. In the introduction to Seven Gothic Dramas (1992), Cox defines this phenomenon as a response to ‘new and redesigned theatrical spaces’, the ‘perceived crisis in the hierarchy of dramatic forms . . . [which] no longer seemed to command large audiences’, and the ‘ideological struggles’ of the period between 1789 and 1825 (Cox 1992: 8). And while Backscheider (1993) draws attention to

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 75

22/09/15 10:22 AM

76

Diego Saglia

the arresting ideological power of Gothic drama as an expression of early mass culture, Gamer’s analyses of the generic status of drama in Romanticism and the Gothic (2000) open up new insights into its controversial thematic and ideological features, thus re-evaluating its centrality to Romantic-period critical and cultural debates. As a result, the term ‘Gothic drama’ itself appears to be inadequate, since it implies a certain relation of mere affiliation and a position of subservience to legitimate, spoken forms of drama. In contrast, such tags as ‘the Gothic stage’ or ‘Gothic on stage’ lend themselves as useful terms in conceptualising Gothic in the Romantic-period theatre differently, that is, as more than a canon of playtexts. Indeed, the closer one inspects the innumerable theatrical manifestations of Gothic in this period, the more they reveal not so much a neatly circumscribed genre, but rather an adaptable lexicon of themes, motifs, forms and practices that surface across a broad range of texts and spectacles. Here, the change in focus from earlier approaches is unmistakable, in that we move from a chronology of works centred on legitimate forms to a sense of a recyclable language, the resilience and persistence of which testifies to its continued fascination and significance. Consequently, the Gothic stage poses a series of interpretative challenges that includes identifying its peculiarity in its distinctly performative language; examining its links with spectacularity, theatricality, and visual culture more generally; and exploring its particular ways of throwing into relief and problematising the cultural, political and ideological concerns besetting the public sphere between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Contemporary critics and reviewers observed and assessed the novelty of this type of theatre, especially its unorthodox formal traits and potential for pleasing audiences. In a well-known letter of January 1798, Coleridge wrote to William Wordsworth about The Castle Spectre, calling it an instance of ‘Schiller Lewis-ized’ that was marred by ‘a flat, flabby, unimaginative Bombast oddly sprinkled with colloquialisms’; at the same time, he did not hesitate to point out that its ‘merit . . . consists wholly in it’s [sic] situations. These are all borrowed, and all absolutely pantomimical; but they are admirably managed for stage effect’ (qtd in Gamer 1999: 104–5). Moreover, even as they attended to its textual and performative features, commentators monitored the problematic import of Gothic on stage, for, much more than fiction, theatre was a collective activity involving large numbers of people, seen as a barometer of the nation’s intellectual and moral health, and, as in the Old Price riots at Covent Garden in 1809, often associated with popular unrest. Explicitly or implicitly, these concerns prompted many anxious

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 76

22/09/15 10:22 AM

The Gothic Stage

77

reactions. In the Monthly Mirror for September 1800, for instance, the pseudonymous ‘Academicus’ rhetorically enquired: Are we to have prodigies and monstrous omens, horrid shapes, and the fruits of brooding darkness forced on us at a place to which we resort to be instructed and amused? . . . Cannot sober melancholy be pourtrayed [sic] without the aid of turrets and gloomy Gothic corridors haunted by ghosts? (Norton 2000: 204)

Though this commentator emphasises certain thematic and ornamental features, his Horatian reference to theatre as a place of amusement and instruction also alerts us to the perceived threats, the deeply political and ideological implications of the Gothic stage. Its contentious relevance lies in its (alternately overt or allusive) mise en scène of central concerns in Britain’s cultural and political debates. Through heightened dialogue, striking props and decor, machinery, lighting effects, costumes and the actors’ bodies, the Gothic stage created sensational and stirring multimedia representations that were more often than not displaced, three-dimensional versions of the ‘here and now’ of contemporary Britain. In a double gesture that is typical of the Gothic, it interrogated current sociocultural, moral and political assumptions, yet also worked to sanction and reinforce them. In the process, it set forth the instabilities within Romanticperiod aesthetics, social norms and political practice. Crucially, these problematic aspects continue to haunt our critical understanding and constructions of stage Gothic – a major product of Romantic-period culture, which, because of its highly contradictory and elusive nature, constitutes a rich intersection of textual-performative elements and ideological-political themes whose challenging and troubling potential remains intact.

Questions of Genre The origins of the eighteenth-century Gothic stage were closely related to tragedy, the most prestigious genre in classical and neoclassical poetics. Subtitled ‘A Tragedy’, Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother was divided into five acts, featured unity of time and place, and centred on the double incest between a knowing mother and her son and the latter and his sister, and the subsequent madness and Roman-style suicide of the guilty mother. The play has both Shakespearean and classical affiliations – incest links the Countess of Narbonne to figures of

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 77

22/09/15 10:22 AM

78

Diego Saglia

classical tragedy such as Jocasta and Phaedra – while, as in Otranto, Shakespearean tragedy (especially King Lear and Macbeth) offers an authoritative modern precedent, together with Restoration tragedies by Otway, Rowe and Dryden. As with Otranto, therefore, Walpole invokes tradition only to undo and redo it, so that, in his words, ‘the cast of the whole play [is] unlike that of any other that I am acquainted with’ (Baines and Burns 2000: 67). In the eighteenth-century literary system, genre was a formal and structural mould and a means of cultural authorisation that also doubled as a mechanism enabling the transformation and supersession of existing forms. Dramatic genres were both normative categories and sites of negotiation where a culture’s acts of self-reflection and redefinition were played out. The Gothic stage followed this dual logic. It both endorsed canonical forms such as tragedy and subverted hierarchies by dissolving and reconfiguring existing models, usually by mixing high and low forms or adapting from other genres. Instigating hybridity through its characteristic cross-fertilisation of modes and types, stage Gothic undermined conventions – both literary and theatrical – and forced their redefinition, as well as that of the epistemological principles and ideological frameworks they encapsulated. Tellingly, in Walpole’s play the decorum and restraint of neoclassical tragedy give way to a hyperbolic manifestation of feelings that anticipates the tendency to ‘express all’ and the ‘refusal of nuance’ of the melodramatic aesthetic (Brooks 1995: 4, 40). As Gothic began to proliferate on stage, texts presented increasingly mixed structures. Subtitled ‘A drama’, yet divided into the five acts of tragedy, Lewis’s The Castle Spectre was a bricolage of modes that both confused and irritated early commentators (Ranger 1991: 1). It mingled comedy, tragedy, farce and pantomime (the latter in the ghost’s appearance, Act IV, scene ii), while music and songs linked it to opera, the musical play and the melodrama (even though it only featured limited incidental music). If contemporary critics found it hard to assign Lewis’s play to any one genre, it still defies attempts to define it today, as critics variously discuss it under the headings of Gothic drama or melodrama (Booth 1965: 52) – the latter category designating illegitimate spectacles combining spoken drama, music, pantomime and special effects, and generally endorsing a reactionary ideological outlook (Cox 2007: 163). The ideological import of stage Gothic’s generic misrule is visible in the reception of Thomas Holcroft’s A Tale of Mystery (Covent Garden, 13 November 1802). A translation/adaptation of Guilbert

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 78

22/09/15 10:22 AM

The Gothic Stage

79

de Pixerécourt’s Coelina, ou l’enfant du mystère (1800), this patently Gothic work was the first play to be explicitly named and described as a ‘melodrama’ in Britain, and was staged, significantly, during the lull in Anglo-French hostilities decreed by the Peace of Amiens (March 1802 to May 1803). Its earliest reviewers focused on its unusual formal aspects, especially its combination of playtext, pantomime and expressive musical accompaniment, that is, ‘all the requisites which are essential to fascinate the public’ (‘The Drama’ 1802: 274). And yet, as melodramas started to flood theatres in London and the provinces, commentators turned to denouncing their mongrelised and deformed nature, starting from that of Holcroft’s Franco-British hybrid. Usually appearing in French garb, the name of the genre came to designate non-descripts, which were ‘neither completely tragical, nor comical, nor burlesque, but rather a species of confused melo-drame’ (‘The Drama’ 1805: 546). Melodrama with Gothic inflections flourished uncontrollably, scoring remarkable successes with Thomas Kenney’s Ella Rosenberg (Drury Lane, 19 November 1807), William Dimond’s The Foundling of the Forest (Haymarket, 10 July 1809), Lewis’s Timour the Tartar (Covent Garden, 29 April 1811) or Isaac Pocock’s The Miller and His Men (Covent Garden, 21 October 1813). In addition, Gothic features, which had been appearing in tragedies since at least the mid eighteenth century, continued to re-emerge in ‘romantic tragic drama’ – Baillie’s De Monfort, Coleridge’s Remorse and Maturin’s Bertram – which sought to reinvigorate what was still the most prestigious stage genre and thus contribute to reforming the national theatre (Cox 2007: 163). Gothic also permeated less successful tragic attempts such as Godwin’s Antonio or Mary Russell Mitford’s Julian (Covent Garden, 15 March 1823). Even a neo-Roman text like James Sheridan Knowles’s Virginius (Covent Garden, 17 May 1820) featured Gothic traits, especially in the depiction of the patrician Appius’ sexual preying on the hero’s daughter, Virginia, which acts as a catalyst for the plebeians’ revolt led by the aggrieved father. Furthermore, the experimental plays by major Romantic figures such as Byron, Shelley, John Keats and Walter Scott presented Gothic inflections in variable degrees. Though Evans originally included this output under the heading of a ‘Gothic survival in literary drama’ (Evans 1947: 216–38), they are best envisaged as additional episodes of cross-fertilisation between literary notions of drama and spectacular practices within an uninterrupted process of regeneration of stage Gothic. Seen as a whole, the period from the 1800s to the 1820s constituted a volatile theatrical milieu, in which Gothic melodrama

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 79

22/09/15 10:22 AM

80

Diego Saglia

expanded uncontrollably alongside the gradual emergence of the melo-drame as the most popular serious stage genre and ‘a dominant dramatic form’ (Buckley 2014: 472); tragedy, with its pervasively Gothic features, lost ground, and the Gothic aesthetic surfaced in a host of spectacular forms including ballet, opera, pantomime, harlequinade, extravaganza and burletta. Indeed, although we commonly associate Gothic with tragedy, its presence in comic spectacle of all kinds was widespread. This took a variety of shapes – from comic lower-class characters in predominantly serious plays (as in The Castle Spectre) to burlesques (such as Bonifacio and Bridgetina, Covent Garden, 31 March 1808, composed by a major purveyor of Gothic entertainment such as Thomas John Dibdin) and parodies like those of Mozart’s Don Giovanni (a sensation on the London stage between 1817 and 1819), from Dibdin’s Don Giovanni; or, A Spectre on Horseback! (Royal Circus, 26 May 1817) to James Robinson Planché’s Giovanni the Vampire (Adelphi, 15 January 1821). Intended for quick consumption, filled with topical references and often never printed, these entertainments capitalised on the public’s insatiable demand for terror and horror, while also employing laughter as a way of exorcising fear. What this heterogeneous corpus emphasises is, particularly, the ingrained and distinctive tendency of stage Gothic to parody itself and, at the same time, to carnivalise reality by setting in train a series of reversals and subversions of prevailing norms and principles. In The Castle Spectre, the lower characters, the servants Motley and Alice, and Father Philip, translate the sophisticated fears and high-flown passions of the main characters into the realms of the instinctual and the physiological. Their dread is expressed through the ridiculously exaggerated tremors of bodies that are often racked with hunger and thirst for alcohol. In Act I, scene i, Father Philip and Motley squabble over a ‘goose-pye’ (which the servant has eaten before the gluttonous friar could get to it) and the fact that Motley ‘keep[s] kissing and smuggling all the pretty girls’ (Cox 1992: 153). In the same vein, the servant Pietro in William Robert Spencer’s Urania; or the Illuminé (Drury Lane, 22 January 1802) sings: ‘My master may boast / All the charms of a Ghost, / And court supernatural merits; / But still to my mind / In a bottle I find / The best and the choicest of Spirits’ (Spencer 1802: 4). Repeatedly, servants and lower-class figures bring highly strung emotions down to the level of ordinary, and thus laughable, physical symptoms, as is the case with Martin, in Henry Siddons’s The Sicilian Romance (Covent Garden, 28 May 1794), who breaks into a stammer at the thought of an

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 80

22/09/15 10:22 AM

The Gothic Stage

81

apparition (‘An ap–ap–pa’; 1794: 11); or Fritz, in Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein (English Opera House, 28 July 1823), who, at the sight of the creature (‘[a] hobgoblin, [and] 20 feet high!’) feels as if he had ‘just come out of strong fits, and nobody to throw water in [his] face’ (Cox 1992, pp. 398–9). On other occasions, comic routines function as carnivalesque devices at the expense of the protagonists or figures of authority more widely. In Miles Peter Andrews’s The Mysteries of the Castle (Covent Garden, 31 January 1795) both the servant Valoury and the prankster Hilario subject the cantankerous Fractioso, originally played by the short and shrill John Quick, to particularly entertaining turns in Act I, scene ii (where Valoury outwits and slaps him) and in Act III, scene i (in which Hilario gets rid of the interfering old man by locking him into a sentry box). On the one hand, the comedic and farcical inflections of stage Gothic highlighted the pivotal role of the body in conjuring up and staging terror and horror. As Backscheider aptly remarks, ‘Horror depends’, among other things, ‘on a fear of violation, usually an invasion of the body’ (Backscheider 1993: 228). On the other hand, they brought about a temporary suspension of fear insofar as they ridiculed human agents of evil or curbed the power of supernatural apparitions. Moreover, the combination of comic and serious elements on the Gothic stage was related to the structure of a theatrical evening at the turn of the nineteenth century, which customarily comprised a succession of entertainments – generally a mainpiece, an interlude, and an afterpiece – with variable tones. The polyphony or cacophony of genres and forms in this type of theatre were in keeping with a broader context in which demarcations and taxonomies were breaking down, and the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate forms becoming increasingly blurred.

Foreign Frissons Though related to homegrown trends in fiction and architecture, stage Gothic was repeatedly accused of being an alien intrusion transplanted into British playhouses from abroad. From the Restoration onwards, theatre had been especially open to foreign influences, and, by the late eighteenth century, there was nothing new about translated, adapted or imitated foreign dramatic texts or hostility to foreign works, genres and performers. Yet, in the case of stage Gothic, the influx of foreign materials was seen as a contamination of a much more infectious kind.

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 81

22/09/15 10:22 AM

82

Diego Saglia

Vehement denouncements in this vein were legion, as the 1790s fashion for German playwrights, whose output shared several traits with the Gothic aesthetic, prompted reviewers to decry ‘an actual conspiracy against British genius’ caused ‘by contracting with foreign scribblers for manuscript plays’ and ‘the irruption of northern barbarians’ and ‘foreign invaders’ (Gamer 2000: 128–9). Largely unknown before the craze for August von Kotzebue’s works in the late 1780s and 1790s, German drama was given an appreciative reception by Henry Mackenzie in a groundbreaking lecture delivered to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1788 and published as ‘Account of the German Theatre’ in 1790. Moreover, in ideological terms, early Germanic civilisations were seen, though not uncontroversially, as the sources of the tradition of Gothic or Saxon liberties of England, its parliamentary institutions and historical identity, in opposition to the later introduction of Norman feudal and absolutist customs (Watt 1999: 51–5, 77–8). Yet, as German writings became more widely known, hostile perceptions emerged about German culture as one obsessed with violent passions (especially in fiction and drama), the macabre (exemplified by Gottfried August Bürger’s gruesome ballad ‘Lenore’ of 1773) and philosophical abstraction leading to immorality, atheism and disregard for established social norms. Germany itself was often imagined as a retrograde country where petty rulers and aristocrats held unchallenged sway over the populace. German theatre was consequently charged with condensing these undesirable cultural traits and disseminating them in Britain at a time when, due to events in revolutionary France, ideas from the Continent were already perceived as a threat to national stability and security. It was not coincidental that, in the heyday of Gothic drama, Edmund Burke in ‘Thoughts on French Affairs’ (1791) stressed the link between Germany and French revolutionary developments, as did the London-based émigré Abbé Augustin de Barruel in Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (1799). In his extensive and influential treatise, Barruel indicated the Bavarian ‘Illuminati’ as the promoters of a European conspiracy, of which the French Jacobins were the most zealous acolytes, to overthrow secular and religious institutions on the Continent (Watt 1999: 76). Secret societies in German settings aimed at subverting established order appeared time and again in Gothic drama, as in the representation of the late-medieval Vehmgericht system in James Boaden’s The Secret Tribunal (Covent Garden, 3 June 1795), a play adapted from Benedikte Naubert’s novel Hermann von Unna (1788).

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 82

22/09/15 10:22 AM

The Gothic Stage

83

Sturm und Drang drama, and, most controversially, Friedrich Schiller’s Die Räuber (The Robbers, 1781), offered further evidence of the subversive threat of German theatre. In her Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799), Hannah More voiced her concern that this play, ‘which inflamed the young nobility of Germany’ to ‘inlist [sic] themselves into a band of highwaymen’, would soon be staged in Britain ‘by persons of quality!’; More then went on to denounce the fashion for German literature as a means for disaffected authors to continue spreading the atheism and libertinism associated with proscribed French works (More 1799: I.38, 40). Such anxieties were exacerbated by the success of Kotzebue’s works, whose disturbing plots full of unbridled passions fascinated audiences and antagonised critics, starting with The Stranger (Drury Lane, 24 March 1798), which detractors accused of unacceptable leniency towards the scandalous topic of adultery. Anxieties about German drama merged with apprehensions about national Gothic drama, often seen as directly derived from German sources or pervaded by Teutonic influences. The Monthly Mirror noted disapprovingly that ‘Mr Lewis’s intimacy with German literature is strongly proclaimed, through the whole Castle Spectre’, several features of which are ‘all German’ and therefore unnaturally not national (qtd in Gamer 2000: 78). In a similar vein, The British Review in 1816 found Maturin’s Bertram brimming with ‘Rotten principles and a bastard sort of sentiment . . . as have been imported into this country from German moralists and poets’ (qtd in Ranger 1991: 16). In actual fact, a remarkable quantity of Gothic drama was either a direct adaptation of German originals or presented German plots, characters and atmospheres. Examples of adapted works were Boaden’s Secret Tribunal, Lewis’s banditti melodrama Rugantino; or, The Bravo of Venice (Covent Garden, 18 October 1805) from Heinrich Zschokke’s Abällino, 1794, or The Freyschütz; or, The Wild Huntsman of Bohemia (1824) by Barham Livius, James Robinson Planché and Washington Irving (from Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Der Freischütz, 1821). Germanised plays, many of which bore traces of Kotzebue’s enduring influence, included Walter Scott’s House of Aspen (written in 1799, not performed), which he later dubbed his ‘Germanized brat’ (qtd in Gamer 2000: 148); Baillie’s De Monfort; Kenney’s Ella Rosenberg; John Tobin’s The Curfew (Drury Lane, 19 February 1807); Pocock’s Miller and His Men; and Peake’s Presumption (Thompson 1928: 86–91). The problems posed by this German and Germanised Gothic on stage lay in the uncanny status of that country’s culture and theatre.

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 83

22/09/15 10:22 AM

84

Diego Saglia

They were familiar in view of the ‘Gothic’ roots England shared with Germany and, more specifically, because recent and contemporary developments in German drama, from Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s reform onwards, were seen as being heavily indebted to Shakespeare. But German culture was also associated with excess, immorality and abstraction, in contrast to English restraint, pragmatism and solid ethical values. It was this oscillation between self-recognition and rejection that pervaded Coleridge’s denunciation, in Biographia Literaria, of what we now call Gothic drama as ‘German drama’, which was actually ‘English’ drama in disguise, being cobbled together from mediocre English materials (Cox 2001: 107). The drama of Germany, however, was only one side of the foreign or ‘foreignised’ theatrical threat of Gothic. France, of which Germany was seen as an ideological adjunct, was another source of dramatic and spectacular dangers of a Gothic cast. Early optical shows, related to Gothic visuality, came to London from Paris, such as the phantasmagoria inaugurated in the French capital by Paul de Philipstal or ‘Philidor’ in 1792–3 and Etienne Gaspard Robertson, also in Paris, in 1797, and then first shown in London in late 1801 or early 1802 (Altick 1978: 217). More importantly, innumerable Gothic plays came from France, including some of the most popular and enduring in Romantic-period theatre in Britain. Apart from Holcroft’s already mentioned A Tale of Mystery, other titles include James Cobb’s The Haunted Tower from the Marquis de Sade’s La Tour enchantée (1788), which ran for eighty-four nights in its first two seasons and was the most successful ‘opera’ staged at Drury Lane over the entire century (Backscheider 1993: 153); John Philip Kemble’s Lodoiska (Drury Lane, 9 June 1794), based on ClaudeFrançois Fillette-Loraux’s and J. E. B. Dejaure’s competing plays, both staged in Paris in 1791; George Colman’s Blue-Beard (Drury Lane, 16 January 1798), adapted from Michel Jean Sedaine’s and André Grétry’s Raoul Barbe-Bleue (1789); Lewis’s Venoni; or, The Novice of St Mark’s (Drury Lane, 1 December 1808) from J. M. Boutet de Monvel’s Les Victimes cloîtrées (1791); Theodore Hook’s Tekeli; or, The Siege of Montgatz (Drury Lane, 24 November 1806) based on Pixerécourt’s Tikili (1803); and James Robinson Planché’s The Vampire; or, The Bride of the Isles (English Opera House, 9 August 1820) based on Charles Nodier’s Le Vampire (1820). The number of Gothic imports from France growing at an astonishing pace, these works were routinely denounced as ideologically suspect and morally corrupting, as betrayals of the national cause while the French military threat lasted. In 1808, Le Beau Monde

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 84

22/09/15 10:22 AM

The Gothic Stage

85

patriotically lamented that, while ‘our warriors shed their blood to keep our foes from our shores’, dramatists busied themselves with adapting French plays that ‘cannot be entirely purified from the Gallic opinions they contain’ and featuring coded expressions of veneration for Napoleon (‘Detector’ 1808: 219). After Waterloo, critics generally dismissed French plays as aesthetically and dramatically inferior, blaming managers and playwrights for inundating British theatres with ‘the trash produced at the innumerable Parisian theatres’ (‘Literary Review’ 1815: 205). Even as audiences increasingly demanded shocking entertainment from abroad, commentators tirelessly attacked stage Gothic from France and Germany as contaminating the national mores and mindset, as well as the integrity of the nation’s theatrical canon. In spite of such resistance, foreign or foreignised Gothic entertainment was popular and profitable, and became part of a repertoire that, throughout the Romantic period, emerged as a problematically uneven combination of vernacular and imported materials.

