Jerrold E. Hogle

The rise of American Gothic

From the turn of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century and the beginnings of a distinctive American literature, the Gothic has stubbornly flourished in the United States. Its cultural role, though, has been entirely paradoxical: an optimistic country founded upon the Enlightenment principles of liberty and “the pursuit of happiness,” a country that supposedly repudiated the burden of history and its irrational claims, has produced a strain of literature that is haunted by an insistent, undead past and fascinated by the strange beauty of sorrow. How can the strikingly ironic, even perverse, career of the Gothic in America be accounted for? Why has it been so at home on such inhospitable ground? The most common responses to these questions have recourse to conventional metaphors: the Gothic, it is frequently reasoned, embodies and gives voice to the dark nightmare that is the underside of “the American dream.” This formulation is true up to a point, for it reveals the limitations of American faith in social and material progress. Yet a simple opposition between the convenient figures of dream and nightmare is overly reductive. These cliches, and the impulses in American life that they represent, are not in mere opposition; they actually interfuse and interact with each other. This realization will take us far in understanding the odd centrality of Gothic cultural production in the United States, where the past constantly inhabits the present, where progress generates an almost unbearable anxiety about its costs, and where an insatiable appetite for spectacles of grotesque violence is part of the texture of everyday reality.

British Gothic fiction, 1885-1930

The skin, and the flesh, and the muscles, and the bones, and the firm structure of the human body that I had thought to be unchangeable, and permanent as adamant, began to melt and dissolve. Arthur Machen, The Great God Pan (1890; Machen, House of Souls , p. 236) I will begin with four Gothic scenarios from the British fin de siecle . Marooned on an obscure island, the protagonist of H. G.Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) must contend with “creatures” who are “human in shape, and yet human beings with the strangest air about them of some familiar animal”(p.40). Prendick, unable to classify these anomalous entities, feels a “queer spasm of disgust,” a “shuddering recoil,” in their presence (pp. 25, 31). In The Great God Pan , the body of the dying Helen Vaughan loses its human specificity in a series of rapid transformations as it “descend[s] to the beasts whence it ascended,” dissolves into “a substance as jelly,” and then takes on “a horrible and unspeakable shape, neither man nor beast.” The doctor who attends Helen is convulsed with “horror and revolting nausea” at the sight of her terrible metamorphoses (Machen, House of Souls, pp. 236-37). The narrator of William Hope Hodgson’s The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” (1907) leans over the water and looks into the eyes of a “thing” with a “white, demoniac face, human save that the mouth and nose had greatly the appearance of a beak.”

Scottish and Irish Gothic

I want to focus in this chapter on qualities particular to Scottish and Irish Gothic fiction, wider histories of which are already available. More specifically, I propose to inquire into some of the general relations between history and the Gothic for Scotland and Ireland and to exemplify these issues through an extended consideration of two texts, one Irish and one Scottish, that might both, in very different ways, make some claim to have an “originary” status in the history of Gothic fiction. One of these is, perhaps, inescapable in any contemplation either of the Gothic in general or of the “Irish Gothic”: Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). My epitome of Scottish Gothic is less obvious, but carries, as I hope to show, a freight of themes that touch at many points on the Gothic: Walter Scott’s The Antiquary (1816). I have in mind also the curious way in which current critical discourse seems to be forming itself round a certain terminology that owes much to the Gothic tradition. I have looked elsewhere at the contemporary preoccupation, in literary as well as in psychoanalytic theory, with crypts, phantoms, and processes of spectralization. Here I want to use different terms, principally the monument and the ruin. Both of these notions, I believe, point us toward the “uncanny,” in that they speak always of history, but of a history that is constantly under the threat of erasure. They speak of history not as a living presence nor yet as an irrecoverable absence, but as inevitably involved in specific modes of ghostly persistence which may occur when, particularly in Scotland and Ireland, national aspirations are thwarted by conquest or by settlement, as they have been so often. I want to show how the Gothic is especially powerful in rendering the complex hauntings in such conflicted histories.

