Gothic Stories Within Stories: Frame Narratives and Realism in the Genre, 1790-1900 PDF
Preview Gothic Stories Within Stories: Frame Narratives and Realism in the Genre, 1790-1900
Gothic Stories Within Stories This page intentionally left blank Gothic Stories Within Stories Frame Narratives and Realism in the Genre, 1790–1900 C C T layTon arlyle arr McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Jefferson, North Carolina ISBN (print) 978-1-4766-6748-5 ISBN (ebook) 978-1-4766-2820-2 libraryofConGreSSCaTaloGuinGdaTaareavailable briTiShlibraryCaTaloGuinGdaTaareavailable © 2017 Clayton Carlyle Tarr. all rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. front cover image: limbird’s british novelist engraving for e Mysteries of Udolpho, london, 1826 Printed in the united States of america McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640 www.mcfarlandpub.com Table of Contents Introduction 1 1. a “frame of uncommon size”: ann radcliffe and the Sublime real 21 2. Go forth and Prosper: Mary Shelley’s Monsters unbound 45 3. loose ends: Melmoth the Wanderer and Confessions of a Justified Sinner 63 inTerlude. The fabric of reality: Sartor Resartus 83 4. The “science of human brutality”: Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall 91 5. The “romantic side of familiar things”: The Old Curiosity Shop and Bleak House 109 6. The descent of Man: Jekyll and Hyde and Dracula 130 Coda. Glory in a Gap: The Turn of the Screw and Heart of Darkness 153 Chapter Notes 165 Bibliography 191 Index 205 v This page intentionally left blank introduction i show rabelais in the history of realism. Perhaps i am mistaken, but i believe that i have added a new page to the history of realism. The term “Gothic realism” did not previously exist in french or russian literature. nobody would be able to cite any examples of anybody, anywhere, at any time writing about Gothic realism. i have enriched the history of realism. —Mikhail bakhtin on 5 november 946, the academic Council of the Gorky institute convened in Moscow to hear bakhtin defend his dissertation, “rabelais and the history of realism.” The meeting was famously contentious, and bakhtin was ultimately conferred the degree of Candidate rather than earning the higher rank of doctorate. one of the many points of debate concerned the suitability of bakhtin’s “Gothic realism.” at the insistence of the committee, bakhtin revised the term to “grotesque realism,” which, together with his model of the carnivalesque, became the focus of his 965 book Rabelais and His World. in spite of the revision, bakhtin’s concept of the grotesque remains intimately connected with the Gothic. he argues that the romantic grotesque is a “terrifying world, alien to man. all that is ordinary, commonplace, belonging to everyday life, and recognized by all suddenly becomes meaningless, dubious and hostile. our own world becomes an alien world. Something frightening is revealed in that which was habitual and secure.”2bakhtin suggests that the grotesque triggers a supernatural terror that destabilizes perceptions of reality. The Gothic accomplishes the same effect, but to an even greater degree. from its inception with horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto(764), the Gothic novel accessed hidden psychic realms—what bakhtin calls the “interior infinite of the individual”—and revealed the supernatural hidden in the natural world.3Perhaps most important to this study, however, is bakhtin’s claim that “form and content in discourse are one.”4 for the distinctive 2 introduction thematic effects of the Gothic novel are, in great part, the result of the genre’s formal attributes—namely its prevalent and dynamic narrative frames. The Gothic has often been considered reactionary anti- realism, an attempt to counter “things as they are” by imagining “things as they are not.” yet, from the beginning, the Gothic aligned itself alongside realism, rather than advertising its opposition. Walpole, for example, famously writes that Otrantowas an “attempt to blend the two kinds of romance: the ancient and the modern. in the former, all was imagination and improbability; in the latter, nature is always intended to be, and sometimes has been, copied with success.”5Similarly, the initial title of William Godwin’s Gothic thriller Caleb Williams (794) was “Things as They are,” and Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (798, 800, 802, 805) was, according to the lat- ter, to be “composed of two sorts”: “persons and characters supernatural” and “incidents of domestic or ordinary life.”6 in bakhtin’s words, “[t]wo types of imagery reflecting the conception of the world here meet at cross- roads.”7 indeed, bakhtin’s distinction between “classical