Political Ambivalences The Gothic playwright and theatrical biographer James Boaden defined the period between the 1790s and early 1800s as ‘the age of revolutions’ – a time when ‘[t]he most surprising events had occurred on the stage of real life, and the mimic world followed the course which seemed to strike down all reasonable expectations’ (Boaden 1831: 2, 345). In this, he echoed Coleridge, who, in his critique of Bertram, had stated that the German (‘Gothic’) drama should be more accurately called the ‘modern jacobinical drama’, since its distinctive ‘confusion and subversion of the natural order of things’ encapsulated, in displaced form, the ideological and political threats of revolutionary France (Coleridge 1983: II.221). As these observations indicate, even though censorship banned political issues from the theatre, they still resonated there through references aimed at audiences trained in the art of allusion and displacement. Circumventing official prohibitions, the Gothic aesthetic on stage offered commentary on contemporary ideological, social and political issues in ways which, once again, were far from univocal and inescapably contentious. As with fiction, stage Gothic portrayed perturbed sociopolitical milieus that easily lent themselves to allusive figuration. Plots revolving around pursuits, persecutions, tortures, conspiracies, incarceration

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 85

22/09/15 10:22 AM

86

Diego Saglia

and oppression, counterbalanced by acts of resistance and rebellion, were especially topical in light of the continued disturbances of a period roughly stretching from the Gordon Riots (1780) to Peterloo (1819) and the Captain Swing riots (1830). A case in point is Elizabeth Inchbald’s The Massacre (1791), a tragedy about religious persecution at an unspecified time and place in France (though the reference is to the St Bartholomew’s Day massacres of 1572). Adapted from LouisSébastien Mercier’s Jean Hennuyer, evêque de Lizieux (1772), the play could be read as representing contemporary France in refracted fashion (‘Horrid disasters have fallen upon the capital’; Boaden 1833: I.362); in 1792, as the Terror loomed over Paris, the Covent Garden managers to whom Inchbald had sent the manuscript deemed its allusiveness unequivocal and highly risky, and decided against submitting it to the Examiner of Plays. Much of the frightening potential of The Massacre derives from the slaughter of Protestants by the Catholic mob in Paris, its invisible violence described in detail by Eusèbe Tricastin’s report (the Seine ‘blushed with blood, and bore upon its bosom disfigured bodies, still warm with life’; Boaden 1833: I.365). This violence materialises in the plot when, in an allusion to the storming of the Bastille in July 1789, ‘the infection of the metropolis . . . spreads’ and ‘the populace’ force the gate and rush into the Tricastins’ house (Boaden 1833: I.365, 370). As a striking sign of politics on the Romantic stage, the mob recurs in Gothic plays, especially in the 1780s and 1790s, from Jephson’s The Count of Narbonne to Colman’s Blue-Beard and Boaden’s Aurelio and Miranda. An eminently ambivalent topos, it encodes rebellion against and the destruction of an unjust social and institutional order, while also conjuring up fears of chaos and misrule. A similar ambivalence also attaches to the embodiments of power and privilege offered by an endless series of Gothic stage despots. Figures such as Osmond in The Castle Spectre, Abomelique in Blue-Beard, or Ordonio in Remorse function as indictments of ancien régime notions of authority, class and hierarchy, while, later in the period, the titanically overreaching protagonist in Bertram could be read as a coded representation of Napoleon’s political and personal trajectory. At the same time, however, the satanic overtones of these figures could also fascinate viewers, transforming their reactions from condemnation of sociopolitical evil to empathy for a tormented individual (Cox 1992: 30–3). Race, gender and class provided further vehicles for charged political reference on the Gothic stage. In The Castle Spectre, for

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 86

22/09/15 10:22 AM

The Gothic Stage

87

instance, the figures of Muley and Hassan bring racial issues to bear on a wider-ranging attack against exploitation, enslavement and inequality. Victimised female characters acquire emblematic significance in the outputs of women playwrights (as in Cowley’s Albina or Joanna Baillie’s Orra, 1812; Franceschina 1997), yet also in a male-authored play such as Shelley’s powerfully disturbing Cenci. Questions of class, particularly in relation to working-class audiences and artisan radicalism, have been critically explored by David Worrall, who reads the ‘Gothic spectaculars of the 1820s’ as a political ‘response to plebeian culture’ and a reflex of popular political activism (Worrall 2000: 97). From the early 1800s to the 1820s and beyond, melodramas contributed to expanding further a gallery of stage oppressors whose evil threatens social hierarchies and is eventually foiled in accordance with the genre’s conservative ideology and providential outlook. In Clari; or, The Maid of Milan (Covent Garden, 8 May 1823), attributed to Planché and John Howard Payne, the duke seduces the heroine, taking her from her rural home, peasant family and social milieu, to which she dedicates the song ‘Home Sweet Home’ (Act I). In Planché’s Vampire, the bloodthirsty Lord Ruthven menaces the entire social fabric, from the family of Lord Ronald, the Baron of the Isles, to that of his own steward Andrew, and is finally defeated by a heroic commoner, the Englishman Robert. As Gothic melodramas also featured villains from a variety of lower social ranks – Romaldi in A Tale of Mystery, Grindoff in The Miller and His Men or Captain Crosstree in Douglas Jerrold’s Black-Eyed Susan (Surrey, 8 June 1829) – they invested audiences with a sense of sociopolitical evil that permeated society at all levels and endangered the familiar spheres of the domestic and the quotidian. Focusing on these thematic axes, Backscheider envisages Gothic drama as being fundamentally concerned with ‘signs of competing ideologies challenging the dominant order’ and functioning as a powerful ‘hegemonic apparatus’ aimed at containing subversive thought and action (Backscheider 1993: 157, 229). By contrast, stressing its links with epochal events such as the fall of the Bastille and Napoleon, Cox emphasises the political ambiguities of Gothic drama, ideological imperatives which, by alternately endorsing revolution and reaction, cannot be reduced to a ‘simple movement from past to liberated future’, but rather offer a ‘more deeply conflicted’ engagement with contemporary issues (Cox 1992: 23). The first major adaptation for the stage of a Radcliffe novel, The Romance of the Forest (1791), Boaden’s Fontainville Forest presents a particularly cogent instance of this mise en scène of the political.

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 87

22/09/15 10:22 AM

88

Diego Saglia

Reworking the troubled historical context in Radcliffe’s narrative, the play discredits the arbitrary power of the ancien régime aristocracy through the overbearing and corrupt Marquis of Montault. Yet, its prologue also explicitly celebrates loyalist and conservative principles by deploring the current situation of France, ‘Fall’n [. . .] beneath oppression’s flood’ with the disappearance of its ‘regal source of order’ after the assassination of Louis XVI in 1793 (Boaden 1794: n.p.). Another revealingly ambivalent treatment of authority is to be found in Holcroft’s A Tale of Mystery, where, differently from its French original, a group of unspecified and unattached ‘archers’ represent the force of law. This empty signifier of institutional power complicates further the play’s lack of resolution, since, as the curtain falls, it is unclear whether the villainous Romaldi will be punished or pardoned – an ambiguous finale producing an impression of ‘political obfuscation’ that renders ‘as vague as possible the state’s moral role in the punishment of individuals’ (Moody 2000: 90). As a distinctive feature of the Gothic aesthetic, this double-edged engagement with the nature, agency and effects of power takes specific shape on the Gothic stage by means of its multidimensional components, from venues and audience composition to discourse and non-verbal performance. Thus, for instance, stage Gothic treats issues of authority and control by translating them into its distinctive intersection of verbal and gestural codes. Lewis’s The Castle Spectre, for example, repeatedly questions power and ridicules hierarchical relations of ascendancy through carefully orchestrated routines that put Osmond’s terrifying agency into abeyance. Thus, in Act II, scene i, and in an allusion to the ghostly portrait in Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, the tyrant tries to seize his destined victim Angela, when suddenly the hero Percy, who is hiding inside a suit of armour, begins to move and make enigmatic gestures that petrify Osmond with fear to the amusement of the audience (Cox 1992: 171–2). In similar fashion, performances of insanity can give corporeal immediacy to the neutralisation of tyranny. An ominous nightmare deranges Osmond who begins to speak and move erratically, his authority temporarily suspended (IV, i), while in Siddons’s The Sicilian Romance, Ferrand, Marquis of Otranto, feels increasing remorse for his past crimes and teeters on the brink of madness, a condition physically transposed by his hair ‘standing on end’ (1794: 15), sudden exits (18) and hyperbolic ejaculations (‘Horror! open earth and swallow me!’ [29]). Prescribing a performance based on frenzied and spasmodic movements, such moments destabilise the personification of power, question his authoritativeness, and stress the irrationality and arbitrariness of

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 88

22/09/15 10:22 AM

The Gothic Stage

89

power itself: a figure whose body denotes his inability to rule himself cannot legitimately rule others. Equally significant is the Gothic stage’s concern with the manifestations and arbitrary effects of power upon its subjects’ bodies. In The Castle Spectre, the bleeding wound on Evelina’s ghostly breast is a gruesome reminder of her death, caused by Osmond’s unlawful desire for her and his brother’s title. Spectres, in other words, may function politically when victims’ bodies reappear as revenants seeking revenge on politically motivated murders. In H. M. Milner’s Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogine; or, The Spectre Bride! (Coburg, 19 June 1826), the female protagonist is killed in the midst of courtly machinations that aim to free her beloved Alonzo to marry the king’s sister. Returning as a ghost during the wedding, Imogine drags the bridegroom away to an underground cavern, where a tribunal of hooded figures cast back their mantles to ‘display the forms of Skeletons!’ (Milner 1852: 23). The spectral metamorphosis of the character’s body transforms the actor’s performance in terms of costume, movement and voice, making strikingly visible the effects of Realpolitik on an innocent individual, as well as enabling supernatural revenge on politically motivated oppression. Distinctive of Romantic-period Gothic on stage, these instances point to intersections of verbal and non-verbal, discursive and physical dimensions as sites for reflecting on power’s contradictory nature. The Romantic theatre of fear tapped into sociopolitical concerns and anxieties, and played to the public’s contrasting desires for change or continuity and security by weaving together a variety of technical practices and textual and acting codes. It is also in view of the composite nature of stage Gothic that its indirect and ambivalent politics, couched in textually and visually engaging forms, is a significant testimony to a period of multiplying political instabilities and social transformations.

Visuality Unleashed The growing relevance of visual over verbal aspects in Romanticperiod theatre was, in many ways, a function of the progressive enlargement of the main London playhouses in the 1790s. By the turn of the century, spectators at Covent Garden and Drury Lane were more numerous and placed farther from the stage than ever before; consequently, acting styles privileged explicit postures and

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 89

22/09/15 10:22 AM

90

Diego Saglia

hyperbolic gestures, while experiments with and improvements in stage painting, lighting and machinery resulted in increasingly spectacular productions. As sensationalism became predominant, Gothic played a central role in the development of techniques for simulations of reality and illusion, strategies which enchanted audiences while proving major concerns for Romantic-period reflections on aesthetics (Burwick 1991). Stage designers devised atmospheric decors and backdrops appreciated both by reviewers and spectators, such as those by the celebrated William Capon of Drury Lane, responsible for the Gothic library in Colman’s The Iron Chest (Drury Lane, 12 March 1796), the cathedral in Boaden’s Aurelio and Miranda, and the chapel in Baillie’s De Monfort (Ranger 1991: 61–3). Yet, theatrical fashions gradually shifted to the use of more complex machinery that enabled movements and actions caused by invisible impulses and thus intensified the audiences’ affective responses to an increasingly uncanny onstage reality. Exemplary instances were the automated mechanisms in the ‘blue room’ in Colman’s Blue-Beard; the cart drawn by dragons carrying the demonic Sangrida in the conclusion of Act II of Lewis’s One O’Clock!; or, The Knight and the Wood Daemon (Drury Lane, 1 April 1807); or the cart enveloped by clouds transporting the titular ghost in the climax of Edward Fitzball’s The Burning Bridge; or, The Spectre of the Lake (Surrey, 16 August 1824). The most sensational contraption for the creation of supernatural movement onstage was the ‘vampire trap’ perfected for Planché’s Vampire, a device that allowed for the actor’s instantaneous disappearance. This mechanism took the ‘immateriality of the material’ conveyed by Romantic-period ghostly performances to a new level of sophistication and astonishing illusion (Hoeveler 2012: 61). Moreover, this and other such techniques modified the spectators’ perception of space through a ‘complex heteroglossia’ that combined ‘the politically and psychologically charged spaces’ of the Gothic playtext and ‘the culturally charged spectacle of its [onstage] realization’ (Crochunis 2001: 157), a nexus that also comprised the unsettling new technology employed for these spatial constructions. In general, then, the Gothic stage stood in some essential but problematic relation to the wider-ranging issue of visuality in Romantic-period epistemology and its threat to the primacy of the word (Galperin 1993: 19–20). Theatre is evidently central to this context because of the institutionally sanctioned contrast between legitimacy and illegitimacy, and what was perceived as its excessively

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 90

22/09/15 10:22 AM

The Gothic Stage

91

spectacular nature. A breeding ground of affecting techniques, stage Gothic promoted a ‘hypertheatrical’ aesthetic (Haggerty 2003: 20) and endorsed ways of seeing that ‘privileged the reader [and spectator] as a sovereign consumer of primarily visual matter’ (Miles 2005), thus complicating the relation between visual perception and issues of knowledge and control. From this perspective, what was visible on the Gothic stage, its illusive nature and its hold on its enraptured audiences raised questions about the possibility and efficacy of controlling spectators’ reactions. When Wordsworth in the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads attacked the public mania for Gothic-inflected ‘sickly and stupid German tragedies’, he specifically targeted their tendency to ignite in their audiences a ‘degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation’ (Wordsworth 2008: 177). A purely instinctual affect without issue in moral improvement or virtuous agency, this stimulation was keyed to notions of cultural involution that were inextricable from ideas of Gothic barbarism. Repeatedly, the issue of subjectivities running out of control due to the physical and emotional effects of stage Gothic emerged throughout the Romantic period, most visibly in comments on spectators’ irrational reactions, from swooning to hysterics, induced by Gothic performance (Saglia 2014: 354). If these affective currents between stage and audience created short circuits at a psychological and physical level, they also raised problems of a sociopolitical kind by making patent the impossibility of policing individual and collective reactions alike. During the 1820s and 1830s, while earlier works gradually became part of the repertoire (The Castle Spectre, Blue-Beard, or Timour the Tartar, among others), Gothic continued undeterred to proliferate, develop and mutate into new forms well into the Victorian period and beyond (Hoeveler 2012; Saglia 2014). A manifestation of Gothic as a collectively affecting experience, the Gothic stage raises critical issues including adaptation and remediation (Hoeveler 2010), and, unlike failed or unperformed Romantic-period drama, ideas of cultural ephemerality and impact. It also taps into a range of aesthetic, ideological and sociopolitical concerns, casting them into high relief through its sensational textuality and spectacular performativity and stagecraft. Rather than a discrete set of texts (‘Gothic drama’), the Gothic stage designates a multiform phenomenon that permeated drama and theatre at a variety of levels, brought into focus many of the central questions in Romantic-period culture, and laid the bases for subsequent multimedia reincarnations of Gothic.

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 91

22/09/15 10:22 AM

92

Diego Saglia

References Altick, Richard D. (1978), The Shows of London, Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press. Backscheider, Paula (1993), Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Baines, Paul and Edward Burns (eds) (2000), Five Romantic Plays 1768–1821, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Boaden, James (1794), Fontainville Forest, a Play, in Five Acts, London: Printed for Hookham and Carpenter. Boaden, James (1831), Memoirs of Mrs Siddons, 2nd edn, 2 vols, London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley. Boaden, James (1833), Memoirs of Mrs Inchbald, 2nd edn, 2 vols, London: Richard Bentley. Booth, Michael R. (1965), English Melodrama, London: Herbert Jenkins. Brooks, Peter [1976] (1995), The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Buckley, Matthew S. (2014), ‘The Formation of Melodrama’, in Julia Swindells and David Francis Taylor (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theatre 1737–1832, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 457–75. Burwick, Frederick (1991), Illusion and the Drama: Critical Theory of the Enlightenment and Romantic Era, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor [1817] (1983), Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cox, Jeffrey N. (ed.) (1992), Seven Gothic Dramas, 1789–1925, Athens: Ohio University Press. Cox, Jeffrey N. (2001), ‘Introduction: Reanimating Gothic Drama’, Gothic Studies, 3: 107–16. Cox, Jeffrey N. (2007), ‘The Death of Tragedy; or, The Birth of Melodrama’, in Tracy C. Davis and Peter Holland (eds), The Performing Century: Nineteenth-Century Theatre’s History, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 161–81. Crochunis, Thomas C. (2001), ‘Writing Gothic Theatrical Spaces’, Gothic Studies, 3: 156–69. ‘Detector’ (1808), ‘Dramatic Strictures’, Le Beau Monde, 4 (November): 218–9. Evans, Bertrand (1947), Gothic Drama from Walpole to Shelley, Berkeley: University of California Press. Franceschina, John (ed.) (1997), Sisters of Gore: Seven Gothic Melodramas by British Women, 1790–1843, New York and London: Garland.

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 92

22/09/15 10:22 AM

The Gothic Stage

93

Galperin, William H. (1993), The Return of the Visible in British Romanticism, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Gamer, Michael (1999), ‘Authors in Effect: Lewis, Scott, and the Gothic Drama’, English Literary History, 66: 831–61. Gamer, Michael (2000), Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haggerty, George E. (2003), ‘Psychodrama: Hypertheatricality and Sexual Excess on the Gothic Stage’, Theatre Research International, 28: 20–33. Hoeveler, Diane Long (2010), Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary 1780–1820, Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Hoeveler, Diane Long (2012), ‘Victorian Gothic Drama’, in Andrew Smith and William Hughes (eds), Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 57–71. ‘Literary Review’ (1815), Theatrical Inquisitor 7 (September): 204–9. Miles, Robert (ed.) (2005), ‘Gothic Technologies: Visuality in the Romantic Era’, Romantic Circles Praxis (last accessed 29 October 2014). Milner, H. M. (1852), Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogine; or, The Spectre Bride! a Legendary Romantic Melo-Drama, in Two Acts, London: John Duncombe. Moody, Jane (2000), Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770–1840, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. More, Hannah (1799), Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, 2 vols, London: Cadell and Davies. Norton, Rictor (ed.) (2000), Gothic Readings: The First Wave, 1764–1840, London and New York: Leicester University Press. Ranger, Paul (1991), ‘Terror and Pity reign in every Breast’: Gothic Drama in the London Patent Theatres, 1750–1820, London: The Society for Theatre Research. Saglia, Diego (2014), ‘Gothic Theater: 1765–present’, in Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend (eds), The Gothic World, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 354–65. Siddons, Henry (1794), The Sicilian Romance; or, The Apparition of the Cliffs, An Opera, London: Printed for J. Barker. Spencer, William Robert (1802), Urania; or the Illuminé. Songs, Choruses, &c., London: Printed by C. Lowndes. ‘The Drama’ (1802), The Monthly Visitor, 2 (November): 268–75. ‘The Drama’ (1805), New Universal Magazine, 3 (June): 546–8. Thompson, L. F. (1928), Kotzebue: A Survey of His Progress in France and England Preceded by a Consideration of the Critical Attitude to Him in Germany, Paris: Honoré Champion. Watt, James (1999), Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, 1764–1832, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 93

22/09/15 10:22 AM

94

Diego Saglia

Worrall, David (2000), ‘The Political Culture of Gothic Drama’, in David Punter (ed.), A Companion to the Gothic, Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 94–106. Wordsworth, William [1800] (2008), ‘Preface’, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800, ed. Michael Gamer and Dahlia Porter, Peterborough: Broadview, pp. 171–87.

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 94

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Chapter 5

Gothic Poetry and First-Generation Romanticism Joel Faflak

I. Horace Walpole stages his ur-Gothic text, The Castle of Otranto (1764), as a stage management of the Gothic itself: ‘The characters are well drawn, and still better maintained. Terror, the author’s principal engine, prevents the story from ever languishing; and it is so often contrasted by pity, that the mind is kept up in a constant vicissitude of interesting passions’ (Walpole 1765: v–vi). Fuelling the Gothic’s well-oiled ‘engine’, Walpole emphasises maintenance but also ‘constant vicissitude’ lest things fall into entropy. Change is thus essential as well as inevitable. On one hand, one never quite knows where ‘Terror’ lies; on the other, randomness requires fear in order to redraw the boundary between self and world, as in theories of the sublime outlined in Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) and later Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790). Walpole simulates ‘interesting passions’ in order to stimulate a visceral response. In order to feel reality as real one must experience it as fake, must feel within our habitual world a reality it has forgotten. Put another way, the Gothic expresses paranoia that Enlightenment reason might be as volatile or anachronistic as the histories and customs it forced underground. As Fred Botting argues, ‘Darkness threatened the light of reason with what it did not know’ (Botting 1996: 30), a sublime encounter that forces reason to recalibrate its overpowering ‘experience of loss and negativity . . . through an imaginative and active process’ (Botting 1996: 8) that re-inscribes codes and limits. Yet this encounter also marks reason’s disturbingly productive encounter with curiosity, desire and enjoyment of transgressing what we think is ‘normal’. Or as both Burke’s and Kant’s theories suggest, something in

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 95

22/09/15 10:22 AM

96

Joel Faflak

us asks for the contrived reproduction of conditions to induce a real response of fear in order to jolt us out of the complacency produced by the equally contrived nature of everyday life in an increasingly industrialised, technologised and commercialised society. Emerging sensationally in the eighteenth century, the Gothic addresses unseen, unknown and unacknowledged aspects of human existence left unexplained by religion or science. Like the sublime, it generates polarising sensations – fear and fascination, terror and awe, grief and elation – intended to call upon inner resources to surmount the confusion but also to keep us off kilter. We are not always sure that the Gothic means what it says because what it says might not be real or true. It invites us to master uncertainty, but also reminds us that uncertainty is not all that new, which is why, as Terry Castle reminds us, it exemplifies the uncanny long before the category had been put theoretically in place (Castle 1995). The Gothic challenges our comfortable reality by reminding us never to take for granted a certainty bought at the price of setting aside improbability, ambiguity, doubt. It thus suggests a form of delayed satisfaction that explains its parallel with the logic of capitalism. Jerrold E. Hogle (2002) speaks of the Gothic as the ‘ghost of the counterfeit’ that finds its form by repeating its own feigned stature and thus trading in its lack of currency and in the simulative nature of all signs. In Walpole’s novella, Ann Radcliffe’s later The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) or The Italian (1797), or Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), Gothic codes are legitimate because they are parodic, a series of commodities whose life and value depend on their circulation in a marketdriven public sphere. Gothic ambivalence thus produces visceral reactions that feel at once real and hyperreal, an authenticity that gains purchase only by buying into the legitimacy of older forms. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818; 1831) partly finds its life by juxtaposing and suturing together the Bible, Milton, earlier Gothic texts and fragments of Romantic verse. William Wordsworth’s poetry forms part of this curation, which takes us back to the firstgeneration Romantic poets’ influence by the circulation of earlier cultural forms. Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) ignited a craze for indigenous anglophone forms of expression different from those of prevailing neoclassical, Augustan tastes, which borrowed from Greek and Roman models. This celebration of an ancient English vernacular inspired, among other works, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (1798) and Walter Scott’s The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802–3). Percy’s

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 96

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Gothic Poetry and First-Generation Romanticism

97

volume was published from a discarded manuscript ‘discovered’ in a friend’s house, and he played fast and loose when editing it, mixing in contemporary examples and altering verses to suit his tastes. The authenticity of James Macpherson’s Fingal (1761), his translation of a rediscovered lost ancient epic based on a mythic Gaelic figure, was similarly challenged. Such disputes foregrounded how tradition, its origins based on an unverifiable and often spurious philology, might just as well be a literary and imaginative fabrication. Percy’s and Macpherson’s volumes, like Walpole’s novella, highlight a central concern of how first-generation Romantic poets take up the Gothic: the validity and accuracy of cultural expression and thus of human perception itself, the sociopolitical dimension of which is inflected by volatile domestic and global events. Events in July 1789 in France galvanised both happily and horrifically for Britons the stakes of throwing out the old for the new, begging the question of whether the past can or should ever be superseded and transformed, even if it is a lie. Turbulent political change abroad and an Industrial Revolution running full steam at home produced toxic and disruptive as well as progressive and enriching effects that threatened to devalue poetry’s currency when vying with other forms of print culture to speak to and for an audience increasingly diversified, stratified and challenged economically, socially and culturally. Yet Romantic writers turn poetry’s apparently outmoded ability to address a meaning beyond or above reality to its advantage by exploring what goes hidden and missing below and within the quotidian, and thus confronting its crisis of representation and legitimation head on. For first-generation Romantic poets, the Gothic highlights, troubles and exploits how thought and writing, always one remove from the reality they express, are, for better or worse, implicitly but necessarily vehicles of incessant change rather than fixed meaning.

II. Writing after Walpole in the later eighteenth century, John Thelwall, Helen Maria Williams and William Blake use the Gothic to animate a political spirit and depth of feeling that, reflecting the tumultuous politics of the 1790s, is at once reparative and disillusioning. Thelwall’s Poems on Various Subjects (1787) deploys the ballad form of the Gothic tale to paint scenes of menace, unknown or mistaken identity and lineage, bodily and psychological threat, unjustified confinement and groundless conjecture. ‘Edmund and Rosalinda’ and

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 97

22/09/15 10:22 AM

98

Joel Faflak

‘The Hermit of the Ruined Palace’, for instance, open in medias res upon subjects in unwelcome circumstances, like Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria (1798), in which the protagonist awakens in prison without knowing how she got there. In ‘Edmund and Rosalinda’, our fleeing, ‘oppress’d’ couple find themselves lost in a ‘dreary forest’ where ‘oppressive outlaws dwell, / And rapine’s desp’rate race / And prowling wolves, more fierce and fell, / Infest the houseless place’ (Thelwall 1787: I.1). Both nature and a social order devolving into nature threaten their liberty and security until they are taken in by a ‘wrinkled dame’ (3) who tells of her betrothal by her father to his favourite Alwin, having ‘bestow’d [her] heart’ to ‘a youth of less degree’ (9). Fleeing before the wedding, she marries her true love and bears their daughter in secrecy. Discovering their deception, the father vows revenge, husband and child flee, and eventually the mother escapes her father’s ‘persecuting pow’r’ to live ‘Secluded in this homely cot’, having ‘shunn’d the public eye’ (12). When the woman mentions the name of her husband, ‘Roldan’ (13), Rosalinda faints into Edmund’s arms, realising the woman is her mother Elfrida, confirmed by the miniature of Roldan hung around her daughter’s ‘infant neck’ (14) when she fled with her father. Reunited in the mother’s happy domestic space, the couple tell Elfrida that they have been persecuted by the grandfather, but that on his deathbed Roldan betrothed Edmund and Rosalinda, leaving the couple to get lost ‘in the wood’ (17), and thus taking us back to the poem’s opening, en route to finding the lost matriarch, who consecrates their ‘mingled joy and woe’ by hoping that ‘Roldan’s virtues shine / In all [their] offspring’ (18). By withholding names, the poem evokes suspicion about familial and dynastic ties, an uncertainty worked through and redeemed, as in Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), by the rational conversation between individuals (Godwin 1971: 141, 302) through which true identities are revealed by simply telling their stories to one another. History’s ‘official’ version, which suppresses citizens as subjects, is thus told through the democratic exchange of the popular ballad form retold and revised to fill in this history’s gaps. Thelwall’s Gothic sensationalism has a reparative agenda, highlighting the terror of wrongful judgement and awakening his audience to the feeling of political response otherwise (and paradoxically) deadened by their ‘thirst’ for such sensation. This shared familiarity with popular culture invokes readers’ common parlance, a contact zone with what Anne Bannerman in Tales of Superstition and Chivalry (1802) will call the ‘charmed minstrelsy’ of history (Bannerman

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 98

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Gothic Poetry and First-Generation Romanticism

99

1802: n.p.) in order to awaken readers to the potential horror of their present lives. Reunited, liberty is passed from mother to daughter who both, unlike Wordsworth’s Martha Ray in ‘The Thorn’, as we shall see, get to tell the story that supposedly cannot be told. And unlike Coleridge’s Gothic archaisms which, as we shall also see, forestall progress, Thelwall’s harness Britons’ ancient right of freedom bred on the pulses of its political life, however short-circuited by current events. Helen Maria Williams locates these events front and centre in her nightmarish vision of the spectres of ‘a mangled regal race’ (Wu 1997: 138), ‘Part of an Irregular Fragment, Found in a Dark Passage of the Tower’ (1786), and in her waking Gothic dream, The Bastille, A Vision (1790). In the former, Williams conjures a primal scene of political violence that at once targets the English royal primogeniture and recalls the bloody histories of England’s pioneering but flawed parliamentary system, and, ironically, presages the regicide of Louis XVI. Williams remained to her death an unregenerate republican sympathiser, even after she was imprisoned in Paris in 1793 during the Reign of Terror, and long after England vilified her politics and her morals (she took up with a married man in Switzerland after being released in 1794). She published the latter poem in Julia, a Novel (1790), which rewrites Rousseau’s Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) by expressing more staunchly pro-Revolutionary sentiments, fuelled by Williams having seen the Revolution first hand. Writing as a prisoner released from the Bastille, the speaker begins: ‘Drear cell, along whose lonely bounds Unvisited by light Chill silence dwells with night, Save when the clanging fetter sounds! Abyss where mercy never came, Nor hope the wretch can find, Where long inaction wastes the frame, And half annihilates the mind!’ (Wu 1997: 1–8)

In this ‘living tomb’ and ‘hideous pile, / Which stains of blood defile’, longing to be ‘shroud[ed] . . . in unconscious gloom’, he has ‘Terrific visions’ of ‘an awful form . . . / Who drags his step to deeper cells / Where stranger wilder horror dwells’ (17–18, 12, 21–4). He descends into the ‘yawning depths’ as if into the political unconscious, where locked in silence ‘A deed was done . . . / Unfit for mortal ear’ (35, 37–8).

