Gothic death 1740–1914

A literary history

Andrew Smith, Andrew Smith

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781526131911
  9780719088414
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526101082
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria europea

Gothic death 1740-1914 explores the representations of death and dying in Gothic narratives published between the mid-eighteenth century and the beginning of the First World War. The book investigates how eighteenth century Graveyard Poetry and the tradition of the elegy produced a version of death that underpinned ideas about empathy and models of textual composition. Later accounts of melancholy, as in the work of Ann Radcliffe and Mary Shelley, emphasise the literary construction of death. The shift from writing death to interpreting the signs of death is explored in relation to the work of Poe, Emily Brontë and George Eliot. A chapter on Dickens examines the significance of graves and capital punishment during the period. A chapter on Haggard, Stoker and Wilde explores conjunctions between love and death and a final chapter on Machen and Stoker explores how scientific ideas of the period help to contextualise a specifically fin de siècle model of death.

1

Touched by the dead: eighteenth-century Gothic poetics

Between 1740 and 1750 there were dramatic developments in a new type of writing centred on mourning. This can be mapped as a change within the history of the elegy as it moved away from the specific (an individual’s death) to the general (death more abstractly considered, or the death of a community). The elegy became progressively culturally supplanted (but not eradicated) by the elegiac. This development was in part supported by a discourse of sensibility as new forms of emotional understanding came to provide both a support for models of mourning and new ways of understanding grief. Sensibility, as we shall see, provided a focus for personal grief and produced an epistemology about dying. A key issue concerns the status and function of melancholy. How to write about melancholy became a pressing concern for those poets (such as the Graveyard poets) who attempted to evoke feelings of melancholy by metaphorically resurrecting the dead. However, the gap between feeling and aesthetic reconstruction threatened to link sensibility to the literary imagination, which challenged models of genuine feeling. How to write about the emotions during the period thus posed a problem for those working within the evolving form of the elegy.¹ These implicit debates concerning the relationship between feeling and writing constitute the moment when a discourse of the Gothic emerged. Feelings and their potential invalidation threatened to compromise ideas of ‘humanity’, and, as we shall see in the following chapter on Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe and Mary Shelley, the Gothic subjects the ‘human’ to close critical scrutiny. The Gothic, as it emerges in the 1740s–1750s in Graveyard poetry, is generated out of this metaphysical uncertainty even whilst it formally models images of the dead that will become one of its iconographical features. The Gothic, in other words, was born out of anxieties about death, but in order to explain this it is helpful to outline critical discussion that supports a Gothic reading of the elegy.

The elegy: critical overviews

Peter M. Sacks in The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (1985) provides an historical overview of the elegy from ancient Greece and explores its origins as an extension of pastoral, in which erotic myths centring on vegetation gods (as images of death and fecund renewal) shaped ideas about how to commemorate the dead. Sacks notes that at these ceremonies elegiac couplets were read, accompanied by flute music. For Sacks, this identifies a recurring feature of the elegy: the tension between feeling and words, as he notes that ‘One of the least well observed elements of the genre is [the] enforced accommodation between the mourning self on the one hand and the very words of grief and fictions of consolation on the other’.² His analysis of mourning argues that the grief-stricken become psychologically healthy when a process of symbolic substitution takes place. Sacks notes in the story of Apollo and Daphne that Apollo’s acceptance of his loss of Daphne is demonstrated by his taking up of a laurel wreath that symbolises that loss. This leads Sacks to conclude that ‘It is this substitutive turn or act of troping that any mourner must perform’ (p. 5). The necessity for this act of substitution is because, following Freud’s ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917), it indicates that the mourner is healthily working their way through grief by substituting the lost loved one with a transitional symbolic object that moves them beyond the initially devastating feelings of loss. The words of the elegy thus effect the same transition, so that ‘The dead … must be separated from the poet, partly by the veil of words’ (p. 9). For Sacks, the elegy thus functions as a psychological stage in a process of mourning. These associations with healthy development may appear to be anti-Gothic as they suggest a positive reaction to trauma. The type of symbolism read by a Freudian such as Sacks should not, however, be regarded as an endorsement of a Gothic trajectory that will lead to Freud. As we shall see, literary texts from the mid eighteenth century and the late nineteenth century repeatedly assert that decoding the symbol generates a positive epistemic exposure – and although we will be looking at often competing forms of epistemology, there is throughout the period a shared emphasis on the presence of an occluded knowledge that can be read. These issues are notably acute in the Gothic, and Jerrold E. Hogle has written an account of the elegy that explores these Gothic tendencies.

