Female Gothic Histories

Gender, Histories and the Gothic

Diana Wallace

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781783160310
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Gothic, Romance, & Horror Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Female Gothic Histories traces the development of women's Gothic historical fiction from Sophia Lee's The Recess in the late eighteenth century through the work of Elizabeth Gaskell, Vernon Lee, Daphne du Maurier and Victoria Holt to the bestselling novels of Sarah Waters in the twenty-first century. Often left out of traditional historical narratives, women writers have turned to Gothic historical fiction as a mode of writing which can both reinsert them into history and symbolise their exclusion. This study breaks new ground in bringing together thinking about the Gothic and the historical novel, and in combining psychoanalytic theory with historical contextualisation.

1

Introduction

The history of England is the history of the male line, not of the female.

Virginia Woolf, ‘Women and Fiction’ (1929)1

If the rationale of History is ultimately to remind us of everything that has happened and to take it into account, we must make the interpretation of the forgetting of female ancestries part of History and re-establish its economy.

Luce Irigaray, Thinking the Difference (1989)2

From the late eighteenth century, women writers, aware of their exclusion from traditional historical narratives, have used Gothic historical fiction as a mode of historiography which can simultaneously reinsert them into history and symbolise their exclusion. If the Gothic with its blatant flouting of realism is always already, as I will suggest here, a kind of metafiction avant la lettre, then Gothic historical fiction, the subject of my study, can be seen as a kind of metahistory, a way of theorising or producing a philosophy of history.3 In the hands of women writers, Gothic historical fiction has offered a way of ‘interpreting’, or symbolising, what Luce Irigaray calls ‘the forgetting of female ancestries’ and of re-establishing them within ‘History’.4

In doing so these novels throw into question what exactly we mean by ‘History’, or indeed, ‘history’, or ‘the past’. That is, how do we shape accounts of what happened in the past (the events of ‘history’) into narratives (‘History’)? How does our understanding of gender influence such processes? What happens to those accounts when women are either left out, or added in? And, if the ‘economy’ (to borrow Irigaray’s term) of ‘History’ is based on the assumption that public and political events have more ‘value’ than private and domestic events, and are more worth recording, how can we revalue, or re-imagine, women’s unrecorded experience in the past?

Furthermore, if (married) women were for over two centuries regarded as ‘civilly dead’, what kinds of ghostly traces can we retrieve from the texts of history? Mary Beard traces back to 1765 the notion that ‘women were a subject sex or nothing at all – in any past or the total past,’ attributing its genesis to Sir William Blackstone’s influential statement of the legal position of married women:

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 every thing.5

This legal concept of the married woman as ‘civilly dead’ led, Beard argues, to what she calls the ‘haunting idea’ that woman in the past was ‘a being always and everywhere subject to male man or as a ghostly creature too shadowy to be even that real’.6 The language of spectrality used by Beard here suggests the particular power of the Gothic to express the erasure of women in history, something which may not be expressible in other kinds of language or in the traditional forms of historiographic narratives. This suggests one reason why the Gothic has been such an important mode of writing for women, and why, from Ellen Moers’s Literary Women (1976) on, it has occupied such a central place in feminist literary criticism.

From the late seventeenth century, with the publication of Madame de Lafayette’s The Princess of Clèves (1678), fiction has been one of the primary ways in which women writers have written history, and written themselves into ‘History’. The invisibility of women within mainstream history, and as historians, obscures the fact that women have not only participated in historical events but engaged with history for as long as we have had historical records. The problem has been that, in Mary Spongberg’s words,

[women’s] historical endeavours have not been regarded as ‘proper’ history. Women who attempted to write history were rarely considered ‘real’ historians: rather they have been characterised as biographers, historical novelists, political satirists, genealogists, writers of travellers’ tales, collectors of folklore and antiquarians.7

History, Bonnie G. Smith argues, has been ‘gendered male by tradition, accident and circumstance’ since its professionalisation in the early nineteenth century.8 More than that, Christina Crosby has suggested, the construction of history as ‘man’s truth’ required ‘that “woman” be outside history, above, below, or beyond properly historical and political life’.9

Yet women’s enforced position ‘outside history’, as what Crosby calls ‘the unhistorical other of history’,10 has often made them sceptical about mainstream historical narratives in ways which have proven fruitful for their fiction. The recognition that history which does not include women’s experience is, in Virginia Woolf’s words, ‘a little queer … unreal, lopsided’,11 has alerted women writers to the ways in which any historical narrative is always constructed from a particular (subjective) point of view. There is not one ‘History’, their fiction suggests, but plural and contradictory histories. It is in fiction that women writers have been able to be most subversive in their critiques of traditional historiography and its effects. In this sense women’s historical fiction has fulfilled Joan Wallach Scott’s stipulation that women’s history should be not just an ‘addition of information previously ignored … but an analysis of the effects of dominant understandings of gender in the past’.12 Despite this, fiction has not been regarded as ‘“proper” history’.

