#81 = Volume 27, Part 2 = July 2000
Carol Margaret Davison
A Gothic Bonanza
Marie Mulvey-Roberts.
The Handbook to Gothic Literature.
Macmillan, 1998. xviii + 294 pp. £15.99 paper.
David Punter. Gothic
Pathologies: The Text, The Body, and The Law. Macmillan (fax:
01256-842084), 1998. xii + 251 pp. £45 cloth.
Victor Sage
and Allan Lloyd-Smith, eds. Modern Gothic: A
Reader. Manchester UP, 1996. vi + 202 pp. $69.95 cloth; $24.95
paper. Dist. in the US by St. Martin’s.
William Hughes
and Andrew Smith, eds. Bram Stoker: History,
Psychoanalysis, and the Gothic. Macmillan
(fax: 01256-842084), 1998. xiv + 229 pp. £42.50 cloth.
While North American universities and
publishers are increasingly warming to the idea that Gothic literature is a
fascinating and legitimate subject of study, British scholarly organizations,
such as the International Gothic Association, have been hosting conferences and
symposia productive of innovative scholarship. British publishers have also
earnestly endorsed the Gothic enterprise. Four recent publications—three from
Macmillan—attest to the growing interest in the Gothic and the extensive
cultural domain in which it may be said to be at work.
Even when one is dealing with a tame
subject, taxonomy is a vexing business. There are bound to be omissions,
repetitions, and a great deal of second-guessing about the designation of
categories. Then, once the work is completed, there is likely to be criticism.
When the subject is the Gothic genre, the taxonomist’s troubles are further
compounded for, as every knowledgeable gothicist knows, the Gothic continues—to
the distress of such pedantic scholars as Maurice Lévy and Stephen Bernstein—to
expand its frontiers, to transgress national and generic boundaries. Indeed,
this is its very nature. As Fred Botting has noted in his introductory book, Gothic
(Routledge 1996), the genre is characterized, first and foremost, by excess.
Clearly, then, the job of undertaking a taxonomy of the Gothic is not for the
faint of heart. Given the importance of such a taxonomy to further scholarship
in the field, someone has to do it.
So they—65 of them to be exact—have
gone where no gothicists have gone before. Under the direction of Marie Mulvey-Roberts,
Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies at the University of the West of England,
specialists in the domain of the Gothic including David Punter, Fred Botting,
and Alison Milbank have contributed to a Handbook to Gothic Literature.
Inspired by Frederick Frank’s eccentric and interesting "Glossary of
Gothic Terms" (contained as an appendix in his wonderful bibliography The
First Gothics: A Critical Guide to the English Gothic Novel [Garland,
1987]), which treats what Roberts describes as "beguiling Freudian
categories" (xvi), The Handbook to Gothic Literature is a unique
pioneering effort to tame the Gothic beast by Augustan means. Designed as a
basic guide for students and general readers, the Handbook is composed of
118 short essays, ranging in length from a paragraph to ten pages and treating
diverse topics, from English-Canadian Gothic, to the Golem, to the concept of
the uncanny, to the Northanger novels (the seven Gothic works recommended to
Catherine by Isabella in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey [1818]).
Well aware of the breadth of the field
of Gothic studies and both humble and sensible in the face of it, Mulvey-Roberts
does not aim for comprehensiveness. For pragmatic reasons and due to space
constraints, this volume focuses on landmark authors in the genre and on
English-speaking countries (with the exception of entries on France, Germany,
and Russia). Readers interested in the multimedia nature of this cultural mode
will be especially pleased by the inclusion of entries on the Gothic’s
manifestation in various genres and disciplines such as drama, film, art, the
novel, photography, and science fiction. While David Seed’s entry on Gothic
Science Fiction is only two paragraphs long and barely scratches the surface of
its subject, it does serve as a stimulating introduction to the ongoing debate
about the exact relationship between these genres.
