The Gothic World

Glennis Byron, Dale Townshend, Glennis Byron, Dale Townshend

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135053055
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Gothic, Romance, & Horror Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Gothic World offers an overview of this popular field whilst also extending critical debate in exciting new directions such as film, politics, fashion, architecture, fine art and cyberculture. Structured around the principles of time, space and practice, and including a detailed general introduction, the five sections look at:

• Gothic Histories
• Gothic Spaces
• Gothic Readers and Writers
• Gothic Spectacle
• Contemporary Impulses.

The Gothic World seeks to account for the Gothic as a multi-faceted, multi-dimensional force, as a style, an aesthetic experience and a mode of cultural expression that traverses genres, forms, media, disciplines and national boundaries and creates, indeed, its own 'World'.

Part I Gothic Histories

Chapter One The Politics of Gothic Historiography, 1660–1800

Sean Silver

DOI: 10.4324/9780203490013-1

The Gothic did not begin as the kaleidoscopic category that it has become. It did not refer to the occult, the macabre, or the supernatural; it was not a genre of horror-driven art, a subgenre of rock music, a style of soaring architecture, or a postpunk subculture with its own recognizable fashion. Nor did it mean, simply, “of or pertaining to the Goths” — the fourth-century civilization in upper Germania — or even, more loosely, “medieval,” “antique,” or “barbaric.” In its original acceptation, the Gothic referred to a partly misremembered, partly manufactured, yet still historically potent myth of origins for the balanced model of English politics. During the century following the 1660 Restoration of the Stuart dynasty to the English throne, the Gothic, in its most important English language usage, emerged as the word that summarized a particular form of constitutional politics. It referred to a way of conceptualizing the present as the legacy of a mythologized past, a way, that is, of imagining history. We might say, then, that the Gothic did not begin as anything at all, for its ultimate origins are lost in a loose mix of myth and mystified national causes.

How the Gothic got here, from there, from a politics to an aesthetics, hinges first on the work of one man, the author of what we have now come to call the first Gothic novel. This author is Horace Walpole, who condensed a lifelong interest in the objects of the past into a hasty proto-novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764). The initial inspiration was a dream, a medieval dream of the supernatural, but the tale's obsessions and major themes are with the Gothic way of telling history. As unlikely as it may seem, then, Gothic historiography, the writing of English history as Gothic history, is the common stem that has blossomed into the word's many modern applications. A mainstream, politically-motivated way of thinking about the past has proliferated into a distinct form of fiction, a sort of music, a category of revival architecture and, more generally, a decidedly counter-cultural lifestyle and aesthetic.

The Political Origins of the Gothic

The story of the Gothic starts with an absence. The critical fact of English politics, driving centuries of tense consensus punctuated by violence, is its lack of a foundational document. British law has no firm beginning to which to point, no original charter which, like Roman law, is etched in stone, and certainly no constitution in the sense that Americans use the word today. The Magna Carta, often referred to in discussions of the English constitution, is an outsized agreement to abide by precedent, and therefore itself stands on the statute books, rather than the other way around. Likewise, the monarch's authority flows from no primitive contract; instead, it stands upon an imposing precedent and the rule of custom. By the seventeenth century, the King could point to nearly six hundred years' worth of lineage; he belonged to a long, admittedly complicated line of authority stemming from William I, the first Norman King of England. When William the Conqueror defeated the Anglo-Saxon King Harold at Hastings in 1066, he forged by force of arms a title to the throne and to centralized, executive power. Upon assuming the role of supreme head of the church in 1534, King Henry VIII additionally united sacred to secular supremacy, adding to the weight of precedent the doctrine of the divine right of rule. The Tudor and Stuart dynasties thereafter wielded a nearly unchallengeable justification for political power, even in the absence of any contract initiating this legal and political tradition.

