Inventing the Gothic Corpse

The Thrill of Human Remains in the Eighteenth-Century Novel

Yael Shapira

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319764832
• eBook ISBN: 9783319764849
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Inventing the Gothic Corpse shows how a series of bold experiments in eighteenth-century British realist and Gothic fiction transform the dead body from an instructive icon into a thrill device. For centuries, vivid images of the corpse were used to deliver a spiritual or political message; today they appear regularly in Gothic and horror stories as a source of macabre pleasure. Yael Shapira's book tracks this change at it unfolds in eighteenth-century fiction, from the early novels of Aphra Behn and Daniel Defoe, through the groundbreaking mid-century works of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding and Horace Walpole, to the Gothic fictions of Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Charlotte Dacre and Minerva Press authors Isabella Kelly and Mrs. Carver.

In tracing this long historical arc, Shapira illuminates a hidden side of the history of the novel: the dead body, she shows, helps the fledgling literary form confront its own controversial ability to entertain. Her close scrutiny of fictional corpses across the long eighteenth century reveals how the dead body functions as a test of the novel's intentions, a chance for novelists to declare their allegiances in the battle between the didactic and the "merely" pleasurable.

© The Author(s) 2018

Yael ShapiraInventing the Gothic Corpsehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76484-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: The Novel, the Corpse and the Eighteenth-Century Marketplace

Yael Shapira¹

(1)

Department of English Literature and Linguistics, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel

End Abstract

This book looks for the eighteenth-century origins of a fictional trope I am calling the “Gothic corpse”—an image of the dead body rendered with deliberate graphic bluntness in order to excite and entertain. With two and a half centuries of Gothic fiction behind us, this way of portraying human remains has become so familiar that it may seem timeless and obvious. As the coming chapters argue, however, the Gothic corpse has not always been there; it is the product of a particular literary-historical development. Rather than appear in Gothic fiction fully formed, it is created through a series of experiments in novel-writing that run through the whole of the long eighteenth century.¹

The sensational allure of the corpse is recognized and partly pursued in the early fiction of Aphra Behn and Daniel Defoe; it is then re-acknowledged but forestalled by Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, albeit in radically dissimilar ways; and it is still contentious in the 1790s, when Ann Radcliffe’s rejection of it and Matthew Lewis’s enthusiastic adoption of it cause the Gothic novel to head off in two opposite directions. By looking closely at what these and other eighteenth-century authors choose to do—and, more importantly in some cases, choose not to do—with the dead body, I show not only how fiction gradually comes to define the corpse as entertainment, but how the corpse helps the novel negotiate its own potential to entertain. In taking measure of the dead body’s ability to titillate and deciding how far (if at all) to exploit it, writers of eighteenth-century fiction engage in sophisticated acts of self-reflection, commenting on their own identity and on the nature of the novel itself as a commercial product.

Using vivid images of the dead to thrill readers is not an established norm in the works I examine. Rather, it is a nascent option that haunts the century’s most famous experiments in novel-writing, tantalizing the pioneers of the realist tradition and alarming its major consolidators before being fulfilled in Gothic fiction, and even there in an incomplete, still-ambivalent manner. Despite the inherent teleology of my argument—I am looking, after all, for the appearance of a literary trope whose eventual existence is evident—what I trace is not a smooth trajectory of change in writing practice, but rather one in which resistance and retrenchment are as significant as forward motion.

I call this version of the corpse “Gothic” even though some Gothic novels—most famously Radcliffe’s—avoid shocking depictions of the dead, opting instead for the subtler effects of suggestion and obscurity.² Nor do such corpses appear only in the Gothic: beginning my account a full century before the Gothic’s heyday, I show that the possibility of turning the dead body into a source of thrills was already evident in far earlier realist novels, though still obscured by the echoes of older discourses that described the corpse vividly in order to teach rather than entertain. What gives the “Gothic corpse” its name is thus the end-point of a long evolution that coincides with the evolution of the novel itself: it was with the emergence of a certain kind of Gothic fiction—Lewis’s The Monk (1796) and Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya; or The Moor (1806) being particularly self-aware and deliberate examples—that the dead body’s ability to function primarily as a fictional trigger of excitement found its most complete expression; and it is primarily in Gothic works (though, again, not in all of them) that it has continued to appear in this form and for this purpose. In using the term “Gothic corpse” while examining a century-long trajectory of novels, I am therefore committing a conscious anachronism: for much of the story I tell, this coinage names not a familiar practice, but a potential that has yet to be realized in full.

