Dangerous bodies

Historicising the gothic corporeal

Marie Mulvey-Roberts

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780719085413
• eBook ISBN: 9781784996130
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Through an investigation of the body and its oppression by the church, the medical profession and the state, this book reveals the actual horrors lying beneath fictional horror in settings as diverse as the monastic community, slave plantation, operating theatre, Jewish ghetto and battlefield trench. The book provides original readings of canonical Gothic literary and film texts including The Castle of Otranto, The Monk, Frankenstein, Dracula and Nosferatu. This collection of fictionalised dangerous bodies is traced back to the effects of the English Reformation, Spanish Inquisition, French Revolution, Caribbean slavery, Victorian medical malpractice, European anti-Semitism and finally warfare, ranging from the Crimean up to the Vietnam War. The endangered or dangerous body lies at the centre of the clash between victim and persecutor and has generated tales of terror and narratives of horror, which function to either salve, purge or dangerously perpetuate such oppositions. This ground-breaking book will be of interest to academics and students of Gothic studies, gender and film studies and especially to readers interested in the relationship between history and literature.

1

Catholicism, the Gothic and the bleeding body

The visions that proliferated in Europe during the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries became increasingly bloody […]. Such intense visualizations of blood were also enacted in rituals and in bodies. Christ figures used in the liturgy to perform the events of Passion Week were sometimes outfitted with bladders of animal blood that could be punctured at appropriate moments to display Jesus’ bleeding before the faithful; cruets for eucharistic wine survive in the form of Christ images with spouts where the wounds occurred. From the thirteenth-century on, bands of flagellants roamed Europe, tearing out of their own flesh the suffering and joy of union with Christ.¹

Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood (2007)

The wounded body is a leitmotif of the Gothic novel and central icon of the Roman Catholic Church, which has perpetuated images of crucifixion, martyred saints, bleeding statues and mystic stigmatics. Sacred art depicts an iconography of suffering, as in devotions to the Sacred Heart of Jesus in which Christ holds his fiery wounded heart wrapped in thorns, dripping blood and surmounted by a cross. His bleeding body has been emulated by penitential flagellants, stigmatics and martyrs. This imitatio Christi has a certain affinity with the Gothic. The Church has readily supplied Gothic novelists with cowled monks, lustful priests, immured nuns, confessionals and secret tribunals, while the Gothic settings of cathedrals, cloisters, convents and crypts evoke the medievalism of an earlier world view replete with superstition, feudalism and antiquity. This chapter will look at how Gothic literature has drawn not only on the repressions of the Inquisition, but also on anti-Catholic movements from the English Reformation to the French Revolution, with particular reference to Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Matthew Lewis’ The Monk. Attention will be given to a neglected reading of Walpole’s novel as a satire of Henry VIII, while Lewis’ Bleeding Nun, who is resurrected in later works, will be seen to represent aspects of the Reign of Terror in revolutionary France.

Many critics regard the Gothic novel as traditionally anti-Catholic and even indicative of a deep-seated prejudice against the Vatican. The first critic to make this really explicit was J. M. S. Tompkins, who insisted: ‘the prejudice against Catholicism, or, more particularly, against priests and monks, the “anti-Roman bray” … is heard at its loudest in both the English and the German novels of terror’.² Voices dissenting from this creed include Montague Summers, who insisted that ‘it is folly to trace any “anti-Roman feeling” in the Gothic novel’.³ Mary Muriel Tarr has argued that the most important function of the Catholic materials she surveyed in 121 Gothic works was to serve as a source for the sublime.⁴ Maria Purves, however, goes further by maintaining that the majority of Gothic novels, despite having been written and read by Protestants, are not actually anti-Catholic. She also points out that society during the eighteenth century was more sympathetic to Catholics than previously supposed, even though Catholic Emancipation did not come into force in Britain and Ireland until 1829. The eighteenth-century picture is complicated by the forces of anti-Catholicism that helped unify Protestants in the face of Dissent, as well as Catholics and Protestant Dissenters being ‘uncomfortably allied’ against the Anglican establishment.⁵ By the 1790s, the Jacobin threat had supplanted anxieties targeted at the Catholic as ‘the hated other’.⁶ Within the Gothic novel, even overtly negative literary representations of Catholicism invariably prove to be less of an attack on the Catholic Church than a means of opening up subversive ways for critiquing secular hegemony and repressive governments.

There is no better expression of Catholic horror than the Inquisition. With its torture dungeons and black-habited Dominicans, the Inquisition was a thing of darkness waiting for the instruments of Gothic terror. Notorious as an organ of persecution in Catholic countries, the Holy Office is a familiar trope in early Gothic fiction, providing novelists with a hooded opportunity to portray the alien Other nearer home. The Inquisition’s reputation for inflicting pain on its victims virtually institutionalised the Christ-like torment lying at the heart of the religion. The ingenuity with which many Catholics appear to relish suffering has been a mystery to their Protestant counterparts. The Passion of the crucified Christ and shedding of his sacred blood gave rise to a number of Catholic devotions. But it is how this veneration was inscribed on the bodies of devotees in the form of bleeding wounds that demonstrated for detractors the extent of the perversity and fanaticism of devotees. The holy stigmatic, through which the wounds of Christ manifest physically, mainly on the bodies of pious women from the Renaissance onwards, was a phenomenon that, it will be argued, has been Gothicised by novelists from Lewis’ Bleeding Nun in The Monk to Bram Stoker’s vampires. These demonic stigmatics are a sublimation of the horror and awe surrounding the crucifixion through which the bleeding body appears at its most sublime.

