Victorian Hauntings

Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature

Julian Wolfreys

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780333922521
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350317710
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Victorian Hauntings asks its reader to consider the following questions:

What does it mean to read or write with ghosts, or to suggest that acts of reading or writing are haunted? In what ways can authors in the nineteenth century be read so as to acknowledge the various phantom effects which return within their texts? In what ways do the traces of such "ghost writing" surface in the works of Dickens, Tennyson, Eliot and Hardy? How does the work of spectrality, revenance and the uncanny transform materially both the forms of the literary in the Victorian era and our reception of it today? Beginning with an expoloration of matters of haunting, the uncanny, the gothic and the spectral, Julian Wolfreys traces the ghostly resonances at work in Victorian writing and how such persistence addresses isues of memory and responsibility which haunt the work of reading.

'Taking the familiar genre of the Gothic as a point of departure and revisiting it through Derridean theory, Wolfreys' book, the first application of "hauntology" to the domain of Victorian Studies is a remarkable achievement. Wolfreys never reduces reading to instrumentality but remains alert to all the potentialities of the texts he reads with a great attention to their idiosyncrasies. Victorian Hauntings should bring a new tone to Victorian Studies, this clever book is quite perfect.' - Jean Michel Rabate, Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania

'You'd have to be dead to know more about ghosts than Julian Wolfreys.' - Martin McQuillan, University of Leeds

1

‘I wants to make your flesh creep’: Dickens and the Comic-Gothic

It is the fear one needs: the price one pays for coming contentedly to terms with a social body based on irrationality and menace.

Franco Moretti

Gothic novels are technologies that produce the monster as a remarkably mobile, permeable, and infinitely interpretable body.

Judith Halberstam

A baby savage, a young monster, a child who had never been a child, a creature who might live to take the outward form of a man, but who, within, would live and perish a mere beast.

Charles Dickens, The Haunted Man

The gothic is always with us. Certainly, it was always with the Victorians: all that black, all that crepe, all that jet and swirling fog. Not, of course, that these are gothic as such, although we do think of such figures as manifestations of nineteenth-century Englishness. These and other phenomena, such as the statuary found in Victorian cemeteries like Highgate are discernible as being the fragments and manifestations of a haunting and, equally, haunted, ‘gothicized’ sensibility. If there is, as I argue in the Introduction, a transition in the nature of gothic from the end of the eighteenth century onwards, an irreversible movement from genre to trope, from structural identity to that which haunts the structures of narrative, it is marked by an inward turn perhaps, an incorporation which is also a spectralization. There is a constant return of the gothic as that which marks national identity without being fixable as a paradigmatic definition of that identity.

The motion of internalization should not necessarily be considered as a denial of the gothic so much as it might be read as a form of intimacy and haunting. In part, the interest in the traces of otherness within is often signalled during the Victorian period by an intense fascination – obsession even on the part of some – with English manners and all that, while apparently alien to the definition of Englishness, is nonetheless projected from within that very identity. The phantoms of English identity, those traces of comic and gothic disturbance, arrive not from some foreign field. Instead, they return as necessary to the construction of national identity, while being resistant to unequivocal identification. For example, it is through what James Twitchell describes as the sober English concern with darkness, mesmerism and Satanism,¹ that the gothic aspects of Englishness are revealed. The gothic does not simply disappear therefore. The gothic, ingested and consumed, becomes appropriate in its fragmentary materialization, ‘a legitimate subject of literature’ to employ Twitchell’s phrase (33). Such a ‘disappearance’ is also an incorporation, as already intimated, so that, though nowhere to be seen coherently or as such, the gothic in its ingested and spectralized form leaves its traces on Englishness. In writing of nineteenth-century literature where writing manifests a gothic return, there is then to be acknowledged an embrace of the uncanny, a more or less direct response on the part of certain Victorian writers to the other within ourselves.

