Part I
Re-imagined Gothic Landscapes: Folklore, Nostalgia and History
1
âDark, and cold, and rugged is the Northâ: Regionalism, Folklore and Elizabeth Gaskellâs âNorthernâ Gothic
Catherine Spooner
Gothic regionalism
âDark, and cold, and rugged is the Northâ, Gaskell writes in her Life of Charlotte BrontĂ« (1857), misquoting Tennysonâs line from The Princess (1847), âdark and true and tender is the Northâ.1 The mock quotation gives the line the force of received wisdom â a stereotype that Charlotte BrontĂ«, for Gaskell, partly confirms but also partly confounds. Throughout the Life, Gaskell is keen to emphasise that southernersâ rejection of BrontĂ«âs depiction of over-exaggerated northern manners is contradicted by her Yorkshire readersâ warm recognition of their own lives and landscapes. Gaskell implicitly defends what is regarded as overblown and grotesque by the cultured south as realistic by local standards. In doing so, she constructs the north as a fictional space that is simultaneously Gothic and realist. Gothic, she implies, is the natural idiom of Haworth and its surrounds.
Gaskell is, of course, primarily known for her realist portrayal of the industrial north in novels such as Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1854â5) as well as her light-hearted portrayal of a provincial community in Cranford (1851â3). She also, however, contributed ghost stories to Household Words and wrote a variety of short fiction that could be described as Gothic, collected in one volume for Penguin Classics by Laura Kranzler in 2000. Like her novels, Gaskellâs short stories are often set in clearly specified northern landscapes, although their focus is rural rather than urban. Nevertheless the identification of these tales as Gothic is far from secure and could be regarded as an opportunistic exercise: with the exception of âThe Old Nurseâs Storyâ (1852) and âThe Poor Clareâ (1856), Gaskellâs stories often depart significantly from the characteristic atmosphere or aesthetic of âclassicâ Gothic through their deployment of a comic or realist register. Reviewing the volume in Gothic Studies, Lisa Hopkins suggests:
A whole collection of Gothic tales by Elizabeth Gaskell would be a marvellous thing, which one would love to have. Unfortunately, however, the present volume... doesnât really fit the bill. [Only three of the stories] could reasonably find shelter under a Gothic umbrella.2
With a flounce, she concludes, âI think Iâll go off and read something Gothicâ.3
Part of the problem in defining Gaskell as Gothic lies in the tendency of Gothic studies as an academic field to value non-realist literary forms. Chris Baldick and Robert Mighallâs excoriating attack on âGothic Criticismâ in David Punterâs A Companion to the Gothic argues that the positioning of Gothic as radical other within the literary tradition often flagrantly disregards historical evidence in the service of what they call âthe mainstream modernist, post-modernist, and left-formalist campaign against nineteenth-century literary realism and its alleged ideological backwardnessâ.4 Gaskell, as a prime proponent of that realism, remains uncomfortably positioned in relation to the Gothic canon. And yet, Gaskell remains reliant on Gothic narrative conventions even in the work that might be reasonably supposed to be most ârealistâ of all: Nicola J. Watson argues that her biography of BrontĂ«, beginning with a tombstone and ending with a funeral, inaugurates its subject as the typical heroine of feminine Gothic, shut up in a restrictive domestic space, and scripts the travellerâs experience of Haworth as a Gothic one.5
This chapter argues that Gaskell attempts to establish a specifically northern Gothic, a Gothic which engages closely with other forms of Gothic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but which also has a specifically regional focus. Given that Gothic was not Gaskellâs primary fictional mode, although she continued to experiment with it throughout her career, the chapter also will ask what is at stake in her construction of northern Gothic, how it reflects or refracts the apparently more âseriousâ concerns of her realist fiction. I suggest that through ânorthern Gothicâ, Gaskell effects a kind of reconciliation between Gothic and realism. The first part of the chapter reflects in general terms on the construction of a Gothic north, both in Gaskellâs own textual strategies and in the wider literary context. I propose that Gaskell positions herself as a kind of antecedent to the modern psychogeographer in the form of a worldly female traveller who becomes a conduit for the colourful local stories that inhere in the places that she visits. In Gaskellâs northern Gothic, therefore, place is constructed not just through landscape, but also through the accumulation of legends and folklore that inform local identity. The second part of the chapter provides a close reading of âThe Poor Clareâ, arguing that in this story Gaskell constructs a regional Gothic that we might define not just as ânorthernâ but as specifically âLancashireâ.
Gaskellâs Gothic tales are almost always rooted in a specific locality, whether Heidelberg and the Vosges in âThe Grey Womanâ (1861) or Cardigan Bay in âThe Doom of the Griffithsâ (1858). However, the rural north of England looms large, whether the Cumberland Fells in âThe Old Nurseâs Storyâ, the Trough of Bowland in âThe Poor Clareâ, or the North Riding of Yorkshire in âThe Crooked Branchâ (1859). As such, they evoke the American literary critical concern with regionalism. Mary Austin, in her 1932 essay âRegionalism in American Fictionâ, argued that âThere is no sort of experience that works so constantly and subtly upon man as his regional environmentâ, and suggested that attention to the âmany subtle and significant characterizationsâ found in regional literature could reveal âseveral Americasâ, problematising the nation as mythic monolith.6 Regional writing of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, commonly celebrated for its mixture of the strange and remote with realistic local detail, has proved a rich source of American Gothic, encompassing writers as diverse as George Washington Cable, Bret Harte and Ellen Glasgow. However, critics generally locate British Gothic fiction in the Orient, in Mediterranean Europe, in Scotland or Ireland, in London â anywhere but in provincial England, the literal space which Gothic authors and readers were supposed to inhabit. In contrast, the strong sense of place conveyed in Gaskellâs writing indicates the existence of a regional English Gothic â a complex fictional geography that may reveal âseveral Englandsâ, or indeed, âseveral Gothicsâ.
Folklore, travel and Victorian Gothic
Since Henry Jamesâs review of Mary Braddonâs Aurora Floyd in 1865, critics have repeatedly noted that the exotic European locations of earlier Gothic fiction are replaced in the Victorian period by locations closer to home.7 A critical preoccupation with the Freudian âUnheimlichâ, however, or with London and the urban environment, has resulted in a surprising neglect of the wide range of actual places depicted in the texts. The fictional shift from exotic locations to homely ones over the course of the nineteenth century matched a corresponding movement to collect and preserve British folklore, in the wake of industrialisation and urban migration. The term âfolkloreâ was in fact introduced by the antiquarian William John Thoms in 1846, and marked a shift from the leisurely pursuit of a handful of amateur antiquarians and gentleman tourists, to an increasingly professionalised endeavour to catalogue and document the disappearing traditions of the British Isles. In the second half of the nineteenth century, then, oral narratives concerning the supernatural were crystallised into written form, fashioning a kind of supernatural map of Britain that still persists today. In their book The Lore of the Land, Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson literally draw up these maps, constructing a supernatural cartography of England.
While most parts of England are revealed as rich in supernatural tradition, Westwood and Simpson discover that some areas are particularly dense sources of local legend. They attribute this in large part to the presumptions of those gathering the data:
In partic...