THE GOTHIC NOVEL’S CATHOLIC LEGACY

Catholicism is a living reminder of a medieval past. The verticality of the Gothic cathedrals rising up throughout Europe from the Middle Ages to the sixteenth century inspires awe and sublimity. Their pointed arches, ribbed vaults, flying buttresses and stone gargoyles furnished Gothic novelists with suitably atmospheric settings. These churches memorialise a pre-Reformation Britain, pre-dating Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy (1534), through which he established himself Head of the Church of England, but it was at an incalculable human cost. Monastic orders were left destitute. Rebellions against Henry’s destruction of the Roman Catholic Church in Britain were ruthlessly suppressed. These included the execution of around 200 Catholics for treason following the Pilgrimage of Grace, a popular uprising in the north of England in 1536. Those resisting Henry’s religious reforms were subjected to torture, beheading, hanging and burning, while some monks were hanged, drawn and quartered and executed by enforced starvation. In Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577–87), estimates of the deaths run into the thousands. Even though the accuracy of the chroniclers was notoriously unreliable, such statistics served as a form of propaganda for anti-Catholic persecution, which lingered across the centuries. The horrors of this bloody episode in British history and the shock waves from the break with Rome vibrate through The Castle of Otranto, whose author, Horace Walpole, regarded Henry as a bloody persecutor.⁷ Yet the novel’s chief legacy has been in providing future authors with an urtext for the Gothic novel. Walpole was also a pioneer in the eighteenth-century architectural Gothic revival. His aspiration for Strawberry Hill, his Gothic home, was for it ‘to have all the air of a Catholic chapel – bar consecration!’⁸ As he explained, ‘my house is so monastic that I have a little hall decked with long saints in lean arched windows’.⁹ With its chapel proclaiming ‘all the glory of popery’,¹⁰ Walpole’s house was a veritable shrine to Catholicism, which he referred to as ‘My gothic Vatican’.¹¹

Walpole’s admission that The Castle of Otranto was inspired by Strawberry Hill is not imparted to readers of his first preface.¹² He states falsely on the title page that it was written in Italian by Onuphrio Muralto, a Roman Catholic Canon, and translated by ‘William Marshal, Gent.’ The deception continued when he explained that it was printed in Naples and probably first written between 1095 and 1243. In his first preface, the accredited father of the Gothic novel has aligned himself with a fictitious Church father and adopted the false persona of editor. When the story ‘first’ appeared, as Walpole explains:

Letters were then in their most flourishing state in Italy, and contributed to dispel the empire of superstition, at that time so forcibly attacked by the reformers. It is not unlikely, that an artful priest might endeavour to turn their own arms on the innovators; and might avail himself of his abilities as an author to confirm the populace in their ancient errors and superstitions. If this was his view, he has certainly acted with signal address. Such a work as the following would enslave a hundred vulgar minds, beyond half the books of controversy that had been written from the days of Luther to the present hour.¹³

The ‘empire of superstition’ under attack from the Protestant Reformation was the Roman Catholic Church. Walpole warns of how a wily Italian priest could succeed in undoing the effects of Martin Luther’s reforms and turn his readers back into Catholics. Here a fake document of the Counter-Reformation is conflated with what would become a template for the Gothic novel. Walpole’s criticism of the Church as a pedlar of ‘ancient errors and superstitions’ is ironic as he, himself, imparts, like an ‘artful priest’, such wares to his readers, with the mendacious assertion that ‘I cannot but believe, that the ground work of the story is founded on truth’ (p. 61). Like the writer of fiction for whom fabrication is an occupational asset, Catholicism, which prided itself on being the one true Church, was tainted by the misuse of casuistry.¹⁴ In his second preface, Walpole confesses the deception to his readers.¹⁵ According to Robert Miles, Walpole’s ‘imposture was meant to be transparent: as a pro-Catholic text Otranto is clearly self-subverting’ and ‘is not about, is not a defence of, or an attack on, Catholicism. It is really about legitimacy, or rather the lack of it.’¹⁶

While the question of legitimacy is central to the novel’s main plot, it also informs a religio-political subtext relating to the Reformation. Luther’s action in posting his 95 theses against Rome on a church door in Wittenberg was an affront to Catholic apostolic succession. In turn, he accused Rome of being the usurper of temporal rights. Walpole’s novel revolves around the genealogy of an ancient Neapolitan line, which has been usurped by Manfred, who is now Prince of Otranto. Miles sees the plot and prefaces as a ‘verbal fugue’ on legitimacy.¹⁷ This he believes to be intricately connected to the figure of the Catholic and the Glorious Revolution, which saw the peaceful overthrow of the last English Roman Catholic monarch, James II. The unsettling effects of the Act of Settlement of 1701, ensuring a Protestant succession to the throne, ripple through the inheritance-related plots of early Gothic novels. Walpole’s condemnation of Manfred’s usurpation and celebration of his overthrow at the end of the novel is read by Markham Ellis as tacit acceptance for the usurpation of Catholic James by Prote...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Catholicism, the Gothic and the bleeding body
• 2 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein and slavery
• 3 Death by orgasm: sexual surgery and Dracula
• 4 Nazis, Jews and Nosferatu
• 5 The vampire of war
• Conclusion: conflict Gothic
• Bibliography
• Index