The Gothic first emerged as a political category during the long and ruinous Civil War (1642–49), which pitted the largely Puritan, commercially inclined Parliament against the centralized government of king and court. In 1616, King James I published (in a revised edition) what was perhaps the strongest statement of the monarch's own inalienable rights; the Trew Law of Free Monarchies posed a strong version of the divine theory of rule, sketching a broad justification of power which was vigorously pursued by his son, King Charles I. Nathaniel Bacon, during a life that crossed statecraft and political philosophy, established himself as an active parliamentarian, becoming one of the chief mouthpieces in the argument for republican government. Bacon had no interest in overthrowing the doctrine of the divine right of rule, whereby political authority descends ultimately from divine providence. His An Historical Discourse on the Uniformity of Government in England (1647–51) argues instead for representative government as a component branch under the general rubric of divine right. “The utmost perfection of this nether world's best government,” Bacon insists, “consists in the upholding of a due proportion of severall interests compounded into one temperature” (Bacon 1647: np). Thus envisioned, the republican parliament tempers the king's will and pleasure, just as the king's single voice and vested authority restrains the state from lapsing into a chaos of competing interests. This sounds reasonable, but it was nevertheless treasonous: according to Bacon's argument, the “Uniformity” of English government would not flow from a single person — that is, the king — but from the dynamic tension emerging out of the constantly shifting, generally opposed interests of Parliament and court (see Pocock 1957).

Against King James's weighty appeal to tradition, what Bacon called his “Arbitrary rule over English Subjects” (Bacon 1647), Bacon sought to identify an ideological counterweight, a tradition of representative rule that could justify the parliamentarian side in the Civil War. The King could point to 600 years of rule, stemming from the Norman King William; Bacon's Historical Discourse identified a much older tradition of distributed power, originating ultimately in the government by assembly practiced amongst the northern tribes of Europe. The first of these tribes to appear on the English scene, according to Bacon's argument, was the Saxons, who mingled and married with the Britons following the fifth-century withdrawal of the Roman Empire. To them, Bacon ascribes what would become traditional: the division of “their Country … into Counties or Circuits,” the “election of [their] Princes … by the general assembly” (the “wittagenmote”) and the “worship of an invisible and an infinite Deity” (Bacon 1647: 14–15, 58). With their suspiciously English institutions, the Saxons therefore provided a plausible tradition for the recognizable features of English government; like the English, the Saxons boasted distributed legal authority and government by a parliament of freeholders, both of which were nevertheless compatible with a monotheistic church. When Bacon mentions the Saxons, then, it is clear that he is also talking about the parliamentary side in the Civil War; each is called “a free people,” Bacon insists, “because they are a Law to themselves” (Bacon 1647: 15).

If the story ended here, however, Neil Gaiman and Anne Rice would be shelved in the Saxon section, and bands like Joy Division and The Cure would have inaugurated a new wave of music called Sax Rock. But the very immemoriality of Saxon political custom called for a more mythic origin, a deeper wellspring of traditional causes. “The Saxons,” writes Bacon, “were in name our first matter,” that is, our “first mater” or “mother,” yet it was “not they onely,” for “they having once made the breach open, and entered this Island,” they were followed by “those Eastern peoples of the Angles, Danes, Almains, and Goths” (Bacon 1647: 96). Among these, the “Angles” offered to England their name: the Angles becoming the “Engl-” of “England.” The “Goths” offered something more. The “Saxon King,” Bacon writes, himself received them “as sworn brethren, kinsmen, and proper Citizens of this Common-weale” (Bacon 1647: 96), because they brought with them the perfection of certain critical laws of government and primogeniture. Later commentators would go further, ascribing to the Goths themselves the strong set of republican laws only later adopted by the Saxon commonwealth. But the outlines of the narrative were already clear: the English government would henceforth be Gothic in origin, the Gothic influence on Anglo-Saxon political tradition accounting for England's uniquely mixed mode of government. “Nor can any Nation upon earth,” Bacon concludes, “shew so much of the ancient Gothique law as this Island hath” (Bacon 1647: 96).

Though Bacon did not invent this narrative, ascribing it instead to remarks by Julius Caesar and Cornelius Tacitus, the Gothic would eventually come to serve as the traditional source of republican institutions, a site where a scholar tracing the history of British custom might plausibly pause before plunging into time immemorial. If the line of English kings could be traced all the way back to William the Conqueror, Parliament, as a native institution, could be traced back much farther, indeed to the very people that William defeated at Hastings in the first place. Because of the priority it assumed, the Gothic thereafter became a standard part of British history, figuring in such politically-motivated tracts as James Harrington's Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), Henry Neville's Plato Redivivus (1681), Algernon Sidney's Discourses Concerning Government (1698, published posthumously), and the anonymous Vox Populi, Vox Dei (1709). By 1716, statesman and essayist Joseph Addison might archly remark of “an old Justice of Peace who lives in the Neighbourhood, and will talk you from Morning till Night on the Gothic Balance” (Addison 1716: 53). By the middle of the century, even Viscount Bolingbroke, a Tory statesman so conservative he would end up in exile during Robert Walpole's Whig administration, might celebrate “The Freedom of our Gothic Institution of Government … transmitted down from our Saxon Ancestors” (Bolingbroke 1735: 102). The Gothic began as an appeal for radical parliamentarians, but would come to be used by Whig and Tory alike, strange bedfellows united by their appeal to the past as a guide for the political present.