What is new about the Gothic corpse, though, is not the image itself. Graphic renditions of the dead body have been present for many centuries in a variety of genres, and part of the labor of my book is to expose the echoes of these older discourses in eighteenth-century fiction. The Christian memento mori, the plague tract, the martyrology, the news report of a political execution—all these relied on depictions of the corpse no less detailed and gruesome than what Gothic novelists would eventually offer. In these older genres, however, the power of graphic death imagery was clearly harnessed to some kind of instructive aim, such as stirring believers to reflection or asserting the power of the regime against those who defy it. When such images enter the novel, I argue, the frames in which they traditionally appeared loosen. While still carrying some of their old didactic load, the dead bodies of eighteenth-century fiction also begin to alter, responding to the different ambitions of a literary form that is, as Cheryl Nixon writes, part of “an expanding print culture characterized by the pressures of buying, selling, marketing, and profiting.”³

Even as they draw on the depiction of the corpse in older didactic discourses, writers of fiction recognize that the dead body has the potential to do something else: made vivid through unflinching description, it can seize the reader’s attention and add a powerful charge to key moments in the plot. To use the corpse this way, however, is to risk accusations of unprincipled pandering that deeply trouble certain authors, while causing others no palpable alarm. Especially when it appears in a novel—itself a product whose alleged moral dangers were widely debated throughout the century—the corpse is liable to be seen as catering to debased and unsavory desires, and thus to taint its creator with the same stigma. In deciding how to portray the dead body, eighteenth-century novelists are therefore defining themselves, as well as the relationship they imagine between author, novel and reader. Concern about the respectability and legitimacy of fiction is thus critical in determining how much of a sensational spectacle the dead body is allowed to become in any particular work.

Spanning both realist and Gothic fiction, then, the development I chart reveals the common dilemmas involved in the crafting of very different dead bodies in novels across the century. By taking a long view of fictional corpses that have not yet been studied together, I expose a complex process of literary-historical evolution. The story I tell runs through not only much-analyzed specimens such as Clarissa’s exquisite body or the wax effigy behind the black veil at the Castle of Udolpho, but the mangled remains of an African king in Behn’s Oroonoko, or, the Royal Slave (1688); the heaps of nameless dead in Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722); the skulls and bones wielded as weapons in the churchyard of Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling (1749); the broken limbs of young Conrad, barely visible beneath the gigantic helmet that crushes him at the beginning of The Castle of Otranto (1764), launching the Gothic tradition; the gruesome visions of dead flesh encountered in such forgotten popular Gothics as Isabella Kelly’s The Abbey of St. Asaph (1795) and Mrs. Carver’s The Horrors of Oakendale Abbey (1797); and the disfigured body threatening to expose the guilt of a murderous wife in Dacre’s Zofloya, among others. By following, in chronological sequence, the scenes displaying these bodies—scenes that prove under scrutiny to be surprisingly dense, allusive and self-aware—I show how they refract for us the novel’s century-long struggle with its own identity, while bringing into being a version of the dead body that would eventually become a pervasive feature of mass entertainment.

Before I turn, in the next four chapters, to the many versions of the dead body found in novels of the long eighteenth century and to the inventive, elaborate and sometimes anxious constructions within which they are situated, it will be important to establish three eighteenth-century contexts from which these literary maneuvers derive their broader significance. One is the generic context of the novel, a commercial form dependent for success on its appeal to the reader and therefore suspected all through the century of catering to an inferior form of appetite. As I show below, the reader’s encounter with the fictional corpse has the capacity to epitomize precisely the kind of debased literary transaction that critics of the novel worry about—a potential accusation that novelists acknowledge, with varying degrees of defensiveness, through the shapes they give to the dead body and the narrative scenarios within which they place it.

The second context I sketch below is that of the eighteenth-century consumer marketplace, where not only verbal descriptions of the corpse but actual dead bodies circulate as commercial spectacles. Drawing on historical studies of this economic activity as a corrective to the prevalent scholarly association of the 1700s with the denial and concealment of death, I point to the dilemmas that novelists share with other entrepreneurs who traffic in the encounter with the corpse. While poised to profit from creating such displays, especially if they are creatively tailored to the desires of the audience, writers of fiction and creators of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: The Novel, the Corpse and the Eighteenth-Century Marketplace
• Part I. Remains of the Past
• Part II. Gothic Negotiations
• 6. Conclusion: Remains to Be Seen
• Back Matter