THE GOTHIC TEXT 9781503618787

Citation preview

The Gothic Text

t h e got h ic tex t =< Marshall Brown

stanford university press stanford, california 2005

Stanford University Press Stanford, California 䉷 2005 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Designed and typeset by Yvonne Tsang of Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services in 11/14 Sabon Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brown, Marshall The Gothic text / Marshall Brown. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8047-3912-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Horror tales—History and criticism. 2. Gothic revival (Literature) I. Title. PN3435.B78 2005 809
.9164—dc22 2004003969 Original Printing 2005 Last figure below indicates year of this printing: 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05

To my family, near and far.

contents

Preface • ix A Note on Sources • xxiii 1. Three Theses on Gothic Fiction • 1 2. Fantasia: Kant and the Demons of the Night • 8 part i origins: walpole 3. The Birth of The Castle of Otranto • 19 4. Excursus: Notes on the History of Psycho-Narration • 34 5. Ghosts in the Flesh • 42 part ii kant and the gothic 6. At the Limits of Kantian Philosophy • 69 7. Kant’s Disciples • 85 8. Kant and the Doctors • 92 9. Meditative Interlude • 105

part iii philosophy of the gothic novel 10. The Wild Ass’s Skin • 115 11. The Devil’s Elixirs • 127 12. Melmoth the Wanderer • 135 13. Caleb Williams • 149 part iv consequences 14. In Defense of Cliche´: Radcliffe’s Landscapes • 161 15. Frankenstein: A Child’s Tale • 183 16. Postscript: Faust and the Gothic • 209 Notes • 223 Works Cited • 253 Index • 271

preface

Horace counsels cellaring one’s writings for nine years. Portions of this book have more than doubled the Horatian term. While the delay is not intrinsically either good or bad, it does yield a different kind of book from one written at fever pitch. My initial notion was that Kant and the gothic together discovered a new dimension of human consciousness. Internal differentiation and chance encounter have both played their part in ramifying a text that now feels to me something between an organism and a construction. Consequently, this preface will offer both a genetic and a structural overview of the book to follow. Early on in that long period, I began a chapter about The Castle of Otranto for my book Preromanticism. That book concerns milestones of literary composition from the 1740s through Wordsworth. Walpole’s little novel was surely a milestone, among the most eccentric of its era’s many oddities. Reading for form, I was struck by its early and extensive use of indirect discourse. I tried pairing Walpole’s unprecedented, and seemingly unremarked, focus on his characters’ thoughts with the great philosophical exploration of consciousness in the work of Immanuel Kant. Those two bachelors seem an odd couple. Yet they weren’t so far apart in age (Kant was seven years younger) or in literary predilections (Kant’s taste ran to Pope and the

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