Hogle notes a similarity between the elegy and the early Gothic because both pivot on moments of death, with early Gothic narratives (Hogle cites Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) as an example) typically focusing upon ‘a mystery linked to sudden … deaths, often of relatives or ancestors whose mode of destruction or burial harbours hidden truths’.³ Hogle also acknowledges an important difference: the elegy tries to lay, no matter how problematically, the past to rest, whereas the Gothic is more interested in resurrecting the past because its unresolved dramas have a continuing presence (which need to be engaged with before that past can ‘die’). Nevertheless there are also, for Hogle, telling symbolic (and structural) points of connection between the elegy and the Gothic. Hogle notes that Richard Bentley’s illustration to Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard’ (1751) makes visible a number of issues in the poem that are also to be found in later Gothic narratives from the eighteenth century. These include an ‘emptying out of the vestiges of the past’ and an attempt to fill the past ‘with alternative meanings provided in the present’ and a final process of reorienting this reworked model of the past so that it speaks to, and in some sense for, the present. Hogle examines how this process is elaborated within the Gothic by a close reading of the two Prefaces of Walpole’s Otranto, the first of which claimed that the text was a sixteenth-century narrative by a Catholic priest (and so is a possible counter-Reformation story), whereas in the second edition (1765) Walpole acknowledged authorship and claimed that the novel was a blend of ancient and modern romance (and so is about the ‘real’ world, although one transposed to the past).

Hogle notes that Otranto might have (in the first edition) passed as Catholic and then worked as Protestant (as Manfred wrestles with his disposition against the forces of fate), but that much of the elegiac content of Graveyard poetry feels strangely secular as its resolutions (via feelings of melancholy) are more psychological than theological – a position that also feeds into the Gothic of the time. It is, however, also important to acknowledge that Graveyard poetry centres on Protestant readings of Catholic memorials, and this cultural translation provides the space in which a critical reading takes place. Hogle’s identification of a symbolic link between the Gothic and the elegy echoes Sacks’s view that symbolism supports a psychological ‘truth’ that, paradoxically, depends on the literary object. For Hogle, this links to ideas of the pastoral, the elegiac challenge to which (as pastoral becomes a graveyard in Gray) renders nature unnatural. He notes that ‘death is best “naturalized” by schemes that highlight the fundamental artificiality in the image of death’ (p. 575). Death thus functions as a multivalent sign in elegies because it represents the projection of present-day concerns – just as the Gothic disguises its historical engagements by locating them in the past. The danger is that such projections simply highlight the presence of a symbolic mode that ‘call[s]‌ out for new cultural content to fill this symbolic void’ (p. 577). In the elegy, as in the Gothic, death dies and becomes replaced by alternative symbolic discourses concerning history, politics and ideas about social power (Hogle notes the class divisions captured in Bentley’s illustration of Gray’s poem). ‘Death’, however, also becomes a vehicle through which other forms of death (especially of cultures and memories about them) are shown as being in conflict with emerging modes of power – which is also captured in the tensions between the ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ romance in Otranto’s second Preface, which emphasises the importance of placing the text within a discourse about writing. This leads Hogle to conclude that ‘the drive’ that links the elegy with the Gothic is the urge ‘to project newer complexes of meaning, including modern struggles between waning and rising beliefs about many areas, back into the spaces once occupied by the dying schemes of older systems that still haunt us with their images of cultural, as well as individual death’ (p. 581). This tension between the past and the present has been given a systematic investigation by Thomas Pfau, who relates the elegy to models of history.