Furthermore, if the historical novel as a genre appears oxymoronic in its yoking of supposedly antithetical opposites – ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’, ‘history’ and ‘literature’, the new (‘novel’) and the old (‘history’) – then the Gothic historical novel is even more problematic. With its associations with the supernatural, the Gothic is even more at odds with our notion of history than the realist novel which at least appears to represent the ‘real’. Like so many other binary oppositions, these two terms are defined in opposition to each other. To say something is ‘Gothic’ is at once to imply that it is obsessed with the return of the past, and to define it as unhistorical, not ‘proper history’, fantasy rather than fact. Conversely, historical fiction proper is defined partly by its eschewing of the fantastic, the supernatural, and (ironically) the ‘fictional’ in the sense of the invented or imaginary.

The Gothic historical novel seems to be yoking together two different and incompatible ways of representing the past. Here Mary Ann Doane’s distinction between the past of historiography and the past of psychoanalysis is suggestive: ‘In psychoanalysis, the past is aggressive – it returns, it haunts, it sometimes dominates the present. In historiography, the past is static, inert – qualities which make it, in effect, more knowable.’13

The past of the Gothic is closer to that of psychoanalysis: aggressively mobile, prone to return, to irruptions into the present. The past in the Gothic never quite stays dead, and is therefore never fully knowable. This is why Gothic fiction so often seems to demand psychoanalytic interpretations as a way of disinterring the repressed secrets of the past. In contrast, critics of the historical novel have traditionally turned to Marxist approaches, aligning the genre with the nineteenth-century realist novel by excluding texts which use fantastic elements.

There is also a problem of nomenclature. Should we talk about the ‘Gothic historical novel’, or about what Montague Summers and Devendra P. Varma called respectively the ‘historical Gothic’ or ‘historical-Gothic’ novel?14 As with many hybrids, it’s not obvious which term should take priority, or if they should be hyphenated. Summers and Varma were primarily interested in the Gothic, and the ‘historical’ as a subcategory within that mode. My own decision to use the term ‘Gothic historical fiction’ reflects the fact that my interest is in historical fiction which uses the Gothic as a way of symbolising questions about history and gender which cannot be formulated in other kinds of language. My project here is to take female historical novelists seriously as historians, to listen carefully to what they are saying about the relationship between women and history. Even more improperly, I want to take seriously the Gothic historical fiction written by women in order to explore what their use of Gothic conventions tells us about women’s position within history.

While literary criticism has tended to focus on ways of separating the two genres, the origins of the Gothic novel and the historical novel are intimately entwined. As David Punter has argued of the early novels which constitute the origins of the Gothic: ‘the reason why it is so difficult to draw a line between Gothic fiction and historical fiction is that Gothic itself seems to have been a mode of history, a way of perceiving an obscure past and interpreting it.’15

One of the obstacles to recognising this has been the neglect, until recently, of a body of work by women writers who produced historical novels before Sir Walter Scott published Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since (1814). While the majority of critics still, erroneously, trace the development of the historical novel as a genre back through what Virginia Woolf called ‘the male line’ to Scott, I want to trace an alternative female genealogy which starts with Sophia Lee’s extraordinary Gothic historical novel, The Recess; or, A Tale of Other Times (1783−5), published over thirty years earlier. This genealogy moves through the short fictions of Elizabeth Gaskell and Vernon Lee, and then the novels of Daphne du Maurier and Victoria Holt, to those of Sarah Waters.

My argument is that the Gothic works as a ‘mode of history’ which has had particular attractions and importance for women writers. Women writers have used Gothic historical fiction with its obsession with inheritance, lost heirs and illegitimate offspring, to explore the way in which the ‘female line’ has been erased in ‘History’. The very literariness of the Gothic, its repetition of, and play with, obviously stylised generic conventions, draws attention to its own constructedness, makes it, indeed, a kind of metafiction.16 ‘The fantastic’, as Rosemary Jackson argues, ‘traces the unsaid and the unseen of culture: that which has been silenced, made invisible, covered over and made absent.’17 Gothic historical novels harness that potential, but root it within the material specificity of history. Here fiction has a close relationship with historiography: the metaphors women historians often use to figure women’s relationship with history − of women being ‘outside’, ‘underneath’ or ‘hidden from’ history18 − are Gothic images of a past which is obscure, dark, buried, needing to be unearthed. The use of such metaphors by historians, as well as writers of fiction, suggests the importance of the Gothic to the ways in which we think about women and history.

Theorising historical fiction

In his ‘Introductory’ to Waverley, Walter Scott set out a manifesto for what he presented as a new mode of fiction:

Had I, for example, announced in my frontispiece, ‘Waverley, a Tale of other Days’, must not every novel-reader have anticipated a castle scarce less than that of Udolpho, of which the eastern wing had long been uninhabited, and the keys either lost or consigned to the care of some aged butler or housekeeper, whose trembling steps, about the middle of the second volume, were doomed to guide the hero, or heroine, to the ruinous precincts? Would not the owl have shrieked and the cricket cried in my very title page?19

Scott draws what appears to...