What is especially engaging about this Handbook
is its resistance to "objective," dry definitions. Most entries do
more than simply define a subject; they offer helpful and provocative
interpretative comments, direct the reader to cross-referenced topics of related
interest, and provide suggestions for further reading. While random perusal is
absorbing in many instances—I added the concept of Zerrissenheit (a
feeling of self-estrangement) to my vocabulary, and read with fascination about
the exhumation and reinterment of the bodies of Mary Wollstonecraft and William
Godwin in the entry on Mary Shelley—more precise research queries are also
generally rewarded.
To take a specific example, the genre
of the female Gothic is extensively treated (it is even given priority as a
distinct category in the appended list of further reading). This is only
appropriate, for, as several entries make clear (e.g., Gothic Romance, Ann
Radcliffe), gender has been important to this genre since its inception, and
indeed the Gothic has, by longstanding custom, been divided into male and female
traditions. Dedicated entries are provided for seven female Gothic writers—Angela
Carter, the Brontës, Ann Radcliffe, Anne Rice, and Mary Shelley. Other
prominent Gothic novelists such as Charlotte Dacre, Sophia Lee, and Clara Reeve,
and Gothic parodists such as Jane Austen, are discussed in entries associated
with their works. Entries treating the Gothic along national lines also examine
women writers: Elizabeth Bowen is a subject in the entry on Irish Gothic, for
example, and Gerry Turcotte’s enthralling ten-page essay on Australian Gothic
mentions several prominent women writers. Finally, entries focusing on the
Gothic’s manifestation in specific genres and disciplines are also of interest
to feminist scholars: the entry on Gothic film, for instance, provides
fascinating information regarding the adaptation of the female Gothic narrative
to the screen in popular 1940s "women-in-peril" films.
If there is a flaw in this compelling
and essential Handbook, it is the fact that it lacks an index. While the
cross-referencing of subjects with dedicated entries is extremely useful, an
index would alleviate the frustrating guesswork involved in tracking down
references to subjects that lack dedicated entries. Perhaps such an index will
be included in the second edition. And there are bound to be several more
editions, since despite being designed as an introductory resource, The
Handbook to Gothic Literature is a necessary addition for even the
specialist’s library. No other single reference volume covers such a broad
range of Gothic-related materials or draws upon such a wealth of scholarship. It
is sure to become a reference Bible for Gothic students and established scholars
alike.
Speaking of Bibles, David Punter’s
1980 publication, The Literature of Terror (Longmans), is arguably the
best critical introduction to the field of Gothic studies. (Punter is an eminent
and prolific Gothic scholar who has contributed—among so many publications—to
the other three works examined in this review.) Recently reprinted in two
volumes, Punter’s "Bible" is, like Mulvey-Roberts’s Handbook,
characterized by a taxonomy of sorts as it traces thematic and technical
developments in the history of the Gothic genre. Informed by a variety of
theoretical approaches, Punter’s close readings are coherent, engaging, and
provocative.
Unfortunately, Punter’s more recent
deconstructive-psychoanalytic explorations in the Gothic genre are often
abstruse, offering insights only for the patient and attentive reader already
well-versed in the Gothic. The eleven essays in Gothic Pathologies: The Text,
the Body and The Law, "a series of incursions into [the] uncanny
territory" (18) of cultural psychology/pathology, are a case in point.
Focusing on an eclectic range of subject matter, from Percy B. Shelley’s Zastrozzi
(1810) and Emily Brönte’s Wuthering Heights (1847) to Alfred Hitchcock’s
Psycho (1960) and Liu Suola’s "King of Singers" (a Chinese
short story from 1985), these essays explore what Punter describes as the rival
forces of the law and psychology in Gothic texts. Focusing on the
sociohistorical context from which the Gothic emerged, Punter traces how
ambivalent representations of and attitudes towards the law in the
eighteenth-century novel were picked up and transformed in the literature of
terror. This transformation, Punter maintains, was due to the increasingly
repressive nature of the legal system between 1750 and 1825. Over this period,
the law—and the prisons that exerted its will—began to evoke social terror.
