Transnational Gothic

Literary and Social Exchanges in the Long Nineteenth Century

Monika Elbert, Bridget M. Marshall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409447702
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317006879
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Offering a variety of critical approaches to late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic literature, this collection provides a transnational view of the emergence and flowering of the Gothic. The essays expand on now well-known approaches to the Gothic (such as those that concentrate exclusively on race, gender, or nation) by focusing on international issues: religious traditions, social reform, economic and financial pitfalls, manifest destiny and expansion, changing concepts of nationhood, and destabilizing moments of empire-building. By examining a wide array of Gothic texts, including novels, drama, and poetry, the contributors present the Gothic not as a peripheral, marginal genre, but as a central mode of literary exchange in an ever-expanding global context. Thus the traditional conventions of the Gothic, such as those associated with Ann Radcliffe and Monk Lewis, are read alongside unexpected Gothic formulations and lesser-known Gothic authors and texts. These include Mary Rowlandson and Bram Stoker, Frances and Anthony Trollope, Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Gaskell, Theodore Dreiser, Rudyard Kipling, and Lafcadio Hearn, as well as the actors Edmund Kean and George Frederick Cooke. Individually and collectively, the essays provide a much-needed perspective that eschews national borders in order to explore the central role that global (and particularly transatlantic) exchange played in the development of the Gothic. British, American, Continental, Caribbean, and Asian Gothic are represented in this collection, which seeks to deepen our understanding of the Gothic as not merely a national but a global aesthetic.

Part 1 Old World Gothic and the New World Frontier

Chapter 1 A Transnational Perspective on American Gothic Criticism

Siân Silyn Roberts

DOI: 10.4324/9781315549859-2

It has been a little over fifty years since Leslie Fiedler first posed a question that redirected the course of scholarship on the Gothic novel in America. Why, he asked in Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), “has the tale of terror so special an appeal for Americans?” (143). Prior to Fiedler, most accounts of the American Gothic understood recurrent tropes of blackness, confinement, or persecution in wholly symbolic terms, where metaphysical forces operated outside history in “the eternal struggle of good and evil” (Chase 11). For Richard Chase, R.W.B. Lewis, and other liberal consensus critics who sidelined social context in favor of ideological ambiguity, the Gothic staged a melodrama of Manichean proportions on American soil. While Fiedler retained the archetypal structures of the mythopoetic school of criticism, he changed the stakes of the Gothic with a combination of depth psychology and historiography. The special appeal of the Gothic for Americans, he famously argued, lay in its ability to encode, in narrative form, the “special guilts” (143) of American experience, chiefly slavery, land dispossession, and revolutionary patricide.

Given that the fiftieth anniversary of Love and Death’s publication has just passed, it seems appropriate to take a retrospective view of the criticism that has since shaped this perennially popular object of study. In the following pages, I offer a brief and inexhaustive overview of the dominant trends and arguments that have characterized the field of American Gothic studies. In considering how subsequent scholars have responded to Fiedler’s enormously generative question, I argue that his interpretative model continues to preside over current critical methods. As Eric Savoy notes, Fiedler’s thesis remains “vitally suggestive” (“Face of the Tenant” 4), as generations of critics—myself included—have taken seriously Fiedler’s claim that the American novel is “essentially a gothic one” (143). In doing so, however, we have updated but not significantly challenged Fiedler’s critical methodologies. As a result, American Gothic studies remains, in the face of disciplinary realignment, largely committed to exceptionalist national distinctions—“British” vs. “American” Gothics—and the allegorical fallacies of psychoanalysis.

The timely anniversary of Fiedler’s work offers the occasion for this review, but its motivation comes from the metacritical turn that has lately distinguished British Gothic studies. In the last decade, some well-known names—Fred Botting,

David Punter, Robert Mighall, Chris Baldick, among others—have called on scholars to rethink some of the “stock formulas” of Gothic criticism (Botting 5). Those critical commonplaces go something like this: the Gothic is an anti-realist revolt against Enlightenment bourgeois norms; it is a politically and ideologically subversive form that stages the transgressive energies of imagination and desire as oneiric fragmentation; finally, it is a repository of repressed psychological impulses and latent anxieties that assail any continuous narrative of self, nation, or history. Indeed, so internalized have these ideas become to our investigative procedures that they have all but passed out of the register of critical orthodoxy and into the realm of common sense. The recent metacritical reevaluation, however, has called their explanatory power into question on the grounds that they hypostatize the intellectual goals of their critics.¹ By this line of reasoning, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, feminism, Marxism, and post-colonialism—the dominant conceptual frames of British Gothic criticism—calculate the cultural significance of the Gothic to the degree it endorses paradigmatic assumptions. For this reason, Baldick and Mighall have forcefully argued, our ideas about the Gothic have become “increasingly implausible,” even “radically misguided” (210, 209). ²

¹ Baldick and Mighall, “Gothic Criticism.” I am enormously indebted to their work for my own reconceptualization of the American Gothic. ² In Botting’s words, “Gothic texts seem to offer themselves freely as endorsements of the veracity of any type of critical reading” (4). See Botting 1–6, as well as Ellis 13–14 and Mighall xi–xxv, who make similar calls for reappraisal.

