THE ADVENT OF UNAUTHORIZED AUTHORSHIP IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN ...

257 Pages·2008·0.89 MB·English

by  Kiyoon Jang

GOTHIC AUTHORS/GHOST WRITERS:
THE ADVENT OF UNAUTHORIZED AUTHORSHIP IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY
AMERICAN GOTHIC LITERATURE

A Dissertation
by
KI YOON JANG

Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of
Texas A&M University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

August 2008

Major Subject: English
GOTHIC AUTHORS/GHOST WRITERS:
THE ADVENT OF UNAUTHORIZED AUTHORSHIP IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY
AMERICAN GOTHIC LITERATURE

A Dissertation
by
KI YOON JANG

Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of
Texas A&M University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Approved by:
Chair of Committee, Dennis Berthold
Committee Members, Clint Machann
David McWhirter
Melanie C. Hawthorne
Head of Department, M. Jimmie Killingsworth

August 2008

Major Subject: English
iii
ABSTRACT

Gothic Authors/Ghost Writers: The Advent of Unauthorized Authorship in
Nineteenth-Century American Gothic Literature. (August 2008)
Ki Yoon Jang, B.A., Sookmyung Women’s University;
M.A., Sookmyung Women’s University
Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. Dennis Berthold

This dissertation proposes “ghost writer” as a new critical term for the “author”
in accordance with what Roland Barthes calls the “death of the author.” For this purpose,
the dissertation conjoins current gothic criticism, modern authorship theories, and
studies of nineteenth-century American literature. Current gothic critics, in their
endeavors to re-define the gothic as a serious genre that represents social, cultural, and
historical anxieties and terrors, have obscured gothic authors’ presence. This indistinct,
ghostly authorial existence within gothic criticism becomes relevant to modern
authorship theorists’ reflection on the end of eighteenth-century sovereign and autarchic
authorship due to the ever-interpretable text and ever-interpreting readers, by means of
the self-effacing gothic writers in nineteenth-century America. American literary
scholars agree on contemporary readers’ increasing power to assess writers’
performance. Gothic writers, especially susceptible to this power since the ambiguities
of the gothic necessitate readers’ active constructions, composed their texts without self-
assumed authorial intentions. This dissertation considers how the century’s five most
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representative gothic writers re-configure the author as a ghost that should come into
being by readers’ belief in what it writes.
Chapter I examines the common grounds between the aforementioned three
fields in further detail and illuminates the exigency of the ghost writer. Chapter II
discusses Charles Brockden Brown’s prototypical exposé in Wieland of Edward
Young’s typically romantic formulation of the originary and possessive author. Chapter
III shows Edgar Allan Poe’s substantiation of Brown’s exposé through his conception of
the author as a reader-made fiction in Arthur Gordon Pym. Chapter IV applies Poe’s
author-fiction to Frederick Douglass and Louisa May Alcott, and investigates how those
two marginalized writers overcome their spectrality with the aid of readers’ sympathetic
relation to their texts, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and “Behind a Mask,”
and subsequent validation of their author-ity. Chapter V explores the author’s willing
self-transformation into the ghost writer in James’s The Turn of the Screw, and ponders
how the ghost writer goes beyond the author’s death. By introducing the ghost writer,
this dissertation ultimately aims to trace the pre-modern shift from the autonomous
author to the heteronomous author.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page
ABSTRACT.............................................................................................................. iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS.......................................................................................... v
CHAPTER
I INTRODUCTION: THE EMERGENCE OF THE GHOST
WRITER............................................................................................ 1
II “THIS PHANTOM TO PURSUE MY STEPS”: THE FAILURE
OF THE AUTHOR IN CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN............ 16
1. How the Author is Born to Fail: Edward Young’s
Conjectures and Brown’s “The Rhapsodist”..................... 17
2. How the Author Fails, and Thrives: Clara, Carwin, and
Brown in Wieland............................................................. 36
III EDGAR ALLAN POE AND THE AUTHOR-FICTION................. 70
1. Poe’s Philosophy of Composition, According to Poe....... 71
2. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, According to
Pym.................................................................................... 86
IV THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE AUTHOR: THE CASES OF
FREDERICK DOUGLASS AND LOUISA MAY ALCOTT.......... 126
1. Self-Story Without Self: Douglass’s Narrative................. 128
2. Mask That Matters: Alcott’s “Behind a Mask”................. 162
V FROM GHOSTWRITER TO GHOST WRITER: THE DEATH
OF THE AUTHOR IN HENRY JAMES’S THE TURN OF THE
SCREW............................................................................................. 193
vi
Page

1. Ghostwriting Governess: James’s The Turn of the
Screw................................................................................. 195
2. Conclusion: Ghost Writer, the Gothic Afterlife of the
Dead Author...................................................................... 220
WORKS CITED........................................................................................................ 227
VITA......................................................................................................................... 251
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CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION: THE EMERGENCE OF THE GHOST WRITER