He argues further that the figure of the monster, prominent in the Gothic,
threatens to dismantle the law and is pleasing to readers, as they are both
apprehensive about and titillated by that prospect.
Looping back throughout the volume to
these basic ideas, Punter is at his best—his most insightful and poetic—when,
in the light of his extensive knowledge of this genre, he generalizes about it.
Regarding literature as "at all points connected to dream" (ix), he
argues that the Gothic investigates the depths and heights of human experience.
While it allows us to see our own abjection, it also allows us to play out a
fantasized transcendence of the limits of the body. Although the law polices our
desires and may try to impose certainty, the Gothic exposes the fact that chaos
ultimately underlies apparent order and that there are forces working behind the
scenes to which we can never be privy. The question of the provenance of evil is
left unanswered in Gothic fiction, just as the violent primal scenes from real
life that find symbolic representation in that fiction remain ultimately
irretrievable.
Drawing on these ideas, Punter examines
the concept of the primal scene in the work of Stephen King and explains the key
to King’s popularity as involving a sense that feelings of loss in childhood
and of loss and separation in adolescence are eventually overcome in a perfected
version of adulthood. His detailed examination of Elisabeth Bronfen’s reading
of gender in Poe’s "Ligeia" (1838) in her 1992 study Over her
Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Routledge, 1992), is
similarly intriguing. While his point is well substantiated that gender is often
fluid in the Gothic, for "we are frequently in a world where the
dramatisations of the ego are nakedly revealed as locked into a series of
specular identification, where legally verifiable ‘character stability’ is
beside the point" (120), his attempt to use Bronfen’s flawed reading of
"Ligeia" to call into question the entire concept of female Gothic is
not convincing, especially given the legitimacy he lends to it in his chapter on
Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818).
This disjunction regarding basic
concepts perhaps provides the key to the primary problem in Punter’s
collection. With the exception of the introduction and conclusion that strive to
connect this volume’s disparate material, one suspects (and this suspicion is
confirmed by the inclusion of Punter’s chapter on King in Sage and Smith’s Modern
Gothic, reviewed here) that these essays were initially written as papers
for a variety of conferences with different foci and later brought together. As
a result, there are some conceptual and sociohistorical gaps and leaps.
Connections drawn between eighteenth- and twentieth-century texts require a fair
degree of qualification that is, generally, absent. Although the opening and
closing chapters provide some of the most interesting insights into the Gothic,
one senses overall a strain to link these independent "incursions."
Perhaps a better approach would have been to publish them as a volume without
attempting to connect them.
That being said, Punter remains, in the
opinion of many, one of the top scholars in this field. The insights that
punctuate his book can certainly vie with those currently on offer in studies by
Punter’s peers and protégés. Punter is a Gothic pioneer who, with his
unrelenting spirit of inquiry, still manages to provide fresh insights into
classic Gothic-influenced works. With any luck, he will return in a future study
to the Gothic-infused genre of cyber-fiction that, he maintains in his
conclusion, gestures towards transcendence and the sublime.
In his claim that early Gothic writers,
"in their dealings with haunting, the phantom and the boundless text, as
with the whole notion of the sublime" (199), foreshadowed certain
postmodernist techniques, Punter lends support to the motivating premise of
Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith’s edited collection, Modern Gothic:
that the Gothic and postmodernism share similar predilections. While Smith is,
as I will illustrate, guilty of dehistoricizing in his comparative analysis of
these two literary modes, the examination of points of connection between
postmodernism and the Gothic is a potentially rich field of inquiry. With
varying degrees of success, the thirteen essays in this volume explore the
nature of this generic consanguinity and offer undeniable evidence that,
especially in the last thirty years, the Gothic has proven to be a very
resistant literary strain. It has moved, essentially, from a position of
marginality to becoming "one of the central languages of the popular
contemporary" (5). With interpretations of works by Isak Dinesen, Iain
Banks, John Banville, Angela Carter, Stephen King, Toni Morrison, Ramsay
Campbell, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and David Lynch, one would be hard-pressed to
find a more eclectic smorgasbord of artistic criticism than is presented in this
collection.