One of the sites of uncanny contestation is the adolescent body or the figure of the child, a figure, arguably for the Victorians, viewed communally as uncanny or unnatural because double, being both self and other: the same, yet not the same. In the novels of Charles Dickens youthful bodies frequently have projected onto and through them the apparitional traces of gothic and abject otherness. As a consequence, the young body comes to be presented as in need of discipline or punishment, if its often gothic otherness is not to get out of hand, and if the child, the adolescent and the teenager (a category not known, of course, to the Victorians) are to grow into proper Englishmen and women. However, the haunting and uncanny aspects of adolescent corporeality which frequently discomfit or perplex Dickens’ adults are rendered all the more ambivalent through the effects of comedy.

Humour already has a ghostly aspect, of course. As soon as one attempts to analyse it, to explain its slippage and excess, its effects vanish, as Antony Easthope has argued.² Nevertheless, certain characteristics can be sketched, and Easthope risks a definition of the features of the Englishness of English humour, these being irony, ‘the exposure of self-deception [and] a tendency towards fantasy and excess’ (163). Moreover, caricature is also a culturally prevalent and historically persistent aspect of English comedy, through which the body becomes doubled, an index of both individual and national moral concerns (171). Such a doubling means that the comedic is never simply itself, never containable according to an unequivocal act of definition or analysis. There is that which once again escapes, to return momentarily and to unsettle the certainties of propriety and rational discourse. Like those gothic traces and tropes, the comic works through a process of the material effects it produces in the complication of reading; as with the gothic, the comic relies on the haunting installation of undecidability. This comes to be particularly troubling when the traces of humour, of a comedic knowingness related to fantasy, excess, and irony, project themselves through the body, the image and the very idea of youth, with all its supposed innocence and purity. Comedy thus unveils that which haunts our own phantasies of the child, those uncanny oscillations of alterity.

The question of Englishness, the constitution and constant policing of national identity, finds a peculiarly intense focus where the gothic and the comic come together. It is not simply the case that Dickens is sometimes gothic and sometimes comic. Frequently both emerge as the disruptive troping phantoms of the narrative, rather than being the defining parameters of narrative form. Constantly disturbing, both humour and the gothic haunt the most typically English scenes in Dickens’ writing and have their haunting half-lives through those figures of children and adolescents which are the concern of this chapter. Moreover, it is not the case that the comic and the gothic figure some neat, stable binary opposition; around and through the youthful body both return and refigure themselves and each other constantly, making the identification of undifferentiated identity problematic at the least, undecidable at the most. Comedy and gothic exceed themselves, overflowing the limits we seek to assign them and becoming this other apparition which we are naming here the comic-gothic.

THE FAT BOY

The title of this essay is well known. It comes from that most famous of narcoleptics (literary or otherwise), the Fat Boy, also called ‘young opium eater’ (PP 345) no doubt in deference to Thomas de Quincey, from The Pickwick Papers. The scene from which the lines come is equally well known, but no less comical and worth repeating for all that.

It was the old lady’s habit on the fine summer mornings to repair to the arbour in which Mr. Tupman had already signalised himself, in form and manner following: – first, the fat boy fetched from a peg behind the old lady’s bed-room door, a close black satin bonnet, a warm cotton shawl, and a thick stick with a capacious handle; and the old lady having put on the bonnet and shawl at her leisure, would lean one hand on the stick and the other on the fat boy’s shoulder, and walk leisurely to the arbour, where the fat boy would leave her to enjoy the fresh air for the space of half an hour; at the expiration of which time he would return and reconduct her back to the house.

The old lady was very precise and very particular; and as this ceremony had been observed for three successive summers without the slightest deviation from the accustomed form, she was not a little surprised on this particular morning, to see the fat boy, instead of leaving the arbour, walk a few paces out of it, look carefully around him in every direction, and return towards her with great stealth and an air of the most profound mystery.

The old lady was timorous – most old ladies are – and her first impression was that the bloated lad was about to do her some grievous bodily harm with the view of possessing himself of her loose coin. She would have cried for assistance, but age and infirmity had long ago deprived her of the power of screaming; she, therefore, watched his motions with feelings of intense terror, which were in no degree diminished by his coming up close to her, and shouting in her ear in an agitated, and as it seemed to her, a threatening tone, –

‘Missus!’

