Locating the Gothic in British Modernity

272 Pages·2019·1.299 MB·English

by  Sam Wiseman

LOCATING
THE GOTHIC
IN BRITISH
MODERNITY
SAM WISEMAN

LOCATING
THE GOTHIC
IN BRITISH
MODERNITY
SAM WISEMAN
© 2019 Clemson University
All rights reserved
First Edition, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-942954-89-7 (print)
eISBN: 978-1-942954-90-3 (e-book)
Published by Clemson University Press
in association with Liverpool University Press
For information about Clemson University Press,
please visit our website at www.clemson.edu/press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Wiseman, Sam, author.
Title: Locating the gothic in British modernity / Sam Wiseman.
Description: Clemson, SC : Clemson University Press, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018060434 | ISBN 9781942954897 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: English literature--20th century--History and criticism. |
English literature--19th century--History and criticism. | Modernism
(Literature)--Great Britain. | Gothic revival (Literature)--Great Britain.
| Place (Philosophy) in literature.
Classification: LCC PR478.M6 W57 2019 | DDC 823/.0872909--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018060434
Typeset in Minion Pro by Carnegie Book Production.
Contents
Locating the Gothic in British Modernity
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction: Tracing the Modern Gothic 1
1 The Strangely Mingled Monster: Gothic Invasions,
Occupations, and Outgrowths in Fin de Siècle London 13
I. Invading the Metropolis 14
II. In Darkest England 26
III. City of Nightmares 38
IV. Half-town and Half-country 50
2 The Old Subconscious Trail of Dread: Shadows, Animism,
and Re-Emergence in the Rural World 63
I. A Flare of the Pit 64
II. The Whirlpool of Dreaming Life 75
III. On the Borderlands of Fear 84
IV. Counter-sites 95
3 In the Black Ruins of the Frenzied Night: Spectral Encounters
in Wartime and Postwar London 109
I. A Richer Feast of Horror 110
II. Hosts of Homeless Ghosts 123
III. The Detested Habitation of the Dead 132
IV. Grey Labyrinths 141
4 From the Waste Land to the Dark Tower: Revitalizing the
Rural Gothic in the Interwar Period 153
I. Tales of Empty Houses 154
II. Restoring the Ghostly Groves 166
III. Dark Enchantments 176
IV. Marshland and Granite, Heather and Stone 187
Conclusion: Afterlives and Revenants of Gothic Modernity 199
Notes 205
Index 249
Acknowledgements
Iw ould like to thank the following people and institutions: the Univer-
sity of Erfurt, for providing the research fellowship that allowed me
to complete this project; Kai Merten, for his feedback and guidance
throughout the writing process; Duncan Harris, for alerting me to some
key material used in my third chapter; Simran Sodhi, for her feedback and
support; and Alison Mero at Clemson University Press, for her diligence
throughout the publication process.
vii

Introduction
Tracing the Modern Gothic
And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and
have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill.1
—Bram Stoker, Dracula
The unknown world is, in truth, about us everywhere […]; the
thinnest veil separates us from it, the door in the wall of the next
street communicates with it.2
—Arthur Machen, The London Adventure
Since its birth in the mid-eighteenth century, Gothic literature has
always been paradoxically yet inextricably entwined with moder-
nity and the Enlightenment. Its emergence coincides with the
development or acceleration of dramatic cultural, social, economic, and
political changes, and it has continued to evolve in parallel with moderni-
ty’s inexorable expansion. This interrelation has been extensively studied,
although critics disagree regarding its nature: Julia Briggs sees the Gothic
as ‘part of a wider reaction against the rationalism and growing secular-
ization of the Enlightenment’; Jerrold E. Hogle argues that ‘the Gothic,
despite its apparent countering of the modern, is deeply bound up with
the contradictions basic to modern existence’; while Daniel Darvay goes
1
2 Locating the Gothic in British Modernity
so far as to suggest ‘a redefinition of the genre not as mere symptom or
antagonist but rather as guardian of modernity’.3 The founding novels
of the Gothic mode, such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto
(1764) and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), are explora-
tions of terror, mystery, and the supernatural which must be understood
within the context of a world growing increasingly confident that such
phenomena can be challenged or banished. The Gothic novel is fascinated
by these affects and ideas precisely because they confront the assumption
that modern scientific rationalism and secularism have granted humanity
complete power over, and understanding of, the world. The present study
takes this fundamental entwinement of the Gothic and the modern as its
founding premise, and focuses upon a specific phase of British moder-
nity, from the late nineteenth century to the outbreak of the Second World
War, which also broadly overlaps with the era of literary modernism. In
parallel with the seismic historical developments of this period, I will
argue, we see the continuing proliferation and mutation of Gothic themes
and aesthetics to form an increasingly complex and fragmented mode of
representation within British literature.
The Gothic is also fundamentally concerned with setting. As Judith
Wilt notes:
No single aspect of plot, image, or mood says ‘Gothic’ to us so
clearly as the aspect of place. The castle, the tower, the grave-
yard, the prison, the rocky crag hung between wind and sea—all
those settings scaled to purposes other than an individual normal
man’s—what could happen there other than what does, posses-
sion, preemption, decreation? Who could inhabit there other
than the dilated, the separated, the monstrous? The unhuman,
the god?4
From its inception, the Gothic situates its particular affects, themes,
and aesthetics within certain types of location, places that manifest core
concepts such as fragmentation, transgression, monstrosity, contamina-
tion, and corruption. ‘Gothic landscapes’, argue Sharon Rose Yang and
Kathleen Healey, ‘are a lens by which cultures reflect back their dark-
ness hidden from the light of consciousness. […] Gothic’s ambience of