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 99

22/09/15 10:22 AM

100

Joel Faflak

Gazing upon this ‘black cell’ of terror (figured as the iron mask falling from the nameless Man in the Iron Mask), the silence speaks as a voice compelling him to ‘Rouse thee from thy numbing trance’ (41). As ‘troubled phantoms melt away’, he is granted ‘Visions of bliss, eternal powers!’ as the voice opens the ‘book of fate’ to reveal ‘Where this dark pile in chaos lies’, to be replaced by ‘freedom’s sacred temple’ (49, 53, 59, 61, 63). Here ‘Philosophy’, ‘shar[ing] the meed / Of Freedom’s noblest deed!’, shall act as ‘Guardian of bliss and friend of man!’ to ‘renovate the gladdened earth’ (89–90, 92, 96). As gatekeeper and repository for the lost but never forgotten, to paraphrase Sigmund Freud on the uncanny, Williams’s Gothic reframes inhuman experience as an apocalypse that preludes the millennium of sociopolitical and cultural transformation. A similar revelation of perception informs William Blake’s poetry, in which the higher innocence of a redeemed historical and political awareness is wrestled from the antithetical perils of experience, what Blake, in one of his longer prophetic works Milton (c. 1804–11), calls ceaseless ‘Mental Fight’ (Blake 1988: plate 1). In his earlier The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), Blake writes: ‘Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence’ (Blake 1988: plate 3). Hence we expect the Gothic ‘mind-forged manacles’ (Blake 1988: 8) of ‘London’ from Songs of Experience (1794), but have already encountered them in the first version of ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ from Songs of Innocence (1789), in which child labourers are freed from their ‘coffins of black’ (Blake 1988: 12) to ascend ‘naked and white’ (16) into the clouds of smoke into which their lives have vanished. The protean gothicism of Marriage’s hybrid of visionary poetry, political manifesto and scriptural doctrine pits competing voices against one another to release their repressed potentiality to produce startling enlightenment. In plates 17–20 Blake sits with an Angel in the ‘root of an oak . . . suspended in a fungus which hung with the head downward into the deep’ to which they have descended from a ‘church, and down into the church-vault, at the end of which was a mill’. Because of the ‘metaphysics’ of the Angel’s overweening religious presence, this ‘infinite abyss’ appears as a monstrous and bloody chaos inhabited by a Leviathan. Yet once the Angel retreats upward to safety, the monster’s ‘spiritual existence’ transforms the scene into the pastoral vision of a ‘pleasant bank beside a river by moonlight’ on which a ‘harper . . . sung to his harp’: ‘And his theme was, “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind”.’ By thus rewriting history’s ‘sacred

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 100

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Gothic Poetry and First-Generation Romanticism

101

codes’ (Blake 1988: plate 4) as sacred cows that oppress change, Blake’s Gothic stands for the shock of a transformational potentiality that, if not perpetually tapped, hardens into other terrors. In ‘The Dark Ladie’, from Anne Bannerman’s widely popular Tales of Superstition and Chivalry (1802), this potential seems as volatile, but less certain. Here history’s menace visits England’s green and pleasant land in the form of a mysterious female. An ‘armed train’ of knights led by Sir Guyon have ‘return’d from Holy Land’ to his English ‘castle, on the sea’, where they are left ‘mute with awe’ and in ‘chill amaze’ by the ‘glare’ of a ‘Ladie’ who, ‘clad in ghastly white, / And veiled to the feet’, ‘took the upper seat’ at their return banquet, momentarily suspends the knights’ senses, and that evening haunts their dreams as the ‘echo, deep’ that ‘no human voice / Could ever reach’ (Bannerman 1802: 3, 5, 6, 9). The next morning Huart recalls that Guyon, while bravely fighting the ‘infidels’, ‘Soon as the Sepulchre he saw / Grew pale and trembled’, and when a knight ‘named the blessed name’, Guyon’s ‘face became as livid clay, / And, on his foamy lips, the sounds, / Unutter’d, died away!’ (9–10). Guyon’s ‘lamentable tale’ thus merges the unidentified ‘blessed name’ with the Dark Ladie’s voice as if he and the Ladie ‘were as one’ (11). Having previously brought the Ladie to his castle, he only peered behind her veil to see ‘that glaring eye’, which ‘dried the life-blood’, after which the Ladie vanished (13). He sees a ‘strange uncolour’d light’ of ‘unearthly hue’ shine ‘thro’ her curtain’d tower’, and his sleep is thereafter haunted by the echo of ‘sounds’ that are ‘dull, deep, and wild’ (13). We are then told she came to Guyon having deserted her husband and child: ‘But where Sir Guyon took her then, Ah! none could ever hear or know, Or, why, beneath that long black veil, Her wild eyes sparkle so. Or whence those deep unearthly tones, That human bosom never own’d; Or why, it cannot be remov’d, That folded veil that sweeps the ground?’ (Bannerman 1802: 15–16)

The poem leaves its readers suspended in the quandary of interwoven narratives – personal, domestic, political, national, international. As Bannerman suggests in her notes to the final poem, ‘The Prophecy of

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 101

22/09/15 10:22 AM

102

Joel Faflak

Merlin’, states are imagined communities that cohere around the suppression of (their) history/histories – i.e. Arthur’s ‘death was politically concealed, lest it should dispirit the Britons. Hence arose so many fabulous stories about it’ (Bannerman 1802: 143). History is fabrication, but also fabrication to particular ends, both good and bad. Thus justifying her own poetic license with a history itself already written and overwritten according to poetic license, Bannerman argues that ‘It will not perhaps be very consonant to popular feeling, that legendary tradition has been violated in the fate and disposal of this great, national hero. But it is all fairy-ground, and a poetical community of right to its appropriation has never been disputed’ (144). The gothicism of simple Romantic ballads thus expresses and mobilises complex political responses difficult to gauge. After his 1794 imprisonment on treason charges, Thelwall wrote Poems Written in Close Confinement in the Tower and Newgate (1795) as ‘transcripts of the heart, rather than flights of the imagination: – rather intended to rouse the patriotic feeling, than calculated to amuse the admirer of poetical enthusiasm’ (Thelwall 1795: ii). Here Thelwall’s life now is the Gothic, lending desperate aesthetic urgency to Wordsworth’s language of ‘real men’. In ‘Sonnet IX: The Cell’, that Thelwall is literally writing for his life is no Gothic hyperbole: Within the Dungeon’s noxious gloom The Patriot still, with dauntless breast, The cheerful aspect can assume – And smile – in conscious Virtue blest! The damp foul floor, the ragged wall. And shattered window grated high; The trembling Ruffian may appal, Whose thoughts no sweet resource supply. (9)

Even without Wordsworthian nature’s steady presence, Thelwall interprets the 1790s Gothic nightmare into which he has awakened according to a protected landscape of inner feeling made permanent precisely because it is threatened. In ‘Sonnet VI: To Ancestry’ he calls for ‘some hidden charm— / Some magic power in [British] Ancestry’ to ‘brook the arm / Of tyrannous Oppression’ (6). But as devoutly as he wishes for this Burkean utopia grounded in the nostalgia for an ancient Briton animated by Liberty’s eternal spirit, his psychological imprisonment makes both Liberty and its history a cruel fiction. Thelwall confronts what Coleridge in his 1802 ‘Dejection: An Ode’ calls ‘A grief without

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 102

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Gothic Poetry and First-Generation Romanticism

103

a pang – void, dark, and drear’ (Coleridge 2003: 21). His ‘shaping spirit of imagination’ (87) failing him, Coleridge describes reality as a ‘dark distressful dream’ (89), a ‘scream / Of agony, by torture lengthened out’ (91–2). The Aeolian harp that tunes his soul’s harmony now ‘pause[s in] . . . deepest silence’ (108) to tell a ‘tale of less affright’ (112). Here Coleridge mutes Gothic sensationalism to reveal its primal scene: ‘a little child’ (115) abandoned in and by the world, unable to find her moorings. Appeals to justice give way to angst about the inequalities of everyday lived experience, for within the space of ten years the Gothic register through which first-generation Romantic poets expressed at least hope for political reform shifted towards different sentiments.

III. At risk in poetry’s date with the Gothic was its cultural ‘virtue’ or aesthetic ‘purity’. Bannerman’s Prologue to Tales of Superstition and Chivalry names the Gothic’s lure as follows: Turn from the path; if search of gay delight Lead thy vain footsteps back to ages past! Frail are the blighted flowers, and thinly cast O’er the dim regions of monastic night. Yet in their cavern’d, dark recesses, dwells The long-lost Spirit of forgotten times, Whose voice prophetic reach’d to distant climes, And rul’d the nations from his witched cells; That voice is hush’d! . . . But still in Fancy’s ear Its first unmeasur’d melodies resound! Blending with terrors wild, and legends drear, The charmed minstrelsy of mystic sound, The rous’d, embodied, to the eye of Fear, The’ unearthly habitants of faery ground. (Bannerman 1802: n.p.)

The Gothic in Romantic poetry asks that we ‘Turn from the path’ to encounter ‘forgotten’ or ‘prophetic times’ that will take us back to the future of our present attempt to make sense of things. To be affected by this ‘charmed minstrelsy’ is to risk its ‘hush’d’ and ‘first unmeasur’d’ echoes re-resounding in our ‘Fancy’s ear’, leaving us aroused by our own experience of its ‘rous’d’ and ‘embodied’ nature,

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 103

22/09/15 10:22 AM

104

Joel Faflak

a politics felt a little too passionately on the pulses post–1789. For Bannerman, to give ourselves to Gothic superstition is to be reminded of a haunting chivalry whose haunted politics becomes a cautionary tale for her present moment. But at first this entrée to history is staged in terms of the dangers of our enthralment by the licence of a poetic narrativisation of history that is, Bannerman suggests, the only way in which we can access the past. How then to resist poetry’s siren, Gothic call? For some, Ann Radcliffe imperilled poetry by embedding it within her prose ‘chillers’, while for others this verse was an edifying presence separate from her novels’ otherwise supernatural settings. Such fears of generic miscegenation evoked other anxieties. Lewis’s gothically inflected volume of poems, Tales of Wonder (1801), offered tales by Scott, translations of tales from other nations (including those of Goethe), as well as Lewis’s own writings. This cosmopolitan anthology legitimated unholy alliances among Gothic readers and nationalities, a hybridity that ‘blurs rather than reinforces social boundaries, interrogating rather than restoring, any imagined continuity between past and present, nature and culture, reason and passion, individual, family and society’ (Botting 1996: 44). For Wordsworth and Coleridge, the Gothic becomes less vehicle for than symptom of political change. In his Preface to the expanded second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800), Wordsworth regrets that ‘the invaluable works of our elder writers’ such as Shakespeare and Milton ‘are driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse’ (Wordsworth 1988: 254), a threatening devolution of poetry’s higher calling in a mass marketplace that catered to an expanding reading population’s less edifying and edified selves. We can pause momentarily to note that melodrama of his response (‘deluge’, ‘frenzy’, ‘sickliness’, ‘idleness’, ‘extravagance’), which tarries with the same rhetoric he would disavow. Yet Lyrical Ballads proposes to counter this effect: The principal object . . . was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men, and at the same time to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way. And further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them (truly, though not ostentatiously) the primary laws of our nature, chiefly as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement. (Wordsworth 1988: 252)

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 104

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Gothic Poetry and First-Generation Romanticism

105

Notice how carefully Wordsworth, like Walpole, ‘maintains’ his subject matter: ‘as far as was possible’ (but not too far); ‘a certain colouring of imagination’ (but without letting the imagination run wild); ‘to make these incidents and situations interesting’ (but not too interesting). Lest the reader’s ‘state of excitement’ distract him or her from ‘the primary laws of our nature’, Lyrical Ballads aims less to fascinate than to stimulate correct ‘associations’. Wordsworth blames both foreign and domestic writers for inspiring thoughtless apprehension rather than understanding. The phrase ‘frantic novels’ suggests Radcliffe or Lewis; ‘sickly and stupid German tragedies’ likely means plays by German dramatist August von Kotzebue; ‘idle or extravagant stories in verse’ might mean Scott’s early ballad translations, the inspiration for his later verse romances The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), Marmion (1808), or The Lady of the Lake (1810), and more distantly it meant French romances of the late seventeenth century. These are not all Gothic texts, but the Preface uses the Gothic as lingua franca for ‘bad’ literature. Michael Gamer argues that the Gothic became an ideological weapon deployed to police, curtail and condemn morally unregenerate or dangerous writing (Gamer 2000). The Preface thus legislates against Gothic ‘radicalism’ in order to champion poetry’s differently revolutionary, purer law of genre at a time of considerable domestic retrenchment. First-generation Romantic writers like Wordsworth and Coleridge, at first celebrating the French Revolution, found themselves betrayed by the Reign of Terror but also by England’s reactionary politics, especially once France declared war on England in 1794. The Gothic is thus an easy target for suspending people’s judgments at a time when speaking or writing against the status quo was considered as unpatriotic, or even treasonous, a repressive state of affairs legislated by the 1794–5 or 1798–1801 suspensions of habeas corpus or of basic liberties via the Gagging Acts of 1795, to which Thelwall was victim. But the Gothic also arrests Wordsworth’s attention, as if to transform and edify its more sensational elements. His earliest writings such as ‘The Ruined Cottage’ or ‘The Discharged Soldier’ portray distracted or forgotten characters whose wasted, barren environment reflect their social abandonment, as if haunted by other forces. We can trace this gothicism in one of his contributions to Lyrical Ballads, ‘The Thorn’, a ballad describing a bush on a hilltop beside a ‘little muddy pond’ (Wordsworth 1988: 30) and a ‘beauteous heap . . . of moss’ (35) that is ‘like an infant’s grave in size’ (52, 61). Between them, if ‘You . . . take care and choose your time’ (58), you will find

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 105

22/09/15 10:22 AM

106

Joel Faflak

‘A woman in a scarlet cloak’, Martha Ray, who ‘to herself . . . cries, / “Oh misery! Oh misery!” ’ (63–5). Abandoned by Stephen Hill, who betroths himself to another, she finds herself pregnant and loses her wits, except ‘when at last her time drew near, / Her looks were calm, her senses clear’ (153–4). What starts as mere observation becomes an entire crime-scene investigation that circumscribes all of society within its sphere of cognition, including future readers. The poem enacts the Enlightenment project of scientific rationalism, the guarantee that our empirical surveillance of our world, including a telescope to bring the scene into perspective, will make sense of things. But, we are never told what happens to the child, though there are plenty of speculators: the narrator, the poem’s addressee, ‘Old Farmer Simpson’, the community, including ‘some’ who ‘had sworn an oath that she / Should be to public justice brought’, except that any attempt to find ‘the little infant’s bones’ makes the hill of moss ‘stir’ and the grass shake ‘for full fifty yards around’, which apparently frightens the Law itself into submission (149, 233, 234, 237, 239). ‘In truth you’d find it hard to say’, the poem begins, whether the thorn ‘could ever have been young / It looks so old and grey’ (2, 3–4). This inability to ‘tell’ structures the poem’s unfolding: ‘I cannot tell, I wish I could’ (89); ‘I’ll tell you everything I know’ (105); ‘I’ll give you the best help I can’ (111); ‘No more I know – I wish I did’ (155); ‘There’s no one that could ever tell’ (160); ‘I thought I saw’ (192); ‘I cannot tell, but some will say’ (214). Within nature the narrator thinks he witnesses supernatural occurrences: a ‘fresh and lovely’ mound that is uncannily ‘beauteous’ (35); a patch of earth that shakes when the wind, which ‘Cuts like a scythe’ (25), blows over the pond; a woman in scarlet moaning for her lost lover or dead child; the image of a baby’s face in the pond staring back at the viewer; ‘plainly living voices’ (171) like ‘voices of the dead’ (173) mingling with Ray’s cries. Observation itself, like the shuddering ground, renders indeterminate the mooring points of perception, understanding and rational communication. The more one peers into the everyday, the more this perception contrives to make the world appear real. Lyrical Ballads reveals within ‘simple life’ the conflicted depths of human nature. It is thus fitting that the first edition opens with Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’. The poem’s archaic spellings signify indigenous English rather than classical Greek or Roman models. Yet this turn to Britain’s past has a defamiliarising effect on readers, as does the tale’s simple yet improbable events. A mariner detains a guest outside a wedding feast with a tale about

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 106

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Gothic Poetry and First-Generation Romanticism

107

a group of sailors who leave on a voyage but quickly lose their bearings in a ‘silent sea’ of ‘wondrous cauld’ and ‘fog’ (Coleridge 2003: 102, 49, 62). When the mariner suddenly kills an albatross hailed by the crew as if ‘it were a Christian soul’ (63), they hang the bird around his neck as penance. A ‘spectre-ship’ or Nightmare-Life-inDeath then takes the crew’s souls save the mariner’s. Left ‘Alone, alone, all all alone / Alone on the wide wide sea’ – notice the stuttering description of reality – the mariner ‘blesse[s] [the water-snakes] unaware’, at which point the ‘albatross fell off and sank / Like lead into the sea’ (200, 224–5, 277, 282–3). The crew rise from the dead to move the ship forward so quickly that the mariner faints and hears two Voices debating his soul, upon which his ‘trance is abated’ (433) and the crew steer safely toward harbour. The mariner then sees a host of ‘dark red shadows’ rise from the moonlit water and ‘A man all light, a seraph-man’ standing on each sailor’s ‘corse’ (486, 517, 518). As a ‘pilot’s boat’ approaches, the ‘ghastly crew’ is resurrected, the ship goes ‘down like lead’, and ‘swift as dreams’ the mariner finds himself in the other boat, its crew stunned by his presence (588, 534, 582, 587). Now ‘st[anding] on the firm land’ of his ‘own countree’, the mariner finds it ‘sweeter far . . . / To walk together to the kirk / With a goodly company!’ (603–4, 635–7). His tale over, the Wedding Guest ‘went like one that hath been stunned / And is of sense forlorn’ (655–6). The poem’s hallucinatory experience unfolds like Freud’s dreamwork: its manifest content seems to be the displaced and condensed – what Freud would call ‘overdetermined’ – version of a more originary latent content. Yet this deeper truth, by remaining hidden, leaves dreamer and interpreter ‘stunned’ by their attempt to make sense of things. What terrorises is thus less the story than an inability to resist its telling. Although the wedding guest awakens ‘A sadder and a wiser man’ the next day, he is held by the mariner’s ‘glittering eye’ against his will (658, 17), like Guyon’s knights. The mariner’s ‘strange power of speech’ compels him to ‘pass, like night, from land to land’ and teach his tale to the ‘man’ he ‘know[s] . . . must hear [him]’ (619, 622). So the poem’s end takes us back to its beginning, as if one has made no sense of events. Mary Robinson famously said the poem had no moral. Yet Coleridge’s 1817 marginal gloss, intended to anchor the tale’s moral (i.e. Christian) compass, also set the original poem further adrift. For the second edition of Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth urged Coleridge to tame the poem’s more lurid Gothic passages and moved it to the end of Volume I (the poem dropped altogether from a later

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 107

22/09/15 10:22 AM

108

Joel Faflak

1805 edition). In Biographia Literaria (1817) Coleridge called his contributions to Lyrical Ballads an ‘interpolation of heterogeneous matter’ (Coleridge 1983: II.8), not unlike what Julia Kristeva calls the abject: what gets expelled because it ‘disturbs’ the proper functioning of ‘identity, system, order’, but which remains this function’s essential if completely unwanted and unacknowledged silent partner (Kristeva 1982: 4). As Botting notes, abjection is the feeling of horror one experiences when touching a cold corpse, recoiling from death itself, yet also sensing (if not quite knowing) that the corpse could (and will) be us (Botting 1996: 9). But as Coleridge also notes in Biographia Literaria, Wordsworth’s Preface told only half the story, for their original plan was for Coleridge to make the supernatural seem, as it were, an everyday occurrence, a ‘willing suspension of disbelief that constitutes poetic faith’ (Coleridge 1983: 2:8). For Coleridge this suspension signified the imagination’s transcendental nature, as if to repeat the divine act of creation itself. But in the ‘Rime’ it also mesmerises the senses and thus one’s humanity. The most famous of Goya’s series of engravings, Los Caprichos (1799), was ‘El sueño de la razón produce monstrous’ – ‘The Sleep of Reason Breeds Monsters’ – which suggests that any system that insists upon its own enlightenment will breed its opposite, like the Reign of Terror. Robinson, a key influence on Wordsworth and Coleridge, powerfully evokes this return of the repressed in ‘The Haunted Beach’ (1800), based on her witnessing two sailors deposit a body on the shore beyond her window, where it lay unclaimed for several days until it was ‘dragged to a cliff’ and ‘covered by a heap of stones without the ceremony of a prayer’ (Wu 1997: 182; Robinson 1803: II.121–4). Like Wordsworth’s observation of the thorn, from this simple yet traumatic origin Robinson spins a tale of a fisherman’s ‘little shed’ that ‘upreared its head . . . Upon a lonely desert beach’ (1–4) and is continually threatened by the sea. This mooring point both emerges from and devolves into a menacing, partly anthropomorphised landscape whose ‘crags were bound / With weeds, forever waving; / And here and there, a cavern wide / Its shad’wy jaws displayed’, just as, when the tide goes out, ‘A shivered mast [that] was seen to ride / Where the green billows strayed’ beyond the shore (13–15, 17–18). There the fisherman sees ‘a band / Of spectres gliding hand in hand’, a ‘ghastly crowd’, like Coleridge’s ‘ghastly crew’, who ‘sullenly . . . wandered’ with ‘pale . . . faces’ and ‘hollow eyes’ and made ‘dismal howlings’ (25–6, 35, 28–30, 33). This turbulent scene portends a supernatural nature mourning in sympathy with the

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 108

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Gothic Poetry and First-Generation Romanticism

109

corpse of the ‘shipwrecked mariner’ who lies in the fisherman’s shed and who, ‘Doomed from home to sever’ but ‘Firm and undaunted ever’ against a ‘resistless’ sea as his ship is threatened with destruction, abandons the ‘spectre band, his messmates brave’ and ‘like a British sailor bold / Plunged where the billows played’ with ‘A packet of Spanish gold’ around his arm (46, 47, 49, 50, 55, 52–4). Things get rather unclear, however: ‘While to the mast he lashed him fast / And braved the storm’s commotion’ (57–8). ‘Him’ could mean the fisherman or ‘himself’, who witnessing the shipwreck retrieves the sailor’s body for gold. That the moonlight marks the ‘murd’rer’s liquid way’ (69) suggests at once the sea as culprit and the path by which the fisherman drags the body to shore. But is he a saviour or murderer? We are told that for thirty years, because ‘Heaven designed [the fisherman’s] guilty mind / Should feed on prospects dreary’, he remains ‘Bound by a strong and mystic chain’ to ‘waste[ ], in solitude and pain, / A loathsome life away / (75–6, 77, 80–1). Real events inspiring the poem suggest the fisherman’s remorse for not saving the sailor. What seems more troubling, however, is that his contemplation of the ‘spectred main’ and its ‘deeply yawning tomb’ is ‘destined’ (67, 70, 79). The moral implications of circumstances seems less at issue than the fact that simply to inhabit reality predetermines our culpability within it, as if the mere act of witnessing becomes an uncanny encounter with ourselves and the world. Perhaps this simple existential fact characterises the first-generation Romantic poets’ use of the Gothic: there is no such thing as ‘mere’ or ‘normal’ existence, which is why, starting with Walpole’s novel, the Gothic manages reality as a stage-managed affair. Only by seeing experience as unreal do we even begin to understand its reality. We are, to this extent, never at one with ourselves or with our worlds. Even the store of memories constituting the matrix of our consciousness, what in Book Two of The Prelude (1805) Wordsworth calls the ‘interminable building reared / By observation of affinities’ (Wordsworth 1979: 402–3), entails our encounter with this building’s past, and with history itself. In Bannerman’s ‘Basil’, from Tales of Superstition and Chivalry, the ‘rude sea-boy’ whose soul was ‘unseen, / Unknown, untutor’d, unrepress’d’, is educated only by the sounds and sights of nature, not by ‘human kind’ (Bannerman 1802: 80–1). In this state of sublime unconsciousness, not unlike the Wordsworthian child reared at nature’s breast, one night the stars that he ‘number’d . . . / As the brothers of his breast’ are overclouded, and ‘the awe, the dread that o’er him came’ leaves him for the first time with ‘that low breathlessness of mind, / When the heart-veins congeal’ (82–3), like the nature

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 109

22/09/15 10:22 AM

110

Joel Faflak

that chases after Wordsworth in his boat-stealing scene from Book One of The Prelude. As if for the first time, the boy hears and feels his previously ‘unseen’ soul, but as the sound and sense of death, the ‘moan that seem’d to come / From some lost wretch, that made his home / Of the desert and the sky’ because he recognises via the object relations of his encounter with the world his inability to possess it and thus himself (83). This ‘spirit of the slain’ drives him from his ‘mountain-home’, and the ‘dreams! The hopes that o’er his soul / Had wander’d of a brighter scene’ are now ‘wilder fits and drearier dreams’ so that ‘when his brain is most perturb’d, / He drags his worn and naked feet / Across the crag, whose chasms meet, / To gaze on his forsaken home’ (86–7). Thus exiling himself from the home in which he is already an alien, he gazes back to see a ‘heap of stones, / . . . laid above these hollow bones, / That the mariner can see afar, / As a beacon, on the main’ (87). The boy that only the poem knows as ‘Basil’, yet despite his unconscious anonymity knows and is known only by himself in turn, is at once freed from and trapped by his identity, as if the only ‘beacon’ of his life can be the anchor of his grave, like Wordsworth gazing upon the grave of the Boy of Winander. To paraphrase Goya, reason is always agitated by its troubling, Gothic sleep. Like the prisoner in solitary confinement who, if he stares at a blank wall long enough, begins both to question and re-imagine its existence, reason’s protracted contemplation of things ends up breeding monsters that may or may not be real, but that exist nonetheless. The Romantic poetic contemplation of nature thus always embeds within itself a scene of Gothic instruction that requires the poetic faith of our suspended disbelief about the world’s existence.