Now it so happened that Mr. Jingle was walking in the garden close to the arbour at this moment. He too heard the shout of ‘Missus’, and stopped to hear more. There were three reasons for his doing so. In the first place; he was idle and curious; secondly, he was by no means scrupulous, thirdly, and lastly, he was concealed from view by some flowering shrubs. So there he stood, and there he listened.

‘Missus,’ shouted the fat boy.

‘Well Joe,’ said the trembling old lady. ‘I’m sure I have been a very good mistress to you Joe. You have invariably been treated very kindly. You have never had too much to do; and you have always had enough to eat.’

This last was an appeal to the fat boy’s most sensitive feelings. He seemed touched as he replied, emphatically, –

‘I knows I has.’

‘Then what do you want now?’ said the old lady, gaining courage.

‘I wants to make your flesh creep,’ replied the boy.

This sounded like a very blood-thirsty mode of showing one’s gratitude; and as the old lady did not precisely understand the process by which such a result was to be attained, all her former horrors returned. (PP 92–3)

The scene is stage-comic and in its stage management provides the would-be gothic writer – or scourge of timid old ladies everywhere – with a textbook example of how to bring off a scene that is at once both gothic, potentially terrifying in its eventual outcome as all good scenes of gothic tension should be and, simultaneously, unremittingly comic. Although all is soon revealed after the last moment described above, as is usually the case in the novels of, for example, Anne Radcliffe, when the rational explanation arrives to calm down the unbearable agitation of being (for both the reader and the principal subject), Dickens works the scene in at least two different directions at once. The scene relies for both its gothic tension and its knowing comic solicitation of that tension on producing the simultaneity, the doubling of feeling, while also providing the reader with a Hitchcock-like view from above down onto the terrorstricken old lady, similar also to the elevation permitted the reader over Catherine Morland by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey.

We know, because we have been told repeatedly, that the old lady is deaf. This is why the Fat Boy bellows. Nonetheless, the information and the manner in which it is delivered does nothing to allay the old lady’s fear. If anything, it is increased. The information, the performance, the anticipation and effect: all are radically incommensurate. Joe’s bellowing in anticipation of the revelation of a secret goes directly contrary to the laws of gothic. He shouts when he should be whispering, and it is a summer’s day at a country cottage, and not the dead of night or dead of winter in some far-off chateau, castle or monastery. We might even suggest that the scene is knowingly anti-gothic, that Dickens is just having a laugh at the expense of tired form, a form he loved as a child and continues to embrace throughout his career, were it not for the fact that the deaf old lady is genuinely terrified. She is made even more an abject figure by her being unable to scream. The comedy of the scene only works because there is such a departure from routine as Dickens makes quite clear, and because the force of the old lady’s emotions is not to be denied. It is in part the cruelty of this scene which makes us laugh, whether or not we choose to admit it. And it is in the results of the cruelty that we glimpse the fleeting ghost of the gothic. For the old lady responds not to any particular object or event, but to the invisible shadows which she has phantasized, and which we can only imagine at a double remove.

The moment in the garden is exemplary of the comic-gothic then. The reader works – and is expected to work – in a number of ways at once here, not least in accommodating the ludic oscillation between comedy and cruelty, the latter as the necessity for the former, the former the outcome of what happens when you get close enough to the gothic to see how the special effects work (which is precisely what Dickens does). At the same time, the scene sets for us all sorts of normal patterns of behaviour, which we are asked to take for granted, solely for the purpose of departing from them so excessively. Yet something remains unsettling in this scene, two things to be precise, moments when the gothic never quite resolves itself away. The first is the Fat Boy’s own agitation, that nervousness of demeanour as he prepares himself for his greatest performance (walking in and out of the arbour is merely for the purposes of warming up). The second is the Fat Boy’s outburst, which serves as the title for this essay: ‘I wants to make your flesh creep’. Why the Fat Boy should wish to do this is a mystery, unless he is merely relishing the effect like all good stage villains. Also, the news he has to impart is hardly the sort to make the flesh creep. The gothic is quite exploded, though the uncanny remains, thereby intimating the return, if not of the repressed then, at least, of that which cannot be described. Quite.