Briefly delineating the basic
similarities between what they term old Gothic and postmodern neo-Gothic, Sage
and Smith claim that both engage in a textual negotiation with history. Both
forms are also, generally, extremely self-conscious in their borrowing of
literary conventions; and, finally, both are apocalyptic in their visions. While
the prospect of annihilation as a result of uncontrollable science or technology
is sometimes at the forefront of the new Gothic, this new genre "strikes a
darker and more disturbing note" (5) than old Gothic, because, among other
things, hell is now decidedly located in the mind.
Allan Lloyd Smith’s speculative,
theoretical essay, "Postmodernism/Gothicism," opens the volume. It
seems to be the product of a postmodernist who was later introduced to the
Gothic and doesn’t really understand the ideological underpinnings and
sociohistorical context of that genre’s emergence. While he, probably
correctly, maintains that "the postmodern condition seems to be occasioned
by transformations determined by technology" (15), he propounds a popular,
erroneous claim about the Gothic, namely that "indeterminism is a narrative
necessity" (7) of that genre, a necessity that is equally prevalent in
postmodern texts. His late-twentieth-century lenses are especially and
problematically obvious when he argues that in both Gothic and postmodern texts
"we confront the embattled, deconstructed self, without sureties of
religion and social place, or any coherent psychology of the kind observable in
both the Enlightenment or modernist traditions" (7). Most works—particularly
those by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew G. Lewis, the two most important Gothic
writers of the 1790s—fail to support this generalization. While the Gothic
offers some interesting challenges to some Enlightenment ideas, it neither
sacrifices a sense of religious certainty nor a sense of coherent psychology in
order to do so. Moreover, a clean break does not occur between the Enlightenment
and Romantic ideology. There is much crucial overlap, and Smith would do well to
peruse Aidan Day’s introductory book on Romanticism (Routledge, 1996)
in order to better comprehend this point. Smith would also have been well
advised to provide specific textual examples in order to support such a claim.
Due to their focus on specific writers
and filmmakers and even specific literary and cinematic texts, most of the other
essays in this collection are not over-generalized theoretical readings. In
fact, a sensitivity to, and awareness of, the nature and implications of various
theories characterizes most of them. At least two—Ros Ballaster’s "Wild
Nights and Buried Letters: The Gothic ‘Unconscious’ of Feminist
Criticism" and Judie Newman’s "Postcolonial Gothic: Ruth Prawer
Jhabvala and the Sobhraj Case"—provide cogent thumbnail sketches of the
complex theoretical issues that must be negotiated when the Gothic is brought to
bear on, respectively, feminist and postcolonial texts. Other fine chapters
include Victor Sage’s piece on the fiction of Iain Banks and John Banville,
and Liliane Weissberg’s examination of Toni Morrison’s Beloved
(1987). The latter text has been frequently misread by gothicists unaware of the
African-American traditions to which that novel also talks back. Aficionados of
the horror film are also well rewarded by this collection. Two of the most
entertaining essays are Peter Hutchings’s "Tearing Your Soul Apart:
Horror’s New Monsters"—covering the slasher films of the late 1970s and
early 1980s—and David Seed’s "Alien Invasions by Body Snatchers and
Related Creatures."