References Bannerman, Anne (1802), Tales of Superstitions and Chivalry, Vernor and Hood, London. Blake, William (1988), The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, rev. edn, ed. David V. Erdman, New York: Doubleday. Botting, Fred (1996), Gothic, New York: Routledge. Castle, Terry (1995), The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny, New York: Oxford University Press. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1983), Biographia Literaria; or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, 2 vols, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (2003), Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Nicholas Halmi, New York: W. W. Norton.

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 110

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Gothic Poetry and First-Generation Romanticism

111

Gamer, Michael (2000), Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Godwin, William [1793] (1971), Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. K. Codell Carter, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hogle, Jerrold E. (2002), The ‘Undergrounds’ of ‘The Phantom of the Opera’: Sublimation and the Gothic in Leroux’s Novel and Its Progeny, New York: St Martin’s Press. Kristeva, Julia (1982), Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press. Robinson, Mary (1803), Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Robinson, 2 vols, London: Printed for Vernor and Hood by James Swan. Thelwall, John (1787), Poems on Various Subjects, 2 vols, London: John Denis. Thelwall, John (1795), Poems Written in Close Confinement in the Tower and Newgate, Under a Charge of High Treason, London: Printed for the author and sold by J. Ridgway, H. D. Symonds and D. I. Eaton. Walpole, Horace (1765), The Castle of Otranto, A Story. Translated by William Marshall, Gent., Dublin. Wordsworth, William (1979), The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams and Stephen Gill, New York: W. W. Norton. Wordsworth, William (1988), Poetical Works, rev. edn, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wu, Duncan (ed.) (1997), Romantic Women Poets, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 111

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Chapter 6

Gothic and Second-Generation Romanticism: Lord Byron, P. B. Shelley, John Polidori and Mary Shelley Jerrold E. Hogle

There is a definite point of passage between uses of the Gothic by Wordsworth, Coleridge and Mary Robinson, among others, and the striking reworkings of the Gothic by several authors we now call the ‘second generation’ of English Romantics. This point is the ‘ghoststory contest’ proposed by Lord Byron in June 1816 at the Villa Diodati he rented by Lake Geneva in Switzerland, where he hosted, among others, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin (Mary Shelley by December) and Byron’s personal physician and occasional homosexual partner, Dr John Polidori, the keeper of a diary during that whole time (Sunstein 1989: 117–22). That challenge began, Polidori tells us, with an immersion in earlier Gothic: a group reading of Fantasmagoriana (1812), a French translation by Jean Baptiste Eyriés of German Gothic tales (Mary Shelley 1982: 7n.) imitative of Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764; see Utterson 1813: i), and Byron’s recitation of Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’, just published in 1816, though mostly as its author had left it in 1800. From this confluence emerged a great deal of important writing: Byron’s own extensions of the Gothic in The Prisoner of Chillon and Other Poems (December 1816) and his verse-drama Manfred (1817) – leading later to the ‘Norman Abbey’ cantos in Don Juan (left incomplete when he died at Missolonghi in 1824) – then Mary’s novel Frankenstein (1818) and Polidori’s novella The Vampyre (1819), perhaps the two most influential of all Gothic fictions to this day, as well as P. B. Shelley’s tragedy The Cenci (1819), parts of his later poetry, and Mary’s subsequent novels and stories as she proceeded to outlive all of the men at Diodati.

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 112

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Gothic and Second-Generation Romanticism

113

The lasting power of these works, I want to show here, comes less from how these authors intensify the Gothic in ‘first-generation’ Romantic writing and more from how they radicalise the features and underpinnings of the Gothic mode itself. Walpole’s Otranto and the Preface to its second edition (1765) define the new ‘Gothic Story’ as a ‘blend’ of ‘two kinds of romance, the ancient’, the supernaturally assisted quest-tales of old Greece and medieval Catholicism as adapted by Shakespeare, Spenser and others, and ‘the modern’, the Protestant eighteenth-century fictions of Defoe, Richardson, Fielding and Smollett grounded, mostly, in empirically based motivations and actions (Walpole 2003: 65). Hence, since it was also inspired by the fear-based ‘sublime’ – that mind-expanding reaction to vast ruins and haunted landscapes in Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) – where the threat of being pulled into the abyss beneath remnants of a dying past is distanced, and thus exalted, by more modern representations of them in paintings or words (Burke 1990: 121–5), ‘Gothic’ writing for the page or stage is, from its start, a tug of war between retrogressive and progressive tendencies, like the ancient Roman god Janus with two faces. It simultaneously looks backwards towards dead or dissolving ways of thinking (Catholic ones, for the eighteenth-century English) and forwards towards progressive beliefs or prospects (Protestant and Enlightenment ‘realism’), without a clear resolution of these opposing inclinations. Such a dynamic tension, it turns out, from Walpole to the 1790s romances of Ann Radcliffe, is the most apt aesthetic mode for symbolising, albeit in hyperbolic disguises, conflicts harboured deep within Western culture between older and newer ideologies (differing systems of interlocking beliefs that configure what ‘reality’ supposedly is); Walpole’s Otranto and Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), for instance, can thus act out, while also obscuring, the opposing pulls in their readers between the ‘traditional’ aristocratic and Catholic ‘claims of landed property’, including the desire to inherit a predefined class or identity, and the ‘new’, more bourgeois and Protestant ‘claims of the private family’ where individuals develop in a less prefigured way out of their immediate environments, interactions, perceptions and acquired ideas (Clery 1995: 77). To be sure, the fear aroused by a shadowy ‘Gothic’ atmosphere comes from the upfront, if vague, threats of death implied by the most quasi-‘ancient’ features that Walpole helped establish: antiquated settings with secrets buried deep in their recesses; the lingering of old beliefs in supernatural causes alongside assumptions that deny such legends in favour of earthly explanations; the looming of spectral or

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 113

22/09/15 10:22 AM

114

Jerrold E. Hogle

monstrous beings, supernatural or psychological or both, because of the old beliefs and secrets; and characters feeling trapped, often in dark, sepulchral undergrounds, between the draws of these fading beliefs and more modern understandings, even as the latter long for some of the assumed sureties in the past they are now inclined to reject. But these immediate fears in fictions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in England (arousing each reader’s individual unconscious) are also intimations of deeper tugs of war, divisions among beliefs leading to broader cultural fears (the social and political unconscious) of what the economic and social changes of that era really meant in their process of leaving a retrograde, yet still appealing, past behind. I want to show how the ‘second-generation’ Romantics of Diodati ‘radicalise’ their uses of the Gothic in a literal sense by insisting on this ‘root’ of the Gothic mode, this use of its Janus-faced elements to symbolise the cultural, as well as the personal, unconscious of unresolved conflicts felt by their authors and audiences. This approach was a sharp turning-away from the first-generation Romantics, especially Wordsworth and Coleridge. For the unabashedly liberal Diodati writers, those two poets by 1815 had become apostates, increasingly Church-of-England conservatives, since their more progressive poems in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads (1798; see Hogle 1988: 40–3). Moreover, even in their earlier poetry, they half-echo their own disparagement of Gothic writing in their criticism by employing figurations reminiscent of Walpole, Radcliffe and even the Matthew Lewis of The Monk (1796) mainly to throw off and cast down in such Janus-faced symbols, or ‘abject’ in the senses defined by Julia Kristeva (1982: 3–18), those conflicts between retrogressive and emerging ideologies they could not resolve. They borrow the Gothic to sequester these knots of contradiction as grotesque and haunting ‘others’ so as to assert, by contrast, their own visions of higher imaginative unity to lift their readers above the many horrors and inequities in Western culture behind and in the wake of the French Revolution. In ‘Christabel’ Coleridge tries to draw his medieval virgin-heroine away from the death-bound fate of ‘Lenore’ in Gottfried August Bürger’s German-Gothic poem of that name (1774) by having her consciously behold and recoil from the reptilian ‘bosom and half her side’ revealed, as she undresses in Christabel’s bedroom, by the grandly beautiful virago Geraldine (Coleridge 1991: 18), the title character’s ‘dark alter ego’ (Hogle 2005: 18). At this Gothic moment of rising monstrosity, we dimly see ‘the embodiment of Christabel’s abjection, of all that she has thrown down’ (Miles 2001: 65) – assertive dominance, sexual aggression, the sort of female vampirism that

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 114

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Gothic and Second-Generation Romanticism

115

draws its life force out of others (as when Geraldine rises with engorged ‘heaving breasts’ after having ‘drunken deep’ in bed with a now-drained Christabel; Coleridge 1991: 30) – against which she will ultimately strive (Coleridge 1991: 43–4), like Radcliffe’s heroines, to be saved from the temptation of her own extreme tendencies. Yet, in so abjecting into a Gothic spectre the feared independence, power and unrestrained sexuality of women that many in the 1790s feared would emerge after the Revolution and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), ‘Christabel’ suggests, but also throws over into a Gothic vampire-figure (a monstrous locus, always, of blurred social, as well as biological, distinctions), the unresolved quandaries of that time over what alternative ways of life women should be free to choose and what those choices might mean for the dissolution of accepted boundaries of gender. For the Diodati circle, I would argue, this use of the Gothic to sequester and monster-ise post-Revolutionary debates, indecisions and human possibilities, a process employed just as much by Wordsworth (see Miles 2008: 62–97; Hogle 2012: 207–9), had to be turned inside out and to have the abjection of it revealed so that the Gothic could be used to expose what the dominant voices of England and the West were trying to abject and the very process of cultural and psychological abjection. After all, if the writers at Diodati were looking back to the 1790s, it was surely to the works of Mary’s father, William Godwin, and her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, who had died in 1797 from the after-effects of the younger Mary’s birth. Though they had become famous as revolutionary philosophers with her 1792 Vindication and his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), they had both turned to prose fiction to demonstrate how the best potentials of men and women ‘can be vitiated by false notions picked up from [the antiquated and oppressive] political, economic, and institutional environment’ described in their treatises (St Clair 1989: 120), so much so that Hugh Murray in 1805 named them among the founders of the ‘philosophical romance’ (Miles 2008: 145). In these novels, both pointedly employ the Gothic not just to depict, echoing Walpole’s Prince Manfred of Otranto, how political oppression ‘insensibly communicates its own spirit to our private transactions’ (Godwin’s own words in Political Justice, cited in Godwin 2000: 9). They also make the Gothic reveal how both oppressors and the oppressed are trapped in the crucibles of antiquated settings where Janus-faced knots of conflicting beliefs, themselves barely concealing the underlying traumas and dissolving distinctions of violent social antagonism and change – what Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek call the un-representable,

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 115

22/09/15 10:22 AM

116

Jerrold E. Hogle

boundary-blurring ‘Real’ (Žižek 1989: 1–7, 43–9) – threaten the very cultural transformations that could release the grip of regressive beliefsystems on human thought and action. In Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), Godwin establishes a Gothic pattern that he continues, with some differences, in later novels from St Leon (1799) to Fleetwood (1805) to Mandeville (1817; see Rajan 2010: 117–73). He has his narrating title-character, here a peasant educated enough to become the private secretary of Ferdinando Falkland, lord of the nearest manor, invoke a Gothic image of his master’s gloomy ‘countenance’ as ‘pregnant with meaning’ (the way suspicious faces in Radcliffe are) and thereby justify his own quest in an old, ‘small apartment’ for evidence locked within a hidden ‘trunk’ that could expose the ‘secret wound’ behind the ‘ruin of that Falkland’ that has made him the virtual ghost of the once alluring gentleman Williams secretly wishes that he himself could be (Godwin 2000: 63–5, 182). When Caleb consequently closes in on evidence of a ‘secret murder’ in Falkland’s past (2000: 445), his master, to keep him silent, threatens him with a perpetual ‘vigilance’ that is a private version of the ‘public and systematical despotism’ that places the lower classes under the surveillance of the higher everywhere (Godwin 2000: 218), as Caleb discovers when he is dogged by that very vigilance from all levels of England’s legal system after he tries to flee Falkland’s control. Yet a prime mover of Caleb’s quest for absolute truth is the same one that has driven his master to murder to maintain his chivalric standing: the attachment they both have from childhood to ‘books of narrative and romance’ (2000: 60), to fictions that provide long-standing justifications for the outdated system of ranks and privilege that Caleb wants to scale as much as to leave behind. Even when he finally forces a public confession of ‘the guilt of Falkland’ and its basis in ‘low-minded envy’, he has to confess to the reader his own guilt for the same inclination, making him a Gothic ‘phantom of departed honour’ as much as Falkland; he thereby admits his ultimate lack of any ‘character’ by the standards of the conflicted discourse of ‘romance’ that still circumscribes his understanding, even as it has invited him to quest beyond it and into the core of it (Godwin 2000: 433–4). What keeps humanity from being able to achieve the more equitable society of Political Justice is the very pull of ‘ancient romance’ and all it justifies against and within ‘modern romance’, the very irresolution that underlies the Gothic, here exposed as one foundation of ‘things as they are’, not as abjected as it is in ‘Christabel’.

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 116

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Gothic and Second-Generation Romanticism

117

Similarly, Mary Wollstonecraft’s novel The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria, published unfinished by Godwin among her Posthumous Works that he edited in 1798 (where he added her sketches for the final sections and his own preface and epilogue), makes Gothic ‘abodes of horror’ into metaphors for describing the asylum imprisoning the middle-class Maria and the serving-woman Jemima, all under the power allowed by law to ‘the selfish schemes’ of ‘tyrant’ men to keep women their possessions (Wollstonecraft 1980: 75–6). This ‘pile of buildings’ is viewed by those captive women only in the terms provided by a ‘romantic fancy’ which Maria admits to carrying over from ‘books, for which I had a passion’, that formed her ‘character’ as ‘romantic’ and so have controlled her mind since she was young (Wollstonecraft 1980: 128). The ‘eye of rage’ she fears seeing as she contemplates escaping may be more a projection of ‘her busy fancy’ loaded with romantic images than an external keeper performing a panoptic surveillance (a figure she has internalised; 1980: 84; see Foucault 1977). Even Jemima’s narrative of how she was once reduced to ‘the servility of a slave’ so debased that she seemed ‘a creature of another species’ (Wollstonecraft 1980: 102–4) – a wrenching anticipation of the tale told by the ‘creature’ to the title character who has formed and then abandoned him in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1982: 97–140) – cannot avoid falling, as per ‘ancient romance’, into saying that ‘Fate dragged me through the very kennels of society’, as though the cause were external to the human choices that classify some groups as subhuman, in part because even Jemima has ‘acquired a taste for literature during’ her ‘servitude’ under a ‘literary man’ (Wollstonecraft 1980: 113). Even though the rhetoric that the speakers of The Wrongs adopt takes genuine trauma from the inchoate level of the Real and elevates it to ‘the despicable shifts of poverty’ long feared as a living death in romances, the ‘literary tradition . . . depicted as causing female oppression’ in this novel is also rendered as ‘providing a means to counter it’; Wollstonecraft’s use of ‘romance’ calls on readers, including the narrators hearing each other’s stories and Godwin serving as editor, ‘to distinguish passive sentiment from active sensibility’, within the wording that pulls the latter towards the former, in a way that ‘transforms the reading of fiction into an activity that forces’ women and men ‘to reconsider their options’ and break the ageing frames of discourse that limit Maria’s, Jemima’s, and their own potentials (Carlson 2007: 32–4). The Gothic moments in The Wrongs of Woman, then, are employed, again more openly than they are in ‘Christabel’, to symbolise for readers and characters how they are caught at points of hesitation

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 117

22/09/15 10:22 AM

118

Jerrold E. Hogle

between confinement and liberation, the concealment and revealing of trauma, and, in those senses, the ideology that lingers on from ‘ancient romance’ while the potentials emerging in ‘modern romance’ struggle concurrently with and against it. Recalling such exemplars more than those of Wordsworth and Coleridge, then, the second-generation Romantics of Diodati each strove to match, in his or her own ways, Godwin’s and Wollstonecraft’s employments of the Gothic. They sought to reveal both the abjection and the tangle of deep-seated conflicts among ideologies calling for, yet preventing, social reform, although now they were those that still bedevilled Western civilisation after 1815 and the quests for viable identity or imaginative transcendence attempted within it. Byron, as it happens, by 1816 thought of himself, and hence his many avatars in his poems, as already a Janus-faced Gothic figure, an amalgam of Falkland and Caleb. The aristocratic credentials of his birth were being evacuated of their former functions, ‘like a ghost haunting an imaginary abbey’, and yet the ‘distinction’ for himself that might refill this emptiness came from his writing a ‘capital formation’ (the marketable Byronic hero) for audiences that both resisted some oppressions carried over from that ancestry, sympathising with Byron’s rebelliousness, but also longed for its vaguely ‘sublime’ powers, given their (and his) fears of lost human meaning in the face of industrialisation and the sheer getting-and-spending of capitalist business in which Byron himself felt trapped (Christenson 1993: 3–18). Consequently, in ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’, the dramatic monologue where his speaker-avatar is the imprisoned Genevan priest and freedom-fighter François Bonivard from the 1500s, Byron makes the ‘fetters’ of ‘Chillon’s dungeons deep and old’, in which all of Bonivard’s brothers have died before his eyes, into the signifiers of ‘Freedom’s fame’ because of their oppressive denial of it – but also into the ‘friends’ by whom the speaker has come to define his being; because of them he and the castle ‘spiders’ have become ‘all inmates of one place’, a metonym for the basic equality of beings in the wider world, so that physical release leaves this rebel still mentally immured in the Gothic ‘darkness of my dim abode’ (Byron 2010: 229–39, ll. 28, 6–8, 381–9). For Byron and his Bonivard, freedom is definable only as a future uncertainty within the limits of stillconfining institutions that strive, like them, to rise above the Real of the death and misery in their deepest recesses. Even more Janus-faced, though, is the Manfred of Byron’s 1817 tragedy, an amalgam of its author’s earlier self-images; the self-doubting, haunted ‘Manfred’ of Walpole’s Otranto; and the

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 118

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Gothic and Second-Generation Romanticism

119

aspiring yet promiscuous Faust in Part One of Goethe’s dramatic poem (the Faust of 1808) as translated by ‘Monk’ Lewis when he visited Diodati. To begin with, this Manfred blatantly dramatises the questions posed by the conflict fundamental to Gothic characters: on the one hand, is selfhood formed by the channelling of desire through accumulating experiences perceived and interpreted in the individual psyche, Manfred’s ‘spirit . . . within myself . . . Contending with low wants and lofty will’ (Byron 2010: 256–7, ll. 25–6, 44) – the stuff of ‘modern romance’? On the other hand, is it constructed theatrically from the staging of the would-be self that develops its ‘nature’ by performing for and responding to the settings and beings with which it interacts, many of them retaining shapes and beliefs from an older world? The latter is what appears in Manfred’s recollection of the search in his younger days for primal causes among ‘wither’d bones, and skulls’ until he found his own better ‘mind’ mirrored back to him by the entrance of the lovely ‘Astarte’, whose ‘features’ were ‘like to mine’ (Byron 2010: 263–4, ll. 79–83, 106–11) – an echo of ‘ancient romance’, partly as dramatised by Shakespeare and Goethe, as well as an abjection of some of the Real (the boundary-blurring incest of Byron with his sister). This tug of war, now more openly displayed, even compared to Caleb Williams, leads Byron’s Manfred to seek a resolution in this play’s highly Gothic final scene reminiscent of how Walpole ends his Otranto by facing his Manfred with the most gigantic spectre that has risen up from under the castle and has finally drawn together its earlier, haunting fragments. Yet even here a problem of conflicting ideologies is answered by a Gothic abjection and the resulting exposure of another such conflict. Hoping to assert his freedom of self-determination in the end, Byron’s Manfred tries to distance himself from all the Spirits raised by his Faustian powers and the people or memories he has called forth to help define his nature to him. But he still responds to the local Abbot’s bidding to ‘Recall a noble spirit’ by raising one final ‘dark and awful figure’ with a ‘brow of thunder-scars’ (Byron 2010: 281, ll. 51–77) that alludes to Milton’s and ‘Monk’ Lewis’s Satans, Goethe’s Mephistopheles, and ‘the figure Byron himself has created in so many poems’ (Sperry 1974: 198), as well as to the towering shade in Walpole’s ‘Gothic Story’. By facing and then releasing himself from this composite doppelgänger, Byron’s Manfred seems to empty out nearly all the leavings of ‘ancient romance’ (even his) that have often controlled him and to realise the irony of constructing the inner self so much from his abjections into hollow figures outside it. This

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 119

22/09/15 10:22 AM

120

Jerrold E. Hogle

admission of the Gothic’s inherent vacuity, recalling that the ghosts in Walpole are only signifiers of effigies, paintings or recollections and never of physical beings (see Hogle 2012: 203–4), admittedly enables a later Byron to use Gothic portraits, spectres and disguises in the Cantos XV–XVI of Don Juan set in Norman Abbey to satirise the hypocrisies in lingering efforts to preserve aristocratic descent by turning all these into theatrical props designed at the abbey to deceive Juan into, then free him from, an all-too-conventional marriage-plot (Byron 2010: 656–79). Back in Manfred, however, Byron has his (anti)hero cast off his final Gothic avatar before dying from natural causes, first because he can claim a superior modern ‘science’ as one basis of his knowledge but also because he looks forward to returning his soul to a ‘knowledge of our fathers’ even older than medieval romance ‘when earth / Saw men and spirits walking side by side / And gave [Manfred’s final Spirit] no supremacy’ (Byron 2010: 282, ll. 115–19). This is a ‘prelapsarian world’ of equality among levels of being (Sperry 1974: 199) that proposes the ideal of a future existence without hierarchy based on the old Greek mythology of a golden age where the natural and the supernatural blurred together. Manfred’s attempted transcendence of ideological conflicts, including the conflicted means of self-construction, attempts an abjection of them into an ‘awful figure’ that even subsumes Byron’s own previous self-fashionings, thereby also abjecting the more chaotic Real of his boundary-crossing life and his whole era of repeated violence extending from England to Turkey. At the same time, such a construction reveals that this abjection is itself covered over by a boundaryblurring, Janus-faced, hence equally Gothic combination of ‘ancient’ and ‘modern romance’ in which an imagined secular future, rejecting the Abbot’s religiosity, can be conceived of only in terms of a much older equalisation of human and spiritual levels. P. B. Shelley, on his side, well before Diodati, had already done more than Byron with the Gothic by publishing adolescent imitations of The Monk, St Leon, and Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya (1805– 6) in Zastrozzi (1810) and St Irvyne (1811), tales which so try to blend progressive philosophy and laments for a ‘world in which traditional values and beliefs have eroded’ that they both show a flagrant ‘unwillingness to fully “resolve” the myriad contradictions’ that result (Stephen Behrendt in P. B. Shelley 2002b: 13–30) and do not bring that paradox forward any more than ‘Christabel’ does. Though he seems to disavow that youthful foray in the half-satiric portrait of himself in his poem Alastor (1815; P. B. Shelley 2002a: esp. 75–7), the Diodati challenge, even if it prompted no immediate

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 120

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Gothic and Second-Generation Romanticism

