Genre and Reception in the Gothic Parody

Framing the Subversive Heroine

Kerstin-Anja Münderlein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000487770
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria del periodo medievale e dei primordi dell'età moderna

This book brings together an analysis of the theoretical connection of genre, reception, and frame theory and a practical demonstration thereof, using a set of parodies of the first wave of the Gothic novel, ranging from well-known titles such as Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, to little known and researched titles such as Mary Charlton's Rosella.

Münderlein traces the development of socio-political debates conducted in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries on female roles, behaviour, and subversion from the subtly subversive Gothic novel to the Gothic parody. Combining two major areas of research, literary criticism and Gothic studies, the book provides both a new take on an ongoing debate in literary criticism as well as an in-depth study of a virtually neglected aspect of Gothic studies, the Gothic parody.

1 Introduction Framing the Gothic Novel

DOI: 10.4324/9781003156642-1

When the English Gothic novel of the first wave was at its height in the 1790s, readers were enthralled by the tales of terror (or horror) set at remote locations and in darker times, with bandits, ghosts, long-lost legacies, corrupt aristocrats, and beautifully virtuous and virtuously beautiful heroines, and fascinating(ly) brooding (hero-)villains. At its heyday, the Gothic novel held more than one-third of the market share of novel production, peaking with 38% in 1795, but it only held its prime position for thirteen years, from 1794 to 1807, until it started sinking speedily into obscurity (Miles 42). During this time, the genre was dominated by Ann Radcliffe and imitators of Radcliffe’s form of Gothic (also called “female” Gothic)¹ and rivalled by the darker Gothic of Matthew Gregory Lewis and his imitators (also called “male” Gothic). A third contribution to the genre, albeit one decidedly smaller in comparison to female and male Gothic, was the Gothic parody that thrived on the often overdrawn generic elements of the genre and gleefully ridiculed anything from Gothic aesthetics to the central characters. Still, by 1820, the Gothic novel genre that had fascinated a generation of novel readers had lost the interest of the public, but it went out with two of the best Gothic novels, namely, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). Henceforth, the Gothic novel lay dormant until it reappeared in a second wave in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

In the twenty-first century, the study of eighteenth-century Gothic might appear to be futile. A wide variety of brilliant and less brilliant monographs and anthologies have already been written on the subject and since the rediscovery of the Gothic and its ennoblement as a valid and academically accepted subject of literary research in the latter twentieth century, interest in it has never abated. The list of names intricately connected with the study of the Gothic is constantly growing, and new books on the subject keep appearing. The field is seemingly well enough investigated, so why write another book about the Gothic? The answer to this question is easier than expected: this is not another book on the Gothic as such; rather, it is a book about theory that uses the Gothic as an example to showcase a theoretical hypothesis.

Specifically, this book intends to show that two major concepts of literary criticism, genre and reception, are mutually dependent and influence each other. The connection between genre and reception has so far only been studied as a by-product of either scholarship on genre or on reception. However, I believe that this interdependence of genre and reception is a fundamental determinant of literary development and should be given more attention. More specifically, I claim that this connection works via frames, tacit principles of (social) organisation inherent to any culture, because frames condition the influence of genre on reception and vice versa. They are thus always in a state of re-valuation and change while they constantly maintain and renew each other (paradoxical as that might sound at first). Any literary genre is determined by its audience’s reception through buying habits and public displays of (dis)favour in reviews, inter alia. The audience’s reception is determined by their expectations towards the genre, which, in turn, is constantly modified by the audience’s demands and reactions to the genre.

This connection of genre and reception thus resembles a hermeneutic circle, which describes the interdependence of understanding and interpretation in literary texts. Every reading is always necessarily a singular process that cannot be imitated because every reading changes the reader’s preconceptions and thus influences their understanding of the text. Applied to the interdependence of genre and reception, the concept of the hermeneutic circle works insofar as it shows that there is no “going back”, so to speak, meaning that the information and interpretation of a text formed during the reading process cannot be undone or “deleted” from the reader’s mind. Knowledge is cumulative and influences the individual, but also the audience overall. Once a genre is “invented” and is accepted by the audience, readers will begin to recognise the specific traits of the genre as soon as more texts using this set of traits start appearing; they will thus base their expectations on two things: first, on their personal familiarity with the genre through their own reading habits, and second, on the common cultural conception of the genre. A person need not have read a crime novel themselves to know what to expect of the genre, and even if they are not familiar with the intricacies of the genre, they possess tacit or passive knowledge through a culturally coined familiarity with the genre “crime novel”. This tacit knowledge does not result from their own reading habits. Instead, the reader can unconsciously draw from their own culture’s frames. Therefore, frames provide knowledge on a subliminal level that all people within this frame (i.e. within the same socio-cultural group) automatically draw on to make sense of the world. In literature, frames are thus at least partly responsible for determining audiences’ expectations.