Finally, William Hughes’s and Andrew
Smith’s Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis and the Gothic, a
collection of twelve specially commissioned essays penned by notable gothicists,
is nothing if not precise in its agenda. Beyond providing some new
interpretations of Stoker’s Dracula (1987), it aims to re-theorize
Stoker’s writings and to expand the domain of Stoker studies by considering
works beyond his classic monsterpiece. The editors note that "at the moment
when the critical future of Dracula seems assured by the apparent
collapse of the exclusivity of canon" (5), a problematic "new
orthodoxy" has arisen that holds that Stoker was the author of only one
work of note. This volume also scrutinizes the major critical approaches to Dracula—described
here as "the Freudian text par excellence" (3). While psychoanalysis
has been the predominant theoretical approach to the book—one that, some
contributors note, remains valid and useful—the discourse analysis that
proliferated after Foucault has tended to concentrate on the power relations and
epistemologies that underpin the novel.
Among the new approaches to Dracula
presented here, perhaps the most provocative is Marie Mulvey-Roberts’s reading
of Stoker’s monsterpiece as "a menstrual narrative" that responds,
in a reactionary fashion, to the Suffragette movement and plays out, by way of
the vampire and his victim, "the relationship between the Victorian male
doctor and the female hysteric"(80). Generally convincing, Mulvey-Roberts
does, unfortunately, push the psychobiographical envelope when she claims that
since Stoker’s wife Florence was "thought likely to have suffered ‘bad
menstrual disturbances’ which probably thwarted Stoker’s libido": in Dracula
"Stoker subconsciously tries to control and even eliminate the
dysmenorrhoea that was blighting their marriage" (85). Alison Milbank’s
interpretation of Dracula as an expression of Stoker’s views on Ireland
is, ultimately, confused, as she reads Transylvania as analogous to Ireland and
the novel’s final moment in England as one where Mina enacts a literal
"Home Rule." One wishes that Milbank could decide where, precisely,
Ireland is located in this text.
In terms of the editors’ second
declared intention, only one of this collection’s essays—David Seed’s
provocative examination of Stoker’s "mummy narratives," entitled
"Eruptions of the Primitive into the Present: The Jewel of Seven Stars
and The Lair of the White Worm"—actually resists comparing Stoker’s
other works to his monsterpiece. Lisa Hopkins’s "Crowning the King,
Mourning his Mother: The Jewel of Seven Stars and The Lady of the
Shroud," offers a prime example of how Dracula continues to
tyrannize Stoker studies. According to Hopkins, The Lady of the Shroud
(1909) essentially "rewrites" Dracula. David Punter’s reading
of The Lair of the White Worm (1911) follows suit, and Victor Sage
concludes his timely essay "Exchanging Fantasies: Sex and the Serbian
Crisis in The Lady of the Shroud," with the claim that that
narrative advocates a similar ideological stance to the one upheld in Dracula.
According to Sage, in the face of the rising tide of female emancipation, Stoker
issues a "clarion call to a flaccid Edwardian bourgeoisie, advocating a
return to patriarchy before it was too late" (131-32).
In the domain of reexamining
theoretical approaches to Dracula, Robert Mighall’s controversial essay
"Sex, History and the Vampire," packs a very powerful punch. Arguing
that the popular modern reading of Count Dracula as a sexual threat is grounded
in the flawed modern view of the Victorians as repressed, Mighall examines works
by Stoker’s sexologist contemporaries wherein the vampire is represented as
unerotic. Mighall’s point that Dracula’s threat as a figure of supernatural
evil has been glossed over and even denied in recent criticism in favor of his
role as a sexual threat must be conceded. He fails to recognize, however, that,
in its semiotic history, evil has long been associated with perverse sexuality.
How fin-de-siècle sexologists interpreted the vampire is of interest but
doesn’t ultimately determine what is behind Stoker’s representation of the
vampire. The vampire trades on desire and seduction, and if the several graphic
sequences featuring the vampire in Stoker’s novel are not to be termed erotic
and titillating, what can we call them?
In sum, these four books prove that
Gothic studies is a booming enterprise, a situation that is unlikely to change
anytime soon.
Back to Home