121

response from him, lured this Shelley back to the Gothic mode by the end of that summer because he could now better articulate how the revisionist transformations of ancient beliefs he often tried to achieve were still pulled strongly back towards the old constructions they were trying to reconfigure. In the ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ (1816–17), the speaker, an atheist like Shelley, rejects the ‘poisonous names’ of ‘God and ghosts and heaven’ for describing the creative ‘power’ rising ‘unseen’ from his unconscious, then realises he can conceive of it only in another regressive way, as the ‘awful shadow’ that first came to him when he sought through ‘cave and ruin’ for ‘high talk with the departed dead’ (P. B. Shelley 2002a: 93–6; ll. 27, 1, 50–2). Both Zastrozzi and St Irvyne, in turn, are echoed with surprising frequency in the several great struggles between older and newer ‘epistemes’ (or ways of knowing) in this Shelley’s answer to Byron’s Manfred, the ‘Lyric Drama’ Prometheus Unbound (1818–20; see Rajan 2010: 46–81). Even this version of Prometheus, on whom Byron too had written in 1816, cannot complete the dethroning of the tyrannical Jupiter he himself raised up in the original Greek myth until he first calls on the depths of the Earth, and later his love Asia, to dredge up the ‘shadows dim’ of ‘awful thoughts’ by which he once conceived of ‘Powers’ as ‘sceptered Phantoms’, if only so he can now see their emptiness (P. B. Shelley 2002a: 214–15; I.146–7, 205–6). Still, the use of Gothic by this Shelley most reminiscent of Godwin and Wollstonecraft, particularly to attack the subjugation of women, is still his verse-tragedy not intended as a closet drama, The Cenci, based on a manuscript about that family’s history in Rome in the late 1500s and composed in Italy during breaks in the writing of his Prometheus. Recalling Walpole’s 1768 Gothic tragedy The Mysterious Mother with its keeping of a mother-son incest in the long-buried past until the mother confesses it just before her suicide (Walpole 2003: 244–7), the Cenci story, as P. B. Shelley recasts it, brings Count Cenci’s rape of his daughter Beatrice to the centre of the play, albeit abjected off stage, as a Gothic symbol less of brute sexuality than a figure for old-world patriarchal power held up, as in Walpole’s play, by the union of the Catholic Church and the nobility, still hanging on throughout the world in 1819. Cenci wants most to reverse Beatrice’s posture of resistance to male authority by making her visage express ‘such pangs as terror ill conceals’ – hints of a ‘darkness of the abyss’ (a Real of violently merging bodies) more deeply horrible than Burke’s terror-sublime can suggest (P. B. Shelley 2002a: 143) – all made visible by the ‘quivering lip’ he hopes to see on her face

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 121

22/09/15 10:22 AM

122

Jerrold E. Hogle

instead of Beatrice’s initial serenity of assumed moral superiority (P. B. Shelley 2002a: 148; I, ii, 110–11). Yet her ultimate response to his assault, her calculated murder of the Count through male surrogates and its concealment, as in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, raises the question most basic to tragedy since the ancient Greeks posed again in Shelley’s Preface: is the tragic heroine here so much victim of her socio-historical circumstances that she could not help thinking in terms of revenge, like everyone around her, or did she have a free-willed choice, in this case to select a ‘forbearance’ that accepts a more Protestant view that ‘no person can truly be dishonoured by the act of another’ (2002a: 142)? The answer seems easy until the audience faces a Janus-face: Beatrice’s way of seeing the world as controlled by an old religion that is ‘interwoven with the whole fabric of life’, inside and outside individuals, while she seeks, like Caleb Williams or Maria, to escape its dictates to a future outside it (P. B. Shelley 2002a: 143). As she strives in her final prison-scene to rise in thought above ‘the only world I know’, she worries, if she abandons her Catholicism, that she will soon confront ‘No God, no Heaven, no earth in the void world’, and so she must re-centre this vacancy on an absolute Pater Noster waiting for her after death. It/he, however, turns out to be, as with Walpole’s and Byron’s Manfred, the ‘form which tortured me on earth’ the most, here ‘my father’s spirit’ opening ‘his hellish arms’ as he was sanctioned to do by Catholic patriarchy (P. B. Shelley 2002a: 200; V, iv, 57–69), a Gothic figuration into which she abjects father-daughter incest beneath what she further abjects, the escape and inescapability of resisting Catholic ideology by the means that this same ideology provides. Even when Beatrice finally recovers some resignation by telling her brother, as Hamlet tells Horatio, to relate her true story, she leaves her future to a tale told within an ideological hegemony tragically like the one that P. B. Shelley fears may keep dragging Italy and all of Europe backwards. For him that drag, after all, is still omnipresent in his adaptation of Petrarch and Dante, The Triumph of Life, the terza rima dreamvision he left unfinished when he drowned in 1822. There the main ‘powers’ that keep most people enslaved within Life’s parade of its captives are the Gothic ‘phantoms’ that nearly everyone projects before their mind’s eye (P. B. Shelley 2002a: 498–500; ll. 480–543), as though those are the self-images they should all obey, not what they really are, the ghost-like fabrications promulgated by waning systems of belief that keep a retrograde view of life triumphing over nearly all people by their own consent.

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 122

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Gothic and Second-Generation Romanticism

123

Meanwhile, though, it would seem that the driving concerns are very different in another Gothic text published in 1819 in the wake of Diodati: Polidori’s The Vampyre, first printed as if it were authored by his Diodati host, even though it actually builds on a separate ‘Fragment’ that Byron briefly attempted for his ‘contest’ and then published with his poem Mazeppa later in 1819 (see Mary Shelley 1982: 260, n. 2). In The Vampyre Polidori develops the ‘Augustus Darvell’ of that ‘Fragment’, the supposed heir of an ‘ancient family’ who guides the younger narrator to an old Turkish cemetery that turns out to harbour Darvell’s own grave, whereupon he turns ‘nearly black’ and dies back into his tomb, as though he were dissolving the division between races as well as between life and death (Mary Shelley 1982: 260–5). Polidori then adds the vampire figures in ‘Christabel’, Byron’s own The Giaour (1813; Byron 2010: 142–3; ll. 755–86), and even Mary’s Frankenstein (where Victor thinks of his creature as ‘my own vampire, my own spirit let loose from the grave . . . to destroy all that was dear to me’ [Mary Shelley 1982: 72]). On top of all that, Polidori infuses this composite with his own 1818–19 sense of Byron, the master who betrayed and dismissed his doctor-lover after the Diodati summer (Macdonald 1991: 99–104). The result in The Vampyre is the predatory, if cadaverous, ‘Lord Ruthven’, named for ‘Clarence de Ruthven’, the given name of the title Lord in Lady Caroline Lamb’s novel Glenarvon (1816; Macdonald 1991: 98), her attack on the Byron before Diodati who had seduced and betrayed her as much as he had Polidori. Nevertheless, this novella is actually quite close in its handling of the Gothic to Godwin, Wollstonecraft, P. B. Shelley and even the Byron it excoriates. The attraction in Ruthven for everyone in Polodori’s Vampyre is not the late-Victorian seductiveness of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in the 1897 Gothic novel made possible by Polidori’s linking of the vampire to the male aristocracy. For Polidori, the Gothic vampire-lord has only a ‘dead gray eye’ unable to read the thoughts of others, a ‘deadly hue’ in his ‘face’ incapable of showing any ‘strong emotion’, and merely ‘the reputation of a winning tongue’, as though there is really nothing (or the nothing of death) inside an ‘outline’ apparently ‘beautiful’ (Polidori 1990: 27–31). The desirability of this hollow spectre comes only from ‘false notions’ thrown into it by others, as in the case of the ‘young gentleman . . . Aubrey’, who, like Caleb facing Falkland or Maria her apparent male protector in the asylum, projects ‘romantic feeling’ on what he takes to be a ‘hero’ because ‘romance’ itself is the basis of his

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 123

22/09/15 10:22 AM

124

Jerrold E. Hogle

‘fancy’ (Polidori 1990: 30–1). Even after Aubrey’s initial illusions have been shattered by how often Ruthven draws in and reflects back the ‘profligate’ vampirisings of him by most people (Polidori 1990: 33), the young man is transfixed as well as terrified when he realises that Ruthven can, like Byron’s Darvell or a perversion of Christ, die and ‘rise again’. At that Janus-faced moment Aubrey feels as if ‘imagination had conjured up the image his mind was resting upon’, an older image so already fixed in his preconscious by ‘romance’ and legend that it continues to be a projection by which he defines the ‘real’ even when its norms seem to be violated (Polidori 1990: 61). As with Manfred facing his final spectre and Beatrice beholding her father’s gaze in her imagined afterlife, Polidori’s Aubrey ends up caught between irreconcilables and sinking into death, becoming ‘emaciated’ with ‘glassy’ eyes that mirror the visage of the un-dead Ruthven whom he has made the external definer of his being (Polidori 1990: 65). The Gothic figure in The Vampyre finally abjects more than just the violent cruelty and boundary-crossing sexuality (again, levels of the Real) that Polidori found in Byron. It abjects yet exposes, as do Byron and P. B. Shelley but in Polidori’s own fashion, the Real of an irresolvable antagonism: the impossibility of entirely divorcing the dead letter of past imaginings – and thus older ways of perceiving – from the very efforts to overcome them that they inspired in the first place. Even so, the greatest ‘second-generation’ achievement to emerge from the convergences at Diodati remains Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818; 1831). Though it develops more than Manfred several implications in the science-writing of that moment (also discussed at Diodati), particularly the claims of Erasmus Darwin about infusing dead matter with the ‘electricity’ now widely viewed as the universal life force (Mary Shelley 1982: 227), Frankenstein draws together a wide array of Gothic pre-texts: the oversized spectre composed of dead fragments in The Castle of Otranto; the imposing vampire-figure from ‘Christabel’ who is also (in its emerging violence) the alter ego of the title character’s repressed tendencies; the desire-hate relationship between an obsessive projector of ‘romance’ and the figure he initially creates in that image and then finds repellant (be they Caleb Williams and Falkland or Aubrey and Lord Ruthven); Wollstonecraft’s Maria – and Jemima – figures, both victims of deliberate social degradation, here recast in a male monster who is placed in an abjected (hence culturally female) position; the Gothicising of Prometheus by P. B. Shelley and Byron that makes this creator of human life and the provider of fire to

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 124

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Gothic and Second-Generation Romanticism

125

humanity, at least somewhat like Victor Frankenstein, still haunted by the ‘sceptered Phantom’ of punishment for defying older schemes of authority that still linger; and the revolutionary young intellectual driven by a regressive self-image, as in Alastor or the ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ or Byron’s Manfred, to search among sepulchers and bones for a basis of self-worth, all within the ongoing purpose of ‘philosophical romance’ to extend the call by Mary’s parents for fairer treatment and better education for women and the working classes, both alluded to powerfully by the outcast ‘creature’. As a result, Frankenstein’s ‘monster’ becomes the most compositing, abjecting and Janus-faced of Gothic ‘others’. He/it takes into his very mixed composition what Frankenstein (like Mary) projects and abjects there: a blurring of the boundary between life and death (hinting at the more abjected Real), the simultaneous attractions of medieval alchemy and modern ‘electrical’/anatomical science, itself caught between retrograde and progressive tendencies (Mary Shelley 1982: 35–6, 45–6), and a celebration of revolutionary thinkers (Coleridge? P. B. Shelley? Byron? Polidori?) alongside a condemnation of them for throwing off their actual need for women, impoverished labourers, and everyday interrelations (all of which Victor abjects into the creature while striving to dissociate them from his process of creation). In the creature’s yellow/white/black-coloured face (Mary Shelley 1982: 52) reminiscent of Byron’s cross-racial Darvell, we even see the horror (for many) of potential racial mixture emerging from the regressive subjugations of British imperialism (see Malchow 1993: 90–124) intermingled with sympathy for the racially ‘othered’ by a Godwin-Shelley circle that argued progressively against colonialism and slavery and in favour of a sympathy common to all humanity before the persistent divisiveness of the receding past can prevent such a brave future world. This supremely Gothic-Romantic novel, then, allows its largely middle-class readers to either confront the deepest ambivalences in Western culture in a symbolic revelation that Gothically exposes the process of their abjection or to reinforce abjection by pretending that all of it is just an improbable fiction of the sort ‘modernity’ has left behind in ‘ancient romance’. That Janus-facedness is what the Gothic has enabled since Walpole first constituted the ‘Gothic Story’, and Frankenstein is the most widely allusive fulfilment of that mixing of modes that emerged when the writers of the Diodati conclave radically took it back to its most fundamental contradictions in their forceful reinvigoration of its process of abjection, there and in all the Gothic writings they produced between June 1816 and the deaths of Polidori and P. B. Shelley in 1821–2.

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 125

22/09/15 10:22 AM

126

Jerrold E. Hogle

To be sure, Mary Shelley, as she outlived the Diodati men, never composited nor abjected as many cultural contradictions again as she does in Frankenstein. Still, Mary’s later writings often carry forward, if not as comprehensively, the Diodati circle’s penchant for employing the Gothic to half reveal and half obscure the Janusfaced beliefs underlying, threatening yet also enabling early nineteenth-century attempts at post-Revolutionary retrenchment. In Valperga (1823), her Gothically inflected historical novel titled after a castle in Italy that seems the very opposite of Walpole’s Otranto – since it is the seat of the Countess ‘Euthanasia’, an advocate for republican resistance to despotism – Mary nevertheless positions its owner as one of the two women, the other being the prophetic ‘Beatrice’ recollective of Dante’s Vita Nuova as well as The Cenci, who divide the attention, as do Matilda and Isabella with Walpole’s Manfred, of the ‘Napoleon-like Italian princeling, Castruccio of Lucca’, a real-life late-medieval adventurer and conqueror (Joseph Lew in Fisch et al. 1993: 162). This Castruccio is heavily fictionalised to deceptively embody ‘the magnetism of despotism’ and is placed in an amorous tug of war with two entirely fictional women, each exemplars of different – really future-oriented – ‘feminine’ ideologies of politics where ‘women [can] participate fully in both the private and public realms’; this semi-Walpolean positioning allows Valperga to explore (while abjecting far into the past) ‘the struggle between opposing romantic ideologies’ in which Mary herself did not always agree even with the now-dead Percy Bysshe, but in which the Wollstonecraftian call towards a real prospect of gender equality, despite at least two different avenues towards it in this novel, is finally wrenched regressively, by way of Castruccio’s ‘magnetism’ and medieval culture, ‘into the tapestry of male history’, a Janusface looking backwards (Lew in Fisch et al. 1993: 163–8). Mary’s later The Last Man (1826), by contrast, seems to pull entirely backwards while seeming futuristic, since there is no one left besides Lionel Verney, the narrator of the title, even to read the pages he writes alone in the twenty-first century, themselves highly allusive to very ancient texts. These pages are gothically discovered as epitaphic ‘Sybilline leaves’ within a cave in 1818, as though Mary was looking back from the publication of Frankenstein to a Diodati circle of male geniuses, the inspirations for several Last Man characters, now all gone by 1824 (Audrey Fisch in Fisch et al. 1993: 278–9). But this ominous future surfacing in the present from out of a gothicised past ultimately makes sense when Lionel’s story recounts the worldwide progression of a plague (based on an actual one that began in India in 1823) that he describes as ‘a totalizing and self-aggrandizing

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 126

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Gothic and Second-Generation Romanticism

127

form’, another giant Walpolean spectre, and it comes to resemble a series of supposedly ‘progressive’ male leaders who cannot finally stop its spread because they all fall back, if differently, into oppressive absolutisms that keep alive ‘the ruins of our old world’ (Fisch et al. 1993: 270, 278). This Janus-like potentiality is what Mary’s readers can expect in the future as really emerging out of a Gothic past if its ideologies hang on too long while others, embodied by women, fight unsuccessfully against it, all of which is abjected/ revealed in ‘leaves’ from an age-old cave. The particular Gothic dynamics of the second-generation Romantics did survive the death of most of them into the Victorian era, where they encountered both strong support and resistance, as other studies show (see Milbank 1992 and Smith and Hughes 2012). But there can be no doubt of the distinctive Gothic achievements of these writers, especially because of their grasp and fulfilment of the fundamental drives in the Gothic that developed in the eighteenth century and that they vividly reestablished in the nineteenth century.

References Burke, Edmund [1757; 1759] (1990), A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Byron, George Gordon, Lord (2010), Byron’s Poetry and Prose: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. Alice Levine, New York: W. W. Norton. Carlson, Julie (2007), England’s First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Christenson, Jerome (1993), Lord Byron’s Strength: Romantic Writing and Commercial Society, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Clery, E. J. (1995), The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor [1816] (1991), Christabel, intro. Jonathan Wordsworth, Oxford: Woodstock Books. Fisch, Audrey A, Anne K. Mellor, and Esther H. Schor (eds) (1993), The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond ‘Frankenstein’, New York: Oxford University Press. Foucault, Michel [1975] (1977), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Random House. Godwin, William [1794; 1831] (2000), Caleb Williams; or, Things as They Are, ed. Gary Handwerk and A. A. Markley, Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press. Hogle, Jerrold E. (1988), Shelley’s Process: Transference and the Development of his Major Works, New York: Oxford University Press.

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 127

22/09/15 10:22 AM

128

Jerrold E. Hogle

Hogle, Jerrold E. (2005), ‘ “Christabel” as Gothic: The Abjection of Instability’, Gothic Studies, 7: 18–28. Hogle, Jerrold E. (2012), ‘Gothic’, in Joel Faflak and Julia M. Wright (eds), A Handbook of Romanticism Studies, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 195–212. Kristeva, Julia [1980] (1982), Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press. Macdonald, D. L. (1991), Poor Polidori: A Critical Biography of the Author of ‘The Vampyre’, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Malchow, H. L. (1993), ‘Frankenstein’s Monster and Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Past and Present, 139: 90–130. Milbank, Alison (1992), Daughters of the House: Modes of the Gothic in Victorian Fiction, London: Macmillan. Miles, Robert (2001), ‘Abjection, Nationalism and the Gothic’, in Fred Botting (ed.), Essays and Studies 2001: The Gothic, Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, pp. 47–70. Miles, Robert (2008), Romantic Misfits, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Polidori, John William [1819] (1990), The Vampyre, intro. Jonathan Wordsworth, Oxford: Woodstock Books. Rajan, Tilottama (2010), Romantic Narrative: Shelley, Hays, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft [1818] (1982), Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text, ed. James Rieger, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shelley, Percy Bysshe (2002a), Shelley’s Poetry and Prose: A Norton Critical Edition, 2nd edn, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, New York: W. W. Norton. Shelley, Percy Bysshe (2002b), ‘Zastrozzi’ and ‘St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian’, ed. Stephen Behrendt, Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press. Smith, Andrew, and William Hughes (eds) (2012), Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Sperry, Stuart (1974), ‘Byron and the Meaning of “Manfred” ’, Criticism 16: 189–202. St Clair, William (1989), The Godwins and the Shelleys: The Biography of a Family, London: Faber and Faber. Sunstein, Emily (1989), Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality, Boston, MA: Little, Brown. Utterson, Sarah E. (ed. and trans.) (1813), Tales of the Dead, Principally Translated from the French, London: White, Cochraine. Walpole, Horace [1764 and 1768] (2003), ‘The Castle of Otranto’ and ‘The Mysterious Mother’, ed. Frederick S. Frank, Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press. Wollstonecraft, Mary [1788 and 1798] (1980), ‘Mary’ and ‘The Wrongs of Woman’, ed. Gary Kelly, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Žižek, Slavoj (1989), The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso.

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 128

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Chapter 7

Political Gothic Fiction Robert Miles

In writing about Political Gothic fiction in the Romantic period two vexed questions confront us. First, in what sense is any Gothic fiction of the period political? Secondly, what is the difference between political Gothic fiction and the Jacobin novel? The essayist and critic William Hazlitt famously commented that Ann Radcliffe’s romances ‘derived part of their interest, no doubt, from the supposed tottering state of all old structures at the time’ (Hazlitt 1907: 73). With his dissenting background Hazlitt understood this interest to be political (Paulin 1999); the ‘tottering of old structures’ clearly signalled the present Revolutionary age, and readers were thrilled with either eagerness or horror at the idea, depending on their political outlook. The connection between the Gothic and Revolution was reinforced by the Marquis de Sade, who claimed that Radcliffe’s and Lewis’s novels were ‘the necessary fruits of the revolutionary tremors felt by the whole of Europe’ (De Sade 1990: 49). This general connection creates the problem: if all Gothic novels refract ‘representations of Revolution’ (Paulson 1983), then no Gothic novels are political. Or rather, politics here is no more specific than it is in David Punter’s seminal discussion of Marx and Freud in his concluding chapter to the The Literature of Terror (1980), in which the Gothic is read as a kind of dystopic imagining in the grim shadow of a new, capitalist Oedipus (Punter 1980). But that, clearly, is not what is understood by the phrase ‘political Gothic fiction’. The phrase suggests that there is a particular strand of Gothic fiction that is more political than other strands. The difficulty here is that this strand already has a name – the ‘Jacobin novel’ (Kelly 1976; Bellamy 1998). More recently it has been paired with ‘Anti-Jacobin’ fiction, novels of parody and reaction, which may include a particularly conservative strand of Gothic that James Watt calls ‘Loyalist’ (Watt 1999: 2–4; Grenby 2001;

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 129

22/09/15 10:22 AM

130

Robert Miles

Wallace 2009). A work may belong to more than one genre, and a genre may have more than one name (Cohen 1991: 88–90). Still, the question needs to be asked: is political Gothic fiction another way of referring to the Jacobin novel, and/or to its reactionary shadow, the Anti-Jacobin? If the answer is ‘yes’, then we hardly need the category of ‘political Gothic fiction’ at all. My argument in this essay is that Gothic political fiction is actually an under-theorised category; I suggest that it is so because the category falls between the two familiar stools I have outlined above. Either we stop thinking about the topic, because it seems so obvious – all Gothic novels are political because they are produced in a Revolutionary age – or because our thinking slots into a separate critical category – the Jacobin novel – which, in the wake of Gary Kelly’s work, seems brilliantly clear and compelling. I shall argue that some Gothic novels are indeed more political than others, and that while the strands of political Gothic overlap with the Jacobin/Anti-Jacobin novel, they are not one and the same. To make a critical approach towards the category of political Gothic fiction we first need to understand how the word ‘Gothic ‘ itself changed in meaning during the 1790s. This aspect of the story is well known. The word ‘Gothic’ was increasingly politicised during the eighteenth century as a byword for, among other things, the ancient constitution and Englishness, both ultimately situated in a Saxon or Gothic past (Kliger 1952; Smith 1987). It was linked to a native style of architecture and to notions of original genius as expressed in English culture, above all by Shakespeare (Drakakis and Townshend 2008). As such its valency was overwhelmingly positive. It was broadly shared across the spectrum of Whig opinion, from the Saxonists, who used its prestige to argue for the American Revolution, to aristocratic civic humanists who draped themselves, patriotically, in the Gothic (Miles 2007). Matters changed with Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Edmund Burke’s dramatic intervention into what had otherwise been a widespread acclamation of the Bastille’s fall in 1789. Burke sought to defend the English tradition, including the tradition of English constitutional politics, against the threat posed by the French Jacobins, regarded by Burke as so many demented philosophes or ‘aeronauts’ hell-bent on setting the fantasies of Enlightenment reason against the cherished wisdom of immemorial practice. Against this threat Burke pitted English culture, manners, habits and prejudices, embracing and defending, as he did so, the legacy of England’s Gothic patrimony, a cherished economic, cultural and political system that he summed up in the

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 130

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Political Gothic Fiction

131

word ‘chivalry’ (Burke 1790: 113). ‘Jacobin’ writers such as William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft rapidly took up the connection. For them, Gothic ‘chivalry’ was backward, regressive and reactionary, mobilising a range of antediluvian significations summed up in the word ‘feudal’. It inculcated ‘proud submission’ (Clery and Miles 2000: 245) or forelock tugging in the masses, and ruined the families of the upper classes through the rigours and exclusions of primogeniture (Wollstonecraft 1790: 44–5). In A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), Wollstonecraft deploys the term ‘Gothic’ on five occasions, each time to critique a feudal practice endorsed by Burke. For Thomas Christie, Burke’s political ideology was a ‘deformed Gothic idol’ (Clery and Miles 2000: 245), while for John Thelwall, subscription to Burke’s version of the constitution was to be sentenced to a mental ‘Bastille’, a cemetery of the living (Thelwall 1796: 15). As mentioned, the ways in which the Jacobin attack on Burke radicalised the meaning of the word ‘Gothic’ is well known, but it begs the trickier question of how this attack inflected Gothic fiction. The usual answer starts with William Godwin and his ‘doctrine of necessity’ as outlined in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793). Godwin subscribed to the principle that ‘the characters of men originate in their external circumstances’ (qtd in Kelly 1976: 16). In the introduction to Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), the fictionalisation of some of the philosophical principles outlined in Political Justice, Godwin informs the reader that ‘It is now known to philosophers, that the spirit and character of the Government intrudes itself into every rank of society’ (Godwin 1988: 4). Within the ‘progressive nature of a single story’ Godwin set out to provide a ‘general review’ of the current pernicious system of tyranny, that is to say, of ‘the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism by which man becomes the destroyer of man’ (Godwin 1988: 4). We are what our environment makes us. That political environment might very well be described as ‘chivalric’, as embodied in Ferdinando Falkland, and Falkland, as much as Caleb Williams, is its victim. Which is to say that the usual answer to the question of ‘what is Political Gothic fiction?’ takes us down the route of the Jacobin novel, with its didactic, reforming mission aimed at extirpating any nostalgic longing the reader might have for the remnants of the feudal or ‘Gothic’ system, including attachment to the polished manners of chivalry. Godwin’s close collaborators, such as Elizabeth Inchbald and Thomas Holcroft, or more distant ones, such as Robert Bage, all share Godwin’s anti-Burkean position. But what of the novelists who