I will return in the following pages to some of the more specific charges laid at the door of British Gothic criticism, although as a scholar working in the field of early American literature my own interests lie in a somewhat different direction. For the sake of this essay, I am interested in how this metacritical reevaluation of recent years would change the way we understand the American Gothic tradition. Conventional criticism on the American Gothic relies on almost identical conceptual frames—depth psychology and historical analysis—that have continuously and almost without challenge defined its British counterpart. It also tends to reproduce a similar set of “stock formulas” that define the American Gothic as the reflection of modern anxieties about race, industrialization, democracy, gender, and territorial expansion. Given the conceptual similarities between British and American critical traditions, it seems reasonable to assume that some of the reservations raised by Botting, Mighall, et al. will be at least partially admissible when brought to bear on scholarship that takes Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, etc., as its object of critique. To my knowledge, we have yet to perform such a task.

Let me state at the outset that it is not my intention to question the hugely important contribution of previous studies on the American Gothic nor marginalize the politics of such criticism. The Gothic played a vital role in the complex, rigorous revisionist projects of the 1980s and 1990s. In that critical moment, it gave voice to forgotten histories—of women, slaves, Native Americans, immigrants—by encoding racial struggle and political violence as psychological oppression. I have in mind studies such as Teresa Goddu’s Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (1997) and the edited collection Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at the Frontier in American Literature (1993). Such criticism placed race firmly at the center of the canon and shifted neglected fiction writers like Harriet Jacobs and Catharine Maria Sedgwick into the mainstream of literary criticism. To legitimate such neglected authors, however, revisionist criticism also had to legitimate a master narrative of developing nationalism and then retroactively commit those authors to such a nation-making project, thereby proving their credentials as viable “American” writers. The reclamation of lost texts and contexts continues, but the emancipatory project of literary criticism has become less pressing and we are now less likely to assume that an inner propulsion toward nationhood accounts for all literature produced in the early republic. For these reasons, I think we can profit by unraveling some of the critical commonplaces about the American Gothic that we currently accept as received wisdom. In making this claim, I join a growing number of critics who agree that the American Gothic is due for reappraisal.³ To pursue this line of inquiry, let me begin—where so many studies of the Gothic do—with the problem of definition.

³ See, for example, Marilyn Michaud’s study on republicanism, the American Gothic, and its origins in Enlightenment revolutionary thought, and Justin Edwards’s transnational study of Gothic discourse. Likewise, the May 2009 edition of the journal Gothic Studies was devoted to imagining “a series of all-new arguments” about the transnational relationship between the Gothic mode and theory (Hogle and Smith 1).

As any number of critics have pointed out, the Gothic is notoriously resistant to generic classification. Even at the height of its popularity in the late eighteenth century, it was a heavily contested aesthetic and theoretical category and this debate over generic identity has continued well into the present.⁴ It has been described as a historical phenomenon, or a style of writing popular on both sides of the Atlantic between the 1790s and 1820s. As such, it ostensibly originates with Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), although its discursive structures arguably derive from historically older forms of writing like the captivity narrative.⁵ It is also a set of textual conventions, or repeated motifs, tropes, and settings that include (but are not limited to) imprisonment, persecution, the animation of the object world, and the deception of the senses. It is a generic category, encompassing novels, poetry, and drama and, in its twentieth- and twenty-first-century incarnations, television, film, radio, and video games. It is a collection of subgenres (Female, Victorian, Queer, Post-colonial, etc.), each one anchored to specific cultural-historical preoccupations (although this implicitly invokes a definitive master category— “the Gothic”—to which these subcategories exist in subordinate relation). As a literary term, “Gothic” refers to a body of works, a historical period, a formal aesthetics, a discursive field, and an epistemological theory. It is, in short, one of literary criticism’s most expansive concepts.

⁴ See Hogle and Smith. ⁵ See Armstrong and Tennenhouse. See also Roland Finger’s essay in this collection.