This book, then, is about theory, but what would theory be without evidence, or, in other words, what would the theoretical description of fundamental concepts in literary studies be without demonstrating such theoretical connections on the basis of actual literary texts? Probably a little dry. To exemplify the theoretical connection of genre and reception as conditioned by frames, this book uses the Gothic, or more specifically British Gothic parodies of the long eighteenth century, as illustrative material. Gothic parodies lend themselves particularly well to this task for several reasons. The first reason is again of a more theoretical nature: parodies generally are intricately linked both to genre and reception, and Gothic parodies are no exception here. Second, the Gothic of the long eighteenth century is a rather narrow genre with a fixed set of generic markers that can be neatly distinguished and analysed. Finding these generic markers in parodies itself shows that knowledge of the original genre (whether passive or active) is necessary to understand the parody, so the narrower or more regulated the set of conventions is, the easier it is to spot it in the parody. Yet parodies reflect back on their original genre, so the existence of a set of parodies will leave its mark on the genre, be that in the inclusion of new traits or the exclusion of those that have become too ridiculous to be continued in the “serious” genre. A Gothic parody thus constitutes a reader’s (or readers’) reaction to the Gothic novel and necessarily alters the Gothic. This process is visible in the development of the use of generic markers, but also – and more interestingly, I would claim – in the political overtones of the Gothic novel and its parody. Despite its nearly hermetic generic make-up, the Gothic possesses a certain potential for subversion, which might or might not have been carried over to the parodies. In tracing the development of subversion from the original genre to the parody, we can observe that genre is always in a state of flux depending on the readers’ reaction to and possible re-working of the political undercurrents of a genre. Specifically, the Gothic heroine, who is usually the central character of “female” Gothic novels, and her development into the rather different parody heroine provide much scope for an analysis of the impact of the parody on the Gothic novel and hence of audience reception on the genre and the frames that govern the Gothic. This book, then, is a book about the Gothic after all.

Like the majority of Gothic novels, most Gothic parodies are no longer extant. From those that are still available, I have selected nine novels (eight novels and one fragment to be precise) that have been given at least some scholarly attention and are thus (repeatedly) mentioned in the literature. I have purposefully combined parodies that are still popular today, such as Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, and parodies that have hardly been studied in the last two centuries, such as Mary Charlton’s Rosella, to ensure that the results of this analysis not only pertain to those tomes that have remained in public favour (or at least consciousness) but also to now-obscure books. In research, some of these texts are well researched, while others have sunk into near obscurity and have only been dealt with by few parody scholars and in passing. From the group of rather unknown texts, some are now being rediscovered and the Gothic parody overall has been given more attention recently.

The Gothic parodies used as a sample in this book all belong to the first wave of British Gothic and emerged in the wake of the first heyday of the Gothic in the 1790s. Although they span a period of more than thirty years (roughly 1791–1824), they can be grouped together literarily as well as historically because they were written as a reaction to and in parodic imitation of the Gothic novel and after the two historical watersheds in the eighteenth century, the American and French Revolutions, including The Terror afterwards. Still, the individual texts exhibit fundamental differences in their political positions, and some are more reminiscent of the subtle subversion of specifically the female Gothic novel in the vein of Ann Radcliffe, while others rather harken back to the conduct book tradition of the early eighteenth century. Hence, the texts are doubly suitable in that they provide both literary parodies of the Gothic novel and a broad range of political criticism, which transcends the socio-political discourses of the Gothic novel. To make them more accessible to the reader of this book, the nine Gothic parodies used here will be introduced in chronological order and briefly summarised (even the well-known ones for the sake of completeness). To date, all of these texts are available either as printed books or free online sources, and I can only encourage the reader to peruse them for themselves.