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 131

22/09/15 10:22 AM

132

Robert Miles

were not part of Godwin’s circle? If political Gothic fiction is not just a synonym for the Jacobin novel, we need to start somewhere from within the Gothic’s symbolic constitution, rather than from ‘chivalry’, which lies on the debate’s surface. The place we need to start from, I suggest, is Tom Paine’s critique of Burke in Rights of Man: Being an Answer to Mr Burke’s Attack on the French Revolution (1791). Of course, the ‘Revolution controversy’, as Marilyn Butler has called it, is also Gary Kelly’s point of departure, and that between Burke and Paine was its most salient exchange, even more so than that between Godwin and Burke (Butler 1984). We seem, here, to be retreating deeper into the territory of the Jacobin novel. However, there is a moment in Paine’s response to Burke – which Burke subsequently takes up in his Thoughts on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace (1796) – that takes us closer to the genre’s political edge. The moment I have in mind concerns Burke’s use of ‘mortmain’ as a metaphor for the sacred compact or ‘contract’ between the dead and the living, a compact we break when we build a constitution from scratch, from the ground up, and from theory, as the Jacobins were supposedly doing in France. Burke praises the policy of adhering to tradition as follows: This policy appears to me to be the result of profound reflection, or rather the happy effect of following nature, which is wisdom without reflection, and above it. A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views. People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors. Besides, the people of England well know that the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation and a sure principle of transmission, without at all excluding a principle of improvement. . . . Whatever advantages are obtained by a state proceeding on these maxims are locked fast as in a sort of family settlement, grasped as in a kind of mortmain forever. By a constitutional policy, working after the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit our government and our privileges in the same manner in which we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives. The institutions of policy, the goods of fortune, the gifts of providence are handed down to us, and from us, in the same course and order. (Burke 1790: 47–8)

For Burke, the wisdom of the ages – and the prosperity and benefits it brings – cascades down through the generations. Political innovation is motivated by individualism, the selfish principle; tearing up the contract with the past may empower the present, but it deprives the future. Directly responding to this passage, Paine

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 132

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Political Gothic Fiction

133

argues that ‘Mr Burke is contending for the authority of the dead over the rights and freedom of the living’ (Paine 1791:10). Paine denies that the dead have any such right, and that it is ludicrous to imagine that the dead should be treated, either legally or morally, on the same footing as the quick: ‘The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies’ (Paine 1791: 9). Paine further argues that it was ever thus. All innovation means deviation from the past, and as Burke accepts the progressive curve of history, from Magna Carta to the Bill of Rights, his position is in any event self-defeating. The reason I suggest that this aspect of the Revolution controversy is a better place to start for grasping politics in the Gothic is that it touches upon a metaphor that is at the centre of the genre’s symbolic constitution: the dead hand of the past, or ‘mortmain’. According to Horace Walpole, this is where the Gothic begins: his novel was prompted by a dream of an ‘ancient castle’; awakening, he recalls only the vision of a ‘gigantic hand in armour’ resting on a banister. As the story develops the armoured hand comes to feature as a synecdoche for the spectral body of Alfonso, but also as a metonym for the feudal order itself, which, in the logic of mortmain, holds us in its palsied grip (Walpole 2001: xxiv). At this point we need to resist the temptation to translate the mortmain metaphor into the unfinished business of the past, or, as we find it in The Castle of Otranto, echoing the grimmer parts of the Old Testament, into ‘the sins of the fathers’ (Walpole 2001: 6–7). Of course, that is part of what it signifies, but mortmain also has a primary, legal meaning: an instrument for restricting the present, of enforcing a prohibition, generally, against fragmenting an estate. In England, mortmain was primarily associated with the legal instruments entailing estates in support of primogeniture, that is, the inheritance or transmission of wealth and property through the first-born son. In the Gothic, mortmain also becomes the will of the father echoing down through the generations, along with his sins. For the Jacobins, this primarily meant the aristocratic commitment to dynastic marriages, with the inter-generational conflict that they breed. In other words, mortmain is political, as both Burke and Paine well understood. We can see this more clearly if we step back and review the different premises from which Burke addresses the issue. Of the two thinkers, Burke is the more modern, in the sense that his self-conscious articulation of the merits of tradition was something new, something brought about by the Revolutionary age in which he lived (Paulin 1999: 148). Paine, on the other hand, stands on

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 133

22/09/15 10:22 AM

134

Robert Miles

ground mapped out by John Locke over a century earlier. For Locke, political personhood precedes entry into the social order. We are born with inalienable ‘natural’ rights, to life, liberty and property. We negotiate these rights when we enter into the social contract. If the sovereign negates the contract, and tramples on our rights, we have the right to rebel, or at least to renegotiate the contract, as was done, for instance, in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, or in the American one that followed between 1765 and 1783. For Burke, there is no personhood, and certainly no personhood endowed with rights, prior to our socialisation (De Grazia 1991: 8; Wallace 2009). We are embedded in our society. It makes us who we are, and it is entirely chimerical to imagine that we have an existence independent of the culture – the manners and mores – in and through which we are constituted. It follows from this that the political imperative is to nurture the culture that makes us, to push forward those traits that strengthen our society, and to push against those that weaken it. We also begin, not outside the society to which we must contribute, but enmeshed within it. The difference is crystallised in the debate about mortmain. For Paine, mortmain means that one generation can expunge the rights of another as they rule from ‘beyond the grave’. For a true Lockean, such a proposition would be anathema. For Burke, mortmain is an example of how the past, present and future are mutually, and beneficially, entwined. On this point, Burke is precise: ‘You will observe that from Magna Charta to the Declaration of Right [sic] it has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert our liberties as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity’ (Burke 1790: 47). For Burke, Britain’s entire constitutional settlement is ‘entailed’, that is, governed by ‘mortmain’, and not just primogeniture. In Thoughts on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace, Burke renews his attack on the Jacobins, producing, in the process, a new phrase for England’s unwritten constitutional settlement, both entailed and entailing; he calls it ‘the old Germanic or Gothic custumary’ [sic] (Burke 1796: 49), meaning the continuum between the legal and political inheritance that we enjoy, courtesy of the Saxons, and their chivalric manners. John Thelwall, recently acquitted in the treason trials for imagining the king’s death, makes a telling response: Are these the institutions which Mr B. wishes to support? Are these the perfect models of social jurisprudence which it is blasphemy to approach with the unhallowed finger of innovation or reform? Are

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 134

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Political Gothic Fiction

135

these . . . the regular and orderly fabrics of the ancient legitimate ‘government of states,’ whose plans and materials were ‘drawn from the old Germanic or Gothic customary,’ and of which those famous architects, ‘the civilians, the jurists, and the publicists,’ have given us such flattering draughts, ground plots and elevations? If they are, perish, I say, such temples of oppression and injustice! Away with your idle jargon of venerable antiquity . . . they must perish; they ought to perish; and they will. They are Augean stables that must be cleansed. They are Bastilles of intellect, which must be destroyed. They are insulting mausoleums of buried rights, and are ready to totter from their base; for the day of the resurrection is near at hand; and ‘the vail [sic] of the temple shall be rent in twain’. (Thelwall 1796: 14–15)

Through a range of architectural metaphors, Thelwall makes several points that are, in a sense, ‘foundational’ for political Gothic fiction: first, superstition is applied as a damning epithet, not to Catholicism, but to the worship of the English constitution as a literal, unchanging fact and source of all authority. Secondly, he raises the question of political legitimacy; and thirdly, he characterises the worship of the constitution as a form of mental imprisonment (‘Bastilles of intellect’). He also returns, obliquely, to the notion of the ‘dead hand’ of mortmain in the phrase ‘buried rights’. As we saw earlier, Hazlitt’s reference to ‘tottering’ was cast wryly backwards, from the vantage point of 1818, after it had become clear that the ‘Gothic’ underpinnings extolled by Burke were strengthening rather than weakening. Twenty years earlier, Thelwall is still optimistically looking forward to their eventual fall, hence his final, apocalyptic note (the rending of the veil), in which Burke’s flimsy idols will be smashed and thrown into the dustbin of history. The relevance of the debate between Burke and the Jacobins endures to this day; it is still being fought out, as one can see, for instance, in the United States, where for some the constitution is a foundational text, sacred, and fixed for all time (the followers of Burke), whereas for others, it is subject to change and amendment according to the needs and views of the living (the followers of Paine) (Mount 2014). For some, the literal text, as originally intended, is the fount of all legitimacy; for others, such an interpretation turns it into a dead hand. Similar divisions played themselves out in the political rhetoric of 1790s Britain. For the Jacobins, personhood exists prior to the social contract. We are born with inalienable rights to liberty and property (including our labour); the bargain that we strike, when we enter the social contract, is contingent on the bargain being kept. This outlook is premised on radical notions of equality. Legitimacy

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 135

22/09/15 10:22 AM

136

Robert Miles

flows from the ‘general will’, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau styles it, or from the ‘people’, as in the Declaration of Independence (Taylor 1992). The people are sovereign, not the paper (or Bill of Rights) that records previous expressions of that sovereignty. For Burke, we are constrained, and thankfully so, by the constitutional history that precedes us. It, not temporary opinion, is sovereign. Political legitimacy flows from the compact with the past, not from the passions, and notions, of the moment. Burke’s position entrenches the inequality of the English social system; hence the paradox of the Whiggish Burke, who, with his passion for constitutional monarchy, supports both democratic principles and the House of Lords, both the freeborn Briton and the privileges of an hereditary aristocracy. For the Jacobins, ‘rank’ is anathema, a feudal holdover to be dissipated by the brisk, equality-bearing winds of modernity. Read through this prism, the Gothic is inherently political. As Jorge Luis Borges long ago commented, texts create their own precursors (Borges 1964); the Revolution controversy of the 1790s retrospectively reveals a latent meaning in Walpole’s Gothic fantasy of the dead hand reaching into the present from beyond the grave. Otranto is allegedly the work of a wily Catholic priest keen on impressing the belief, among the credulous, that the social and political order is divinely ordained. Providence ensures that the usurped castle of Otranto will be denied to the posterity of the usurper and restored to the legitimate bloodline. This frame is, of course, highly ironic; the providential narrative is meant to be read as Catholic humbug, as the reactionary propaganda of the Counter-Reformation put under pressure by the victorious Protestants. Read through the prism of the 1790s and the Revolution controversy, the ‘dead hand’ becomes a metonym for the feudal system itself (enmeshed in the ‘great chain of being’), and its capacity to imprison all those who fall within its deadening grasp: even the survivors, Theodore and Isabella, endure in a state of ruined melancholy. In Gothic fictions of the 1790s, much the same applies, particularly in Ann Radcliffe, the dominant Gothic novelist of the decade. Read through the prism of the Revolution controversy, it is hard not to interpret the conflict over primogeniture (the concrete case of mortmain) as a reprise of the Burke/Paine debate. Throughout all of Radcliffe’s fiction, an older generation that is committed to rank, hierarchy and dynastic alliances may be found to be in conflict with a younger generation that is committed to sensibility, equality and companionate marriage. When Wollstonecraft critiques Burke for his devotion to the medieval practice of entailed estates, with its

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 136

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Political Gothic Fiction

137

damaging consequences, she sounds as if she is describing a typical Gothic novel in the Radcliffean mode: Who can recount all the unnatural crimes, which the laudable, interesting desire of perpetuating a name has produced? The younger children have been sacrificed to the eldest son; sent into exile, or confined in convents, that they might not encroach on what was called, with shameful falsehood, the family estate. (Wollstonecraft 1790: 44–5)

But this takes us back to our starting point. The assertion that Gothic novels are political is too general to be useful, and when we do focus on political Gothic novels, we return to the school of Godwin. Thus, the challenge remains: is there a strand of Gothic political fiction that is not synonymous with the Jacobin novel? I want to argue that while political Gothic fiction includes some Jacobin novels, it also includes works that are not included in the school of Godwin. The enlargement of our perspective requires two necessary conditions: (1) Political Gothic fiction is that fiction which reflexively thematises ‘mortmain’ as a feudal system that imprisons us (Thelwall’s ‘Bastilles of the intellect’); and (2) it is a recognisable subset of the Gothic. The point of the second condition is that it ensures that we stay within the realm of Gothic works, while the first condition will enable us to distinguish those novels that are only generally political from those that are explicitly so. Both conditions are more complex than they might, at first, seem. As regards (1), we need to establish what it means for a text to thematise, reflexively, the practice of ‘mortmain’. Secondly, there is the question of what is meant, precisely, by Thelwall’s notion of ‘Bastilles of the intellect’. Whatever answer we come up with will implicate ideology, the notion that we are imprisoned in mental constructs that betray our best interests and rights. As regards (2), we have the familiar problem of what it means to belong to a genre. Do we categorise works as belonging to a genre because they exhibit a sufficient number of its defining, formal features? Or do we categorise on the basis of an essential quality, as in, say, tragedy, where any work of art is tragic if it lays bare the ‘primordial contradiction’ of existence, to use Nietzsche’s definition? In an essay of this length I cannot possibly explore these issues in the depth that they require. Instead I will try to indicate how one might go about doing so by taking some concrete examples. The point of (2), above, is that it encourages us to discriminate between those Jacobin novels that are clearly Gothic, and those where

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 137

22/09/15 10:22 AM

138

Robert Miles

the overlap is less obvious. In either case, we need to begin with Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794). No prior novel so explicitly takes as its subject matter the invasive ‘spirit and character of government’ that Godwin addresses in the Preface. Written in the shadow of the treason trials, and the counter-terror of William Pitt the Younger’s government, Caleb Williams sets itself the task of discrediting the Gothic system of chivalry, which it does through the tragic history of Falkland, who is motivated, we are told, largely by his love of the chivalric system (Godwin 1988: 13). Godwin partly has in mind Burke and his notorious defence of Marie Antoinette (Burke 1790: 113), but he is also thinking of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who, in the Discourse on Inequality (1754), ‘pinpoints a fateful moment when society takes a turn towards corruption and injustice, when people begin to desire preferential esteem’, which is to say, a system of ‘hierarchical honour’ (Taylor 1992: 48). This is a strand of thought that runs deeply through Godwin’s work. Thus, in a later, revised edition of his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1796), Godwin identifies the ‘love of distinction’ (Godwin 1796: I.332) as a root cause of modern ills, a theme that he returns to in his second novel, St Leon; A Tale of the Sixteenth Century (1799). Here, his eponymous hero receives, as the parting gift of a dying stranger, the elixir of life and the philosopher’s stone, ensuring eternal life and inexhaustible riches. Naturally, they do not make him happy, not least because his love of distinction corrupts any chance that he has of domestic bliss. He cannot restrain himself from thinking and acting like an aristocrat with a nice sense of honour. Rather than cleaving to his family, he is constantly drawn into various fracas where his honour is at stake, until he finds himself entirely alienated from those whom he loves. The same, precise sense of honour undoes Falkland in Caleb Williams. For its sake he ambushes and kills the odious Tyrrel, who has publicly thrashed the diminutive Falkland in a most ungentlemanly manner; Falkland then allows his neighbours to suffer the death penalty for the crime that he committed rather than own up to his own skulking act of retribution. While his dishonesty may have saved Falkland’s public face, privately, his outraged sense of honour eats into his soul. It is the spectacle of Falkland’s private suffering that leads Caleb to probe into his master’s secrets, with fatal results. Godwin refers to his philosophy as ‘necessitarian’, meaning, roughly, that we are thoroughly shaped by our environment as if through an implacable chain of cause and effect. In a notorious passage from the first edition of Political Justice, considerably muted in the second, Godwin suggested that the assassin was no more to

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 138

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Political Gothic Fiction

139

blame than the knife that he wielded (Godwin 1793: I.289–91). The knife and the assassin both lay at the end of a long chain of causality. Godwin concedes that they differ in that the knife lacks agency, or ‘motive’ (Godwin 1793: I.286); however, even at the level of motive, or psychology, the same long chain of cause and effect may be found within the mind of the murderer. As Jerrold E. Hogle comments elsewhere in this volume, Godwin, along with Mary Shelley, ‘turned to prose fiction to demonstrate how the best potentials of men and women “can be vitiated by false notions picked up from [the antiquated and oppressive] political, economic, and institutional environment” described in their treatises (St Clair 1989: 120)’ (see page 115 of this volume). The process of vitiation goes very deep indeed. Although he lacks the word, Godwin has a lively sense of ‘ideology’, of the way in which opinion can become a kind of mental prison, not because we lack rationality, but because of ‘necessitarianism’: once born into twisted systems of thought, there is no escape, no way of breaking the chain, for either the ‘knife’, or the ‘assassin’. In his unfinished, and unpublished, essay on Of History and Romance (1797), Godwin argues that the novel is more philosophical than history because it allows us to slow down the trains of cause and effect that together form our environment, thus anatomising the heart of man, in order to form a true political praxis (Clery and Miles 2000: 261; see Kelly 1976: 15–16). It is only by understanding psychology that we can grasp how the despotic spirit of government invades all aspects of life, and it is only the novel that affords a method of thinking where we can create a mental laboratory for understanding the trains of association that bind us in our false consciousness. Godwin is precise on the issue: ‘The real essence of every story of human affairs is character. Without this it is all rottenness and dust. It is by character that I understand a story, and come to feel its reality’ (qtd in Kelly 1976: 16). For Godwin, character is the royal road to the political unconscious. The form of the novel that undertook this kind of analysis is best known as the ‘philosophical romance’, a term aptly coined by its first critic, Hugh Murray (1805). Naturally enough, Caleb and Falkland are not readers of philosophical romances, as the action of the novel precedes the existence of the first exemplar of the genre. And that being the case, they have no wherewithal for slowing down their own trains of association and regaining control and agency: they are Bastilled in their intellects, in their vitiated systems of thoughts. The work of analysis, detachment and correction is left to us. While there is no way out, no chance of a happy ending for the novel’s protagonists, there are lessons to be

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 139

22/09/15 10:22 AM

140

Robert Miles

drawn by the philosophically disposed reader, but only if the reader excepts the truth: the ‘system of liberty’ is ‘delusive’ (Godwin 1793: 292); the precondition for apprehending truth is by accepting that we are bound, ideologically. Caleb Williams, then, clearly meets our first criterion: it reflexively thematises ‘mortmain’ as a feudal system that imprisons us. While the novel does not directly reference the ‘dead hand’, it nonetheless strives to make the reader aware of history’s ‘Gothic and unintelligible burden’ (Godwin 1793: I.33), as summed up, in this case, by the institution of ‘chivalry’, which Burke advanced as the principle ground plan of the ‘custumary’ that nurtures us, or as the Jacobins would have it, binds us. As Godwin tells us in his Preface, this modern spirit of despotism is the novel’s principle theme. Not only does it pervade all aspects of life, it is, literally, inescapable, as Caleb to his peril discovers. Falkland’s powers of surveillance and control may seem exaggerated, but the ubiquity of these powers is meant to signal the themes of inescapability and imprisonment. If, then, our first criterion is met; what of the second? As Kelly makes clear from the outset, as the first Jacobin novel Caleb Williams is explicitly political, but is it also Gothic? That is, I think, a more difficult question. While Caleb Williams is conventionally referred to as Gothic, it lacks many of the features that we typically look for in a Gothic novel. There are, nevertheless, two ungainsayable reasons for considering it as a Gothic text: the first is because it does thematise feudal remnants as a form of mental imprisonment, as a kind of feudal live burial, where the protagonists wander lost in the unintelligible burden of a Gothic past. In other words, there is no difficulty in reading Caleb Williams as Gothic once we understand that it realises the genre’s defining trope, the past as a form of live burial, metaphorically, unlike mainstream Gothic, which tends to play lavishly with the literal version, as in, for instance, Isabella wandering the crypts of Otranto in Walpole, or Agnes languishing in those of her convent in Mathew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), or Monçada imprisoned in the Madrid catacombs in Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). The second reason for considering it Gothic is that it features conspiracy. While Godwin’s form of philosophical romance took Gothic fiction in an explicitly political direction, the distinction of being the first to do so really belongs to Friedrich Schiller’s Der Geisterseher (1789; translated as The Ghost-Seer in 1795). Godwin understood his foray into novel writing as a necessary detour as he pursued his main business as a man of letters, a fictional detour the aim of which

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 140

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Political Gothic Fiction

141

was to influence public opinion on a broader scale than was possible through the publication of a complex, philosophical tome such as the Enquiry. The repressive measures taken by Pitt’s government crippled the mechanism of the bourgeois public sphere: there was no longer a general agreement that everyone had the right to comment on matters of public importance in a rational manner. Some views were off limits, given how liberally the authorities were interpreting the antiquated wording of the law that defined treason as ‘imagining the King’s death’. One cannot argue for democracy without imagining a country without a king; ergo democracy, in itself, was treason (Barrell 2000). With the political public sphere closed off, Godwin turned to the literary one, to the republic of letters. In doing so he followed the precedent of others, such as Schiller, whose play The Robbers (1781), contributed the trope of banditti to the Gothic. In the process Schiller highlighted one of the key political quandaries of the Revolutionary age: does oppression ever legitimise rebellion? And if so, is it possible to rebel without becoming corrupted in the process? The dilemma anatomised by Schiller became increasingly acute as the French Revolution followed its dizzying course, as one can see from Wordsworth’s The Borderers (1797), which answers Schiller’s questions with an unenthusiastic ‘yes’ and a sorrowful ‘no’. The Ghost-seer is also a foray into the political arena. The novel features a German prince with a key weakness, a love for the marvellous (he is the ‘seer’ of ghosts), a trait exploited by powerful, secret forces who conspire to turn him to their own interests. As the heir apparent of a sizeable German principality, the stakes are high. The novel references the two main groupings often blamed for conspiring against governments: the freemasons, but especially a radical branch founded by Adam Weishaubt, in Ingolstadt, Germany, dubbed the ‘Illuminati’, and the Inquisition. At first it seems that the freemasons are the principle agents of subversion, but the appearance is just another ruse in an elaborate sting orchestrated by agents of the papal authority. Their object is to turn the Prince from Protestantism to Catholicism, in order to return the principality to the true church. While inquisitorial conspiracy did not take off as a new subgenre of the novel, tales of the Illuminati did, assisted by the publication of Augustin Barruel’s four-volume Memoirs, Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (1798), which laid the French Revolution at the feet of the Illuminati, as the true cause of the late, lamentable events. Written prior to the French Revolution, The Ghost-seer is less an attack on the Inquisition (an inoffensive because improbable choice of villain), and more an attack on those political systems that

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 141

22/09/15 10:22 AM

142

Robert Miles

invite conspiracies. If the fate of the nation rests on the gullibility of a young sovereign off on his grand tour, one really is in trouble. A sophisticated political system resistant to conspiracy will feature a far more robust public sphere, with political checks and balances. In England, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, both were in short supply. Instead, there came to the fore what the American historian, Richard Hofstadter, calls the ‘paranoid style of politics’. For the ‘paranoid rhetorician, “History is a conspiracy, set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendent power” ’ (qtd in Wheatley 1997: para. 2). Kim Wheatley aptly summarises the result: ‘Obsessed with the threat of revolution, users of the paranoid style – conspiracy theorists by definition – ascribe to their enemies the ability to effect large-scale social and political change’ (Wheatley 1997: para. 2). With the foregoing in mind we should begin to think of political Gothic fiction as being composed of several strands. The Jacobin novel tended towards didacticism (Kelly 1976: 14–19). While Jacobin novels generally fretted about the health of the public sphere, they were based on the implicit belief that rational debate could be revived; accordingly, most Jacobin novels tend to appeal to the rational capacities of its readerships. Conspiracy fiction, on the other hand, dealt in paranoia, either fomenting it, as in, for instance, Horrid Mysteries (1796) by Karl Grosse, or taking a critical attitude towards it, as we find in Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland; or, The Transformation, an American Tale (1798). I earlier argued that in order for us to consider a Gothic novel political it needed reflexively to thematise the ‘dead hand’ of mortmain. Representing live burial metaphorically rather than literally is generally a sign that the mortmain is being so thematised. I argued that Caleb Williams’s way of doing so was to represent its protagonists as being caught fast within the iron cage of ‘opinion’, or ideology. In full-blown conspiracy fiction this sense of entrapment is often expressed as the conspirators’ power to ‘brainwash’ their victims. This is essentially the plot of The Ghost-seer, and it is a fundamental aspect of the paranoia found in Horrid Mysteries, where brainwashing impressionable young gentlemen is taken to an entirely new level, one involving underground caves, gardens and willing female adherents to the cause. While the trope remains the same (mental fetters), the politics are often diametrically opposed. Thus, for Godwin, the conspiracy comes from the ‘establishment’, that is, from Falkland using all his powers as a state-sanctioned magistrate, whereas for

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 142

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Political Gothic Fiction

143

Grosse and others in the anti-Illuminati vein, conspiracy emanates from the side of the Revolutionary freemasons. But this is perhaps only to note a regular feature of political Gothic fiction, which is that it is almost always two sided. Just as the politicised Jacobin novel provoked a reaction in Anti-Jacobin writing, so, too, with conspiracy fiction. This is also the case with my final example of a strand of political Gothic fiction. As noted earlier, one of the main preoccupations in the Revolution controversy was primogeniture, entailed estates and the woman question. In a work such as Wollstonecraft’s unfinished The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria (1798), the two conditions for categorising a work of Gothic as ‘political’ are explicitly met. Thus, Maria, the protagonist, adapts Thelwall’s phrase, and complains that marriage has ‘bastilled me for life’ (Wollstonecraft 1976: 154–5). In the novel Wollstonecraft takes her critique of Burke’s support of mortmain from A Vindication of the Rights of Men, and turns it into an explicitly Gothic narrative of imprisonment, slavery and ‘live burial’, in which women are revealed to be living in a society that has stripped them of Locke’s inalienable rights. As James Watt has argued, many of the ‘Loyalist’ Gothics tend to reverse the political polarity, so that female merit and obedience are seen to be rewarded by a patriarchal system embedded within a ‘redeemed’ castle (Watt 1999). But what of Radcliffe? Is she simply in the general, ambiguous middle? Too assertive to be ‘Loyalist’, especially through her insistent support of the ideal of the bourgeois ‘companionate couple’ with its implicit gender equality, but too general to be considered ‘political’? With our two conditions in place I think there is a case for arguing that in The Italian; or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797), the last novel published in her lifetime, Radcliffe does write political Gothic fiction. In his Reflections Burke urged his readers to submit, proudly, to the nation as it is, including to ageold practices such as entailed estates. Radcliffe’s heroine Ellena in The Italian refuses to submit, asserting, proudly, her right to choose, while, arguably, the state of being ‘Bastilled’ in a patriarchal structure is reflexively thematised through the dungeons of the Inquisition, which ‘feminise’ Vivaldi (Miles 1995: 149). My point is not to insist on this reading of Radcliffe but to suggest that criteria are needed to distinguish between those Gothic works that are generally, and those that are specifically, political. The aim of this essay has been to suggest some ways of doing so.

