Inventing the Gothic Corpse

269 Pages·2018·5.08 MB·English

by  Yael Shapira

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Inventing the Gothic Corpse
Yael Shapira
Inventing the
Gothic Corpse
The Thrill of Human Remains in the
Eighteenth- Century Novel
Yael Shapira
Department of English Literature and Linguistics
Bar-Ilan University
Ramat-Gan, Israel
ISBN 978-3-319-76483-2 ISBN 978-3-319-76484-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76484-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018943395
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
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Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
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publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu-
tional affiliations.
Cover illustration: Anon. The Heiress of the Castle of Morlina; or The domains of Isabella di
Rotaldi restored [1802]. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library,
Yale University.
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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer International
Publishing AG part of Springer Nature.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
For my parents, Ruthie and Itzik Shapira, with love
A
cknowledgements
In writing this book, it has been my great blessing to find at every turn not
only the intellectual and practical guidance I needed, but the warmth and
support of mentors, friends and family. My debts of gratitude are therefore
an inseparable mix of the professional and the personal.
As supervisors of the dissertation in which this book is rooted, Ruth
Ginsburg and Leona Toker encouraged me to pursue the questions that
fascinated me most, while teaching me to strive for the highest intellectual
standards. That they did so without losing sight of the challenges I faced
as the mother of small children makes them the kind of mentors every
young scholar—especially a woman—should have; their example is one
that I will always try to follow.
Dror Wahrman helped this project in more ways than I could list here.
His enthusiasm, generosity and contagious love of intellectual adventures
have been essential to the growth of the book (and of its author). I am
grateful to him for many things, but above all for a faith in my abilities that
has always exceeded my own.
Finally, Sue Lanser’s wisdom and friendship saw me through the diffi-
cult last stages of writing. Under her guidance the book assumed its final
shape and made its way into the world, a feat of midwifery for which I am
deeply thankful.
I would like to thank the three academic institutions under whose aus-
pices the book was written. As a doctoral student and then a postdoctoral
fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, I benefited from the exper-
tise and support of teachers, friends and colleagues, among them Ruben
Borg, Sandy Budick, Andrew Burrows, Elizabeth Freund, Hannan Hever,
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Carola Hilfrich, Ilana Pardes, Eynel Wardi, Shira Wolosky and Tzachi
Zamir. Special thanks to Shuli Barzilai for her unwavering encouragement
and support, to the much-missed Emily Budick for help both intellectual
and material, and to Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan for treating me like a
scholar long before it ever occurred to me that I could become one.
I am grateful to Indiana University, especially the Center for Eighteenth-
Century Studies and the English Department, for two wonderful years of
postdoctoral study. My thanks to Dror Wahrman, Fritz Breithaupt and
Stephen Watt for making my stay in Bloomington possible, and to the
members of the Eighteenth-Century Group for allowing me into their
unique community. Special thanks to Susan Gubar and Deidre Lynch for
sharing their time and expertise, and to Jonathan Elmer and Mary Favret
for their generous advice and friendship. Siobhan Carroll, Paul Westover
and Courtney Wennerstrom kindly welcomed me into their reading group
and offered illuminating comments on my work; Courtney receives special
mention here as co-founder and sole other member of the Bloomington
Corpse Club, a kindred spirit always ready to talk dead bodies over coffee
and scrambled eggs.
The Department of English Literature and Linguistics at Bar-Ilan
University has been my academic home since 2010. Ilana Blumberg, Evan
Fallenberg, Daniel Feldman, Susan Handelman, Michael Kramer, Esther