For good and ill, then, the Gothic way of telling history would prove to be an important early component in the development of the modern British nation-state. It was the first experiment in what would emerge as a necessary precondition for the nation generally as, in Benedict Anderson's terms, “new-emerging nations imagined themselves antique” (Anderson 1991: xiv; see Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Chapter 5 of this volume). It is not just that the Gothic historically explained the British constitution, providing a genealogical story for a whole community, and an explanation for what sets it apart from others. It is what guaranteed, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, the exceptionalism of British culture, anchoring a community as much by ethnicity as by a shared way of being in the world, a shared commitment to a set of inherited values. This, then, is where the Gothic began: as a way of anchoring British parliamentarian politics.

Stadial Historiography and the Gothic Aesthetic

By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, Gothic historiography would be swept up in an even more ambitious historiographic mode. Abandoning the traditional interest in the actions of great men and moral exemplars, early modern historians began the more ambitious task of recapturing the narratives of whole societies, including the patterns in which civilizations might be thought to develop. The so-called stadial model of history, developed largely among the university culture of Scotland, proposes a set of natural laws guiding the development of civilizations. According to this theory, every civilization will inevitably follow the same set of more-or-less universal stages: from the hunter-gatherer phase, a civilization will develop into the pastoral-agricultural, the feudal, and, eventually, the modern-commercial, one predictable phase giving way to the predictable next (Berry 1997; Pocock 1999; Phillips 2000). An analysis of the sources of production would therefore be expected naturally to suggest a set of legal institutions, habits and literary and artistic forms. Each age implied an entire way of being in the world: a cultural consciousness, a general aesthetics, a politics.

The place of the Gothic in stadial historiography is most clearly articulated by Richard Hurd's Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762). Hurd was an English divine, who would become a bishop, but in the years during which he composed his popular Letters, he was a translator and theological writer toiling in obscurity in London. The Letters, which in some ways were unlike anything else he wrote, were nevertheless destined to become his most popular achievement, setting the tone for what the Gothic would become. They aim to explain two things: the rise of chivalry as a system of manners, and the aesthetic of the romance as the major art form of the late-medieval and early-Renaissance eras. Each of these, as Hurd understands it, is routed through the Gothic, for the same Gothic system of government that gave rise to the British brand of liberty also gave rise to the arts and decorum of the chivalric romance.

The system of manners known as chivalry, Hurd writes, “seems to have sprung immediately out of the Feudal Constitution” (Hurd 1762: 7). This constitution, which directly expressed the Gothic tradition of distributed government, put power in the hands of local barons and freeholders. The central paradox of the Gothic system as understood by Bacon — that a stable system could emerge as the articulation of differences (Pocock 1957) — would become, for Hurd, the defining feature of the Gothic tradition in culture and the arts. Because of the continual political tension between autonomous freeholders, the continual skirmishes and border conflicts which arose between them, soldiers would “go in quest of adventures” (Hurd 1762: 14), which Hurd understands to be a kind of patrolling; the quest narrative might be seen as a natural outcome of the perpetual struggle between small communities of relatively autonomous barons. Hence, too, a system of “Justs and Turnaments” would naturally follow, as a way of maintaining “the military discipline of their followers” (Hurd 1762: 9). “Courtesy, affability, and gallantry” might emerge as a necessary consequence of the neo-urban castle complexes in which men and women were forced to live (Hurd 1762: 15). Even “the free commerce of the ladies,” and the “gallantry” evinced by men, could be welded into a political interpretation of Gothic feudalism; “violations of chastity being the most atrocious crimes they had to charge their enemies,” Hurd supposes, “they would pride themselves in the glory of being its protectors” (Hurd 1762: 17–18). Chivalry, as a martial tradition and a system of manners, was therefore “no absurd and freakish...