Studies of the “American” Gothic have not escaped this generic confusion. As an American form, it has been identified as a national style (Fiedler); a regional style (Goddu); a transnational discourse (Edwards); an “oppositional” (Crow 2) or marginal phenomenon properly belonging to “women, gays, and colonials” (Gross 2); and a “frontier” literature that mirrors the expansion of the Western continent in its explorations of the psyche (Mogen et al). Whether these definitions are contradictory or simply illustrate the Gothic’s remarkable formal adaptability, there is one thing on which the majority of critics tend to agree: that the Gothic’s transmission across the Atlantic in the 1790s resulted in an altogether new incarnation of the form, with wholly “American” preoccupations.⁶ In my survey of the scholarly works on this subject, this claim for literary exceptionalism is one of the most often repeated. Eric Savoy calls this formal and ideological divergence from its British counterpart “the rise of American gothic” (“The Rise of American Gothic” 167). Let me explain further.

⁶ Some exceptions to this include Leonard Tennenhouse and Justin Edwards.

By this account, what begins as a colonial imitation of a popular but derided British tradition is transformed in the hands of Charles Brockden Brown and his successors into a mainstream, national literary style.⁷ As Allan Lloyd-Smith explains it, this formal transformation was compelled by “unique cultural pressures,” chief among them “the frontier experience, with its inherent solitude and potential violence; the Puritan inheritance; fear of European subversion and anxieties about popular democracy which was then a new experiment; the relative absence of developed “society”; and very significantly, racial issues concerning both slavery and the Native Americans” (4). To put it another way, the Gothic’s preoccupation with “specifically American concerns” (Smith 41)— chiefly race, frontier expansion, and revolution—makes it uniquely “American” in experience and expression. To argue this point, criticism routinely invokes the preface to Edgar Huntly (1798), where Charles Brockden Brown famously declared that he would replace the “puerile superstitions and exploded manners” of the European Gothic with “the incidents of Indian hostility and the perils of the western wilderness” (4). As Fiedler puts it, Brown “solved the key problem of adaptation” by submitting the Gothic mode to a “complex metamorphosis” (145) on American soil.

⁷ See Ringe, and Martin and Savoy.

Brown’s preface has become what Justine Murison calls “a talisman of American studies scholarship” (242) because it offers a descriptive theory of American cultural nationalism: cut adrift from European antiquity and its archive of narrative materials (Catholicism, medievalism, and aristocratic despotism), the American Gothic turned to its own indigenous horrors for inspiration. This narrative of cultural origins, however, makes an emancipatory gesture that potentially forecloses other explanations for the Gothic’s intrinsic “American” qualities. As the story goes, the Gothic in America liberates itself from the burden of British history and thought to create unanticipated and experimental new possibilities at the level of form and ideology. This not only reproduces the narrative of America’s revolutionary emancipation but reiterates the romance plot that accounts for the “rise” of the novel, where the young nation declares its own progressive self-making as the inevitable realization of a developmental trajectory.⁸ To validate its own historical preconceptions, this account takes as its starting point a literary revolution—that is, the need “to invent some essential difference” (Barnes x)— that conceals the historical and political realities of its own interpretative labor. We should, as Louis Althusser cautions, treat “the concepts of origin” with circumspection “because they always more or less induce the ideology which has produced them” (68). To draw a strict demarcation between European and American Gothics at the level of historical experience is to retell the story of one of the most powerful foundational myths of American self-fashioning.

⁸ See also Mogen et al; Punter; Savoy, “The Rise of American Gothic.” See Homer O. Brown on the reproduction of the romance plot in literary criticism.

There can be no doubt that Charles Brockden Brown, like many of his contemporaries, was committed to producing a “native” literary tradition. The eschatological narrative of literary nationalism adopts the period’s acts of self-description as evidence of that tradition, but we tend to leave out the complex transatlantic cultural history from which it arose. Such a history may help us understand why manifest narrative elements from British Gothic literature persist in works produced on this side of the Atlantic. Consider Charles Brockden Brown’s use of established Gothic tropes in this description of Huntly’s live interment in a cave in the Delaware wilderness:

Methought I was the victim of some tyrant who had thrust me into a dungeon of his fortress, and left me no power to determine whether he intended I should perish with famine, or linger out a long life in hopeless imprisonment … Sometimes I imagined myself buried alive. Methought I had fallen into seeming death and my friends had consigned me to the tomb, from which a resurrection was impossible. (154–5)

Far from eschewing British forms, Brown adopts them to describe a space that obeys the same epistemological principles as the castle or dungeon. Let us think of the European castle as a space that temporarily introduces apparently inexplicable sp...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1 Old World Gothic and the New World Frontier
• Part 2 Gothic Catholicism
• Part 3 Anglo-American Genre Exchanges: Beyond the Novel
• Part 4 Social Anxieties and Hauntings
• Index