The Victorian Gothic in English novels and stories, 1830-1880

In the gray early morning of 20 June 1837 the young Princess Victoria left her bedroom in a tumbledown St. James’s Palace, and with it the enclosure of her isolated youth under the authority of Sir John Conroy, to be greeted on bended knee by the Lord Chancellor and the Archbishop of Canterbury with the news of her accession to the throne. The Victorian age began like the ending of an Ann Radcliffe novel: the bad uncles and despotic guardian give way to the true heir, who is now able to preserve and defend her national inheritance. This moment seemed to fulfill the description of the British constitution by the jurist William Blackstone as “an old Gothic castle, erected in the days of chivalry, but fitted up for a modern inhabitant.” In time the key elements of the Radcliffean Whig Gothic suggested in the above tableau – the politics of liberty and progressivism, freedom from the past, and the entrapped heroine – would indeed be revived in Gothic writing. But in the early years of Victoria’s reign, that was not possible. To some extent this was because of the ambivalence of many social groups toward the institution of the monarchy and the gender of the new monarch, all during the 1840s. The influence of this view of the Queen upon the modes of political and literary sensibility during this time may seem surprising, but it can be amply demonstrated. While

The Gothic on screen

It may come as a surprise, in view of the generic force of the term Gothic , that there is no established genre called Gothic cinema or Gothic film . There are Gothic images and Gothic plots and Gothic characters and even Gothic styles within film, all useful to describe bits and pieces of films that usually fall into the broader category of horror , but there is no delimited or demonstrable genre specific to film called the Gothic. This is at least in part due to the fact that film, as a medium born with the twentieth century, is both a late-comer to and an avid, unashamed plagiarizer of earlier, literary forms of the Gothic. As such, the Gothic does not “belong” to film, and the film medium must content itself with providing a home for that catch-all category of terror and spookiness, the horror genre. Nonetheless, if it is surprising that there is no such thing as Gothic cinema, that is because we perfectly well know the Gothic when we see it. There is, in fact, something peculiarly visual about the Gothic. As William Patrick Day has pointed out, the Gothic tantalizes us with fear, both as its subject and its effect; it does so, however, not primarily through characters or plots or even language, but through spectacle (Day, Circles of Fear and Desire , p. 63). The fearful effect of the Gothic, at least in its literary forms, depends on our ability to cast certain conventionalized images from the text onto the “screen” of our mind’s eye. The Gothic is thus particularly suited to the cinema, trading as the latter does in images that affect the individual psyche, albeit in culturally legible terms. Indeed, this is both the strength and weakness of the Gothic on screen: its ability to capture the spectacular element of the Gothic effect and encode it in culturally recognizable – ultimately perhaps in all too recognizable – forms.

Gothic fictions and Romantic writing in Britain

That Gothicism is closely related to Romanticism is perfectly clear, but it is easier to state the fact than to prove it tidily and convincingly. There is a persistent suspicion that Gothicism is a poor and probably illegitimate relation of Romanticism, and a consequent tendency to treat it that way. There are those, indeed, who would like to deny the relationship altogether. (Robert Hume, “Gothic Versus Romantic,” p.282) This was the way matters stood in 1969 when Robert Hume published “Gothic Versus Romantic: a Revaluation of the Gothic Novel” in the flagship journal of America’s Modern Language Association, PMLA . To reread Hume’s essay today is to be surprised by the modesty of its claims – since it points to conventions, aesthetics, and reading experiences shared by Gothic and Romantic texts and their readers – and by the energy with which these claims were attacked by another scholar, Robert Platzer, in a “Rejoinder” published as a companion piece to it. Their exchange resembles another, better-known dispute between Arthur Lovejoy and Rene Wellek over the nature of Romanticism. There Lovejoy had attacked Wellek’s holistic definition of Romanticism by pointing to its exceptions. Here Platzer took a similar approach: attacking the fundamental vagueness of the categories of “Gothic” and “Romantic”; allowing for common thematic preoccupations but no closer relation; and arguing for the two terms as part of an overarching “continuum” of print culture. Sharing subject matter and themes, he claimed, did not amount to sharing consciousness, and only the most selective account of both movements could point to real common ground or direct and unmediated influence (Platzer, “Gothic Versus Romantic: Rejoinder,” pp. 270–71).

Colonial and postcolonial Gothic

Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him – all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness The Gothic - as Walter Scott observed in his commentary on Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto - is above all the “art of exciting surprise and horror.” The genre’s appeal to readers, in Scott’s view, comes from its trying to reach “that secret and reserved feeling of love for the marvelous and supernatural which occupies a hidden corner in almost everyone’s bosom.” As it happens, this “literature of nightmare” (MacAndrew, Gothic Tradition in Fiction , p. 3) was, from its earliest history in England and Europe, fundamentally linked to colonial settings, characters, and realities as frequent embodiments of the forbidding and frightening. This mixed genre was still less than forty years old when Charlotte Smith – the eighteenth-century poet and novelist admired by so many in her time, including Jane Austen – set her novella “The Story of Henrietta” (1800) in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica, where the terrors of the heroine’s situation are exacerbated by her atavistic fears of Jamaica’s African-derived magicoreligious practice of Obeah and the possibility of sexual attack by black males. By the 1790s Gothic writers were quick to realize that Britain’s growing empire could prove a vast source of frightening “others” who would, as replacements for the villainous Italian antiheroes in Walpole or Radcliffe, bring freshness and variety to the genre. With the inclusion of the colonial, a new sort of darkness – of race, landscape, erotic desire and despair – enters the Gothic genre, and I here want to show and explain the consequences of that “invasion” throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Stoker’s Counterfeit Gothic: Dracula and Theatricality at the Dawn of Simulation