Schupak and Marcela Sulak make going to work (in all its forms) a plea-
sure even when it is hard. My thanks to Joel Walters, Shifra Baruchson-
Arbib and Eliezer Schlossberg as deans of humanities under which I
worked on this book, and to Sharon Armon-Lotem, Susan Rothstein and
Elinor Saiegh-Haddad for their guidance and help. Smadar Wisper gets
me the books I need almost before I ask for them, and Hani Gilad, Rachel
Gilboa, Chana Redner and Irit Segal are always there with any other kind
of support I might require. Finally, I owe a special debt to William
Kolbrener for being such an excellent mentor and friend.
Over the years I have benefited much from the wisdom and kindness of
colleagues in my various intellectual communities. For conversations, aca-
demic comradeship and/or help in all its forms, my thanks to Reut Barzilai,
Elisheva Baumgarten, Ayelet Ben-Yishai, Galia Benziman, Zoe Beenstock,
Norbert Besch, Hannah Hudson, Nir Evron, Michael Gamer, Yael Greenberg,
Yoel Greenberg, George Haggerty, Tamar Hess, Diane Long Hoeveler, Scott
Juengel, Anthony Mandal, Kinnereth Meyer, Elizabeth Neiman, Leah
Price, Milette Shamir, Ephraim Shoham-Steiner, Andrew Smith, Orianne
Smith, Ellen Spolsky, Dale Townshend, Anne Williams and Angela Wright.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT S ix
For financial assistance that made work on this book possible, I am
grateful to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and, within it, to Jon
Whitman and the Center for Literary Studies and to the Lafer Center for
Women and Gender Studies. I also wish to thank the Lady Davis Fellowship
Trust, and the Israel Science Foundation (grant no. 128/15) for support-
ing this research. Many thanks also to Ben Doyle and Camille Davies, my
editorial team at Palgrave Macmillan, to Jim Watt and the second reader
of the manuscript for their insightful and constructive comments, and to
Joanie Elian and Staci Rosenbaum for their meticulous help in getting the
book ready for publication.
My greatest debt is to the people whose friendship and affection have
made the pains of book-writing easier, and the pleasures more palpable.
Eitan Bar-Yosef has been not only a close friend but a source of astute
editorial guidance when my book very much needed it. Haim Weiss has
listened, advised, encouraged and provided numerous opportunities to
vent and laugh. Danny Porat and I have been talking about the books we
want to write for almost two decades (though he writes them much faster
than I do). David Carmel, Yaakov Mascetti, Anat Prior, Yael Shenker and
Nurit Inbar Weiss have shared academic challenges as well as intellectual
and personal joys. Micky Kopievker and Noa Paz Wahrman have loved
and fed my family and myself on occasions too numerous to count. Ephrat
Havron and Ido Ariel have been by my side throughout the years of grow-
ing a book and a family at the same time, and their love, faith and humor
keep the ground under my feet.
My parents, Ruthie and Itzik Shapira, never doubted that I could and
should do anything I set my mind to do, even when that turned out to
be writing a book about Gothic corpses. I miss my mother, who died in
2015, more than I can express here; I know how proud she would be. My
father has felt the ups and downs of this project as deeply as I have, and
his delight in its completion has only added to my own. Elisheva Farkas,
my mother-in-law, gave me the best gift a working mother can receive:
knowing my children were so well-loved that my absence went unno-
ticed. My sisters, Michal Granit and Adi Shapira, are my first and most
effective support group, offering smart advice and wild laughter in equal
measures.
Finally there is my greatest blessing, the home that came into being
during the same years as this book. It contains Maya, Ori and Gali Farkas—
more glorious and surprising than anything I could ever write—and Yaniv
Farkas, my best friend, who understands everything.
c
ontents
1 Introduction: The Novel, the Corpse and the Eighteenth-
Century Marketplace 1
Part I Remains of the Past 47
2 Spectacles for Sale: Reframing the Didactic Corpse in Behn
and Defoe 49
3 Fictional Corpses at Mid-Century: Richardson, Fielding
and the Trouble with Hamlet 85
Part II Gothic Negotiations 133
4 Death, Delicacy and the Novel: The Corpse in Women’s
Gothic Fiction 135
xi
xii CONTENTS
5 Shamelessly Gothic: Enjoying the Corpse in The Monk
and Zofloya 177
6 Conclusion: Remains to Be Seen 219
Bibliography 233
Index 255