GOTHIC FICTION

Introduction

by Peter Otto

9 - Gothic echoes / Gothic labyrinths

In a letter to William Wordsworth, written early in October 1810, Coleridge explains how, after "reading a Romance in Mrs Radcliff's style", he constructed “a scheme, which was to serve for all romances a priori – only varying the proportions –-- A Baron or Baroness ignorant of their Birth, and in some dependent situation – Castle – on a Rock – a Sepulchre – at some distance from the Rock – Deserted Rooms – Underground Passages – Pictures – A ghost, so believed – or – a written record – blood on it! – A wonderful Cut throat -- &c &c &c.”

Similar schemes are commonplace during the period. Walker's Hibernian Magazine for January 1798 offers the following "recipe":

“Take – An old castle, half of it ruinous
A long gallery, with a great many doors, some secret ones.
Three murdered bodies, quite fresh.
As many skeletons, in chests and presses.
An old woman hanging by the neck; with her throat cut.
Assassins and desperadoes, 'quant. suff.'
Noises, whispers, and groans, threescore at least.

Mix them together in the form of three volumes, to be taken at any of the watering places before going to bed.”

The view that Gothic fictions rely on a small stock of devices, conventions and preoccupations recurs in many accounts of the Gothic, often with negative connotations. Amongst the Gothic's "trappings", Hume mentions "haunted castles, supernatural occurrences (sometimes with natural explanations), secret panels and stairways, time-yellowed manuscripts, and poorly lighted midnight scenes". Sedgewick's list of Gothic preoccupations includes

“the priesthood and monastic institutions; sleeplike and deathlike states; subterranean spaces and live burial; doubles; the discovery of obscured family ties; affinities between narrative and pictorial art; possibilities of incest; unnatural echoes or silences, unintelligible writings, and the unspeakable; garrulous retainers; the poisonous effects of guilt and shame; nocturnal landscapes and dreams; apparitions from the past; Faust- and Wandering Jew-like figures; civil insurrections and fires; the charnel house and the madhouse. The chief incidents of a Gothic novel never go far beyond illustrating these few themes.”

Putting aside the quibble that this list contains many more than a "few themes", it is important to note that stock devices and themes are only the most overt sign of the shaping role played in this genre by intertextuality. At times, Gothic texts seem to be engaged in a long, unfinished conversation with each other and with other texts and genres; or, alternatively, Gothic seems to be a labyrinth in which texts echo, plagiarise, but also recontextualise and transform their precursors and competitors.

Amongst the (originally) non-gothic voices that can be heard in the Gothic, the most prominent are: Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry (1757) and, indeed, many of the key eighteenth-century theorists of the sublime; Shakespeare's plays, most prominently the ghost scene in Hamlet and the witches scene in Macbeth; Milton's Paradise Lost, in particular his portrait of Satan, which influenced the way that Gothic villains were characterized; Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy; the work of the Graveyard poets, such as Edward Young's The Complaint or, Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality (1742), Robert Blair's The Grave (1743) and Thomas Gray's "Elegy written in a Country Church-Yard" (1751); James McPherson's "Ossianic" poems, Fingal (1762) and Temora (1763); myths and popular ballads from Britain and the Continent; the literature of sensibility, particularly novels by Rousseau, Richardson and Prévost; and Schiller's Die Räuber (The Robbers, 1781) and Geisterseher (The Ghostseer, 1787-9). Even this long list is far from complete!

"Conversion" between Gothic texts sometimes involves no more than plagiarism and/or abbreviation. Chapbook authors in particular were liable to draw resources from pre-existing works: Wolfstein; or, The mysterious bandit (London: J. Bailey, [n.d.] is a shameless plagiarism of Shelley's St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian: a romance (London: J. J. Stockdale, 1811); The midnight groan; or The spectre of the chapel involving an exposure of the horrible secrets of the nocturnal assembly (London: T. and R. Hughes, 1808) borrows liberally from Grosse's Horrid Mysteries; The castle of St. Gerald, or The fatal vow (London: J. Ker, [n.d.]) condenses Clara Reeve's The Old English Baron; and The romance of the Appennines (London: J. Nichols, 1808) "is a gothic refabrication of two Shakespearean comedies, Twelfth Night and As You like it with Gothic embellishments from several other plays plundered liberally in order to Shakespeareanize the terror and suffering".