Pfau discusses the elegy within the context of the 1790s and addresses how the form should be read through the new aesthetic models developed by Kant, Schiller, Hölderlin and Novalis. The 1790s represent a sea change in the elegy because the implicit discussion of symbolism within the form is now given explicit aesthetic treatment. He also argues that by the 1790s a new model of time emerges that is secular and linear, and this contrasts with earlier (classical) models of time which had suggested that time was cyclical (as we are reborn).⁴ However, ‘Unlike mythical time, modern temporality and history not only can never recur but can only ever be experienced as “passing” into the past or as the anxious projection of an uncertain future’ (p. 550). For this reason modern ‘death’ has become secular and devoid of meaning and this very absence conjures into being theories of aesthetics that attempt to put back the forms of meaning (about human value, agency and the creative imagination) which have been lost. The chief irony is that elegies are themselves, as we saw in both Sacks’s and Hogle’s account of the form, fundamentally aesthetic engagements that imply acts of creativity (or perhaps reconstruction would be closer to Hogle’s terms) which indicate both the presence of a void, because they are unreal, and an overcoming of that void, because for Sacks, pace Freud, the symbol represents a moment of psychological transition. What we are witnessing in this historical moment is an acute metaphysical uncertainty. Ideas about post-mortem resurrection, for example, are transferred to texts and issues about representation, so that metaphysical hesitations are nervously manifested around models of textual interpretation and textual composition. Along the way a new type of metaphysics becomes ‘performed’ that both erases a Catholic past and moves beyond a completely committed Protestant way of reading, meaning that the idea of representation becomes addressed in predominantly abstract terms. New reflections upon reading and writing are generated by the rhetorical production of this emerging Gothic subject – a subject who also complicates the idea of resurrection and spiritual ascendency because they indicate the presence of absence, or the reality of the void.

Pfau’s discussion of Schiller’s distinction between the naive and the sentimental is central to this new understanding of a late-eighteenth-century aesthetic and it also has points of contact with Sacks’s reading of Freud.⁵ For Pfau, the naive represents a lost condition of childhood in which an innocent overwhelming by the world has been superseded by a self-conscious sentimentality that effectively creates the world as it engages with it. This leads him to the view that ‘the rise of aesthetics and of comprehensive theories of “culture” must be understood as a symptom of an all-pervading malaise and loss for which art offers itself as a self-conscious supplement’ (p. 555). For Pfau, this position supports De Man’s view that the allegorical mode of romanticism indicates that literature self-consciously refers to itself rather than either a Kantian realm of noumenal ideas or phenomenal objects.⁶ Considered in these terms, the emptiness of ‘death’ in the elegy is only provisionally compensated for by precarious acts of creativity that unconsciously point towards their own emptiness as forms of aesthetic reconstruction. We will pursue these ideas in the following chapter in a discussion of how Frankenstein (1818, revised 1831) engages with aesthetic discourse as a means of concealing death, in which new psychological versions of the subject are developed through a complex literary self-consciousness.

The readings of the elegy provided by Sacks, Hogle and Pfau helpfully identify the highly symbolic nature of the elegy. There are different resolutions to this issue of symbolism and Sacks’s Freudian reading is certainly more optimistic than that of either Hogle or Pfau. However, the relationship between death and creativity is acknowledged at different levels of engagement by all three, and although Pfau observes this within a quite specific trend of the 1790s, its roots can be found earlier and in texts that explore the relationship between creativity and the Gothic, such as in Edward Young’s ‘Conjectures on Original Composition’ (1759), William Duff’s An Essay on Original Genius (1767), Nathan Drake’s later ‘On Gothic Superstition’ (1798) and Radcliffe’s ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’ (1826).⁷ However, before dis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Touched by the dead: eighteenth-century Gothic poetics
• 2 Mourning, memory and melancholy: constructing death in the 1790s–1820s
• 3 From writing to reading: Poe, Brontë and Eliot
• 4 Gothic death and Dickens: executions, graves and dreams
• 5 Loving the undead: Haggard, Stoker and Wilde
• 6 Decoding the dying: Machen and Stoker
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index