The oldest text in the sample, The Effusions of Sensibility; or, Letters from Lady Honoria Harrowheart to Miss Sophonisba Simper: a Pathetic Novel in the Modern Taste, Being the First Literary Attempt of a Young Lady of Tender Feelings (c.1791), is a novel fragment by the famous Gothicist Matthew Gregory Lewis, written around 1791, but published only in 1839. Despite having been written by a well-studied author, Lewis’s novel fragment has escaped critical attention for the most part. It was first made available for the reader through its inclusion in the complete edition of Lewis’s works (The Life and Correspondence of M.G. Lewis, vol. II). Although the novel was never finished, it would merit more critical attention as it is a very diligent imitation of the epistolary and the Gothic novel. In the course of this book, this novel will be referenced as Effusions, and it will be quoted from the aforementioned The Life and Correspondence of M.G. Lewis with a simple page number in brackets, for example (261).

As the title implies, Effusions is a fragment of an epistolary novel which comprises three letters (two by Honoria and one by Sophonisba) on twenty-nine pages. It traces the rather ordinary life of Lady Honoria, who leaves her childhood home to travel to London with her father and attends social gatherings there. The banality of the content is juxtaposed by the “effusions” of the style both characters use in writing, such as Sophonisba’s response to Honoria’s first letter: “A thousand heart-breathed expressions of gratitude does Sophonisba entreat the zephyrs to bear to her angelic Honoria, in return for her very long and very interesting letter” (261). The parody of the fragment thus mainly lies in the parodic self-fashioning of the two overdrawn characters and their constant misconception of the world through “Gothic-tinted glasses”.

Azemia, a Novel: Containing Imitations of the Manner, Both in Prose and Verse, of Many of the Authors of the Present Day; with Political Strictures (1798): this two-volume novel is the second and expanded version of William Beckford’s 1797 hilarious Gothic parody, which added the subtitle “with Political Strictures” to the original title. Surprisingly, Azemia is not a very well-researched novel, even though Beckford himself contributed greatly to the development of the Gothic novel with his oriental Gothic tale Vathek (1786). In 2010, a critical edition of Azemia (the first and so far only critical edition), edited by Beckford specialist Robert J. Gemmett, was published by Valancourt Books and has provided an important addition to the scholarship on Beckford. Compared to Lewis’s fragment, Azemia has been studied more often, but in comparison to Vathek, its brilliance has so far been largely overlooked. In the course of this book, this novel will be referenced as Azemia, and it will be quoted from the 1798 edition with volume, chapter, and page number indicated in brackets, for example (I.2, 25).

Written only one year after his parody on the sentimental novel, Modern Novel Writing (1796),² Azemia recounts the story of a young Turkish girl who is captured by English pirates and taken to England. There, she finds herself initially in the unenviable position of being held prisoner by a “noble Duke” but is soon passed on to first another family and then the maternal Mrs Blandford. By letting his characters traverse the upper echelons of English society, the narrator uses Azemia as a focal point to identify and mock the idiosyncrasies and vices of the upper classes through the different encounters Azemia has with them. As a counterpoint to the heroine Azemia, the novel introduces Charles Arnold, midshipman and son of a country gentleman, as the valiant but somewhat inept hero. The narrative of the novel is interspersed with satirical poetry, often imitating the panegyrical poetry found in the Gothic novel (e.g. “The Forficula Auricularis, or Ear-Wigge, to Her Love” as an imitation of Radcliffe’s “The Butter-Fly to His Love”; Chapter I.4, 43–45), and one complete Gothic short story, called “Another Bluebeard”, which is part of a letter to Mrs Blandford (Chapter I.10, 151–253).

The New Monk, A Romance, in Three Volumes (1798): the author of this 1798 parodic rewriting of M.G. Lewis’s The Monk is indicated as R.S. Esq., and some scholars of the Gothic parody, for instance Archibald Bolling Shepperson (161–163) or Natalie Neill (194), use this abbreviation. However, Richard Sickelmore has been identified as the author of New Monk and several scholars have attributed the novel to him, for example James Watt (125). The novel has received little critical attention and is more often noted in passing, for instance by E.J. Clery and Robert Miles, who call it “lacklustre” (201), or by Shepperson, who points out that the book was only “unenthusiastically received” (163). What is particular about New Monk, however, is that it is a complete rewriting of one specific text and as such unlike any other Gothic parody to follow (Frank 131). The most detailed appraisal of the novel has been provided by its 2007 critical edition by Elizabeth Andrews, published by Valancourt Books. In the course of this book, this novel will be referenced as New Monk and it will be quoted from the original 1798 edition with volume, chapter, and page number indicated in brac...