Sex and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature

Jolene Zigarovich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136182365
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Gothic, Romantik & Horror Literaturkritik

This book discusses sex and death in the eighteenth-century, an era that among other forms produced the Gothic novel, commencing the prolific examination of the century's shifting attitudes toward death and uncovering literary moments in which sexuality and death often conjoined. By bringing together various viewpoints and historical relations, the volume contributes to an emerging field of study and provides new perspectives on the ways in which the century approached an increasingly modern sense of sexuality and mortality. It not only provides part of the needed discussion of the relationship between sex, death, history, and eighteenth-century culture, but is a forum in which the ideas of several well-respected critics converge, producing a breadth of knowledge and a diversity of perspectives and methodologies previously unseen. As the contributors demonstrate, eighteenth-century anxieties over mortality, the body, the soul, and the corpse inspired many writers of the time to both implicitly and explicitly embed mortality and sexuality within their works. By depicting the necrophilic tendencies of libertines and rapacious villains, the fetishizing of death and mourning by virtuous heroines, or the fantasy of preserving the body, these authors demonstrate not only the tragic results of sexual play, but the persistent fantasy of necro-erotica. This book shows that within the eighteenth-century culture of profound modern change, underworkings of death and mourning are often eroticized; that sex is often equated with death (as punishment, or loss of the self); and that the sex-death dialectic lies at the discursive center of normative conceptions of gender, desire, and social power.

Part I

Marriage and Grave Plots

1 The Wages of Sanctity

Fatal Consequences of Marriage and Motherhood in the Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel

Ruth Bienstock Anolik

The eighteenth-century Gothic novel is deservedly famous for moments of deviant sex conflated with moments of unnatural and violent death. Yet the consequence of death is not limited to those women who engage in illicit or nonnormative sexual behavior. In fact, Gothic novels recurrently present examples of pure and noneroticized women for whom the consequence of acceptable sexual behavior is death. For these women, death arrives in the form of marriage, and not only because marriage typically signals the end of the narrative; it also signals the metaphoric death of the character. The linkage between the sanctioned sexual behavior of wives and the consequence of death is not readily accessible; it must be unpacked by the reader as the sexual behavior is implied or repressed, evidenced only by the children who follow. Yet despite the missing links, the causal connection is there: in the Gothic novel, marriage leads to sexual behavior, which leads to children; the consequence of this chain of causal actions is almost inevitably death.

Thus the example of the wife and mother in the Gothic novel expands the literary warnings of eighteenth-century fiction to its female readers. Not only are “loose” women the property of men, they are vulnerable to all manner of physical assault. Connected women too are in danger; by entering the system of sanctioned sex—that is, marriage—wives forfeit all legal rights to their property, their bodies, and their children. Even if they are not murdered by their omnipotent husbands, they undergo the civil death that is the consequence of the legal codes of coverture and primogeniture.

COVERTURE: THE DEATH OF THE WIFE

The eponymous character of Mary Wollstonecraft's Wrongs of Woman, or, Maria (1798) is hardly overstating her case when she writes in her fictional memoir, “the prejudices of mankind … have made women the property of their husbands” (146). A principle of English common law, written into the Commentaries on the Laws of England by Blackstone in 1758, stated that when a woman married, she became a feme-covert [sic] and ceased to exist as a separate legal entity.¹ Under the system of coverture, the woman's legal identity was “covered” by that of her husband. She underwent a civil death and forfeited all rights to possess property, to custody of her own children, and, indeed, to her body. Through marriage, the husband gained legal possession of the woman (“under the common law a wife was in many ways regarded as the property of her husband”), her property (“at marriage and any property that came to her during marriage”), and her children (the husband “determined how and where their children would be raised”).² In Blackstone's formulation:

By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover she performs everything; and is therefore called in our law-french, a feme-covert, foemina viro co-operta; and is said to be covert-baron, or under the protection and influence of her husband, her baron, or lord; and her condition during her marriage is called her coverture. (1:442)