Bram Stoker is now widely celebrated as a major contributor to Gothic fiction — and even to Gothic theatre and film — but the exact nature of his contribution needs to be better understood. I want to show here that Stoker draws us forcefully back to the most basic foundations of ‘Gothic’ fiction and theatre, especially in Dracula, while simultaneously offering a ‘zone of horror’ that vividly harbours a host of anxieties basic to Anglo-European, white middle-class culture at both the fin de siecle of Stoker’s time and our own turn of the century. For me it forms no mere coincidence that 1897, the ‘birth-year’ of Dracula, was the 100th anniversary of the death-year of Horace Walpole, the first writer to subtitle a novel ‘A Gothic Story’. Stoker intensifies the most fundamental and lasting tendencies in the Walpolean Gothic, and does so, I would contend, nowhere more so than in Dracula. Even his alterations of the Gothic tradition, the ones most revealing of his own culture at his own historical moment, are arresting fulfilments of the principal ‘technologies’ (the modes of symbolisation) that emerge in the Gothic from the writings of Walpole through those of Radcliffe, Lewis, Polidori and Charlotte Bronte, to Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886).

Romanticism and the “schools” of criticism and theory

For students of English literature from the 1780s through to the mid 1830s, “Romanticism” and the “Romantic period” are not what they used to be – one good reason for a second edition of this volume. To be sure, “Romanticism” as a literary movement or a complex of beliefs and styles of art, and “Romantic” as a descriptor of that type of writing or writer, have long referred to “being like romance”:1 to reworking an aesthetic mode, particularly the European quest-romance of the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries, where imagination, desire, and myth-making heighten what we usually take as perceived “reality” to extend its limits with symbolic suggestions that deepen, expand, or transcend everyday human awareness. Such a relocation of “romance,” in fact, was already in progress well before 1780. By then “romantic” as a signifier had already strayed from mainly describing supernatural tales of chivalry, including their expressions of love, parodied in Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605–15), to characterize the assertively “natural,” but also mythological and idealizing, landscape paintings of Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa from the seventeenth century as these came to Britain from southern France and northern Italy (to many, then, the “regions of romance”) to become exemplars of grand sublimity within the late eighteenth-century culture of “sensibility” (Eichner, ‘Romantic,’ p. 5). It has thus seemed proper to connect “Romantic” with William Wordsworth’s claim in a revision of his preface to the 1800 edition of the Lyrical Ballads – for many the collection that launched British Romanticism – that these poems, whether written by him or Samuel Taylor Coleridge, take “incidents and situations” based in “common life,” including a revivified “nature,” and “throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things” are “presented to the mind in [such] an unusual aspect” that readers can now “trace” in them “the primary laws of our nature . . . the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement.”2 This paradoxical “return to nature” that also transfigures its basic impressions to arrive at “what is more integral than nature, within [the] self,” therefore became defined by 1970 as JERROLD E. HOGLE

French and German Gothic

Literary genres do not emerge overnight, nor do they arise in cultural isolation. This is especially true of the Gothic, which not only underwent an initial period of gestation, development and decline (broadly speaking, from the publication of Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto in 1764 to some moment after Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer of 1820) but also, from the very outset, borrowed liberally from a vast range of sources, foreign and domestic, literary, aesthetic, and scientific. In light of the burgeoning academic interest in the Gothic in Britain and the Americas over the last decades of the twentieth century, it is easy to forget that the English Gothic genre was by no means the only example of a popular aesthetic of horror in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe. Indeed, in France a tradition of sentimental adventure stories, stories which generally contained more than the occasional macabre frisson , had existed since the 1730s (and been equally popular elsewhere, particularly in Britain); while in Germany, at almost exactly the same moment as the vogue for the Gothic reached its apogee in Britain, the reading public devoured a succession of novels and tales featuring knights, robbers, and ghosts (thus giving rise to a tripartite genre generally thought of as the Ritter -, Rauber -, and Schauerroman ). At some moment in the late eighteenth century, moreover, under the impact of translated English and German works, the French sentimental adventure story transmuted itself into yet another distinct genre, termed the roman noir , which appropriated genre markers from translated foreign literature while generally obeying local norms with regard to narrative structure and ideological content.