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 143

22/09/15 10:22 AM

144

Robert Miles

References Barrell, John (2000), Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide, 1793–1796, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barruel, Augustin (1798), Memoirs, Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, trans. Robert Clifford, London: Printed for the author by T. Burton & Co. Bellamy, Liz (1998), ‘The Jacobin Novel’, in Commerce, Morality and the Eighteenth-Century Novel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 157–81. Borges, Jorge Luis (1964), ‘Kafka and his Precursors’, in Other Inquisitions 1937–52, trans. Ruth L. Simms, intro. James T. Irby, Austin: University of Texas Press, pp. 106–7. Burke, Edmund (1790), Reflections on the Revolution in France, London: J. Dodsley. Burke, Edmund (1796), Thoughts on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace, London: J. Owen. Butler, Marilyn (1984), Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clery, E. J. and Robert Miles (eds) (2000), Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook, 1700–1820, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Cohen, Ralph (1991), ‘Genre Theory, Literary History, and Historical Change’, in David Perkins (ed.), Theoretical Issues in Literary History, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 85–113. De Grazia, Margreta (1991), Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus, Oxford: Oxford University Press. De Sade, Marquis (1990), ‘Ideas on the Novel’, in Victor Sage (ed.), The Gothic Novel: A Casebook, London: Longman, pp. 48–9. Drakakis, John, and Dale Townshend (eds) (2008), Gothic Shakespeares, London and New York: Routledge. Godwin, William (1793), Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness, 2 vols, Dublin: Luke White. Godwin, William (1796), Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness, 2nd edn, corrected, London: Printed for G. G. and J. Robinson. Godwin, William [1794] (1988), Caleb Williams; or, Things as They Are, ed. Maurice Hindle, London: Penguin. Grenby, M. O. (2001), The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hazlitt, William [1818] (1907), Lectures on the English Comic Writers, London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press.

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 144

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Political Gothic Fiction

145

Kelly, Gary (1976), The English Jacobin Novel, 1750–1805, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kliger, Samuel (1952), The Goths in England: A Study in 17th and 18th Century Thought, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Miles, Robert (1995), Ann Radcliffe: The Great Enchantress, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Miles, Robert (2007), ‘Eighteenth-Century Gothic’, in Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (eds), The Routledge Companion to Gothic, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 10–18. Mount, Ferdinand (2014), ‘No Theatrics’, London Review of Books, 36.16 (21 August): 14–17. Murray, Hugh (1805), Morality of Fiction; or, An Inquiry into the Tendency of Fictitious Narratives, with Observations on Some of the Most Eminent, Edinburgh: Mundell & Son. Paine, Thomas (1791), Rights of Man: Being an Answer to Mr Burke’s Attack on the French Revolution, London: J. S. Jordon. Paulin, Tom (1999), The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt’s Radical Style, London: Faber and Faber. Paulson, Ronald (1983), Representations of Revolution, 1789–1820, New Haven: Yale University Press. Punter, David (1980), The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic fictions from 1765 to the Present Day, New York: Longman. Schiller, Friedrich (1795), The Ghost-Seer; or, Apparitionist, trans. D. Boileau, London: Vernor and Hood. Smith, R. J. (1987), The Gothic Bequest: Medieval Institutions in British Thought, 1688–1863, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, Charles (1992), The Ethics of Authenticity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thelwall, John (1796), The Rights of Nature, against the Usurpations of Establishments. A Series of Letters to the People of Great Britain, on the State of Public Affairs and the Recent Effusions of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, 3rd edn, London and Norwich: H. D. Symonds. Wallace, Miriam L. (2009), Revolutionary Subjects in the English ‘Jacobin’ Novel, 1790–1805, Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Walpole, Horace [1764; 1765] (2001), The Castle of Otranto, ed. Michael Gamer, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Watt, James (1999), Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, 1764–1832, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wheatley, Kim (1997), ‘Paranoid Politics: Shelley and the Quarterly Review’, in Orrin Wang (ed.), Romanticism and Conspiracy, Romantic Circles Praxis, (last accessed 14 November 2014).

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 145

22/09/15 10:22 AM

146

Robert Miles

Wollstonecraft, Mary (1790), A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, London: J. Johnson. Wollstonecraft, Mary [1798] (1976), ‘Mary’ and ‘The Wrongs of Woman’, ed. Gary Kelly, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 146

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Chapter 8

Shorter Gothic Fictions: Ballads and Chapbooks, Tales and Fragments Douglass H. Thomson and Diane Long Hoeveler

The publication history of the little-known Gothic story ‘Albert of Werdendorff; or, The Midnight Embrace. A Romance from the German’ (1812) provides a case study of the obscurities and complexities attending an investigation of shorter Gothic tales during the early nineteenth century. If this tale is known at all today, one would credit Franz Potter’s 2004 edition of the chapbook by Sarah Wilkinson. In his introduction to the tale, Potter reasonably argues that this tale of seduction, betrayal and revenance draws upon M. G. Lewis’s then famed ‘Alonzo the Brave and Fair Imogene’, first appearing in The Monk (1796), later in many literary magazines, and then in Lewis’s ‘hobgoblin repast’, Tales of Wonder (1801),1 a collection of Gothic ballads and burlesques. However, the real source of Wilkinson’s tale is the anonymous ballad ‘Albert of Werdendorff; or, The Midnight Embrace. A German Romance’ from Tales of Terror (1801), another anonymous collection of Gothic tales and burlesques many times wrongly attributed to Lewis. Wilkinson simply drew upon, without acknowledging, the ballad of the tale in creating her prose version and, as was her wont, she ‘extracts’ a ‘moral’ from the original: ‘virtue is a female’s firmest protector’ (Wilkinson 2004: 29). The story of Albert does not end there: as something of a revenant itself, the tale reappears as ‘The Midnight Embrace in the Halls of Werdendorff’ in Legends of Terror! and Tales of the Wonderful and the Wild. Original and Select, In Prose and Verse (1826), a 642-page compendium of Gothic ballads and prose short stories that casts its net widely in gathering Gothic tales from a variety of sources (ballads, magazines, annuals, previous collections and chapbooks). Although very few of the ‘Legends’ are attributed

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 147

22/09/15 10:22 AM

148

Douglass H. Thomson and Diane Long Hoeveler

to authors – indeed, the overall volume contains no indication of the names of its editors – this reincarnation of ‘Albert’ does provide both ‘Prose and Verse’, as it begins with a selection from the 1801 ballad and then reprints Wilkinson’s chapbook sans her concluding ‘moral’. This curious, but not atypical, little bibliographic tale suggests a number of things about the subject of shorter Gothic fiction in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. First is the close literary kinship (in this case interchangeability) of prose and verse, both featuring strong lines of allegedly ‘German’-sourced horror and unqualified supernaturalism within a limited narrative frame. Next is the obvious fact that shorter versions of the Gothic, especially 36-page chapbooks such as Wilkinson’s, were far more affordable than a multi-volume Gothic novel, as they were designed with the newly literate working class as target audiences. That design is reflected not only in the affordability of such shorter Gothic works as chapbooks and broadside ballads but in their storylines, which often pit haughty and deceitful aristocrats against virtuous and long-suffering peasants. For example, the opening lines of ‘The Midnight Embrace’ set up an emphasis on class featured in countless shorter Gothics: LORD Albert had titles, Lord Albert had power, Lord Albert in gold and in jewels was clad; Fair Josephine bloom’d like an opening flower, But beauty and virtue were all that she had. (Anon. 1801a: 1–4)

The ungainly lines of this ballad raise another issue long associated with shorter forms of the Gothic, especially chapbooks: their lack of artistic merit. Long considered by critics as mere ‘hack’ or ‘pulp’ fiction, these shorter Gothic tales often shamelessly redact episodes from longer Gothic novels and unapologetically draw from folk sources considered sub-literary by the period’s critics. They make no claims for originality and the more exalted regions of the imagination being defined by emergent Romanticism, although such poets as Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Walter Scott were clearly influenced by one manifestation of these shorter tales of terror, the Gothic ballad. This chapter will first define the various forms of shorter Gothic literature and their niche in the literary marketplace, before considering how they engage in the ideological and aesthetic discourses of their time.

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 148

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Shorter Gothic Fictions

149

To Make a Long Story Short: Varieties of Shorter Gothic Tales and Ballads Prose versions of the Gothic tale appear in four different places: chapbooks, omnibus collections of tales, keepsakes and annuals, and general periodicals or literary magazines. Appearing in 24-, 36-, or 72-page formats, chapbooks were pocket-size Gothics, approximately four by seven inches in size, often stitched into a cover of flimsy blue paper lacking any kind of board binding (hence the descriptor ‘bluebook’). Selling for a shilling or less (hence the term ‘shilling shocker’), these chapbooks often offered for their mainly working- and middle-class readers affordable redactions of more expensive, longer Gothic novels or, at least, drew upon the durable fund of Gothic conventions. As Edith Birkhead in her landmark study Tales of Terror (1921) wrote, ‘Ingenious authors realised that it was possible to compress into . . . a short story as much sensation as was contained in the five volumes of a Gothic romance’ (Birkhead 1963: 185). Because of the ephemeral nature of chapbooks, it is difficult to determine the number of titles printed during the last decade of the eighteenth century and first quarter of the nineteenth century, but scholars (Frank 2002: 133–46; Hoeveler 2010: 171) have estimated an output in the thousands, making bluebooks among the best-selling literature of the age. Peter Haining provides a modern collection of representative chapbooks in his The Shilling Shockers: Stories of Terror from the Gothic Bluebooks (Haining 1972), and Diane Hoeveler is developing an online Archive of many rare chapbook texts. Shorter Gothic tales can also be found in many collections, such as Romances and Gothic Tales of 1801 (Curties 1801), written by T. J. Horsley Curties and published by the prolific distributor of Gothic chapbooks, Ann Lemoine; Romantic Tales of 1802 (Crookenden 1802) by Isaac Crookenden, who specialised in writing Gothic novels in miniature; Tales of Superstition; or, Relations of Apparitions of 1803 (Anon. 1803) published by another main purveyor of the Gothic chapbook trade, Thomas Tegg of Cheapside; Isabella Lewis’s Terrific Tales of 1804 (Lewis 1804); Romantic Tales of 1808 by M. G. Lewis (Lewis 1808), somewhat of a mixed bag including three Gothic ballads ‘of German origin’ and of its five tales, two Gothic, if one includes ‘The Anaconda, an East Indian Tale’, in which the titular serpent takes on a supernatural

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 149

22/09/15 10:22 AM

150

Douglass H. Thomson and Diane Long Hoeveler

menace; Fantasmagoriana of 1812 (Anon. 2004), a collection of German ghost stories, the French translation of which helped inspire the famed ghost-story telling contest at the Villa Diodati in 1816; Popular Tales and Romances of the Northern Nations (1823) by an assortment of European writers (La Motte-Fouqué et al. 1823); and the aforementioned Legends of Terror! and Tales of the Wonderful and the Wild of 1826 (Anon. 1826). As for literary annuals and keepsakes, Katherine Harris (2012) has called attention to this relatively neglected venue for Gothic tales in her Forgotten Gothic: Short Stories from British Literary Annuals, 1823–31 (Harris 2012). Christine Alexander (1993) explores the influence upon the Brontë sisters of Gothic stories plentifully found in such annuals as the Forget Me Not, Literary Souvenir, Friendship’s Offering, and The Keepsake, featuring such titles as ‘The Haunted Chamber’, ‘The Novice, or the Convent Demon’ and ‘The CurateConfessor of Virofloy, a Real Ghost Story’ (Alexander 1993). Finally, Gothic tales appear regularly in the monthly magazines, such as The Lady’s Magazine, The Tell-Tale; or, Universal Museum, and the New Gleaner, or Entertainment for the Fireside. Robert D. Mayo (1950) has drawn up an extensive inventory of Gothic writing in the magazines from 1770–1820 (Mayo 1950), while Franz Potter’s The History of Gothic Publishing, 1800–1835 lists some 650 titles from chapbooks, collections, annuals and magazines (Potter 2005). One finds a recurrent sidebar debate concerning this plethora of Gothic tales: some scholars contend that the chapbooks and trade Gothic are symptomatic of (Mayo 1942: 64; Richter 1996: 125) or responsible for (Punter 1980: 114) the decline of the Gothic around 1820, while many recent studies (Alexander 1993; Potter 2005; Hoeveler 2010 and Harris 2012), charting its endurance in these shorter publications, have cast doubt about that end point. In examining these repositories of Gothic tales, one frequently comes across brief, unfinished stories labelled as ‘fragments’, and these represent the high- and low-end of Gothic prose achievement. The high-end source for such fragments is John Aikin’s ‘Sir Bertrand, A Fragment’ (1773), with an accompanying essay by his sister, Anna Laetitia Aikin (later Barbauld) entitled ‘On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror’. The essay in itself makes a distinction between high and low versions of the Gothic, distinguishing a cruder form that merely arouses suspense and curiosity from a nobler form, her praise of which remarkably anticipates Romantic enthusiasm for the sublime: ‘where the agency of invisible beings is introduced, of “forms unseen, and mightier far than we” our imagination, darting

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 150

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Shorter Gothic Fictions

151

forth, explores with rapture the new world which is laid open to its view, and rejoices in the expansion of its powers’ (Aikin and Aikin 1773: 122). Aikin’s fragment, chronicling the adventures of a knight who encounters increasingly mysterious terrors, was designed for readers to finish the fragment, and several imitations and completed versions appear later.2 An examination of the chapbooks, however, supplies a less exalted rationale for Gothic fragments. One frequently finds appended to the main tale the phrase ‘to which is added’, and what is added is often a fragment, simply designed to fill out the pages of the chapbook. The many writers interested in the poetic tale of terror turned to the ballad as a pliable medium for conjuring up the old, folk-inspired bogies and demons. With such works as Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) and Johann Gottfried Herder’s Volkslieder (Herder 1778–9), the mid-to-late eighteenth century witnessed a ballad revival, but for many years earlier the broadside ballad had provided the most common (in both senses of the word, vulgar and widespread) repository of cheap ‘stories in song’. Distributed widely in what Eric Nebeker has described as a ‘promiscuous’ fashion (Nebeker 2014), the broadsides could be found pasted on public posts, church doors, walls of homes and alehouses; they also could be purchased for as little as one penny from travelling chapmen. The Bodleian Library Catalogue of Broadside Ballads confirms Nebeker’s observation that many of them deal with ‘wonders and monstrous happenings’: 130 ghost stories, 242 tales of seduction and abandonment, and many more on such proto-Gothic subjects as highwaymen, incest, rape, mesmerism and fortune-telling. Reflecting recent critical interest in the folk ballad, the most recent edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period begins for the first time with a section on ‘Balladry and Ballad Revivals’. In making the case that ‘literary culture began to engage, somewhat squeamishly, with an oral culture associated with sensational stories (of infanticide, bloody feuds, supernatural events [and] illicit sex)’ (Stillinger 2012: 31), the editor provides several proto-Gothic ballads, including ‘The Dæmon-lover’. Walter Scott believed that interest in ancient British and Germanic ballads with supernatural themes ‘might be easily employed as a formidable auxiliary to renewing the spirit of our own [art of poetry]’, which he felt ‘was at a remarkably low ebb’ in the closing years of the eighteenth century (Scott 2014a). Several ballads in the German style appeared early in the 1790s, including John Aikin’s ‘Arthur and Matilda’ from his Poems (1791) and Frank Sayers’ ‘Sir Egwin’

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 151

22/09/15 10:22 AM

152

Douglass H. Thomson and Diane Long Hoeveler

(in his Poems, 1792), an adaptation of Frederick Leopold Stolberg’s ‘Die Büβende’ (‘The Penitent Woman’). However, two seminal poems appeared in March of 1796 that truly galvanised fascination with the poetic tale of terror and provided two distinct approaches to the subject: William Taylor’s adaptation of Gottfried August Bürger’s ‘Lenore’ (originally entitled ‘Lenora’, later ‘Ellenore’) in the Monthly Magazine3 and M. G. Lewis’s ‘Alonzo the Brave and Fair Imogine’ in his novel The Monk. With its pouncing rhythms, splashy onomatopoeia and archaic diction, ‘Lenora’ provided a dramatic model of writing ballads in the old and German style. Four other translations of Bürger’s ballad surfaced within the year, and Taylor followed the success of ‘Lenora’ with several other dark ballads, most notably ‘The Lass of Fair Wone’ from Bürger’s ‘Des Pfarrers Tochter non Taubenhain’ (Taylor 1796b: 223–4). During the same period, ‘Alonzo the Brave and Fair Imogine’ appeared ten times in such periodicals as The Morning Chronicle, The Star, and The Gentleman’s Magazine (Parreaux 1960: 50). With its novel anapestic metre and contemporary diction, Lewis’s ballad served as a prototype of the new or ‘modern’ style of writing Gothic ballads. Although the distinction between old and new styles, like those between ‘original’ and ‘imitation, ‘translation’ and ‘adaptation’, could often become blurred, Taylor and Lewis provided two workable patterns for the poetic tales of terror to come. Some of Walter Scott’s earliest poetry shows the influence of both models: his excited discovery of Taylor’s ‘Lenora’ (which had electrified an Edinburgh literary society in a reading by Anna Laetitia Barbauld) led to his interest in translating German ballads and, eventually, to his working relationship with Lewis on a collection of Gothic ballads originally to be entitled Tales of Terror. Frustrated at delays in Lewis’s publication, Scott turned to his friend James Ballantyne for his own collection of Gothic ballads, An Apology for Tales of Terror (1799). Although only twelve copies were printed, its table of contents provides an early canon of Gothic ballads with German and supernatural themes. Scott appears with three translations from the German: ‘The Erl-King’ (from Goethe’s ‘Erlkönig’), ‘The Chase’ (from Bürger’s ‘Der Wilde Jäger’), and ‘William and Helen’ (his version of Lenore). The volume also features two ballads by Lewis (‘Alonzo the Brave and Fair Imogene’ and ‘The Erl-King’s Daughter’), one ballad by John Aikin (‘Arthur and Matilda’) and two by Robert Southey (‘Lord William’ and ‘Poor Mary, Maid of the Inn’). Southey also had a noteworthy connection to both Taylor and Lewis. Claiming in a letter of 1799 to Charles Wynn that he ‘shall

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 152

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Shorter Gothic Fictions

153

hardly be satisfied till I have got a ballad as good as “Lenora” ’ (Southey 2009), Southey joined the Norwich school of Taylor and Sayers with their agenda to create, in the words of Taylor, ballads ‘old in the costume of the ideas, as well as of the style and metre – in the very spirit of the superstitions of the days of yore’ (Robberds 1843: I.235–6). Southey composed many Gothic ballads in both the old and new styles, including ‘The Old Woman of Berkeley’, considered by Taylor as ‘unquestionably the best original English ballad extant’ (Robberds 1843: II.106); ‘Cornelius Agrippa’s Bloody Book’ (one source of Mary Shelley’s ‘The Mortal Immortal’); and the Bürgeresque ‘Donica’. All of these plus three other ballads would appear in Lewis’s long-delayed Tales of Wonder. Tales of Wonder provides the fullest and most representative, if problematic, range of Gothic ballads for the age. The first of this two-volume edition contains ten ballads by Lewis that he labels ‘Original’, including ‘Alonzo the Brave’, followed by its burlesque, ‘Giles Jollup the Brave and Brown Sally Green’; six of Lewis’s adaptations from German, Danish and Runic sources (including Goethe’s ‘The Erl-King’ and ‘The Fisherman’); four original ballads, two with Scottish settings, by Scott; the six ballads by Southey; and one ballad each by John Leyden, Henry William Bunbury and Julius Mickle. The second volume, drawing largely from Percy’s Reliques, provides reprints of older English ballads with supernatural subject matter; four traditional Scottish ballads (which Scott pointedly refashioned in his Minstrelsy); and as a conclusion, Taylor’s ‘Lenora’, regarded by Lewis in the headnote to the poem as ‘a masterpiece of translation’ rivaling the original. Peter Mortensen argues that ‘Lewis’s eclectic choice of sources [in Volume II]constructs an alternative genealogy – an ancient British genealogy – of supernatural poetry’ (Mortensen 2004: 82). Despite this historical and nationalist pedigree for the Gothic ballad, Lewis’s ‘hobgoblin repast’ came under attack as ‘Tales of Plunder’ for its many non-original contributions – and for its high price of one guinea (Thomson 2009: 26–8). For the one-volume second edition of Tales of Wonder (1801), Lewis obligingly withdrew the contents of the first edition’s second volume, leading his publisher, Joseph Bell, to cobble together another collection of wholly original Gothic ballads which he entitled Tales of Terror (1801). On the Advertisement page for the second, cheaper, one-volume edition of Tales of Wonder, Bell noted that Tales of Terror ‘is printed uniform with this edition of TALES OF WONDER, and makes a good second volume to it’ (Thomson 2009: 43). Thus began the groundwork for a long and

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 153

22/09/15 10:22 AM

154

Douglass H. Thomson and Diane Long Hoeveler

remarkably enduring tradition of error in wrongly attributing Tales of Terror to Lewis. The anonymous Tales of Terror, also often wrongly considered as a parody of Tales of Wonder, actually, as a companion volume, carries on the mix of serious and comic Gothic ballads found in its predecessor, and some of its poetry, especially the stirring defence of a specifically termed ‘Gothic’ imagination in its ‘Introductory Dialogue’, deserves greater critical attention. In narrating his narrow ‘escape’ from ‘the general depreciation’ of the Tales of Wonder, Scott partially attributes that volume’s generally negative critical reception to his opinion that the ‘passion for ballads and ballad-mongers ha[d] been for some time on the wane’ (Scott 2014a). Scott makes an interesting claim. It is true that he desired to distance himself from the Lewisite brand of Gothic writing as he goes on to compile a more authentically nationalist collection of ballads, The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802). However, it should be noted that both he and his countryman, James Hogg, continued to collect and write ballads with supernatural themes well into the first quarter of the nineteenth century (see examples of such poetry in the recently published Longman Anthology of Gothic Verse (Franklin 2011)). For his part, Southey demanded the withdrawal of his ballads from the second edition of Tales of Wonder and, like Scott, came to regard his dabbling with ballads as, at best, a minor chapter in his poetic career. Also supporting Scott’s assertion of the Gothic ballad’s decline is the general absence of collections of such poetry in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Adriana Craciun (2002: 156–94) has argued that one such volume, the Scottish poet Anne Bannerman’s fascinating Tales of Superstition and Chivalry (1802), with its rewriting of the Gothic ballad from a woman’s perspective, became tainted by association with Tales of Wonder. Yet, unlike the prose tales of the shorter Gothic, we really do not have, to date, a study of the Gothic ballad in the periodicals, keepsakes and literary annuals from this period. While we await such a study, it seems hard to believe that a vacuum extends between turn-of-the-century poetry of terror and Poe’s ‘The Raven’ (1845).4

‘We need to lower our sights’: Ideological Readings of Shorter Gothic Tales The same factors – brevity, sensationalism, and affordability – that contributed to the popularity of shorter Gothic tales also formed the basis for their largely negative critical reception. The cheapness