Or in the words of a popular saying “ascribed to the great eighteenth-century jurist Sir William Blackstone … ‘In law husband and wife are one person, and the husband is that person.’”³ Joan Perkin's rendering of this principle is somewhat less whimsical; quite correctly, she notes that under coverture, the wife became “a feme covert, a hidden person…. In Orwellian language, she became an ‘Unperson’” (2).⁴ This modern category of the “unperson” had a contemporary equivalent. As Emma Clery notes, John Locke's minimum condition for civil rights is the ownership of property; the loss or lack of property denoted loss of civil rights.⁵ Immanuel Kant, too, links political viability with property (and with maleness—embedded in the parenthetical “of course” of the following sentence). In “On the Relationship of Theory to Practice in Political Right,” he writes: “The only qualification required by a citizen (apart, of course, from being an adult male) is that he must be his own master … and must have some property” (78).

Donna Dickensen's discussion in Property, Women and Politics: Subjects or Objects? (1997) is particularly useful in teasing out the distinction between woman as subject of property possession (owner) and as object of property possession. As she indicates, under coverture women were doubly threatened: “construed as property” and objects of possession, they were also thus denied the status of possessors of property (6). Dickensen, who notes that coverture “applied to married women with particular ferocity in Locke's time” (10) and that “in the doctrine of coverture the wife did indeed lose her agency and selfhood” (86), traces the consolidation of this principle:

Coverture was the culmination and consequence of a long decline in women's civil rights, including their rights in property. [During the Middle Ages] women's economic activity and autonomy were substantial…. In the long run, the transfer of production from home to factory made the economic contribution of women appear less significant…. Women were restricted from public participation and civil rights…. The English property codes … gave the husband all control over his wife's property and earnings … as The Lawes Resolutions of Women Rights, or the Lawes Provision for Women (1632) enunciated in the seventeenth-century doctrine: “That which the husband hath is his own … that which the wife hath is the husband's.” The situation of married women was worse in England and America during Locke's time … than on the Continent … because of the way the common law developed…. A married woman was effectively dead at law. (81–83)

The principle of coverture, then, was based on a legal fiction—that is, the civil metaphorical death of the married woman.⁶

Martin Kayman, who draws on the language of literature to argue that eighteenth-century law did not “invent new plots” to reflect “new conditions and properties” but instead adapted old plots to new uses (380), cites Fuller, who “points out that, in legal terms, a ‘fiction’ taken seriously, e.g., ‘believed’ becomes dangerous and loses its utility…. A fiction becomes wholly safe only when it is used with a complete consciousness of its falsity” (382). Taking the legal fiction engendered by coverture seriously is exactly what the Gothic does in literalizing the metaphor of coverture. The obsessive repetition of the motif of wifely imprisonment and vulnerability in the Gothic master plot represents the legal fiction of civil death in a literal and literary form. This literalization vividly illustrates just how seriously this legal fiction should, in fact, be taken.

The linguistic paradigm of literalization is delineated by Margaret Homans in Bearing the Word (1986). Reinterpreting the Lacanian account of the “myth” of language acquisition from the perspective of the female child, Homans discovers that “because difference does not open up between her and her mother in the same way that it does between mother and son, the daughter does not experience desire in the Lacanian sense” (5). For the daughter, the mother continues as a presence instead of becoming the necessary absence that Freud, Lacan, and their predecessors locate as the precursor to the development of symbolic language.⁷ In Homans's formulation, the daughter “does not enter the symbolic order as wholeheartedly or exclusively as does the son,” nor does she embrace the “law of the father” as enthusiastically. Her language remains more literal than men's, more grounded in literal presence and lacking the “gaps between signifier and referent” that typify symbolic language (11–14). Homans provides a specific instance of the appearance of literal language in literary texts that is useful to this discussion: “some piece of overtly figurative language, a simile or an extended or conspicuous metaphor, is translated into an actual event or circumstance” (30). This example of literalization works to identify the Gothic affinity for literal language that Homans associates with women. In the Gothic representation of marriage as dangerous and confining to the wife, it is possible to see the Gothic working to literalize the abstract metaphors of the legal fiction of coverture.