Conjoining three fields, current gothic criticism, theories of authorship, and
studies of nineteenth-century American literature, this dissertation proposes “ghost
writer” as a new critical term that substitutes for an “author” in accordance with what
Roland Barthes calls “the death of the author” or the end of the dominance of eighteenth-
century sovereign and autarchic authorship. The basic grounds for this proposal are
encapsulated in the typically gothic adjective, “ghost,” as well as the distinction between
the “author” and the “writer.” Whereas the author usually refers to one who
autonomously assumes an authorial position and exercises authority over the text and
readers, the ghost writer describes one who takes into consideration his or her
interrelationship with readers and seeks readers’ acknowledgement of his or her author(-
)ity by adopting the ghostlike—that is, barely visible and disembodied—posture in the
production and signification of the text. To demonstrate how exactly the ghost writer can
work in the author’s stead, this dissertation will examine five major nineteenth-century
American writers’ envisioning and practice of reader-initiated and reader-directed
authorship in their representative gothic works, including Charles Brockden Brown’s
Wieland; or, The Transformation: An American Tale (1798), Edgar Allan Poe’s The
Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of
____________
This dissertation follows the style of The Henry James Review.
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the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (1845), Louisa
May Alcott’s “Behind a Mask; or, A Woman’s Power” (1866), and Henry James’s The
Turn of the Screw (1898).
Modern scholarly interest in gothic literature, though roughly begun as early as
the 1950s,1 had not taken its definitive form until 1980 when the two most influential
gothic studies concurrently appeared: David Punter’s The Literature of Terror, and Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick’s The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. Noticeably, both of them
focus on the representational capability of gothic literature. To Punter, “Gothic fiction
has, above all, to do with terror; and where we find terror in the literature of the last two
centuries, in Britain and in America, … we almost always find traces of the Gothic” (14).
Based on this close affinity of terror to the gothic, Punter insists that we study the genre
as a mode of literary expression of diverse kinds of terror in reality: “exploring Gothic is
… seeing the various ways in which terror breaks through the surfaces of literature,
differently in every case, but also establishing for itself certain distinct continuities of
language and symbol” (21). Sedgwick makes an issue of how the earliest modern gothic
criticism was customarily “privileging the spatial metaphor of depth from among the
Gothic conventions” and “taking that metaphor to represent a model of the human self”
as defined by the (Freudian) psychology of the inner unconscious (11). From Sedgwick’s
perspective, such a custom results not from a close and proper reading of gothic

1 Scholars generally agree that Robert Heilman’s 1958 essay, “Charlotte Brontë’s ‘New’
Gothic,” initiates such an interest. See Heilman, “Charlotte Brontë’s ‘New’ Gothic,”
From Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad: Essays Collected in Memory of James T. Hillhouse,
eds. Robert. C. Rathburn and Martin Steinmann, Jr. (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,
1958) 118-132.
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literature itself, but from “an extreme critical irritation with the surfaces of Gothic
novels” and subsequent endeavor to endow gothic superficiality with semantic
profundity (11-12). Then Sedgwick, based on her own reading of eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century gothic works, suggests revising that custom: she contends that “the
major Gothic conventions are coherent in terms that do not depend on that psychological
model” for “the strongest energies inhere in the surface,” and that gothic literature,
therefore, rather works “to undermine the sense of inside and outside, the centeredness
of the ‘self,’” in a proto-postmodern fashion (12, 27).
Punter’s emphasis on the characteristically gothic “language and symbol” and
Sedgwick’s revisionary proposition of new consistent gothic conventions of the surface
simultaneously attest and show the way to contemporary gothic critics’ efforts to redeem
gothic literature from its traditional status as nothing more than the lurid, sensational,
and shallow writing and to re-define it as a primarily historico-cultural—and thus
“serious”—genre. Following Punter and Sedgwick, ensuing critics have become in large
part concerned with the ways gothic texts articulate otherwise unrepresentable anxieties
and terrors in society. George E. Haggerty, in Gothic Fiction/Gothic Form (1989),
argues that gothic writers from Horace Walpole to James conceive and develop a new
narrative form of gothic “tale” in order to defy the standard realistic novel form that
reflects “an eighteenth-century empirical worldview” and to “giv[e] private experience
external manifestation” (7). Teresa A. Goddu’s Gothic America (1997), postulating that
“the gothic registers its culture’s contradictions, presenting a distorted, not a disengaged,
version of reality” (2-3), traces the eruption of American historical terrors such as
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American Revolution, Indian massacre, and slavery in eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century American gothic works. And Peter K. Garrett, in Gothic Reflections (2003),
takes notice of “the typically Gothic multiplication of narrative versions” or
interpretations as indicating the gothic’s exploration of “relations between extremity and
the ordinary, between ‘privately bred’ isolated subjectivities and public norms,” and
between the individual and society (6-7).
This scholarly focus on the gothic’s textual formality in turn invests gothic texts
with a representational agency and scholarly significance of their own and obscures the
role of gothic writers in the production of those texts.2 It is, one might say, as if gothic
texts overpower and even erase their own authors’ intention, consciousness, and
presence. As a result, gothic writers become inconspicuous and inconsequential as
authors to the point that, intriguingly, they are analogous to one of the most distinctively
gothic characters they write about: ghosts. Put another way, in modern gothic criticism

2 Critics like Haggerty and Garrett do point out the centrality of the author-reader
relationship in the gothic. Haggerty notes that gothic authors count considerably on
readers inasmuch as the representation of subjective feelings and emotions can become
objectified and legitimate only “by each reader in his or her private terms” (8). Similarly,
Garrett pinpoints as the peculiar power of the gothic its “narrative force, not only
affective, rhetorical, and ideological force but the dynamics of plotting and that active
engagement of readers which makes every narrative a dialogical transaction” (ix). Yet
both Haggerty and Garrett stay in line with gothic criticism’s emphasis on the
representational modality of gothic literature. After all, Haggerty attributes gothic
authors’ invention of the gothic tale to the gothic’s “primary formal aim” of the
“emotional and psychological involvement of the reader” (18), and Garrett’s point of the
multiple narratives of a gothic story created by the intercommunication between the
author and readers is subsumed for him under gothic narrative’s generation of
“alternative perspectives on the relationship between an isolated consciousness and the
social group” (220).