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 154

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Shorter Gothic Fictions

155

of chapbooks and ballads was long understood not just in financial terms but in terms of artistic merit too. Critics considered ballads and short Gothic tales as sub-literary, cheap in the sense that they lacked artistry, complexity and that emerging Romantic criterion of merit, originality. Even modern critics who championed the cause of the Gothic expressed little regard for chapbooks.5 Devendra Varma, to cite one of the harsher verdicts, felt that the little Gothics ‘catered to the perverted taste for excitement among degenerate readers’ (Varma 1957: 189). While most modern studies of this subject acknowledge that shorter Gothic tales, especially those in chapbooks, generally lack artistic merit, some critics find such tales of value in the way that they illuminate the emergence of working-class reading culture. The phrase ‘We need to lower our sights’ comes from Potter’s study of The History of Gothic Publishing, 1800–1835 (Potter 2005: 3), and voices his insistence that if we are to understand the first Gothic revival, we need study not just its canonical novelists but also its dispersal among the so-called ‘trade Gothic’, which is dominated by such shorter Gothic tales as the chapbooks. The ‘degenerate readers’ that Varma refers to were largely members of the working classes, and as literacy rates increased among them due to the Sunday School movement and other factors, the demand for reading materials appropriate for their reading level increased as well. As such, it is impossible to discuss the chapbook and ballad without recognising that both class and religion influenced the content and style of these productions. An overview of this subject reveals a paradox: on the one hand, working-class resentment of the upper class finds expression in the plots of countless Gothic ballads and chapbooks that depict the aristocracy and clergy as corrupt; on the other, the consumption of these shorter and cheaper Gothic tales allowed the new readership to participate in a fashionable culture usually reserved for those more affluent who could afford novels.6 Given its cheap price and wide circulation, the chapbook was a successful vehicle for spreading the often negative attitudes that the working classes had towards both the aristocracy and Roman Catholicism. More specifically, chapbooks typically presented aristocrats as libertines, rakes, seducers, predators, gamblers and adulterers, while Roman Catholic clergy were depicted in much the same way, with the added complication that they were able to hide their crimes in cloisters that were not open to public view. Wilkinson’s ‘Albert of Werdendorff, or The Midnight Embrace’ (1812) is, as we noted in our introduction, a very typical example of working-class rage directed at aristocratic lechers and their practice of dynastic

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 155

22/09/15 10:22 AM

156

Douglass H. Thomson and Diane Long Hoeveler

marriages. Focusing on a seduced and abandoned working-class heroine who wreaks vengeance on her aristocratic suitor and his ‘haughty’ bride, the chapbook clearly expresses working-class anger towards the class system. The working-class victim, the poisoned Josephine, returns from the dead with the power to act as a direct agent of God, not as simply someone seeking her own personal revenge. This agency suggests that the working class has divine sanction to seek restitution against its aristocratic oppressors, and such a sentiment would not have been lost on the working-class readership. Bürger’s ‘Der Wilde Jäger’ (translated by Walter Scott as ‘The Wild Huntsman’) provides, from the ballad tradition, a spectacular and highly politicised example of this kind of divine retribution. A malicious, proud Earl destroys whatever stands in the way of his hunt, first a ‘poor’ farmer and his crops, then a herdsman and his flock (on Sunday, no less). Ignoring the warning voice of a lowly hermit to desist and repent, the Earl stands terrified as, from ‘the yawning rifts’ of a deep chasm, ‘misbegotten dogs of hell’ emerge to hunt the hunter throughout time (Scott 2014b). In language that recalls the Ancient Mariner’s dictum, the hermit issues the lesson in terms of both species and class: ‘let thy fate instruct the proud, / God’s meanest creature is his child’ (Scott 2014b). The presentation of Roman Catholicism in the tales and ballads is somewhat more complex and convoluted,7 but suffice it to say that the chapbook, with its almost medieval world view, cautioned the working classes against the liberal policies of the Church of England and waged something of a propaganda war against the passage of a number of bills that eventually gave Catholics emancipation in 1829. The sheer number of anti-Catholic chapbooks (more than 100) suggests that the ideology was widespread and popular, and that whole publishing houses (like Tegg, Hughes or Vernor and Hood) were committed to promulgating the Gothic as a species of covert religious writing, propagandising and quasi-pamphleteering. Chapbooks with titles like ‘Father Innocent’, ‘The Memoirs of Angelique; or, The Nun’ and ‘Monkish Mysteries’ suggest how bald and blatant the propagandising was in these works. Examples of ballads featuring jaded and licentious Catholic clergy include Lewis’s ‘Bothwell’s Bonny Jane’ (not surprisingly, showcasing a villainous monk, despite the poem’s Scottish setting), ‘The Black Canon of Elmham; or Saint Edmond’s Eve’ (author unknown), and Southey’s ‘Bishop Bruno’ (Thomson 2009). Although many Gothic tales express this resentment towards the aristocracy and the Catholic church, their stories of olden times set

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 156

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Shorter Gothic Fictions

157

in exotic locales granted the working and middle classes access to a world of fantasy more usually reserved for the upper classes. It is difficult to know exactly what proportion of the working class purchased their own chapbooks or opted instead to obtain them through a circulating library as either a subscriber or a day-borrower. Either way, the working classes thought that they were participating in the ideological and intellectual developments of their culture. If they could not afford to attend the opera or theatre productions in even the ‘illegitimate’ theatres of London, they could read highly condensed redactions and much-simplified abridged versions of novels by Walpole, Reeve, Radcliffe or Lewis. Possessing these little Gothics allowed the working classes to have the same reading experience that the elite experienced and therefore the same access to, and ownership of, their culture’s luxury items. Gary Kelly has recently observed that the chapbook is another manifestation of early street literature with its ‘emphasis on destiny, chance, fortune and levelling forces such as death, express[ing] the centuries-old experience of common people . . . with little or no control over the conditions of their lives . . . For these people, life was a lottery’ (2002: x). According to Kelly, the fact that the working classes were the target audience of these early productions is also obvious from their very heavy use of narrative repetition, their emphasis on incident and adventure and their episodic and anecdotal structures. A major difference between working- and middle-class reading materials is the absence in the working-class works of any extended depictions of subjectivity or emotions in the protagonists (Kelly 2002: x, xv). Kelly argues that the earlier ‘lottery mentality’ that was operative in the working-class chapbooks was eventually replaced during the late eighteenth century by a dominant ‘investment mentality’ that we can see evidenced in the emerging middle-class chapbooks. This investment mentality was characterised by Protestant ideologies of self-improvement, self-advancement, modernisation and self-discipline, or what he refers to as ‘the middle-class discourse of merit’ (Kelly 2002: xxiii). Increasingly hostile to working-class street literature, which it saw as politically subversive and at the same time spiritually reactionary, the middle class effectively displaced street literature by co-opting it. Hence Hannah More published her Cheap Repository Tracts (1795–8) for the working classes, actually imitating cheap broadside ballads and chapbooks and suffusing them not with the ‘lottery’ but with the ‘investment’ mentality that she and her cohorts were attempting to promulgate: a disdain for immediate gratification,

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 157

22/09/15 10:22 AM

158

Douglass H. Thomson and Diane Long Hoeveler

a focus on the disastrous consequences of moral relativism, and a stress on the accumulation of ‘solid and useful’ knowledge for middle-class life. In her study and checklist of early nineteenthcentury bluebooks, Angela Koch concludes that, in contrast to the full-length Gothic novels such as those by Lewis, in which horror is a manifestation of moral ambivalence and unrestrained use of the supernatural is common, ‘the sentimental and rationalised contents’ of many bluebooks ‘reveal them as a reactionary mode of the Gothic’ that reassures the general reader that their own concepts of reality are ‘stable’ (Koch 2002: 9). The Gothic chapbook tradition is split, then, between workingand middle-class agendas, both of which were presenting alternative versions of the secularised uncanny to their readers. One group of tales – the middle-class variety – made claims for the powers of reason, rationality and secularised education, while, paradoxically, it kept alive the vestiges of a belief in a mythic and sacred past of divine beings. As Kelly notes, the representation of subjectivity is more developed in these works, but this subjectivity is often severely ‘disciplined’ so that the new bourgeois citizens are those who control their emotions in even the most perilous of situations (Kelly 2002: xix). The other group of tales – the working-class variety – persisted in promulgating a ‘lottery’ view of life, with fate, magic or luck as the ultimate and inscrutable arbiters in all matters and with human beings merely pawns in the hands of tyrannical forces they could not fully understand. For Kelly, the subjectivity that occasionally appears in working-class chapbooks is like the simulation of richer fabrics on cheap printed cottons of the period, . . . a form of symbolic consumption rather than ideological and cultural instruction for the text’s readers. It is as if the readers of the street Gothics were aware that there was a certain model of subjectivity prized in middle-class and upper middle-class culture, but that subjectivity in itself was of little interest . . . for these readers. (Kelly 2002: xxiii)

One example of this working-class ideology embroidered with middle-class subjectivity and moralising can be found in Isabella Lewis’s Terrific Tales (1804). A series of short vignettes without titles that purport to be true, the contents of Terrific Tales are fantastical and reveal an interesting mix of residual supernaturalism, rationalisation and Christian moral exemplum. For instance, one tale concerns an aristocrat, ‘of very inordinate passions’, who is kidnapped by a

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 158

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Shorter Gothic Fictions

159

spirit who arrived on horseback. Obviously a prose revision of the Germanic ballad ‘Lenore’, the homily at the conclusion remarks on his abduction as ‘a punishment for his excessive passions’ (Lewis 1804: 7). What is most interesting about these tales, besides their repetitive use of spectres, devils, ghosts in chains, warnings from purgatory and clouds of sulphur, is their persistent assurance that the afterworld exists. In one tale, a dead man appears to his friend to exclaim, ‘Michael, Michael! Nothing is more true than what has been said of the other world’ (Lewis 1804: 61), and such a message allows us to understand one more reason for the popularity of these works. The supernatural was not supposed to be explained away, but instead confirmed as real. This was not a populace ready to accept the stark lessons of materialism and the finality of death, and the short Gothic tale provided its new readership with not just thrills but an assurance of a better world to come. If in these tales a better world was fitfully and often critically imagined by the working classes as the province of aristocratic power and prestige, the afterlife promised its own rewards.

‘On horror’s head horrors accumulate’: The Legacy of Shorter Gothic Tales and Ballads Although early Gothic tales traditionally occupy the lower rungs in the hierarchy of literary works as a minor form of a genre already marked by considerable critical condescension, they did lay the groundwork for later, more sophisticated explorations of the dark regions of human consciousness. The descendant of the humble chapbook, the penny dreadful, numbered among its youthful readers Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Louis Stevenson. The better accomplished tales of terror from Blackwood’s Magazine (beginning publication in 1817) provided an even more direct influence on Poe and the many Victorian writers who would adapt and transfigure Gothic themes. Finally, the Gothic ballad, despite critical attacks on the ‘new species of horror-breeding bards’ (Anon. 1801b: 289), would play a role in the formation of what we now understand as Romantic poetics. When Robert Louis Stevenson half fondly, half ashamedly, referred to his Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) as his ‘penny (12 penny) dreadful’, a mere ‘Gothic gnome’ (Stevenson 1994–5: V.128, 163), he pointed to one legacy of the early nineteenth-century Gothic chapbook and tale. The penny dreadfuls furnished lurid serial stories appearing in parts over a number of weeks, with each weekly

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 159

22/09/15 10:22 AM

160

Douglass H. Thomson and Diane Long Hoeveler

installment costing one penny. Gothic chapbooks, which disappeared around 1830, transmuted via advances in print technology and made their way over to the double-columned pages of cheap newspaper copy. As Louis James observes, Tegg, Hughes, Hurst and the other publishers of the Gothic chapbooks ‘could not compete with the new, larger printing presses, which turned out quarto and folio magazines for a penny’ (James 1963: 72). Although the penny dreadfuls share with the chapbook a focus on sensationalist literature aimed for the working classes (and, for the dreadfuls, an increasingly adolescent one at that), they introduced some new twists to the Gothic tradition, especially with their interest in criminal psychology and their often more contemporary and local settings, such as dark London cityscapes. This serial literature provides one link between Gothic shorter tales and the more psychologically nuanced tales of Poe, Dickens and Stevenson. For example, one of the teenage Dickens’s favorite reads was The Terrific Register, a penny magazine weekly which featured such topics as murder, ghosts, incest and cannibalism; he claimed the stories ‘frightened the very wits out of [his] head’ (qtd in Forster 1875: I.vi). The influence of penny dreadfuls can be seen in not only the interpolated tales of his Pickwick Papers (1836) but in his many ghost stories and in the practice of serial publication itself. Coming full circle, a cable television series entitled Penny Dreadful premiered in the UK and USA during the spring of 2014 on Showtime, reanimating in mash-up format the tropes, conventions and themes of the Victorian penny dreadful with the high-gloss production values of contemporary televised horror shows. Imagining vampires on the loose in working-class London, the series employs all of the devices that made the original penny dreadfuls so popular: sudden shocks, violent assaults on damsels in distress, the sexual victimisation of children, and the correlation of blood, severed body parts and sex in a series of nauseating tableaux. The tales of terror from Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine furnish the most compelling example of the transition from earlier Gothic tales to the emergence of the modern short story with interests in the bizarre and the supernatural. The authors of some of these tales have Gothic pedigrees: Thomas De Quincey, James Hogg (especially with his ‘The Mysterious Bride’), William Godwin Junior, John Galt (friend and biographer of Byron) and Walter Scott. Noting that the magazine’s canny editor, William Blackwood, ‘was most interested in terror fiction’, Morrison and Roberts describe these tales as ‘sensational and shamelessly commercial’ yet trace their impact on such writers as Browning, Dickens, the Brontës and most especially

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 160

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Shorter Gothic Fictions

161

Poe, ‘who emulated, parodied, and reworked Blackwood’s tales throughout his career’ (Morrison and Roberts 2013: 6). Morrison and Baldick, editors of Tales of Terror from Blackwood’s Magazine, acknowledge the link to earlier Gothic stories but importantly note that the Blackwood tales depart from their predecessors in ‘their sharper and more explicit rendering of terror . . . The usual tone in these stories is one of clinical observation (although without the customary detachment) rather than of genteel trepidation, and for the most part the terrors are unflinchingly “witnessed”, not ambiguously evoked’ (Morrison and Baldick 1995: xv). One can think of many nineteenth-century writers of terror tales who traverse the divide between detachment (see the ghost stories of Henry James) and witness (a preoccupation of Poe’s and also of George Lippard’s). With these tales comes a new aesthetic finally regarding shortness as a literary virtue: according to Poe, ‘brevity’ or a ‘reading in one sitting’ contributes directly to ‘the intensity of the intended effect’ and provides a better ‘unity of impression’ (Poe 1989: 373). Examining the legacy of the Gothic ballad involves a rewriting of one origin of Romantic poetics. Recent critical assessments (Gamer 2000; Mortensen 2004; Hoeveler 2010) have stressed the formative role played by the Gothic ballad and its reception in the theorising of Wordsworth and Coleridge. One no longer considers Wordsworth’s programme to ‘counteract this degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation’ in purely aesthetic and ethical terms, as an expression of concern that stories based on ‘extraordinary incidents’ can ‘blunt the discriminating powers of the mind’ (Wordsworth 2008: 177). Critics such as Gamer argue that what motivates Wordsworth’s attack on ‘deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse’ (Wordsworth 2008: 177; emphasis added) is his desire to distance his ballads from those in the Gothic vein, which in those crucial years of 1796–1800 were at their apex. The presence of Bürger figures largely in many of the Lyrical Ballads, and recent studies chart how Wordsworth worked to ‘counteract’, contain and transfigure that influence: using parody in ‘The Idiot Boy’ to mock ‘Lenore’; mollifying the eerie effects in ‘The Thorn’ by attributing them to a superstitious narrator in his reworking of ‘Des Pfarrers Tochter non Taubenhain’; and evoking in ‘Hart-Leap Well’ the creed of natural piety to temper the antiaristocratic invective of ‘Der Wilde Jäger’. However, these conscious reworkings of seminal Gothic ballads encountered an irony: ‘most reviewers had failed to read the ballads as distinct from – and as critiques of – other contemporary [G]othic writers’ (Gamer 2000: 117). Indeed, some contemporary critics found Wordsworth’s poems to

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 161

22/09/15 10:22 AM

162

Douglass H. Thomson and Diane Long Hoeveler

suffer from the matter-of-factness, idiosyncrasy and repetitiveness long associated with the common ballad tradition: ‘tiresome loquacity’, according to Southey (Southey 1798: 198); ‘low and inelegant expressions [that] . . . degenerate into mere slovenliness and vulgarity’, according to Francis Jeffrey (Jeffrey 2008: 412). Wordsworth’s fierce attack on the Gothic in his Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800) clearly aims to disassociate his poetry from the literature of terror. This anti-Gothicism finds expression in many ways: his assertion that ‘feeling’ matters more than ‘action and situation’, those key features of the ballad with its narrative emphasis; the sanctifying glosses attached to the too-Gothic ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and its demotion in the 1800 edition;8 the substitution of ‘Michael. A Pastoral’ for ‘Christabel’; and the addition of the word ‘Pastoral’ to the title of the 1802 edition, providing a verse genre about rustics more literarily acceptable than the lowly ballad. There can be little doubt that Wordsworth’s advocacy of a more meditative, lyrical and less incident-driven poetry would prove decisive in canonical accounts of emergent Romanticism and would help serve to marginalise the Gothic ballad further. Yet there also can be little doubt that Wordsworth drew upon the Gothic ballad to define his own poetic agenda. Occupying a modest place, at best, in the literary canon and a commercially successful niche in the literary marketplace, shorter Gothic fictions remain of considerable historical interest today. In their appeal to a relatively new readership, the working classes, from whose ranks emerged its authors and publishers, they warrant attention in accounts of the first Gothic revival and the broader cultural contexts out of which it emerged. These little Gothics also provided a paradigm of popular culture against which an emerging high literary culture, that of Romanticism, defined itself. While economic exigencies played a significant role in their brevity, these tales and ballads point the way to the great short stories and poetry of terror to come later in the nineteenth century.

Notes 1.

2.

Despite the 1801 date on the title page, evidence points to its publication in late 1800 (see Thomson 2009: 41). Lewis used the phrase ‘hobgoblin repast’ in an undated letter to Scott (which he marked ‘1798’); see Lockhart 1862: 10. In 1815, M. Randall of Stirling published an edition of ‘Albert of Werdendorff’ . . . ‘to which is added the Danger of Pleasures’.

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 162

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Shorter Gothic Fictions 3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

163

Taylor’s ballad was actually composed in 1790 and circulated widely before its publication. Legends of Terror. . . . In Prose and Verse (1826) contains twenty ballads, seven of which are taken from Tales of Wonder (1801) and Tales of Terror (1801). Hoeveler surveys the treatment of chapbooks ’in largely accusatory tones’ by earlier and modern critics (Hoeveler 2010: 171–2, 178), including such scholars as Montague Summers, Frederick Frank and David Punter. Gary Kelly notes that in 1800 a three-volume Gothic novel could cost as much as two weeks’ wages for a labourer, while the thirty-six- and seventy-two-page prose chapbooks cost from sixpence to a shilling, or the price of a meal or a cheap theatre seat (Kelly 2002: 218). Hoeveler explores this subject in The Gothic Ideology: Religious Hysteria and Anti-Catholicism in British Popular Fiction, 1780–1880 (Hoeveler 2014). Also see Victor Sage’s Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition (Sage 1988). David Chandler provides an important reassessment of Southey’s infamous comment on the ‘Rime’ – ‘a Dutch attempt at German sublimity’ – by reading it from the perspective of the Taylor school of writing ballads in the ‘old’ style (Chandler 2003–4).

References Aikin, John and Anna Laetitia Aikin (1773), ‘On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror, with Sir Bertrand, A Fragment’, in Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose, London: J. Johnson, pp. 117–37. Aikin, John (1791), ‘Arthur and Matilda’, in Poems, London: J. Johnson, 1791, pp. 31–41. Alexander, Christine (1993), ‘ “That Kingdom of Gloom”: Charlotte Brontë, the Annuals, and the Gothic’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 47: 409–36. Anonymous (1801a), Tales of Terror, London: W. Bulmer for J. Bell. Anonymous (1801b), Rev. of M. G. Lewis’s Tales of Wonder, Anti-Jacobin Review, 8: 322–7. Anonymous (1803), Tales of Superstition; or, Relations of Apparitions, London: Printed for Tegg & Castleman. Anonymous (1826), Legends of Terror! and Tales of the Wonderful and the Wild. Original and Select, In Prose and Verse, London: Sherwood, Gilbert and Piper. Anonymous [1812] (2004), Fantasmagoriana, ou Recueil d’histoires d’apparitions de spectres, revenans, fantômes, etc., ed. and trans. A. J. Day, St Ives: Fantasmagoriana Press. Bannerman, Anne (1802), Tales of Superstition and Chivalry, London: Vernor and Hood.

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 163

22/09/15 10:22 AM

164

Douglass H. Thomson and Diane Long Hoeveler

Birkhead, Edith [1921] (1963), Tales of Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance, New York: Russell & Russell. Chandler, David (2003–4), ‘Southey’s “German sublimity” and Coleridge’s “Dutch attempt” ’, Romanticism on the Net (last accessed 7 August 2014). Craciun, Adriana (2002), Fatal Women of Romanticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crookenden, Isaac (1802), Romantic Tales, London: S. Fisher, 1802. Curties, T. J. Horsley (1801), Romances and Gothic Tales, London: T. Maiden for Ann Lemoine. Forster, John (1875), The Life of Charles Dickens, 2 vols, Boston: James R. Osgood & Co. Frank, Frederick S. (2002), ‘Gothic Chapbooks, Bluebooks and Short Stories in the Magazines’, in Douglass H. Thomson, Jack G. Voller and Frederick S. Frank (eds), Gothic Writers: A Critical and Bibliographical Guide, Westport, CT: Greenwood, pp. 133–46. Franklin, Caroline (ed.) (2011), The Longman Anthology of Gothic Verse, London: Longman. Gamer, Michael (2000), Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haining, Peter (1972), The Shilling Shockers: Stories of Terror from the Gothic Bluebooks, New York: Taplinger. Harris, Katherine (2012), Forgotten Gothic: Short Stories from British Literary Annuals, 1823–31, Camarillo, CA: Zittaw Press. Herder, Johann Gottfried (1778–9), Volkslieder, 2 vols, Leipzig: In der Weygandschen Buchandlung. Hoeveler, Diane (2010), ‘More Gothic Gold’, Papers on Language and Literature, 46: 165–93. Hoeveler, Diane (2013), Gothic Archive (last accessed 7 August 2014). Hoeveler, Diane (2014), The Gothic Ideology: Religious Hysteria and AntiCatholicism in British Popular Fiction, 1780–1880, Cardiff: University of Wales Press. James, Louis (1963), Fiction for the Working Man 1830–50, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Jeffrey, Francis [1802] (2008), ‘Rev. of Robert Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer’, in Michael Gamer and Dalia Porter (eds), Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800, Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, pp. 409–17. Kelly, Gary (2002), ‘Introduction’, in Varieties of Female Gothic, Vol. 2, London: Pickering & Chatto, pp. i–xxv. Koch, Angela (2002), ‘ “The Absolute Horror of Horrors” Revised: A Bibliographical Checklist of Early-Nineteenth-Century Gothic Bluebooks’, Cardiff Corvey: Reading the Romantic Text, 9 (last accessed 7 August 2014).

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 164

22/09/15 10:22 AM

Shorter Gothic Fictions

165

La Motte-Fouqué, Friedrich Heinrich Karl, Johann Karl August Musäus, Ludwig Tieck, et al. (1823), Popular Tales and Romances of the Northern Nations, 3 vols, London: Printed for W. Simpkin and R. Marshall. Lewis, Isabella (1804), Terrific Tales, London: J. F. Hughes. Lewis, Matthew Gregory (1808), Romantic Tales, 4 vols, London: Printed by D. N. Shury for Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme. Lewis, Matthew Gregory [1796] (2003), The Monk; A Romance, ed. D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf, Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press. Lewis, Matthew Gregory [1801] (2009), Tales of Wonder, ed. Douglass H. Thomson, Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press. Lockhart, J. G. (1862), Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Vol. II, Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black. Mayo, Robert (1942), ‘The Gothic Short Story in the Magazines’, Modern Language Review, 37: 448–54. Mayo, Robert (1950), ‘Gothic Romance in the Magazines’, PMLA, 65: 762–89. Morrison, Robert and Chris Baldick (1995), ‘Introduction’, in Tales of Terror from Blackwood’s Magazine, ed. Robert Morrison and Chris Baldick, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. i–xxviii. Morrison, Robert and Daniel Roberts (2013), ‘ “A character so various, and yet so indisputably its own”: A Passage to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine’, in Robert Morrison and Daniel Roberts (eds), Romanticism and Blackwood’s Magazine: ‘An Unprecedented Phenomenon’, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–22. Mortensen, Peter (2004), British Romanticism and Continental Influences: Writing in an Age of Europhobia, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Nebeker, Eric (2014), ‘The Heyday of the Broadside Ballad’, English Broadside Ballad Archive (last accessed 7 August 2014). Parreaux, André (1960), The Publication of the Monk: A Literary Event, 1796–1798, Paris: Librairie Marcel Didier. Percy, Thomas (1765), Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, London: J. Dodsley. Poe, Edgar Allan [1846] (1989), ‘The Philosophy of Composition’, in David Richter (ed.), The Critical Tradition, New York: St Martin’s Press, pp. 370–8. Potter, Franz (2005), The History of Gothic Publishing, 1800–1835, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Punter, David (1980), The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day, London: Longman. Richter, David (1996), The Progress of Romance: Literary Historiography and the Gothic Novel, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Robberds, John Warren (1843), Memoir of the Life and Writings of the Late William Taylor of Norwich, 2 vols, London: John Murray.

4823_Wright - Romantic Gothic.indd 165

22/09/15 10:22 AM

166

Douglass H. Thomson and Diane Long Hoeveler

Sage, Victor (1988), Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition, New York: St Martin’s Press. Sayers, Frank (1792), ‘Sir Egwin’, in Poems, London: Crouse and Stevenson, pp. 176–84. Scott, Walter (1802), The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Kelso: Printed by J. Ballantyne, for T. Cadell and W. Davies. Scott, Walter [1830] (2014a), ‘Essay on Imitations of the Ancient Ballad’, ed. Douglass H. Thomson, The Walter Scott Archive