The Gothic then moves to counter the legal interpretations that allow for horrors to be perpetuated under the guise of rational civil law. In writing of Blackstone's formulation of coverture, Dickensen states: “Blackstone presents this doctrine of coverture not as irrational, or anomalous … but as the revealed truth of reason, in conformity with natural law” (83). The Gothic narrative interrogates and demystifies the metaphor, revealing the horror that lurks beneath the neutral language of Blackstone's presentation. Yet even Blackstone reveals an awareness of the bloodcurdling consequences of rational English law. Clery notes that Blackstone draws on an architectural metaphor to emblematize property law: “we inherit an old Gothic castle, erected in the days of chivalry, but fitted up for a modern inhabitant. The moated ramparts, the embattled towers, and the trophied halls, are magnificent and venerable.”⁸ Clery extends Blackstone's Gothic metaphor to note that through marriage, the woman becomes a haunting ghost, resulting in the “haunting of the [structure of the] law by the spectre of the woman” (79). Kayman makes a similar connection; he characterizes English common law as “a feudal story, a sort of legal romance” (378), with its timeless “plots” in which “a finite set of actions is performed by a stock cast of figures, and produces a fixed and predictable range of orderly conclusions” (378). The Gothic maneuver of literalization, then, builds upon the inherent Gothicism of English common law, demonstrating that the literal application of the law results in situations that are, indeed, unnatural, irrational, and horrifying.

The tendency of Gothic husbands to imprison or otherwise efface their wives clearly literalizes the metaphorical fiction of coverture; the metaphoric invisibility of the wife in civil law becomes literal in the Gothic text.⁹ In The Castle of Otranto (1764), “the virtuous and tender Hippolita,” wife of Horace Walpole's Manfred and mother of his children, is threatened with divorce and immurement within the walls of a convent when she and her children are no longer adequate to sustain Manfred's dynastic plans. Manfred sets the tone for his many successors, men who attempt to make their wives quite literally disappear: Maria's husband plots to lock her away in an asylum where she is “bastilled” by marriage;¹⁰ in Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Montoni imprisons Mme. Montoni; and in her A Sicilian Romance (1790), Mazzini imprisons Louisa. In each of these instances the Gothic literalization of the legal metaphor effectively interrogates and demystifies the situation of the married women by showing the actual horrors implicit in symbolic civil death, and by making explicit the connection between state-sanctioned sex and death. The Gothic representation of marriage—the literalization of coverture—is, then, a reflection and demystification of the state of the married woman. As Michelle Massé indicates, far from indulging in fantastic escapism, the Gothic thus undertakes the serious work of realistically representing the lives of eighteenth-century women.

The legal metaphor of the civil death of the wife is literalized by the trope of the dangerous male relative. This figure highlights the reality that the father and the husband who promote marriage, and whose economic plots and possession of the woman are supported by that marriage, are frightening sources of death and peril. The long line of murderously dangerous husbands and fathers,¹¹ beginning with Walpole's Manfred, supports this reading. A number of other husbands threaten their wives with death, including Montoni, whose imprisonment of Mme. Montoni results in her death, and Mazzini, who attempts to poison the wife he has imprisoned. Gothic fathers, too, are dangerous, literalizing the danger of the unbridled power allocated to fathers under coverture: in a literalization of the marriage plot, Montoni attempts to exert his paternal proprietorship and to “sell” Emily to his friend, Morani; Manfred mistakenly stabs his daughter Matilda to death at the end of The Castle of Otranto (1764); this murder anticipates the action of Schedoni, the quasi-father/priest, who narrowly escapes killing his brother's daughter (whom he later mistakes for his own daughter) with a dagger in Radcliffe's The Italian (1797). ¹²

* * *

In these instances, the Gothic works to subvert legal structures by literalizing and thereby disclosing them; in this the mode deploys a strategy of heightened realism to interrogate material structures. The conventions of the Gothic mode work to subvert the powers of patriarchy in another, competing way: in a ludic, fantastic maneuver, the power of the patriarch—the power that reflects legal realities—is almost always subverted in the Gothic narrative. The dangerous fathers and husbands of the Gothic, for all their threatening power, always ultimately fail, whereas the women persevere and endure. At the end of Otranto, Manfred is in despair, having mistakenly murdered his daughter and been revealed as the descendant of a usurper. Stripped of family, property, and dynasty, he signs an “abdication of the principality”; he and his wife take on “the habit of re...