realism” and “grotesque realism” demonstrates that several genres share “realism road.”8 for the principal discrepancy between realism and the Gothic is a matter of differing perspectives on what is “real.” Whereas realism shows the world reflected in a mirror, the Gothic looks througha glass darkly to suggest the hidden realms of the human experience. This effect—the unveiling of an alternate “reality” and the horror that comes with it—is reliant on the formal properties and distinct function of narrative frames.9 Gothic novelists have long employed framing devices both around and within their novels. in a manner similar to what Jacques derrida con- ceptualized with his model of the parergon, Gothic frame narratives blur narrative and cognitive boundaries, producing a destabilizing effect that challenges rational epistemology and suggests a deeper “reality” than the realist novel can possibly achieve. This “reality” can be understood through both immanuel Kant’s realm of das Ding an sich (“the thing in itself”) and Jacques lacan’s concept of the real, the chaotic welter of pre- symbolic life that dissipates all forms of logic. although Gothic novels can never represent the real, they do suggest its existence through hor- rifying, yet attractive figures—monstrosities that can be articulated through symbolic devices that are best explained by Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection. These implications of the real draw readers closer to a deep reality while simultaneously screening them from the horror that is at the core of being. i argue that they achieve their distinctive and disturbing status in Gothic novels as a result of the dynamic process through which the central narratives interact with their frames. although Gothic frames Introduction 3 seem to serve as boundaries, they in fact function as thresholds between the central narrative and the reader’s reality, which are often articulated by objects like veils. When monstrous abjections transgress narrative frames, the novel’s narrators and readers are forced to face the horror that they have worked to reject. This argument has several steps, and i will make them more coherent below both by expanding on theoretical con- cepts and by engaging literary examples, which conclude with a brief read- ing of Walpole’s Otranto—the first text to call itself a “Gothic Story.” but first, it is prudent to address not only the aims of this book, but also to acknowledge its potential limitations.0Scholarship on Gothic lit- erature, in all its forms, is rich and rewarding, perhaps more so than any other genre. due to the deep, complex nature of the Gothic, critical approaches line the theoretical spectrum.To propose a reading of Gothic literature based primarily on psychoanalytic principles, whether inspired by freud, lacan, Kristeva, or others, is not a new approach. in fact, the productive history of such readings only continues with two recent, equally invigorating, contributions, and no doubt there will be many more to come.2This book, however, does not attempt to supply comprehensive psychoanalytic readings of canonical texts. nor does it aspire to consign authors, characters, or even readers to the analyst’s couch. rather, it engages select psychoanalytic models to articulate one distinct set of for- mal attributes pervasive to Gothic fiction. and it does so not only with assistance from other theoretical approaches, including deconstruction and narratology, but also with the backing of contextual documents, rang- ing from letters and journals to records and reviews. no text is placed in a psychoanalytic vacuum. and no author is subject to posthumous diag- nosis. but this does not mean that i wish either to disparage psychoanalytic approaches or to undermine my own readings. for the Gothic and psy- choanalysis are so closely intertwined that to unravel them would be not just fruitless, but potentially irresponsible.3Writing of Sigmund freud’s relation to the Gothic, William Patrick day observes: The Gothic is not a crude anticipation of freudianism, nor its unacknowledged father. rather, the two are cousins, responses to the problems of selfhood and iden- tity, sexuality and pleasure, fear and anxiety as they manifest themselves in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Gothic arises out of the immediate needs of the reading public to escape from conventional life and articulate and define the turbulence of their psychic existence. We may see freud as the intellec- tual counterpart of this process.4 Gothic literature and psychoanalysis are cooperative, though sometimes combative, participants in the human drive to unlock the secrets of the
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