To make someone’s flesh creep is, we might say, Young Opium Eater’s desire. Anyone less like Thomas de Quincey, the man who made even Wordsworth gothic, is hard to imagine. But the Fat Boy’s desire finds its target in the terrified old lady. The Fat Boy understands that creeping flesh is a necessity if the narrative he wishes to unfold is to be deemed successful. He relishes his role, his performative status in the whole event. It is participation that is important. The Fat Boy is thus exemplary of the domestic gothic. He no longer is content, like so many good British subjects, with sitting back and enjoying being scared. He wants to take part. The English, no longer afraid – temporarily – of Catholics and foreigners (the Irish of course are always an exception, but that has to do with proximity to home, as all good cultural historians will acknowledge) need to scare themselves, to cut a caper at home, put on a sheet and run around going ‘hoo, hoo’ for their own delight and terror. There are no bogeymen abroad, so why not pretend to be a little spooky in one’s own back yard? As Sam Weller’s knowing sobriquet for the Fat Boy attests, the other is within us, in this case in the possible form of the drug addict. And of course it doesn’t really matter if the Fat Boy is addicted, what matters is that he might be. The perceived drug addict as the most gothic of figures then, haunted from within, tremulous without. Right in our own gardens. This is what we are witness to and the Fat Boy plays it up unmercifully. As James Kincaid notes, the Fat Boy is double, both ‘harmless toy and raging demon’ (‘Designing Gourmet Children’, 8). Doubleness is of course a feature of the uncanny, as Freud acknowledges (U 234).³ It is this doubleness which Dickens remarks through the ambivalence, if not the undecidability, of the comic-gothic.

Kincaid also raises the issue of the boy’s appetite, his constant desire to consume flesh and to turn whatever he consumes into flesh. It is interesting to speculate, in the light of Kincaid’s remarks, on a possible connection between the Fat Boy and the then contemporary concern with cannibalism in relation to the distrust of medical science’s advocacy of anatomy, as H. L. Malchow discusses.⁴ As Malchow suggests, there were growing worries about ‘domestic, if metaphoric, cannibalism’ as a manifestation of the gothic in the form of anatomical dissections in the 1830s given voice in places both high and low, in The Lancet and in popular songs of the day (110). Perhaps from a fear of the anatomist’s knife and its implied relation to ‘barbaric’ practices, a grim humour, a ‘[d]issection-room humor’, arose during the period, and ‘Dickens made much use of this kind of humor’ from Pickwick to Our Mutual Friend, as Malchow acknowledges (114–15). Malchow cites the dinner scene between the medical students Bob Sawyer and Ben Allen, who joke about the ‘source’ of their meat (a child’s leg), terrifying Mr Pickwick. He also recalls the meal consumed by Wegg and Mr Venus in Our Mutual Friend, in the taxidermist’s shop where the two men are surrounded by jars containing the pickled remains of ‘Indian and African infants’, along with scenes from Bleak House (115). Harry Stone also notes the frequency of the ‘comic mode’ in relation to the theme of cannibalism, citing the example of the Fat Boy.⁵ As Stone makes clear, Young Opium Eater makes little if any distinction between animal and human flesh (78). Such comedic business succeeds, argues Stone, in banishing the gothic quality of such moments. Howev...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Abbreviations and a Note on References
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface: on Textual Haunting
• Introduction
• 1. ‘I wants to make your flesh creep’: Dickens and the Comic-Gothic
• 2. Tennyson’s Faith: In Memoriam A. H. H.
• 3. Phantom Optics: George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil
• 4. Little Dorrit’s ‘land of fragments’
• 5. ‘The persistence of the unforeseen’: The Mayor of Casterbridge
• Afterword: Prosopopoeia or, Witnessing
• Notes
• Index