Works by Radcliffe and Lewis were, as I have suggested, valuable quarries for plagiarists, while also providing a point of reference for their competitors, imitators and followers. Although the first two sections of the collection are designed to foreground the schools who took Radcliffe or Lewis as their models, this should not be allowed to conceal the intertextuality that often structures relations between their followers, between both minor and well-known Gothic writers, and within (or between) the various sub-genres of the Gothic (monastic shocker, robber romance, tower gothic, oriental gothic, gothic melodrama, and so on).

In addition to Sedgewick's list of Gothic preoccupations, these debates or inter-textual conversations return again and again to questions such as: the nature and limitations of sensibility; the "powers" of the heroine of sensibility; the "new man", exemplified by Vivaldi in Radcliffe's The Italian or Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey; the problems and possibilities posed by reading, particularly in the context of the new mass market for books; the relation between public and private, male and female spheres of influence; the limits and possibilities opened for women by companionate marriage; the nature of the passions; the status of the novel; the role of women writers; and so on.

These inter-textual conversations are in part driven by the desire to "cash in" on a genre and set of themes that for much of the nineties and until perhaps the beginning of the 1820s, were of widespread popular interest. Indeed, Gothic fictions are deeply inflected by yet another set of exchanges, between authorial intent, market expectation, generic constraints, and the demands of publishers and distributors. An important feature of the microfilm collection is, therefore, the reproduction of the publisher's advertisements and other material often published with Gothic texts.

Until the 1960s, the remarkable intertextuality of the Gothic was commonly seen as a flaw making the genre unworthy of serious study. Gothic was a popular rather than a "high" genre; its members were, in Coleridge's celebrated distinction, works of fancy rather than imagination. In other words, rather than composing an organic, unified whole, Gothic novels were like Victor Frankenstein's monster, a collocation of materials drawn from other sources, bound together in a monstrous (dis)unity. Of the mediocre mass of Gothic fictions, only a handful were worthy of study. George Sampson's judgement, in The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature (1941) is a representative instance of these views:

“The 'tale of terror' had a great run of popularity ... at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. Some of them were trash of the most abject kind ... And just as three or four real story-tellers have emerged from the modern horde of semi-literate murder-merchants, so three fairly considerable figures [emerged from the Gothic] ... These are Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory Lewis, and Charles Robert Maturin.”

Michael Sadleir's pioneering bibliographical research, along with early accounts of the genre by Summers and Varma, arguably prepared the ground for the remarkable revaluation of the Gothic that occured in the last decades of the twentieth century. Indeed, during this period, informed by successive waves of literary theory (in particular Marxist, psychoanalytic, New Historicist and feminist approaches and, more recently, Queer Theory), some of the features that had previously relegated Gothic to the margins now attracted readers to the genre. From the beginning of the 1980s, increasing numbers of critics have been drawn to the Gothic precisely because is a popular genre, the first developed for a modern mass-market; its authors and readers are more likely to be women than men; the genre is structured by quotation, pastiche, allusion, intertextuality, and so on.

Despite this resurgence of interest in Gothic, it has been difficult to find all but the most well-known members of this genre. As Sadleir observes,

“the library circulation represented to within a few copies the entire dissemination of an ordinary novel; ... the volumes were read to pieces if they were popular, and quickly scrapped if they were not; and ... such fictions being regarded as at best a transient entertainment, it was to no one’s interest or satisfaction to care for their survival.”

Consequently, despite the growing interest in "non-canonical" Gothic authors and in the genre as a whole, most accounts of the Gothic still focus on "canonical" authors. There is, for example, no extended study of the literary exchanges between Ann Radcliffe or Matthew Lewis and their followers. Aside from William W. Watt's fifty-four page monograph, there are few discussions of Gothic chapbooks or their illustrations. Even key writers of the genre, such as Catherine Cuthberson, Regina Maria Roche and Charlotte Dacre have seldom been the object of extended critical discussion. Despite recent work, Dorothy Blakey's now outdated The Minerva Press (1939) remains the only book-length study of the most important of the circulating libraries and presses that "fed" the Gothic craze.94 Although there have been important studies of Gothic conventions, discourses and preoccupations, most rely on only a small sample of texts. One of the hopes of the editors of this microfilm collection is that it will provide the catalyst to redress this situation.

Peter Otto
University of Melbourne

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